“What are you doing on the road at night?” Cat asked sternly. “When honest folk are in their beds.”
“I’m just a miserable, poorly paid dry-goods clerk, Your Honor.” Nameless adopted the manner of a clerk who seemed to think he would be safe as long as he kept talking. “I heard the mysterious call to Ise and dropped the abacus and account book. My master was generous with his blessings, but he withheld aid of a more fiscal nature. I calculated that my finances would not fit around a leisurely journey to the holy shrine, so I decided to shrink the journey to accommodate my finances.”
“You’re traveling night and day?”
“As long as the moon and stars provide light, Your Honor. By running I’ll spend fewer days on the road, thereby eating less and requiring fewer nights’ lodging.”
“And has there been a holy call to Ise?”
“Oh, yes, Your Honor. The road to the east is as crowded with pilgrims as sardines in a tub. If you wait, you’ll soon meet far richer”—Nameless searched for a polite term for his situation— “clients than the poverty-stricken wretch you see before you.”
“I’m not a bandit, you simpleton,” Cat growled.
“Oh, I could tell you weren’t, kind sir.”
“No.” Cat smiled mischievously at his supine back. “I’m an ogre in disguise. And I have a particular fondness for the taste of human flesh.” She paused to see what effect that would have.
“We are not destined to live forever, Your Honor.” Nameless shook as though afflicted with ague.
“You’ve run so far already, you look stringy.” Cat poked his side with the butt of her staff. He curled up tighter. “I could boil you a year and still wear out my teeth on you.” As she talked Cat motioned for Kasane to hide in the bushes. “Can you count, Dry-Goods Clerk?”
“Surely, Your Honor. Counting is my speciality. It’s the only thing I can do.”
“Count slowly to eighty-eight in a loud voice.” Cat was becoming tired of his chatter. “Then pick up your purse and go. If you look up while you’re counting, I’ll shave your scrawny limbs into flakes like dried bonito and make soup of you.”
Nameless started counting, but he interrupted himself continually with pleas for mercy and sad stories of all the people who were depending on him and the intense grief his master would suffer if he didn’t return. Cat slipped a pilgrim’s gift of a small silver coin into his bag. On top of the bag she set the last rice cake wrapped in a bamboo sheath. Then she joined Kasane in the underbrush.
They stifled their laughter as they watched Nameless reach fifty, raise his head slightly, and look up. He stood cautiously and stared up the road. He turned and stared down it. Then he picked up his purse and retreated back the way he came.
“He’s a chatterer,” Kasane managed to gasp through her laughter. “A bell on the end of a pole.”
Cat and Kasane added pebbles to the piles at JizM’s stubby bare feet. They each pressed their palms together in front of their faces, bowed low, and prayed to the smiling god for protection on the dark road across the mountain. Then, laughing softly, they continued their journey.
CHAPTER 51
BOILS AND TUMORS
Cat and Kasane reached Mitsuke when everything was still tightly shuttered against the eleventh-month wind and the night. With their travel cloaks blowing about their legs, they limped wearily down the empty main street. They sat on a pile of poles and watched the sky lighten and the mist rise from the fast-flowing Tenryu River.
Cat had wanted to cross the river, but a pack driver had already hired the only ferryman awake. Cat could see that loading and ferrying the horses two by two would take a long time. Besides, Kasane was nodding where she sat, and she had begun limping badly the last ri.
Cat put an arm around Kasane’s waist She helped her back to the lane that crossed a red-painted bridge over a ditch, then meandered off between the hedges of bush clover through the dark forest. Faded characters on a small wooden sign promised an inn at the end of the lane.
A servant was just opening the shutters. In the dawn’s light the place seemed secluded and tranquil. Cat and Kasane were grateful for the tiny, cluttered room they were given.
The tranquillity didn’t last long. The roosters were the first to shatter the silence, then the wood seller with her shrill, monotonous song. A rice huller started up somewhere with a low, hollow thud mat vibrated the floor and walls like a heartbeat. Only thin sliding screens divided Cat and Kasane’s room from the inn’s usual morning exuberance.
Most of the overnight guests were preparing to leave, and they were discussing the packing arrangements with their servants. The kago bearers and porters laughed loudly outside.
Horses neighed. A shrill quarrel erupted in the kitchen, where pots and tubs and ladles rattled as though a minor tremor had settled there on a semipermanent basis. A baby was crying, and someone was beating a hand drum and chanting his morning devotions at full volume.
The proprietress was a big woman with a capacious blue apron. She had tied back the wide sleeves of her kimono. She had wrapped a thin blue towel around her hair. She followed the maids around, shouting instructions and remonstrances at them as they shook and flailed the bedding. Over it all was the steady patta, patta, patta of paper-strip dusters against the panes of the wall screens.
Cat wasn’t used to the noise necessary to running a large household. The rooms where she and her mother had slept had always been serene. She had wakened most mornings to the soft rustle of the servants’ robes and tabi socks, to the song of birds in the plum tree outside her veranda, and to the splash of water falling into the carp pond.
“Don’t grasp the brush as though it were a rice mortar.” Cat rolled over so her back was to Kasane. She covered her head with the thin quilt that was molting gray cotton wadding, and she tried to ignore the cacophony. “Hold it lightly between your thumb and first two fingers,” she added. “Keep your wrist limber. Move the brush from your elbow.”
Kasane continued covering the cheap sheet of paper with tiny black characters of the hiragana syllabary. When she came to the left-hand side she began again, filling in the spaces from right to left, top to bottom.
She had found the letter from Traveler on the temple message board. She was composing a reply. Even though she was as exhausted as Cat, even though her remaining pair of straw sandals, like Cat’s, was in tatters and she had walked the last ri limping with the pain in her ankle, love was an elixir. She was wide awake. She cheerfully offered to keep watch while Cat slept.
More than anything, Cat wanted to sleep. She had crossed the raging Oi River and come eleven and a half ri since the previous morning. She had walked all night to do it.
Cat felt disoriented in time as well as in place. The rhythm of her life had been disrupted. She was trying to sleep while the world went about its business. Finally exhaustion overcame the uproar. She slept for hours.
She awoke to a man’s voice that sounded as though its owner were at her bedside.
“In this age work and ingenuity don’t count. Only money makes more money.” The man was in the next room. He spoke with a thick Osaka accent.
A pair of maids tittered. Men’s voices growled in agreement. The proprietress, suddenly demure, murmured in admiration of her wealthy, uncultured guest.
Cat reached from under the quilt and found the staff she had left by the lumpy pallet. Kasane was asleep on her own bed. The paper on which she had been practicing still lay on the low writing stand. It was black. When she filled it she had written over the previous characters, until they could only be distinguished by the shininess of the wet ink.
“One press of my seal can open chests of gold,” the merchant said.
Cat relaxed. She laid her head back on the hard cylindrical cushion of the pillow stand and closed her eyes. In the House of the Perfumed Lotus she had heard this sort of boasting many times. The women listened dewy-eyed until such guests left. Then they bet on how long the wastrels would take to spill
their fortunes with a winnowing fan in the pleasure districts. They joked about how soon the men would be reduced to cooking their millet gruel over a fire of broken chopsticks and fingernail parings.
Cat glanced out the round window at the roof. She assessed the angle of shadow on the thatch and sagging eaves and bamboo gutters where weeds had sprouted. She realized she must have slept most of the day away. The house was quieter now. Kasane was breathing evenly. Her face was young and peaceful in sleep. Cat lay still, floating in the sluggish river of her exhaustion.
“I have my sources of private rice, you know.” The merchant in the next room lowered his voice conspiratorially, although it was still perfectly audible. “I’m on my way back from the tenth-month distribution in Edo. I have warrants to collect for three lords and seventy-two samurai.” He tapped the mouthpiece of his brass pipe on a locked document box.
Rats and rice brokers multiply at harvest time, Cat thought.
She knew what he was. In the early days of the Tokugawa family’s rule, officials had collected their own rice stipend. But as peace continued and the bureaucracy grew, lowly government positions were filled by low-ranking samurai or rMnin. Unable to live on their meager annual salaries of twenty koku or less, they borrowed from the merchants against the three yearly distributions. They gave them warrants to collect the rice on their behalf, thus saving themselves the trouble and indignity of waiting in line.
Cat remembered them, the threadbare warriors, waiting in the tea houses near the government storehouses. With ivory toothpicks they probed meditatively between their teeth as though they had just eaten, when in fact they hadn’t money to buy bean paste or a bowl of pickled vegetables.
Government officials were assigned payment dates according to rank or, for those of equal standing, by lottery. The system was so complex, the men often waited for days before the broker brought them the monetary equivalent of their rice allotment. After the go-between subtracted his fees and commission, as well as the amount of the original debt and its exorbitant interest, his clients were usually indigent again.
“What use are the samurai and their arts of war?” Food had been served in a hollow clatter of lacquered bowls and cups and trays. The merchant talked with his mouth full. “Their swords are only good for paring radishes. Their skill with the naginata might scare off the occasional burglar. They could shoot their cats with arrows for stealing their fish.”
He slurped his soup loudly as everyone laughed politely at his wit. “The daimyM owe a hundred times more money than exists in the country. They do no work, yet their retainers swagger through the streets as though they owned even the maggots in the piles of horse dung.”
Once—only days ago, in fact—Cat would have slammed aside the sliding screen and served him up a bitter course of her fury. Now she almost smiled. He was his own punishment. All the money in the country wouldn’t expand his soul or make him a whit less vulgar.
She remembered what her father had told her. “Others deal in visible things,” he had said. “We deal in the invisible. The only business of the bushi, the warrior, is to maintain ‘right-ness.’ If we didn’t exist, right would disappear, the sense of shame would be lost, and injustice would prevail.”
“The rMnin are the worst.” The proprietress sounded as though she had been tasting some of her own sake.
“The rMnin are a plague in the country,” someone agreed.
“Take Asano’s man, the coward Oishi, for example.” The rice broker sucked his teeth and belched. “He’s so cautious he carries a lantern in daytime.”
Everyone in the next room laughed. Cat stiffened. The fact that Oishi hadn’t registered a vendetta had made him the object of ridicule from one end of the country to the other.
“Last month, at the hour of the Tiger, I was returning from the House of the Maple Leaf,” the broker continued.
“Where is that?” asked the proprietress.
“Shimabara. KyMto’s paradise.” He must have leered because the maids giggled again. “There by the light of my servant’s lantern I saw Oishi lying in the road.”
“Was he hurt?” the proprietress asked.
“He was drunk. He was covered with his own vomit and singing abominably.”
“Disgraceful.”
“ ‘You’re a boneless man,’ I said to him. He only babbled stupidly. I was so disgusted I kicked him. He didn’t move. So I spat on him. I couldn’t be bothered circling around him. I stepped on his hand and continued on my way. I may only be a wretched townsman, but I have more heart than Asano’s councilor.”
The screen slid open next door. “Does anyone want tobacco or tooth powder?” a youthful voice said. “I have here the finest nose papers from my master’s shop on High Street.”
The conversation turned to the clerk’s selection of wares, but Cat didn’t hear it. She lay with her eyes closed. A hot tear ran down her cheek, and sorrow burned inside her.
Kasane reached across the tatami between the pallets and took Cat’s hand. She rested her upper body’s weight on one elbow, leaned close, and whispered, “Pay no attention to him, mistress. Like boils and tumors, tactless people don’t care where they appear.” Kasane’s hand was warm and callused and strong. “Oishi-sama will help you,” she whispered.
CHAPTER 52
A STONE BOAT
Just inside the big gate of Mitsuke’s main temple, the priests had set up a long counter for feeding the hordes of young pilgrims. Three men were heating mason’s trowels over a brazier until they glowed red. Then they used them to scorch parboiled fish laid out on planks. Two other men used rakes to stir vegetables in a huge tub. Hungry pilgrims swarmed around them or squatted on their heels while they ate.
With his knees spread, a man sat on a stool under the wide eaves of the temple gate. He had stuck a bamboo pole into the ground next to him. The pole sported a vertical cloth banner with a comic picture of Daikoku, the plump, smiling god of wealth, painted on it.
“Personal finances are my specialty,” he informed the throng of people passing in and out the gate.
At first glance the financial adviser seemed prosperous enough, but Hanshiro noted that his topknot smelled of an inferior grade of hair oil. The collar of his yellow-and-white-checked robe and the hems of his black hakama were almost imperceptibly frayed. His black camlet jacket displayed the crest of no particular clan. Hanshiro suspected that inside it and the robe was the rental shop’s cipher embroidered in white cotton floss. Even the inro, the nested medicine box suspended from his sash, was the cheap type rented at ten mon a week.
To get Hanshiro’s attention the adviser slid the back of the long nail of his middle finger across his abacus, producing a clicking whir like insects in an autumn meadow at night.
“You too can hear the crickets’ song of wealth, honorable sir,” he said. “My rates are reasonable. If money is troubling you, let’s talk it over. I can help you sort it all out.”
Hanshiro ignored him. He stared at the letter pinned to the temple gate among the prayers and messages and petitions. He pulled one hand back through his wide sleeve and inside his jacket. He poked it up through the neck opening and rubbed the stubble on his chin. He had made a decision about the letter, but it was troubling him.
“Kamiko-rMnin,” the adviser muttered contemptuously. “Paper-clothing drifter. Pauper.”
Hanshiro turned his head to flash him a brief, wolfish smile from under his wide-brimmed rush hat. “The general of a defeated army should not talk tactics,” he said softly.
He carefully unpinned the letter and tucked it between the overlapping front flaps of his jacket, under his sash. He strode through the crowd toward a small tea house in the licensed quarter that had sprung up to serve the more secular needs of temple visitors. Devils live in front of the temple gate, as the old saying went.
He was in no hurry. The farmer to whom this letter was addressed was at least half a day behind him and more likely two or three days. If Hanshiro noticed the pair of
rough-looking men who followed him at a distance, he gave no indication.
The children’s religious fervor had spread to the adults. Parents were closing their houses and setting out after their offspring. Masters were laying down their account books and tools and following their clerks and apprentices. The tea shop, like all the restaurants in Mitsuke, was packed with pilgrims.
The racks for the customers’ sandals and geta and swords were full. Footwear was stacked on the packed earth of the entry way. The management had run out of wooden redemption tickets for them and was using chips of bamboo with numbers hastily painted on them.
Steam rose in warm, moist clouds from the big kettles on the clay stoves. The aroma of a vat of cooked rice competed with the smell of roasted eel. The waitresses glistened with perspiration even though the entire front of the house was open to the winter air.
The waitresses all wore identical blue aprons, robes the deep blue of a winter’s night sky, and wide yellow headbands charmingly tied in mannish style above their right ears. They shrilled their customers’ orders at the harried cooks. Their wooden geta made a cheerful din as they hurried back and forth along the bare earth runways between the raised platforms where the customers sat.
An extra silver piece rented Hanshiro a tiny room to himself in the wing at the rear of the garden. At night the rooms there served for assignations with courtesans from the House of the Trout next door. Now they offered solitude to customers willing to pay for it.
Hanshiro had made no move to surrender his long blade so it could be hung with the others at the entryway. And no one had dared ask him for it. The tea shop’s owner had been relieved to usher him and his swords out of sight.
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