CHAPTER SEVENTY-NINE

SPRING DWELL INSIDE THE STRAGGLING BUDS

When Cat arrived at the gate, a crowd of the neighboring lords’ servants and retainers stood in front of it, craning to see inside. Oishi and his stool had disappeared. Cat set her naginata against the wall and walked without hesitation through the heavy wooden doors.

Hanshiro started to call her back, then thought better of it. A month ago Lady Asano had set out on her journey alone. It was only right that she finish it alone. Hanshiro. tried neither to stop her nor follow her.

Cat stopped just inside the gate and looked around. The courtyard was quiet. It was empty except for the bodies. The predawn light revealed the dead and wounded everywhere, but she was relieved to see that none wore the black-and-white coat of the Ak men. On the other side of the yard the offices and front reception rooms of Kira’s mansion lay open to view. The inner wall panels all had been smashed or toppled, exposing room after room, receding into the night that lingered there.

A warrior-priest lay sprawled in the shadow of the gate, his sword still clutched in his hand. He must have been one of the first to die. Perhaps he had been performing his morning devotions and so had been awake at the hour of the Tiger.

Cat had no time to ponder what his relationship to Kira might have been. She stripped off her fireman’s coat and put on the man’s outer robe. She took the cloth off her shaved head, transforming herself into a young bonze. She pulled the rosary from under the dead priest’s sash and draped it over her hands.

Fingering the beads and chanting sutras for the repose of the spirits of the dead, she walked slowly across the courtyard and up the steps. She was concentrating so intently on the interior of the house and the enemies who might be lurking there that when she passed the slain warrior on the veranda she stepped into the pool of his blood. Her sandals left crimson tracks behind her on the tatami as she walked into the devastation.

She walked around the heaps of broken ceiling panels and painted screens and powdered plaster. She surveyed the scattered account books and abacuses and the upturned writing tables of the steward’s office. She saw the scroll torn from the wall of the reception hall’s tokonoma. A lacquered altar cupboard had been toppled and the articles inside smashed underfoot.

As Cat walked through the ruin of Kira’s mansion, it seemed like a lovely garden to her. A paradise of retribution. It soothed her angry spirit as water running over the rocks in her mother’s garden once had.

She headed toward the sound of women sobbing. They were in the family’s private quarters, and that was where Kira most likely would be. But the corridor leading to the inner rooms at the rear of the house was empty, and Cat wondered where her father’s men had gone.

At the other end of the hallway the damage was even worse. Cat waded through torn robes and mattresses and gossamer drifts of silk floss wadding. She stepped over scattered porcelain and lacquerware, smoking utensils, lanterns, and works of art. Storage chests big enough to hide a man had been smashed and the contents strewn about. Bedding had been pulled from the cupboards and ripped open. Draped over a broken rack was a torn purple satin quilt with arrows bristling from it.

In the next room, long smears and splatters of fresh blood glistened on the wall like the calligraphy of a death poem in an alien language. Braziers had been knocked over, but Cat noticed that someone had doused the embers in them. Wet charcoal and floods of ash-thick water had flowed out across the floors. Oishi’s men had seen to it that fire didn’t destroy Kira’s house before they found him.

The outer wooden shutters had been knocked from their tracks along the corridor facing the garden. Cat could imagine the Ak men kicking them out at the top so that they lay in a row, in a long uneven slope from the raised floor of the corridor down to the ground. As she followed the hallway to the back of the mansion, she began to hear men’s voices. When she reached the end of it she stood in the shadows and looked past the family shrine with its small torii gate.

Oishi and his men were gathered there around a small shed near the rear wall of the compound. The shed was the sort used to store charcoal. It stood near the kitchen in the midst of the gardeners’ clutter—ladders and poles, dusty baskets, mats, and heaps of straw rope. It was a contemptible place for someone of Kira’s position to hide.

Cat could feel her heart pounding as she tried to see what was happening there. The men all moved back when those inside the shed came out. Someone raised a spear, and everyone cheered. Stuck onto the willow-leaf-shaped blade was a bloody head. Cat had no doubt it was Kira’s. The ferocity of her joy was so intense, her ears rang with it.

She drew back into the darkness of the house and retraced her route through the blood and the desolation. She had seen no one inside, but she still heard women wailing in a distant room.

When she walked out through the front gate, Hanshiro was surprised to see his beloved, who had entered as a fireman, emerge as a priest. Her face was impassive, but he recognized the look of triumph in her eyes. She retrieved her naginata and stood quietly next to him in front of the crowd. Together they waited for the forty-seven rnin of Ak to appear.

When Oishi finally led his weary men through the gate, a murmur went up from the people outside. The warriors’ clothes were torn and bloody. Several of the wounded leaned on their comrades. Some of the older men staggered from exhaustion. Onodera Jnai, a blood-soaked rag wrapped around his gray hair, stepped away from the others.

“Lord Kira Kozuke-no-suke Yoshinaka is dead,” he announced. “We have satisfied the restless spirit of our master, Asano Takumi-no-Kami. We mean no harm to anyone else.”

He moved to join the others, who were forming a double column behind two spearmen and a man bearing a box on a pole. Inside the box was Kira’s head wrapped in a wide sleeve torn from a silk robe. Several warriors moved in as a guard behind the box bearer. They were followed by Oishi walking alone, then Chikara, supporting his seventy-seven-year-old comrade. The rest of the forty-seven fell in line at the rear. A bell from the nearby temple began sounding the hour of the Hare.

Oishi stopped in front of Cat. “Hime.” He smiled at her. “Never have I seen you look so saintly.”

The rosary rattled as Cat reached up to touch with the tips of her fingers the soft black fuzz that covered her head. “Where will you go now, sensei?”

“If no one stops us, we’ll walk to Sengakuji, to Spring Hill Temple. We’ll burn incense and leave this offering on our lord’s grave. We’ll tell him of our insignificant efforts to repay some small part of our debt to him.” Oishi reached into his jacket and drew out two folded pieces of paper. He hadn’t expected to be able to give them to her in person. “I regret most deeply that I cannot stop to see your mother.” He held out the letters. “One is for you. Will you please deliver the other to her?”

Cat accepted them with both hands and bowed low over them. She was still bowing when Oishi took his place in the procession and the forty-seven men began walking through the snow toward the setting moon. When Cat looked up she watched their receding backs until they were out of sight.

Only when the last man turned a corner and the crunch of sandals and the rattle of weapons faded away did she look at the letters. The sight of her mother’s name on one of them created a longing so intense, her chest ached with it. She realized she was free to see her mother and her nurse.

The tiny house where they were living seemed as great as a mansion to her now. On the way there she would buy charcoal to fill the braziers and warm every corner of it. And she would write Kasane a message and send it to Lord Hino’s upper mansion.

She looked at the second letter. It was addressed to “One who desires flowers.” Cat had almost forgotten the nickname, taken from the opening line of an old poem. Oishi had called her that when she was a child and used to beg him every spring to take her to see the cherry blossoms at Mukojima on the banks of the Sumida.

Cat opened the letter with trembling fingers and held it so Hanshiro could read it, too. The familiar calligraphy of Oishi’s poem was like a dear friend she hadn’t seen in a long time but whom she could now keep with her for as long as she lived.

“Remember,” he wrote, “that spring dwells inside the struggling buds of snow-covered hills.”

“My lady …” The familiar voice sounded just behind her.

Cat turned to see Viper and Cold Rice standing next to their borrowed kago. They bowed low. “We’re at your service to carry you anywhere.”

“Where do you want to go?” Hanshiro asked softly.

“Home,” Cat said.