CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

THE BALL OF DOUBT

Northeast of Odawara the Tkaid wound upward into steep hills. At the top of a high ridge, Cat sat cross-legged on a moss-covered boulder. She had stopped to rest and to wait for the dawn. Kasane had fallen asleep curled among the roots of an oak. She and Cat had left the See No Evil inn in Oiso while everyone still slept. They had traveled by the light of a waning moon in a star-strewn sky.

Cat looked out over the dark valley to the southwest and to the mountains of Hakone on the other side of it. In the darkness the mountains weren’t visible, but she felt their presence.

Cat was frightened. Her stomach churned at the prospect of facing the Hakone barrier. How stupid she had been, to think she could fool the officials there with her mimicry of a peasant boy. She could almost feel their rough hands on her as they led her away.

Unnerved by her own fear, Cat considered the possibility that she wasn’t capable of the task she had set for herself. She had had few moments of uncertainty in her life. This one made her think of the old Chinese poem:

The ball of doubt within my heart
Big as a wicker basket.

To calm herself she stared into the darkness as though she could see her father’s west country lands more than a hundred ri away. The estate of Ak had been the home of her father’s family for almost sixty years. Until seven years ago she had spent every summer there. But when she turned thirteen Lord Asano’s request for travel papers for the child listed as his servant’s daughter had simply not been granted. Nor had a permit been issued to leave Edo since then.

No explanation was ever given, but Cat and her mother guessed the reason. Cat had come to resemble strikingly both her father and her mother. Government officials had discovered her real relationship to Lord Asano. In a way, the government too was tacitly recognizing Cat as his daughter and heir.

So over the years Ako had become fixed in Cat’s mind as a haven, always warm and green and safe. It was a paradise scented with salt breezes and with the blossoms from the groves of sweet oranges. Cat longed to wander the forested hills and shining headlands of Ak again.

She had reveled in the freedom of country life. With Oishi’s son, Chikara, who was three years younger, she had explored the high turrets and balconies of her father’s graceful, many-gabled keep. They had looked down on the roofs of the retainers’ houses below. Cat had luxuriated in the prickle of grass under her bare feet. She had fenced with the plainspoken sons of her father’s west country retainers. Best of all, she had studied the warrior’s arts with Oishi almost every day.

On hot summer evenings Cat and her mother and nurse had gone for boat rides on the Inland Sea. They had sailed among small islands of rocky cliffs and gnarled pines. They had laughed and sung and composed poetry about the beauty of the moonlight on the water. The fishermen had lit fires in the metal baskets hanging from the prows of their boats. Rocked by the gentle swell, Cat had watched the distant lights swoop and wink in the darkness.

Cat and Chikara had caught fireflies on the bank of the river. They had put them in gauze-covered cages and used them as lanterns to light the way home. Cat’s nurse released the fireflies into the rippling, room-size tent of silk gauze that served as Cat’s mosquito net. Their twinkling had amused her until she fell asleep.

Cat’s mother told her the fireflies were the spirits of the dead, come to light the way for loved ones left behind. The spirit, her mother had said, can travel a thousand ri in a day.

Cat drew a bundled towel from inside her jacket and unwrapped Kasane’s knife. She pressed her thumb hard against the blade. It was sharp.

As she held the knife in her lap, Cat remembered the old tale Oishi had told her that summer long ago. He told it during a game of a Hundred Supernatural Stories. As each person told a ghost story he or she extinguished one candle. The party had started in the eerie light of a hundred candles covered with blue paper hoods. By dawn only one had been left. Oishi had snuffed the last light and they all sat in darkness as he told of the warrior who traveled a hundred ri in a day.

The warrior had left his home near Ak to travel to Izumo on the other side of the country. He promised his brother he would return on the ninth day of the ninth month. He arrived almost at the end of the appointed day. Everyone had gone to bed except his brother, who waited for him at the front gate. The two men had a joyful reunion, and the returning warrior told of being imprisoned by the cruel lord of Tonda castle.

As Oishi told the story he took both parts.

“‘Until today,’ the warrior said, ‘I could find no way to escape.’

“‘Until today!’ his brother exclaimed. ‘But Izumo is a hundred ri away.’

“‘Yes.’ The warrior looked at him sadly. ‘Fortunately I was allowed to keep my sword and so could make the journey here in time. Say good-bye to our mother.’ With that, he disappeared.”

Cat remembered the heat of that summer night and the cool itch of salty tears on her cheeks as she had listened to Oishi’s low, resonant voice in the dark. “He had killed himself,” Oishi said. “So his ghost could travel a hundred ri and keep his promise.”

Cat opened the neck of her jacket and laid the flat of the cold blade against her breast. She closed her eyes and concentrated on the hard, smooth feel of it as it took on the warmth of her body. It too could release her spirit and allow her to reach Oishi in a day. Her ghost could enlist his help.

Cat sighed. The story of the two faithful brothers was a tale told to amuse children. Belief in ghosts was for servants and peasants and the very young.

Cat would have to stay alive. She would have to continue walking along a road that seemed to have no end. She would have to face the officials at the Hakone barrier.

She pulled her jacket farther open and felt under her ribs for the place where the knife’s blade would enter if she were to commit suicide as her father had. With eyes still closed she turned the knife so she was holding the handle in both hands, the blade poised. She sat like that a long while, breathing deeply and trying to imagine her father’s last moments, his last thoughts.

Finally a cold gust from the sea caused her to shiver. When she opened her eyes she saw that dawn was just spilling out from the seam where the bay met the sky. As she watched, the pale blue of the water became streaked with iridescent turquoise and lavender and spangled with fire from the rising winter sun.

The loops and folds of the Sakawa River trailed across the landscape below like a discarded length of metallic thread. Beyond the bare fields and the town on the other side of it were the mountains. At the mountains’ base the tiered roofs of Odawara castle, with their upswept gables, floated on the dark green canopy of firs and pines. The shadows among the trees’ branches looked like shreds of night still caught there. A flock of crows separated from the shadows, cawed, and rose into the sky.

Cat put away the knife. She took slow, deep breaths of the cold air as she stared at Mount Fuji rising pale as a cone of mist beyond the dark mountains. The sight of Fuji calmed her fearful spirit. She realized she had become distracted by the details of her journey. The feverish tally of ri and cho and towns and days had been clicking in her mind like the beads of a merchant’s abacus.

Cat had studied Zen with her mother’s mentor, the abbot of Sengakuji. She had sat long hours in meditation; but now, although she tried to eliminate extraneous thoughts, Musui’s mischievous, lopsided grin intruded. His presence was as unstoppable as the sun that would soon appear and brighten the day.

Sensei, Cat thought, the disciple you named Endurance wants nothing except to behead a man.

“You must eat the fruits of your own deeds.” Cat heard Musui as clearly as if he were standing at her side, fingering the beads of his rosary and enjoying the fine view. “Don’t worry yourself about life. The world is but a traveler’s inn. The Path is not the means to an end. The Path is the goal itself.”

Cat let her breath out until she felt empty and light. She paused before drawing more air in. For an instant she felt as though she had no need of breath. She was serene and unafraid.

“Thank you, sensei,” she murmured.

She climbed down from her perch on the boulder and crouched next to Kasane, who was still asleep. She looked so young, so innocent, that she reminded Cat of something Bash had written. In his travels he had met a pink-cheeked farm girl, a “darling named Kasane.” “Kasane,” he wrote. “A curious, sweet name.”

Watching her, Cat realized that Kasane too had lost her home and a loved one and had been pursued by enemies. Cat vowed to make amends for her own meanness of spirit.

“Elder sister,” she said.

Kasane jerked awake. She jumped up, grabbed her pack, and began struggling into the straps. “I’m sorry to delay you, mistress. Please forgive me, though I don’t deserve your forgiveness.” In her haste Kasane fumbled with the roll of mats. Cat helped her fasten them in place.

“While I slept and wasted time your gentleman waits for you in the south country.”

“Don’t worry yourself. We have time.” Cat settled her furoshiki on her back, then retrieved her staff from where it leaned against the boulder. “Dewa mairo? Shall we go?”

They hadn’t walked far along the deserted road when Cat felt a shy tug at her sleeve.

“Forgive my rudeness … .” Kasane held out a round white paper fan.

Someone had written on it in a simple, masculine hand using hiragana , the syllabary of women and the poorly educated. Cat was relieved to see that the writing held neither threat nor warning.

“Where did you get this?”

“I found it in my pack.” Kasane crowded close to look over Cat’s shoulder. “Who wrote it?”

“It’s a poem.” And an unpolished and presumptuous one at that, Cat thought, but she held her tongue.

Cat was rather amused by the flawed but heartfelt attempt at eloquence of a young man caught up in the romance of the road. She read the poem aloud.

The last maple leaf,
blasted by an icy wind,
turns crimson and falls.

“What does it mean?”

“You must have an admirer. He probably paid a servant to slip this in among your things.”

“Dame! Impossible!” Kasane blurted out. She covered her mouth in horror at her own rudeness.

“Maybe it was written by the handsome young man who was staring at you last night in the See No Evil. I think his poem means that your cold glances wounded him.”

“Is that so?” Kasane was rattled. She turned her face away and waved her hand, as though to scatter such a preposterous notion. But when Cat gave the fan back to her she held it reverently and stared at it before sticking it into her robe and under her sash.

“No one ever sent poetry to this unworthy person before,” she confessed shyly.

Wisps of hair were already escaping from the shimada hairdo Hawk had created on her the day before. Kasane had wrapped a blue-and-white cloth around it and tied it at the base of the thick looped club of hair. The kerchief made her look again like the commoner she was. She wore her big straw pilgrim’s hat over it. She wore mud-spattered cloth gaiters and straw sandals over bare feet. She had tucked the skirt of the pilgrim’s robe into her sash at the small of her back.

Her brother’s pilgrim’s robe had gone overboard with him, so Cat had traded his wadded jacket for a pair of used white robes from Wave, the proprietor of the See No Evil. Wave probably had everything she had ever acquired stored somewhere in the inn. She had led Cat to a small storage room and ransacked the trunks there. She had thrown clothing about until she’d found the white robes. They’d been left by two unfortunate pilgrims who had died, and Wave was glad to be rid of them and the bad aura that accompanied them.

Cat was grateful that fate and Wave had provided two robes. A brother and sister wearing a mismatched pair would have aroused suspicion. Still, she had inspected the style of the weave closely. The cloth had been made in Edo. It was possible that two pilgrims from Kazusa could be wearing it.

For walking Cat too had tucked up the hem of the robe, revealing Kasane’s brother’s tight-fitting breeches. She also wore his old tabi and gaiters. She and Kasane had tied their spare sandals to their sashes. They carried walking sticks and wore travel cloaks against winter’s cold. To a passerby they did look like brother and sister.

Cat, however, was still wondering how she could convince Kasane to leave her. If Kasane were caught with her at the barrier, the punishment could be terrible. Cat decided to coax her into talking about her family and the fishing village where she was born. Maybe she would grow homesick enough to agree to return there. In any case, Cat could hear more of her accent.

“Elder sister, tell me about Pine village.”

“Excuse my rudeness, but there’s nothing to tell. It’s a poor, dull place.”

Cat knew Kasane was right, but she tried to think of something she could ask that would start Kasane talking.

“I have a book.” Kasane spoke in a voice so low, Cat turned around to make sure she hadn’t fallen behind. Kasane rested the pack on a low wall and found the book. She blushed a charming pink as she held it out to Cat.

It was one of the cheap editions of “spring pictures” bound between heavy cardboard covers. Peddlers sold them throughout the countryside. The wooden blocks from which it had been printed had worn down until even new, the pages were barely legible. The hairdos were months out of style, but the book’s twelve foldout panels contained detailed illustrations of men with penises the size of mackerel copulating acrobatically with women. The books of “spring pictures” were customary presents for brides-to-be.

Cat leafed through it with amusement. “Was this an engagement gift?”

“Honorable Go-Between gave it to me.” Normally Kasane would never have talked about this with someone of Cat’s class, but Cat’s insistence on asking personal questions had suspended the rules of proper behavior.

“My parents hired her to arrange a marriage for me with a gentleman from another village,” Kasane went on. “The go-between said that even though I’m homely, I’m strong and healthy and there is no insanity in my family, so she made a good match for me. We were going to be married after the trip to Ise. His mother wanted me to be there for the spring rice planting.” Kasane’s blush deepened. “I never saw him, and now I never will.”