CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

SINCE I LOST THE BRINDLE CAT

About the middle of the afternoon Hanshiro saw, walking up the mountainside, the person who was surely Lady Asano. Her disguise as an intinerant entertainer was clever. The huge red papier-mâché demon mask was familiar to Hanshiro. It was the type carried in shrine processions in Tosa. It reached from above her head almost to her waist. Its long nose distorted her silhouette. Imagining a beautiful face behind it was difficult.

Hanshiro left Gentle Haven inn and tea house, crossed the red-lacquered bridge, and waited out of sight behind the tall bushes at the side of the road. When Lady Asano passed he moved out behind her. As he followed her he was amused by her stride. It was jaunty, even on the steep slope of the mountain trail.

Dressing and acting in a mannish fashion was all the rage among the courtesans and upper-class women of the Eastern Capital. Hanshiro had always thought the style beguiling. He was charmed to find that Lady Asano was adept at it.

Even though her legs and feet were swaddled in dirty leggings and tabi, he had to admire them, too. With his eyes he followed her slender heels and ankles to her calves, then to the hollows behind her knees. Above them his view was blocked by the frayed hem of the long baggy coat of wadded cotton. Before he could rein in his thoughts, however, they had strayed where his gaze couldn’t.

Hanshiro imagined the celestial intersection where her thighs met the firm curves of her haunches. He pictured the secret cleft with its soft black copse of hair nestled in the depths of that wild country between her legs. He pictured parting the hair with gentle fingers and touching, ever so lightly, the recumbent lilac folds hidden under it. He pictured, in fact, more than he ought to have. His loins ached as he stared, mesmerized, at the subtle churn of slender cheeks under the tail of the patched, dusty jacket.

He blinked and raised his eyes to the samisen tied across her back. But its bump and sway in rhythm with her boyish stride caused his heart to thump faster in spite of his resolution to remain detached. His face grew hot. His chest felt constricted, making each breath more difficult in the mountain air.

Idiot! he thought.

Hanshiro rehearsed what he would say when he confronted her.

Do not fear me, Your Ladyship.

No. That wouldn’t do. To begin with, he suspected she didn’t fear him. The look she’d given him at the abbey that night hadn’t been one of fear.

I’m here to protect you from Kira’s rabble.

Insulting. She had proven to be capable of protecting herself.

I must ask you to come with me.

Too abrupt.

I mean you no harm, Lady Asano.

Better. But best not to say her name aloud. Hanshiro moved quickly around in front of the masked beggar, who came to an abrupt halt.

“I mean you no harm.” Hanshiro lightly held his umbrella parallel to his body to block the way. “Struggling will serve no purpose.”

“Robbing me will serve no purpose, either.” The boy took off the mask and grinned up at Hanshiro. “I spent my last coppers on a ground-tea harlot at Sanmai Bridge.” He waggled the mask’s long nose suggestively forward and back.

For a heartbeat Hanshiro was perplexed. The face under the mask wasn’t beautiful. It wasn’t Lady Asano’s. It wasn’t even a woman’s.

“I mistook you for someone else,” he said.

“How about a few coppers for the fright you caused me, general?” The lad was a brash one. “You terrified me so badly I soiled my loincloth. I’ll have to buy a new one.”

Hanshiro didn’t go so far as to smile at the jest, but he did toss him a five-mon piece. While the boy bowed with exuberant courtesy and called blessings down like a summer cloudburst upon Hanshiro’s children and the children of his children, Hanshiro retreated.

He returned to the high balcony of the Gentle Haven to ponder this particular turn of fate’s wheel. The landlady’s son was waiting for him.

When Snow sent her son down the mountain after bonito, Hanshiro had given him an additional charge. The boy was to read the notices on the board outside the government post station. He was to inquire, circumspectly, among the couriers, the postboys, and the kago bearers at the transportation office. He was to report unusual events.

“Any interesting news?” Hanshiro asked.

“Yes, honorable uncle.” The boy was at that stage in life when his arms and legs were too long for his small, slender body. His hands and feet were too big and too far away for him to manage gracefully. “The authorities caught the murderer of the two samurai in Hiratsuka.”

“Is that right?” Hanshiro continued to gaze calmly out over the valley, but he heard the rest of the boy’s report as though he were inside a big bronze temple bell that someone had just tapped with a wooden mallet.

“He was dressed as a priest. They captured him in a bawdy house in Miyanoshita. He killed another man in Odawara. He was very drunk, and they had to hem him in with ladders to take him. They say he’s the one who was in that fight at the ferry at the Tama River.”

“What does he look like?”

“Headless, I would imagine. The police took him directly up the mountain, in the black of night. I hear they executed him at the barrier at first light this morning. His head is on display.”

“Did you hear anything else?”

“No, Your Honor.”

“Thank you.”

“I’ve been studying the moves you taught me, Your Honor.” The boy dared not directly ask Hanshiro to play go with him, but he glanced at the game board set up on a low table. His ambition was to be accepted at the go academy in Edo.

“The road is long,” Hanshiro said. “The hour is late.”

The boy knew that was Hanshiro’s way of saying he could not play with him today. He bowed and withdrew. Hanshiro sat alone.

Hanshiro had no family. His mother died giving him birth. When Hanshiro was six his father was killed in a dispute with a gang of gshi. Goshi were peasant warriors recruited by the Yamanouchi family, descendents of the Tokugawa allies who had usurped power almost a hundred years earlier.

The orphaned child was taken in by his father’s master, a minor lord of a fiefdom worth only fifteen thousand koku. Hanshiro and the lord’s only son had been raised as brothers. It was only natural that as soon as he was of age, Hanshiro pledged his sword to his young master.

The lord retired to Edo and left the running of the estate to his son, but the boy squandered his inheritance on the favors of a beautiful courtesan. The lord’s retainers were turned out. The money lenders took the proceeds from everything the family had left to sell. The rice crop was mortgaged to creditors. Tokugawa Tsunayoshi granted the estate to a scion of the Yamanouchis.

The young lord’s father publicly disowned him. Dressed in the rags of a mendicant priest, he set out to do penance. When he bade farewell, Hanshiro thought the sorrow too great to be contained. Now he was ambushed by grief much more unexpected and almost as fierce as that.

Since I lost the brindle cat … The words of Kanzan, the Mad Poet of Cold Mountain, came unbidden to mind. The rats walk right up and peer into the pot.

Within a few heartbeats of hearing of Cat’s beheading, the rats of Hanshiro’s discontent had become very bold indeed. By the time he had gathered his few belongings and politely said good-bye to Snow and her family, he had made his decision.

He would verify that the head exhibited at the barrier belonged to the beautiful, ill-fated woman he had been hunting. He would pray for her spirit’s well-being. Then he would continue his westward journey.

The authorities must have discovered that the body of the executed killer was a woman’s. They must have identified her as the illegitimate daughter of Lord Asano; but they hadn’t made the information public. Maybe they intended to keep the disgraceful affairs a secret to avoid the inconvenience of a scandal.

The Ak retainers deserved to know the fate of their lord’s daughter. Hanshiro would carry the word to Lord Asano’s councilor, Oishi, whom gossip said was carousing in Kyoto. When he had done that, he would walk to the coast. He would hire a boat to take him across to Shikoku. He would retire to that grotto by the sea. He would not think of Lady Asano again.

When he arrived at the Hakone barrier at dusk, he walked slowly along the line of four stands and the heads, placed conveniently at eye level. He read the writing on the square wooden plaques set on upright poles next to each one. He reached the last stand, turned, and walked back slowly.

He looked at the staring eyes, the open mouths, the bluish skin. He studied the texture of the shaggy, unbound hair and the condition of the teeth, bared in the grimace of death. Then he stood for a long time, gazing past them to the fence and the guards and the building where the officials sat.

A shadow of a smile crossed his face. He had underestimated her again. She must have walked under his very nose sometime that day. His face was stoic; his heart soared like a dragon kite in a second-month wind. He thought of the old proverb: “You cannot catch the wind in the meshes of a net.”

Hanshiro presented his travel permit at the barrier. On the other side he found the tea house frequented by the guards and the barrier scribes. As he sipped hot tea and watched the steady, light rain that had just begun, he methodically reviewed all those he had watched pass on the road.

It had been the usual Tokaid parade—pilgrims, clerks, brokers for the big merchant houses, priests, peripatetic laborers, porters, pack train drivers, peasants carrying all manner of goods. And Nameless. West country warrior. Painter of Benkei on the Gojo Bridge.

Nameless. Hanshiro paused with his cup halfway to his mouth. He didn’t notice the steam tickling his nose. He almost heard the whisper of a smooth go stone sliding across the heavy wooden game board. The polished, black slate disk was small, a convenient size to hold loosely between thumb and forefinger. He heard the crisp click of it being snapped down on its new place at a nexus of grid lines. Black game pieces converging, surrounding the round, polished white clamshell disk of the opponent. The key was Nameless.

Despite his broken nose, Nameless could have traveled much farther along the Tokaid in the days since the fight at the ferry. Instead, his progress so far had matched Lady Asano’s. Whom had he been following today?

Hanshiro eliminated all the travelers except the unseen creature struggling along under the stack of goods. Even then he found it easier to believe that Cat hadn’t traveled the road to Hakone at all that day. Something told him, however, that she had been that faceless peasant.

Astonishment was one more emotion in which Hanshiro rarely indulged ; but he was astonished at the idea of Lady Asano hauling a load like any shoulder-burden-auntie. He could imagine the pampered daughter of a lord setting out on a foolhardy journey alone and in disguise. He could imagine her fighting her enemies and even killing them. He could not imagine her submitting to the humiliation of serving as a beast of burden.

More than any other evidence of her endurance and her determination to reach her father’s lands, this was the most poignant. As the tea house filled with the boisterous laughter of the off-duty barrier guards, Hanshiro sat motionless.

He remembered sensei’s words, The Way is not difficult, if you do not make choices. Hanshiro realized that he was not making a choice. He was only acknowledging, finally, what he had been meant to do from the time Old Jug Face’s messenger appeared at the door of his room. He vowed silently to do more than just protect Lady Asano in her quest. He pledged himself, heart and spirit, arm and sword, to her and to her cause.

Now all he had to do was find her. He looked over at the rear corner where the government scribes usually sat. Two were there now, drinking sake. They would know the names on the permits of the hundreds of travelers who had passed them that day. In all likelihood they would be able to match those names with faces. That was their job.

The skills of the warrior were diverse and inventive. Hanshiro had learned the cord-tying art, the sword-drawing art, the arts of treading water in armor and swimming with arms and legs bound. He had learned to deflect flying arrows with an iron fan and to spit needles into an opponent’s eye. Now he needed the one art for which there was no school, no known master. That was the art of getting a man just drunk enough to remember what Hanshiro needed to know and too drunk to remember the next morning what he had said the night before.