Musashi - Eiji Yoshikawa [213]
The chain. The sickle. Two hands…
As he listened, the seeds of other thoughts formed in his mind. “The sword can be used with one hand, but a man has two hands….”
The second bottle of sake was empty. While Baiken had drunk a good deal, he pressed even more on Musashi, who had far surpassed his limit and was drunker than he ever had been before.
“Wake up!” Baiken called to his wife. “Let our guest sleep there. You and I can sleep in the back room. Go spread some bedding.”
The woman did not budge.
“Get up!” Baiken said more loudly. “Our guest is tired. Let him go to bed now.”
His wife’s feet were nice and warm now; getting up would be uncomfortable. “You said he could sleep in the smithy with Iwa,” she mumbled. “Enough of your back talk. Do as I say!”
She got up in a huff and stalked off to the back room. Baiken took the sleeping baby in his arms and said, “The quilts are old, but the fire’s right here beside you. If you get thirsty, there’s hot water on it for tea. Go to bed. Make yourself comfortable.” He, too, went into the back room.
When the woman came back to exchange pillows, the sullenness was gone from her face. “My husband’s very drunk too,” she said, “and he’s probably tired from his trip. He says he plans to sleep late, so make yourself comfortable and sleep as long as you want. Tomorrow I’ll give you a nice hot breakfast.”
“Thanks.” Musashi could think of nothing more to say. He could hardly wait to get out of his leather socks and cloak. “Thanks a lot.”
He dived into the still warm quilts, but his own body was even hotter from drink.
The wife stood in the doorway watching him, then quietly blew out the candle and said, “Good night.”
Musashi’s head felt as if it had a tight steel band around it; his temples throbbed painfully. He wondered why he had drunk so much more than usual. He felt awful, but couldn’t help thinking about Baiken. Why had the blacksmith, who had seemed hardly civil at first, suddenly grown friendly and sent out for more sake? Why had his disagreeable wife become sweet and solicitous all of a sudden? Why had they given him this warm bed?
It all seemed inexplicable, but before Musashi had solved the mystery, drowsiness overcame him. He closed his eyes, took a few deep breaths, and pulled the covers up. Only his forehead remained exposed, lit up by occasion al sparks from the hearth. By and by, there was the sound of deep, steady breathing.
Baiken’s wife retreated stealthily into the back room, the pit-a-pat of her feet moving stickily across the tatami.
Musashi had a dream, or rather the fragment of one, which kept repeating itself. A childhood memory flitted about his sleeping brain like an insect, trying, it seemed, to write something in luminescent letters. He heard the words of a lullaby.
Go to sleep, go to sleep.
Sleeping babies are sweet… .
He was back home in Mimasaka, hearing the lullaby the blacksmith’s wife had sung in the Ise dialect. He was a baby in the arms of a light-skinned woman of about thirty … his mother…. This woman must be his mother. At his mother’s breast, he looked up at her white face.
“… naughty, and they make their mothers cry too….” Cradling him in her arms, his mother sang softly. Her thin, well-bred face looked faintly bluish, like a pear blossom. There was a wall, a long stone wall, on which there was liverwort. And a dirt wall, above which branches darkened in the approaching night. Light from a lamp streamed from the house. Tears glistened on his mother’s cheeks. The baby looked in wonder at the tears.
“Go away! Go back to your home!’
It was the forbidding voice of Munisai, coming from inside the house. And it was a command. Musashi’s mother arose slowly. She ran along a long stone embankment. Weeping, she ran into the river and waded toward the center.
Unable to talk, the baby squirmed in his mother’s arms, tried to tell her there was danger ahead. The more he fretted, the more tightly she held him. Her moistened cheek rubbed against his. “Takezō,” she said, “are you your father’s child, or your mother’s?”
Munisai shouted from