The Tokaido Road (1991)(528p) (24 page)

“No, master.” Kasane spoke so low, Cat could hardly hear her.

“Kidnapped?”

“Yes, master.” Kasane hesitated. “The others were killed,” she murmured.

“What others?”

“From my village. Thirteen of us were traveling to the great shrine at Ise.” Kasane stopped in confusion. She hadn’t meant to draw attention to her plight.

Cat turned away to discourage further revelations. She didn’t want to find out any more about the dirt-eater. She might feel obligated to help her, and she didn’t need anyone else’s troubles. She already felt guilty about taking the money the child had had the foresight to steal from her captor. Cat soothed her conscience by reasoning that she would arrange for her to be found in the morning. Then she would be someone else’s problem.

Cat bought a cheap lantern with a carrying pole, a collapsible paper shade, and a few extra rolled paper wicks. Then she stopped at stacks of round wooden tubs filled with various types of oil. The oil peddler stood among them and scratched his back with the long handle of his sieve.

“Where’s the nearest temple?” Cat asked as he measured out whale oil into a bamboo container.

He waved his sieve toward the west. “You’d be better off at the shrine on the main road to Edo, though,” he said. “It’s dedicated to Daikoku and his magic mallet. The fat businessmen flock there to clap their hands before his image and bargain with the god of wealth for a bountiful crop of gold and silver.

“On the other hand, the temple has fallen on hard times. It doesn’t even have a bonze. The ShintM priest changes his robes and goes there now and then to chant the Buddhist services.”

Impatiently Cat started to bid him good night. Then she thought better of it. “Is the temple deserted?”

“Only by the living.” The oil seller grinned and wiped oil off his hand and onto his heavy black apron. “In my grandfather’s grandfather’s day it was famous for its warrior-monks, adept at the art of the spear. The graveyard is full of the tombstones of the foolish young students of the warrior’s Way who journeyed there to challenge them.”

“Thank you.” Cat bowed and backed away. When she was out of sight she doubled back behind the buildings and headed for the deserted temple.

GHOSTS AND GIRLS

As she walked along the dark road, the expression on Kasane’s plain round face was stoic, but she had no illusions about her future. She knew that her new master might be intending to take her to a deserted place and rape and kill her, but she doubted it.

Kasane was a shy child and a virtuous one, but in the past few days she had come to think of herself as merchandise.

She had been kidnapped at sea by a pirate masquerading as an honest boat captain. He had sold her to the procurer, who had peddled her to innkeepers twice and then restolen her. He would have done it again if the mysterious, ferocious young stranger hadn’t interfered. Now this latest master would undoubtedly go into business, too, with Kasane as his stock. One didn’t waste anything that could be exchanged for money.

Before leaving for the pilgrimage to Ise several days earlier, Kasane had never been beyond the call of her village drum. Since then she had seen only the worst of men, but this one was nothing like the pirate and the procurer. For one thing, he was very young. And he was certainly extravagant. Even though the moon was only beginning to wane and was almost directly overhead, he had lit the lantern.

Kasane carried the baggage and the lantern too along the deserted farm road. She walked in front and held the lantern’s pole to the side and behind her so it lit her new master’s way. She glanced back over her shoulder only once. The light and shadow had transformed Cat’s glower into a hideous mask. She looked to Kasane like Lord Emma, the king of hell.

The temple grounds were beyond the fields, among the steep folds of the high hills west of Totsuka. A heavy mist swirled low to the ground there. In the darkness of a grove of trees, Cat almost missed the slender granite marker indicating the turnoff onto a badly maintained path.

As she and Kasane moved forward cautiously, the trees and bushes closed in around them. A fox barked. Something rustled in the black depths of the undergrowth. Kasane stopped so abruptly, Cat almost bumped into her.

“A goblin,” Kasane whispered.

“Keep walking, simpleton.”

In the stillness of the night Cat’s own voice sounded harsh to her. She thought of Musui’s kindness and felt small and mean. She remembered his gentle admonition.
A true warrior knows compassion.
Cat decided to leave the child some money when she abandoned her.

In the moon’s bright light, tears glistened on Kasane’s cheeks. Her lips trembled as she felt her way along the dark, rocky path. A gust of wind blew, and both she and Cat heard a rattling, like bones.

Kasane gave a small cry and shrank back when something tall and thin loomed from the ground fog. She felt rather than saw more shapes in the darkness under the trees.

“Tombstones.” Cat lowered her voice and took a firmer grip on her walking staff.

Hundreds of tiered stone monuments rose up from the fog and crowded the slope of the hill. A forest of tall wooden funerary laths, some new, some old and neglected, clattered against each other in another gust.

Cat and Kasane walked past granite columns and slabs, carved with snarling lions and the ferocious faces of Buddhism’s guardian kings. In the mist the grave markers looked like a silent army turned to stone.

The lantern had been burning low. Suddenly it guttered and went out.

“He said it held enough oil for two hours’ light.” Cat was furious that the oil vendor had cheated her. She knew he had long since closed up for the night and decamped; but she wanted to march back to Totsuka, rap him on the head with her staff, and demand her money back.

Kasane shrank back against her and clutched her sleeve.

“Don’t be a fool.” But Cat herself spoke in a whisper. “When our eyes grow accustomed to the darkness, the moon will guide us.”

Kasane didn’t dare point out that the massive cedars were now shutting out most of the moon’s light. Still clinging to Cat’s sleeve, she strained to see around her. “Did you see that?” she whispered.

“Yes,” Cat murmured. Suddenly Kasane’s presence was a comfort to her.

A flame flared in the distance, then softened and broadened into the glow from a lantern. It lit portions of the gravestones around it and in places left angular sheets of night.

Three huge shadows stooped and reared against the granite monuments. Each shadow sported a pair of pointed fox’s ears.

“Where?” The word drifted, like a fragment of a lost conversation, through the gravestones.

“Over here.” The voice was nervous and subdued.

“Bring the light, you bucket of night soil.”

“
Two
of them in one night.” The first speaker sounded as though he had fortified himself with strong drink, home-brewed sweet-potato wine, probably. His dialect was too coarse to belong to someone who could afford
sake.
“What luck.”

Cat heard the rhythmic
kachunk
of wood striking stones and saw the curved shadows of two mattock blades rise and fall on the monument. She thought again about returning to Totsuka but dismissed the idea. The inns would be tightly shuttered. Even if she could have found shelter in a shed or chapel in town, she would have had the problem of avoiding Kira’s men in the morning. The idea of sharing her night’s lodging place with this sort of riffraff made her skin crawl, though. The only solution was to evict them.

With both hands gripping the staff lightly, she held it up as though it were a long-sword, parallel to her body and with the tip slanted outward. Her pulse thrummed in her ears as she started forward, crossing each foot in front of the other in the buoyant scissor gait of a sword player.

She was concentrating on centering her thoughts and breathing properly when she felt a hard tug at her sleeve. She whirled, dragging a heavy weight with her. She struck down and behind her with great force but stayed her hand at the last moment. When the staff landed on Kasane’s side, it was painful but not damaging.

Kasane shut her eyes tight and held on to Cat’s sleeve with both hands. She had decided she would rather die of a blow from her strange new master’s staff than release her grip.

“Let go of me, you idiot!” Cat whispered as she tried to disengage her. “Wait here.”

“Don’t leave me, master.” Kasane spoke in a tiny, strangled voice. “Kill me, but don’t leave me in this haunted place.”

Cat could see the hysteria rising in the peasant’s contorted face. She shook her hard by the shoulders. “I’ll be back. I’m only going to see who they are.”

“They’re demons or ghosts.”

“I doubt it. I think they’re human, and they’re up to no good.”

Cat pried Kasane’s rigid fingers loose. She brandished her staff and started forward again, using the gravestones for cover. She lifted each foot deliberately and set it down as softly as a leaf landing. She thought they were mortal, but she wasn’t certain.

Kasane stood in the gloom and watched the only being who might possibly be human desert her. From the corner of her eye she thought she saw something stir in the well of night behind a tombstone. The roots of her hair tingled at the nape of her neck. She tucked her robe’s skirts up into her sash. Crouching, she crept after Cat.

Kasane wanted to scream to drown out the noise of the mattocks and the rustlings and squeakings and the liquid hooting of the owl in the darkness. She could only whimper far back in her throat. She remembered the old proverb, “Ghosts and girls are best unseen,” but it was no comfort.

“When were they buried?” The man’s voice sounded so close, it startled Kasane. It distracted her from the sharpening odor of rotting flesh.

“The other one’s only a few days old. This one’s been here almost a week.”

The light of the lantern was close enough now to make the darkness around Kasane complete in contrast. But at least she could see the beings that were casting the shadows. She could see that the fox ears were formed by the stiff knotted ends of the towels tied around their heads. She also could see that these demons were wearing filthy loincloths and collections of paper rags.

Kasane crouched behind a marker and watched Cat approach the men. She put a hand down to steady herself, but instead of earth, she felt the cold, rubbery skin of a woman’s breast. It gave strangely under her fingers. The stench of death hit her in the face.

Kasane shrieked. She shrieked again. She kept on shrieking.

NO HOME IN THE THREE WORLDS

At Kasane’s shriek, Cat whirled to stare into the darkness. “Idiot!” she muttered. “I should have left her in the closet, too.” But Cat’s skin prickled, and her heart raced at the horror in Kasane’s cries.

At the start of a battle,
Musashi wrote,
shout as loudly as possible. The voice is a thing of life.

Cat took a deep breath, gripped her staff tighter, and gathered her courage. “Ei-i-i-i-i!” she screamed as she charged through the gravestones toward the lantern light.

No one was there. When Kasane’s screams descended to gurgling sobs, Cat heard the men running headlong through the underbrush. With her staff at the ready and her heart still pounding, Cat picked up the abandoned lantern and prowled the area. When she was sure they were alone, she called to Kasane.

“There’s a dead person here, Your Honor.” From the darkness Kasane’s voice shook with fright.

“ There are hundreds of dead people here, you bucket of dirt.” Cat was so enraged that she forgot her parents’ careful instruction on proper conduct and terms of address. Kasane’s scream had unnerved her and completely disrupted her concentration. “Peasants have no sense,” she muttered to herself.

“This one isn’t buried,” Kasane said. “Maybe it’s a homeless spirit.”

Cat walked among the tombstones to where Kasane crouched, her arms crossed in front of her and her hands clutching her own shoulders. Her eyes were wide in terror.

Cat stooped to inspect the body. “She’s gone in the white scarves of death.” She knew she was only affirming the obvious. “But someone bothered to bury her for those dung beetles to dig up. She must have relatives to pray for her soul. In any case, we can’t do anything for her.” Cat stood. ‘ ‘It’s late. We have to find a place to sleep.”

“Here?” Kasane dared to question her new master. Her encounter with the supernatural had made him seem relatively harmless by comparison. Mad, certainly, but not homicidal. “The demons might come back.”

“They aren’t demons.” Cat held Kasane’s wicker pack while Kasane arranged the woven straps over her shoulders. Then she tied the rolled mats on top of the pack and held the
furoshiki
on top of the mats while Kasane adjusted the knotted ties across her chest. The burden towered over Kasane’s head.

“They’re men so poor they steal from the dead.” Cat handed her the lantern. “They fear the executioner’s blade in this world and the wrath of the gods in the next. They won’t be back.”

“Must I go first, master?”

“Yes.” Cat prodded her with the staff to start her moving.

‘”What were they stealing?” Kasane spoke in a hushed voice. She was fearful of disturbing the corpses and angering her master; but she was more terrified of a silence broken only by the anonymous rustlings of foxes and monkeys and owls.

“A corpse’s hair and fingernails are easily pulled out. The thieves sell the hair to wig makers. They trim the nails, then sell them in the gay quarters. The women give them to their patrons as pledges of love. That way a woman can fool many men into thinking each is the only one she loves.”

“Don’t the women know where the fingernails come from?” Kasane shivered at the thought of touching a corpse’s fingernail. Being kidnapped by pirates and almost violated, being dragged into the night by a fierce stranger, finding opened graves and plundered corpses, they were all too much for her. She shook so badly that the lantern’s light trembled along the ground.

“ We. . .” Cat caught herself.’ ‘The women don’t think about it. Go-betweens buy the tokens from the robbers and sell them. The buyers never see the scoundrels who did the deed.”

Coffin carriers, priests, and merchants have found a way to profit even from death,
Cat thought. She remembered the delicate, half-moon-shaped nails she herself had bought, and wondered, for the first time, from whose hand they had been taken.

Through the canopy of leaves Cat saw a slope of silvery moss and weathered cedar shingles glinting in the moonlight. A well-worn path led to a plainly built, open-sided chapel set back among the trees and bamboo and underbrush. She rapped Kasane’s pack with the staff and pointed to it. “We’ll sleep here.”

Near the place of death was one of life. The small, wall-less building was festooned inside with wooden ladles with the bottoms missing. They had been blessed by the ShintM priest who also served as a Buddhist bonze. Then they had been carried home by pregnant women. After successful deliveries, the women had written their names and ages on the handles and returned them.

“Lay out the mats,” Cat said.

“Yes, Your Honor.” Kasane was relieved that at least he didn’t seem inclined to kill her. She hurriedly unrolled the mats and laid one on top of the other for double thickness.

“You can sleep on one,” Cat said gruffly. The chapel’s floor was of packed earth and quite cold. As angry as Cat was with Kasane, she couldn’t bear the thought of making her sleep directly on it.

“You’re very kind, master.” Kasane knelt and knocked her forehead repeatedly on the ground. Then she scurried around, filling Cat’s small brass pipe and lighting it with the flint. While Cat smoked and stared out at the dark forest, Kasane took her brother’s paper travel cloak from her pack and laid it over her master’s mat. She spread Cat’s new cloak on top of that as a coverlet.

She lay down on the other bare mat. She drew up her legs and tucked the hem of her robe around her icy feet in a futile attempt to warm them. She pillowed her head on her arm, closed her eyes, shivered with the cold, and thought of home.

The thatched hovels that made up Matsu-mura, Pine village, would all be dark by now. Kasane knew that her parents and her grandmother would be asleep on their frayed straw mats in the single room of their tiny house there. They wouldn’t even be worried about her. As far as they knew, she and her younger brother and seven other pilgrims were in the care of the leader of Pine village’s pilgrimage club and were on their way to the great shrine at Ise.

Kasane was sure that fate wouldn’t allow her to see her family again. She was also sure that was just as well. Her parents had engaged a go-between to arrange a marriage for Kasane with a young farmer, a stranger from a neighboring village. Kasane’s trip to the Sun Goddess’s shrine was to be the traditional pilgrimage of a bride-to-be. But the pilgrimage had gone dreadfully awry.

Now Kasane felt sullied beyond redemption. Even though she had not lost her virginity, she knew that no man would have her as a bride. She knew that if she returned to Pine village, she would bring terrible shame to her family. She would live out her life single and the object of endless gossip. Tears burned her eyes and nose as she buried her face in the crook of her arm.

The procurer had snatched Kasane from the inns where he had sold her each night and had kept her on the run for days. She was so exhausted that even her grief, the cold, and the terrors of the graveyard nearby couldn’t keep her awake. By the time Cat finished smoking and brooding about the journey ahead of her, Kasane was asleep.

Kasane looked so young and innocent and helpless that Cat felt a pang of shame at treating her so badly. She draped the shabby paper cloak over her. Then she wrapped herself in her own cloak, laid her staff next to the mat, and drifted into uneasy sleep.

Because the temple had no priest, no dawn bell rang to waken Cat. The hour of the Hare was half over, and the sun had risen when she opened her eyes. Cat stared up at the clusters of dusty wooden ladles dangling from the broad beams of the chapel’s ceiling. Each represented a child brought into the world. Cat wondered what all of them were doing this morning.

She glanced at the other mat. It was neatly rolled and tied and set next to the dirt-eater’s pack and the
furoshiki.

“Idiot!” she raged at herself. If she had slept so soundly she didn’t hear the peasant escape, she wouldn’t have heard enemies creeping up on her, either.

Cat knew she had to leave immediately, before the child brought the authorities. She tied up the
furoshiki’s
ends and settled it on her back. She studied the abandoned pack. Surely the peasant didn’t want it, or she would have taken it. Inside, there might be something she could use as a disguise. Cat put one arm through the pack’s straps and hoisted it onto her left shoulder.

She was tying the cords of her hat under her chin when Kasane appeared. The hem of her white robe was tucked up, and her bare feet and legs were covered with black loam. She carried several dirt-covered bamboo shoots in her arms. They were about as long as her forearm and pointed at each end.

“I brought the bamboo’s children for you to eat, master.” She put them down and washed her hands and feet in the nearby stream.

Cat took off the hat and the
furoshiki
and the pack. When she sat cross-legged and rummaged in the bundle for her pipe, Kasane lit it. Then Cat watched in astonishment as Kasane pulled a large, sharp knife from inside her robe. Where had she gotten it? Cat was appalled at her own carelessness.

Kasane was staring humbly at the ground, but she caught the look. “It belonged to my last master,” she said.

She deftly split a large section of bamboo that was dead and dried to a silvery brown. She carved a narrow slit in the back of one of the halves. She filled the hollow in the piece beneath it with bamboo shavings.

When she rubbed a strip of bamboo across the first half, sparks flew from the silica in it. The hot powdered residue fell through the slit into the tinder below. Kasane blew gently on it through a slender bamboo tube. She had a fire going in about sixty heartbeats.

She fed the tiny flames with dried cypress needles and twigs, then larger pieces of wood until the fire crackled and burned steadily. She arranged five flat stones around it. On them she balanced three sections of green bamboo with bottoms formed by the nodes. While the water in them boiled she used the knife to peel, trim, and slice the shoots. The rice, the bamboo’s children, and two of the dried flying fish were cooked about the same time. Kasane used the water in the third container for tea.

Kasane dished the food onto bamboo sheaths and served all of it to Cat. Then she retired to the far side of the chapel. She sat back on her haunches, folded her hands in her lap, and bowed her head.

The shoots were white and crisp and sweet. When Cat had eaten the two fish and half the rice and shoots, she pushed the bamboo sheath with the remainder across the dirt floor to Kasane.

“Thank you so very much, kind master. You honor this miserable individual.” Kasane bowed several times before eating the warm rice. She savored the rich, unfamiliar taste of it.

The
shMgun
had decreed that peasants weren’t to eat rice, but Cat decided to defy the law. She wasn’t happy about the necessity of tying up her captive and abandoning her. She was buying her conscience off cheaply.

“What village do you come from?” Cat asked. If it turned out to be convenient, she would send word to the peasant’s people.

“Matsu-mura, Pine village, in Kazusa province.”

“I have to tie you up and leave you here.”

“Please, master, don’t leave me.” Kasane flung herself forward in a supine bow. “I beg of you, please don’t leave me here. This is a haunted place.” She imagined being tied up when night fell and the robbers returned to pull out her fingernails.

“You’ll tell the authorities where to find me.” Even as Cat said it, she wondered why she was bothering to explain her actions to a peasant.

“I promise I won’t tell anyone.” Kasane was weeping so hard that she was practically unintelligible. “No one will find me in this desolate place. Night will come. Demons will come.” She clutched at Cat’s jacket. Her tears left dark spots on the faded black cloth. “Take me with you. I’ll be your servant. I’m strong. I’ll carry everything. I’ll massage your feet and cook your meals.”