CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

A STONE BOAT

Just inside the big gate of Mitsuke’s main temple, the priests had set up a long counter for feeding the hordes of young pilgrims. Three men were heating mason’s trowels over a brazier until they glowed red. Then they used them to scorch parboiled fish laid out on planks. Two other men used rakes to stir vegetables in a huge tub. Hungry pilgrims swarmed around them or squatted on their heels while they ate.

With his knees spread, a man sat on a stool under the wide eaves of the temple gate. He had stuck a bamboo pole into the ground next to him. The pole sported a vertical cloth banner with a comic picture of Daikoku, the plump, smiling god of wealth, painted on it.

“Personal finances are my specialty,” he informed the throng of people passing in and out the gate.

At first glance the financial adviser seemed prosperous enough, but Hanshiro noted that his topknot smelled of an inferior grade of hair oil. The collar of his yellow-and-white-checked robe and the hems of his black hakama were almost imperceptibly frayed. His black camlet jacket displayed the crest of no particular clan. Hanshiro suspected that inside it and the robe was the rental shop’s cipher embroidered in white cotton floss. Even the inro, the nested medicine box suspended from his sash, was the cheap type rented at ten mon a week.

To get Hanshiro’s attention the adviser slid the back of the long nail of his middle finger across his abacus, producing a clicking whir like insects in an autumn meadow at night.

“You too can hear the crickets’ song of wealth, honorable sir,” he said. “My rates are reasonable. If money is troubling you, let’s talk it over. I can help you sort it all out.”

Hanshiro ignored him. He stared at the letter pinned to the temple gate among the prayers and messages and petitions. He pulled one hand back through his wide sleeve and inside his jacket. He poked it up through the neck opening and rubbed the stubble on his chin. He had made a decision about the letter, but it was troubling him.

“Kamiko-rnin,” the adviser muttered contemptuously. “Paperclothing drifter. Pauper.”

Hanshiro turned his head to flash him a brief, wolfish smile from under his wide-brimmed rush hat. “The general of a defeated army should not talk tactics,” he said softly.

He carefully unpinned the letter and tucked it between the overlapping front flaps of his jacket, under his sash. He strode through the crowd toward a small tea house in the licensed quarter that had sprung up to serve the more secular needs of temple visitors. Devils live in front of the temple gate, as the old saying went.

He was in no hurry. The farmer to whom this letter was addressed was at least half a day behind him and more likely two or three days. If Hanshiro noticed the pair of rough-looking men who followed him at a distance, he gave no indication.

The children’s religious fervor had spread to the adults. Parents were closing their houses and setting out after their offspring. Masters were laying down their account books and tools and following their clerks and apprentices. The tea shop, like all the restaurants in Mitsuke, was packed with pilgrims.

The racks for the customers’ sandals and geta and swords were full. Footwear was stacked on the packed earth of the entryway. The management had run out of wooden redemption tickets for them and was using chips of bamboo with numbers hastily painted on them.

Steam rose in warm, moist clouds from the big kettles on the clay stoves. The aroma of a vat of cooked rice competed with the smell of roasted eel. The waitresses glistened with perspiration even though the entire front of the house was open to the winter air.

The waitresses all wore identical blue aprons, robes the deep blue of a winter’s night sky, and wide yellow headbands charmingly tied in mannish style above their right ears. They shrilled their customers’ orders at the harried cooks. Their wooden geta made a cheerful din as they hurried back and forth along the bare earth runways between the raised platforms where the customers sat.

An extra silver piece rented Hanshiro a tiny room to himself in the wing at the rear of the garden. At night the rooms there served for assignations with courtesans from the House of the Trout next door. Now they offered solitude to customers willing to pay for it.

Hanshiro had made no move to surrender his long blade so it could be hung with the others at the entryway. And no one had dared ask him for it. The tea shop’s owner had been relieved to usher him and his swords out of sight.

Hanshiro looked around the tiny room. Several of the paper panes in the sliding screens were ripped. The high shelf to the gods was dusty. The picture scroll in the alcove was faded. But the room opened onto a corner of the garden, and the embers in the firewell gave off a comforting warmth. Hanshiro took his long-sword from his sash and sat cross-legged on the tatami next to the well. He laid the sword on a silk cloth at his right side with the honed edge facing outward. He put Cat’s letter next to it.

The kneeling waitress slid open the paper wall panel facing the garden. She stood, carried in the footed tray, knelt, and set it down. “Eels eaten on the Ox’s day are good for your health.” She fanned the embers and added a few pieces of charcoal. Then she poured a cup of tea, bowed, and retreated, sliding the door closed behind her.

Hanshiro left the letter on the floor, a mute and puzzling companion for his meal. He ate three steaming helpings of rice from the large covered dish and three skewers of eel grilled with sweet soy sauce to a dark, glossy brown.

When he poured the last of the tea into his rice bowl, the water was almost clear from passing so often through the leaves. He stirred the remaining few grains of rice into it and drank it. He wiped his mouth and fingers with one of the paper napkins in his wallet, folded the napkin into a tiny packet, and slipped it into his sleeve.

Only then did he pick up the letter and hold it in his big, square hands. The ideograms that spelled “To Traveler” had been drawn by a calm hand. Even after all Lady Asano had been through, she betrayed no fear or excitement in the subtleties of the strokes that made each character.

Hanshiro closed his eyes, concentrating all his senses into the tips of his fingers. He imagined the warmth of Lady Asano’s touch on the paper. He felt himself melt into her body as she wrote. For an instant he looked out from her eyes. His hands were shaking when he unfolded it.

He had rationalized that reading the letter would lead him quickly to Lady Asano so he could protect her from her enemies; but he felt like a thief. He felt like an impotent man who pays to watch from behind a screen the pillowing of others. His face grew hot as he read what Cat had written.

Oh, to be the moon
shining in the still of night
On my lover’s bed.

And then, “Prayers to Inari. The Floating Weed.”

He understood the message in “Prayers to Inari, the Rice God,” but the poem seemed to be no more than the insipid peasant verse it was. Was she indeed carrying on a flirtation with a farmer? Had grief driven her mad? Had he misjudged her completely?

He carefully refolded the letter and retied it in the flat knot. A woman would detect the tampering immediately, but Hanshiro was sure Traveler wouldn’t notice.

When he heard the whispers in the next room, they were a welcome diversion. He had expected the thieves to wait until he stopped for the night and was asleep, but they looked the type to be short of patience as well as cunning.

He pretended to study the refolded letter as he listened. He distinguished at least five voices. The two who had been eyeing his swords since he’d entered the outskirts of Mitsuke were machi yakko, town underlings. They were almost certainly intent on illicit gain. Each carried a single sword of his own. Hanshiro assumed their accomplices did, too.

As a rule, swords were paid for not by quality or decoration, but by the inch. Kanesada blades were another matter, however. The price these thieves could receive for Hanshiro’s matched pair would either support their families for life or make quite an impression at the brothels and card games for a much shorter time.

While Hanshiro waited for the whispering to stop, he thought of sensei, his teacher. He remembered him as he had last seen him, silhouetted by the sun shining through the paper screen of the tiny tea house in his garden. That was the day sensei had given Hanshiro the swords.

They both had known that the tea ceremony would be the last time they would see each other, yet neither had spoken of parting. And although sensei had intended to award a certificate of mastery to Hanshiro, he made no comment about his favorite student’s decision to leave.

“The sword of the New Shadow school is the sword that gives life.” Sensei had spoken in his usual soft voice. He had looked with affection at the blades resting on their low ebony stand. They had shone softly in the sunlight filtering through the paper screens. ”Its purpose is defense, not offense,” sensei had continued. “The New Shadow school aims not to slash, not to take, not to win, not to lose.”

Sensei had always seemed so old, possessed of a wisdom that could only have come from a long life. Hanshiro realized with a start that twenty-three years ago, when he had become sensei’s disciple, the master had only been as old as Hanshiro was now.

Two of the men next door raised their voices as though in argument. Hanshiro knew the others were using the noise to cover their approach. He sensed the change in the pressure of air in his room as they lifted a panel from its tracks behind him and slid it silently open. He felt them watching him. He had met their sort before. He knew they were likely to be crude but vicious fighters.

As he sat, Hanshiro wove his hands through the intricacies of the nine-symbols-cutting, the esoteric hand signs affected by ninja, or “warrior wizards.” He knew it would impress them. Then he picked up the three slender skewers that had held the grilled eel and tossed them into the air. With a move too fast for the eye to follow, he drew the short-sword from the scabbard in his sash and struck. The skewers dropped to the tatami, each in two pieces, sliced lengthwise. He gathered the six pieces, threw them up, and cut each one in half as they fell.

He solemnly replaced his sword in the sheath. He rested his hands on his thighs with his elbows out and continued staring straight ahead while the men next door left quietly and quickly.

Yagy Muneyoshi, the founder of the New Shadow school, had written more than a hundred poems about being a swordsman. As Hanshiro thought about Cat, he remembered the one that seemed most appropriate.

Though I may win fights with a sword
I’m but a stone boat on the sea called life.

When he left the inn he returned to the temple and replaced the letter exactly where he had found it. Then he went to the transport office. He had to dicker and cajole and pay a high price, but he managed to rent a horse without a postboy to lead it at a walk. He mounted and set off at a brisk canter for Futagawa and the famous temple to Inari.