Musashi - Eiji Yoshikawa [214]
Musashi opened his eyes. When he started to doze off again, a woman—his mother? someone else?—intruded into his dream and woke him again. Musashi could not remember his mother’s appearance. He thought of her often, but he couldn’t have drawn her face. Whenever he saw another mother, he thought perhaps his own mother had looked the same.
“Why tonight?” he thought.
The sake had worn off. He opened his eyes and gazed at the ceiling. Amid the blackness of the soot was a reddish light, the reflection from the embers in the hearth. His gaze came to rest on the pinwheel suspended from the ceiling above him. He noticed, too, that the smell of mother and child still clung to the bedcovers. With a vague feeling of nostalgia, he lay half asleep, staring at the pinwheel.
The pinwheel started slowly to revolve. There was nothing strange about this; it was made to turn. But … but not unless there was a breeze! Musashi started to get up, then stopped and listened closely. There was the sound of a door being slid quietly shut. The pinwheel stopped turning.
Musashi quietly put his head back on the pillow and tried to fathom what was going on in the house. He was like an insect under a leaf, attempting to divine the weather above. His whole body was attuned to the slightest change in his surroundings, his sensitive nerves absolutely taut. Musashi knew that his life was in danger, but why?
“Is it a den of robbers?” he asked himself at first, but no. If they were professional thieves, they’d know he had nothing worth stealing.
“Has he got a grudge against me?” That did not seem to work either. Musashi was quite sure he had never even seen Baiken before.
Without being able to figure out a motive, he could feel in his skin and bones that someone or something was threatening his very life. He also knew that whatever it was was very near; he had to decide quickly whether to lie and wait for it to come, or get out of the way ahead of time.
Slipping his hand over the threshold into the smithy, he groped for his sandals. He slipped first one, then the other, under the cover and down to the foot of the bedding.
The pinwheel started to whirl again. In the light of the fire, it turned like a bewitched flower. Footsteps were faintly audible both inside and outside the house, as Musashi quietly wadded the bedding together into the rough shape of a human body.
Under the short curtain hanging in the doorway appeared two eyes, belonging to a man crawling in with his sword unsheathed. Another, carrying a lance and clinging closely to the wall, crept around to the foot of the bed. The two stared at the bedclothes, listening for the sleeper’s breathing. Then, like a cloud of smoke, a third man jumped forward. It was Baiken, holding the sickle in his left hand and the ball in his right.
The men’s eyes met and they synchronized their breathing. The man at the head of the bed kicked the pillow into the air, and the man at the foot, jumping down into the smithy, aimed his lance at the reclining form.
Keeping the sickle behind him, Baiken shouted, “Up, Musashi!” Neither answer nor movement came from the bedding.
The man with the lance threw back the covers. “He’s not here!” he shouted.
Baiken, casting a confused look around the room, caught sight of the rapidly whirling pinwheel. “There’s a door open somewhere!” he shouted.
Soon another man cried out angrily. The door from the smithy onto a path that went around to the back of the house was open about three feet, and a biting wind was blowing in.
“He got out through here!”
“What are those fools doing?” Baiken screamed, running outside. From under the eaves and out of the shadows, black forms came forward.
“Master! Did it go all right?” asked a low voice excitedly.
Baiken glowered with rage. “What do you mean, you idiot? Why do you think I put you out here to keep watch? He’s gone! He must have come this way .
“Gone? How could he get out?”