CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

CROSSING AT A FORD

“Ditch planks!” By the time Cat arrived at the edge of the river outside Okitsu, the two porters were wading the swift, shallow current as it meandered through the boulders and across the shingle of the riverbed.

“Wooden privy shoes!” She raged at their naked, moxa-scarred backs and their buttocks, which were clad only in faded gray cotton loincloths.

She would have waded in after them had not Kasane held on firmly to her sleeve. Cat jerked it from her grasp.

“I would rather be attacked with swords than made a fool of.” Cat hitched up her own loincloth under her trousers, as though about to go after them anyway. “Robbers in every country, rats in every house,” she muttered.

“For a warrior of your skill to attack them would be like skinning a louse with a spear, Hachibei.” Kasane was diplomatic, but surprisingly firm. She feared her mistress’s aristocratic temper would draw attention.

The porters had demanded seventy coppers each, thirty over the usual rate, to carry Cat and Kasane across the river. The river was deep and treacherous, they said. They deserved the extra pay, they said. And the river had been deep. Kasane had been terrified as the man carrying her on his back struggled against the rushing water. The cold water had rushed past her thighs, soaking her to her waist.

Shrouded in gray clouds, the sun had just risen above the horizon when they reached the shore. The porters had found no return fares at such an early hour, so they had wandered upstream, around a sharp curve. Cat had grown suspicious and followed them. She’d arrived at the bank as they were wading across the real ford, which was much shallower. The river had shifted in its bed recently, moving the sand bank away from the highway’s crossing. Cat had been gulled.

“Cockroaches!” Cat shouted one more imprecation at them while she untied the sandals hanging from her belt and put them on. She pulled the left front opening of her jacket farther across the right and tightened her sash. “Baka!” she muttered.

“We’re on our way back, Your Honor,” a voice called from above. “We can take you cheap as far as Mariko.”

The two hostlers were the ones who had sold their hats to Cat and Kasane at the base of the climb to Satta Pass. Now they were sitting on a bench in front of an open-air tea stand among booths selling sugared rice cakes, ear shellfish, and gift-wrapped packages of dried bonito and papery seaweed. The tea stand and the bench were on a rise, commanding a view of both the actual and extortionary· fords. The postboys’ mare was tied to one of the shop’s front corner posts.

Cat knew Kira’s men were questioning all the hostlers and kago bearers. Traveling back and forth as they did, they were in the best possible position to act as spies and informers. These two had big grins on their faces, which made Cat even warier. Oishi had always said a laughing person could not be estimated.

“Your offer is kind.” Cat bowed politely. “But we shall ride the knee chestnut-haired horse.”

“Well, then, walk if that suits you.”

The hostlers looked so much alike, they must have been brothers. They had thick mustaches and goatees. A disorderly fringe of dusty hair stood out around the shaved crowns of their heads. They wore the small topknots of laborers. Their patched and faded blue jackets were dirty at the collars and frayed at the sleeve hems. Curly black hair showed at the diagonal front openings of the jackets.

“Walking is very good for the circulation.” The second man grimaced in ecstatic concentration as he dug in his left ear with a long-handled, ladle-shaped ear pick.

Cat glanced at Kasane. The swelling in her ankle had gone down some, and she was maneuvering well with her crutch; but Cat still felt terrible about making her walk.

“You understand why we can’t hire a horse, don’t you?” she said in a low voice.

“Yes. Don’t worry about me.”

“Boss Viper sends greetings,” one of the men called out as Cat and Kasane started back toward the main road.

“The kago man?”

“The very one.”

Cat took a firm grip on her staff, looked around for trouble, then climbed the steep path to the tea stand. Once she got closer she could see that the two men had drawn a grid in the dirt. While they drank their morning tea, they used river pebbles as markers for a game of Six Musashi. One moved the “parent” stones with a long bamboo withe. The other had removed one of his sandals and was using his toes to grip and move the “child” pieces.

“I’m Bsh.” The stouter one bowed as he sat cross-legged with his feet tucked under his thighs. Cat knew that Bsh wasn’t his name, of course, but the province from which he came.

“This hirsute love child of a bow-legged badger,” Bsh continued, “is my brother, Hairy.”

Cat was in no mood for what passed as wit among the laboring class. “How do you know Viper?” she asked.

“He’s Boss.” Bsh seemed surprised Cat didn’t know that.

“Everyone knows Boss Viper,” Hairy added.

“He instructed us to look out for you,” his brother said. “Though he wears rags, Viper has a heart of brocade.”

Cat beckoned with her staff to a tall thicket of bamboo. The Bsh brothers abandoned their game and untied their shaggy chestnut pony. As the mare followed them her hoofs clattered on the stony path.

Cat looked around to make sure no one else was close by. “What did he tell you about me?”

“It’s as they say, honorable sir,” Bsh said. “‘Word of an evil deed travels a thousand ri before good news leaves the gate.’ Boss Viper sent word to those he trusts that you’re the son of a poor but honorable warrior confined to his bed by a lingering illness. You’re on a quest to recover a treasured pair of swords stolen from your father’s house by his evil steward. The steward has since fled to the Western Capital. The thief’s henchmen are pursuing you to keep you from recovering what’s rightfully yours.”

Kasane listened attentively to this latest version of her mistress’s adventures. Cat wore a neutral expression, but she was impressed with Viper’s creativity. Whether he and the Bsh brothers knew Cat’s real identity was a mystery, however.

“How did you like the view from Satta Pass?” Bsh untied the straw horseshoes from the saddle and began tying them on the mare’s feet. It wasn’t an easy task. The pony stamped and fidgeted. She drew her purple lips up over her long yellow teeth, twisted her neck sideways, and nipped at him as he worked.

“So you were the ones who left the barring-stone,” Cat said. And tied the crossed feathers of my father’s crest to it, she thought.

“We noticed the Edo sharks swimming upstream.” Bsh and Hairy managed to look both noncommittal and conspiratorial.

“How much would you charge to take us to Mariko?” Cat asked.

“Because you’re the first customers of the day and we’re going that way anyway, we’ll give you a bargain for luck. Only two hundred coppers each.”

“Two hundred coppers!” Cat narrowed her eyes and shifted the staff she was leaning on, a warning not to cheat her. “You said Father Viper told you to watch out for me.”

“He didn’t say we had to starve doing it.” Hairy led the mare in front of the stone wall that kept the hillside from sliding onto the road. With a merry jingling of the brass bells on her bridle, the pony turned to glare balefully at Cat through her long, disheveled forelock, white as mulberry threads.

Cat felt a tug on her sleeve.

“Please, Hachibei,” Kasane said. “You ride. I’ll walk.”

Cat handed her bundle to Hairy and climbed onto the retaining wall. “We should take advantage of this opportunity to wash our clothes while the devil’s away.” She held out a hand to pull Kasane up.

The saddle was a rickety affair consisting of two oaken arches front and rear with two thick pads of cloth-covered straw between them. A pair of open wooden frames large enough to hold one passenger each hung on either side of it. The panniers’ bottoms, with their bars and knobs and the ridges formed by the rope lashing them together, were padded with a pair of shabby, thin quilts, folded to fit. The horse’s blanket was decorated with large black characters spelling “good luck.” From the looks of the saddle, “good luck” was an appropriate sentiment.

With a great deal of chivvying and clucking and whipping of his bamboo rod, Bsh kept the mare in one place long enough for Cat to lower herself into the nearest box. Then he turned the horse so Kasane could clamber into the one on the other side. He tightened the straw rope that served as a cinch and compensated for the differences in the passengers’ weight by dangling stones from Cat’s pannier. But the entire contrivance looked as if it might come apart or slide under the horse’s belly at any moment.

Hairy tied Cat’s and Kasane’s bundles across the mare’s haunches, but Cat rested her staff along the rim of the box so it would be close at hand. She wedged the soles of her sandals against the corner pieces to brace herself for the jolts to come. She shifted about gingerly in a futile effort to fit her shoulder blades under the frame’s crosspiece.

Bsh jerked on the nose rope, and the mare lurched forward with a tinkling of bells and a great explosion of wind. As Cat’s pannier rolled and pitched to the rhythmic jingle of the pony’s brass bells, she thought of the river porters again. Musashi wrote of crossing at a ford in his Fire Book.

Crossing at a ford occurs often in a lifetime, he had written. It means setting sail even though your friends stay in harbor. It means discerning the enemy’s capabilities and attacking at his weak point, If you succeed in crossing at the best place, Musashi had said, you may take your ease.

“Bsh,” Cat said, “do you know of a maker of weapons between here and Mariko?”