Shōgun

For more than an hour his Eminence sat motionless in his high-backed leather chair, staring sightlessly at the fire. Alvito waited patiently near the bookcase, his hands in his lap. Shafted sunlight danced off the silver crucifix on the wall behind the Father-Visitor. On one side wall was a small oil by the Venetian painter Titian that dell’Aqua had bought in his youth in Padua, where he had been sent by his father to study law. The other wall was lined with his Bibles and his books, in Latin, Portuguese, Italian, and Spanish. And, from the Society’s own movable-type press at Nagasaki that he had ordered and brought at so much cost from Goa ten years ago, two shelves of Japanese books and pamphlets: devotional books and catechisms of all sorts, translated with painstaking labor into Japanese by Jesuits; works adapted from Japanese into Latin to try to help Japanese acolytes learn that language; and last, two small books that were beyond price, the first Portuguese-Japanese grammar, Father Sancho Alvarez’s life’s work, printed six years ago, and its companion, the incredible Portuguese-Latin-Japanese dictionary printed last year in Roman letters as well as hiragana script. It had been begun at his order twenty years ago, the first dictionary of Japanese words ever compiled.

Father Alvito picked up the book and caressed it lovingly. He knew that it was a unique work of art. For eighteen years he himself had been compiling such a work and it was still nowhere near finished. But his was to be a dictionary with explanatory supplements and far more detailed—almost an introduction to Japan and the Japanese, and he knew without vanity that if he managed to finish it, it would be a masterpiece compared to Father Alvarez’s work, that if his name was ever to be remembered, it would be because of his book and the Father-Visitor, who was the only father he had ever known.

“You want to leave Portugal, my son, and join the service of God?” the giant Jesuit had said the first day he had met him.

“Oh, yes, please, Father,” he had replied, craning up at him with desperate longing.

“How old are you, my son?”

“I don’t know, Father, perhaps ten, perhaps eleven, but I can read and write, the priest taught me, and I’m alone, I’ve no one of my own, I belong to no one. . . .”

Dell’Aqua had taken him to Goa and thence to Nagasaki, where he had joined the seminary of the Society of Jesus, the youngest European in Asia, at long last belonging. Then came the miracle of the gift of tongues and the positions of trust as interpreter and trade adviser, first to Harima Tadao, daimyo of the fief of Hizen in Kyushu where Nagasaki lay, and then in time to the Taikō himself. He was ordained, and later even attained the privilege of the fourth vow. This was the special vow over and above the normal vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, given only to the elite of Jesuits, the vow of obedience to the Pope personally—to be his personal tool for the work of God, to go where the Pope personally ordered and do what he personally wanted; to become, as the founder of the Society, the Basque soldier Loyola, designed, one of the Regimini Militantis Ecclesiae, one of the professed, the special private soldiers of God for His elected general on earth, the Vicar of Christ.

I’ve been so very lucky, Alvito thought. Oh, God, help me to help.

At last dell’Aqua got up and stretched and went to the window. Sun sparkled off the gilded tiles of the soaring central castle donjon, the sheer elegance of the structure belying its massive strength. Tower of evil, he thought. How long will it stand there to remind each one of us? Is it only fifteen—no, it was seventeen years ago that the Taikō put four hundred thousand men to building and excavating, and bled the country to pay for this, his monument, and then, in two short years, Osaka Castle was finished. Incredible man! Incredible people! Yes. And there it stands, indestructible. Except to the Finger of God. He can humble it in an instant, if He wishes. Oh, God, help me to do Thy will.

“Well, Martin, it seems we have work to do.” Dell’Aqua began to walk up and down, his voice now as firm as his step. “About the English pilot: If we don’t protect him he’ll be killed and we risk Toranaga’s disfavor. If we manage to protect him he’ll soon hang himself. But dare we wait? His presence is a threat to us and there is no telling how much further damage he can do before that happy date. Or we can help Toranaga to remove him. Or, last, we can convert him.”

Alvito blinked. “What?”