Musashi - Eiji Yoshikawa [144]
“Otsū couldn’t be here at Koyagyū!” he told himself. “My ears must be playing tricks on me…. Still, it’s not impossible. It could have been her.”
As he debated with himself, he envisioned Otsū’s eyes among the stars above him, and soon he was carried away by memories: Otsū at the pass on the Mimasaka-Harima border, where she had said she could not live without him, there was no other man in the world for her. Then at Hanada Bridge in Himeji, when she had told him how she had waited for him for nearly a thousand days and would have waited ten years, or twenty—until she was old and gray. Her begging him to take her with him, her assertion that she could bear any hardship.
His headlong flight at Himeji had been a betrayal. How she must have hated him after that! How she must have bit her lips and cursed the unpredictability of men.
“Forgive me!” The words he had carved on the railing of the bridge slipped from his lips. Tears seeped from the corners of his eyes.
He was startled by a cry from the top of the moat. It sounded like, “He’s not here.” Three or four pine torches flickered among the trees, then disappeared. They hadn’t spotted him.
He was annoyed to find himself weeping. “What do I need with a woman?” he said scornfully, wiping his eyes with his hands. He jumped to his feet and looked up at the black outline of Koyagyū Castle.
“They called me a coward, said I couldn’t fight like a man! Well, I haven’t surrendered yet, not by a long shot. I didn’t run away. I just made a tactical retreat.”
Almost an hour had passed. He began walking slowly along the bottom of the moat. “No point in fighting those four anyway. That wasn’t my aim to begin with. When I find Sekishūsai himself, then the real battle will start.”
He stopped and began gathering fallen branches, which he broke into short sticks over his knee. Shoving them one by one into cracks in the stone wall, he used them for footholds and climbed out of the moat.
He could no longer hear the flute. For a second he had the vague feeling Jōtarō was calling, but when he stopped and listened closely, he could hear nothing. He wasn’t really worried about the boy. He could take care of himself; he was probably miles away by now. The absence of torches indicated the search had been called off, at least for the night.
The thought of finding and defeating Sekishūsai was once again his controlling passion, the immediate shape taken by his overpowering desire for recognition and honor.
He had heard from the innkeeper that Sekishūsai’s retreat was in neither of the castle encirclements but in a secluded spot in the outer grounds. He walked through the woods and valleys, at times suspecting he had strayed outside the castle grounds. Then a bit of moat, a stone wall or a rice granary would reassure him he was still inside.
All night he searched, compelled by a diabolic urge. He intended, once he had found the mountain house, to burst in with his challenge on his lips. But as the hours wore on, he would have welcomed the sight of even a ghost appearing in Sekishūsai’s form.
It was getting on toward daybreak when he found himself at the back gate of the castle. Beyond it rose a precipice and above that Mount Kasagi. On the verge of screaming with frustration, he retraced his steps southward. Finally, at the bottom of a slope inclined toward the southeast quarter of the castle, well-shaped trees and well-trimmed grass told him he’d found the hideaway. His conjecture was soon confirmed by a gate, with a thatched roof, in the style favored by the great tea master Sen no Rikyū. Inside he could make out a bamboo grove shrouded in morning mist.
Peeking through a crack in the gate, he saw that the path meandered through the grove and up the hill, as in Zen Buddhist mountain retreats. For a moment he was tempted to leap over the fence, but he checked himself; something about the surroundings held him back. Was it the loving care that had been lavished on the area, or the sight of white petals on the ground? Whatever it was, the sensitivity of the occupant came through,