Musashi: Bushido Code (51 page)

The second bottle of sake was empty. While Baiken had drunk a good deal, he pressed even more on Musashi, who had far surpassed his limit and was drunker than he ever had been before.

"Wake up!" Baiken called to his wife. "Let our guest sleep there. You and I can sleep in the back room. Go spread some bedding."

The woman did not budge.

"Get up!" Baiken said more loudly. "Our guest is tired. Let him go to bed now."

His wife's feet were nice and warm now; getting up would be uncomfortable. "You said he could sleep in the smithy with Iwa," she mumbled. "Enough of your back talk. Do as I say!"

She got up in a huff and stalked off to the back room. Baiken took the sleeping baby in his arms and said, "The quilts are old, but the fire's right here beside you. If you get thirsty, there's hot water on it for tea. Go to bed. Make yourself comfortable." He, too, went into the back room.

When the woman came back to exchange pillows, the sullenness was gone from her face. "My husband's very drunk too," she said, "and he's probably tired from his trip. He says he plans to sleep late, so make yourself comfortable and sleep as long as you want. Tomorrow I'll give you a nice hot breakfast."

"Thanks." Musashi could think of nothing more to say. He could hardly wait to get out of his leather socks and cloak. "Thanks a lot."

He dived into the still warm quilts, but his own body was even hotter from drink.

The wife stood in the doorway watching him, then quietly blew out the candle and said, "Good night."

Musashi's head felt as if it had a tight steel band around it; his temples throbbed painfully. He wondered why he had drunk so much more than usual. He felt awful, but couldn't help thinking about Baiken. Why had the blacksmith, who had seemed hardly civil at first, suddenly grown friendly and sent out for more sake? Why had his disagreeable wife become sweet and solicitous all of a sudden? Why had they given him this warm bed?

It all seemed inexplicable, but before Musashi had solved the mystery, drowsiness overcame him. He closed his eyes, took a few deep breaths, and pulled the covers up. Only his forehead remained exposed, lit up by occasion al sparks from the hearth. By and by, there was the sound of deep, steady breathing.

Baiken's wife retreated stealthily into the back room, the pit-a-pat of her feet moving stickily across the tatami.

Musashi had a dream, or rather the fragment of one, which kept repeating itself. A childhood memory flitted about his sleeping brain like an insect, trying, it seemed, to write something in luminescent letters. He heard the words of a lullaby.

Go to sleep, go to sleep.

Sleeping babies are sweet... .

He was back home in Mimasaka, hearing the lullaby the blacksmith's wife had sung in the Ise dialect. He was a baby in the arms of a light-skinned woman of about thirty ... his mother.... This woman must be his mother. At his mother's breast, he looked up at her white face.

". . . naughty, and they make their mothers cry too...." Cradling him in her arms, his mother sang softly. Her thin, well-bred face looked faintly bluish, like a pear blossom. There was a wall, a long stone wall, on which there was liverwort. And a dirt wall, above which branches darkened in the approaching night. Light from a lamp streamed from the house. Tears glistened on his mother's cheeks. The baby looked in wonder at the tears.

"Go away! Go back to your home!'

It was the forbidding voice of Munisai, coming from inside the house. And it was a command. Musashi's mother arose slowly. She ran along a long stone embankment. Weeping, she ran into the river and waded toward the center.

Unable to talk, the baby squirmed in his mother's arms, tried to tell her there was danger ahead. The more he fretted, the more tightly she held him. Her moistened cheek rubbed against his. "Takezō," she said, "are you your father's child, or your mother's?"

Munisai shouted from the bank. His mother sank beneath the water. The baby was cast up on the pebbly bank, where he lay wailing at the top of his lungs amid blooming primroses.

Musashi opened his eyes. When he started to doze off again, a woman—his mother? someone else?—intruded into his dream and woke him again. Musashi could not remember his mother's appearance. He thought of her often, but he couldn't have drawn her face. Whenever he saw another mother, he thought perhaps his own mother had looked the same.

"Why tonight?" he thought.

The sake had worn off. He opened his eyes and gazed at the ceiling. Amid the blackness of the soot was a reddish light, the reflection from the embers in the hearth. His gaze came to rest on the pinwheel suspended from the ceiling above him. He noticed, too, that the smell of mother and child still clung to the bedcovers. With a vague feeling of nostalgia, he lay half asleep, staring at the pinwheel.

The pinwheel started slowly to revolve. There was nothing strange about this; it was made to turn. But ... but not unless there was a breeze! Musashi started to get up, then stopped and listened closely. There was the sound of a door being slid quietly shut. The pinwheel stopped turning.

Musashi quietly put his head back on the pillow and tried to fathom what was going on in the house. He was like an insect under a leaf, attempting to divine the weather above. His whole body was attuned to the slightest change in his surroundings, his sensitive nerves absolutely taut. Musashi knew that his life was in danger, but why?

"Is it a den of robbers?" he asked himself at first, but no. If they were professional thieves, they'd know he had nothing worth stealing.

"Has he got a grudge against me?" That did not seem to work either. Musashi was quite sure he had never even seen Baiken before.

Without being able to figure out a motive, he could feel in his skin and bones that someone or something was threatening his very life. He also knew that whatever it was was very near; he had to decide quickly whether to lie and wait for it to come, or get out of the way ahead of time.

Slipping his hand over the threshold into the smithy, he groped for his sandals. He slipped first one, then the other, under the cover and down to the foot of the bedding.

The pinwheel started to whirl again. In the light of the fire, it turned like a bewitched flower. Footsteps were faintly audible both inside and outside the house, as Musashi quietly wadded the bedding together into the rough shape of a human body.

Under the short curtain hanging in the doorway appeared two eyes, belonging to a man crawling in with his sword unsheathed. Another, carrying a lance and clinging closely to the wall, crept around to the foot of the bed. The two stared at the bedclothes, listening for the sleeper's breathing. Then, like a cloud of smoke, a third man jumped forward. It was Baiken, holding the sickle in his left hand and the ball in his right.

The men's eyes met and they synchronized their breathing. The man at the head of the bed kicked the pillow into the air, and the man at the foot, jumping down into the smithy, aimed his lance at the reclining form.

Keeping the sickle behind him, Baiken shouted, "Up, Musashi!" Neither answer nor movement came from the bedding.

The man with the lance threw back the covers. "He's not here!" he shouted.

Baiken, casting a confused look around the room, caught sight of the rapidly whirling pinwheel. "There's a door open somewhere!" he shouted.

Soon another man cried out angrily. The door from the smithy onto a path that went around to the back of the house was open about three feet, and a biting wind was blowing in.

"He got out through here!"

"What are those fools doing?" Baiken screamed, running outside. From under the eaves and out of the shadows, black forms came forward.

"Master! Did it go all right?" asked a low voice excitedly.

Baiken glowered with rage. "What do you mean, you idiot? Why do you think I put you out here to keep watch? He's gone! He must have come this way .

"Gone? How could he get out?"

"You're asking me? You thick-headed ass!" Baiken went back inside and stamped around nervously. "There are only two ways he could have gone: he either went up to Suzuka ford or back to the Tsu highway. Whichever it was, he couldn't have gone far. Go get him!"

"Which way do you think he went?"

"Ugh! I'll go toward Suzuka. You cover the lower road!"

The men inside joined forces with the men outside, making a motley group of about ten, all armed. One of them, carrying a musket, looked like a hunter; another, with a short field sword, was probably a woodcutter.

As they parted, Baiken shouted, "If you find him, fire the gun, then everybody come together."

They set off at great speed, but after about an hour came straggling back, looking hangdog and talking dejectedly among themselves. They expected a tongue-lashing from their leader, but when they reached the house, they found Baiken sitting on the ground in the smithy, eyes downcast and expressionless.

When they tried to cheer him up, he said, "No use crying about it now." Searching about for a way to vent his wrath, he seized a piece of charred wood and broke it sharply over his knee.

"Bring some sake! I want a drink." He stirred up the fire again and threw on more kindling.

Baiken's wife, trying to quiet the baby, reminded him there was no more sake. One of the men volunteered to bring some from his house, which he did with dispatch. Soon the brew was warm, and the cups were being passed around.

The conversation was sporadic and gloomy.

"It makes me mad."

"The rotten little bastard!"

"He leads a charmed life. I'll say that for him."

"Don't worry about it, master. You did everything you could. The men outside fell down on their job."

Those referred to apologized shamefacedly.

They tried to get Baiken drunk, so he would go to sleep, but he just sat there, frowning at the bitterness of the sake, but taking no one to task for the failure.

Finally, he said, "I shouldn't have made such a big thing out of it, getting so many of you to help. I could have handled him all by myself, but I thought I'd better be careful. After all, he did kill my brother, and Tsujikaze Temma was no mean fighter."

"Could that rōnin really be the boy who was hiding in Okō's house four years ago?"

"He must be. My dead brother's spirit brought him here, I'm sure. At first the thought never crossed my mind, but then he told me he'd been at Sekigahara, and his name used to be Takezō. He's the right age and the right type of person to have killed my brother. I know it was him."

"Come on, master, don't think about it anymore tonight. Lie down. Get some sleep."

They all helped him to bed; someone picked up the pillow that had been kicked aside and put it under his head. The instant Baiken's eyes were closed, the anger that had filled him was replaced by loud snoring.

The men nodded to each other and drifted off, dispersing into the mist of early morning. They were all riffraff—underlings of freebooters like Tsujikaze Temma of Ibuki and Tsujikaze Kōhei of Yasugawa, who now called himself Shishido Baiken. Or else they were hangers-on at the bottom of the ladder in open society. Driven by the changing times, they had become farmers or artisans or hunters, but they still had teeth, which were only too ready to bite honest people when the opportunity arose.

The only sounds in the house were those made by the sleeping inhabitants and the gnawing of a field rat.

In the corner of the passageway connecting the workroom and kitchen, next to a large earthen oven, stood a stack of firewood. Above this hung an umbrella and heavy straw rain capes. In the shadows between the oven and the wall, one of the rain capes moved, slowly and quietly inching up the wall until it hung on a nail.

The smoky figure of a man suddenly seemed to come out of the wall itself. Musashi had never gone a step away from the house. After slipping out from under the covers, he had opened the outer door and then merged with the firewood, drawing the rain cape down over him.

He walked silently across the smithy and looked at Baiken. Adenoids, thought Musashi, for the snoring was thunderous. The situation struck him as humorous, and his face twisted into a grin.

He stood there for a moment, thinking. To all intents and purposes, he had won his bout with Baiken. It had been a clear-cut victory. Still, this man lying here was the brother of Tsujikaze Temma and had tried to murder him to comfort the spirit of his dead brother—an admirable sentiment for a mere freebooter.

Should Musashi kill him? If he left him alive, he would go on looking for an opportunity to take his revenge, and the safe course was doubtless to do away with him here and now. But there remained the question of whether he was worth killing.

Musashi pondered for a time, before hitting on what seemed exactly the right solution. Going to the wall by Baiken's feet, he took down one of the blacksmith's own weapons. While he eased the blade from its groove, he examined the sleeping face. Then, wrapping a piece of damp paper around the blade, he carefully laid it across Baiken's neck; he stepped back and admired his handiwork.

The pinwheel was sleeping too. If it were not for the paper wrapping, thought Musashi, the wheel might wake in the morning and turn wildly at the sight of its master's head fallen from the pillow.

When Musashi had killed Tsujikaze Temma, he had had a reason, and anyway, he had still been burning with the fever of battle. But he had nothing to gain from taking the blacksmith's life. And who could tell? If he did kill him, the infant owner of the pinwheel might spend his life seeking to avenge his father's murder.

It was a night on which Musashi had thought time and again of his own father and mother. He felt a little envious as he stood here by this sleeping family, sensing the faint sweet scent of mother's milk about him. He even felt a little reluctant to take his leave.

In his heart, he spoke to them: "I'm sorry to have troubled you. Sleep well." He quietly opened the outer door and went out.