Musashi - Eiji Yoshikawa [146]
“It’s a good thing I read this,” Musashi said to himself. “If I hadn’t, I’d have made a perfect fool of myself!”
With the sun now fairly high in the sky, the nightingales’ singing had subsided. From a distance up the hill came the sound of rapid footsteps. Apparently frightened by the clatter, a flock of little birds arced up into the sky. Musashi peeped through the gate to see who was coming.
It was Otsū.
So it had been her flute he had heard! Should he wait and meet her? Go away? “I want to talk with her,” he thought. “I must!”
Indecision seized him. His heart palpitated and his self-confidence fled. Otsū ran down the path to a point a few feet from where he stood. Then she stopped and turned back, uttering a little cry of surprise.
“I thought he was right behind me,” she murmured, looking all around. Then she ran back up the hill, calling, “Jōtarō! Where are you?”
Hearing her voice, Musashi flushed with embarrassment and began to sweat. His lack of confidence disgusted him. He couldn’t move from his hiding place in the shadow of the trees.
After a short interval, Otsū called again, and this time there was an answer.
“I’m here. Where are you?” shouted Jōtarō from the upper part of the grove. “Over here!” she replied. “I told you not to wander off like that.”
Jōtarō came running toward her. “Oh, is this where you are?” he exclaimed. “Didn’t I tell you to follow me?”
“Well, I did, but then I saw a pheasant, so I chased it.”
“Of all things, chasing after a pheasant! Did you forget you have to go look for somebody important this morning?”
“Oh, I’m not worried about him. He’s not the kind to get hurt.”
“Well, that’s not the way it was last night when you came running to my room. You were ready to burst into tears.”
“I was not! It just happened so fast, I didn’t know what to do.”
“I didn’t either, especially after you told me your teacher’s name.” “But how do you know Musashi?”
“We come from the same village.”
“Is that all?”
“Of course that’s all.”
“That’s funny. I don’t see why you should start crying just because somebody from the same village turned up here.”
“Was I crying that much?”
“How can you remember everything I did, when you can’t remember what you did yourself? Anyway, I guess I was pretty scared. If it’d just been a matter of four ordinary men against my teacher, I wouldn’t have worried, but they say all of them are experts. When I heard the flute I remembered you were here in the castle, so I thought maybe if I could apologize to his lordship—”
“If you heard me playing, Musashi must have heard it too. He may even have known it was me.” Her voice softened. “I was thinking of him as I played.”
“I don’t see what difference that makes. Anyway, I could tell from the sound of the flute where you were.”
“And that was quite a performance—storming into the house and screaming about a ‘battle’ going on somewhere. His lordship was pretty shocked.”
“But he’s a nice man. When I told him I’d killed Tarō, he didn’t get mad like all the others.”
Suddenly realizing she was wasting time, Otsū hurried toward the gate. “We can talk later,” she said. “Right now there are more important things to do. We’ve got to find Musashi. Sekishūsai even broke his own rule by saying he’d like to meet the man who’d done what you said.”
Otsū looked as cheerful as a flower. In the bright sun of early summer, her cheeks shone like ripening fruit. She sniffed at the young leaves and felt their freshness fill her lungs.
Musashi, hidden in the trees, watched her intently, marveling at how healthy she looked. The Otsū he saw now was very different from the girl who had sat dejectedly on the porch of the Shippōji, looking out at the world with vacant eyes. The difference was that then Otsū had had no one to love. Or at least, such love as she had felt had been vague and difficult to pin down. She had been a sentimental child, self-conscious about being an orphan, and somewhat resentful of the fact.
Coming to know Musashi, having him to look