The Tokaido Road (1991)(528p) (27 page)

Now, as Kasane walked behind Cat’s straight, indifferent back, she wiped her eyes with the thin towel Cat had given her and blew her nose into it. In the days since her brother’s death Kasane hadn’t even been able to pray properly for his soul, and the tinkling of the bell on a passing pilgrim sent a shudder of grief through her.

A CUDGEL FROM A BAMBOO BUSH

Just before Hiratsuka, the TMkaidM became a raised causeway through the brown rice paddies that covered a broad plain. On both sides the paddies came up to the huge pines that lined the road. The mountains of HakMne that hunched against the ashen sky to the southwest were the same dark gray as the clouds closing in overhead.

Raveled strands of lightning flicked at the mountain peaks. The branches of the pines stirred fitfully. A
kago
bearer trotted by with his empty conveyance strapped to his back. As a pack horse driver hurried his animals past Cat and Kasane, the bells on the harnesses had an urgency to them.

Cat stopped at a stand selling religious accessories to those going to the small temple in the grove of ancient pines nearby. She bought two bundles of slender incense sticks, two small bowls of rice and tiny cups, and a pair of deep orange Mino persimmons. She chose the persimmons with care, picking the largest, so ripe and swollen with sweet juice that they seemed about to burst.

Cat divided her purchases with Kasane. “For your brother,” she said gruffly.

Kasane tried to thank her, but she was too overcome to speak. She bowed low over the things in her outspread hands.

Together they rinsed their mouths and hands at the chapel’s big stone basin. They put the bowls of rice and cups of water in front of the altar. They lit the incense in the coals of the brazier kept there for that purpose. Then they each put their palms together and bowed their heads. Cat prayed for the repose of her father’s soul and Kasane for her brother’s.

They resumed their journey in silence and were just entering Hiratsuka when the first large drops splattered on the brim of Cat’s hat. A gust of wind tore umbrellas and blew people’s clothes about them. It set the pines to lashing, and Cat and Kasane had to lean into it to walk. The few remaining travelers ran for shelter.

“Stop!” The cry came from the stable next to the government transport office. It was loud and imperious, and Cat heard it, of course. She shifted her grip on her staff so she could use it as a weapon and kept moving.

“Halt, you!” Two men moved away from the stable.

As the rain began falling in torrents, Cat dodged into an alley. She tucked her chin down, pulled her elbows in, and ran, splashing mud all over herself. She darted at random down one narrow passageway, then another.

She was trying to lose the peasant woman while she was at it. Being caught with Cat would mean trouble for Kasane. But Kasane had been ill used by so many people, she had come to think of Cat as a champion of sorts. She was determined not to be left behind. Burdened as she was, however, Kira’s men soon passed her.

Cat could hear the men gaining on her. When she saw the back door of a bathhouse slightly open, she slipped inside and slid it shut behind her. She ran down the dark back hallway while the wind rattled the heavy wooden shutters across the front of the building and rain drummed loudly on the cedar shingles of the roof.

Cat almost collided with an off-duty attendant on her way to take a bath herself. She was wearing an unbelted cotton robe with a small towel draped over one shoulder. She screamed and threw up her hands, and the toiletries flew out of the basin she was carrying. She charged through a sliding screen to avoid being trampled by Kira’s men.

Cat found the maneuvering space she needed in the large, high-ceilinged room of the bath itself. A square cypress tub with sides as high as Cat’s waist stood in the center of it. It was big enough to accommodate eight or nine bathers. Round wooden buckets for washing were stacked in pyramids against the walls. Wooden grates covered the long drains that ran around the edges of the room. One wall near the entrance was covered with broad shelves for clothing.

Two more attendants were taking advantage of the off-hour leisure. Naked, they gossiped as they scrubbed themselves with small bags of rice bran. They had been anticipating a long soak in the bath. They had slid off the wooden lid so that one edge rested on the floor and the other against the rim. Steam rose from the water.

They stared, with mouths open and bran bags poised, as Cat rushed in. When they saw the expression on her face they screamed and fled, leaving their clothes behind on the shelves. Cat whirled to face the door. She raised her staff in a fighting stance and poised her weight on the balls of her feet. Kira’s men followed with their long-swords drawn.

Cat backed up until the side of the tub almost grazed the backs of her legs. The steam rising from it enveloped her, giving her a ghostly appearance. When outnumbered, take the offensive, was Musashi’s advice. With a cry she charged. She maneuvered toward the left, pressing their off sides and keeping them in front of her. She thrust and blocked without the interference of conscious thought, sensing the men’s moves before they made them.

She knew she couldn’t hold out long against the two of them. She wasn’t well trained in the use of the staff, and in any case it lacked the reach and menace of the
naginata.
Her only advantage was desperation and the fact that Kira’s men had been ordered to capture her if possible and kill her only as a last resort.  Kira didn’t want to be linked to a murder he couldn’t claim was an accident.

Musashi taught that a warrior must strike slow and hard, like the flow of deep water. Cat must feel the strength welling up within her. She must strike from the muscles of the abdomen and swing into the blow with her entire body. Cat’s staff resounded each time it blocked a steel blade. The shock of the blows numbed her fingers. Cat knew she was barely holding them at bay, and she was beginning to flag. Soon they would close and disarm her.

From the corner of her eye she saw Kasane enter the room. Kasane had taken off her pack and the
furoshiki.
As she raised one of the heavy wooden washtubs high over her head, the sleeves of her pilgrim’s robe fell back, revealing the sinuous muscles of someone used to hard work. Kasane heaved the bucket at the man closest to her.

He saw it coming, but not soon enough. He hadn’t been expecting a cudgel from a bamboo bush, an attack from a peasant. The tub hit him squarely on the side of the head. He toppled facedown into the bath, with his legs sticking out over the side. Other than the waving of his sleeves in the turbulent water, he didn’t move.

Kasane stared at him with a dazed look, as though her hands and arms and shoulders had acted without the permission of their owner. As though their imprudence were likely to get her into a great deal of trouble. Cat took advantage of the diversion to strike.

With a crunching sound, the staff connected with her opponent’s skull. Cat felt the give of bone through her fingers and up into her arms. As the man’s sword clattered to the floor and he crumpled, Cat whacked him across the back of the shoulders for good measure.

“Help me put him in the water.” With numb fingers and throbbing arms, Cat grabbed him under the armpits. Kasane picked up his legs. Together they swung him into the tub. Water cascaded over the sides and rushed across the floor and into the drains along the walls.

“Go check the alley, “Cat said. “Hurry. The police are surely coming. I’ll be right behind you.”

As soon as Kasane left, Cat heaved the first man’s legs into the water, too. Then she pulled the heavy lid up over the tub. It was designed to fit snugly inside the pale cypress walls and to float on the water. It pressed the men under. Maybe they would be rescued before they drowned, but Cat didn’t care if they weren’t.

She looked longingly at the fallen swords but left them. Even one of them would be too hard to hide and too likely to be traced. Instead she scooped up a robe and sash left on the shelf. She grimaced to herself as she thought of the old saying, “A liar is the beginning of a thief.” In her case, a murderer was the beginning of a thief.

Only a short time had passed between Cat’s darting into the bathhouse and her reemergence into the empty alleyway. She put the stolen robe in Kasane’s pack. Then she took the
furoshiki
from her and settled it onto her own back. Relieving Kasane of half her burden was small thanks for saving Cat’s life.

Beyond the end of the covered alleyway, Cat could see the storm raging. Trees whipped to and fro. The rain fell so heavily that she couldn’t see the building across the street.

Cat knew she and Kasane couldn’t stay in Hiratsuka. The police would be searching for her and for Kasane too if anyone had seen her hit the
samurai.
They would surely set up roadblocks and post notices. Oiso was only three-quarters of a
ri
away.

Cat put a spare cord over her hat and tied it tightly under her chin. Kasane did likewise. They both put their raincapes on over their packs and belted them around the waist to keep them from shredding in the gale.

When Cat reached the end of the alleyway’s shelter, she bent over to shield her face from the sting of the wind-driven rain. Leaning into the storm, she set off for Oiso. Without a word of complaint or protest, Kasane pulled down her hat brim and followed.

Hanshiro decided to seek shelter in Hiratsuka until the storm abated. He was sure Lady Asano wouldn’t be traveling in weather like this. When he saw the people clustered under straw mats and raincoats in the downpour outside the bathhouse, he went to investigate.

The crowd parted to make way for him and his swords. He could hear the high, shrill babble of women’s voices inside. He found the room where the cedar tub was and stood quietly behind the police and Hiratsuka’s magistrate, the bath’s manager, attendants, and servants.

He was startled to see the two corpses laid out on the floor.

They were still bright red, parboiled by the bathwater, which had heated up considerably under the wooden lid.

Hanshiro almost smiled. He had to admit the wench was a woman of arm. She had persistence, length of heart. But if they connected her with this murder, she was doomed.

“He was a ghost!” One of the women who had been washing when the fight started now clutched a loose bathing robe about her. Her hairdo was disheveled, and she hadn’t even bothered to put on makeup. “I saw right through him.”

The second attendant disagreed. “He was a demon. He had horns. He had the face of a fox and the ears of a badger.”

Hanshiro listened a while longer to make sure no one here would be able to describe Lady Asano to him. But she was close, probably hiding somewhere in Hiratsuka. Finding her would be like searching for a thing in a bag.

Lady Asano had turned her flight into
musha-shugyo,
training that took the form of a journey. A warrior went on a pilgrimage of sorts to challenge other sword players and sharpen his own skills.

Hanshiro was amused by the thought that he would have to exercise some care in capturing her. This would be more entertaining than he had anticipated.

The tiger’s loose in the market,
he thought as he hitched up his raincape around his shoulders, pulled down his hat brim, and walked out into the storm.

A DEVIL TIED UP IN DARKNESS

The room Kasane was to share with the seven sages at the See No Evil in Oiso looked as though a typhoon had passed through. Combs, cosmetic brushes, and lacquered boxes of powders and tiny jars of hair oil lay scattered among tangled combings of black hair on the crude straw mats. Robes and underclothes were strewn in every corner. When the seven bathhouse attendants went on pilgrimage, they left tidiness behind, along with their other obligations.

The mess was hardly noticeable in the See No Evil. Usually clutter in an establishment like this was found in the servants’ hall. But the See No Evil was a chaos of broken furniture and rice mortars, parts of looms, tools, lumber, mildewed account books, stacks of dusty tubs and earthenware jugs and torn straw matting. Swags of blackened cobwebs hung from the high beams.

Cats perched everywhere, and the odor of their urine pervaded the place. The ceilings were water-stained. The fine latticework on the round windows and the carved openwork over the doorways were coated with grime. Most of the paper panes in the sliding door panels were ripped. The See No Evil seemed determined to sink into ruin despite the desultory efforts of the antique manservant who dozed by the door and the three young maids from the country.

The plaster on the wall out front had fallen off in large slabs, revealing the packed mud and straw underneath. The monkey carved on the faded sign over the roofed gate may have had its hands over its eyes in chagrin. The See No Evil had started as a respectable establishment, built sixty years earlier to elegant proportions. It had slid considerably since then.

Its open corridors were ranged around the ruins of a tiny garden. Only a few wiry azaleas and durable ferns were left in what was now a pond of mud. Wooden washtubs sat atop the garden’s three decorative boulders.

In sunny weather laundry dried there. Today however, beyond the doorway of the seven sages’ room and the open corridor, rain was still falling. The cascade of water from the eaves created a steady roar under the sages’ banter.

When Cat and Kasane had arrived, soaked and shivering, at the See No Evil, the sages had been delighted to see Cat again. They remembered her as Musui’s handsome acolyte, Endurance, but they accepted the fiction that Cat was Kasane’s younger brother, Hachibei. If they noticed that Cat’s accent had grown thick and rustic in two days, they said nothing. Stranger things than that had happened along the TMkaidM.

They had made a fuss over Cat. They renamed her the Mountain of Love. With playful slaps and tickles, the sages had offered to strip off Cat’s wet clothes and rub her dry. Cat had barely managed to towel off and slip into Kasane’s brother’s baggy-seated peasant trousers and tie the sash around his spare jacket before the sages had come looking for her.

Laughing and teasing, they had dragged her into their room to keep them company while they passed the rainy afternoon. Cat was there now, feeling the warmth of the tea flowing into her stomach. The chipped porcelain cup felt wonderfully hot between her numb hands.

The sages wore only their unbelted underrobes as they sat in front of their mirror stands and arranged each other’s hair and makeup. O-Taka, Hawk, the leader of the sages, had already dressed Cat’s wet hair in a boyish style—a short queue atop two full side folds with the back section drawn up tight and tied with a red paper cord. When Hawk had finished she beckoned Kasane to sit in front of the mirror.

“I’m far too homely for you to trouble yourself with,” Kasane murmured.

Hawk laughed. “White hides seven defects.” She held up a box of face powder. “And even a devil is pretty at seventeen.”

“I was once maid in charge of the front service of Lord Hanobo’s mansion.” Sea Wave, the proprietress of the See No Evil, lounged by the door. She watched Hawk divide Kasane’s damp hair into three parts and rub camellia oil into it.

As Cat sipped tea she too watched Kasane intently. She worried that Kasane would forget to call her Hachibei instead of “master.” She worried about what the peasant woman would do when she finally realized she had attacked a
samurai.
It was a crime that, given Kasane’s low status, would earn her a gruesome death. But Kasane sat still as a statue, as though bewitched by the gentle touch of Hawk’s kindness.

“Lord Hanobo’s mansion was a fine place, I can tell you.” Wave puffed contentedly on her small pipe. She was long-waisted and sturdy, and she wore a blue-and-white cloth tied around her disheveled hairdo. She had shrewd eyes, a child’s voice, and the build of a rice mortar.

“My lady had a fawn-colored traveling outfit of eight-roll silk, with flaming maples embroidered on it,” Wave went on. “When we promenaded, we all wore the same color robes with my lady’s crest on them. She made us dress like country bumpkins with our sashes tied behind, while she wore her sash high and her sleeves open in the masculine way that was all the rage. I received a yearly salary of a hundred and twenty
momme
and clothes for the four seasons.”

Hawk smoothed the rear section of Kasane’s thick hair and folded it into the hanging hairdo called a seventeen
shimada
because it was worn by seventeen-year-old women. She sculpted it to lie in an outwardly curving loop along the nape of Kasane’s neck. She held out her free hand, and Bamboo, the youngest of the sages, gave her a flattened black paper cord to tie it in place.

“Why did you leave the lord’s service?” Hawk poked a wooden skewer into the coil and used it to ease the hair into a fuller contour.

“My lady became jealous. I was thought by some to have slightly better than average looks, though you would never guess it now.” Wave caught a cat that sauntered by, headed for the tray of broiled bream. An animal crossing a room was bad luck. “Please excuse me,” she said to it as she turned it around and boosted it out the door.

“My lady became cruel toward me,” Wave went on. “She refused to renew my contract.”

“You should have stolen her husband to spite her.”

“The ladies of the inner apartments seldom catch a glimpse of a man, much less smell the perfume of a loincloth.” Wave smiled slyly. “For their pleasure they must court their middle fingers. But as I was in the front service I saw my lord every day. He became quite taken with me. Our pillowings were so tempestuous, we caused the sliding doors to rattle in their tracks.”

“Why didn’t he keep you?”

“His wife’s family was influential, and she had a high nose. He was spread under her buttocks. Besides, I was born in a Fiery Horse year. When my lady dismissed me, he said nothing in my defense. I was a wisteria without a pine to cling to.”

The women hissed in sympathy. Women born in a Fiery Horse year were usually too spirited for marriage. Fiery Horse women were inclined to kill their husbands. Not many men were willing to risk extended liaisons with them.

When Hawk finally finished, the women exclaimed on the transformation. Kasane tried to hide her powdered and painted face in her hands.

For the rest of the afternoon she rubbed Cat’s feet and back. She served her tea and lit her pipe while Wave and the sages gossiped. Now and then she reached up cautiously to pat the thick clubbed topknot of her
shimada
as though it were a pet cat with an inclination to claw. She sneaked glances at her painted face in the big round mirrors propped on their stands.

Toward the middle of the afternoon the old servant appeared and whispered in Wave’s ear. Wave excused herself. She came back excited.

“Murder was committed in Hiratsuka. The police were here asking if anyone suspicious had checked in. They looked through my guest book.”

“A murderer!” The sages were thrilled.

Kasane dropped the canister of tobacco. “Please, excuse my stupid clumsiness.” With trembling fingers she brushed the spilled tobacco back into the jar.

“Forgive my fool of a sister.” With her folded fan Cat rapped Kasane hard on the shoulder. “She’s stupid and clumsy by nature; but fear makes her doubly so.” Cat looked at Wave with wide, guileless eyes. “Imagine,” she said. “We came from Hiratsuka this very afternoon. The killers may have been on the road with us. How many were there?”

“Only one.” Wave was disappointed that the police would part with very little information for her to pass on. “Witnesses say he was huge, with red eyes and a fearsome expression.”

Cat was relieved. No one had seen Kasane use a wooden tub to drop the
samurai.

To Cat’s and Kasane’s relief, the talk left the present and meandered off among stories of past murders and suicides and illicit affairs. Wave talked of her decline from maid of the front service to the ranks of “nighthawks,” older women who solicited trade in the darkness under bridges. As a nighthawk she had consorted with men who didn’t even carry paper handkerchiefs to clean up after themselves.

Not many who sank so low rose again
,
but Wave had become the beloved mistress of the owner of the See No Evil. When he died he left behind no wife or relatives to dispute Wave’s claim to the inn.

Bamboo had poured a bit of
sake
into her teacup. When she rose to entertain them all, her robe fell off one shoulder, exposing a small white breast. She fluttered her fan coquettishly at Cat and danced a few mincing steps.

“I think I’ll wash my testicles with care.” As she danced she sang with exaggerated innocence. “For as the old saying goes, ‘If you don’t polish a ball, it won’t shine.’ ” She ended in a suggestive and definitely masculine pose.

The sages’ laughter and their simple songs and tales made them seem carefree and innocent in spite of their profession. Cat imagined the sages back in the unlicensed brothel that masqueraded as a bathhouse. She knew that after their customers had bathed, dressed, climbed into their wooden
geta,
and clattered off into the night, the attendants who had made engagements to meet men at their inns ate a quick meal and prepared to go out.

They would probably borrow a sash or a veil or paper handkerchiefs from the women who were staying home. Those who had made no assignations would share the bathhouse’s scant bedding and wadded nightclothes. They would lie hip to hip and talk of actors and of their home villages and of the latest fashions worn by the courtesans of the Yoshiwara.

The day’s light was fading when the See No Evil’s ancient seneschal came to tell Cat the bath was ready. The tiny size of the inn’s dark bathroom with its round, one-person cedar tub saved Cat from having all the sages offer to crowd in to scrub her down. To be safe, she tied the door closed with a straw cord. She washed from the basin on a stand in the corner, near a flickering wall sconce. She barely had room to climb the step to the platform that held the tub and get in.

She heard the old servant’s knees creak as he stooped to poke twigs and leaves and wood scraps into the tiny furnace opening on the other side of the thin wall. As Cat soaked in the scalding water, with the nape of her neck resting on the rim and her knees drawn up to her chest, she savored one of the prime benefits of being male, the right to be first in the bath.

Finally she stepped out of the tub and dried off with her damp cotton towel. She was struggling into her stiff new loincloth, and bumping her elbows in the cramped space, when Kasane yanked on the door and broke the cord holding it. She stood silhouetted in the lighted doorway. She carried a wadded jacket loaned by Wave for the boy the sages now called the Mountain of Love.

“Mas—” Kasane stopped in midword. She stared open-mouthed at Cat’s small, taut breasts, turned a bright pink by the hot bathwater.

Cat grabbed her arm and yanked her inside. She pulled the door closed and used her sash cord to tie it shut again. The time had come for a heart-to-heart. A talk with their knees drawn together. Cat would have to act out two fictions at once.

With Kasane almost chest to chest with her, Cat put on Kasane’s brother’s old jacket. Then, to maintain the level of superior above inferior, she sat on the edge of the tub platform. Kasane knelt on the tiny square of floor. She faced at an angle to one side with her eyes downcast, as courtesy required.

“Do you know who I am?” Cat whispered.