第1节

Two dark stiff-winged objects were moving across the sky on a line that

would take them almost directly above the boat on which he stood. The

objects were heading in a south-westerly direction, along the ragged

forward edge of a massive blanket of grey cloud now advancing over Lake

Mi-shiga from the northwest.

Oblivious of the wind-driven snow-flakes that were beginning to swirl

round him, Izo Wantanabe stood there open-mouthed with his small son

clutched to his breast and watched as the objects passed over the jetty

to which the wheelboat was moored then grew smaller and were finally

swallowed by the advancing snow-cloud.

And there he stayed, his dark button eyes fixed on the point where the

two winged dots had vanished, oblivious of the tiny fingers that pulled

playfully at his bottom lip.

The questions raised by what he had just witnessed caused him to forget

the original reason for being there and it took the shrill cries of his

wife, Yumiko, to alert him to the fact that his son's unprotected head

was now liberally coated with snow.

Wantanabe meekly allowed Tomo to be snatched from him and followed his

wife inside.

By the traditional laws of domestic etiquette, a wife was not permitted

to upbraid her husband but, in practice, that convention was normally

only observed when friends, relatives, servants or superiors were

present. A wife was duty bound to respect and obey her husband but

that did not stop the more spirited (or malicious) members of the

female sex from giving their menfolk an earful in private - or showing

their displeasure in other, more subtle ways.

Wantanabe seated himself on the mat behind his writing desk and endured

the inevitable blast for endangering the health of his youngest child

in dignified silence. He knew Yumiko's concern was well-founded but

his mind was engaged on other, far more important matters which she,

being a woman, could not be expected to understand.

He slowly twirled the point of his writing brush on the ink block and

let her voice flow unheeded through his brain. Stripped of their

meaning, the stream of words resembled the clucking of an irate hen

driven from a newly-laid egg before she has had time to admire her

handiwork.

Eventually, as the ten-month-old child was vigorously rubbed dry and

his happy gurgles indicated that he was not about to expire, the

reproachful clucking was replaced by the soft mothering sounds that

humans and animals use when nurturing their young. And shortly

afterwards, when he had been dressed in dry clean clothes, the

glowing-checked child was presented to his father as a peace

offering.

Musing upon the fact that his wife's moods were as predictable as night

and day, Wantanabe gathered Tomo briefly in his arms, bestowed a kiss

on his soft, downy skull then handed him back carefully. For Yumiko,

the crisis was over, harmony was restored. Her husband's problems were

only just beginning.

Izo Wantanabe and his wife Yumiko came from a race of people known to

their neighbours as Iron Masters; a stratified collection of asiatic

bloodlines in which the Japanese formed the top layer, followed by

Chinese, Korean then the other ethnic groups in descending order.

Each group's position related directly to the distance - in the World

Before - of their ancestral lands from a sacred site known as Mount

Fuji.

Successive waves of the Iron Masters' ancestors had landed on the

north-eastern coast of North America between 2300 and 2400 A.D. Now,

six centuries later, the seventeen domains that made up their nation

state known as Ne-Issan - stretched from the Atlantic to Lake Erie, and

from the St Lawrence Seaway to Cape Fear, in North Carolina.

Wantanabe's family owed its allegiance to the noble house of

Yama-Shita, holder of the exclusive licence to trade with the

grass-monkeys who roamed the endless Western Plains. Izo's family

formed part of the Japanese ruling class but he himself was a

love-child produced by one of his father's Chinese concubines.

The resulting social stigma, while not catastrophic, meant he was

permanently barred from the high appointments open to his peer group

and that his future wife should he choose to marry - would have to be

Chinese.

This had led to his decision to enter commerce, for it was here that

many Chinese families had flourished, and his father's connections had

secured him a junior position in one of the rich trading houses with a

string of depots from Bu-faro on Lake In to the Eastern Sea.

His alert intelligence, plus a head for figures and a flair for

organisation, won him quick promotion and a fortunate introduction to

Yumiko, the fourth daughter of a Chinese merchant who, with a shrewd

eye to the main chance, provided her with a handsome dowry.

The father's gamble on Izo's family connections did not bring the

hoped-for rewards. After Yumiko had given birth to a son and a

daughter, and was carrying Tomo within her, the senior partner's latent

disapproval of Izo's mixed parentage was finally reveal