Musashi - Eiji Yoshikawa [152]
City folk were fast forgetting the balmy days of Hideyoshi’s regime and instead speculating on what might be gained in the days ahead. It made little difference to them who was in power; so long as they could satisfy their own petty wants, they saw no reason to complain. Nor did Ieyasu disappoint them in this respect, for he contrived to scatter money as he might pass out candy to children. Not his own money, to be sure, but that of his potential enemies.
In agriculture, too, he was instituting a new system of control. No longer were local magnates allowed to govern as they pleased or to conscript farmers at will for outside labor. From now on, the peasants were to be permitted to farm their lands—but to do very little else. They were to be kept ignorant of politics and taught to rely on the powers that be.
The virtuous ruler, to Ieyasu’s way of thinking, was one who did not let the tillers of the soil starve but at the same time ensured that they did not rise above their station; this was the policy by which he intended to perpetuate Tokugawa rule. Neither the townspeople nor the farmers nor the daimyō realized that they were being carefully fitted into a feudal system that would eventually bind them hand and foot. No one was thinking of what things might be like in another hundred years. No one, that is, except Ieyasu.
Nor were the laborers at Fushimi Castle thinking of tomorrow. They had modest hopes of getting through the day, the quicker the better. Though they talked of war and when it might break out, grand plans to maintain peace and increase prosperity had nothing to do with them. Whatever happened, they could not be much worse off than they were.
“Watermelon! Anybody want a watermelon?” called a farmer’s daughter, who came around at this time every day. Almost as soon as she appeared, she managed to make a sale to some men matching coins in the shadow of a large rock. Jauntily, she went on from group to group, calling, “Won’t you buy my melons?”
“You crazy? You think we’ve got money for watermelons?”
“Over here! I’ll be glad to eat one—if it’s free.”
Disappointed because her initial luck had been deceptive, the girl approached a young worker sitting between two boulders, his back propped against one, his feet against the other, and his arms around his knees. “Watermelon?” she asked, not very hopefully.
He was thin, his eyes sunken, and his skin ruddily sunburned. A shroud of fatigue dimmed his obvious youth; still, his closer friends would have recognized him as Hon’iden Matahachi. Wearily he counted some grimy coins into the palm of his hand and gave them to the girl.
When he leaned back against the rock again, his head drooped morosely. The slight effort had exhausted him. Gagging, he leaned to one side and began to spit up on the grass. He lacked the little strength it would have taken to retrieve the watermelon, which had tumbled from his knees. He stared dully at it, his black eyes revealing no trace of strength or hope.
“The swine,” he mumbled weakly. He meant the people he would like to strike back at: Okō, with her whitened face; Takezō, with his wooden sword. His first mistake had been to go to Sekigahara; his second to succumb to the lascivious widow. He had come to believe that but for these two events, he would be at home in Miyamoto now, the head of the Hon’iden family, a husband with a beautiful wife, and the envy of the village.
“I suppose Otsū must hate me now … though I wonder what she’s doing.” In his present circumstances, thinking occasionally of his former fiancée was his only comfort. When Okō’s true nature had finally sunk in, he had