CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

PASSIONATE LOVE AND A COUGH

Cat and Hanshiro lay entwined on top of Cat’s travel cloak and under Hanshiro’s. Over them arched the intricate wooden corbelings and underpinnings of the bridge. The river murmured nearby. Plovers cried plaintively from the shallows. Cat pressed harder against Hanshiro and drew in long, slow breaths of contentment. So this was what all the courtesan’s songs and stories were about.

Hanshiro himself was stunned with joy. Years of sorrows and disappointments had fallen away. He felt as giddy and carefree as a child at a temple fair.

“I was so cruel to you.” Cat rubbed her cheek in the thick hair of his chest. “Making you sit in the rain.”

“To serve when the master treats you well is not to be a retainer.” Hanshiro ran his hand along the sinuosity of her side and hip. He kissed her bare shoulder, then pulled the cloak up to cover it. “To obey a master who’s heartless and cold, that’s true service.”

“Do you think me heartless and cold?”

“I thought you had neither blood nor tears.” He brushed unruly wisps of hair from her eyes.

“Why did you persist?”

“I knew you would relent. You returned Lord Hino’s letter of safe passage to me instead of tearing it up.” Hanshiro’s smile stretched the torn skin and muscles of his cheek, but he hardly felt the pain. “By giving me the letter to hold, you made me the pawnbroker of your fate.”

“I thought you cold and cruel, too.” Cat touched his lacerated cheek tenderly with the tips of her fingers. “I was frightened of you.”

“Not as frightened as I was of you, my sweet lady.”

“You’re making fun of me again.”

“I’m not.” Hanshiro threw aside the cloak and reached between Cat’s legs for the end of the red silk loincloth she had worn. “‘More fearful than a tiger,’” he whispered in her ear, “‘is a length of scarlet crepe.’”

Half of the cloth lay under Cat. Hanshiro drifted the other end lightly along her thigh and across the dark thicket that sheltered the confluence of desire. He increased the pressure, drawing the silk into the swollen folds and pulling it between them until it glistened with a satiny moisture. Cat moaned as it pressed against the hidden kernel, the core of her delight, and tugged it tantalizingly upward. She could also feel the other half of the cloth sliding forward, tight and insistent, along the crevice of her buttocks.

The long silken caress sent Cat soaring in a tightening spiral toward the bursting. When the cloth pulled free of her weight, Hanshiro teased it lightly across her belly and breasts. Using knots reserved for one’s most beloved, he wound it around her neck and wrists. He tied it so that by pulling her wrists Cat could tighten the cloth’s pressure on her neck and increase her own pleasure.

As she writhed in Hanshiro’s tender bonds, he licked her breasts and throat, her chin and mouth. The heat of his tongue and mouth and the chill of the night air on Cat’s wet skin concentrated her entire awareness to the surface of her body. Bared to the indifferent night, to the stars, to any passerby, Cat, though bound, felt a wild freedom.

She pulled on the silken manacles until her head spun and light exploded into incandescent copper dust behind her eyelids. She increased the pressure until she was gasping for air. As though he were traveling with her, Hanshiro knew when she reached the peak and hovered there. He knew the exact instant between soaring and falling, and he spread the soft folds of her groin and touched her once, lightly, with the tip of his finger. She cried out, a single descending note that set off alone into the darkness. A plover answered with its mournful cry.

Hanshiro untied her wrists and cradled her as she floated back to him. In the distance a wakeful rooster crowed.

“‘If I were to make this night into a thousand nights …’” Hanshiro murmured into the tumbled fragrance of Cat’s hair. “‘Many a sweet word would remain unsaid when the cock heralded the dawn.’”

 

 

Kasane awoke before the rooster crowed. The twisted rush wick of the night lantern had burned out, and the room, an inner one, was dark. She dressed quietly in her servant’s livery and sneaked past the mattress and quilts, still as unrumpled as when the maids made it up for Hanshiro and his disciple. But the quilts were heaped high, and in the dark Kasane couldn’t tell if they were occupied or not.

When she reached the front of the Nightingale, she found the old servant sitting, stark naked, in the wan light of a rush lamp. He was mending his worn loincloth.

“More traffic,” he grumbled when Kasane handed him the wooden ticket for her sandals and her pilgrim’s staff. “In and out, all night. A body can’t get any sleep.”

Kasane refrained from pointing out that he hadn’t been asleep. With much mumbling and wheezing and creaking of leathery joints, the old man produced her sandals from among the fifty or so pair stored neatly on shelves against the wall.

Kasane stepped from the raised floor of the entryway onto the big flat boulder, then into her sandals. She lit the small travel lantern with the inn’s name on it and hung it from the end of its pole. She pulled her cloak about her and ducked out the small side door into the darkness of the sleeping town.

The eaves of the two rows of buildings almost met over the narrow street. The cold wind from the bay blew down it as though through a tube. The scuffle of Kasane’s soles reverberated off the rows of heavy wooden shutters.

Kasane passed through the large open market for which Yokkaichi, Fourth Day Market, was named. The small stands were shuttered with screens of woven bamboo or with straw matting. A few booths and two-wheeled carts sheltered their owners, who slept curled up on matting with other ragged mats pulled over them. A scrawny dog growled at her. Sleepy chickens stirred on their roosts along the rooflines of the sheds.

Kasane approached the transport office, where a pale necklace of bare male nates ringed the fire in the trampled yard. The hostlers, porters, couriers, and kago bearers were warming themselves. Kasane could hear their slang and their laughter when she stopped to read the official notices on the bulletin board. They were only the usual edicts and admonishments, though, none of which concerned her mistress.

Kasane turned onto the lane leading to the local temple and walked between the shuttered souvenir stands that linked it. Doves cooed and fluttered among the massive, ornate eaves of the roof over the temple’s wooden gate. Kasane was disappointed to find no letter addressed to the Floating Weed among the posted notices, the sutras, and the pleas for health or the return of wayward mates. She began scanning the message board again.

“Forgive my rudeness … .” The voice was diffident, but it startled Kasane. She took a firmer grip on her staff and whirled to face the speaker. The accent identified him as being from Kazusa, her home province.

Traveler stood in the shadow of the eaves of a shuttered noodle stand across the way. His face was hidden by the square straw hood on his head and by the towel pulled low over his eyes and tied under his mouth. He wore used clothes, the fringed apron and ragged jacket of a low-class ne’er-do-well for hire.

He didn’t know what had become of the shy young maiden who had stolen his heart at the See No Evil in Oiso, but by now he was sure she was embarked on a venture sown with peril. He had decided to go into the disguise business himself until he solved the mystery.

“I was instructed to give this to the one serving the Tosa rnin and his disciple.” The young man bowed deeply as he held out a thin bamboo pole with his latest letter wedged into the slit in the end. The letter was on the finest pale yellow Sugiwara stock. It was adorned with a single sprig of pine.

“Where is the one who asked you to deliver this?”

“Not far away, Your Excellency.” Traveler backed deeper into the shadows. He was sure Kasane could hear his heart thumping like a hand drum. Truly, he thought, one sight is worth a thousand hearings.

“Did the sender give you any verbal message to accompany this?” Kasane had been waiting for ten days to meet her suitor face to face. She didn’t know whether to be despondent or relieved or angry that he hadn’t arrived yet. He’s as slow as a centipede tying on sandals, she thought.

“The author of this letter said only that I would know the object of his regard by beauty of form and tenderness of expression.”

Embarrassment warmed Kasane’s face. “Are you to deliver my reply also?”

“I can be here when the fifth bell sounds and receive a reply if Your Excellency so desires.”

“My two masters may have offices for me to perform. Meet me instead at the Nightingale inn.” Kasane bowed. “Ask for Hachibei of Kazusa.”

“As you wish, Your Excellency.”

Traveler was in a turmoil. Swinging between despair and a most uncharacteristic rage, he watched Kasane tuck the letter into the front of her jacket and walk back toward the town.

He was confused by the gender change his beloved had undergone along the road. He was no longer sure if he had begun by loving a man dressed as a woman or if he was now in love with a woman disguised as a man. Whichever she was, he was distressed to find her in the company of the taciturn Tosa rnin who had walked with him for part of his journey. Ever since he had seen the three together in Miya he had been racked by jealousy.

He was suffering from the usual lover’s delusion. Because he loved Kasane he assumed everyone found her as irresistible as he did. To make matters worse, he wondered if his own praise of her had brought her to Tosa’s attention.

Even if Kasane had still been the shy young peasant woman on pilgrimage with her brother, as when Traveler first saw her, he would have been cautious. He may have thrown himself into this affair with reckless abandon, but he was not interested in the usual roadside romance. Whoever this exciting and enchanting enigma was, he had decided he couldn’t go on with his life unless she shared it. He would have to approach her with respect and decorum.

The decision was as daring as it was irresponsible. A suitable marriage had already been arranged for Traveler with a woman he had never seen. He was about to abandon his duty, fail his parents, and risk exile from the village of his birth. He was about to become the worst possible creature, one without a sense of obligation.

At a distance he followed Kasane into the market, where people were stirring now in the dawn’s ashen light. Women were wetting down the dust with gourds of water or arranging vegetables in artistic stacks. Men were rolling out tubs and kegs. Children swept the ground around their parents’ booths or raced about on errands. Chickens scratched for scattered rice and millet grains. They dodged reluctantly from in front of Kasane’s feet.

Kasane made several purchases, her cloth bundle growing larger with each one. Then Traveler watched her disappear into the Nightingale, through the big wooden shutter that the old servant was shoving open with his bony shoulder. The young man crouched behind a stack of empty tubs in the alley next to the distillery to wait and to speculate on the entire bewildering affair.

Since Hanshiro had given Kasane the responsibilities of a servant, she had developed a determined, capable air. She had begun taking care of the details of travel. In her dealings with porters and innkeepers, she no longer bowed as low as she once had.

Now she went directly to the tiny room the master of the Nightingale used as an office. After exchanging the usual pleasantries with him, Kasane handed over the delicacies she had bought and left instructions for breakfast. When she finished there she strode, flat-footed and formidable, down the halls. She acknowledged almost curtly the obeisances of the inn’s staff.

In the morning light filtering through the paper walls, she could see that the pile of mattresses was occupied. Cat and Hanshiro were lying on their left sides under the quilt. Cat was curled against Hanshiro’s chest, and he slept with an arm thrown over her protectively, his cheek against her hair.

Kasane smiled to herself. Like as not Hanshiro-san’s bridge to heaven was snug inside her ladyship’s royal gate and his heart was beating fast against her shoulder blade. Passionate love and a cough, Kasane thought, cannot be concealed.

When she knelt at the foot of the bed, she saw Hanshiro’s hand tighten on the wooden staff he had left there. Kasane knew the movement was reflexive and that he wouldn’t strike her. Hanshiro had an uncanny ability to identify people by their footsteps. Kasane was sure he knew she was the intruder.

Kasane found Cat’s ankle under the quilt and gently shook it. “Young master,” she said,”the hour is late. The road is calling.”