The Tokaido Road

by Lucia St. Clair Robson

  Those in the fight at the kabuki performance in Kambara said Lady Asano had a gang of fierce swordsmen with her. The man who lived through the attack at Satta Pass wrote in his report that she was defended by a spear player the size and ferocity of Benkei and a shrieking female demon in the shape of a green ball of fire.

  Kira had come to distrust all the messages he received from his retainers on the road. Besides, he had troubles of a much more serious nature than a runaway woman. The rumors in Edo of Cat’s escape and flight had been replaced by gossip of a revenge plot against him. Kira stayed behind the walls of his mansion and called back most of the men he had sent after her. He kept secret the fact that many of them had returned in casket tubs slung from poles and carried by porters. The casualties confirmed his belief that Lady Asano wasn’t acting alone and that her father’s retainers were finally rising against him.

  Halfway through the hour of the Boar, Cat and Kasane and the pilgrim came to a double row of houses perched on a ledge between the side of a hill and the river below. The single street through the hamlet was so narrow, the eaves almost met over it. No lights shone from the open spaces between the mud-plastered walls and the roofs. Several houses were propped up with poles that extended into the narrow roadway, and the three travelers had to pick their way around them.

  The pilgrim’s cousin’s house was the most prosperous of the lot. He pounded on the shutters and called to those inside. Then the three of them stood among the large cylindrical open-weave baskets in the darkness under the eaves and waited. They could hear voices and footsteps inside, but they also heard a feint rustling and creaking much closer.

  “Ma!” Kasane jumped and squealed and grabbed Cat’s arm. “Something touched me.”

  “Cormorants,” the old pilgrim said. “My cousin fishes with them.”

  The storm shutter slid open with a loud squeal. When a lantern’s light shone on the baskets with their hinged wooden lids, the birds inside stirred and muttered. They poked their bills through the weave and nattered for fish.

  The house was a single room occupied by the aged cousin and his wife, their son, daughter-in-law, and three grandchildren. They moved to make room for Cat and Kasane and the pilgrim. Kasane piled their sleeping mats one on top of the other, and she and Cat lay curled together for warmth. Cat could feel Kasane shaking.

  “Are you cold, elder sister?” Cat whispered.

  “No.” Kasane snuffled. She hesitated before giving in to a personal confession. “This house reminds me of the one where I used to live.”

  Cat held her close to comfort her. She lay awake after Kasane finally cried herself to sleep and looked up at the bunches of long white radishes hanging like ghostly, rat-gnawed stalactites from rafters black and shiny with soot. She was still awake when the family’s questions and conversation ceased and the room was filled with the sound of heavy breathing.

  She heard a low shudder nearby.

  “Grandfather,” she whispered, “are you ill?”

  The old man let out a long, tremulous sigh. “Once I stepped on my dead wife’s comb,” the old pilgrim murmured. “The chill of it under my bare heel pierced my heart. At night she used to comb her hair with it.”

  “You know as I. . .” Cat softly recited the ancient poem:

  The nature of this illusory world,

  How nothing stays—

  Endeavor to be brave and stalwart,

  Do not wear out that heart in grief.

  But the old man lay awake a long time, stifling quiet sobs in the crook of his arm. Cat lay awake, too, with tears running silently down her cheeks. The weight of sorrow seemed enough to wear out her heart. She cried for herself and for her parents and for Kasane, an exile, too. And even though she knew her mother’s faithful servants were only living out their karma, she cried for them, turned out into the world with neither rice nor protector. She cried for Oishi Kuranosuke, the once proud warrior lying in the gutter. And for his abandoned wife and children.

  She wondered what Musashi would have had to say about the tears. Would he have considered them clouds of bewilderment? When your spirit is not in the least clouded, he wrote. When the clouds of bewilderment clear away, there is the true void. In the void is virtue and no evil. And no tears, she thought.

  Cat stiffened once when a horse’s hooves echoed between the walls of the houses lining the hamlet’s only street. The sound roused the cormorants, which clucked and murmured and shook themselves restlessly. As the hoofbeats faded Cat slipped, finally, into sad dreams, and Hanshiro continued on through the night, toward Futagawa.

  CHAPTER 54

  ONE DAY A THOUSAND AUTUMNS

  Hanshiro’s new clothes hung over a lacquered rack in the room next to the bathing area of Futagawa’s public bathhouse. The two side sections of the rack were hinged to stand, as a sheet of paper will stand if folded in half vertically. The clothes were draped to form a sort of tent over the brass incense pot that squatted in the angle. From its openwork lid issued clouds of aromatic sandalwood smoke to perfume the silk undershirt, the black-and-white tile-design wadded-silk kimono, and the formal black hakama, and haori jacket.

  Hanshiro had bought the clothes after he decided to pledge himself to Lady Asano’s cause. They were the first such he had had in fifteen years. To buy them he had pawned his great grandfather’s cloisonné medicine case and, for the first time in his life, borrowed from a money lender. While rain held him up he had had his family’s crest, a graceful spray of wisteria bent in a circle, embroidered in gold on the haori.

  The new loincloth, black silk waist cord, and stiff red sash lay folded on a high-rimmed clothing tray. On the raised floor of the alcove, below a scroll painting of the Amida waterfall, Hanshiro’s swords rested on a low stand. Hanshiro himself was still in the steam-filled room that housed the cypress tub, but he had left the sliding door panel open so he could keep an eye on his swords.

  From the neck down his skin was bright red. The line where the blush began was as sharp as if bounded by a thread. It marked where the scalding water had reached while he soaked. His body still tingled from the scouring the bath attendants had given it with loofah pads before he had climbed into the tub.

  The priests said bathing symbolized the scrubbing away of evil. It cleansed the soul as well as the body. But Hanshiro had seen the latest letter to Cat posted at the shrine to Inari, the Rice God. He was wishing he could wash away lust and longing and jealousy as easily as he had washed away the dust of the road.

  With one bare leg tucked under him and the other extended, he sat naked on a large cloth on the damp, polished boards of the bathhouse. One of the attendants had just finished cutting and polishing his fingernails. Now her shiny, triple chignon was bobbing over his toenails. Her elbow was a blur as she buffed them vigorously with pumice, then wood sorrel. Her other hand massaged his foot sensuously as she held it.

  A second woman knelt behind him. She had slipped her arms out of her cotton bath robe so that it hung around the sash at her waist. She had trimmed his sidelocks and rubbed fragrant camellia oil into his long black hair and was arranging it in a topknot.

  With one hand she held the thick hank so tightly that it pulled at the skin of Hanshiro’s temples. She leaned forward, brushing her bare breasts slowly along his neck and shoulders as she reached for a flat paper cord. She tickled his ear with the cord on the way back.

  Her teasing roused the desired response in him. He tried to redirect his restive thoughts, but for an instant the breasts were Cat’s. The cord brushing his earlobe was Cat’s tongue.

  A third woman entered with more tobacco for the canister on the wooden tray at Hanshiro’s side. A fourth arrived with tea.

  “Ma!” The tea server regarded Hanshiro’s crotch admiringly as she fanned the coals in the portable earthenware brazier. “A warrior of the school of the one-inch advantage.”

  The other three burst into gales of laughter. Musashi had written that those who sought to own swords longer than the
ir opponents’, to have the one-inch advantage, were deluded. These four might have disagreed with his premise.

  “ ‘Five feet of blade lose to one inch of tongue.’ ” Hanshiro smiled at them roguishly. “I surrender to your wit.”

  “Put away your sword, then,” giggled the manicurist. “I know of a snug scabbard.”

  The hairdresser finished and held up a pair of mirrors so Hanshiro could see the full effect of her work. He grunted his approval.

  It didn’t occur to Hanshiro to wonder if he was handsome. He only wanted to be presentable. Looking shabby when he offered his sword to Lady Asano would have been shameful. Just as carnal thoughts of her were shameful. And weakness besides.

  The hairdresser began massaging Hanshiro’s neck and shoulders. The manicurist looked up coquettishly from his foot. Her face was a mask of white powder.

  “He has two of the three sacred treasures,” she said. “The jewels and the sword.”

  “ ‘In the Floating World,’ “ Hanshiro recited, “ ‘the way of the warrior cannot conquer.’ ”

  “A brilliant versifier, too!” The manicurist finished her task with a flourish. Hanshiro’s neatly trimmed nails glowed.

  She added water to the ink stone on the low writing stand. Then she slipped her robe off her shoulders and presented him with her plump, mottled back. The powdery white paste of her makeup formed a neat crescent, a chalky moon under her neck and shoulders. Her skin was pocked with moxa scars.

  “Why don’t you inscribe the poem using the implement that accompanied you into this fleeting world?” She pursed her red-painted lips and looked seductively over her shoulder. “It would rival Ikkyu’s broom.”

  The others laughed behind their sleeves and tapped her playfully with their fans. Ikkyu had been known for using a broom to paint enormous characters.

  To everyone’s disappointment Hanshiro used the bamboo brush instead as he solemnly painted the poem onto her back. While the others fanned the ink dry, they exclaimed over the strength and refinement of Hanshiro’s calligraphy. They argued about which of the six great calligraphers his hand most resembled.

  Hanshiro knew this was professional gaiety. It was an old, old game of flirtatious pun and sexual ambiguity. It was a form of verbal fencing in which Hanshiro had indulged more times than he could remember.

  He was amused by the fact that these women recognized him as a dangerous man, but they didn’t fear him. They were like the teasing magpie that knew it was safe from the tiger. He also sensed a genuine longing in their banter.

  Under the bathhouse attendants’ hands, Hanshiro had cleaned up quite nicely. Beneath the dust and whisker stubble, the power in the set of his jaw excited the women. They were drawn to the ferocious sensuality of his angular cheekbones and his dark, remote eyes. Hanshiro had the eyes of a tiger in a cave.

  Even these jigoku-onna, these bathhouse-hell-women, recognized the worldly quality that was called sui in the pleasure districts. In Hanshiro sui was more than mere sophistication. It was elegance. It was the artless grace of a wild animal.

  The women were also responding to something subtler still. They could not have defined it, but they sensed in him a rare, pensive sort of sympathy. Hanshiro thought about their kind more than they would have supposed. He pitied them as caged birds who feigned their songs of passion in the night. He could not change their fate, but he could ease their lot with a jest and a kind word.

  He bowed gallantly, lower than he needed to, but not low enough to risk disdain. “Both my heart and my insignificant sword of flesh regret that duty summons me from your luminous presence.”

  “We’ll dress you, then.” They rose like a flock of wagtails startled into sudden flight and headed for the room where his clothes were.

  “Please.” He knew he was about to offend them. “To ready the spirit as well as the body, I must not be disturbed. But if you would move my clothing to the upstairs room facing the street, I would be grateful.”

  It was midmorning. There were no other customers yet, and the prospect of the long afternoon was burdensome. The women had been looking forward to spending it in Hanshiro’s company, but they heard the unspoken command in his request. They bowed quietly, picked up the tea things and the food trays, and left in a muffled patter of bare feet on glossy boards.

  Hanshiro put on a cotton robe and tied it with a sash set low on his hips. Then he bowed to his swords and picked them up. He walked up the narrow staircase to the room where the attendants had taken his clothes. He carefully set his swords and their stand in the alcove and slid the door panel closed behind him.

  He dressed with as much care as if he were going into battle. Before the day ended he would offer his fealty, his life, and his sword, which was his soul, to Lady Asano. One day a thousand autumns, he thought, when spent in anticipation.

  The frivolity with the bathhouse attendants hadn’t distracted Hanshiro. Over the years he had developed the released mind that his sensei likened to an empty gourd floating in water. If touched, the gourd slipped aside. By its nature it evaded being grasped. So it was with the mind of someone who perceived everything but lingered on nothing.

  When he finished dressing, Hanshiro opened the outer screen and took his swords onto the balcony. He knelt on the boards and assumed the formal position, sitting back on his crossed ankles. While he polished the swords he could watch-without-watching the busy street below and the temple gate on the other side of it. He would know when a certain handsome boy and his sister arrived.

  Holding the blade with a silk cloth, he placed his short-sword in front of him and bowed to it. He moved even more deliberately than usual to still the emotions churning inside him. He was worried about Lady Asano. She was suspended from his heart. His mind was no longer released. It was lingering on her and on the danger that surrounded her.

  He held the hilt in his left hand with the sharp edge of the blade up. He took a sheet of special paper from his cleaning kit and folded it over the blade just beyond the ornate bronze hilt guard. He wiped the softly glowing curve with a single long stroke that flowed from the guard to the angled tip.

  He repeated the process twice more. Then he rapped a small red cloth bag of limestone powder along the sinuous length of the temper line. It left patterns like delicate chrysanthemums. He wiped the blade with forty more smooth strokes to rid the surface of body oils. He finished by spreading a thin film of aromatic clove oil over it. As he worked he concentrated on freeing his mind of the doubts threatening to immobilize it. He concentrated on not-concentrating.

  When he had rented the horse in Mitsuke, he had bought the postboy sake in the shop next to the transport office. He had learned that four of the five Edo samurai who had been waiting in town all month had disappeared. The remaining man had hired several members of Mitsuke’s lower order. The hostlers didn’t know what he had hired them to do, but Hanshiro could guess. The story had been the same in the other post stations between Mitsuke and Futagawa. Lord Kira was recalling his retainers to Edo. Something must be brewing there.

  Don’t despise your enemy though you take him to be small, nor fear your enemy though you take him to be great. Hanshiro was beginning to wonder if he had underestimated Kira’s remaining men. He had assumed they and their local thugs wouldn’t try to attack Lady Asano on the crowded road between Mitsuke and here. He had assumed they would wait until nightfall and that she would be in Futagawa and in his care before then. But what if he were wrong?

  Hanshiro felt a shiver of dread and, worse, doubt. He should have waited for Lady Asano at the Arai barrier. He could have had a message delivered to her offering his services. If she had refused his help, he could have followed her. He could have protected her.

  Instead, he had tempted fate. He had decided to test her, perhaps out of jealousy at her frivolous flirtation with the farmer or pique at her failure to meet his standards of proper behavior. If she passed the barrier at Arai, if she eluded Kira’s men and reached Futagawa, she was worthy of
his loyalty, if not his respect.

  Mostly, however, he knew now he had been testing himself. By postponing the meeting, he was trying to prove that his foolish passion wasn’t leading him like the hostlers led their shock-headed mares. He was trying to deny that he felt a kinship with the poet who wrote, “That such a one could be so longed for— Today I spent the whole day hopelessly gazing.”

  “Idiot!” He returned the gleaming short-sword to its scabbard. He could not polish his long-sword while in this state.

  He placed his hands on his thighs, closed his eyes, and began to breathe deeply. His consciousness sank to the center of the center behind his navel. After a long while he heard the sound of rushing water, distant but approaching. Finally the torrent washed through his skull, flushing away thoughts and doubts. It left behind a welcome emptiness and a roaring, like a waterfall.

  CHAPTER 55

  SHOUT AGAINST THE FIRE

  The old pilgrim decided to spend the day visiting with his cousin, so Cat and Kasane left him behind. The detour around the bay was long and arduous. Then they had to wait at the Arai barrier through the hours of the Snake and Horse because of a daimyM’s procession and the number of pilgrims trying to pass through.

  The wait was tense. The Arai barrier marked the boundary of the province of Mikawa. Lord Kira’s closest allies were in Mikawa. Once Cat and Kasane reached the head of the line, however, they found that the harried officials weren’t checking commoners’ papers very thoroughly.

  By the time they reached Futagawa the sun had almost set. They ignored the shouts and the tugs on their sleeves as the waitresses tried to pull them into the tea houses for sake and raw fish. Instead they bought hot chestnuts from a street vendor and peeled and ate them as they followed the people heading toward the temple gates.