Musashi - Eiji Yoshikawa [156]
“It’s a spy! A spy from Osaka!”
“They’ll never learn.”
“Kill him! Kill him!”
Rock haulers, earth carriers and others, screaming as though the “spy” were their personal enemy, bore down on the chinless samurai. He darted behind an oxcart shambling through the gate and tried to slip out, but a sentinel caught sight of him and tripped him with a nail-studded staff.
From the overseer’s scaffold came the cry: “Don’t let him escape!”
With no hesitation, the crowd fell upon the miscreant, who counterattacked like a trapped beast. Wresting the staff from the sentinel, he turned on him and with the point of the weapon knocked him down headfirst. After downing four or five more men in similar fashion, he drew his huge sword and took an offensive stance. His captors fell back in terror, but as he prepared to cut his way out of the circle, a barrage of stones descended on him from all directions.
The mob vented its wrath in earnest, its mood all the more murderous because of a deep-seated distaste for all shugyōsha. Like most commoners, these laborers considered the wandering samurai useless, nonproductive and arrogant.
“Stop acting like stupid churls!” cried the beleaguered samurai, appealing for reason and restraint. Though he fought back, he seemed more concerned with chiding his attackers than with avoiding the rocks they hurled. More than a few innocent bystanders were injured in the melee.
Then, in a trice, it was all over. The shouting ceased, and the laborers began moving back to their work stations. In five minutes, the great construction site was exactly as it had been before, as though nothing had happened. The sparks flying from the various cutting instruments, the whinnying of horses half addled by the sun, the mind-numbing heat—all returned to normal.
Two guards stood over the collapsed form, which had been trussed up with a thick hemp rope. “He’s ninety percent dead,” said one, “so we may as well leave him here till the magistrate comes.” He looked around and spotted Matahachi. “Hey, you there! Stand watch over this man. If he dies, it doesn’t make any difference.”
Matahachi heard the words, but his head could not quite take in either their import or the meaning of the event he had just witnessed. It all seemed like a nightmare, visible to his eyes, audible to his ears, but not comprehensible to his brain.
“Life’s so flimsy,” he thought. “A few minutes ago he was absorbed in his sketching. Now he’s dying. He wasn’t very old.”
He felt sorry for the chinless samurai, whose head, lying sideways on the ground, was black with dirt and gore, his face still contorted with anger. The rope anchored him to a large rock. Matahachi wondered idly why the officials had taken such precautions when the man was too near death to make a sound. Or maybe already dead. One of his legs lay grotesquely exposed through a long rip in his hakama, the white shinbone protruding from the crimson flesh. Blood was sprouting from his scalp, and wasps had begun to hover around his matted hair. Ants nearly covered his hands and feet.
“Poor wretch,” thought Matahachi. “If he was studying seriously, he must have had some great ambition in life. Wonder where he’s from … if his parents are still alive.” Matahachi was seized by a peculiar doubt: was he really bemoaning the man’s fate, or was he bothered by the vagueness of his own future? “For a man with ambition,” he reflected, “there ought to be a cleverer way to get ahead.”
This was an age that fanned the hopes of the young, urged them to cherish a dream, prodded them to improve their status in life. An age, indeed, in which even someone like Matahachi might have visions of rising from nothing to become the master of a castle. A modestly talented warrior could get by simply by traveling from temple to temple and living on the charity of the priests. If he was lucky, he might be taken in by one of the provincial gentry, and if