CHAPTER TWELVE

SIDETRACKS

As Viper trotted toward the foothills west of Kawasaki, his song blew back in great gusts around Cat.

What I like to lie beside,
The body of a young girl.
Her flesh is smooth
And firm as bean curd.

Sitting cross-legged, Cat clung to a strap hanging from the carrying pole running across the top of the flimsy contrivance. She had ridden many times in palanquins, but she had never had a ride like this one. Cat weighed so little, the kago felt almost empty to Viper and his companion, Hiyameshi no Jimbei, whom Viper referred to as Cold Rice.

Sleep with her one night,
And you’re mixed up seven days after.

Viper and Cold Rice sang ditties that the family servants wouldn’t have dared repeat in Cat’s presence; and they sang them lustily.

The body of the young girl
Is beau-u-u-tiful!

Cat’s mother’s palanquin had been a lacquered wicker coach three times this size, with silken cushions and gilded interior. Now Cat sat on a dirty straw mat infested with fleas. Her flea powder was in the pack strapped to the carrying pole.

This was a mountain kago, built as light as possible for carrying up steep slopes. It was only a large, shallow circular basket hanging from the carrying pole by triangular woven panels at front and back. A flat, rectangular mat served as a roof. The entire contraption squeaked and groaned rhythmically to the beat of Viper’s bare feet. Cat’s staff was tied alongside the kago’s carrying pole, and the iron rings jangled loudly.

As Cat bounced along she felt as though her organs were being wedged up into her chest. For what seemed hours, Viper and his partner had headed toward the line of blue-green hills to the west. They were following a raised path through the brown rice paddies that covered the southern edge of the broad plain of Musashi. Cat looked out at the farmers thrashing rice or measuring it under the watchful eyes of the government’s tax collectors.

She watched the tiny hamlets pass, one after the other. They all looked alike to her—ramshackle huts and small garden plots perched on higher ground, surrounded by brown, stubbly fields and irrigation ditches. The women sat in their dooryards spinning yarn or cranking small rice hullers. The dusty, half-naked children stared at Cat as she passed.

In his Wind book Musashi warned that to all Ways there were sidetracks. “If you follow the true Way and diverge a little,” Musashi wrote, “this will later become a large divergence.”

This was becoming a large divergence. Cat was about to shout at Viper, to tell him to stop, when he turned onto a precipitous track hacked from the side of the first high hill. Cat fell against the flimsy back of the kago as the front of it tilted upward abruptly.

She had a terrible headache, and with each bounce pain chipped away at the backs of her eyeballs. Hunger and the jostling had unsettled her stomach, and she tasted bile rising in her throat. How did one tell, she wondered, if one’s present situation resulted from karma or merely a stupid decision?

“Go on, go on!” From the rear of the palanquin, Cold Rice called encouragement to his partner. “Are you asleep up there?”

“You’re the one who sleeps,” Viper shouted good-naturedly over his shoulder. “I hear that while you’re away your wife powders her face with rice flour. She waits with her rolled mat under the Bungo Bridge and services the bargemen.”

“Your old woman consorts with badgers and grave diggers.”

At the next jolt, Cat’s head hit the carrying pole. Her teeth snapped shut on her tongue, and pain coursed through her mouth. She tasted blood. She was furious.

She held on to the bamboo frame and leaned out to berate Viper’s bare buttocks and soles, the only parts of him visible, and she stared over the edge of the footpath and into a deep, boulder-choked ravine. Hastily she pulled back inside. This was not the place to get into an argument with kago bearers. Kago bearers had been known to dump irascible or stingy customers off the sides of mountains and laugh about it afterward, over their teacups full of sake.

“Ekkorasassa!” Viper hissed as they rounded a sharp turn. It was the signal to set the kago down.

Cat heard the clack of the.men’s stout oaken sticks as they transferred the carrying pole to them and lowered the kago to the ground. A samurai stood, arms akimbo, in the middle of the trail. He was a small man, which may have been why he wore a kataginu, a formal sideless vest with shoulders quilted and stiffened to stand out like triangular wings. His partner waited at the chess board set up on a stump outside their thatched shelter.

Like most fugitives, Cat assumed everyone was after her. She draped her towel over her head to hide her face. She began rubbing the beads of her rosary and droning the Lotus sutra as though deep in meditation. Her staff was tied along the carrying pole, so while she chanted, she assessed the distance to Viper’s heavy oak stick.

“Whom do you carry?” The samurai used the guttural, clipped speech of men either used to authority or bent on acquiring it.

“We carry only a mad priest to cure a worthless stone-woman.” When Viper bowed low, the tiger tattooed on his buttocks seemed to smile at Cat.

“Lord Katsugawa wants no madmen or beggars depleting his resources or spying.” Lord Katsugawa’s retainer walked closer to inspect the tall hat hanging next to Cat’s staff. Priests of empty nothing were often employed as spies.

“The holy one will perform the necessary exorcism, then be on his way, Your Honor.”

“Your papers.” The samurai was so close, Cat could see the dust in the weave of his leggings.

Viper produced his travel permit from the pouch that hung from the carrying pole. The samurai studied it for what seemed an eternity. Finally he handed it back.

“Pass.” As parting proof of his rank, he rapped the top of the kago with his staff.

Viper and Cold Rice picked up the pole. “Ho-yoi-yoi,” they shouted as they settled it on their callused shoulders. Except for grunting the nonsense syllables “Ho-yoi-yoi” in time with their footsteps, they didn’t speak until they were safely out of hearing.

Viper signaled to set the kago down. There was a short silence, and then Cat heard the sound of a stream of water hitting a rock. “‘Lord Katsugawa wants no madmen and beggars on his lands.’” When Viper finished urinating he hawked and spat and tightened his loincloth.

“All the madmen and beggars are in Katsugawa’s employ,” he said. “I happen to know that that fool standing in the road like a ri-marker is the third son of a millet farmer. Did you see him inspect that paper, Cold Rice? Solemn as a clam. And the idiot can no more read than a toad can dance.”

A stone-woman, Cat thought. A woman who could not bear children. Of all Viper’s cheerful obscenities, this was the only one that shocked Cat. It was a phrase women never spoke aloud.

Viper had said he wanted Cat to speak to the dead. Was the stone-woman dead? Was her soul in Stone-Woman’s Hell, condemned for eternity to dig bamboo shoots with a lamp wick? Was her spirit the one to which Cat was supposed to speak? Or was she alive and her barrenness caused by a homeless ghost?

When Cat left Edo she had been prepared to fight mortal enemies. She hadn’t considered immortal ones.

Even so, the hissing “Ekkorasassa!” was welcome when Viper and Cold Rice finally set the kago down. Viper hurried around to untie Cat’s pack and hat and staff. Even in the cold air his sturdy body glistened with sweat as he bowed Cat out of the basket.

“Welcome to our humble village.” He gestured cheerfully. “It’s three ri from a wine shop and two ri from a bean curd shop.”

Cat stood stiffly and leaned on the staff, waiting for the sensation to return to her legs. The lower end of her spine felt bruised from the jolting, but the cold air revived her. The pain in her head subsided. She looked around.

Twenty or thirty small houses were scattered on several levels of a hillside that was covered with bushes and tall trees. The houses’ steeply pitched thatched roofs almost reached the ground at the eaves. The walls of unpainted timber and pressed earth had weathered a dark brown. Straw thatch covered enormous wood piles.

Bamboo pipes caught water from the many rivulets and tiny waterfalls and directed it to stone pools and cisterns. The sound of running water was constant. The low mountains were neatly terraced with fields carved into the slopes.

The women stopped their spinning and their hulling. The men put down their flails and their square measuring boxes. No one looked directly at Cat, but she could feel their suspicion. The place had an air of foreboding.

The headman stepped forward. He was not old, but his face was furrowed with care. Concentric, semicircular folds of skin hung under his eyes. He beckoned Viper to one side, but Cat could hear the murmured conversation.

“What news do you bring, nephew?” he asked.

“This priest has kindly consented to cure my foolish wife. He will speak to the troublesome ghost.”

“One trusts he’s not a cheat, like the last with his mossy skull of a so-called saint and his demands for contributions.”

Under the villagers’ surreptitious scrutiny, Cat felt young and inept and a contemptible mountebank. She was also angry that Viper had taken her so far out of her way and made such extravagant promises on her behalf.

Still, Kira’s men weren’t likely to look for her here. Maybe they would press ahead in their search, leaving her to follow them. She would feel much safer behind them than in front of them. As for the stone-woman’s barrenness and the homeless ghost, she would do what she could.

She pounded the butt of her staff on the ground, jangling the iron rings on top of it. Everyone bowed a little lower but peered at Cat obliquely.

“Namu Amida Butsu,” she intoned through her nose. She rattled the rings again. “After I have bathed and purified myself, I shall question the woman,” she announced. “I shall speak to the spirit.”

 

 

“I’ve tried all the cures.” Viper’s wife, Okyo, lay under a faded quilt with matted gray cotton wadding escaping from the torn seams.

Her closed eyes were sunken into hollows the color of ripe eggplant. She was so thin and wasted-looking, Cat jumped when she spoke. She had thought she was dead. As for Okyo, when she turned her head and looked at Cat, she was surprised to find that the priest was a boy, beardless and beautiful.

In the kitchen Viper sat with his back stolidly toward this small sleeping room. He and Sakuta, the village headman, were discussing Lord Katsugawa’s latest assessment added to the sixty percent taxation rate the farmers were already paying.

“I made a pilgrimage to Shojuin Temple and left a statue of the sainted Jiz-sama there.” Okyo hadn’t the strength to speak much above a whisper.

The damp night air was cold, and she shivered under the quilt. Cat rose onto her knees and moved across the plank floor to the cupboard. Balls of dust and lint nested in the corners. Okyo had been ill a long time, and her young maid had no one to supervise her.

Inside the cupboard Cat found another coverlet in as poor condition as the first. She shook it out and laid it over the woman. Then she sat back and fingered her beads. Cat’s flea bites made her frantic to scratch, but she forced herself to listen quietly.

“I burned incense and prayed to Benten-sama,” Okyo said. “I asked Kannon-sama for help. I slept in the room with my husband’s sister, who has given birth to three children. I jumped over the birth sacks of the last five babies born here.” She paused to catch her breath.

“I’ve asked my husband to divorce me.” A single tear spilled over her eyelid and coursed slowly down her hollow cheek. “If I live, I shall wear a pilgrim’s bell and roam the earth. I cannot stay here. The people of this village believe I’ll cause all the wombs to wither. They think I’ll cause all the women to become no-life-women like myself.” Okyo reached under the cover and held up a doll made of straw. “This was found nailed to the oak in the center of the village. Someone put it there to lay a curse on me.”

“Maybe it was meant for another.”

“It was meant for me.”

“Your husband believes the bones unearthed in the new field have caused your barrenness.”

“He doesn’t want to admit the real reason.”

“What do you think is the real reason?”

“Ours was a love marriage,” she murmured. “Not one of duty. We have been self-indulgent, reckless with our feelings. This is our punishment. I will have no children to make offerings when I die. But my husband can remarry and have children by a worthier woman.”

“I will ask the spirits the true reason.”

Cat had seen diviners at work. She knew the procedure, if not the sorcery behind it. And if she wasn’t a priest, she was at least a bat in a birdless village. She would have to do.

She held out a bowl of water and a slat of wood on which she had written Okyo’s name. Okyo dipped the wooden tablet in the water and sprinkled Cat with it.

Cat leaned her elbows on a box and rested her forehead in the palm of her hands. She heard no voices from beyond, but then she hadn’t expected to. However, the wave of grief and loneliness that swept over her took her by surprise. She felt a terrible, aching pity for the time-ravaged bones unearthed by strangers in a field.

“I’m hungry.” When she finally spoke her voice was strained by grief and sounded alien in her own ears. “I’m lonely. I’m frightened. No one cares for my soul as I travel the Three Paths.”

Okyo’s eyes grew wide.

“Bury my bones properly.” Cat knew, as clearly as if the owner of the bones had spoken to her, what she must do. “Say prayers over my remains. Burn incense. Feed my spirit, and I will haunt this woman’s womb no longer.”