One man pulled away from the group outside the gate as though the others had stopped to chat. Centipede’s courier had tucked the rear of his kimono up into his sash at the small of his back. He held a tall spear vertically in one hand. It was his badge of office.
As the courier passed the Gazing-Back-Willow at a dead run, Cat could see the taut muscles in his powerful legs. The thick fringe of horsehair ringing the top of his long spear quivered and jounced. He disappeared down the raised causeway that threaded through the marsh surrounding the Yoshiwara.
It has started, Cat thought.
Through the coarse skirt of her jacket coat, Cat hitched up the unfamiliar waistband of her loincloth. She pushed the wide sash lower on her hips.
In her year as a courtesan Cat had learned to converse with men. She knew their slang and their rhythm of speech. She was used to taking boys’ parts in impromptu dances and dramas for the entertainment of more favored guests or for the amusement of the other women.
Without much effort she shed almost nineteen years of training as a paradigm of feminine grace and subtlety. She trotted into the darkness with the peculiar, flat-footed, light-footed, splay-footed gait of a peasant used to scurrying at his superiors’ beck.
“Shire mono!” she grunted. “Idiots!”
CHAPTER 4
THE BURGLAR IN THE HOUSE
Cat dodged through the late-night foot traffic. The roadway was crowded with entertainers and with samurai, beggars, hawkers, holy men, and sightseers. This was the teeming neighborhood between the pleasure district and the city of Edo itself. It and the Yoshiwara made up what had come to be called Ukiyo, the Floating World. Life here was of the moment, lovely and perishable as cherry blossoms.
Commoners came on foot, and the aristocracy arrived in the privacy of closed palanquins. Merchants and mountebanks had settled here to cater to them. There was no demand, however trivial, not met by some entrepreneur.
Beyond the marsh and rice paddies surrounding the Yoshiwara, the high, packed-dirt road was hemmed in by open-fronted shops of dark wood. The crooked alleys that wandered among the two-story buildings were wide enough for only two people to walk abreast. They were festooned with paper lanterns painted with advertisements.
White cotton banners hung almost to the ground and fluttered in the winter wind. In bold, black characters they announced each shop’s specialty. Laundry hung on the bamboo poles that laced together the wide, second-story eaves above the passageways.
At this hour many of the shops were shuttered, but not all of them were. Some still displayed souvenirs and guidebooks to the pleasure district or hand-colored prints of actors and courtesans. Food and sake vendors still called out to passersby.
The short curtains strung across the tops of the open fronts forced people to duck to see what was offered. The theory was that if the head could be lured inside, the rest of the customer would follow. The merchants here were determined that no denizen of the Yoshiwara should be left with a single copper in the bottom of his wide sleeve.
The smell of noodle soup and roasted rice dumplings coated with sweetened soy sauce, the odor of fried fish and fresh garbage, made Cat’s head reel. She hadn’t eaten since long before the customer had devoured the serving of blowfish, and her stomach ached with hunger.
In her year in the Yoshiwara, Cat often had sat at night on the second-floor balcony of the House of the Carp and looked out at Edo. From that distance the Eastern Capital had seemed a fairyland of colored lights. Currents of music and laughter had drifted on the wind across the dark carpet of marsh grass.
Up close, the enchanted city was a confusion of alleys and slums. The poor houses, set side by side, were so narrow they were called “eel beds.” Many neighborhoods were sealed off with barriers that were closed at night because of rice riots in years past. In a hundred years the five Tokugawa shMgun had turned a swampy fishing village into their capital city, a metropolis of more than half a million inhabitants. As she walked, Cat considered the task of finding her way around in it.
Cat had been raised in Edo, but she had only seen its streets from between the narrow slats of the blinds covering the windows of a palanquin. If she had been able to locate the house where she grew up, there would be no point to it. It had been confiscated along with Lord Asano’s town mansion and second villa in the suburbs. The shMgun had given them to someone else.
Cat’s mother was living in a shabby house in the drapers’ ward, but Cat didn’t know how to find her, either. Even if she could locate the house, she would only carry disaster through the gate.
She did know that after Lord Kira’s retirement he had moved to his new villa across the Sumida River, but she didn’t know where. The city was full of the government’s informers, and Cat could hardly go up to strangers and ask for directions. She realized that if she was going to avenge her father’s death, she would need help and information from someone.
She went through the possibilities. Many men were besotted with her. The small rosewood casket in her room at the Carp was full of their letters. Whenever the box became too full, Cat had paid a discreet servant to transform the poetry and passion into smoke. But Cat knew she could expect the least help from those who claimed to be most smitten by her.
They certainly wouldn’t help her escape from the Perfumed Lotus and their own grasp. Even those who had proposed setting her up as their outside-wife were only offering her another sort of cage. Besides, they were all too cowardly to risk the wrath of Kira’s third son, the powerful Lord Uesugi.
Cat knew of one man who might help her. She even knew where to find him. She stepped to the side of the road, pulled a playbill from inside her coat, and studied it. Somehow she had to reach the heart of Edo, the Nihon Bridge.
Nihon Bridge was the commercial center of the city. Most people considered it the center of the country. All distances were calculated from the middle of its high, crescent span. All highways, including the great TMkaidM, began there. The theater district lay nearby.
Cat had visited the theaters three times, but she hadn’t crossed the city to get there. She and the other women of the Carp had traveled by boat down the Sumida River to Nihon Bridge. Because kabuki plays started at dawn, they had had to board at the hour of the Ram, when most of the world slept.
The excursions had been the only times Cat had felt at peace in the past year. She and Plover and the others had drunk sake until they were giddy. They had sucked the sweet flesh of grilled river trout from delicate bones. Accompanied by Plover on the samisen, they had sung sad ballads, their voices floating out over the river. On the way home the next evening they had heatedly discussed the merits of the actors and the details of the plays and the costumes.
Cat remembered all that as she rolled the playbill and stuck it into the front of her jacket. If she could find the Sumida, she could find the Nihon Bridge and the theaters. She could find someone who might help her.
“A true inhabitant of Edo never keeps a coin overnight in his wallet.” The voice sounded, loud and hoarse, at Cat’s elbow, and she jumped.
Its owner was hidden by the short, divided curtains hanging from the front opening. The curtains were dyed dark blue with white caricatures of octopi wearing short coats and towels, twisted and tied around their heads as sweatbands. A purple-veined hand snaked out from between them and clutched the hem of Cat’s jacket. Another hand pulled aside the curtain.
Cat looked down at a mass of wrinkles, interrupted by the broad, concave delta of a nose. From the center of the weathered landscape gleamed two black eyes, shiny as beetle carapaces. They glowed with points of colored light, reflections of the paper lanterns.
Like those on either side of it, the shop’s dirt floor was below street level. The old woman sat cross-legged on a tattered cushion on a platform that she shared with a small, rectangular iron grill. The grill was covered with eels that had been sliced open, spread out flat, and threaded on skewers.
The coals underneath were so hot t
hat the old woman had pulled her skinny arms out of her ragged sleeves. In spite of the tenth-month chill, her patched wadded cotton robe hung over the sash around her waist, leaving her chest and back bare. If she hadn’t been careful when she dressed, she would have caught the empty sacks of her breasts under her sash.
“Handsome, most honorable customer, try our delicacy.” She tugged at Cat’s jacket tail, which was taut because Cat was pulling away from her. “Our eels are guaranteed to make you fertile, Your Honor.” The eel vendor had lost so many teeth, she had forgotten how her own wares tasted. “O-Inu-Kubo-sama, Honorable Dog ShMgun himself, eats them.”
Cat knew that was a lie. Tokugawa Tsunayoshi was called the dog shMgun because he forbade the killing of animals, although seafood seemed to have escaped his notice.
Keeping her grip on Cat’s coat, the old woman selected a stick from among those slowly turning to charcoal on the grill. The eel had roasted to a dark mahogany color, and its odor was overwhelming. She held it up tantalizingly. Cat wanted it.
But Cat had never paid cash for anything. When merchants brought their wares to her mother’s mansion or to the House of the Carp, she never had to ask the price. Everything was charged to the clandestine account her father had set up for her mother, or to the Carp. In the latter case Cat’s debt was taken from her earnings. Even now she couldn’t bring herself to discuss something so vulgar as money.
She bowed to the level proper for the owner of the clothes she was wearing. It was a very low level. “I have the empty wallet of a true Edokko. I shall borrow a few coppers from my friend and come right back.”
“You wouldn’t trick an old woman who shares her wretched hovel with the god of poverty, would you?”
“I assure you, I shall return shortly and bring my hungry friend with me. He’s waiting for me at the Sumida River. Can you tell me which way it is?”
The eel seller considered a moment before pointing the eel eastward. She knew very well this particular fish would swim away and not come back, but there were other fish, and bigger.
“You!” She waved the skewered eel at a shaggy, emaciated black bear and his bearded Ainu handler. The eel had the bear’s complete attention.
“Step right up, Your Honors,” the old woman cajoled. “Try our delicacy. It’ll make you fertile.” With a round paper fan she blew the coals under the grill as though she were preparing to temper steel.
“Tell me,” she said conversationally. “Which of you hairy barbarians is carrying a purse?” The eel seller broke into a storm of laughter that set her wrinkled breasts to quivering. But since neither the bear nor the Ainu understood her language, the joke was lost on them.
Cat melted back into the crowd with the eel seller’s laughter still in her ears. Was the old woman an informer? Would she wave a hand at Cat’s retreating back? Would Cat find a pack of Edo’s policemen, solid and impassive as stone monuments, blocking her path?
Cat felt as if she carried her father’s crime and her own blazoned across her hat, the way religious pilgrims painted the names of their hometowns on theirs. But when no one ordered her to halt, when a slender shaft of steel didn’t intrude under the sloping eave of her hat, her heart slowed. She had been perspiring with fear, and it felt cold on her brow in the winter air. She took several deep breaths and headed in the direction the eel vendor had pointed.
The route took her down silent streets fronted by the high walls and massive gates of the mansions of the daimyM. Cat felt small and lost and alone walking past them. Dogs barked at the sound of her footsteps echoing off the walls.
The shMgun’s decrees strictly defined the size and ornamentation of the gates each lord was allowed. The classifications were based on the number of koku, or bales of rice, raised on the daimyMs’ estates. These gates all belonged to men who, like her father, rated fifty thousand to seventy thousand koku. Her own father’s mansion, or the one where he ended his life, might be nearby.
Cat wondered if her father traveled down this very street, to spend his final hours as a prisoner in Lord Tamura’s house. He had been dressed in shabby hempen robes. He had been carried in a kago, the flimsy open-weave sedans used by commoners. The guards had thrown a net over it and paraded him through the streets like a criminal. Cat’s face grew hot even now at the shame of it.
She left the residential neighborhood and walked until she came to the government’s granaries lining the Sumida’s banks. During the day this was a bustling place. Men hauled bales of rice through the noisy traffic of handcarts. Lighters crowded the wharves. But now the rows of huge, white-plastered warehouses were silent and ghostly in the moonlight.
When Cat reached the broad Sumida she stood on the stone embankment. The full moon was almost directly overhead. It threw a shirred ribbon of light across the water. It seemed to hang so low that Cat felt as though she could reach up and touch it.
A moon this full and bright had the power to illuminate the past. As Cat stood in its spectral light, she remembered the last moon viewing in the garden of her mother’s house. It had been in the second month of the year of the Dragon, a month before her father’s suicide.
Cat remembered her father’s arrival in the plain palanquin he used for discreet visits to his outside-wife. As always, the house had been cleaned thoroughly. As always, Cat and her mother, with the servants in ranks behind them, had kneeled on the veranda and bowed in welcome. When Lord Asano stepped from the palanquin, Cat had felt the thrill she always did. He was so handsome and so obviously in love with her mother.
The moon viewing had been a quiet affair, with only Lord Asano’s Chief Councilor, Oishi Kuranosuke, and a few close friends. Lord Asano’s official wife came from a powerful family; and though the marriage had been arranged only for political connections, Lady Asano was not happy about her husband’s outside-wife and child.
Lord Asano’s simple, countrified moon parties had been less extravagant than those of the city daimyM, but they had been admired nonetheless. The gardeners had built a high mound of pure white sand, a cone as smooth and graceful as Mt. Fuji. Servants served humble food on plain lacquered trays to remind everyone of the vanity of ostentation. Tasteful presents had been exchanged and graceful poetry composed about the loveliness of the moonlight on the sand.
The silvery light of that full moon had made Cat’s mother and father appear as young as teenagers. They had laughed together and snared looks of furtive passion. And Lord Asano had told them of his decision to legally adopt Cat, over his wife’s objections. Cat couldn’t remember ever seeing her mother look so happy. She had been as radiant as the moonlight.
There had been other news, that night. Cat’s father had just learned that he and a young lord from the province of Iyo had been selected to receive the imperial envoy at the shMgun’s court. Lord Asano knew he would have to pay for food and drink and entertainment for the envoy, as well as buy silk court costumes for himself and his retainers. The expense would be extravagant, the ritual complex. But the high councilor had assured him that Lord Kira, the shMgun’s master of ceremonies, would instruct him.
Lord Kira. The name had meant nothing to Cat then. Now she could think of little else. She looked across the moonlit waters to the trees on the far shore. Somewhere over there was Lord Kira’s new villa, the one he couldn’t afford.
Kira was a bannerman, one of Tokugawa Tsunayoshi’s own retainers. The position was prestigious but not well paid. Kira had built this mansion with presents he had demanded from other lords.
He expected much more than the traditional package of dried bonito in exchange for instruction in court etiquette. Cat knew her father was austere and schooled in the old ways. He was quick to anger. Among the free-spending folk of Edo he was said to be frugal to the point of parsimony. He would not spend great amounts of money to obtain what was Kira’s duty to provide. As a result Kira refused to teach him the intricate moves of court ritual.
Cat squeezed her eyes shut to keep from crying. She knew it was useless
to resent fate, but she could not stop herself from going over those tragic events again and again. If only her father’s advisers had secretly given Kira the presents he expected. But they hadn’t. If only Lord Asano’s chief councilor, Oishi Kuranosuke, had been in Edo instead of at the family estate in AkM. But he wasn’t.
Instead, the situation deteriorated until Asano couldn’t ignore Kira’s insults any longer. Asano drew his sword in the shMgun’s palace and attacked Kira. It was a terrible mistake. The penalty for such an act was death.
Cat could see it all in her mind’s eye as surely as if she had been there. She knew her father’s headstrong nature.
“Stop, Father!” When she said it out loud her own voice startled her. “Please stop.”
Her only reply was the comforting murmur of the river as it flowed past her on its way to the sea.
The story of Lord Asano’s death soon leaked out and became the subject of gossip. The folk of Edo were outraged at the injustice. Tokugawa Tsunayoshi didn’t punish Kira for his part in the feud, but he did make him move out from behind the moat surrounding his palace and grounds.
Lord Uesugi was Kira’s son. He had put his shrewd councilor, Chisaka, in charge of his father’s defense. Chisaka had sent extra warriors to guard Kira’s more vulnerable new mansion, and all of Edo speculated. After all, one could not live under the same sky with the slayer of one’s lord or father. When would Lord Asano’s men, the warriors of AkM, take revenge?
“Are you afraid, Lord Kira, shut away behind your walls?” Cat whispered. She wondered which lights shining among the thick growths of pines marked her enemy’s villa. She stared until the lights and the sound of the river’s current almost sent her into a trance.
She followed Musashi’s advice and imagined herself as Lord Kira. Kira was the burglar whom Musashi wrote about. Everyone thought of the burglar as a fortified enemy. But what did the world look like to the burglar in the house?