The Tokaido Road

by Lucia St. Clair Robson

  Kasane crouched behind a marker and watched Cat approach the men. She put a hand down to steady herself, but instead of earth, she felt the cold, rubbery skin of a woman’s breast. It gave strangely under her fingers. The stench of death hit her in the face.

  Kasane shrieked. She shrieked again. She kept on shrieking.

  CHAPTER 26

  NO HOME IN THE THREE WORLDS

  At Kasane’s shriek, Cat whirled to stare into the darkness. “Idiot!” she muttered. “I should have left her in the closet, too.” But Cat’s skin prickled, and her heart raced at the horror in Kasane’s cries.

  At the start of a battle, Musashi wrote, shout as loudly as possible. The voice is a thing of life.

  Cat took a deep breath, gripped her staff tighter, and gathered her courage. “Ei-i-i-i-i!” she screamed as she charged through the gravestones toward the lantern light.

  No one was there. When Kasane’s screams descended to gurgling sobs, Cat heard the men running headlong through the underbrush. With her staff at the ready and her heart still pounding, Cat picked up the abandoned lantern and prowled the area. When she was sure they were alone, she called to Kasane.

  “There’s a dead person here, Your Honor.” From the darkness Kasane’s voice shook with fright.

  “ There are hundreds of dead people here, you bucket of dirt.” Cat was so enraged that she forgot her parents’ careful instruction on proper conduct and terms of address. Kasane’s scream had unnerved her and completely disrupted her concentration. “Peasants have no sense,” she muttered to herself.

  “This one isn’t buried,” Kasane said. “Maybe it’s a homeless spirit.”

  Cat walked among the tombstones to where Kasane crouched, her arms crossed in front of her and her hands clutching her own shoulders. Her eyes were wide in terror.

  Cat stooped to inspect the body. “She’s gone in the white scarves of death.” She knew she was only affirming the obvious. “But someone bothered to bury her for those dung beetles to dig up. She must have relatives to pray for her soul. In any case, we can’t do anything for her.” Cat stood. ‘ ‘It’s late. We have to find a place to sleep.”

  “Here?” Kasane dared to question her new master. Her encounter with the supernatural had made him seem relatively harmless by comparison. Mad, certainly, but not homicidal. “The demons might come back.”

  “They aren’t demons.” Cat held Kasane’s wicker pack while Kasane arranged the woven straps over her shoulders. Then she tied the rolled mats on top of the pack and held the furoshiki on top of the mats while Kasane adjusted the knotted ties across her chest. The burden towered over Kasane’s head.

  “They’re men so poor they steal from the dead.” Cat handed her the lantern. “They fear the executioner’s blade in this world and the wrath of the gods in the next. They won’t be back.”

  “Must I go first, master?”

  “Yes.” Cat prodded her with the staff to start her moving.

  ‘”What were they stealing?” Kasane spoke in a hushed voice. She was fearful of disturbing the corpses and angering her master; but she was more terrified of a silence broken only by the anonymous rustlings of foxes and monkeys and owls.

  “A corpse’s hair and fingernails are easily pulled out. The thieves sell the hair to wig makers. They trim the nails, then sell them in the gay quarters. The women give them to their patrons as pledges of love. That way a woman can fool many men into thinking each is the only one she loves.”

  “Don’t the women know where the fingernails come from?” Kasane shivered at the thought of touching a corpse’s fingernail. Being kidnapped by pirates and almost violated, being dragged into the night by a fierce stranger, finding opened graves and plundered corpses, they were all too much for her. She shook so badly that the lantern’s light trembled along the ground.

  “ We. . .” Cat caught herself.’ ‘The women don’t think about it. Go-betweens buy the tokens from the robbers and sell them. The buyers never see the scoundrels who did the deed.”

  Coffin carriers, priests, and merchants have found a way to profit even from death, Cat thought. She remembered the delicate, half-moon-shaped nails she herself had bought, and wondered, for the first time, from whose hand they had been taken.

  Through the canopy of leaves Cat saw a slope of silvery moss and weathered cedar shingles glinting in the moonlight. A well-worn path led to a plainly built, open-sided chapel set back among the trees and bamboo and underbrush. She rapped Kasane’s pack with the staff and pointed to it. “We’ll sleep here.”

  Near the place of death was one of life. The small, wall-less building was festooned inside with wooden ladles with the bottoms missing. They had been blessed by the ShintM priest who also served as a Buddhist bonze. Then they had been carried home by pregnant women. After successful deliveries, the women had written their names and ages on the handles and returned them.

  “Lay out the mats,” Cat said.

  “Yes, Your Honor.” Kasane was relieved that at least he didn’t seem inclined to kill her. She hurriedly unrolled the mats and laid one on top of the other for double thickness.

  “You can sleep on one,” Cat said gruffly. The chapel’s floor was of packed earth and quite cold. As angry as Cat was with Kasane, she couldn’t bear the thought of making her sleep directly on it.

  “You’re very kind, master.” Kasane knelt and knocked her forehead repeatedly on the ground. Then she scurried around, filling Cat’s small brass pipe and lighting it with the flint. While Cat smoked and stared out at the dark forest, Kasane took her brother’s paper travel cloak from her pack and laid it over her master’s mat. She spread Cat’s new cloak on top of that as a coverlet.

  She lay down on the other bare mat. She drew up her legs and tucked the hem of her robe around her icy feet in a futile attempt to warm them. She pillowed her head on her arm, closed her eyes, shivered with the cold, and thought of home.

  The thatched hovels that made up Matsu-mura, Pine village, would all be dark by now. Kasane knew that her parents and her grandmother would be asleep on their frayed straw mats in the single room of their tiny house there. They wouldn’t even be worried about her. As far as they knew, she and her younger brother and seven other pilgrims were in the care of the leader of Pine village’s pilgrimage club and were on their way to the great shrine at Ise.

  Kasane was sure that fate wouldn’t allow her to see her family again. She was also sure that was just as well. Her parents had engaged a go-between to arrange a marriage for Kasane with a young farmer, a stranger from a neighboring village. Kasane’s trip to the Sun Goddess’s shrine was to be the traditional pilgrimage of a bride-to-be. But the pilgrimage had gone dreadfully awry.

  Now Kasane felt sullied beyond redemption. Even though she had not lost her virginity, she knew that no man would have her as a bride. She knew that if she returned to Pine village, she would bring terrible shame to her family. She would live out her life single and the object of endless gossip. Tears burned her eyes and nose as she buried her face in the crook of her arm.

  The procurer had snatched Kasane from the inns where he had sold her each night and had kept her on the run for days. She was so exhausted that even her grief, the cold, and the terrors of the graveyard nearby couldn’t keep her awake. By the time Cat finished smoking and brooding about the journey ahead of her, Kasane was asleep.

  Kasane looked so young and innocent and helpless that Cat felt a pang of shame at treating her so badly. She draped the shabby paper cloak over her. Then she wrapped herself in her own cloak, laid her staff next to the mat, and drifted into uneasy sleep.

  Because the temple had no priest, no dawn bell rang to waken Cat. The hour of the Hare was half over, and the sun had risen when she opened her eyes. Cat stared up at the clusters of dusty wooden ladles dangling from the broad beams of the chapel’s ceiling. Each represented a child brought into the world. Cat wondered what all of them were doing this morning.

  She glanced at the other mat. It w
as neatly rolled and tied and set next to the dirt-eater’s pack and the furoshiki.

  “Idiot!” she raged at herself. If she had slept so soundly she didn’t hear the peasant escape, she wouldn’t have heard enemies creeping up on her, either.

  Cat knew she had to leave immediately, before the child brought the authorities. She tied up the furoshiki’s ends and settled it on her back. She studied the abandoned pack. Surely the peasant didn’t want it, or she would have taken it. Inside, there might be something she could use as a disguise. Cat put one arm through the pack’s straps and hoisted it onto her left shoulder.

  She was tying the cords of her hat under her chin when Kasane appeared. The hem of her white robe was tucked up, and her bare feet and legs were covered with black loam. She carried several dirt-covered bamboo shoots in her arms. They were about as long as her forearm and pointed at each end.

  “I brought the bamboo’s children for you to eat, master.” She put them down and washed her hands and feet in the nearby stream.

  Cat took off the hat and the furoshiki and the pack. When she sat cross-legged and rummaged in the bundle for her pipe, Kasane lit it. Then Cat watched in astonishment as Kasane pulled a large, sharp knife from inside her robe. Where had she gotten it? Cat was appalled at her own carelessness.

  Kasane was staring humbly at the ground, but she caught the look. “It belonged to my last master,” she said.

  She deftly split a large section of bamboo that was dead and dried to a silvery brown. She carved a narrow slit in the back of one of the halves. She filled the hollow in the piece beneath it with bamboo shavings.

  When she rubbed a strip of bamboo across the first half, sparks flew from the silica in it. The hot powdered residue fell through the slit into the tinder below. Kasane blew gently on it through a slender bamboo tube. She had a fire going in about sixty heartbeats.

  She fed the tiny flames with dried cypress needles and twigs, then larger pieces of wood until the fire crackled and burned steadily. She arranged five flat stones around it. On them she balanced three sections of green bamboo with bottoms formed by the nodes. While the water in them boiled she used the knife to peel, trim, and slice the shoots. The rice, the bamboo’s children, and two of the dried flying fish were cooked about the same time. Kasane used the water in the third container for tea.

  Kasane dished the food onto bamboo sheaths and served all of it to Cat. Then she retired to the far side of the chapel. She sat back on her haunches, folded her hands in her lap, and bowed her head.

  The shoots were white and crisp and sweet. When Cat had eaten the two fish and half the rice and shoots, she pushed the bamboo sheath with the remainder across the dirt floor to Kasane.

  “Thank you so very much, kind master. You honor this miserable individual.” Kasane bowed several times before eating the warm rice. She savored the rich, unfamiliar taste of it.

  The shMgun had decreed that peasants weren’t to eat rice, but Cat decided to defy the law. She wasn’t happy about the necessity of tying up her captive and abandoning her. She was buying her conscience off cheaply.

  “What village do you come from?” Cat asked. If it turned out to be convenient, she would send word to the peasant’s people.

  “Matsu-mura, Pine village, in Kazusa province.”

  “I have to tie you up and leave you here.”

  “Please, master, don’t leave me.” Kasane flung herself forward in a supine bow. “I beg of you, please don’t leave me here. This is a haunted place.” She imagined being tied up when night fell and the robbers returned to pull out her fingernails.

  “You’ll tell the authorities where to find me.” Even as Cat said it, she wondered why she was bothering to explain her actions to a peasant.

  “I promise I won’t tell anyone.” Kasane was weeping so hard that she was practically unintelligible. “No one will find me in this desolate place. Night will come. Demons will come.” She clutched at Cat’s jacket. Her tears left dark spots on the faded black cloth. “Take me with you. I’ll be your servant. I’m strong. I’ll carry everything. I’ll massage your feet and cook your meals.”

  “Don’t be a fool. In the next town I’ll tell someone to notify your people. You can go home.”

  “I can’t return to Pine village, master. I’ve been disgraced.”

  “I have enemies,” Cat said. “Traveling with me would be dangerous.”

  “If I stay here, the old master will catch me.” Kasane’s voice trembled, but she stopped crying. This was to be her fate. She must accept it. “He’ll beat me and sell me again, but there is no help for it. A woman has no home in the three worlds.”

  The old saying had originally alluded to the three realms of Buddhist existence. Among country folk, ignorant of Buddhist philosophy, it had come to mean that women must live first in the homes of their fathers, then their husbands, then their sons.

  Kasane opened her pack and dug into it. “This will protect you on your journey, Your Honor.” She held out a cheap wooden amulet in a tiny brocade bag. It was dedicated to the god of travelers, and the headman and president of Pine village’s Ise club had presented one to each pilgrim. Then she handed Cat a packet wrapped in cloth and oiled paper. She treated it as though it were as magical as the amulet.

  “My brother’s travel permit.”

  “How do I know you won’t inform on me?” Cat stared at the packet. “How do I know the authorities won’t be looking for this permit?”

  “I promise, master.”

  “What good is a peasant’s promise?” Cat was ashamed of the sympathy she felt for this commoner.

  “Even an inch-long worm has a half-inch soul, master,” Kasane said softly.

  Cat winced. Kasane’s words struck her like a side blow that slipped through her armor. She remembered Musui’s kind smile. This whole business was bothering her far more than it should. She was becoming weak and foolish. This peasant’s trifling problems were interfering with her purpose.

  Cat stared at the travel permit. It would be of great use, but she had good reason for not wanting to take it. To accept it would burden her with on, a debt of gratitude. On could be a very heavy load indeed.

  Cat took the permit and paced with it. Through the cloth and the oiled paper she felt its sharp, crisp edges. Ahead of her lay the mountains of HakMne and the most formidable government barrier of them all. The permit might get her through it.

  “I’ll take you as far as Fujisawa, the next town,” she said. “From there you must make your own way.”

  “Thank you, master. Thank you. May the gods smile down on you.” Kasane bowed low again. Then she hastened to clean up and pack.

  CHAPTER 27

  THIS FIRE OF LOVE

  Everyone in Fujisawa seemed to be celebrating, except Hanshiro and his drinking companion, Nameless, the painter of paper lanterns. Hanshiro had to concentrate to keep from wincing every time someone in the boisterous throng jostled him. The pain in his skull throbbed in time with the huge drum. It exploded anew with each beat of the drumsticks, thick as a man’s wrist. Then it pulsed with the reverberations.

  His stomach churned, and he belched up bile. Nameless’s face was still bandaged, and he seemed to be sunk at least as deep in misery as Hanshiro. Fujisawa was usually bustling with worshipers on their way to the sacred island of Enoshima across the tidal flat. But this was the annual festival coinciding with the Fowl Market, celebrated on the day of the Cock, of the eleventh month. Today, especially, Fujisawa was no place for two men with hangovers.

  Hanshiro could no longer distinguish the boom of the drum from the pounding in his head. The drum was only one of thousands being played in Fujisawa, but it was by far the biggest. And it was much too close.

  It sat in a massive wooden cart pulled by a patient ox. At least Hanshiro assumed it was on an ox cart. He could see the great humped curve of the drum, like a diving whale, moving slowly through the sea of people and banners along the waterfront. The ox, however, was invisible. The
drum and the drummers seemed to be borne on the shoulders of the noisy worshipers.

  The red-and-black crest painted on the drumhead dwarfed the two drummers, who wore only loincloths and headbands. They stood facing each other in the cart and alternated their strokes, keeping up a booming cadence, measured and primal as a heartbeat. The expressions on their spare, angular faces were remote, as though they were hypnotized by the pulse of their own making. Sweat glistened on their naked bodies. The muscles of their backs quivered with each stroke.

  The drum was accompanied by the clangor of bells, the keening of flutes, and the piercing, nasal chant of thousands of pilgrims. Most of the faithful were beating on small drumheads stretched across circular frames and held by handles, like round fans. More people lined the second-floor balconies of the houses and shops facing the bay and rained noise down on Hanshiro’s aching head.

  The crowd was following the ornate gilt portable shrine as it moved ahead of the ox cart. The shrine’s carrying poles were shouldered by a host of young men. They chanted as they careened from one side of the road to the other. They plowed through the press of people, tilting the shrine precariously and causing the purple silk draperies to wave and flap. Hanshiro could follow its course by the scattering and contracting of the crowd and by the graceful, gilded phoenix on top.

  Hanshiro and Nameless slowed their pace, allowing the procession to surge around them. When they had almost reached the rear of it, Hanshiro raised his folded fan above the press and pointed it at a tea house, the Fuji-Viewing shop. He and Nameless began maneuvering toward it through the thinning crowd.

  They pushed aside the short curtains that hung from the open front of the shop to just below eye level. They took off their sandals and stepped up onto the raised floor. Hanshiro spread a silk cloth out on the tatami and laid his long-sword and scabbard on it, close to hand.