CHAPTER FIFTEEN

TYING A LINE OF FISHES

Kawasaki wasn’t situated where travelers were likely to spend the night. Usually all they left behind them was dust from distant provinces and contributions in the farmers’ wayside conveniences.

A one-legged beggar sat on a frayed square mat across the road from the open-air tea shop near the ferry. He kept up a steady racket, beating with a mallet on the flat bell lying in front of him. He had been droning sutras since before Viper and Cold Rice arrived.

“I’m terribly embarrassed about the poor quality of the tea.” The tea shop’s owner arrived with the tray held over her head so her breath wouldn’t contaminate the contents. She set it down between Viper and Cold Rice. “The typhoon ruined the crop.”

“This is tea to make a palate rejoice.” Viper held up the cup and admired it politely.

He and his partner dangled their feet from the wide bench outside the shop. Their kago stood between them and the open shed that sheltered the ferry’s waiting passengers. A pair of dusty mats had been thrown over the kago’s carrying pole.

“May I bring you anything else, Boss?” Viper was Oyabun, Boss of the brotherhood of kago bearers for this section of the Tkaid.

“Can you serve us some fresh news, Kiku-san?”

“I can indeed!” Kiku, Chrysanthemum, was so small that she had to double her blue-and-white tie-dyed cotton robe twice under her sash to keep from tripping on the hem. She was also shy, but she lit up at the chance to relay gossip.

“A pack of rascals passed through,” she said in a low voice. “They waited a day at the Full Moon Inn. Then they left three men behind and continued on. The three have been squatting there like toads ever since, drinking all the Full Moon’s sake and complaining endlessly.”

“Who are they waiting for?”

The waitress beamed from behind her tray. This was the best part. She looked around, leaned closer, and lowered her voice even more.

“A terrible brigand.” She was elated that a terrible brigand might pass through Kawasaki. “Travelers from Edo say the Eastern Capital is buzzing with stories about him. He single-handedly fought off a horde of enemies and burned down half the pleasure district. They say he’s extremely handsome and he may even be disguised as a woman.”

“Who are his enemies?”

“I don’t know. But I hear they’re wicked. I hear the lone warrior intends to annihilate them and give all their gold to the poor.”

“Is that so?”

“That’s what I hear.”

“Thank you.” Viper bowed and smiled. “We’ll finish our tea and trouble you no more.”

“No trouble at all, Boss Viper.” She bowed as she backed away. In her tall geta she clattered back to the domed clay stove where her kettle simmered.

Viper thought of the mysterious young lord as he had last seen him, a slender, stoic figure in dusty priest’s robes meditating in a cloud of incense smoke at the foot of the pine tree.

“This whole affair is a fire across the river,” Cold Rice muttered into his teacup. “It doesn’t concern us.”

“It’s entertaining, my old friend.”

“The boy-lord’s orders were to leave the kago near the ferry, then disappear.” Cold Rice persisted in his attempts to dissuade Viper from folly, even though he knew it was hopeless.

Viper just smiled into his teacup. He counted among his friends members of Edo’s otokodate, gangs of commoners who fought against the depredations of samurai and bannermen. He had been in more street brawls than Cold Rice could count.

“Arguing with you is like driving a nail into bran.” Cold Rice was exasperated.

“Which of them do you suppose are the spies?” Viper studied the assortment of people sitting on the benches under the thatched roof.

“How should I know?”

“There,” Viper said. “Our young lord approaches.” He felt around next to his bare legs to make sure his oaken kago stick was close by.

Through the square of open mesh in her hat, Cat saw Viper about the same time he saw her. “Idiot!” she muttered.

She was furious that he would defy her. So be it. If he was determined to become a Buddha, she wouldn’t stop him.

Clutching her staff, Cat walked slowly past the dusty weeds and dry, brown rice paddies west of Kawasaki. She had tied back her sleeves to be ready for action. From inside her big hat she surveyed the few wretched hovels that fronted directly on the roadway. Except for the activity at the ferry, the village seemed almost deserted.

The passengers who had just arrived from the other side of the river were dispersing. Some rested in the shade of the tall trees along the river or stopped at the shabby tea houses. Others continued their journeys. Cat gave a start when a merchant strode up to Viper and demanded to hire his kago.

“You’re too fat,” she heard Viper say. “Walk. The exercise will do you good.”

Cat left Viper to argue with him and watched the two-horse pack train that was delaying the loading of the ferry. The flat-bottomed boat could only hold one animal at a time, and neither horse was cooperating with the driver. While they waited, the travelers chatted or rooted in their cloth bundles for radishes and rice dumplings. Children selling sweet bean cakes and straw sandals and toothpicks swarmed around them.

The boy Jsh was selling tea from his portable stand. When he saw her, he looked worried. Several surly men from Edo and a formidable rnin from Tosa had been asking about the handsome young priest of empty nothing. They might show up at any moment. Jsh had told them nothing, of course. He owed the young priest a great debt for the wonderful future he had read in the six copper coins.

The beggar stopped his chanting and bell ringing. He hung the cords of the mallet and bell around his neck. He emptied the coppers from his begging bowl into his sleeve, slid his rosary onto his wrist, and tucked his mat under his arm. He hauled himself up on his staff, hiked the hem of his long robe up into his sash, and hopped off on his one leg.

The spy, Cat thought. Now she only had to wait until the beggar alerted his employers.

The travelers waiting at the ferry were the usual sort. The pack horse leader. A pair of dry-goods clerks with their pilgrim’s scrolls slung on their backs. A panderer for harlots at ten percent. A pawnshop owner. A ditch cleaner with his broom and rake. And the retinue of two prosperous rice brokers from the bustling Kitahama commercial district in Osaka, where, it was said, money flowed past the wharves and strolled in the streets.

There were also three women going to the vast temple complex dedicated to Kb Daishi in the forest on the opposite side of the river. And a young artist, a westcountryman, who painted folding paper lanterns with pictures of Benkei on the Gojo Bridge. He had set up shop on an overturned tub.

The artist seemed to be seventeen or eighteen, a year or so younger than Cat. He wore his towel over his head with the sides folded across his cheeks and tied under his lower lip. Peasants covered their heads that way, and so did men who wanted to obscure their faces.

Jsh wandered casually up to Cat. “Tea, Your Holiness?”

“Thank you,” Cat answered.

“Beware.” To cover his voice Jsh rattled the wooden ladle against the side of the water bucket. “Several men are looking for a priest, and they mean him harm.”

“Thank you for your kindness to a stranger.” Cat bowed and accepted the small cup of tea. She drank it as though nothing were amiss.

When Cat didn’t retreat Jsh followed her at a distance. He scanned the river’s broad dry bed and the treeline for enemies. He jumped when Cat pounded the butt of her staff on the ground, jangling the iron rings.

“Allow me to read your fortunes, gentlefolk,” she said. “Your future is written in your face.”

The rice merchants ignored her. They sat on their travel boxes, smoking and discussing the recent fortuitous typhoon. The storm had created food shortages around Edo and made them both wealthy men.

“Permit me to read your face.” Cat stopped in front of the painter of paper lanterns. The cloth of his hakama was the orange and blue and yellow plaid common to the area around Ak. She wanted to make him speak to see if his accent confirmed her suspicion about his origins. “You, sir, have a long-life eyebrow.”

The artist waved his sleeve peevishly at her and tried to avoid her gaze, but she persisted. “Note how his eyebrow is wide, and the hairs are longer at the tail than at the head.”

The three women and several of the children crowded close to look. Jsh set down his big water buckets and watched from a distance. The artist became increasingly agitated, but he said nothing. He stood up suddenly and knocked over his water pot and scattered his brushes in the sand. He tied back his sleeves with a long cord and knelt to collect them.

“Please do me the favor of reading my future, holy one,” one of the women said. She and her two friends giggled behind their sleeves as if life itself were a wonderful joke. They were merry with the intoxication of travel and the freedom from responsibility.

Cat took off her hat and leaned her staff and pack against one of the shed’s corner posts. She studied the woman’s face. “You have a long head and a wide chin. You’re a fire person.”

“Is that good, holy one?”

“You are polite, but you have a hot temper.”

“That’s you!” The two friends laughed.

From the corner of her eye Cat saw Kira’s three retainers hustling across the trampled beach toward the ferry landing.

“Your clear voice and thin body mean you’re combined with wood,” Cat went on. “Success and fame will probably come to you after age thirty.”

Jsh hissed a warning, which Cat didn’t seem to hear. She bowed low as she accepted the woman’s donation of ten coppers tossed into her begging bowl. While the other two congratulated their friend on her good luck, Cat moved out to meet Kira’s retainers.

“Allow me to read the future in your faces, kind sirs.”

The men were startled. They had expected her to run or at least to be frightened. But Cat was following Musashi’s advice. She was making her fear transferable. By appearing calm, she was transferring restlessness to her enemy, the way one transferred sleepiness by yawning.

“You, sir …” Cat pointed her staff at the leader. “You have a small gray ear. Not a good sign.”

“Come with us.” When the leader and his two companions drew their long-swords, the passengers, the children, and the ferryman ran for the tea shop. Only the young artist remained, holding his paintbrushes.

Cold Rice stood back to belly with the others under the shop’s eaves, as though sheltering from a sudden and violent storm. Viper stayed where he was, sitting on the bench with his legs dangling. He held his kago stick ready, but he suspected that his young lord wouldn’t need much help.

“A gray ear means you can’t be trusted to keep a secret.” Cat threw back the matting over the kago’s carrying pole. She unloosed the slipknots and released the six-foot-long naginata from alongside the pole.

“And your nose … modern diviners never pay enough attention to noses, in my opinion.” Holding the naginata’s shaft loosely in her hands, Cat circled to the left.

Cat had studied many aspects of the warrior’s Way, but she had worked hard at only one endeavor in her life. She had practiced with the naginata from the time she was big enough to hold a small one. She had begun serious training at the age of seven.

The naginata was a heavy weapon and required great stamina to wield, but the weight of it felt good in her hands. The year away from it seemed only an instant. She remembered Oishi’s calm voice as he coached her in Ten-no-michi, Heaven’s Way. She was glad now that he had insisted she use a variety of naginata so she didn’t develop a preference for one.

Cat held her chin high and looked straight ahead. Her nostrils flared as she felt vigor flowing up into her scalp. She had a three-foot reach on the swordsmen, and they were cautious. But Cat could tell they didn’t consider her dangerous.

“You have an eagle’s nose.” She turned to the leader to divert the others’ attention as she moved to keep the sun on her right.

You must drive the enemy together as if tying a line of fishes, Musashi wrote. And when they are piled up, cut them down without giving them room to maneuver.

With a sudden cry and using her lead hand as a fulcrum, Cat whirled, hissed, and snapped her rear hand upward. Because strokes with the naginata were made not with the lead hand, but with the rear one, it slashed faster than a sword and didn’t signal its movements. And so, when the long, curved blade swooped down, the second man didn’t move quickly enough.

Cat clearly saw, as though time had slowed, astonishment streak across his face when the blade sliced deep into his right shoulder. He dropped his sword. Blood spurted from his ripped sleeve. Cat flipped the blade up and felt the slight tug as it disengaged from his flesh. She was beyond all conscious thought now, or fear or elation.

With quick, small steps she lunged and swirled in a blur of motion. Her long blade described flashing circles in the sunlight as she parried and feinted. She slid her hands easily along the smooth shaft, snapping it downward, then reversing her grip to bring it up again in deadly arcs. She made low, horizontal sweeps at the men’s shins, keeping them hopping to avoid amputation.

From the corner of her eye she saw the painter of paper lanterns run toward her with a sword he had hidden in his rolled sleeping mat. Too fast to see, she reversed the naginata shaft and smashed the butt of it sideways into his nose as he came abreast of her. She heard a crack as the oak crumpled the cartilage. The artist’s eyes widened in surprise and chagrin before he sprawled in the sand and lay still.

Cat severed the third man’s sword hand at the wrist. People scattered as he stumbled into the tea shop. With his good arm he knocked the kettle to one side and plunged the bleeding stump into the glowing coals. It hissed and steamed and sent out an odor of charring flesh. Backed up against the back wall, the waitress screamed steadily.

‘‘Ma!” Viper tucked his feet under him, sucked on a straw, and watched raptly.

When the leader tried to dart into sword range, Cat swiveled the curved blade downward again and sliced his ear off at the skull. Demoralized, he turned to run, and she swept the blade low, severing both ankle tendons.

“Ancient Chinese diviners wrote,” she called after him as he crawled away, “that ‘a man with a nose like an eagle’s beak will peck at another man’s heart.’”

Cat threw the ten coppers the woman had given her onto the wide, flat prow of the ferryboat. She didn’t know if the amount was enough, but it would have to do. She turned toward the tea house where the ferryman cowered. Viper and Cold Rice and their kago had wisely disappeared before the authorities could arrive. Viper must have realized that the young priest didn’t need his help and that staying there would surely mean trouble.

Cat stood her naginata upright and hung on to it, panting. “Ferryman,” she shouted. “Take me across.”