The Tokaido Road Read online

  Cat bowed low. “The Buddha will remember your gift, kind sir,” she said. And I will remember your face, she thought. And if we meet under different circumstances, I will separate your head from your shoulders.

  Ignoring their laughter, she moved on through the crowd, begging her way toward the head of the line. By the time she reached the gate she had emptied the bowl of the kago bearer’s contribution, but nothing else had taken its place. The people of Edo seemed to have no time for charity or religion.

  With heart pounding she passed between the guards and walked to the open-fronted building where the government’s officials sat. White bunting decorated with the three hollyhock leaves of the Tokugawa crest hung from the eaves of the porch.

  The magistrate hardly glanced at Cat when she stood before him. He sat cross-legged on a cushion on a tatami-covered dais and leaned on an elbow cushion. His assistant sat at a low writing table covered with sheafs of paper and ink pads and stamps. Behind him, on a lower level, the captain of the guard and three of his men sat back on their heels.

  Cat had rehearsed her story, but the magistrate didn’t even question her. His assistant waved her past.

  Cat’s knees felt weak as she walked through the opposite gate. Beyond it was the broad TMkaidM, the great road called the Eastern Seaway. While Cat leaned on her staff to calm her racing heart, a pack train passed. The bells on the horses’ bridles jingled merrily. Just ahead of Cat walked a group of pilgrims who also wore bells. They were singing and clapping time and improvising dance steps as they went. Their straw sandals kicked up little explosions of dust.

  “Holy man.”

  Cat jumped when the old man tugged at her sleeve.

  “Holy man, please accept this unworthy donation for your temple.” The man was bent and worn, and his clothes hung about him in tatters. The ten-mon piece he held out must have been most of what he had.

  “You need this more than I, grandfather,” Cat said.

  “Excuse my rudeness, but you would honor me by taking it. It will bring me the blessing of Buddha.” The old man bowed low and hobbled off before Cat could say anything else.

  Cat stood in the center of the busy traffic and looked down the wide road. Its raised, hard-packed earthen surface was unmarred by ruts. Wheeled vehicles weren’t allowed on it. Rebel armies could be fed and armed with the contents of wheeled vehicles.

  On both sides of the TMkaidM, huge pine trees provided shade. The brown mosaic of rice paddies and irrigation ditches of the plain of Musashi came right to its verges. At the other end of the TMkaidM, one hundred and twenty-five ri away, lay KyMto, the Western Capital of Peace and Tranquillity. According to Shichisaburo, Oishi spent his nights in Shimabara, KyMto’s pleasure district. Cat’s hopes and all her prospects of avenging her father resided there.

  Musashi wrote that the journey of a thousand ri began with the first step. A stranger in her native country, Cat drew a deep breath of chill winter air and took the first step.

  CHAPTER 8

  THE WHITE WAKE

  The parrot perched on a thin cotton towel spread across Old Jug Face’s shoulder. As usual when he was nervous, he searched under the second cloth tied around her head as a kerchief. When he found her pendulous earlobe, he nibbled it and murmured to her.

  “Centipede says you’re the best.” Old Jug Face’s dubious expression was understandable. Hanshiro didn’t look prosperous. He didn’t even look solvent. He grunted noncommittally.

  “The best is required for this situation,” Old Jug Face hastened on. She didn’t want to offend him. Centipede said he was particular about the jobs he accepted. She shuffled along, close on his tabi-clad heels as he crossed the room where Cat had entertained her last guest.

  “People in high places want her kept here. Out of the way,” Old Jug Face whispered. She knew that servants, both her own and a few sent by Lord Kira to spy, were listening intently in the nearby rooms.

  Hanshiro grunted again. Kira was at quite a disadvantage. The shMgun disapproved of him. Members of the upper class ridiculed him. The rabble despised him.

  If the mistress of the Perfumed Lotus was telling the truth, Lord Asano had had an outside-wife and child. Kira must fear that the daughter would coalesce a vendetta among Asano’s former retainers. The fact that Asano’s daughter had disappeared on the monthly anniversary of her father’s death must have Kira agitated.

  Hanshiro stood in the doorway between Cat’s small dressing room and the bedchamber. They were both tidy. The soiled quilt and the blowfish were gone. After Hanshiro had inspected the single slice of fugu and its garnish of dead flies and cockroaches, servants had cleared it away.

  Hanshiro read the titles of the books on Cat’s shelf. They consisted of classics and all five volumes of Musashi’s Book of Five Rings instead of the usual bawdy romances.

  Pretensions of intellect, he thought. He unrolled a scroll and studied the calligraphy. An exceptionally good hand for a woman. The characters were drawn with a boldness that was almost masculine.

  “Is she kurage, a change of saddles?”

  “No, she’s not a habitual runaway. This is the first time she’s disappeared. All her clothes are still here and at the Carp.”

  Hanshiro was bored. He had heard this story many times before, with only the slightest variations. Women had no sense. They ran away with the first man who rolled his eyes, waved his cucumber of love, and pledged his everlasting devotion. As soon as he lured them out of the Yoshiwara, he resold them elsewhere.

  The dressing room was elegantly furnished, but that was to be expected. According to what the mistress had reluctantly divulged, the courtesan named Cat had come from a good family. Her mother’s people had been of noble stock, sturdy of arm, strong of spirit, but empty of purse. She was probably pampered. Spoiled. Vain.

  “I don’t know how this happened.” Old Jug Face was still frantically sorting through possible ways to avoid blame for the disaster. “Centipede says he saw Lady Asano’s guest near the Great Gate at the hour of the Rat, but he didn’t see her. Of course there was an unfortunate accident at the gate last night.”

  Hanshiro didn’t even bother to grunt. He had drawn both arms inside the capacious sleeves of his rumpled, dusty-black jacket and crossed them over his taut stomach. He poked one hand through the frayed diagonal of the neck opening and scratched the dark stubble on his cheek. The beard, streaked with a few wiry gray hairs, blurred the angles of his high cheekbones and strong jaw, but his dark, brooding eyes glowed clear and sharp and with an intensity that bordered on the savage.

  He obviously hadn’t been to a hairdresser in a long time. The wide strip of scalp from his forehead to his crown was supposed to have been shaved. Instead it bristled with a half-inch pelt. The long black hair around it had been caught up into a shaggy whisk at the crown of his head and carelessly wrapped and tied with a cord of rice straw.

  He was slightly taller than average and solid, with muscular arms and shoulders and big hands. He was forty-one, born in the year of the Tiger. In a lifetime of adversity he had learned that he could depend only on himself.

  Hanshiro didn’t like to ask questions, but now and then they were the quickest if not the best way to get answers. He didn’t want to waste any more time on this job than necessary. He was tired of cases involving runaways. He had taken this one because the story of the young woman’s downfall had piqued his curiosity.

  “Your servants have checked everywhere?”

  “Oh, yes.” Old Jug Face’s parrot muttered to himself and scanned longingly for his cage. “She’s not in the district.”

  Hanshiro put his arms back through his sleeves. He was left-handed, and as he knelt, his right hand moved reflexively to his side. He intended to push his long-sword’s sharkskin-covered hilt down so its tip would swing upward away from the tatami; but his long-sword was in Centipede’s care.

  Hanshiro’s blunt index finger and thumb closed delicately around a few black silken threads lying on the dark gr
een binding where two mats met. When he held the hairs up, they hung down a foot and a half on each side of his fingers. Old Jug Face stared at them as a mouse would watch a snake. Her own stubby fingers were interlaced under the light mauve apron she wore over her brown checked robe. Her hands were clenched so tightly that white ellipses formed at the knuckles.

  Old Jug Face was almost thirty-nine in a profession where the foot soldiers were dismissed as middle-aged at twenty-five. She had struggled to fortify herself a comfortable redoubt here. She made a hundred mon in squeeze from every ichibu a customer spent on food. She made a percentage on the maids’ and servants’ tips and the courtesans’ fees. Now she was terrified that Lord Kira would have her turned out, as she herself had turned out women too old to attract trade.

  “The woman’s guest probably didn’t leave,” Hanshiro said.

  “But Centipede saw him, just before the metsuke ...” The possibility of a link between Cat’s disappearance and the fire that had consumed Lord Kira’s cousin hit Old Jug Face. She looked like a crow that had just flown headlong into a wall.

  In a daze she plucked the parrot off her shoulder. When she cradled the bird in her arms he struggled briefly, sneezed, then subsided. Hanshiro could tell that his latest employer was staring straight into the leer of her own mortality. He wasn’t given to jocularity, but he almost smiled at the look on her face.

  Hanshiro went to the rear wall panel and slid it open. He looked up and down the back corridor. No woman, especially none of Cat’s rank, cut off three feet of her hair unless she intended to become a nun.

  “Was she religious?” he asked without turning around.

  “Not particularly, although she read the holy scriptures each day.”

  “And the fugu, the blowfish?”

  “A terrible accident.”

  “You had an unusual number of accidents here last night.”

  “Nothing like that has ever happened in the Perfumed Lotus before. My fugu man is a qualified fish surgeon. Never in his ...”

  Hanshiro held up a hand to quiet her. He wasn’t concerned with what was probably a murder. He wasn’t being hired to solve that. Nor did he want to be. Missing people weren’t usually very interesting, but they were more interesting than dead ones.

  “No one else was with her?”

  “Her little maid slept in another room last night.”

  Hanshiro prowled the narrow back corridor toward the dark doorway to the storeroom. He walked with a straddle-legged swagger and a slight limp. If the long, divided, pleated skirts of his hakama had been new and crisp, they would have flared almost to the wall on either side. But this hakama was limp and faded from black to a streaked bluish gray. The hems had raveled into a pale fringe. Even the tips of the fringe were frayed.

  Behind him Hanshiro heard the rustle and squeak of women. He knew the maids were fluttering like radiant butterflies behind the paper walls, trying to see and hear. He could picture them whispering behind their sleeves. For a morning, at least, they had more on their minds than hairdos.

  Hanshiro stood in the doorway of the storeroom and tried to conjure up the image of Cat, the woman who was to have been Lady Asano. He tried to form her from her handwriting and from the scent that lingered in her rooms. Was she a fugitive or a victim or a murderer?

  The sun shone through cracks in the wall and painted gilt stripes on the sacks and barrels. Dust motes frolicked in the sunbeams. When his eyes adjusted to the gloom, Hanshiro saw the traces of Butterfly’s broom and the trail of the quilt. He saw the freshly scattered dust, lighter in color than the rest, on the sake barrels. Cat’s white wake, left in her flight.

  He thought of the old poem.

  To what shall I compare

  this world?

  To the white wake behind

  A ship that has rowed away

  at dawn.

  Hanshiro rapped the sides of the sake barrels with the pry bar. He opened the rear one and peered inside. The corpse was naked. Was Lady Asano wearing the guest’s rented clothes? “Here,” he grunted.

  “The woman we seek?” Old Jug Face’s blocky silhouette filled the lighted doorway.

  “No.” Hanshiro felt something that was almost admiration, but not quite. After all, she couldn’t have done this herself. She had an accomplice.

  He crossed one possibility off the list. She might be a fugitive and/or a murderer, but she probably wasn’t a victim. Yet.

  When Old Jug Face looked inside the barrel, she gave a strangled scream and pressed her hands to her painted mouth. She looked around in panic, trying to figure out how she could hide this from the authorities and knowing she couldn’t.

  Without another word Hanshiro strode toward the back door. The madam had given him a list of Cat’s regular guests. He would start with them.

  Old Jug Face scurried after him. “Find her before she bothers Lord Kira, and I’ll pay you extra.” And add the cost to Lady Asano’s debt, Hanshiro thought. When he reached the back stoop, the Perfumed Lotus’s sandal man appeared on the run around the corner. Lowly as his job was, he was a master at it. He carried Hanshiro’s tattered, muddy straw footgear without a hint of distaste. Hanshiro stood on the back stoop while the sandal bearer tied them over his worn tabi, then bowed repeatedly and disappeared.

  The broad eaves of the two brothels almost met overhead. Hanshiro looked down the gloomy alley to the ribbon of sunlight at the end, to the slice of bustling street life visible there.

  It was happening as it usually did.

  Hanshiro was always alert; but once the chase started something stirred and stretched inside him. Something yawned and flashed long, ivory fangs and a pink predator’s tongue. Something sniffed the odors on the eddies of the wind and rumbled hungrily far back in its throat.

  When he was twenty-five Hanshiro had joined the ranks of unemployed samurai called rMnin, which meant, roughly, “men adrift on life’s seas.” In the fifteen years since then he had earned a precarious living in the shifting, elusive field of endeavor called the Water Trade. The Water Trade was made up of gamblers and procurers, of sake-and-bathhouse proprietors, aunties, courtesans, prostitutes, and entertainers.

  Hanshiro found lost things—people, treasure, honor. Enough people, treasure, and honor were misplaced in the Yoshiwara to keep him busy full-time. He didn’t often have the sums of money necessary to patronize the assignation houses, but he was a familiar figure here nonetheless.

  Hanshiro went directly to the Great Gate, where he planned to exchange his numbered wooden ticket for information as well as for his weapon. Centipede’s assistant knew better than to retrieve Hanshiro’s sword. He stood back, bowing, while Centipede himself accepted the ticket and went into the gate house.

  Even though Hanshiro’s Kanesada blade was in its scabbard, Centipede carried it on a silk cloth laid across both palms. He bowed low over it when he held it out. The bow was more out of respect for the curved, slender, two-hundred-year-old length of silvery-blue steel than for its present owner. Mortals passed into other existences, but the spirit of a sword like this endured forever.

  With the trailing edge of the silk cloth, Centipede lovingly polished the horse roundels of mother-of-pearl inlay on the copper-and-gold-flecked lacquered ground of the scabbard. The crows circling the round brass hilt guard represented the New Shadow school of strategy.

  Centipede sighed. “The inferior new blades can’t match those of the KotM masters.”

  Hanshiro grunted. He knew that if he kept silent, Centipede’s curiosity would do most of his work for him.

  Centipede had acquired his nickname in his youth when he had been so fast with two swords, he’d looked as though he had extra arms. Like Hanshiro, he was a rMnin. His master had died in the bed of a famous kabuki actor during the great Fire-of-the-Long-Sleeved-Garment forty-five years ago. The ignominy lay not in the fact that the lord had died with ano mono, “that thing,” splitting the melon of another man, but that he had died in bed instead of in battle. The
tragedy had given rise to a lot of sly poetry about the heat of his passion.

  A true warrior observed a quota of one lord per lifetime, and the government forbade loyal retainers from following their masters into the spirit world. Besides, the country had been plagued by peace since Tokugawa Ieyasu had taken power a hundred years ago. Warriors, especially unemployed ones, were as welcome as fleas in a low-class inn, and about as plentiful. Since the gay life in the Yoshiwara had always suited Centipede, he had decided to make a career of his hobby.

  Now his hobby was accumulating rumors. He had quite a large collection of them, but he shared it with very few people.

  Centipede left his assistant in charge of the gate. The district was deserted by all but merchants’ clerks and service people at this hour anyway. He invited Hanshiro into the tiny gate house for a cup of tea.

  As he poured, Centipede drew air in through his teeth with a hissing noise. He was concentrating on finding the best way to start the conversation. He was mortified that his carelessness had allowed Cat to disappear. He even felt responsible for the accidental death of the metsuke, and he suspected the two events were related somehow.

  He decided on noncommittal. “There was some excitement here last night.”

  “So there was.” Hanshiro was a master at noncommittal.

  The two sipped in silence for a while.

  “She’ll have a difficult time hiding,” Centipede observed. “She’s very beautiful.”

  “A bell cricket is kept in a cage because of its song.”

  “The bannerman must be worried.” Centipede couldn’t resist mentioning Kira’s lower rank.

  “Keisei,” Hanshiro said, and Centipede laughed.

  Beautiful women were called keisei, “castle falling in ruins,” because they often led to the destruction of men and kingdoms. One had destroyed Hanshiro’s young lord in Tosa fifteen years ago. The young man had squandered his portion of his family’s fortune for the favors of an arrogant, fickle courtesan. His father had posted an act of disownment. Humiliated, impoverished, cut off from his family, the young man had shaved his head and become a mendicant monk. And so, indirectly, a beautiful woman had ruined Hanshiro also and changed the course of his life.