CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

DRAWN ON BY MOONLIGHT

A line of singing children danced past Hanshiro and his new traveling companion, the pilgrim who had been following Kasane. The children were calligraphy students from a school on Tub Makers’ Street in Mariko. They wore identical white robes and bamboo hats, each inscribed with an inspirational verse painted by their teacher. To keep their group together they held on to a straw rope that caused frequent entanglements on the crowded road.

Now that the rain had stopped, the muddy Tkaid was a-swarm with youthful pilgrims again. The urge to go to Ise had reached at least as far as here. Hanshiro’s companion smiled at the noisy children as though they were innocent, poppy-cheeked Buddhas. In fact, everything seemed to cause him delight.

“They say that what with this holy call to the children and the arrival of Lord Wakizaka and Hino’s men, Shimada looks like an earthquake in a thread shop,” he said.

Hanshiro grunted in reply.

The young man called himself Traveler. He had an angular face, a wide mouth, squared jaw, and narrow black eyes. His high nose belied his peasant origins. He wore brown leggings and brown cloth arm coverings with flaps that extended to the first knuckles of his callused fingers. He had on a wide-brimmed pilgrim’s hat with the shallow rim that shielded his face. He wore a pilgrim’s robe and trousers of cheap white cotton. He carried a wicker pack on his back. His pilgrim’s scroll was rolled into his straw sleeping mat to keep it dry.

The lad was a relentless optimist. As far as Hanshiro could tell, he was a model of his class. He extolled hard work and the nobler virtues. He was friendly, earnest, honest, cheerful, and candid. He was almost handsome. Hanshiro wanted nothing more than to run his sword through him and leave him squirming in the mud.

For Hanshiro, emotions of all sorts were infrequent and unwelcome guests, but he had never experienced jealously before. He had gone back on his resolve to ignore Lady Asano’s vulgar indiscretion, and he was furious with himself. Instead of continuing his journey, he had waited for the recipient of her letter to retrieve it from the temple message board in Okitsu. The discovery that Lady Asano was carrying on a flirtation with a peasant had Hanshiro almost speechless with rage.

Never turn loose the reins of the wild colt of the heart, he thought bitterly.

Traveler was such a simple, countrified sort that Hanshiro suspected a ruse. He was too innocent to be plausible. Maybe he was putting on a cat show, feigning innocence.

Hanshiro preferred to think so. He wanted to believe Traveler was not a suitor, but a conspirator in the Asano cause. The love letter was only a subterfuge, a way of passing messages.

Traveler wasn’t behaving like a conspirator, though. He was behaving like a man addled by love. He looked like a pigeon that had swallowed a peashooter.

For the past five ri Hanshiro had listened carefully for mistakes in his speech, but his dialect was flawless. Either he was a superb actor, or he was what he appeared, a rice farmer from the province of Kazusa. And he was receiving love poems from the most beautiful, ferocious, accomplished woman Hanshiro had ever known. The woman who called herself the Floating Weed.

“I haven’t spoken to her yet, but when I saw her with the actors in Kambara, she was dressed as a boy.” The worst of it was that Traveler insisted on discussing his dalliance. “She looked charming, really charming. And she’s so cultured for someone of her class. She writes the most exquisite poetry.”

“Umh.” Hanshiro was appalled by the possibility that with very little encouragement this bumpkin would recite Lady Asano’s amorous poetry.

Hanshiro had coaxed from the young man the information he wanted. Now he was ready to quit his maddeningly genial company. Traveler was to leave his reply to Lady Asano’s last letter on the board near the east gate of the main temple in Mitsuke. He already had bargained with a messenger to run ahead with it, but he was hopeful of finally speaking face to face with his beloved there. That explained his ebullience.

Unless, of course, the whole story was a fiction.

“Bow down! Bow down!” A liveried runner trotted along the road, scattering people in front of him.

Behind him Hanshiro heard the calls of Lord Wakizaka’s shouters. Above the dispersing crowd he could see the rhythmic shiver of the plumed fringes on the heralds’ tall staffs. The rear of the procession wound up the slope and out of sight around the crest of a hill. Pedestrians were either disappearing into the refuge of tea houses to wait out the train’s passing or they were kneeling by the side of the road and bowing until their heads touched the ground.

Hanshiro sighed. No wonder the Tokugawa family had held on to power for a hundred years. The mandatory annual visits to Edo drained the provincial lords’ coffers. And when Wakizaka traveled he insisted on making a display of every sandal bearer and armor polisher he was allowed.

Hanshiro didn’t much care that the expense was ruining Wakizaka and adding to the influence of the money lenders. He did care that the Tkaid would be clogged for days. Unless he stayed ahead of Wakizaka, he wouldn’t be able to find a bed or a river porter or a decent meal anywhere. Fortunately, staying ahead wouldn’t be too difficult since daimy trains only averaged four or five ri a day.

Traveler, however, was awed by the ranks of banners, emblazoned with Wakizaka’s crest and snapping in the breeze. He gaped at the guards in their matching jackets and hakama and wide-winged vests. The pike bearers and bowmen and the caparisoned horses bearing the swordsmen were followed by clerks, grooms, footmen, sandal bearers, and servants of all varieties.

Just coming into view on the slope were the women’s black-lacquered palanquins with their swaying gauze curtains. Walking beside them were maids and ladies-in-waiting wearing bright cloaks and veils and twirling their parasols. Still out of sight behind the hill’s crest was the baggage train that extended back a ri.

They entered the town limits of Mariko in a silence that intensified the solemnity and splendor. The heralds twirled and tossed their tall, feather-decked staffs in rhythm with their stride. Behind them the footmen drew their left feet up to their lower backs in unison and extended their right arms, then reversed the order. As they advanced they appeared to be swimming through the air. Hats and umbrellas and banners and feather-fringed pikes danced with the motion of the march.

The government that required travel of the daimy tried to deny it to the peasantry. Government edicts forbade “sight-seeing and rambling over the hillsides.” As with most edicts, this one was often ignored, but Traveler had never in his nineteen years seen such a sight. He prostrated himself in the mud but indiscreetly tilted his chin so he could peek at the marchers as they approached.

With legs astraddle and his hands on his hips, Hanshiro looked down at him. If the fool weren’t careful, some fifty-koku field warrior with rice paddy manure still between his toes would catch his eye, take offense, and lop off his head as though it were a cabbage.

Hanshiro didn’t consider Traveler’s well-being his concern, however. He took a few quiet steps backward, turned, and joined the people ducking into side streets.

By nightfall he reached Fujieda and found it crowded, too. The daimy’s retinues were augmented by youthful pilgrims who slept everywhere. He read a note pinned to a door: “We have gone to give thanks at Ise.”

The word of the holy signs found in Okitsu had surged on ahead of Hanshiro. People were camping in courtyards and under the roofs of well sheds. Charitable merchants were offering free food and tea and towels and sandals. As the town watchman made his rounds, he called for a lost child.

The horde of pilgrims was wonderful cover for someone passing as a pilgrim herself. If Cat had started this flood, she could now lose herself in it. She would be the translucent fish, the white-bait. “The white-bait, just like the color of water, itself moving,” as the poem said.

Hanshiro knew he could find lodging and a warm welcome at the Iris inn no matter how crowded the Fujieda might be. The Iris’s gentle, soft-spoken proprietor would serve him herself. She would ladle scalding water over him in the bath. She would laugh softly behind her hand as she caught him up on the gossip since his last visit. When the night lantern burned low, she would slide under Hanshiro’s covers.

When he left the next day she would demonstrate her love. She would leave her gate and come out barefoot into the cold dew and the public’s gaze. She would wave to him until he was out of sight.

Hanshiro had never felt worthy of such affection, bestowed like a gift, without thought of thanks or repayment. He certainly had never encouraged it, except to treat her with the grace and affection he accorded all the women he admired. Her silent, enduring devotion had always mystified him, but it had been as comfortable and warm and all-enveloping as the Iris’s satin quilts.

Thoughts of the Iris’s cooking and quilts would have to suffice for now. Hanshiro only paused to look through the gate and into the inn’s small garden. He knew the Oi River was in flood and Shimada was jammed with people; but he would not stop. He would use a ruse that was risky but had worked for him before.

He had supplied himself with a lantern on which was painted “official business.” It was the sort carried by the men escorting government messengers. It would get him across the river ahead of the processions of Hino and Wakizaka.

The moon rose late, halfway to morning; but it was worth the wait. Even in its last quarter it was so bright that it threw shadows from the rocks in the road. The silvery light gave a soft, spectral glow to the houses and trees and signposts. It gleamed from the bald heads of the Jiz statues in the stone niches along the roadside.

As he strode through the light, Hanshiro savored the elegant syllables of an old poem.

Drawn on by moonlight
He passes right by the inn
Where he meant to stay;
A traveler in the night
Is walking tomorrow’s road.

“Ssst. Your Excellency …” The nighthawk stood in the shadow of a wooden bridge that arched over a stream. She was careful not to let the moon’s beams fall on her face and expose the wrinkles there. “For a trifling thirty mon I shall play your flute as it’s never been played,” she whispered hoarsely.

“I’m grateful for your kindness, auntie,” Hanshiro said good-naturedly. The moonlight and the solitude had restored his composure. “But I haven’t time for heavenly music tonight.”