CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

THE WHOLE TIGER

“Walk slowly.” Cat ignored the thousands of eyes fixed on her. “Put your heel down firmly and roll forward smoothly. Push off with the ball of your foot.”

Cat tried to catch her breath. She had seen this done, but she’d never walked herself. Her mother had once told her that when walking on fire the innocent and the serene needn’t fear. But what about the harried and the frightened?

Cat set her bare heel down in the deep bed of coals, pulsing with heat and light. Kasane did the same. The two of them took one step, then another. They felt only a pleasant warmth underfoot as they walked, hand in hand, the length of the path.

The head priest looked inclined to berate them, but he was reluctant to further disrupt the ceremony. He glowered at them as they murmured apologies and slipped through the ranks of brightly robed bonzes lined up to walk across the fire pit. They ducked into the crowd and disappeared.

Cat pulled Kasane behind a tall stone lantern and studied the roofed-over two-story gate and the drum tower near it. A shadow moved in the tower. Someone there was watching the compound and the gate. Cat would have been willing to wager that men were waiting outside the gate to catch her if she tried to leave by it.

Kasane held up a straw cord broken in her haste to strip off her sandals. Breaking a sandal tie was very bad luck.

“Buddha will protect us.” Cat gave her another sandal from the pair tied to her sash.

She put on her own muddy sandals and began working her way along the high wall. She dodged among the people and used the huge cryptomeria trees and the stone lanterns and monuments as cover. Her mouth was dry as silk floss, and she stopped at the stone cistern so she and Kasane could rinse their mouths and drink from the bronze, dolphin-shaped spout.

As Cat gulped the cold water from her palm, she kept watch. She had no trouble picturing the bounty hunter striding after her across the coals. She wouldn’t have been surprised to find him close behind her.

The faithful had pressed into the center of the compound to take their turns at fire walking. That made the going easier here at the fringe. It was also darker away from the lights of the ceremony.

Cat followed a path into the blackness of the cryptomeria grove. She passed the Revolving Library, the Hall of Bones, and the Founder’s Hall. Beyond them was the temple’s kitchen. Cat and Kasane picked their way through the usual debris discarded behind it. From there three paths branched off. Cat chose the one without a marker of any kind.

She took Kasane’s hand, and going by the feel of the stone paving through the soles of her sandals, she groped toward a distant light. When they reached the end of the lane, they stayed in the shadow of the trees and surveyed the thorn hedge in front of them.

It was twice as tall as they were. The thorns were as long as Cat’s thumb. The only opening was a wooden gate flanked by lanterns and two red-painted wooden statues of the ferocious guardian kings who frightened away demons. Sitting at the gate was a small group of black-robed bonzes, their shaven heads gleaming in the lantern light. They seemed to be keeping a vigil as they rattled their rosaries and intoned the sutra of the Jewel in the Lotus. Above the hedge Cat could see the roof tiles of a building.

She considered the situation. Getting over the roofed, two-story-high wall around the temple compound would have been very difficult, if not impossible. The grounds were vast. Finding another way out in the dark might take all night. This was the time of the new moon, a “moon-hidden” day, and they could expect no light from above.

If Cat returned to the main area, the crowds would provide some protection, but she was sure the rnin from Tosa would find a way to capture her, witnesses or no. He had plenty of help, and he was better than good at his job. He was supernatural. The fact that he had anticipated her arrival at the temple, then had had the effrontery to taunt her with a letter, had unnerved her. As for his warning about the drum tower, she was sure it was a trick of some sort.

If Cat stayed in the forest, she risked his finding her and capturing her with no one but Kasane to see him do it. With no witnesses there was no telling what the beast would do. He might force himself on her. He might kill Kasane to ensure her silence.

However, whatever was beyond that hedge seemed to be off limits to the laity. If she and Kasane could sneak inside, they might be safe for the time being.

With her flint, Cat lit their collapsible travel lantern and trimmed the wick as low as it would go. She tugged Kasane’s sleeve, dragging her back up the path. When they came to the kitchen, Cat searched stealthily through piles of broken tools and utensils. Kasane gave a little squeak when Cat disturbed some roosting chickens and they flapped away. Cat felt around until she found what she needed.

“Catch hold of that end of the tub,” she whispered.

“It has no bottom.” Kasane peered through the wooden cylinder. The fitted staves were still held together by twisted bamboo strips, but it was missing a bottom.

“I know.” Cat blew the lantern out again and waited until her eyes adjusted as much as possible to the darkness.

The two of them carried the cumbersome tub back toward the end of the path. Cat stubbed her toe and bit her lip to hold back tears. The pain was intense, but she knew if she started crying, she might not be able to stop.

She and Kasane hauled the tub around the outer perimeter of the hedge, feeling their way through the deep underbrush. Every time the leaves rustled, Cat held her breath and waited for someone to shout, “Halt!”

Finally Cat thought they had gone far enough. The darkness here was almost complete.

“Set it down,” she whispered.

“What will we do now?”

“Help me shove it into the base of the hedge.” Cat lined up the tub with one of the open ends facing outward. “Keep your head down so no thorns stick you in the face. And keep your eyes closed.”

She rolled the cylinder back and forth until she found a spot between the individual stalks of the plants. She and Kasane pushed the tub into the hedge until it formed a sort of tunnel to the other side. Cat took off her bundle and pushed it and her staff through the opening. Then she dropped to her stomach and wriggled after it.

“It’s safe.” The tub amplified and distorted Cat’s voice. It startled Kasane, but she hastily put her furoshiki into the hole and pushed it ahead of her.

When they stood and looked around, they saw they were at the rear of a chapel. Stone lanterns lit patches of the bare ground in front of the building, but not much of their light reached here. A mist rose from the damp earth. The building had a forsaken, haunted look about it.

“We shouldn’t be here,” Kasane whispered.

In the darkness under the broad, low-hanging eaves, Cat felt along the back wall for a door.

“We’ll get into trouble,” Kasane whispered.

Cat almost laughed out loud. Irritating officialdom was not Cat’s definition of trouble. “Stop grazing on the roadside grass and help me find a way inside.”

“Avoiding the fire, they leap into the water,” Kasane muttered. But she dutifully began fumbling among the water barrels, door frames, and stacks of poles and shingles. “Here, mistress,” she called softly.

The bottom of the window was about chest height. The pale light coming through perforations in the cedar shutter looked like constellations of stars. Kasane and Cat heaved up the shutter that was suspended over the window casing by iron hooks.

While Kasane held it, Cat propped it open with a pole. She looped her waist cord through the tied ends of her furoshiki with her narrow straw mat attached and lowered it quietly through the window. When it was resting on the floor inside, she let loose one end of the cord, retrieved it, and used it to put Kasane’s bundle and mat inside. She poked her staff through last.

Cat climbed onto a barrel and ducked under the shutter. She threw a leg across the bottom of the casing and eased herself over. Then she helped Kasane in.

They were in the area behind an altar set on a platform approached by wooden stairs at the front. Light filtered through the altar curtain, once dark red but now faded to a streaked and dingy gray. The light illuminated a jumble of dusty statuary, portable altars, chests, draperies, scrolls, and screens leaning at angles against the wall. They could hear chanting from the chapel beyond.

They knelt on the floor. Each licked the pad of a middle finger and tapped it lightly against a rice paper pane of the screen beyond the curtain. They wet their fingers and tapped again, repeating the process until they each had made a small hole. They put their eyes to them and peered into the main hall of the chapel.

The room was lit as bright as midday by hundreds of lanterns crowded among the rafters. It was hazy from the smoke spewed by bundles of incense sticks in large brass urns. A few priests sat on the floor with legs crossed and palms together, fingers pointed upward. They were facing Cat and Kasane, but their eyes were closed. They held their rosaries draped over their hands as they chanted.

Cat and Kasane moved away from the curtains and screens and into the shadows.

“We can spend the night here,” Cat whispered.

She edged around the corner of a panel of the altar shrine to see which form of Buddha was being venerated. Instead of a statue of Amida, serene and inanimate, she saw a mummy. He was dressed in the tall conical hat and brilliantly colored robes of an abbot. His brown skin was so desiccated, it stretched over the bones of his face, drawing his mouth into a hideous, toothless grin.

His eyelid twitched.

Cat clamped her hand over Kasane’s mouth before she could scream. “Don’t be afraid,” she murmured in her ear. “He’s an honorable tree-eater.” She removed her hand.

“He’s alive,” Kasane whispered.

“He’s probably at the end of his fast.”

Cat and Kasane retreated as far as they could get from the living corpse. They sat huddled against the rear wall, under the window.

“Tree-eaters subsist on nuts and berries and bark for a thousand days or more,” Cat whispered. “At the end of their alotted time they eat only pine needles. Their flesh and organs wither away, leaving only skin and bones. If this one is truly blessed, he’ll expire on the last day of his fast and his body won’t decay.”

“Why do they do it?”

“They believe they won’t really die. Their souls can stay in their bodies and wait for the coming of the Blessed Buddha.”

Cat and Kasane spread their mats where they could find room and lay close so they could whisper to each other. Each drew comfort from the other’s presence.

“My foolish letters caused your enemies to find us.” Kasane sighed. “The mouth is the front gate of all misfortune.”

“Don’t dwell on what’s past.” Cat spoke gently, although she had already rebuked herself for being so careless as to leave traces of her presence in public places.

“Who wrote the other letter?” Kasane whispered. She hadn’t had time to spell out the contents of her own letter, and it was too dark to do it now. She was consumed with curiosity about the second message.

“He’s a filthy wretch, a hireling of my father’s enemy. He’s chased me from the Eastern Capital.”

“The rnin you tried to stab?”

“Yes.”

“He looked like he was trying to help you.”

“By seeing one stripe you know the whole tiger. He had no intention of helping me.”

“But he warned you about the man in the drum tower.”

“It was a trick, a needle concealed in a mass of silk floss.”

For a while they lay in silence in the mustiness of the old draperies and straw matting and scrolls around them. Cat was bothered by the fact that Hanshiro hadn’t tried to capture her. Had he been toying with her?

“Even his poem was deceptive,” she said finally.

“Is that so?” Kasane tried to sound noncommittal.

“‘Now is not the time,’” Cat recited, “‘to be thinking of yourself as one all alone.’”

“Maybe he means he wants to help you.”

“He’s mocking me. He’s telling me I can’t escape him. But I’ll travel the Three Paths before I’ll allow him to take me.”

Her anger discouraged further conversation. Kasane tumbled quickly into an exhausted sleep. Cat sat up and tried to keep watch, but eventually she could fight off fatigue no longer.

She awoke stiff and sore, curled up next to Kasane. She looked up into the rays of sun shining through the holes in the cedar shutter of the window. In the daylight she could see that the holes formed a graceful pattern of waves.

“Did you sleep well, my lady?” Hanshiro asked politely.

Cat sat up and gathered her legs under her in a crouch. She grabbed for her staff, but it was gone. Hanshiro was kneeling in the formal position, sitting back on his heels, his palms resting on his thighs. Cat looked into his tiger eyes.

Cat was incensed that Hanshiro had seen her asleep like some servant or peasant or outcast under a bridge. She pulled the knife from her jacket and heard Kasane scream as she lunged at him with it. He barely swiveled sideways, but Cat’s blade stabbed emptiness where his chest had been.

Cat knew there was no use continuing. She could not harm him. She could not escape him. She turned her blade around and would have stabbed it into her own breast if he had not reached out faster than she could see. He held her wrist in a grip gentle but strong as an iron band.

“Kill me if you will, my lady,” he said. “I will not try to prevent it. Only grant me the favor of hearing me out.”

“Mannerless wretch!”

“You have reason to think so.” He handed her a brocade bag. “But accept this as a token of my sincerity.”

Cat opened it as though it contained a snake. She shook the contents onto her cotton towel. With the point of her knife, she separated the topknots and laid them in a line. There were eight of them.

“They belonged to your enemies, Your Ladyship,” Hanshiro said. “I have named my sword the Barber.” If Hanshiro was making fun of himself, Cat couldn’t tell. His face was perfectly solemn. “I apologize that I couldn’t catch the man in the drum tower.”

“Are the owners of these dead?” she asked.

“Worse. They’re shamed. The magistrate detained them for public brawling. They won’t bother you again.” Hanshiro took a long, slow breath to compose himself.

Even now, her eyes heavy with sleep and her hair disheveled, Lady Asano was lovelier than anyone he had ever seen. Teeth like pasania nuts. Dark, perfectly arched eyebrows. Strong chin and the high, narrow nose of a warrior. Arms white as mulberry ropes. A perfect hairline, each hair strong and glossy as black silk thread and growing from skin smooth as pale jade. Hanshiro longed to trace with his finger the contour that marked the wilderness of Cat’s hair.

“I have something that will be of use to you, Your Ladyship.” Hanshiro laid a folded letter on his open fan and offered it to her. The wax seal bore the crest of her father’s ally, Lord Hino.