“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.”
CHAPTER 76
THE TROUBLED WATERS ARE FROZEN FAST
When Cat and Hanshiro arrived at the government barrier in Shinagawa, Viper and Cold Rice were jogging in place. Viper held the palanquin door balanced on his head. They were both shouting, “Go on! Go on!” in rhythm with their feet, as though they were carrying the whole conveyance.
The sun had set long before, and underlings had lit the lanterns. They had slid the big shutters partway across the open front of the building and stood ready to close the narrow opening they had left. Inside, wrapped in a cocoon of lantern light and secure in the prerogatives of government service, clerks were finishing the day’s paperwork. They sat on the tatami and leaned over their low desks, their brushes flying. Rolls of paper lay piled up around them.
Cat could tell that the barrier official’s impassive expression was only masking his exasperation, but he let the small procession pass with little trouble. The travel papers Lord Hino had supplied were all in order. Cat’s pass gave her mother’s family name of Suzuki. Besides, a highborn woman entering Edo didn’t require the scrutiny of one leaving.
Hanshiro knew that the guards and clerks and the officials themselves assumed Cat was Lord Hino’s consort, his woman of the provinces. The silent affront set him to seething with a fury that surprised him, but he matched their polite hisses and bows.
On the other side of the barrier, Hanshiro dismissed the two criers, the box bearer, and the men carrying his palanquin. He arranged for the officials to have it returned to Lord Hino. Viper and Cold Rice insisted they could carry Cat’s palanquin themselves, and the extra men were paid off, too.
From here Hanshiro would trot along behind and act the part of a servant, carrying the clothing box on its pole across his shoulder. He looked as stalwart as always, but the long, rough ride had made him ill. He ached in every joint. The exercise and the cold air would do him good.
Cat directed Viper and Cold Rice to turn off at Sengakuji, Spring Hill Temple. Whatever happened, she couldn’t pass by her father’s grave without honoring him, especially now, on the eve of the monthly anniversary of his death. Viper and Cold Rice passed through the big, ornate wooden gate, turned left, and set down the palanquin among the gravestones in the grove of trees.
Hanshiro helped Cat out into snow that came above her ankles. In the moonlight, her white robes seemed to be part of the soft white landscape around her. To Hanshiro she looked like the mythical Lady of the Snows, who would fade into mist in a man’s arms.
Cat turned to Viper and Cold Rice, who had folded into tight obeisances in the snow. Only the ragged patchwork humps of their jackets and the cheerful sparrows on their blue head towels were visible.
“I thank you both for your great efforts on my behalf. Amida will bless you,” Cat said. “And please, Boss Viper, give my greetings to your honorable wife.” She shivered and pulled her cloak about her. “We’ll continue on foot, so you can leave the palanquin. Hanshiro-san will arrange with the priests here for its return to Hino-sama.”
“Your Ladyship ...” Viper looked up at her from the snow. “We’re ready to carry you to your final destination. And we might be of some further, though humble, use to you.”
“That wouldn’t be prudent. And please stand up before your hands freeze.”
“At least let us take you to Nihon Bridge,” Viper persisted doggedly. “You can travel faster with us carrying you.”
“Lord Hino’s palanquin would draw attention to us.” Cat was used to Viper’s impertinent habit of arguing with his superiors, but Hanshiro marveled at her patience with him. Someday, if they survived the night, he would ask her about it.
“How’s this for a bargain, my lady?” Viper adopted his favorite expression, somewhere between cunning and irony. “If, when you finish here, Cold Rice and I are waiting with a kago, a nondescript, lowly, and completely unworthy affair, would you honor us by riding in it? ”
Cat had to smile to herself. Viper and Kasane were chiseled from the same rough-hewn, cross-grained stuff. “We’re not sure where we’ll go from here, but perhaps we’ll have need of your services, if you can find a kago in such a short time.”
In fact, Cat didn’t know where to look for Oishi and the AkM men. She planned to begin at the inn where Oishi and his son had stayed near the Ninon Bridge. It was the same one that received the red-haired barbarians on their annual visits to Edo.
If he wasn’t there, she would go to the drapers’ district and ask for the shop of Otaka Gengo, the AkM retainer who took lessons from Kira’s tea master. Then she would try to find the shop of Kanzaki Yogoro, who had posed as a rich KyMto rice merchant and had gained access to Kira’s mansion. There were thousands of rice shops scattered throughout Edo, though, and finding Yogoro’s would be difficult. The thought of knocking at shuttered doors in deserted streets and finding no one there filled Cat with despair.
When Viper and Cold Rice trotted off into the darkening night, Cat leaned against Hanshiro. She drew comfort from his warmth and solidity. He put an arm around her shoulder and held her close to shelter her from the cold. Then he prayed with her at the statue of Kannon-sama, the smiling goddess of mercy.
Snow had been falling in Edo for three days, and a thick covering of it lay over everything on the temple grounds. The full moon had risen. The snow mounded on the gravestones and statues and tall granite lanterns glowed in its light. Long black shadows flowed away from the buildings and monuments and trees.
The full moon hung low in the eastern sky like the tip of a fat, badger-hair brush dipped in light. Cat’s exhaustion made her weak and dizzy, and she succumbed to the moon’s spell. As she stared, it pulsed and shimmered, growing and receding. No wonder the peasants believed that to gaze on the moon in solitude was to risk enchantment. Cat had to shake her head to break its hold.
“Everything looks different from the last time I was here.” Cat thought back to the morning she had awakened in the chapel to Kannon-sama so very long ago. She remembered how ignorant and foolish she had been. “It seems so peaceful. As though there could be no sorrow in all the world.”
“ ‘The troubled waters are frozen fast under clear heaven,’ ” Hanshiro recited.
“ ‘Moonlight and shadow ebb and flow.’ ” Cat finished Lady Murasaki’s poem.
They walked to Lord Asano’s grave. Fresh incense was still burning there as Cat unwrapped the food and joss sticks she had bought as an offering. She lit the incense in the coals that burned for that purpose. Hanshiro took out the scarf, still wrapped around the coil of Cat’s hair. He laid it on the grave as his own offering. Then he and Cat bowed their heads and prayed.
A pale moon shadow fell across the grave, and Hanshiro leaped back, his hand on his sword hilt.
“My lady.” The plump-faced man on the other side of the grave had slightly bulging eyes and a mild expression. He folded his hands together and bowed. Several gray-headed men, all in formal black clothes, stood behind him like a gathering of sages.
“Good evening, sensei.” Cat bowed low. “Are you in good health?”
“Yes, hime, princess. And you?”
“I am well.” Cat turned to Hanshiro. “This is the councilor, Oishi Kuranosuke,” she said.
As the abbot ended the purification ceremony in a rear reception chamber of the monks’ quarters, Hanshiro sat silent in the corner with Cat. He had never been in a room so suffused with warrior spirit. These were the old men, the leaders, the planners of the vengeance league.
One was seventy-seven. Five were in their sixties and four in their fifties. Except for his sixteen-year-old son Chikara, Oishi, at forty-five, was the youngest of the AkM retainers there.
Several of the temple’s acolytes served tea and tobacco. Then, w
hen the abbot withdrew to let the men discuss their plans, Oishi turned to Cat. She still wore the nun’s clothes, and the white scarf framed her oval face. She was even more beautiful than Oishi remembered her.
His large, sad eyes sparkled with tears in the lantern light. He had heard that the young Lady Asano had been killed somewhere along the TMkaidM Road. It had been one more care added to the terrible burden he had carried for two years.
“Hime, we’ve been worried about you.” He used the affectionate term from Cat’s childhood. “It eases our hearts to see you safe and in the shade of such a strong tree as Hanshiro of Tosa.”
Hanshiro caught the brief glance Oishi gave him. It was a request to continue looking after Lady Asano no Kinume. Hanshiro nodded slightly, in acceptance of the charge.
The sight of her father’s oldest and most trusted retainers almost made Cat forget the tragedy that brought them here. The occasion seemed like a reunion of loved ones after a long separation.
But she knew that soon all these men would be dead. Chikara, with whom she had hunted fireflies and explored the rocks and beaches of AkM, would be dead. Oishi would be dead. Surely a heart was too small a vessel to contain so much grief.
“How many men are in the league?” she asked.
“Forty-seven.”
“Forty-seven,” Cat murmured. Lord Hino had said there were sixty. Could forty-seven men overcome the small army living in barracks on the grounds of Kira’s mansion?
“A number of them fell away.” Onodera Junai, Oishi’s sixty-one-year-old chief of staff, spoke up. “People nowadays have lost the perseverance of their ancestors.”
“One cannot weigh honor on a merchant’s scale,” added Yoshida Chuzayemon. “And so it has been discarded as worthless.”
“How will you manage it, with so few?”
“It’s best, mistress, that you know as little as possible about the plan,” Oishi said.
“I have a right to know.”
Oishi smiled. That was true. She was her father’s daughter in spirit as well as in beauty. Oishi had heard of the troubles Kira’s men had experienced on the TMkaidM. He could easily believe she and her companion from Tosa had taken such a toll on their enemies.
Besides, he recognized the look on her face. He had seen her narrow those swallow’s eyes, flare her nostrils, and set her jaw since before she had been old enough to speak the word no. He gave in gracefully.
“Dressed as tradesmen and laborers and priests, the young men have been mapping the area around Kira’s mansion on Matsuzaka Street, HonjM-chMnai, HonjM ward. Tonight we will all meet at the hour of the Ox at Yogoro’s rice shop north of the Ryogoku Bridge. It’s close to the mansion.” Oishi paused to light his pipe and take a puff. He was terribly weary, but he knew the end was near now. “I’ll take half the men to the front gate. Chikara, with Junai and Chuza, will lead the rest around behind the mansion. While Kira’s men try to stop the tiger at the front gate, the wolf will enter at the rear.”
Chikara nodded politely. To Cat he looked hardly older than when she last had seen him, a laughing, naked boy of nine wading in the surf at AkM.
“The young men will enter and fight,” Oishi said. “A few of them will rush the armory and cut the bowstrings and break the spear shafts. Hara, Mase, and I, we old ones, will guard the gate, to cut off the enemy’s retreat and repel reinforcements.”
“Lord Uesugi’s bowmen?”
“Yes. Lord Uesugi has loaned his father some of them. We think the rest are quartered at Uesugi’s villa in Azabu, all the way across the city. Unless we can find Kira quickly, we expect them to come to his aid as soon as they hear of the attack.”
“If we fail to find him, mistress,” Junai said, “we will set fire to the house and commit seppuku.’”
“Sensei...” Cat began.
Oishi raised a few fingers in a gesture of restraint, and Cat fell silent.
He knew that she had been about to ask to go with them. The silence in the room became strained. Hanshiro understood it. He knew he had no place here. Even Lady Asano, for all her determination and skill and noble blood, had no part in this.
For almost two years these men had lived only for this night. They had abandoned their families and destroyed their good names. They were risking the ignominious death of criminals and perhaps subjecting their families to the same fate. They had given up everything to keep faith with their honor. In the process, they had become a unit with a single mind and arm and purpose. They could admit no one else.
Oishi lifted his right leg from under him and by dropping it forward, shifting his weight, lifting the other, and pivoting, he moved along the mat. In his full black hakama he seemed to glide across the floor until, almost knee to knee with Cat, he put his legs under him and settled back on his ankles.
‘ ‘Whether we find our enemy tonight or not,” he said gently, “all who embark on this will die as a result of it.”
“I’m not afraid to die, sensei.”
“I would expect no less of you, my lady. But true courage is in living when it is time to live and dying when it is time to die. In your veins alone flows the blood of your father. If you die before bearing an heir, your father truly dies. While you live, his spirit lives. Future generations depend on you.” Oishi paused to give Cat time to think about his words.
“For me there will be no moment like this one, sensei.” Cat’s grief threatened to overwhelm her, so she retreated behind the barrier of decorum. “None of us can hope to live forever,” she said. “But your names and your devotion will live in the hearts of those to come.” She bowed low. “On behalf of my mother I thank you. I will pray for your success.”
“We are grateful, my lady, that Amida of Immeasurable Light has spared us to see this night. And to see you before we follow our liege on the dark path.” Almost as though he were talking to himself, Oishi quoted Li Po. “ ‘Heaven and earth,’ the poets say, ‘are but a roadside inn for Time, a traveler on a journey through the ages, and our fleeting lives are but phantoms in Time’s dreams.’ “
Oishi was silent for a moment, and when he spoke again his voice for the first time betrayed his weariness. “Please, hime, when you see your mother, tell her I deeply regret the sorrow my actions must have caused her. Tell her she has always been in my thoughts.”
“ I will, sensei.” Cat knew the time had come for her to go.
Hanshiro held a brief, whispered conference with Oishi, then he and Cat left the room. As they walked down the quiet corridor, the voices of the men faded behind them. As though but phantoms in Time’s dream, Cat thought.
She and Hanshiro tied on their sandals at the stone stoop of the veranda and walked out into the night. The temple bell tolled five times, marking the hour of the Dog. They had three long hours until the watch of the Tiger and the raid on Kira’s mansion.
“What did sensei say to you?” Cat asked.
“I volunteered to perform a service.”
Cat was about to ask what service when she saw Viper and his partner. They were standing next to a battered open wickerwork kago, and though they were suitably solemn, the expression in their eyes was triumphant.
Suddenly Cat was exhausted. The temple bell had stopped ringing, but the sound continued to reverberate in her skull. The strain of speaking with her father’s men for the last time had used up the strength that had brought her through the long ordeal of the trip. When Hanshiro helped her into the basket, he was alarmed at how cold her hands were. She settled back against the worn cushions and closed her eyes. Viper draped a ragged quilt over the kago to keep out the worst of the wind.
“The Circle Inn.” Hanshiro’s voice seemed faraway to her. “HonjM-chMnai, HonjM ward.”
Cat imagined she was a snowflake, whirling on a high wind before gently dissolving into nothingness.
CHAPTER 77
A DREAM, AN ILLUSION, A BUBBLE
The seven-foot scroll hanging in the tokonoma contained a single ideogram as long as Hanshiro’s
arm. At the serifs of its bold black strokes, splatters of ink arced out onto the white paper, testimony to the calligrapher’s vigor. The character spelled “DREAM,” the single word the priest and swordsman Takuan was to have written just before he died.
Hanshiro lay on his side with his arm across Cat’s waist and studied the scroll by the dim light of the night lantern. As he stared at it, the ideogram seemed to separate from the soft rice paper and brocade of the scroll and float in the clouds of incense from the bronze pot nearby. It was a universe in itself. Hanshiro knew that each angle of the strokes, each irregularity left by the calligrapher’s brush, had meaning, if he could only interpret it.
The midnight tolling of a distant temple bell told him the time had come to get up. He lay still a few moments longer, breathing in rhythm with Cat and savoring the feel of her body pressed against him. As he lifted his arm off her and eased away, he tucked the quilt around her bare back so the cold air wouldn’t waken her.
His good clothes and the ones Cat had worn as his disciple were draped on racks. Fragrant smoke drifted up from the incense pot under them. Hanshiro’s swords, helmet, long-bow, and quiver of arrows and Cat’s naginata rested on racks in front of the tokonoma.
To retrieve his helmet and bow, Hanshiro had detoured by the tenement where he rented a tiny room. Viper and Cold Rice had waited in the street, standing guard over their borrowed kago and its sleeping occupant while Hanshiro hurried inside. He had been relieved that Cat had been asleep and didn’t see the shabby neighborhood where he lived.
Then they had trotted through the throngs on the tall arc of the Ryogoku Bridge. The Sumida River below had been crowded with boatloads of partygoers eating and drinking and enjoying the moonlight on the snowy landscape. The boat’s strings of lanterns spangled the night. The aroma of broiling eel and the sounds of hand drums and samisens and laughter drifted upward.