Musashi: Bushido Code (38 page)

By and by the samurai became aware of his gagging. "You there," he said. "What's the matter?"

"It's the heat,' answered Matahachi.

"You're in pretty bad shape, aren't you?"

"I'm a little better than I was, but I still feel dizzy."

"I'll give you some medicine," said the samurai, opening his black-lacquered pillbox and shaking some black pills into the palm of his hand. He walked over and put the medicine in Matahachi's mouth.

"You'll be all right in no time," he said.

"Thanks."

"Do you plan to rest here for a while longer?"

"Yes."

"Then do me a favor. Let me know if anybody comes—throw a pebble or something."

He went back to his own rock, sat down, and took a brush from his writing kit and a notebook from his kimono. He opened the pad on the rock and began to draw. Under the brim of his hat, his eyes moved back and forth from the castle to its immediate surroundings, taking in the main tower, the fortifications, the mountains in the background, the river and the smaller streams.

Just before the Battle of Sekigahara, this castle had been attacked by units of the Western Army, and two compounds, as well as part of the moat, had suffered considerable damage. Now the bastion was not only being restored but also being strengthened, so that it would outclass Hideyori's stronghold at Osaka.

Quickly but in great detail, the student warrior sketched a bird's-eye view of the entire castle and on a second page began making a diagram of the approaches from the rear.

"Uh-oh!" exclaimed Matahachi softly. From out of nowhere the inspector of works appeared and was standing behind the sketcher. Clad in half-armor, with straw sandals on his feet, he stood there silently, as if waiting to be noticed. Matahachi felt a pang of guilt for not having seen him in time to give warning. It was too late now.

Presently the student warrior lifted his hand to brush a fly off his sweaty collar and in doing so caught sight of the intruder. As he looked up with startled eyes, the inspector stared back angrily for a moment before stretching out a hand toward the drawing. The student warrior grabbed his wrist and jumped up.

"What do you think you're doing?" he shouted.

The inspector seized the notebook and held it high in the air. "I'd like to have a look at this," he barked.

"You have no right."

"Just doing my job!"

"Butting into other people's business—is that your job?"

"Why? Shouldn't I look at it?"

"An oaf like you wouldn't understand it."

"I think I'd better keep it."

"Oh, no you don't!" cried the student warrior, making a grab for the notebook. Both pulled at it, ripping it in half.

"Watch yourself!" shouted the inspector. "You'd better have a good explanation, or I'll turn you in."

"On whose authority? You an officer?"

"That's right."

"What's your group? Who's your commander?"

"None of your business. But you might as well know that I'm under orders to investigate anyone around here who looks suspicious. Who gave you permission to make sketches?"

"I'm making a study of castles and geographic features for future reference. What's wrong with that?"

"The place is swarming with enemy spies. They all have excuses like that. It doesn't matter who you are. You'll have to answer some questions. Come with me!"

"Are you accusing me of being a criminal?"

"Just hold your tongue and come along."

"Rotten officials! Too used to making people cringe every time you open your big mouths!"

"Shut up—let's go!"

"Try and make me!" The student warrior was adamant.

Angry veins popping up in his forehead, the inspector dropped his half of the notebook, ground it under foot, and pulled out his truncheon. The student warrior jumped back a pace to improve his position.

"If you're not going to come along willingly, I'll have to tie you up and drag you," said the inspector.

Before the words were out, his adversary went into action. Uttering a great howl, he seized the inspector by the neck with one hand, grabbed the lower edge of his armor with the other, then hurled him at a large rock.

"Worthless lout!" he screamed, but not in time to be heard by the inspector, whose head split open on the rock like a watermelon. With a cry of horror, Matahachi covered his face with his hands to protect it from the globs of red pasty matter flying his way, while the student warrior quickly reverted to an attitude of complete calm.

Matahachi was appalled. Could the man be accustomed to murdering in this brutal fashion? Or was his sangfroid merely the letdown that follows an explosion of rage? Matahachi, shocked to the core, began to sweat profusely. From all he could tell, the other man could hardly have reached the age of thirty. His bony, sunburned face was blemished by pockmarks, and he appeared to have no chin, though this may have been due to a curiously shrunken scar from a deep sword wound.

The student warrior was in no hurry to flee. He gathered up the torn fragments of his notebook. Then he began looking quietly about for his hat, which had flown off when he made his mighty throw. After finding it, he placed it with care upon his head, once again concealing his eerie face from view. At a brisk pace he took his leave, gathering speed until he seemed to be flying on the wind.

The whole incident had happened so fast that neither the hundreds of laborers in the vicinity nor their overseers had noticed it. The workmen continued to toil like drones, as the supervisors, armed with whips and truncheons, bellowed orders at their sweating backs.

But one particular pair of eyes had seen it all. Standing atop a high scaffold commanding a view of the whole area was the general overseer of carpenters and log cutters. Seeing that the student warrior was escaping, he roared out a command, setting into motion a group of foot soldiers who had been drinking tea below the scaffold.

"What happened?"

"Another fight?"

Others heard the call to arms and soon stirred up a cloud of yellow dust near the wooden gate of the stockade, which divided the construction site from the village. Angry shouts rose from the gathering swarm of people.

"It's a spy! A spy from Osaka!"

"They'll never learn."

"Kill him! Kill him!"

Rock haulers, earth carriers and others, screaming as though the "spy" were their personal enemy, bore down on the chinless samurai. He darted behind an oxcart shambling through the gate and tried to slip out, but a sentinel caught sight of him and tripped him with a nail-studded staff.

From the overseer's scaffold came the cry: "Don't let him escape!"

With no hesitation, the crowd fell upon the miscreant, who counterattacked like a trapped beast. Wresting the staff from the sentinel, he turned on him and with the point of the weapon knocked him down headfirst. After downing four or five more men in similar fashion, he drew his huge sword and took an offensive stance. His captors fell back in terror, but as he prepared to cut his way out of the circle, a barrage of stones descended on him from all directions.

The mob vented its wrath in earnest, its mood all the more murderous because of a deep-seated distaste for all
shugyōsha.
Like most commoners, these laborers considered the wandering samurai useless, nonproductive and arrogant.

"Stop acting like stupid churls!" cried the beleaguered samurai, appealing for reason and restraint. Though he fought back, he seemed more concerned with chiding his attackers than with avoiding the rocks they hurled. More than a few innocent bystanders were injured in the melee.

Then, in a trice, it was all over. The shouting ceased, and the laborers began moving back to their work stations. In five minutes, the great construction site was exactly as it had been before, as though nothing had happened. The sparks flying from the various cutting instruments, the whinnying of horses half addled by the sun, the mind-numbing heat—all returned to normal.

Two guards stood over the collapsed form, which had been trussed up with a thick hemp rope. "He's ninety percent dead," said one, "so we may as well leave him here till the magistrate comes." He looked around and spotted Matahachi. "Hey, you there! Stand watch over this man. If he dies, it doesn't make any difference."

Matahachi heard the words, but his head could not quite take in either their import or the meaning of the event he had just witnessed. It all seemed like a nightmare, visible to his eyes, audible to his ears, but not comprehensible to his brain.

"Life's so flimsy," he thought. "A few minutes ago he was absorbed in his sketching. Now he's dying. He wasn't very old."

He felt sorry for the chinless samurai, whose head, lying sideways on the ground, was black with dirt and gore, his face still contorted with anger. The rope anchored him to a large rock. Matahachi wondered idly why the officials had taken such precautions when the man was too near death to make a sound. Or maybe already dead. One of his legs lay grotesquely exposed through a long rip in his
hakama,
the white shinbone protruding from the crimson flesh. Blood was sprouting from his scalp, and wasps had begun to hover around his matted hair. Ants nearly covered his hands and feet.

"Poor wretch," thought Matahachi. "If he was studying seriously, he must have had some great ambition in life. Wonder where he's from ... if his parents are still alive." Matahachi was seized by a peculiar doubt: was he really bemoaning the man's fate, or was he bothered by the vagueness of his own future? "For a man with ambition," he reflected, "there ought to be a cleverer way to get ahead."

This was an age that fanned the hopes of the young, urged them to cherish a dream, prodded them to improve their status in life. An age, indeed, in which even someone like Matahachi might have visions of rising from nothing to become the master of a castle. A modestly talented warrior could get by simply by traveling from temple to temple and living on the charity of the priests. If he was lucky, he might be taken in by one of the provincial gentry, and if he was still more fortunate, might receive a stipend from a daimyō.

Still, of all the young men who set out with high hopes, only one in a thousand actually ended up finding a position with an acceptable income. The rest had to be content with what satisfaction they could derive from the knowledge that theirs was a difficult and dangerous calling.

As Matahachi contemplated the samurai lying before him, the whole idea began to seem utterly stupid. Where could the path Musashi was following possibly lead? Matahachi's desire to equal or surpass his boyhood friend hadn't abated, but the sight of the bloodied warrior made the Way of the Sword seem vain and foolish.

Horror-stricken, he realized that the warrior was moving, and his train of thought stopped short. The man's hand reached out like a turtle's flipper and clawed at the ground. Feebly he lifted his torso, raised his head and pulled the rope taut.

Matahachi could hardly believe his eyes. As the man inched along the ground, he dragged behind him the four-hundred-pound rock securing his rope. One foot, two feet—it was a display of superhuman strength. No muscle man on any rock-hauling crew could have done it, though many boasted of the strength of ten or twenty men. The samurai lying on the threshold of death was possessed by some demonic force, which enabled him to far surpass the power of an ordinary mortal.

A gurgle came from the dying man's throat. He was trying desperately to speak, but his tongue had turned black and dry, making it impossible for him to form the words. Breath came in cracked, hollow hisses; eyes popping from their sockets stared imploringly at Matahachi.

"Pl—lul—poo—loo—ees . . ."

Matahachi gradually understood he was saying "please." Then a different sound, all but inarticulate, Matahachi made out to be "beg you." But it was the man's eyes that really spoke. Therein were the last of his tears and the certainty of death. His head fell back; his breathing ceased. As more ants started coming out of the grass to explore the dust-whitened hair, a few even entering a blood-caked nostril, Matahachi could see the skin under his kimono collar take on a blackish-blue cast.

What had the man wanted him to do? Matahachi felt haunted by the thought that he had incurred an obligation. The samurai had come upon him when he was sick and had had the kindness to give him medicine. Why had fate blinded Matahachi when he should have been warning the man of the inspector's approach? Was this destined to have occurred?

Matahachi tentatively touched the cloth-wrapped bundle on the dead man's obi. The contents would surely reveal who the man was and where he was from. Matahachi suspected that his dying wish had been to have some memento delivered to his family. He detached the bundle, as well as the pillbox, and stuffed them quickly inside his own kimono.

He debated whether to cut off a lock of hair for the man's mother, but while staring into the fearsome face, he heard footsteps approaching. Peeking from behind a rock, he saw samurai coming for the corpse. If he were caught with the dead man's possessions, he'd be in serious trouble. He crouched down low and made his way from shadow to shadow behind the rocks, sneaking away like a field rat.

Two hours later he arrived at the sweetshop where he was staying. The shopkeeper's wife was by the side of the house, rinsing herself off from a washbasin. Hearing him moving about inside, she showed a portion of her white flesh from behind the side door and called, "Is that you, Matahachi?"

Answering with a loud grunt, he dashed into his own room and grabbed a kimono and his sword from a cabinet; he then knotted a rolled towel around his head and prepared to slip into his sandals again.