CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

TO SPIT AGAINST HEAVEN

Just beyond Kambara’s outlying fields, the Tkaid became steep as the skirts of the mountains swept precipitously to a towering, pine-fringed escarpment above the sea. Along the top of the cliff snaked the road over Satta Pass. Cat and Kasane had walked almost to the bottom of the long ascent that would take them over it.

Cat kept looking back over her shoulder for pursuers, but all she saw were a pair of postboys and their shaggy mare.

“Hitch up your underwear and speed away … .” The two men were singing off key as they ambled up behind Cat.

One led their pony, and the other rode her. They were bare-legged and dressed in belted, blue cotton wadded jackets. They had draped blue-and-white towels over their heads and knotted them under their chins. Their large, conical hats dangled on each side of the horse’s haunches.

“Forty coppers for both the hats,” Cat called out.

“Thirty each and they’re yours.” Both men bowed deeply and sardonically.

“Fifty for the pair.”

“Sold.”

When the man who was afoot moved to untie the hats, the horse laid back her ears and drew her lips over her teeth. She sidestepped daintily and kicked out with her rear hooves. The postboy ignored her.

As he exchanged the hats for the string of coppers, the hostler gave Kasane and her scarlet robe and wig an appraising look.

“How much do you charge for her?” he asked.

“More than you can afford,” Cat answered.

As they trotted away the two men started their song again.

Hitch up your underwear and speed away;
We’ll spend the night at Mitsuke.
Whatever happened to Hachibei?
The horses ate him along the way.

When Cat heard Hachibei, the name on her travel papers, her hand tightened on her staff. She relaxed only when the horse’s rump disappeared around a bend, and she remembered that Hachibei was a common name among the lower classes.

Cat was now dressed in the boy’s clothes she had bought for Kasane. Kasane was wearing Dragonfly’s son’s wig and red silk robe. She had tucked the long skirts into her sash, but the geta made keeping up with Cat a struggle.

Kasane was in high spirits in spite of the rough road. She read aloud the signs of the roadside stands. She had been infected with the excitement of the theater, and she was anticipating rejoining Shichisaburo’s troupe in Okitsu. She had been backstage when the fight broke out, and she didn’t realize that the mêlée at the performance had been more than the foolishness of farmers. She didn’t know that she and Cat were in more peril than usual.

Also, she was enjoying the feel of the red silk dress. She was vaguely aroused by the cloth’s soft cling and by its subtle shifting of colors in the sunlight. She didn’t know that Cat intended to put her back into cotton at the first opportunity. A peasant in silk could attract the attention of officials as well as hostlers.

As for her suitor, Kasane wasn’t very upset about leaving him behind in Kambara. This game of cat and rat seemed only to fan the fires of his passions, and she was sure he would find her again. Kasane preferred the chase because it postponed a decision as to the disposition of her virtue.

She touched her sash where the pilgrim’s latest letter was hidden in an oiled paper under her robe. He had addressed it to “the Floating Weed” and signed it “the Traveler.” Something his hand had touched was touching her bare body. Kasane’s face warmed at the thought. Part of her elation was due to the fact that, with Cat’s help, she could now read the Traveler’s words.

“What happened to the Soga brothers?” Kasane asked.

She had been particularly taken with the younger brother, Gor, in the Revenge of the Soga Brothers. The actor’s dramatic pose, with his outer robe flung off his shoulders and the map to Lord Kud’s hunting camp clamped in his teeth, had made her dizzy with a romantic fever.

“They avenged themselves on Lord Kudo for the death of their father.” Cat was understandably distracted. She glanced back again, expecting to see the unkempt ronin of Tosa closing in on her. “Jur-san was killed in the fight.”

“And Gor-san?”

“He was captured and condemned to be beheaded with a dull sword.”

“That’s not fair! Wicked Lord Kud killed their father! Jur-san and Gor-san registered their vendetta legally.” Kasane was outraged. “That play is foolish. The farmers were right to protest.”

“The play is only a mirror reflecting life. One cannot change one’s fate. Jur and Gor killed Lord Kud. They avenged their father. They died satisfied.”

Cat thought of Lord Kira, safe in his mansion while she pursued what might prove to be a fool’s undertaking. She would have considered it a bargain to have her head sawed off with a blunt sword in exchange for the privilege of beheading Kira. She pictured the long, glittering curve of a naginata blade slicing as easily through his neck as a honed knife through bean curd. She imagined the feel of it, the resistance his spinal column would make.

If she were to execute him, she would not even try to leave a piece of skin intact. She wanted to see his head, lifeless eyes still bulging in terror, bouncing across the ground.

“Something’s happened ahead.” Kasane nodded toward a group of people standing in a circle in the middle of the road.

In low voices they were discussing a pale gray river rock, a bit larger than a man’s fist, which sat in the dust. A black cord was tied around it. It was a path-barring-stone. It said, “Go no farther.”

The two small feathers fastened to the cord carried an additional message. Their shafts had been laid at right angles to each other and lashed with thread. Many families used variations of crossed feathers as their crests. Banshu-Ak was one of them. Cat assumed the warning was meant for her.

A few people turned back. Most joined together into larger groups for protection in case the stone’s warning was genuine. They all had heard the stories of bandits at Satta Pass. The travelers tied back their sleeves, pulled their loincloths tighter for the climb, and started up the treacherous slope.

Cat sauntered off the road to a shed housing a traveler’s convenience. She needed time to think.

As she loosened her loincloth and squatted over the hole, she stared at the simple lines of an opened umbrella carved into the wall in front of her. A woman’s name and a man’s name were incised in flowing, vertical characters, one on each side of the umbrella’s shaft. A man and woman sharing an umbrella was an old conceit. It meant they were lovers.

Cat sighed. As far as she was concerned, lovers were of a different species. She couldn’t imagine being in love. She couldn’t even imagine sleeping through the night with a quiet heart.

She was suddenly overwhelmed by despondency again. Her enemies were everywhere. How long could she avoid them?

Who had known she would pass this way and had left the stone for her to find? If she must stop to fight for every foot of ground between here and Kyoto, how could she ever reach Oishi? And how often could she engage her enemies before she was caught and punished?

“What does the stone mean?” Kasane whispered through the open top half of the shed.

“It means we’re not going over the pass.”

“Where are we going, then?” Kasane was bold enough now to ask it of Cat when she came out of the shed.

“To Okitsu.”

“But—”

“We’re going by the lower route. By way of ‘Not-knowing-Parents.’”

 

 

Cat was too impatient to wait for the tide to ebb completely. The surf was still crashing when she and Kasane made their way down the overgrown path and through the tumbled boulders to the base of the cliff

Kasane took off the cotton cloth wrapped around her waist as an underskirt and laid it on the ground. She put the wig and get in the middle of it and knotted the ends around them so she could sling the bundle over her shoulder. Then she hitched up her skirts. She was ready to follow her mistress into whatever calamity the Tkaid might provide.

“According to the guidebook, ‘Not-knowing-Parents’ is only twelve cho across,” Cat said. But she could see that reaching the other side of the great stone barrier would be difficult.

The strip of boulder-strewn beach had been aptly named. In fleeing the tiger’s den, they had entered a dragon’s hole. Cat tried to imagine lines of travelers passing this way fifty yes earlier, when “Not-knowing-Parents” was the only route.

Some of the boulders rose three or four times higher than Cat. Waves crashed against them, sending up geysers of salt spray that stung their eyes. Before Cat and Kasane had gone twenty steps, they were soaked to the skin and shivering with cold. Flat swags of glossy brown seaweed twined around their ankles. The dark, wet-slick stones that paved the narrow beach rolled about under their feet.

Cat and Kasane splashed through tidal pools. They clambered over the branches and tree trunks and flotsam snagged among the boulders. Barnacles cut them when the larger breakers pushed them against the rocks, then tried to drag them out to sea.

About halfway around the vast bulge of the escarpment, Cat stopped suddenly as she was passing between two huge boulders. She braced herself with each hand pressed against one of the rocks and stared ahead.

“What is it?” Kasane asked.

“Fuji-san.”

Cat reached out to steady Kasane over a particularly rough stretch, then stepped to one side so she could see. The two of them held hands in the shower of cold spray, with the waves surging around their legs, and stared at Mount Fuji.

“It’s splendid,” Kasane said at last.

“So it is.” Cat regretted being cheated of the view from the pass. If it was this beautiful here, it must be magnificent from above.

The mountain was framed by the jagged, glistening black crags of “Not-knowing-Parents.” Its backdrop was a blue sky, so clear it seemed to pulse. Snow had fallen on Fuji during the night, cloaking the graceful slopes in a gleaming white mantle. A cap of cloud hung over the volcano’s scone.

“Do you see a dragon’s form in the cloud?” Cat asked.

“A dragon, mistress?”

“A dragon in the clouds above Fuji means success.”

Kasane stared intently. “I think I see one. There. That’s his nose and that’s his tail.”

“I see it.”

Twenty waves roared in and crashed against the rocks before Cat finally broke the mountain’s spell. She started forward again, then stopped when she heard Kasane’s cry. She turned in time to see her twist and pitch sideways, her foot caught in a crevice between two rocks.

“Sister!” Cat scrambled back to help her up before the next wave washed over her.

“It hurts,” Kasane said softly.

“Put your arm around my shoulders.” Cat put her own arm around Kasane’s waist and supported her weight as Kasane limped forward.

“I’m so clumsy.” Kasane was sobbing, not with pain but with remorse at slowing Cat’s progress toward her love, waiting, she thought, among the ferocious southerners of Satsuma. “I’m so stupid.”

“It’s my fault, dear Kasane.” Cat held her close as though Kasane were a child in need of comforting. She cried, too, stung by her own remorse. “I was too impatient to wait for the ebb tide. I’m sorry.”

Together, they struggled toward a large tangle of debris. Kasane winced each time she had to put weight on the injured ankle, but she made no complaint.

Cat was helping Kasane over the slippery trunk of a fallen pine when they saw the naked body. The man’s fractured arms and legs were wrapped at impossible angles around the spokes of the tree’s upturned roots. Cat and Kasane stared down at him.

“He hasn’t been here long,” Cat said.

“The kappa must have caught him and pulled his liver out his anus.”

“Bandits, more likely.” Cat laid her head back, trying to see the trail at the top of the rough gray wall towering over them. A fish hawk swooped from its nest in a crevice and soared out over the bay.

“They stole his money and his clothes and threw him over the side,” Cat said. “Even the poor are not safe.”

“Was the path-barring-store a warning about bandits?”

“Probably.” Cat knew there was more to the warning than bandits, but she saw no use in making Kasane unhappier than she already was. A blind person feared not the snake.

When a wave lifted the man’s head, Cat noticed the red, gourd-shaped mark on his cheek. “Do you know who this is?”

“Who?”

“The husband of the outcast under the bridge.”

“That’s right.” Kasane rested against the trunk as she considered the implications. “His family must not know he’s gone on to travel the Three Paths.”

“No.”

“Probably no one but us knows.”

“That’s right.”

“He’s a homeless spirit.” Kasane shivered from dread as well as from cold and pain.

“We’ll burn incense and pray for him at the first temple we come to.”

Of the many forms Cat had seen death take, this one was the saddest, to lie broken and forgotten, discarded like a worn-out umbrella on a rubbish heap.

“And then we saw you,” Cat recited.

Pillowed upon your shaking beach,
Using those wave-beaten rocks
As if the coast were spread out for your bedding;
On such a rugged place
You have laid yourself to rest.

“That’s a sad poem, mistress,” Kasane said. “Did you write it?” “It was written long ago by someone who found a body on a beach like this. The end of the poem is saddest of all.”

If I but knew your home,
I would tell them where you sleep;
Your wife would come searching for you.
How she must be waiting,
How anxiously now longing for you,
She the dear one you call wife.

Kasane knew that the outcast had spit against heaven and must suffer the retribution he deserved. But she had a tender heart. She gave a small whimper of a sob and wiped her eyes on her sleeve, which didn’t do much good since her sleeve was soaked.

With Cat supporting her Kasane started slowly toward the far end of the cliff; but she kept looking back, as though the homeless ghost might be following her, drifting along just above the beach like some hideous supernatural flotsam.

“We children found a man on the beach once,” Kasane said.

“Was he someone you knew?”

“It was impossible to tell. The crabs had eaten his face.”

Kasane was struck by a sorrow and a fear from her childhood. She remembered the nights she had looked out over the black water, searching among the many fishermen’s lights for the one on the prow of her parents’ boat. Her dread was the one morning her parents’ cumbersome, leaky vessel wouldn’t return. Their bodies would be found washed up on the beach and covered with a shifting crust of crabs. The broken planks of their boat would be scavenged to form part of some villager’s hut.

Kasane trembled inside the wet silk robe that clung to her like another skin. She closed her eyes against the stinging spray of a breaker. She tried to ignore the pain radiating up from her ankle. She tried to ignore the longing for her parents and her village and the sonorous call of the evening bell.