The Shogun's Daughter

by Robert Ames Bennet

“A little hot soy will flavor the rice,” I replied. “Lead on.”

He shuffled about, and we strolled out and along the road, keeping half a hundred paces behind the rearmost of the strutting hatamotos. Leisurely as was the advance of the cortege, we were soon clear of Shiba and approaching a hill that Yoritomo called Atago-yama. The eminence was provided with two means of ascent, a straight steep stairway and another one long and winding. The cortege passed by on one side.

We now descended into a low and thickly populated quarter, passing at every two hundred paces one of the gloomy gates which divide off all the streets of the lower city into wards of fifty or sixty houses. Each ward was given over to a particular trade or the sale of a certain article,—as a street of blacksmiths, squatting before their primitive forges, a street of toy merchants, another of lacquer-dealers, fan-makers, cabinet-workers, and so forth.

Shops and people differed little from those I had already seen, but for the first time I observed the lofty ladder watch towers, at the top of which hung firebells. The urgent need of such means of warning in a city built, for the most part, of tinder-like materials, was evident from a belt of ash-covered ground off to our right, in which the only buildings unburned were a few mud-walled storehouses.

My roving eye was recalled by a word from Yoritomo to be on my guard. Kohana had conjectured that the attack would be made near one of the moats, and we were approaching a boat-crowded canal or moat, the outermost of the line of fortifications that gird in the Shogun’s palace and the yashikis, or palaces, of the daimios. I loosened my swordblade in its scabbard, and held my hand ready to jerk up the skirts of my robes and tuck them in the back of my girdle.

The cortege moved slowly on down the busy street and out upon the old wooden bridge that arched across from the grassy slope of the nearer bank to the abrupt stone wall which Kämpfer calls the Outer Castle. We followed, warily scanning the band of samurais that approached from the far end of the bridge and the scattered groups that clattered up behind us through the crowds of common people. All alike, however, showed the utmost deference in avoiding close contact with the attendants of the Princess, and the crests of their respective daimios, conspicuous on the backs, breast, and sleeves of their haoris, proved that they were not ronins.

We plodded after the cortege, across the canal and through the bastioned gateway on the far side, out into one of the smooth wide streets of the official quarter. Here there were no commoners to be seen, and the few samurais scattered up and down the broad way were hastening to shelter before the first gusts of the coming rain-squall. But even the threatened downpour failed to hurry the hatamotos out of their stately strut. Seeing no sign of any ronins, I relaxed my tense nerves and looked about at the long walls of the yashikis which lined each side of the street.

I knew that these residences of the daimios each consisted of a mansion house surrounded by courts and gardens, all set in the defensive hollow square of the retainers’ barracks. What I had failed to picture from Yoritomo’s descriptions was the extent and odd appearance of these samurai quarters. One of them stretched along the road nearly a quarter of a mile, its continuous roof of red tiles broken only by a grand, ornate gate, midway of the monotonous façade.

The mortarless stone foundation walls of the yashikis rose from deep, curbed ditches that flowed along each side of the street. Above the high foundations the walls were of diagonally-set black tiles with wide joints of white plaster. Well up in this checkerboard surface, rows of small windows, stoutly barred against attack, projected in shallow bays.

A turn in the street brought us in view of the citadel just as the rain-squall came swirling upon us. Across the head of the street loomed up a mighty wall of cyclopean masonry, its granite base deep beneath the placid waters of a broad moat, its crest crowned with trees and square pagoda guardtowers. Our street rose to meet the causeway that ran along the moat bank and curved in to cross a wooden bridge. At the far side a huge bastioned gateway led up into the higher ground of the citadel.