The Tokaido Road (1991)(528p) (64 page)

As Cat crouched, she saw the ice leaves under the nearby clump of bamboo. Rime had formed on the leaves. It had been imprinted with each threadlike vein and then had fallen away. The perfect, fragile copies, translucent and glittering, littered the ground. Cat wept at the intensity and transience of their beauty.

TIME TO BEAT THE GRASS

Hanshiro rested his right hand on the Barber’s hilt. He pulled his left hand back through his wide sleeve and out the neck of his jacket. He rubbed the dark stubble on his chin and stroked the long, ugly scab over the gash on his cheek. The sleepless night had left his eyes red-rimmed and puffy and particularly menacing.

Like a falcon surveying plump mice from a great height, he stared around at the semicircle of fresh bearers who squatted on their dirty heels before him. Behind the bearers, the front and rear criers stood leaning on their poles. Beyond them rose the ascent to Suzuka Pass. The TMkaidM was crowded with early-morning traffic. The bells on the pack horses made a merry noise.

“If any of you bolt”—Hanshiro’s tone, barely above a whisper, was far more effective than a harangue—”I will widow your wives and orphan your children.”

He waited a few beats to let the message register. These were the men who had been waiting in the yard of the transport office in Tsuchiyama. Lord Hino’s advance man had hired them from the pool of local laborers. They weren’t Hino’s retainers, nor were the criers his warriors in disguise. In matters of defense Cat and Hanshiro were now on their own.

“But if we reach Kameyama by midday,” Hanshiro added, “you’ll each receive a bonus.”

From the corner of his eye Hanshiro saw Cat return from the roadside convenience. Her nun’s scarf hid her face and shaved head as she lowered herself into the rear palanquin sitting beside the road. Hanshiro grunted, and the men rose and trotted to their places at the carrying poles.

“
Ho-yoi-yoi.”
The bearers used their sticks to heave the poles onto their callused shoulders, and the palanquins lurched forward. Only one of them held a passenger, though. Hanshiro chose to jog just behind the front crier.

By the time Hanshiro had run one of the two nearly vertical
ri
separating Tsuchiyama and Sakanoshita, his heart was thumping like a frantic animal in his chest. His calves cramped with pain, but he was so relieved to be free of the confines of the palanquin that he didn’t care.

The mist that had reached tentative wisps out onto the low lands had thickened into a dense fog by the time the bearers reached the suspension bridge, the detour over the deepest gorge. The crier gave his usual shout. The line of travelers waiting their turn to cross the narrow, swaying span parted and bowed. Looking out into the fog, Cat had the feeling that the rest of the world had disappeared. That these were the survivors, the last of earth’s mortals.

The bearers stopped at the entrance of the bridge so Cat could get out. She untied her wide-brimmed hat from the side of the palanquin and put it on over her veil. Then she retrieved the
naginata
from the carrying pole and walked back to stand behind the rear crier. Hanshiro gave her the briefest of looks, but it sufficed. He was counting on her to help him keep the bearers from deserting.

Hanshiro led the way out onto the lengths of bamboo lashed together to form the bridge’s floor. Five farmers had already started across carrying heavy wooden frames loaded with bales of rice and towering bundles of firewood. They were followed by a lightweight
kago
carried by two men. Their passenger followed them on foot. A large party of pilgrims, several of them women, approached, single file, from Sakanoshita. The bamboo flooring clattered incessantly, and the woven bamboo hawsers creaked with the travelers’ weight and tread and the wind that blew in the gorge.

The bridge’s concave arc hung below the tops of the cliffs on either side, and the chasm looked as though it had been filled to overflowing with thin, steaming rice gruel. When Hanshiro had almost reached the middle of the bridge, he could just make out the five disreputable-looking
rMnin
lounging at the other side. He smiled to himself. Hino was so predictable.

But there were only five swordsmen. Hanshiro was offended that Hino thought so little of his skill and that of Lady Asano. Apparently Hino thought she had insisted on the
naginata
only as some foolish female whim, as an accessory, like a mirror or a tortoiseshell comb. Perhaps he thought that because she wasn’t a legitimate daughter, Lord Asano had neglected her training in self-defense.

 “Halt!” The leader of the
rMnin
moved to the entrance of the bridge.

Suzuka Pass was famous for bandits. The people heading toward the
rMnin
wasted no time. They turned and began pushing back through those behind them. Those already moving away from the ruffians increased their pace.

“We have a quarrel with the hirelings of the traitor Hino,” the man shouted. “The rest of you may cross in peace.”

No one believed him for an instant. The women began screaming. Everyone bunched up ahead of Hanshiro as they tried to crowd past the
kago.
The
kago’s
bearers, however, were also trying to turn around, and their carrying pole had become entangled in the woven ropework that formed the sides of the bridge.

The fact that Hanshiro and the white-robed nun and their men didn’t retreat seemed to infuriate the
rMnin.
He made a great show of drawing his short-sword and sawing at one of the two main hawsers supporting the bridge.

The travelers’ fright turned to panic. Men and women clawed at each other’s clothing as they tried to force their way through the press. The
kago’s
owners cut the ropes holding the pole to the top of the basket and pushed it through the mesh of ropes and out into space. The fog swallowed it. One of the bearers almost fell after it as he tried to hoist the flimsy bamboo
kago
onto his back while the other travelers shoved past him.

Hanshiro motioned for his own men to move to one side so people could hurry by. And still the
rMnin
sawed at the hawser.

“He’s bluffing.” Hanshiro could tell the bearers didn’t believe him. “And even if he weren’t, you can cling to the bridge if it falls, but you cannot escape the Barber.” With one hand he slid his long-sword a few fingers’ width from its scabbard. When he pushed it back in, the iron sword guard hit the sheath’s lacquered rim with a hollow, ominous click. The click’s echo seemed amplified by the fog.

Finally everyone had passed Hanshiro but the unfortunate
kago
bearer, deserted by his partner and fare. He stood, mouth agape and eyes bulging, as Hanshiro strode toward him. When he realized that with such a bulky load he could not pass the palanquins, he looked back over his shoulder. The
rMnin
was still sawing on the hawser.

“Homage to Amida Butsu.” Hardly pausing to take breath, the bearer muttered the sacred phrase over and over. With his immortal soul taken care of, he tried to figure out how to save his
kago
and his livelihood.

Cat disdained letting go of the
naginata
to grab the ropework that formed the side of the dancing bridge. She planted her feet firmly about a shoulder’s width apart on the corrugated bamboo surface. She flexed her knees so her legs moved easily in response to the bridge’s gyrations. She stood like a sailor on the deck of a storm-tossed boat as the wind whipped her white robes and scarves about her.

From habit, she turned to reassure Kasane, who had always stood behind her. And she remembered the poem a courier had handed through the bars of her window when she’d reached Tsuchiyama. It had been written in Kasane’s childish hand.

The mist that rises

On the far-flung mountaintops

where morning finds you

Is but the breath of the sighs

Of one who remains behind.

The ancients believed that the thoughts of those at home accompanied loved ones on their journeys. Cat felt Kasane’s presence now.
I
welcome your spirit, elder sister,
Cat thought.

She was glad Kasane was safe. Her young man would marry her. She would bear children noisy as summer’s flies. In time she would remember her former mistress only on the prescribed days of mourning.

Cat watched the desperate
kago
man suspend his flimsy basket over the side. Leaning his chest against the cables, he sidestepped along, carrying it past the terrified palanquin bearers. The
rMnin
cut through the hawser, and that side of the bridge dropped with a sickening lurch. The sudden fall and shift in the cant of the bridge’s floor threw the bearers and Cat against the cable webbing that formed the handhold on the lower side. Cat recovered first.

When the palanquin bearers turned to flee, they saw her kneeling on one knee. She had braced her other leg in front of her. She held the
naginata
over her head and aimed at them. Behind the flapping ends of the scarf she was grinning like a madwoman. Oishi had been right when he’d told her that swordsmanship led one to the center to confront life and death.

Cat realized that perhaps Hino planned to kill her after all, but she wasn’t afraid. She was exhilarated by the prospect of falling into the swirling void below her. She and her beloved would die together, to live forever in Paradise.

Her men were convinced, however, that they were in the employ of a particularly deranged pair of demons. Wide-eyed, babbling in terror, they struggled to carry the palanquins forward on the tilting bridge.

Cat decided that the bearers had come too far to try to retreat. She could pass them now to be at Hanshiro’s side. As good as Hanshiro was, he would need her help against five men. She began toiling up the tilting, sloping, swaying span. The bearers looked back at the yawning expanse of the abyss behind them and hurried after her.

The
rMnin
was sawing at the second cable as Hanshiro closed in on him. He looked murderous, but he didn’t fool Hanshiro. Even though the man himself had obviously fallen on hard times, his short-sword was of a superior quality and finely honed. He could have cut through the cable in one stroke of his long-sword instead of making all this show.

Hanshiro remembered Kasane’s endless store of peasant aphorisms.
Time to beat the grass and scare the snake,
he thought. Time to do the unexpected.

He crossed his arms on his chest, threw back his head, and laughed. He laughed heartily, joyously. He laughed louder than he had laughed in ten years.

“Baka!”
The leader of the
rMnin
glowered at him. Hanshiro could see the thoughts going on behind those squinting, venal eyes as plainly as if they were written on a scroll being slowly unrolled. The
rMnin
hadn’t been instructed to kill Hanshiro, but even if he had, he wouldn’t have been able to bring himself to attack a laughing opponent.

Hanshiro’s laughter was so infectious, Cat began laughing, too. Helpless with it, she braced the butt of her
naginata
and hung on it. She laughed until her sides ached and tears ran down her cheeks.

THEY REFUSE TO HELP A TRAVELER

Cat lay curled up tightly on her side among the cushions of the palanquin. The pounding of the bearers’ feet across the wooden bridge woke her from the anxious sleep into which she had plummeted. The drumming scattered the memories and dreams swarming about her.

She tried to stretch to relieve the cramps in her legs and feet but came up against the sides of the palanquin. Still disoriented and anxious from the imaginary voices that had been shrilling for her attention, she thought of the poet-priest Musui, Dream Besotted. His kind eyes and lopsided smile comforted her, and she wondered, briefly, where he was this cold winter morning. Probably on the road somewhere, she thought, in a hovel sharing a cracked cup of millet tea with some peasant whose load he had carried.

She remembered Musui lifting his staff when crossing bridges so as not to disturb Kobo Daishi’s sleep. She remembered him reciting Daishi’s poem.

They refuse to help

A traveler in trouble.

One night seems like ten.

In spite of her own troubles, or maybe because of them, the tattoo of feet on a wooden bridge at night had distressed Cat ever since her brief time with Musui. It distressed her now, at dawn, just outside Totsuka.

She wanted to tell the bearers to stop. To walk softly. People might be sleeping underneath. A young outcast woman and her children and their grandfather might be huddled there, seeking shelter from the long cold nights. Travelers in trouble, whom no one would help. Whom Cat had been unable to help.

In the past five nights and four days, Cat had had time to remember the outcast family and a great deal more. The world had shrunk to the interior of the palanquin. She could close her eyes and visualize every stitch and stain and wrinkle in the silk upholstery. She had memorized every brush stroke of the illustration from
The Tale of Genji,
painted on the gilt walls.

She had tried to read but had become too sick. So she had folded a piece of paper several times to stiffen it. She had stuck it vertically between two thin reed slats of the blind covering the window. It was a vulgar practice, a casual disregard for propriety that her nurse had always deplored as a sign of society’s decay. Cat remembered her scoldings fondly.

Cat had spent the past four days gazing out through the narrow opening at the procession of muddy brown rice fields. She’d watched the same straw and mud-plastered hovels of the villages and the backs of the bowing populace, endlessly repeated. She’d felt helpless and detached as the relays of bearers changed without a word from her. She’d felt like a stone on a go board, being moved by a greater hand.

As she passed each village and town, she tried to remember what had happened to her there, but she found it difficult. Those things had happened to someone else. The TMkaidM itself was completely different when experienced from inside a palanquin. Once removed from the company of the people who traveled the road and lived along it, the danger, the romance, the singular excitement of the great highway, ceased to exist.

The nights were the worst. That was when Cat shivered in a frigid darkness clamorous with memories and regrets. At night she babbled incoherently to her nurse. She sobbed with longing for her mother and father. She held long, silent conversations with Kasane. She dreamed of boarding a boat with Hanshiro and sailing into the rising sun, toward the far green land of Tosa.

Toward the end of her journey she screamed silently for the bearers to stop torturing her with their cruel, steady, bone-shaking pace. The only relief had been on the second night. She had spent much of it on the boat from Kuwana to Miya. She had been lulled by the drone of the boatmen’s talk, by the flap and hum of the sails, and by the crackle of fire in the big iron basket that hung out over the prow. She had slept curled with Hanshiro under a tattered rented quilt in the bottom of the boat. Now she tried to imagine his arms around her again, his body warm against hers.

She knew that boat ride might be the last time she would feel the strength of his arms encircling her. If fate willed it, she would be in Edo tonight. She would find Oishi. She would avenge her father. Then she would die.

The palanquin jerked to a halt, and Cat heard the familiar morning garble of a transport office yard. She heard the shouts of her own bearers, who, somewhere in the long, grueling journey, had ceased to be human. They had become apparatuses like the wheels that lifted water into the irrigation ditches, or the stone disks and wooden cranks that hulled rice.

The palanquin lurched forward, then back, as the bearers set it down. While they went off to report to the transport officials, Cat sat relishing the few moments of peace and anticipating the chance to stretch her cramped legs. Hanshiro slid open the door.

“My lady.” As he bowed, Cat detected a conspiratorial smile.

She pulled her scarf across her face. The rowdy crowd of men in the transport office yards was always ready to have a look at the occupants of palanquins, especially if they were women. Hanshiro stood between them and Cat as he helped her out into a world transformed by a thick white quilt of snow.

As he walked with her to a grove of pines across the road, their sandals crunched in the deep fluffy powder. Beyond the trees a narrow river coiled like a black snake through the white expanse of rice paddies. Hanshiro turned Cat so she faced south and west.

“Ma!”
Kasane’s favorite phrase escaped before Cat could stop it. No wonder Hanshiro had been smiling.

The gently curving slopes of Mount Fuji were covered in snow tinted mauve against a golden-pink sky. A spindrift of windblown snow floated eastward from the peak. The lower peaks around Fuji seemed to float on a tinted ocean of mist.

“ ‘One never tires of gazing upon the face of Fuji,’ ” Cat murmured.

They both stared at the volcano, watching the subtle shifts in color on its slopes. Finally Hanshiro reluctantly broke the silence. “Lord Todo travels ahead of us, my lady.”

Cat grimaced. Lord Todo’s retinue would number in the hundreds, and it would be moving extremely slowly. To try to pass him on the road would be more than rude, it would probably be suicidal. A lord’s retainers had the right to cut down anyone of lower rank who disrupted their procession.

“Move smartly, Cold Rice!”

The shout from the yard startled Cat from her gloomy calculation. She turned to see Viper trotting in place at the front of her palanquin. She pulled her scarf farther down over her face and sidled over to stand behind Hanshiro.

“Do you know him?”

“He and his wife sheltered me.”
In another life,
Cat thought.

“It would be best if he didn’t see you.”

“Yes. That would be best.” Cat had to smile behind her scarf.

Given Viper’s reckless determination to help her, that indeed would be best. Viper surreptitiously tried to see who his mysterious fare was, but Cat held her scarf in place as she ducked into the palanquin. Viper and Cold Rice grunted in unison as they lifted the front of the large carrying pole and two other men held up the rear.

When Hanshiro gave the new bearers the usual promise of a bonus, he also tipped them in advance, to ensure that their songs wouldn’t be insulting. So for the next
ri
Viper exchanged ripostes with passing
kago
men and sang his bawdy ditties to entertain his veiled passenger. Cat wasn’t amused, though. With a lump of dread heavy in the pit of her stomach, she watched for the criers and liveried porters who would be bringing up the rear of Lord Todo’s procession. She watched the sun climb higher in the sky.

Then a courier Viper had just good-naturedly insulted called back over his shoulder as he trotted away, “I hear they hung Sakuta out like a shop banner.”

Viper didn’t answer, but Cat felt an almost indiscernible falter in his stride.

Sakuta.
Cat concentrated until she remembered where she had heard the name. Sakuta was the headman of Viper’s village. He had been such a mild, honest-seeming man. Even when he’d drunk too much at the celebration in Viper’s kitchen after the exorcism of the homeless ghost, he had been soft-spoken. She remembered that he’d been worried about the welfare of his people. Cat wondered what he could have done to deserve execution, for that was surely what the courier had meant.

Cat raised the blind, held her fan out the window, and gestured with it. The four bearers moved to the side of the road and set the palanquin down near an open-air tea shop. They lined up, knelt in the snow, and bowed until flakes of it powdered their foreheads.

“I wish to speak privately with the two forward
kago
men,” Cat said.

The other two joined the crier and box bearer and Hanshiro’s four
kago
men, who crowded around a roadside stand to order a bit of
sake
for warmth. Viper and Cold Rice remained prostrate next to the palanquin. Hanshiro, ready for trouble, stood behind them.

Viper and Cold Rice both wore baggy trousers and leggings and jackets with the skirts tucked up into their sashes. Their jackets and trousers had started out dark indigo, but they had been patched and repatched with whatever cloth was available. They were so worn, frayed, and covered with stitching and patches that they were hardly recognizable as specific articles of clothing. The towel Viper wore over his head and tied under his chin hid most of the gaudy tattoo.

“Are you in good health, Boss of the
kago
men?” Cat drew back the yellow gauze curtain with two pale, slender fingers and allowed Viper to catch a glimpse of her face. She almost laughed at his astonished expression. “Do you remember me?” she asked.

“Yes, Your Lordship.” Viper hastened to correct himself. “Your Ladyship.”

“Do you still think me the ghost of Lord Yoshitsune?”

“Forgive my stupidity for thinking that, Your Ladyship. Wisdom can’t circulate in the body of a big man. A fool at thirty is a fool for life.”

“What happened to Sakuta?”

“A farmer’s lot is to have just enough to live on and no more. But our lord didn’t leave us even that much. Sakuta delivered our petition for lower taxes to Lord Katsugawa’s bailiff, but he was refused. Sakuta became very sad. He said that if he ignored the pain of the villagers, it was like leaving his own wounds untended. So he went to Edo, to the palace of O-Kubo-sama himself. He waited at the Tiger Gate until O-Kubo-sama’s chamberlain passed. Then he ran past the guards and stuck the petition in through the palanquin window.”

Cat took a deep breath of anguish. She knew what must have happened next. Sakuta also must have known what would happen. “He was executed? “

“Crucified. His body was left hanging for the crows to dine on.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“It was his duty. And O-Kubo-sama did reduce our taxes by forty-five bales, so Sakuta was successful in his mission.” Viper’s voice faltered. “But his family—his wife and children and parents—were made outcasts.”

“They will all surely be reborn higher on the Wheel.”

“Thank you, Your Ladyship. But on death all accounts are canceled, and we shouldn’t trouble you with our petty problems. You must reach Edo tonight, is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“Todo is ahead of us with a train of five hundred. His movements are as drawn out as an ox urinating. If we have to follow him, we won’t reach the Shinagawa barrier by sundown.”

They all knew the barriers closed at sundown.

“Do you know a detour?”

“It’s a long one. But if you hire extra bearers in Kanagawa, Cold Rice and I can slide the palanquin door off
its tracks and run ahead with it.”