The Tokaido Road (1991)(528p) (9 page)

Hanshiro went directly to the Great Gate, where he planned to exchange his numbered wooden ticket for information as well as for his weapon. Centipede’s assistant knew better than to retrieve Hanshiro’s sword. He stood back, bowing, while Centipede himself accepted the ticket and went into the gate house.

Even though Hanshiro’s Kanesada blade was in its scabbard, Centipede carried it on a silk cloth laid across both palms. He bowed low over it when he held it out. The bow was more out of respect for the curved, slender, two-hundred-year-old length of silvery-blue steel than for its present owner. Mortals passed into other existences, but the spirit of a sword like this endured forever.

With the trailing edge of the silk cloth, Centipede lovingly polished the horse roundels of mother-of-pearl inlay on the copper-and-gold-flecked lacquered ground of the scabbard. The crows circling the round brass hilt guard represented the New Shadow school of strategy.

Centipede sighed. “The inferior new blades can’t match those of the KotM masters.”

Hanshiro grunted. He knew that if he kept silent, Centipede’s curiosity would do most of his work for him.

Centipede had acquired his nickname in his youth when he had been so fast with two swords, he’d looked as though he had extra arms. Like Hanshiro, he was a
rMnin.
His master had died in the bed of a famous
kabuki
actor during the great Fire-of-the-Long-Sleeved-Garment forty-five years ago. The ignominy lay not in the fact that the lord had died with
ano mono,
“that thing,” splitting the melon of another man, but that he had died in bed instead of in battle. The tragedy had given rise to a lot of sly poetry about the heat of his passion.

A true warrior observed a quota of one lord per lifetime, and the government forbade loyal retainers from following their masters into the spirit world. Besides, the country had been plagued by peace since Tokugawa Ieyasu had taken power a hundred years ago. Warriors, especially unemployed ones, were as welcome as fleas in a low-class inn, and about as plentiful. Since the gay life in the Yoshiwara had always suited Centipede, he had decided to make a career of his hobby.

Now his hobby was accumulating rumors. He had quite a large collection of them, but he shared it with very few people.

Centipede left his assistant in charge of the gate. The district was deserted by all but merchants’ clerks and service people at this hour anyway. He invited Hanshiro into the tiny gate house for a cup of tea.

As he poured, Centipede drew air in through his teeth with a hissing noise. He was concentrating on finding the best way to start the conversation. He was mortified that his carelessness had allowed Cat to disappear. He even felt responsible for the accidental death of the
metsuke,
and he suspected the two events were related somehow.

He decided on noncommittal. “There was some excitement here last night.”

“So there was.” Hanshiro was a master at noncommittal.

The two sipped in silence for a while.

“She’ll have a difficult time hiding,” Centipede observed. “She’s very beautiful.”

“A bell cricket is kept in a cage because of its song.”

“The bannerman must be worried.” Centipede couldn’t resist mentioning Kira’s lower rank.

“Keisei,”
Hanshiro said, and Centipede laughed.

Beautiful women were called
keisei,
“castle falling in ruins,” because they often led to the destruction of men and kingdoms. One had destroyed Hanshiro’s young lord in Tosa fifteen years ago. The young man had squandered his portion of his family’s fortune for the favors of an arrogant, fickle courtesan. His father had posted an act of disownment. Humiliated, impoverished, cut off from his family, the young man had shaved his head and become a mendicant monk. And so, indirectly, a beautiful woman had ruined Hanshiro also and changed the course of his life.

By the end of the hour of the Dragon, Hanshiro had learned a great deal. He had left just enough rumors with Centipede to pay for the information. More important, he had listened to the old man’s reminiscences of the times long past. He had shared with him the anomie of living among
samurai
obsessed with money and the acquisition of goods.

Finally, Hanshiro stuck his long-sword’s scabbard into his sash at a precise angle to the right of his short-sword. He passed silk cords through the loops of the scabbards and secured them to the sash. He bowed and left Centipede brooding over his fifth cup of tea.

Hanshiro knew which people to talk to along the route into the city. He met with success at the fifth try.

When he reached the eel seller’s stall he bowed low and actually gave a flicker of a smile. He had sought information here often, and he knew that this one required more than money. To get full value from her he had to show he shared her sense of cosmic irony.  “Did you see a slender commoner in a Nakagawa Freight uniform pass here last night? A little after the hour of the Rat?”

The old woman stared at him blankly, her eyes wide as an owl’s. “My hearing is bad, Your Honor.”

Hanshiro added ten paper-wrapped
mon
to the pile in his palm. The eel seller slipped them into her sleeve. Then she went back to tending her rack of charring eels. “I might have. My sight is not very good, either.”

Hanshiro patiently added ten more coins.

“Ten more would help my memory.” She smiled fondly at him as he wrapped the coins. She smiled at him the way a cat smiled at the hand holding the fish entrails.

“Yes, I saw her. A young woman dressed as a dirt-eater. Very convincing. But she smelled of camellia oil, and she reached up to arrange hair that was no longer on her head. Also, her hand was uncallused.”

“Who was with her?”

“No one.”

“No one?”

“No one.” The old woman grinned toothlessly at him. “But for the insignificant sum of ten more coppers, my memory might improve enough to tell you where she went.”

Hanshiro complied.

“When she left here she was reading a playbill.”

“Which theater?”

“Alas, coppers enough to choke a priest wouldn’t improve my rheumy old eyes that much.”

Hanshiro bowed low and gave her ten more coins, for luck. She handed him half a section of bamboo heaped with rice and with a savory eel lying across the top. He ate as he headed for the theater district.

“Tosa-san,” she called after him. When he returned she spoke in a much lower voice. “There’s one you should beware of.”

“One of Uesugi’s men?”

“No, although Kira’s son’s toadies are on the prowl after your pretty dirt-eater. This is a young westcountryman. A
rMnin
like yourself. From AkM, judging by the accent. He’s been asking questions.”

Hanshiro paused a moment. The westcountryman was probably from Asano’s estate in AkM, or one of Asano’s neighbors, perhaps hired by Kira because he knew what Cat looked like.

Hanshiro left the eel seller with something better than coppers. He smiled at her. She probably appreciated the rarity of the gift.

He went to Shichisaburo’s theater, the Nakamura-za, first because Shichisaburo was on the list given to him by the mistress of the Perfumed Lotus. Also, Centipede had told him the actor wasn’t actually matching his bird to Cat’s nest when he arranged assignations with her. Something was amiss in that.

Besides, Shichisaburo was a versatile actor, and Hanshiro liked his style. He hadn’t adopted the vulgar new “rough stuff” method of acting so popular with Edo’s merchants and
samurai.
Hanshiro agreed with the theater critic who said Shichisaburo was like patent medicine, good for everything.

TO CROSS THE EXPANSE

Cat was strong, but she wasn’t used to walking. By the time she reached the village of Kawasaki, a mere two
ri
and three
cho
from the Shinagawa barrier, her feet and legs ached. The pack’s straps were digging painfully into her shoulders.

She stopped at a shop displaying a stack of plump rice balls, each wrapped in a sheet of dark green, iridescent seaweed. She gathered her resolve. She would have to engage in the vulgar exchange of money for goods, or she would starve. She pointed to the rice balls and held out two precious coppers.

The shopkeeper looked astonished, then angry. “Please accept this as a humble donation.” As he put a ball into Cat’s begging bowl, he bowed with excessive courtesy. The bow was so exaggerated, it was unmistakably insulting.

Cat could see that the rice ball had been dropped in the dirt. “May the merciful Buddha bless you,” she said.

“Two coppers for a rice ball!” he muttered as Cat walked away. “Does he take me for a fool?”

Cat was so hungry that she brushed off the dirt and slid the ball under the rim of the basket so she could eat it. It was stale and brittle, and it tasted like chaff in her mouth. Cat did not like the view of the world from the other side of a begging bowl. Her hand trembled in humiliation and rage.

Cat’s indifference toward commoners was hardening into a tight knot of loathing. She would have given her life to assemble her
naginata
there in the crowded, dusty road and to pin the rice ball vendor like a fly to the wall of his shop. But her life was not hers to give. The stakes were much higher than that.

Even after eating the dry rice cake Cat felt dizzy with hunger. She limped to a spot of sunlight against a wall that blocked the cold wind. She leaned on her staff for support and watched the cheerful traffic stream by.

She realized that she would face problems that hadn’t occurred to her when she thought she could reach KyMto in ten days. She didn’t know what food or lodging cost, or the price of a bath or the ferry across the Tama River on the other side of Kawasaki. She couldn’t even do something as simple as buy rice.

“Are you thirsty, holy one?” A young tea seller, perhaps nine or ten years old, stopped in front of her.

His spindly hips were draped in a loincloth worn thin as gauze with age. His torn paper jacket was belted with the straw cord from a rice bale. His conical rush hat advised people to visit Mitsui
sake
shop, where there were “Cash sales” and “No fancy prices.” Even in the chill of early winter his feet were bare.

Two wooden water buckets, almost half his height, hung from the pole he carried across his right shoulder. Balanced on top of the front bucket was a two-tiered tray with wooden slats forming its high sides. It held four chipped bowls, a lacquered tea canister, and bamboo utensils. On top of the lid of the rear bucket perched a tiny iron charcoal brazier and kettle.

“How much is your tea?” Cat felt more comfortable discussing money with a child.

“No charge.” The boy studied Cat. “Are you still hungry?”

“Yes.”

“How many coppers do you have?”

Cat searched through the pocket formed by the seam that closed the bottom two-thirds of her jacket sleeve opening. She held out the ten-copper piece the old man had given her at the barrier and five
mon,
all she had managed to beg.

The boy raised his eyebrows at the fiscal incompetence of this priest. Then he took the money and disappeared into the crowd. Cat was beginning to berate herself for letting him rob her when he returned with two fat, fresh rice cakes wrapped in bamboo leaves artistically formed into tetrahedrons, and a small packet of pickled radish. He handed them to her, then set down his buckets.

“Nosewater,” he shouted to a passing noodle seller.

Cat flinched. The last thing she wanted was attention. She took off her pack and sat wearily, cross-legged, on the ground.

“You owe me a fist, remember? For the
sake,”
the tea seller said.

“Suck it, JMshk,” the other boy replied amiably. Strapped on his back was a high box whose narrow shelves contained bowls of buckwheat noodles. “I only owe you four fingers.”

“A fist. But give me two bowls and we’re even.”

The noodle vendor reluctantly handed over two bowls of cold buckwheat noodles and stood waiting for JMshk and the priest to empty them.

Cat would have to take off her big hat to eat. Next door, however, were the stables and courtyard of Kawasaki’s post station. The office building itself was set back from the road so the porters, messengers, and horses gathered there wouldn’t snarl the foot traffic. In the courtyard,
kago
bearers, hostlers, and off-duty couriers lounged in the sun.

On the
tatami
mats inside the low, open-fronted transport office sat a flock of clerks in identical robes. One of their main occupations was keeping tabs on the likes of Cat. With their ink stones and brushes and rolls of paper they were as dangerous, in their way, as the police and Kira’s retainers.

Cat turned away from the transport office and took off the tall hat. When she shook her high-set tassel of hair, dust flew from it. If someone recognized her, so be it. She couldn’t reach the Western Capital if she starved to death first. She held out her hands for the bowl of noodles.

If the boys noticed Cat’s delicate features, they said nothing.  They had seen too many strange goings-on to comment on the foibles of a
komuso,
a priest of empty nothing. Most of them were mad to begin with, and not a few were fallen aristocrats and dangerous men.

JMshk handed Cat a pair of chopsticks, and she didn’t even look to see if they were clean. She didn’t worry that someone of her rank didn’t eat in the streets like an ill-bred commoner. She devoured the noodles and gave the vendor back the bowl. Then she ate one of the rice cakes and the pickles. She wrapped the other in her thin towel and stowed it in her sleeve to eat later.

“Tell Suruga I’m looking for him,” JMshk called as the tall noodle stand bobbed back into traffic.

JMshk wiped out a narrow teacup with the dangling end of his loincloth. Squatting in the dust, he used a tiny bamboo ladle, hardly bigger than an ear pick, to measure out the coarse dried black leaves and stems of the cheapest grade of tea. He set the small kettle onto the brazier to warm.

‘ ‘It would be most fortunate to meet someone who could see the future.” JMshk artfully arranged his request into a polite oblique as he waited for the water to heat.

“Reading events to come is not my talent.” Cat saw disappointment skim across the boy’s face. “Why do you need to know the future?”

“My parents died while we were on pilgrimage. I want to know if I’ll ever see my village again.”

“Do you have six coppers?” Cat wiped her fingers on her dusty robe and held them out. JMshk dipped water from his bucket and poured it over them. Reading the future was holy work. It required purification.

JMshk laid down one of the wooden lids for Cat to work on. His purse hung from a long cord around his neck. He pulled it up from the depths of his paper jacket and separated six
mon
from the string of them.

“I haven’t the eight diagrams, so this will be only a simplified reading.” Cat shook the coins in her closed hands.

Like all the women who lived in the House of the Carp, Cat had had her future read often by the blind masseuse who doubled as a diviner. She knew the simplest of the more than eleven thousand combinations, and in any case, she was determined to make up a bright future for JMshk.

She laid the coins out in a vertical line on the lid, and the boy leaned closer. He was trying to see happiness, or at least a thatched roof and a daily bowl of rice, in the combination of the coins’ stamped and plain sides.

As Cat studied the results she sucked in her breath, hissing with pleasure. All the coins had landed with their stamped sides up, a rare combination. She would not have to lie to him.

“Will it be a good life?” he asked anxiously. A few people stopped to look over his shoulder. Then a few more.

“This is a pairing of two Heaven combinations. Very manly.” Cat was so intent on the message in the coins, she didn’t notice the small crowd of people craning to see.

‘ ‘Extreme happiness will follow sorrow.” Cat was astonished at her own elation over his good fortune. “A dragon rising to Heaven is your symbol. Even if you’re not doing well right now, your worries and troubles will diminish. But you must work hard for success.”

“Ma!”
JMshk murmured. “You don’t say!”

When Cat scooped up the coins to return them, he held up his hand, refusing them. He gave her a hempen cord and showed her how to thread it through the square hole in the center of each copper, then knot them in place. It was a small accomplishment, but it gave Cat the sudden, heady feeling that she could learn the arcane ways of commerce. She could survive in the world of merchants. She smiled as she put the small string into her sleeve.

“Do me the kindness of reading my future, holy one.” A woman set down the two huge cloth-wrapped packages she carried and squatted in front of Cat. The child who rode on her back and shared her oversize coat peered out from the big, loose collar. The woman held out six coins.

“I am weary,” Cat said. “Let me rest a few minutes.” She was having trouble keeping her eyes open.

“Go on.” JMshk shooed them away.  “The holy one has traveled far. Can’t you see he’s exhausted?”

Reluctantly, the crowd dispersed.

From the direction of Edo a jangle of bells approached. The tips of two messengers’ spears, with their thick black fringe of horsehair, bobbed above the traffic. Travelers moved toward the side of the road, and a pair of couriers panted into the yard of the transport office.

They weren’t the regularly scheduled runners, and JMshk smelled intrigue. Intrigue was more than just entertainment for him. From time to time he was able to exchange his knowledge

for coppers. “Will the honorable holy one do me the august favor of watching my shop?”

Without waiting for an answer, JMshk abandoned his water buckets and tea tray to Cat’s care. The last Cat saw of him were the blackened soles of his feet as he wriggled through a well-worn hole under the post station’s plastered wall.

Cat leaned her lower back against her own wall, crossed her arms on her raised knees, and rested her head on them. The sun felt warm on the top of her head. The noise of the TMkaidM faded and surged and echoed around her. Worms of light swam in front of her eyes.

JMshk found her sleeping there a few minutes later. He studied the top of her head. The priest was pretty enough to be the one the authorities sought. But if he were the woman, surely she wouldn’t be napping here like a chicken in the dust next to the government office.

“Holy one.” JMshk shouldered his pole and adjusted the buckets to balance. “I have to sell the rest of my tea.”

Cat tried to force her eyes open against the fatigue that weighted the lids. “What message do they carry?” she asked.

“A courtesan ran away. They think she may be heading for the west country.” JMshk was disappointed that the news had been so uninteresting.

“Is she wanted for any crime?”

“No.” JMshk considered her a moment. “There’s a place where you can sleep, holy one, away from noise and curious eyes.”

He led Cat between the buildings to the beach beyond. He maneuvered his pole and buckets among the nets and drying racks and boats until he stood in front of a half-rotted hull. It was turned upside down, with one gunwale in the sand and the other propped up by a broken rudder.