CHAPTER NINE

TO CROSS THE EXPANSE

Cat was strong, but she wasn’t used to walking. By the time she reached the village of Kawasaki, a mere two ri and three cho from the Shinagawa barrier, her feet and legs ached. The pack’s straps were digging painfully into her shoulders.

She stopped at a shop displaying a stack of plump rice balls, each wrapped in a sheet of dark green, iridescent seaweed. She gathered her resolve. She would have to engage in the vulgar exchange of money for goods, or she would starve. She pointed to the rice balls and held out two precious coppers.

The shopkeeper looked astonished, then angry. “Please accept this as a humble donation.” As he put a ball into Cat’s begging bowl, he bowed with excessive courtesy. The bow was so exaggerated, it was unmistakably insulting.

Cat could see that the rice ball had been dropped in the dirt. “May the merciful Buddha bless you,” she said.

“Two coppers for a rice ball!” he muttered as Cat walked away. “Does he take me for a fool?”

Cat was so hungry that she brushed off the dirt and slid the ball under the rim of the basket so she could eat it. It was stale and brittle, and it tasted like chaff in her mouth. Cat did not like the view of the world from the other side of a begging bowl. Her hand trembled in humiliation and rage.

Cat’s indifference toward commoners was hardening into a tight knot of loathing. She would have given her life to assemble her naginata there in the crowded, dusty road and to pin the rice ball vendor like a fly to the wall of his shop. But her life was not hers to give. The stakes were much higher than that.

Even after eating the dry rice cake Cat felt dizzy with hunger. She limped to a spot of sunlight against a wall that blocked the cold wind. She leaned on her staff for support and watched the cheerful traffic stream by.

She realized that she would face problems that hadn’t occurred to her when she thought she could reach Kyto in ten days. She didn’t know what food or lodging cost, or the price of a bath or the ferry across the Tama River on the other side of Kawasaki. She couldn’t even do something as simple as buy rice.

“Are you thirsty, holy one?” A young tea seller, perhaps nine or ten years old, stopped in front of her.

His spindly hips were draped in a loincloth worn thin as gauze with age. His torn paper jacket was belted with the straw cord from a rice bale. His conical rush hat advised people to visit Mitsui sake shop, where there were “Cash sales” and “No fancy prices.” Even in the chill of early winter his feet were bare.

Two wooden water buckets, almost half his height, hung from the pole he carried across his right shoulder. Balanced on top of the front bucket was a two-tiered tray with wooden slats forming its high sides. It held four chipped bowls, a lacquered tea canister, and bamboo utensils. On top of the lid of the rear bucket perched a tiny iron charcoal brazier and kettle.

“How much is your tea?” Cat felt more comfortable discussing money with a child.

“No charge.” The boy studied Cat. “Are you still hungry?”

“Yes.”

“How many coppers do you have?”

Cat searched through the pocket formed by the seam that closed the bottom two-thirds of her jacket sleeve opening. She held out the ten-copper piece the old man had given her at the barrier and five mon, all she had managed to beg.

The boy raised his eyebrows at the fiscal incompetence of this priest. Then he took the money and disappeared into the crowd. Cat was beginning to berate herself for letting him rob her when he returned with two fat, fresh rice cakes wrapped in bamboo leaves artistically formed into tetrahedrons, and a small packet of pickled radish. He handed them to her, then set down his buckets.

“Nosewater,” he shouted to a passing noodle seller.

Cat flinched. The last thing she wanted was attention. She took off her pack and sat wearily, cross-legged, on the ground.

“You owe me a fist, remember? For the sake,” the tea seller said.

“Suck it, Jsh,” the other boy replied amiably. Strapped on his back was a high box whose narrow shelves contained bowls of buckwheat noodles. “I only owe you four fingers.”

“A fist. But give me two bowls and we’re even.”

The noodle vendor reluctantly handed over two bowls of cold buckwheat noodles and stood waiting for Jsh and the priest to empty them.

Cat would have to take off her big hat to eat. Next door, however, were the stables and courtyard of Kawasaki’s post station. The office building itself was set back from the road so the porters, messengers, and horses gathered there wouldn’t snarl the foot traffic. In the courtyard, kago bearers, hostlers, and off-duty couriers lounged in the sun.

On the tatami mats inside the low, open-fronted transport office sat a flock of clerks in identical robes. One of their main occupations was keeping tabs on the likes of Cat. With their ink stones and brushes and rolls of paper they were as dangerous, in their way, as the police and Kira’s retainers.

Cat turned away from the transport office and took off the tall hat. When she shook her high-set tassel of hair, dust flew from it. If someone recognized her, so be it. She couldn’t reach the Western Capital if she starved to death first. She held out her hands for the bowl of noodles.

If the boys noticed Cat’s delicate features, they said nothing. They had seen too many strange goings-on to comment on the foibles of a komuso, a priest of empty nothing. Most of them were mad to begin with, and not a few were fallen aristocrats and dangerous men.

Jsh handed Cat a pair of chopsticks, and she didn’t even look to see if they were clean. She didn’t worry that someone of her rank didn’t eat in the streets like an ill-bred commoner. She devoured the noodles and gave the vendor back the bowl. Then she ate one of the rice cakes and the pickles. She wrapped the other in her thin towel and stowed it in her sleeve to eat later.

“Tell Suruga I’m looking for him,” Jsh called as the tall noodle stand bobbed back into traffic.

Jsh wiped out a narrow teacup with the dangling end of his loincloth. Squatting in the dust, he used a tiny bamboo ladle, hardly bigger than an ear pick, to measure out the coarse dried black leaves and stems of the cheapest grade of tea. He set the small kettle onto the brazier to warm.

“It would be most fortunate to meet someone who could see the future.” Jsh artfully arranged his request into a polite oblique as he waited for the water to heat.

“Reading events to come is not my talent.” Cat saw disappointment skim across the boy’s face. “Why do you need to know the future?”

“My parents died while we were on pilgrimage. I want to know if I’ll ever see my village again.”

“Do you have six coppers?” Cat wiped her fingers on her dusty robe and held them out. Jsh dipped water from his bucket and poured it over them. Reading the future was holy work. It required purification.

Jsh laid down one of the wooden lids for Cat to work on. His purse hung from a long cord around his neck. He pulled it up from the depths of his paper jacket and separated six mon from the string of them.

“I haven’t the eight diagrams, so this will be only a simplified reading.” Cat shook the coins in her closed hands.

Like all the women who lived in the House of the Carp, Cat had had her future read often by the blind masseuse who doubled as a diviner. She knew the simplest of the more than eleven thousand combinations, and in any case, she was determined to make up a bright future for Jsh.

She laid the coins out in a vertical line on the lid, and the boy leaned closer. He was trying to see happiness, or at least a thatched roof and a daily bowl of rice, in the combination of the coins’ stamped and plain sides.

As Cat studied the results she sucked in her breath, hissing with pleasure. All the coins had landed with their stamped sides up, a rare combination. She would not have to lie to him.

“Will it be a good life?” he asked anxiously. A few people stopped to look over his shoulder. Then a few more.

“This is a pairing of two Heaven combinations. Very manly.” Cat was so intent on the message in the coins, she didn’t notice the small crowd of people craning to see.

“Extreme happiness will follow sorrow.” Cat was astonished at her own elation over his good fortune. “A dragon rising to Heaven is your symbol. Even if you’re not doing well right now, your worries and troubles will diminish. But you must work hard for success.”

“Ma!” Jsh murmured. “You don’t say!”

When Cat scooped up the coins to return them, he held up his hand, refusing them. He gave her a hempen cord and showed her how to thread it through the square hole in the center of each copper, then knot them in place. It was a small accomplishment, but it gave Cat the sudden, heady feeling that she could learn the arcane ways of commerce. She could survive in the world of merchants. She smiled as she put the small string into her sleeve.

“Do me the kindness of reading my future, holy one.” A woman set down the two huge cloth-wrapped packages she carried and squatted in front of Cat. The child who rode on her back and shared her oversize coat peered out from the big, loose collar. The woman held out six coins.

“I am weary,” Cat said. “Let me rest a few minutes.” She was having trouble keeping her eyes open.

“Go on.” Jsh shooed them away. “The holy one has traveled far. Can’t you see he’s exhausted?”

Reluctantly, the crowd dispersed.

From the direction of Edo a jangle of bells approached. The tips of two messengers’ spears, with their thick black fringe of horsehair, bobbed above the traffic. Travelers moved toward the side of the road, and a pair of couriers panted into the yard of the transport office.

They weren’t the regularly scheduled runners, and Jsh smelled intrigue. Intrigue was more than just entertainment for him. From time to time he was able to exchange his knowledge for coppers. “Will the honorable holy one do me the august favor of watching my shop?”

Without waiting for an answer, Jsh abandoned his water buckets and tea tray to Cat’s care. The last Cat saw of him were the blackened soles of his feet as he wriggled through a well-worn hole under the post station’s plastered wall.

Cat leaned her lower back against her own wall, crossed her arms on her raised knees, and rested her head on them. The sun felt warm on the top of her head. The noise of the Tkaid faded and surged and echoed around her. Worms of light swam in front of her eyes.

Jsh found her sleeping there a few minutes later. He studied the top of her head. The priest was pretty enough to be the one the authorities sought. But if he were the woman, surely she wouldn’t be napping here like a chicken in the dust next to the government office.

“Holy one.” Jsh shouldered his pole and adjusted the buckets to balance. “I have to sell the rest of my tea.”

Cat tried to force her eyes open against the fatigue that weighted the lids. “What message do they carry?” she asked.

“A courtesan ran away. They think she may be heading for the west country.” Jsh was disappointed that the news had been so uninteresting.

“Is she wanted for any crime?”

“No.” Jsh considered her a moment. “There’s a place where you can sleep, holy one, away from noise and curious eyes.”

He led Cat between the buildings to the beach beyond. He maneuvered his pole and buckets among the nets and drying racks and boats until he stood in front of a half-rotted hull. It was turned upside down, with one gunwale in the sand and the other propped up by a broken rudder.

Cat lay down gratefully on the raveled mat Jsh spread out under the boat. She cradled the walking staff in her arms. A tattered scrap of a quilt and a few broken utensils were wedged up into the thwarts overhead. Jsh took down the quilt and spread it over her.

A pair of wooden tablets with Jsh’s parents’ death names written on them were fastened to the ceiling formed by the boat’s broken floorboards. Stubs of incense sticks bristled from the sand. A bowl of cooked rice with chopsticks stuck into it and a thimbleful of water were mute evidence that Jsh had been faithfully providing for his parents’ well-being in the spirit world.

“Buddha of the Boundless Light will bless you, child,” Cat murmured before she fell asleep.

She slept through the hours of the Snake and Horse. She slept through the rainstorm that produced a flowering of bright, water-repellent paper umbrellas and big straw rain hats along the road and sent unprepared travelers scurrying for cover. She slept until the moist crunch of feet in the sand woke her. Without changing the rate of her breathing, she slipped her hand into her sash and found the scissors.

“Holy man.” The voice was gruff. Cat tightened her grip on the scissors. “Jsh says you’re a diviner.”

In spite of the introduction, of sorts, Cat almost stabbed the face that peered under the dripping gunwale. The man’s vein-laced nose had been broken two or three times. The bulbous tip of it slanted toward the lumpy left ear growing like a fungus on the side of his head.

He had shaved his eyebrows, exposing the thick ridge of bone over his bulging eyes. His bristle of black hair poked out from under a towel, rolled into a narrow tube, wrapped around his head, and knotted above his left ear.

At first glance Cat thought his head was being swallowed by a snake. A snake’s distended jaws had been tattooed along his own jawline. The lower and upper fangs bracketed his puffy-looking lips. A forked red tongue flicked across his nose. A pattern of blue scales covered his chin and ran down his neck.

“What do you want?” Cat asked.

“To beg a favor of you. In return, to offer you food and lodging.”

“And a bath?”

“My wretched hovel has few amenities, but certainly you can bathe there.”

Musashi wrote that to cross the expanse one must assess the perils, the directions, the obstacles. Cat realized, with a heavy feeling in the pit of her stomach, that she didn’t know what the perils and obstacles of the Tkaid were. She didn’t know whom she could trust and whom she must fear. As she crawled out from under the boat, she saw that this was certainly a man to fear. She decided to trust him.

He was squat, with long, powerful arms. The thick calluses on his shoulders marked him as a kago bearer. The snake tattoo that started at his face wound in thick coils down his neck, across his chest, and around his torso. The tail disappeared into the pouch of the loincloth that was his only clothing. Cat suspected that the tip of the tail ended at the tip of ano mono.

He hissed politely as he bowed. “For reasons obvious to all but a blind man, these stewed tea loaf fools call me Mamushi no Jiro, Viper.” He gestured at the world in general. It was the sort of name a bandit or gambler would adopt, and Viper seemed pleased with it.

He motioned her toward a flimsy bamboo kago sitting on the sand. Another bearer squatted beside it. As Viper slogged off through the sand, he hitched up his loincloth and tightened it up for the work ahead. Cat stared, fascinated, at the golden-and-black-striped tiger face covering his bare, tightly muscled buttocks.

The narrow white roll of loincloth partially obscured the pink nose at the point where his nether cleavage began. The huge eyes glowered from either side of it. The tiger’s cheeks followed the contours of the nates, and when Viper walked, his great cat seemed to be chewing thoughtfully.

Cat knew that to cross the expanse she would have to trust her own instincts. Her instincts told her Viper was offering her more than shelter. He was offering her sanctuary.

“What do you want of me?” She pulled her staff and pack from under the boat.

“To speak to the dead.”