The Tokaido Road (1991)(528p)

by Lucia St. Clair Robson

  At least the shame of being beaten by one small woman would keep Kira’s men from making much of a fuss about it. They were like men who stepped in dog dung in the dark. They would be quiet about the entire affair.

  The abbot ran a hand over his satiny skull. This brawl at the ferry would surely bring him problems.

  “A thick-livered fellow, that priest,” said Musui. “Four to one, you say.”

  “His opponents were small-livered, cowardly, and unskilled.”

  Unskilled! With her head still bowed Cat sent a smoldering sideways glance Hanshiro’s way. She looked down quickly when her eyes met his. Unskilled!

  She was outraged. Didn’t the filthy hired killer have a high nose. Didn’t he have a good opinion of himself, though. Unskilled, indeed.

  “Might this be connected with the AkM-Asano affair?” In the dim light Musui didn’t seem to notice Cat’s hands shake as she poured his tea. “I’ve heard many stories about it lately.”

  “They say a lone warrior is gathering an army to avenge the death of Lord Asano,” said the man sitting next to Mountain Wind.

  “The fugitive is only a wandering lunatic,” said Hanshiro. “But there are those in Edo who want this nonsense cropped while it’s a tender shoot, before it grows into something requiring an ax.”

  “And you are certainly the shears to prune it,” murmured Musui.

  “In the village, the well-side talk is that Lord Asano had a daughter who has fled the capital. She’s now in hiding, and this warrior-priest is her champion,” said the abbot.

  “I was there,” Mountain Wind said.

  They all turned to stare at him.

  “I was in the House of the Perfumed Lotus the night the wench disappeared, the one they say might be Asano’s child.”

  Cat was sure they could hear her heart, loud as storm surf in her head. Except for Musui’s bamboo flute, there was nothing close at hand to serve as a weapon. If only she had her scissors with her. She could at least have driven them into her heart before the hired killer took her. She vowed that if she lived through this night, she would keep the scissors honed and would always carry them with her.

  Make emptiness your path. The words from Musashi’s Book of Emptiness calmed her. Make emptiness your path and your path is emptiness.

  “What does Her Ladyship look like?” Hanshiro asked casually. He was already sitting bolt upright, but Cat noticed his spine stiffen a bit more.

  “I didn’t actually see her. It was my first visit to the Perfumed Lotus. And my last.” Mountain Wind was happy finally to have the group’s attention. “I had wrestled the champion, Mr. Long-Way-from-Nostril-to-Nostril, at the Green Jade Hall that afternoon. He beat me with the dragonfly twist, but—”

  “Excuse me ...” The abbot had spent evenings with wrestlers before. ‘ ‘What happened in the House of the Perfumed Lotus?”

  “Nothing we’d want to know about.” The long-toothed monk gave Cat’s sleeve another seductive tweak.

  “It was an unpleasant evening,” Mountain Wind said. “The vixens there had forced me to drink a bit of sake. Four half-night whores were taking turns sucking on my scepter when an army of men attacked.”

  Mountain Wind waved his bulky arm as though flourishing a sword. “They were probably Asano’s retainers, come to rescue their dead master’s daughter. There was much screaming and running to and fro. I think there was an earthquake, and then the fire bell rang. I had to dash into the night air naked. The whores scattered like spider young. I left unsatisfied.”

  As the talk of what was called the AkM-Asano affair continued, Cat passed through fear and into a detached serenity. She walked the path of emptiness.

  She kneaded her master’s shoulders when he complained of stiffness and in the process managed to remove the bloody scrap of paper from his skull. She poured his tea and emptied and refilled his pipe, although she was careful not to perform too gracefully.

  Cat was not too detached to notice that the rMnin from Tosa was a willow in the wind. He bent before questions so that they blew over him. The rMnin had tiger eyes, eyes with golden irises. People answered the questions of those with tiger eyes. He spoke little, but he skillfully nudged the conversation along, setting it back on course when it strayed from the subject of the feud between Asano and Kira.

  By the end of the evening he had extracted all the available information. He had surrendered almost none himself. Cat was relieved to hear that the available information added up to very little that was correct, more that was incorrect, and a great deal that was pure foolishness. The word had gotten out, though, that Lord Asano had a daughter.

  “Do you play the flute, Tosa-san?” Musui picked up the flute from where it lay next to him.

  “Very badly,” said Hanshiro.

  “Perhaps you would honor us with a song to end this most pleasant evening.”

  “Forgive me, but I lack the skill to perform for such an august company.” Hanshiro bowed to blunt the rudeness of his refusal.

  “Please honor us by passing the night with us here,” said the abbot. “Our accommodations are austere, but I trust you’ll find them adequate.”

  “Thank you, Your Reverence.”

  As the monks prepared to retire to their tiny rooms, Hanshiro debated paying a night visit to the page who had glanced at him with such a flash of passion in his eyes. He was a comely lad. Graceful. And clever as a woman at pretending to be shy and virtuous. After that first signal he hadn’t met Hanshiro’s gaze again. Very appealing.

  In fact, every time Hanshiro looked at him he felt a warm, tingling confusion, like that produced by the first few sips of sake. As the evening progressed the confusion had taken the form of desire.

  But a tumble with him would divert Hanshiro from his purpose. And the boy might already be the lover of the master Musui. In any case, he would probably find the lad’s bed either empty or doubly occupied.

  Besides, Hanshiro’s experience with boys had been unsatisfying. Even the most beautiful of them couldn’t escape the impediment of being young and inexperienced and much too worshipful in the light of day. Hanshiro didn’t relish being teacher as well as lover, which was what boys required.

  Hanshiro preferred second- and even third-rank courtesans, and the older, plainer-looking ones at that. They were as skilled but not as devious as the tayu. Their fees didn’t drive a man to the money lenders. Unlike the haughty tayu, they didn’t taunt him or keep him waiting in the reception room with giggling apprentices. They didn’t make petulant demands for expensive presents and fawning love letters.

  “Sensei.” Hanshiro gave a slight pull on Musui’s sleeve as he passed on his way to the door.

  “Yes.”

  “I wish to make a presumptuous request.”

  “Anything you like, my son. It was delightful to hear the views of one as cultured as you.”

  “May I borrow your flute?”

  The night had turned chill, and thunder rolled like waves onto a distant and desolate shore. A wind rattled the bamboos in the abbey garden. Cat lay under a thin quilt on the narrow pallet assigned her. Many of the thin pallets in the acolytes’ crowded quarters were empty, however. The boys who should have been occupying them were warming the beds of their masters.

  O-JizM-sama of the Six States of Existence, Cat thought. Tomorrow I will make an offering and send up incense and prayers to you for protecting me this night.

  Then she surrendered her attention to the mournful music coming from the stormy garden outside the abbey.

  Musui said that each bamboo flute had a soul and a voice of its own. He said it only waited for a kindred human spirit to release its song. Now his flute was singing through Hanshiro. Its song was the moan of lonely winds through high, wind-scoured mountain crags. It was the cry of seabirds hovering above waves crashing on huge rocks.

  If Cat hadn’t already seen the rMnin’s hard, implacable face, she would have thought it the song of a man lonely and longing for love. The deep minor-key
tremolo set up a resonance of longing in Cat herself. She yearned for the company of women, even the women of the House of the Carp.

  In the past year Cat had endured the maulings of the men who paid for her company. While they plunged and grunted she had consoled herself by thinking of the money Old Jug Face would send to her mother. But now she missed lying under the satin quilts with Plover in the moments they had managed to steal together.

  She missed the whispered talk, mouth to ear, of Plover’s hopes for the future. Like most of the women of the Floating World, Plover dreamed of a handsome, rich, kind young man who would pay her pillow fee and make her his separate consort. In the pleasure districts love, not sex, was forbidden.

  Cat missed the warmth and security of Plover’s arms around her. She missed her gentle laugh and her accomplished caresses. While the flute’s notes floated down around her and the bamboo whispered to the wind, Cat spread her legs under the quilt. She ran her hand across her breasts and down her belly, seeking the hidden kernel. She imagined that her own fingers were Plover’s as she slowly, sensuously, consoled herself.

  CHAPTER 19

  THE DISCIPLE IS THE THREAD

  What was taking him so long? Musui was such an amiable, unaffected sort, hardly the type to suffer from constriction of the bowels. Cat stared at the head-high thicket of bamboo screening the roadside privy in the hills above Kanagawa. She stamped impatiently and splattered mud. This was her fourth day on the road, and she hadn’t even reached the third post station.

  Rain dripped steadily from the brim of her hat. She shivered in the raw wind. She stamped her feet again, this time to relieve the cramp in her calves.

  Cat was offended. She didn’t want Musui to recognize that she was the daughter of Lord Asano, of course; but she expected him, somehow, to realize he was in the presence of a peer. Musui, however, seemed unaware of his own privileged birth, much less hers.

  He had left Cat standing in the road, in the cold rain. The muddy stream of rainwater washed over her sodden straw sandals and soaked her tabi. Her toes were numb with the cold.

  Far below, at the bottom of the hill, a group of pilgrims in bamboo hats huddled like mushrooms under a bead tree. Otherwise, the road was empty. Sensible travelers had all sought shelter.

  Cat carried Musui’s big cloth bundle, his furoshiki. The knotted ends cut into Cat’s chest, but she dared not take it from under her raincape. It would have been soaked immediately. Cat had never had to carry her own things, much less someone else’s. The indignity of it bothered her more than the effort.

  The bundle had seemed light enough when she started, but it had grown more burdensome with each step. She felt like the greedy woman who tricked an enchanted sparrow into giving her a basket of riches. The basket had grown heavier and heavier as the woman carried it. When opened, not riches but demons tumbled out.

  Cat was wearing the yellow-and-black-striped jacket and the gray breeches given her at the temple. The bottoms of the breeches were tucked into her old black canvas leggings. When she walked, the rubbing of the wet cloth stridulated, measured and imperious as a cricket’s call.

  She had to hold on to her hat or the wind blew under it, causing the straw cord under her chin to choke her. Rain fell from the edge of the brim and sluiced down the rectangular cape of woven straw. The cape refused to compromise with her body. It stood out from her back and flapped like a broken wing. The sandals and wet tabi had rubbed raw places on Cat’s feet. Those feet had carried her only two ri today, and she felt they couldn’t take another step.

  She and Musui had left the broad plain of Musashi behind. The hills had become increasingly precipitous since leaving Kawasaki. Rags of mist drifted among the trees on the steep slopes. The TMkaidM followed the coastline where possible, but at times it was forced up and over the stubby green fingers of headlands poking into the surf. As the road wound upward it passed beneath ancient pines, twisted by the ocean’s salty breath.

  After a long climb Cat and her master had reached the crest of a high tor. A large stone phallus, covered with moss, stood nearby. A pile of rocks as tall as Cat stood next to it. Each rock was the offering of some traveler who had gained the top.

  To the southwest Cat could see the thatched roofs of Kanagawa rising from a lake of mist. The village was wedged into the crotch of two steep headlands. It backed up to a bay that was pale under a gray sky. A glow at the horizon, like a row of floor lanterns behind a screen, promised better weather.

  “What a splendid privy!” Musui was still adjusting the tucked-up skirts of his robes as he emerged, beaming, from the thicket of bamboo. “It qualifies as Daibenjo, a Great-Convenience-Place. “

  Like Cat he wore a clumsy raincape and a wide hat on which was written “We two, pilgrims together.” The second pilgrim referred to was the long-dead priest, scholar, artist, educator, humanitarian, and builder, Kobe Daishi. Musui also had on a short white underrobe and a black outer one and muddy brown gaiters. His prayer beads and bell hung around his wrist. On top of his raincape rode the roll of his sleeping mat with his pilgrim’s scroll and flute inside.

  He opened his umbrella and smiled his lopsided grin at Cat. Musui was so suffused with good spirits that Cat found it hard to stay angry with him, but she managed. She lowered her head so the hat hid her scowl as she hurried through the wet bamboo to the privy. In the past four days she had had more experience with commoners’ toilets than she wanted.

  But Musui was right. As roadside privies went, it was exceptional. Some enterprising farmer had made additions to lure travelers into passing up other privies in favor of his, thus providing more fertilizer for his fields.

  A waist-high screen of supple bamboo shielded its occupant while allowing a fine view of Kanagawa’s roofs, like peaked, straw-colored waves, and the bay lapping at its back doors. The floor around the hole was of fragrant, newly cut cypress. The farmer had fastened two blocks of pine, cut in the shape of feet, on each side of the hole, to help the weary traveler adopt the best position. A thatched roof sheltered it all. Wisteria vines climbed the support posts.

  With his piece of charcoal Musui had written a poem on the tight weave of the bamboo screen. Cat wasn’t surprised. He had been leaving poems on the sides of storage houses, on gates and fences and rain barrels. The rich merchants of Edo, eager for the furtive status derived from acquisition, would have paid stacks of thin gold coins for samples of Musui’s poetry and his sinuous calligraphy. Yet if the rain washed off the words as soon as Musui drew them, it seemed to make no difference to him. The privy’s roof, however, kept this one dry.

  Flocks of silver birds

  Shift and veer toward coming night,

  And do not heed me.

  Cat balanced herself on the raised footprints and watched through the doorway as gusts blew the rain westward in undulating lines across the hard-packed earth. When they hit the ground the drops splattered, sending up twin sprays that did look like the wings of the birds in Musui’s poem. Cat became mesmerized by the erratic flights of the phantom birds. They exploded into life, then vanished, to be replaced by others, blown along in front of another gust.

  Cat took as long as she could at the privy. She was grateful to be out of the rain and wind. Grateful not to be climbing interminable hills and sliding in the mud. But she knew she mustn’t keep her master waiting long. She sighed and trudged out to the road.

  “A farmer with the heart of an artist.” Musui held the umbrella so it sheltered them both. Then he and his bamboo staff splashed off through the water, and Cat had to hurry to keep up.

  “Daishi knew the importance of commoners,” Musui said. “He preached that one can’t make a delicious meal with one flavor or a beautiful song with but one note.”

  Maybe the Honorable Daishi never had a commoner drop a turd in his begging bowl, Cat thought.

  “The next village looks like a pleasant place to eat.” Cat was trying to maneuver Musui into resting.

  “I had hoped to have a talk w
ith that gentleman from Tosa.” Musui was not to be maneuvered. “But he seemed to be pressed by urgent business.”

  He’s no gentleman, Cat thought. And his buttocks are in the fire all right, until he has me in his flea-cracking grasp.

  She was glad Musui had delayed so long at the temple that morning. By the time he had chanted the entire Lotus sutra and he and Cat had completed the Hundred-Times-Worship, backward, Hanshiro had been gone for many hours.

  The Hundred-Times-Worship had taken more time than usual because the temple grounds were teeming with the faithful, come to worship and to cheer for their favorite wrestlers. Musui and the abbot had shouted encouragement as one after another, the local aspirants entered the ring and tried to get a purchase on Mountain Wind’s unaccommodating bulk.

  The challengers had wrapped their arms as far around him as they could reach. They had clung to his broad leather loincloth in desperate embraces. But he had waddled them over the ring of rice bales faster than they could name their home villages.

  “Hanshiro is from the Cape of Muroto.” Musui seemed unaware of the murderous thoughts his disciple was harboring for the taciturn rMnin. “Daishi-sama achieved enlightenment there, you know. I wonder if Hanshiro has seen him. Perhaps we’ll meet up with him on the road and I can ask him.”

  “A torii, sensei.” Cat was eager to change the subject.

  “Where?” Musui squinted into the lush, sodden undergrowth. Almost hidden among the trees and up a slope, an old wooden gate leaned forward precariously. It marked the entrance to a shrine.

  Musui stopped at every roadside temple and shrine. Small shrines and temples dedicated to local deities abounded, and members of the ShintM and Buddhist pantheons were often mixed together. ShintM or Buddhist, Musui worshiped at them all. He rinsed his hands and mouth, dropped a coin in the slatted wooden box, and rang the big bronze bell if there was one. He burned incense. He clapped his hands, bowed his head, prayed, and chanted. When Cat finished her much shorter rituals, she waited.