The Tokaido Road

by Lucia St. Clair Robson

  Some men had on helmets. Others had tied cloth bands around their heads. They carried paired swords in their sashes, of course, but they were also armed with spears and naginata, bows, arrows, and staffs. Rust on a man’s weapon indicated corrosion of his spirit, and every blade had been polished until the moonlight glinted off it.

  Some of the men had stuck thin poles into the backs of their sashes so that the small cloth banners attached to them waved above their heads. They had written their death names on the banners.

  A few men carried bamboo ladders and heavy, long-handled mallets. Several held large, truncated cones of blackened cypress veneer with handles at the narrow ends. The cones were lanterns with gimballed candles that could direct a beam of light at the enemy while leaving the bearer in shadow.

  Kanzaki Yogoro led the procession. He was followed by a man holding up a pole with a small box on the end of it. Cat knew the box must contain the AkM rMnin’s statement of purpose.

  Oishi walked behind the box bearer. He carried a battle drum by a cord loop. The drum’s head was painted with the twin red yin and yang symbols, the crest of the Yamaga school of strategy. His expression was calm.

  As Cat watched him approach she murmured the ancient poem.

  Yamato is a land

  Where the word-spirit aids us.

  Be happy. Fare you well!

  When she saw Oishi look around she started, even though she knew that spoken words possessed a spirit of their own. They could carry out the speaker’s wishes, and perhaps Cat’s words had made themselves felt.

  The moonlight was so bright that the men had no need of lanterns. No one spoke. Their presence was announced only by the crunch of their straw sandals in the fresh snow and by the muted rattle of metal and wood. It was an archaic noise, an echo from the centuries of warfare that had preceded this one. It was a sound not often heard in the streets of Edo.

  Hanshiro had been raised as a warrior, but he had never seen men march into battle. He had thought the warrior spirit extinguished by the corrupting influence of money and the decadence of his generation. He knew the Edo had never seen the equal of this procession, nor would it be likely to again.

  Cat and Hanshiro watched the double column move down the empty street. Then it turned a corner and was lost to sight. Cat stared, rapt, at the buildings hiding her father’s men until they reappeared at the head of Matsuzaka Street. When the procession reached the corner of Kira’s wall, it divided, like a stream flowing around a boulder. Chikara and his men separated and headed for the rear of the compound.

  Oishi and the rest walked to the front gate. The warriors crouched in the snow while those with the ladders leaned them against the eaves of the gate’s wide roof. Men climbed the ladders and eased up the slope of the gate roof until they could look over the peak into the compound beyond. As Cat watched them, the silence of their movements gave the scene the quality of a dream.

  A few of Oishi’s men scrambled up over the gate roof and dropped into the courtyard below. Cat couldn’t see them there, but they must have overpowered the night watch huddled around their brazier in the gate house, because soon the heavy doors swung slowly open. Those with the gimballed lanterns lit them.

  Oishi raised the war drum and held it poised and silent until Cat wanted to shout to him to give the signal. Finally he hit the drum sharply with the drumstick. A heartbeat later Cat heard the hollow report. It was followed by the faint crash of huge wooden mallets against the smaller back gate. Oishi’s men crowded through the front gate. Oishi and two of his older lieutenants, Hara Soyemon and Mase Kyudaiyu, stationed themselves outside to repel reinforcements and to stop those inside from escaping.

  Cat leaned out from the railing, as though she could fly to join her father’s men. She heard shouting and saw Kira’s guards burst from their tiny rooms along the front wall. They were barefoot and half-dressed. Their uncombed hair hung down around their shoulders, but most of them had their swords drawn. The clash of blades rang out over the men’s shouts.

  Long beams from the lanterns flashed and swooped. Their light caught parts of the combatants—a leg, an arm, a face contorted with rage—and froze them for an instant like some artist’s depiction of war. Some of the AkM rMnin held off the guards in the courtyard while the rest charged up the steps onto the veranda. They battered down the door of the entrance hall, and women began screaming from inside the house.

  “They’re getting away.” Cat pointed to two men running across the garden. The men threw a gardener’s ladder against the wall on the far side and climbed over. They dropped to the street below and raced for the Sumida River. “We should warn Oishi.” Cat started for the ladder, but Hanshiro held her arm.

  “Remember the words of one wiser than we,” he said. “ ‘Do not fight with another’s bow. Do not ride another’s horse. Do not discuss another’s faults. . . .’ ” He paused to let her finish.

  “ ‘Do not interfere with another’s work.’ ” Her voice was low and bitter. But this is my work, she thought.

  She strained to make sense of the confusion in Kira’s compound, of bodies in motion, of light and shadow, flashing steel, and the high whine of bowstrings discharging their arrows. The sounds of shrieking and crashing and ripping rose and fell inside the house as Oishi’s men searched for Kira. The fight spilled over the courtyard wall and into the garden beyond.

  Lights came on in the nearby compounds, and soon people appeared on the roofs. Most of them were afraid a fire had broken out. Men slipped out the smaller doors set in the main gates and ran to see what was happening.

  Oishi had unfolded a stool and sat calmly in front of the gate while his two gray-haired companions, Hara and Mase, paced. When a small crowd gathered, Hara and Mase conferred with the men sent by neighboring lords. The messengers dispersed, scattering back to their masters’ compounds and disappearing through the side doors.

  Mase unfolded a stool and sat next to Oishi. Hara went back to pacing. Cat and Hanshiro waited for Kira’s neighbors to send men to aid him, but the gates of the surrounding mansions stayed discreetly shut.

  About halfway through the hour of the Tiger the noise of fighting finally quieted. Cat could see bodies scattered about the courtyard and the garden. They sprawled across the steps and the verandas. She could hear the sound of women wailing and the noise of destruction. In their search for their lord’s enemy the AkM men were breaking open chests, pulling down ceiling panels, and slashing bedding. Kira’s mansion was modest, but even in a modest mansion there were lots of places for a man to hide.

  The moon had almost set. In the east a band of pale light lay along the horizon, but no whistle signaled that Kira had been found. Cat thought she would go mad with the waiting. To reassure her Hanshiro allowed his sleeve to brush hers. He moved his hand so that it rested lightly against hers on the railing.

  After a long discussion Hara and Mase finally persuaded Oishi to let them go inside. They left him sitting alone on the stool in the trampled snow outside the gate. He seemed as calm as a buddha, but he looked forlorn, abandoned, left out of the vengeance he had planned. Cat wondered what he was thinking. Had Kira escaped? Had all Oishi’s effort and suffering been for nothing?

  “They’re coming,” Hanshiro said.

  Cat turned to look. A bristle of bows moved across the bridge into HonjM from Fukagawa. The thirteen archers were a token force, but they were reputed to be the best in the country. And the AkM rMnin must be exhausted by now.

  Cat reached for the iron rod that hung near the big bell, but Hanshiro put a hand on her arm.

  “If we ring the bell, Uesugi’s men and Oishi’s will clash,” he said. “The master of the New Shadow school wrote that if your mind reaches the ultimate of swordsmanship, the sword will have no place.”

  “What do you propose?”

  “Persuasion. It would be best if you stay here while I go down and talk to them.”

  Cat just looked at him, and he smiled ruefully. He hadn’t really tho
ught she would agree to stay behind. “If they kill us, we will at least have delayed them,” he said.

  Chubei’s mochiyokko appeared suddenly, as if on cue, on the rooftops lining the bowmen’s route.

  “You said Chubei promised that his men wouldn’t interfere.”

  “They’re not there to fight.” Hanshiro started down the ladder. “We’ll use them as go stones, surrounding the enemy and ending the game in a draw.”

  He led Cat at a run through back alleys reeking of garbage and sewage. They came out on the main street a few blocks in front of Uesugi’s bowmen. With their faces hidden in the shadows of their hoods, they waited.

  Hanshiro’s bow was unstrung and slung across his back. His swords were in their scabbards. Cat’s naginata blade was sheathed, and she held it vertically, with the butt resting in the snow.

  “Comrades,” Hanshiro said when the archers drew close, “this quarrel is not with you or your master.”

  “We have our orders.” The captain was in his middle years and obviously very well trained. He was from Yonezawa to the north, and he had little regard for city warriors. In Hanshiro he recognized an equal, something he hadn’t found often in Edo.

  Hanshiro approached close enough to speak softly. He nodded toward the rooftops, where almost a hundred men were clearly outlined against the pale gray sky. They stood so that their mattocks and adzes and scythes were silhouetted, too. From side streets came the creak of gates closing.

  The captain knew his men could be trapped here between the unbroken facade of the buildings, with no room to maneuver while they were attacked from above. He realized his choices would be to engage in a brawl with commoners or retreat from them. He didn’t relish either alternative.

  “Your orders were to come to the aid of a certain lord,” Hanshiro said. “Surely your master didn’t mean for you to sully your weapons with the likes of them.”

  “True.” The captain had been instructed, in fact, not to cause a disturbance in the streets.

  “The ignorant rabble of HonjM are an impulsive and irrational lot. And they’ve taken an insolent interest in this case. If you continue, I fear they’ll attack.”

  Hanshiro knew the captain wasn’t afraid of a gang of commoners, and the captain knew Hanshiro knew it. They both also knew that the government forbade interference in private disputes. And then there was the edict about the chastisement of an enemy not being attended by riot. The machi yakko excelled at riot.

  “I. . .” The captain stopped. He sighed. He bowed.

  Cat and Hanshiro bowed lower to lend dignity to his retreat as he spun on his heel and strode off the way he had come. His men wheeled and followed him.

  Cat turned and ran north, toward Kira’s mansion. She was only a block away when she heard the shrill call of a whistle, then another. A shout went up. Oishi’s men had found Lord Kira.

  CHAPTER 79

  SPRING DWELLS INSIDE THE STRUGGLING BUDS

  When Cat arrived at the gate, a crowd of the neighboring lords’ servants and retainers stood in front of it, craning to see inside. Oishi and his stool had disappeared. Cat set her naginata against the wall and walked without hesitation through the heavy wooden doors.

  Hanshiro started to call her back, then thought better of it. A month ago Lady Asano had set out on her journey alone. It was only right that she finish it alone. Hanshiro tried neither to stop her nor follow her.

  Cat stopped just inside the gate and looked around. The courtyard was quiet. It was empty except for the bodies. The predawn light revealed the dead and wounded everywhere, but she was relieved to see that none wore the black-and-white coat of the AkM men. On the other side of the yard the offices and front reception rooms of Kira’s mansion lay open to view. The inner wall panels all had been smashed or toppled, exposing room after room, receding into the night that lingered there.

  A warrior-priest lay sprawled in the shadow of the gate, his sword still clutched in his hand. He must have been one of the first to die. Perhaps he had been performing his morning devotions and so had been awake at the hour of the Tiger.

  Cat had no time to ponder what his relationship to Kira might have been. She stripped off her fireman’s coat and put on the man’s outer robe. She took the cloth off her shaved head, transforming herself into a young bonze. She pulled the rosary from under the dead priest’s sash and draped it over her hands.

  Fingering the beads and chanting sutros for the repose of the spirits of the dead, she walked slowly across the courtyard and up the steps. She was concentrating so intently on the interior of the house and the enemies who might be lurking there that when she passed the slain warrior on the veranda she stepped into the pool of his blood. Her sandals left crimson tracks behind her on the tatami as she walked into the devastation.

  She walked around the heaps of broken ceiling panels and painted screens and powdered plaster. She surveyed the scattered account books and abacuses and the upturned writing tables of the steward’s office. She saw the scroll torn from the wall of the reception hall’s tokonoma. A lacquered altar cupboard had been toppled and the articles inside smashed underfoot.

  As Cat walked through the ruin of Kira’s mansion, it seemed like a lovely garden to her. A paradise of retribution. It soothed her angry spirit as water running over the rocks in her mother’s garden once had.

  She headed toward the sound of women sobbing. They were in the family’s private quarters, and that was where Kira most likely would be. But the corridor leading to the inner rooms at the rear of the house was empty, and Cat wondered where her father’s men had gone.

  At the other end of the hallway the damage was even worse. Cat waded through torn robes and mattresses and gossamer drifts of silk floss wadding. She stepped over scattered porcelain and lacquerware, smoking utensils, lanterns, and works of art. Storage chests big enough to hide a man had been smashed and the contents strewn about. Bedding had been pulled from the cupboards and ripped open. Draped over a broken rack was a torn purple satin quilt with arrows bristling from it.

  In the next room, long smears and splatters of fresh blood glistened on the wall like the calligraphy of a death poem in an alien language. Braziers had been knocked over, but Cat noticed that someone had doused the embers in them. Wet charcoal and floods of ash-thick water had flowed out across the floors. Oishi’s men had seen to it that fire didn’t destroy Kira’s house before they found him.

  The outer wooden shutters had been knocked from their tracks along the corridor facing the garden. Cat could imagine the AkM men kicking them out at the top so that they lay in a row, in a long uneven slope from the raised floor of the corridor down to the ground. As she followed the hallway to the back of the mansion, she began to hear men’s voices. When she reached the end of it she stood in the shadows and looked past the family shrine with its small torii gate.

  Oishi and his men were gathered there around a small shed near the rear wall of the compound. The shed was the sort used to store charcoal. It stood near the kitchen in the midst of the gardeners’ clutter—ladders and poles, dusty baskets, mats, and heaps of straw rope. It was a contemptible place for someone of Kira’s position to hide.

  Cat could feel her heart pounding as she tried to see what was happening there. The men all moved back when those inside the shed came out. Someone raised a spear, and everyone cheered. Stuck onto the willow-leaf-shaped blade was a bloody head. Cat had no doubt it was Kira’s. The ferocity of her joy was so intense, her ears rang with it.

  She drew back into the darkness of the house and retraced her route through the blood and the desolation. She had seen no one inside, but she still heard women wailing in a distant room.

  When she walked out through the front gate, Hanshiro was surprised to see his beloved, who had entered as a fireman, emerge as a priest. Her face was impassive, but he recognized the look of triumph in her eyes. She retrieved her naginata and stood quietly next to him in front of the crowd. Together they waited for the forty-seven rMnin of
AkM to appear.

  When Oishi finally led his weary men through the gate, a murmur went up from the people outside. The warriors’ clothes were torn and bloody. Several of the wounded leaned on their comrades. Some of the older men staggered from exhaustion. Onodera Junai, a blood-soaked rag wrapped around his gray hair, stepped away from the others.

  “Lord Kira Kozuke-no-suke Yoshinaka is dead,” he announced. “We have satisfied the restless spirit of our master, Asano Takumi-no-Kami. We mean no harm to anyone else.”

  He moved to join the others, who were forming a double column behind two spearmen and a man bearing a box on a pole. Inside the box was Kira’s head wrapped in a wide sleeve torn from a silk robe. Several warriors moved in as a guard behind the box bearer. They were followed by Oishi walking alone, then Chikara, supporting his seventy-seven-year-old comrade. The rest of the forty-seven fell in line at the rear. A bell from the nearby temple began sounding the hour of the Hare.

  Oishi stopped in front of Cat. “Hime. “ He smiled at her. “Never have I seen you look so saintly.”

  The rosary rattled as Cat reached up to touch with the tips of her ringers the soft black fuzz that covered her head. “Where will you go now, sensei?”

  “If no one stops us, we’ll walk to Sengakuji, to Spring Hill Temple. We’ll burn incense and leave this offering on our lord’s grave. We’ll tell him of our insignificant efforts to repay some small part of our debt to him.” Oishi reached into his jacket and drew out two folded pieces of paper. He hadn’t expected to be able to give them to her in person. “I regret most deeply that I cannot stop to see your mother.” He held out the letters. “One is for you. Will you please deliver the other to her?”