The Tokaido Road (1991)(528p) (67 page)

When Cat had dressed she draped a large cloth over her bare head. She folded the sides down along her cheeks and tied it under her chin. Hanshiro lit incense in his shallow, bowl-shaped black-lacquer helmet. If things went awry tonight, if warfare broke out in HonjM and his head were taken, it would be fragrant.

He and Cat lit more incense in front of the ornate lacquered cupboard that housed the altar. They each put their palms together, bowed their heads, and prayed to Amida Buddha and to the god of warriors. In unison they softly chanted the Diamond
sutra.

Every phenomenon is like a dream,

an illusion, a bubble, a shadow;

It is like dew and also like lightning.

So is all to be seen.

They burned their messages to each other. Hanshiro stuck his swords into his sash and put his coat over them. He hung his helmet from the sash. He tied the quiver on his back so the fan of arrows stood up over his head. He picked up his long bow.

When he gave Cat the heavy fireman’s coat, tears welled up suddenly in her eyes. She stroked the stiff canvas.

“My father ...” She paused until her voice was steady enough to go on. “My father took great care with his fire brigade.”

Lord Asano’s fire company had numbered more than fifty men, picked from the strongest and handsomest of the AkM-Asano retainers. They were better equipped and trained than any in their part of Edo. Cat remembered how proud she had always felt when she had watched them drill. They had looked so impressive in their leather coats, with their pikes and fire hooks on their shoulders.

Hanshiro helped Cat adjust the hood of the coat. He held her face in his big hands and laid his forehead against hers. He brushed her lips with his. She picked up the
naginata,
and they went out into the silence of the snowy street.

THE ULTIMATE OF SWORDSMANSHIP

As in all of Edo, gates shut off most of HonjM’s narrow side streets. The gatekeepers slept inside the small gate houses. Those of the main street, a thoroughfare that ran north from the Ryogoku Bridge, were open to
facilitate movement in case of fire. Hanshiro and Cat strode down the center of it. A light snow earlier in the evening had covered the layer dirtied by the day’s traffic. It silenced the tread of their sandals, but they made no special effort to be quiet.

They had no need to skulk. They were going about their duties as part of HonjM’s latest innovation, a merchants’ fire brigade. Of course, paired swords, a
naginata,
a seven-foot bow, and a quiver full of arrows weren’t standard fire-fighting equipment, but Chubei had assured Hanshiro that no one would interfere with him and Lady Asano.

They entered HonjM’s commercial district. The streets were lined with the dark wooden shutters of shops and tenements. Hanshiro led the way past fire buckets stacked against a large house. Like the others here, the house fronted directly on the roadway. The ladder to the fire watch’s rooftop lookout leaned against the first-floor overhang.

Cat started up it. She climbed past the first- and second-story eaves to the small platform built above the roof peak. This was Chubei’s house. Between it and the open workshop behind it was a small garden, exquisitely designed and ethereally beautiful in the moonlight. Cat was astonished to find it attached to a carpenter’s house.

Edo was built on low land that was fairly level. For as far as Cat could see stretched the jumble of snow-covered roofs, none more than two stories high. Except for a distant five-storied pagoda, only rooftop drying racks and spindly fire towers rose above the undulating expanse of white.

When Cat turned around, her
naginata
hit the bronze bell hanging from the center of the platform’s roof. In the stillness it set up a metallic rumble that seemed loud enough to wake the whole district or at least the household sleeping below her.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered as Hanshiro’s head appeared. Her breath formed a cloud in the cold air, and she shivered.

“Don’t worry,” Hanshiro said. “It could hardly be heard from below.”

The full moon seemed inordinately large and almost close enough to touch. It was beginning to descend in the southern sky, but it lit everything with a silvery clarity. The snow reflected and intensified the light. From the platform, Cat and Hanshiro could see the Sumida River and the Ryogoku Bridge to the west.

To the north and east were the residences of the lords. Their walled compounds of gardens and outbuildings, servants’ quarters, family shrines, and rambling houses were scattered among the pines. In Edo’s crowded center near the walls of the
shMgun’s
castle, the lords’ “upper” mansions were set one against each other. That was why so many of the government’s retired officials had chosen to build their “middle” mansions here.

The middle mansions were where the lords’ families lived and where they had room to quarter their retainers in barracks along the inner side of the wall facing the street. Kira’s middle mansion only had two small rooms next to the armory near the gate. His guards were crowded into them.

“Which is Kira’s?” Cat asked.

Hanshiro pointed with his fan. “Where the branches of the pine hang over the wall.”

Cat found the gate of Kira’s compound. She studied the barracks roofs and the inner courtyard where the palanquins and carriages of guests were received. Beyond the courtyard’s low wall lay Kira’s garden and private quarters.

Cat followed the angular meandering of the mansion’s roof-lines. She memorized the wings and ells, the verandas and covered corridors, connecting the main part of the house with the family’s rooms at the rear of it. Somewhere under those roofs Lord Kira was sleeping.

“The men should pass by here,” Hanshiro said. “Yogoro’s rice shop is past the brewery, three blocks down and across the street.”

The brewery was easy to distinguish from the other shops. Its symbol, a huge brown globe of dried cypress needles, hung from the second-story gable. Nothing stirred in the streets except the occasional cat and a rat that scuttled along the white plaster walls of a warehouse. But Cat stared as though she could have looked through the roof of the rice shop and seen the men inside. She tried to imagine what they were doing, what they were saying. What they were feeling.

Cat and Hanshiro stood with their hands on the railing and their sleeves touching and surveyed the moonlit, snow-shrouded walls and houses and trees below. The streets and rooftops seemed empty, but they weren’t.

Cat walked around the platform looking for signs of Viper and his friends. She knew they must be hiding behind the big tubs of water on the roofs or behind fences or in the narrow side streets, but she could see no one.

“They’re very good,” she whispered. Perhaps some of the stories she had heard about the
machi yakko
hadn’t been exaggerated after all.

“There.” Hanshiro pointed with his iron fan to a roof several blocks away.

Moon shadow faintly outlined footprints leading up the roof’s slope to the huge wooden barrel of water, stored there in case of fire. Cat realized that what few traces of the
machi yakko
she could detect were in the area around Kira’s mansion.

“Chubei swore his men wouldn’t interfere.” Hanshiro answered Cat’s unspoken doubt. He expected Chubei to keep his word, but he wasn’t surprised to see the
machi yakko
keeping watch. They wouldn’t miss the chance to see this night’s battle.

Cat and Hanshiro looked down the street toward the bridge and canal that separated HonjM from Fukagawa, the next ward to the south. If Lord Uesugi sent reinforcements, they would most likely approach from that direction.

“We’re to ring the fire bell once if we see them coming,” Hanshiro said.

A temple bell began tolling the seventh watch, the hour of the Tiger. Its notes hung, expectant, on the air. Cat gripped Hanshiro’s arm to keep her own hands from trembling. The hairs on the back of her neck stirred, and her heart pounded. She felt transcendently aware, as though through the walls of Yogoro’s rice shop she could hear the forty-seven men breathe. As though she could smell the incense with which they had perfumed their helmets.

The last note had faded when Cat heard the faint rasp of a wooden shutter being slid back. The AkM
rMnin
began fanning out from the front door of the shop. Cat strained to distinguish individuals as they formed into a double line. When they moved out from under the eaves, they and their weapons threw a bristling shadow, like a long, spiked dragon, onto the snow.

For more freedom of movement, they had wrapped leggings around the bottoms of their
hakama.
As a disguise they wore the heavy canvas hooded capes of a warriors’ fire brigade. Their sleeves were tied back to reveal mail gauntlets under matching black broadcloth coats with large white triangles around the cuffs and hems. The white design would be easier to see in the dark corridors of Kira’s mansion and would identify the men to each other.

Some men had on helmets. Others had tied cloth bands around their heads. They carried paired swords in their sashes, of course, but they were also armed with spears and
naginata,
bows, arrows, and staffs. Rust on a man’s weapon indicated corrosion of his spirit, and every blade had been polished until the moonlight glinted off it.

Some of the men had stuck thin poles into the backs of their sashes so that the small cloth banners attached to them waved above their heads. They had written their death names on the banners.

A few men carried bamboo ladders and heavy, long-handled mallets. Several held large, truncated cones of blackened cypress veneer with handles at the narrow ends. The cones were lanterns with gimballed candles that could direct a beam of light at the enemy while leaving the bearer in shadow.

Kanzaki Yogoro led the procession. He was followed by a man holding up a pole with a small box on the end of it. Cat knew the box must contain the AkM
rMnin’s
statement of purpose.

Oishi walked behind the box bearer. He carried a battle drum by a cord loop. The drum’s head was painted with the twin red
yin
and
yang
symbols, the crest of the Yamaga school of strategy. His expression was calm.

As Cat watched him approach she murmured the ancient poem.

Yamato is a land

Where the word-spirit aids us.

Be happy. Fare you well!

When she saw Oishi look around she started, even though she knew that spoken words possessed a spirit of their own. They could carry out the speaker’s wishes, and perhaps Cat’s words had made themselves felt.

The moonlight was so bright that the men had no need of lanterns. No one spoke. Their presence was announced only by the crunch of their straw sandals in the fresh snow and by the muted rattle of metal and wood. It was an archaic noise, an echo from the centuries of warfare that had preceded this one. It was a sound not often heard in the streets of Edo.

Hanshiro had been raised as a warrior, but he had never seen men march into battle. He had thought the warrior spirit extinguished by the corrupting influence of money and the decadence of his generation. He knew the Edo had never seen the equal of this procession, nor would it be likely to again.

Cat and Hanshiro watched the double column move down the empty street. Then it turned a corner and was lost to sight. Cat stared, rapt, at the buildings hiding her father’s men until they reappeared at the head of Matsuzaka Street. When the procession reached the corner of Kira’s wall, it divided, like a stream flowing around a boulder. Chikara and his men separated and headed for the rear of the compound.

Oishi and the rest walked to the front gate. The warriors crouched in the snow while those with the ladders leaned them against the eaves of the gate’s wide roof. Men climbed the ladders and eased up the slope of the gate roof until they could look over the peak into the compound beyond. As Cat watched them, the silence of their movements gave the scene the quality of a dream.

A few of Oishi’s men scrambled up over the gate roof and dropped into the courtyard below. Cat couldn’t see them there, but they must have overpowered the night watch huddled around their brazier in the gate house, because soon the heavy doors swung slowly open. Those with the gimballed lanterns lit them.

Oishi raised the war drum and held it poised and silent until Cat wanted to shout to him to give the signal. Finally he hit the drum sharply with the drumstick. A heartbeat later Cat heard the hollow report. It was followed by the faint crash of huge wooden mallets against the smaller back gate. Oishi’s men crowded through the front gate. Oishi and two of his older lieutenants, Hara Soyemon and Mase Kyudaiyu, stationed themselves outside to repel reinforcements and to stop those inside from escaping.

Cat leaned out from the railing, as though she could fly to join her father’s men. She heard shouting and saw Kira’s guards burst from their tiny rooms along the front wall. They were barefoot and half-dressed. Their uncombed hair hung down around their shoulders, but most of them had their swords drawn. The clash of blades rang out over the men’s shouts.

Long beams from the lanterns flashed and swooped. Their light caught parts of the combatants—a leg, an arm, a face contorted with rage—and froze them for an instant like some artist’s depiction of war. Some of the AkM
rMnin
held off the guards in the courtyard while the rest charged up the steps onto the veranda. They battered down the door of the entrance hall, and women began screaming from inside the house.

“They’re getting away.” Cat pointed to two men running across the garden. The men threw a gardener’s ladder against the wall on the far side and climbed over. They dropped to the street below and raced for the Sumida River.  “We should warn Oishi.” Cat started for the ladder, but Hanshiro held her arm.