Osaka, and no cannon

Rodrigues wakes in pain and curses Blackthorne for saving his life. Blackthorne pilots the galley to Osaka from the Portuguese rutter he has copied. In the cabin Rodrigues rambles through fever: the Taikō's expulsion edicts, the twenty-six martyrs crucified at Nagasaki, Father Alvito "Tsukku-san" the interpreter, the mound of Korean noses at Miyako, and hundreds of thousands of converts in a nation of twenty million. Blackthorne, who thought London the biggest city on earth, sees Osaka and its gilded donjon and feels "an ice barb" in his bowels. After a night in a house and a meal of rice, a curtained palanquin carries him to the castle, where Hiro-matsu waits with fifty Browns among thousands of hostile Grays. Through gates, moats, mazes and mortarless fifty-ton stones, Blackthorne notes there is not a single cannon. The corridor ends at a guarded door.

A travelling chapter that doubles as a briefing: Rodrigues's fever delivers the Jesuit history and the scale of Japan while the galley delivers Blackthorne to Osaka. The gilded donjon and the absent cannon are the two observations that matter, awe and calculation in the same glance. The closed door is a curtain-raiser.