CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE

THEY REFUSE TO HELP A TRAVELER

Cat lay curled up tightly on her side among the cushions of the palanquin. The pounding of the bearers’ feet across the wooden bridge woke her from the anxious sleep into which she had plummeted. The drumming scattered the memories and dreams swarming about her.

She tried to stretch to relieve the cramps in her legs and feet but came up against the sides of the palanquin. Still disoriented and anxious from the imaginary voices that had been shrilling for her attention, she thought of the poet-priest Musui, Dream Besotted. His kind eyes and lopsided smile comforted her, and she wondered, briefly, where he was this cold winter morning. Probably on the road somewhere, she thought, in a hovel sharing a cracked cup of millet tea with some peasant whose load he had carried.

She remembered Musui lifting his staff when crossing bridges so as not to disturb Kb Daishi’s sleep. She remembered him reciting Daishi’s poem.

They refuse to help
A traveler in trouble.
One night seems like ten.

In spite of her own troubles, or maybe because of them, the tattoo of feet on a wooden bridge at night had distressed Cat ever since her brief time with Musui. It distressed her now, at dawn, just outside Totsuka.

She wanted to tell the bearers to stop. To walk softly. People might be sleeping underneath. A young outcast woman and her children and their grandfather might be huddled there, seeking shelter from the long cold nights. Travelers in trouble, whom no one would help. Whom Cat had been unable to help.

In the past five nights and four days, Cat had had time to remember the outcast family and a great deal more. The world had shrunk to the interior of the palanquin. She could close her eyes and visualize every stitch and stain and wrinkle in the silk upholstery. She had memorized every brush stroke of the illustration from The Tale of Genji, painted on the gilt walls.

She had tried to read but had become too sick. So she had folded a piece of paper several times to stiffen it. She had stuck it vertically between two thin reed slats of the blind covering the window. It was a vulgar practice, a casual disregard for propriety that her nurse had always deplored as a sign of society’s decay. Cat remembered her scoldings fondly.

Cat had spent the past four days gazing out through the narrow opening at the procession of muddy brown rice fields. She’d watched the same straw and mud-plastered hovels of the villages and the backs of the bowing populace, endlessly repeated. She’d felt helpless and detached as the relays of bearers changed without a word from her. She’d felt like a stone on a go board, being moved by a greater hand.

As she passed each village and town, she tried to remember what had happened to her there, but she found it difficult. Those things had happened to someone else. The Tkaid itself was completely different when experienced from inside a palanquin. Once removed from the company of the people who traveled the road and lived along it, the danger, the romance, the singular excitement of the great highway, ceased to exist.

The nights were the worst. That was when Cat shivered in a frigid darkness clamorous with memories and regrets. At night she babbled incoherently to her nurse. She sobbed with longing for her mother and father. She held long, silent conversations with Kasane. She dreamed of boarding a boat with Hanshiro and sailing into the rising sun, toward the far green land of Tosa.

Toward the end of her journey she screamed silently for the bearers to stop torturing her with their cruel, steady, bone-shaking pace. The only relief had been on the second night. She had spent much of it on the boat from Kuwana to Miya. She had been lulled by the drone of the boatmen’s talk, by the flap and hum of the sails, and by the crackle of fire in the big iron basket that hung out over the prow. She had slept curled with Hanshiro under a tattered rented quilt in the bottom of the boat. Now she tried to imagine his arms around her again, his body warm against hers.

She knew that boat ride might be the last time she would feel the strength of his arms encircling her. If fate willed it, she would be in Edo tonight. She would find Oishi. She would avenge her father. Then she would die.

The palanquin jerked to a halt, and Cat heard the familiar morning garble of a transport office yard. She heard the shouts of her own bearers, who, somewhere in the long, grueling journey, had ceased to be human. They had become apparatuses like the wheels that lifted water into the irrigation ditches, or the stone disks and wooden cranks that hulled rice.

The palanquin lurched forward, then back, as the bearers set it down. While they went off to report to the transport officials, Cat sat relishing the few moments of peace and anticipating the chance to stretch her cramped legs. Hanshiro slid open the door.

“My lady.” As he bowed, Cat detected a conspiratorial smile.

She pulled her scarf across her face. The rowdy crowd of men in the transport office yards was always ready to have a look at the occupants of palanquins, especially if they were women. Hanshiro stood between them and Cat as he helped her out into a world transformed by a thick white quilt of snow.

As he walked with her to a grove of pines across the road, their sandals crunched in the deep fluffy powder. Beyond the trees a narrow river coiled like a black snake through the white expanse of rice paddies. Hanshiro turned Cat so she faced south and west.

“Ma!” Kasane’s favorite phrase escaped before Cat could stop it. No wonder Hanshiro had been smiling.

The gently curving slopes of Mount Fuji were covered in snow tinted mauve against a golden-pink sky. A spindrift of windblown snow floated eastward from the peak. The lower peaks around Fuji seemed to float on a tinted ocean of mist.

“‘One never tires of gazing upon the face of Fuji,’” Cat murmured.

They both stared at the volcano, watching the subtle shifts in color on its slopes. Finally Hanshiro reluctantly broke the silence. “Lord Td travels ahead of us, my lady.”

Cat grimaced. Lord Td’s retinue would number in the hundreds, and it would be moving extremely slowly. To try to pass him on the road would be more than rude, it would probably be suicidal. A lord’s retainers had the right to cut down anyone of lower rank who disrupted their procession.

“Move smartly, Cold Rice!”

The shout from the yard startled Cat from her gloomy calculation. She turned to see Viper trotting in place at the front of her palanquin. She pulled her scarf farther down over her face and sidled over to stand behind Hanshiro.

“Do you know him?”

“He and his wife sheltered me.” In another life, Cat thought.

“It would be best if he didn’t see you.”

“Yes. That would be best.” Cat had to smile behind her scarf.

Given Viper’s reckless determination to help her, that indeed would be best. Viper surreptitiously tried to see who his mysterious fare was, but Cat held her scarf in place as she ducked into the palanquin. Viper and Cold Rice grunted in unison as they lifted the front of the large carrying pole and two other men held up the rear.

When Hanshiro gave the new bearers the usual promise of a bonus, he also tipped them in advance, to ensure that their songs wouldn’t be insulting. So for the next ri Viper exchanged ripostes with passing kago men and sang his bawdy ditties to entertain his veiled passenger. Cat wasn’t amused, though. With a lump of dread heavy in the pit of her stomach, she watched for the criers and liveried porters who would be bringing up the rear of Lord Td’s procession. She watched the sun climb higher in the sky.

Then a courier Viper had just good-naturedly insulted called back over his shoulder as he trotted away, “I hear they hung Sakuta out like a shop banner.”

Viper didn’t answer, but Cat felt an almost indiscernible falter in his stride.

Sakuta. Cat concentrated until she remembered where she had heard the name. Sakuta was the headman of Viper’s village. He had been such a mild, honest-seeming man. Even when he’d drunk too much at the celebration in Viper’s kitchen after the exorcism of the homeless ghost, he had been soft-spoken. She remembered that he’d been worried about the welfare of his people. Cat wondered what he could have done to deserve execution, for that was surely what the courier had meant.

Cat raised the blind, held her fan out the window, and gestured with it. The four bearers moved to the side of the road and set the palanquin down near an open-air tea shop. They lined up, knelt in the snow, and bowed until flakes of it powdered their foreheads.

“I wish to speak privately with the two forward kago men,” Cat said.

The other two joined the crier and box bearer and Hanshiro’s four kago men, who crowded around a roadside stand to order a bit of sake for warmth. Viper and Cold Rice remained prostrate next to the palanquin. Hanshiro, ready for trouble, stood behind them.

Viper and Cold Rice both wore baggy trousers and leggings and jackets with the skirts tucked up into their sashes. Their jackets and trousers had started out dark indigo, but they had been patched and repatched with whatever cloth was available. They were so worn, frayed, and covered with stitching and patches that they were hardly recognizable as specific articles of clothing. The towel Viper wore over his head and tied under his chin hid most of the gaudy tattoo.

“Are you in good health, Boss of the kago men?” Cat drew back the yellow gauze curtain with two pale, slender fingers and allowed Viper to catch a glimpse of her face. She almost laughed at his astonished expression. “Do you remember me?” she asked.

“Yes, Your Lordship.” Viper hastened to correct himself. “Your Ladyship.”

“Do you still think me the ghost of Lord Yoshitsune?”

“Forgive my stupidity for thinking that, Your Ladyship. Wisdom can’t circulate in the body of a big man. A fool at thirty is a fool for life.”

“What happened to Sakuta?”

“A farmer’s lot is to have just enough to live on and no more. But our lord didn’t leave us even that much. Sakuta delivered our petition for lower taxes to Lord Katsugawa’s bailiff, but he was refused. Sakuta became very sad. He said that if he ignored the pain of the villagers, it was like leaving his own wounds untended. So he went to Edo, to the palace of O-Kubo-sama himself. He waited at the Tiger Gate until OKubo-sama’s chamberlain passed. Then he ran past the guards and stuck the petition in through the palanquin window.”

Cat took a deep breath of anguish. She knew what must have happened next. Sakuta also must have known what would happen. “He was executed?”

“Crucified. His body was left hanging for the crows to dine on.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“It was his duty. And O-Kubo-sama did reduce our taxes by forty-five bales, so Sakuta was successful in his mission.” Viper’s voice faltered. “But his family—his wife and children and parents—were made outcasts.”

“They will all surely be reborn higher on the Wheel.”

“Thank you, Your Ladyship. But on death all accounts are canceled, and we shouldn’t trouble you with our petty problems. You must reach Edo tonight, is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“Td is ahead of us with a train of five hundred. His movements are as drawn out as an ox urinating. If we have to follow him, we won’t reach the Shinagawa barrier by sundown.”

They all knew the barriers closed at sundown.

“Do you know a detour?”

“It’s a long one. But if you hire extra bearers in Kanagawa, Cold Rice and I can slide the palanquin door off its tracks and run ahead with it.”

“With the door?”

“If the door arrives at the barrier by sunset,” Hanshiro broke in, “the officials are required to wait for the rest of the palanquin.”

Hanshiro sensed the affection between Lady Asano and this outlandish commoner. He wondered, briefly, what had formed the bond. And he realized that his beloved mistress still had her secrets.

“If you get us to Edo tonight, I will be in your debt,” Cat said.

“The debt is mine, my lady.” Viper dallied while Cold Rice went back to his place at the carrying pole and began gulping down the rice and tea the other bearers had brought him. Then he spoke in a low voice. “The cloud didn’t cover the moon this month.”

“Congratulations!” Cat knew Viper was saying that his wife’s monthly bleeding hadn’t arrived.

Viper actually blushed. “It’s too early to know for certain, of course. But my foolish, inconsequential wife is very happy.”