Musashi - Eiji Yoshikawa [11]
“You mean your father was murdered?”
Nodding silently, she began in spite of herself to weep, and Takezō felt something deep inside himself start to thaw. He hadn’t felt much sympathy for the girl at first. Though smaller than most other girls of sixteen, she talked like a grown woman much of the time, and every once in a while made a quick movement that put one on guard. But when the tears began to drop from her long eyelashes, he suddenly melted with pity. He wanted to hug her in his arms, to protect her.
All the same, she was not a girl who’d had anything resembling a proper upbringing. That there was no nobler calling than that of her father seemed to be something she never questioned. Her mother had persuaded her that it was quite all right to strip corpses, not in order to eat, but in order to live nicely. Many out-and-out thieves would have shrunk from the task.
During the long years of feudal strife, it had reached the point where all the shiftless good-for-nothings in the countryside drifted into making their living this way. People had more or less come to expect it of them. When war broke out, the local military rulers even made use of their services, rewarding them generously for setting fire to enemy supplies, spreading false rumors, stealing horses from enemy camps and the like. Most often their services were bought, but even when they were not, a war offered a host of opportunities; besides foraging among corpses for valuables, they could sometimes even wangle rewards for slaying samurai whose heads they’d merely stumbled upon and picked up. One large battle made it possible for these unscrupulous pilferers to live comfortably for six months or a year.
During the most turbulent times, even the ordinary farmer and woodcutter had learned to profit from human misery and bloodshed. The fighting on the outskirts of their village might keep these simple souls from working, but they had ingeniously adapted to the situation and discovered how to pick over the remains of human life like vultures. Partly because of these intrusions, the professional looters maintained strict surveillance over their respective territories. It was an ironclad rule that poachers—namely, brigands who trespassed on the more powerful brigands’ turf—could not go unpunished. Those who dared infringe on the assumed rights of these thugs were liable to cruel retribution.
Akemi shivered and said, “What’ll we do? Temma’s henchmen are on their way here, I just know it.”
“Don’t worry,” Takezō reassured her. “If they do show up, I’ll greet them personally.”
When they came down from the mountain, twilight had descended on the marsh, and all was still. A smoke trail from the bath fire at the house crept along the top of a row of tall rushes like an airborne undulating snake. Okō, having finished applying her nightly makeup, was standing idly at the back door. When she saw her daughter approaching side by side with Takezō, she shouted, “Akemi, what have you been doing out so late?”
There was sternness in her eye and voice. The girl, who had been walking along absentmindedly, was brought up short. She was more sensitive to her mother’s moods than to anything else in the world. Her mother had both nurtured this sensitivity and learned to exploit it, to manipulate her daughter like a puppet with a mere look or gesture. Akemi quickly fled Takezō’s side and, blushing noticeably, ran ahead and into the house.
The next day Akemi told her mother about Tsujikaze Temma. Okō flew into a rage
“Why didn’t you tell me immediately?” she screamed, rushing around like a madwoman, tearing at her hair, taking things out of drawers and closets and piling them all together in the middle of the room.
“Matahachi! Takezō! Give me a hand! We have to hide everything.”
Matahachi shifted a board pointed to by Oka and hoisted himself up above the ceiling. There wasn’t much space between the ceiling and the rafters. One could barely crawl about, but it served Okō’s purpose, and most likely that of her departed husband. Takezō, standing on a stool between