Musashi - Eiji Yoshikawa [219]
Baiken, still wiping the spit off his face, was thrown off balance, and in that instant, Otsū’s hand caught the hilt of his sword.
“Bitch!” he barked, grabbing for her wrist. Then he howled with pain, for the sword was already partly out of its scabbard, and instead of Otsū’s arm, he’d squeezed his hand around the blade. The tips of two fingers on his right hand dropped to the ground. Holding his bleeding hand, he sprang back, unintentionally pulling the sword from its scabbard. The brilliant glitter of steel extending from Otsū’s hand scratched across the ground, coming to rest behind her.
Baiken had blundered even worse than the night before. Cursing himself for his lack of caution, he struggled to regain his footing. Otsū, now afraid of nothing, swung the blade sidewise at him. But it was a great wide-bladed weapon, nearly three feet long, which not every man would have been able to handle easily. When Baiken dodged, her hands wobbled, and she staggered forward. She felt a quick wrenching of her wrists, and reddish-black blood spurted into her face. After a moment of dizziness, she realized the sword had cut into the rump of the horse.
The wound was not deep, but the horse let out a fearsome noise, rearing and kicking wildly. Baiken, yelling unintelligibly, got hold of Otsū’s wrist and tried to recover his sword, but at that moment the horse kicked them both into the air. Then, rising on her hind legs, she whinnied loudly and shot off down the road like an arrow from a bow, Jōtarō clinging grimly to her back and blood spewing out behind.
Baiken stumbled around in the dust-laden air. He knew he couldn’t catch the crazed beast, so his enraged eyes turned toward the place where Otsū had been. She wasn’t there.
After a moment, he spotted his sword at the foot of a larch tree and with a lunge retrieved it. As he straightened up, something clicked in his mind: there must be some connection between this woman and Musashi! And if she was Musashi’s friend, she would make excellent bait; at the very least she would know where he was going.
Half running, half sliding down the embankment next to the road, he strode around a thatched farmhouse, peering under the floor and into the storehouse, while an old woman stooped like a hunchback behind a spinning wheel inside the house looked on in terror.
Then he caught sight of Otsū racing through a thick grove of cryptomeria trees toward the valley beyond, where there were patches of late snow.
Thundering down the hill with the force of a landslide, he soon closed the distance between them.
“Bitch!” he cried, stretching out his left hand and touching her hair.
Otsū dropped to the ground and caught hold of the roots of a tree, but her foot slipped and her body fell over the edge of the cliff, where it swayed like a pendulum. Dirt and pebbles fell into her face as she looked up at Baiken’s large eyes and his gleaming sword.
“Fool!” he said contemptuously. “Do you think you can get away now?”
Otsū glanced downward; fifty or sixty feet below, a stream cut through the floor of the valley. Curiously, she was not afraid, for she saw the valley as her salvation. At any moment she chose, she could escape simply by letting go of the tree and throwing herself on the mercy of the open space below. She felt death was near, but rather than dwell on that, her mind focused on a single image: Musashi. She seemed to see him now, his face like a full moon in a stormy sky.
Baiken quickly seized her wrists, and hoisting her up, dragged her well clear of the edge.
Just then, one of his henchmen called to him from the road. “What are you doing down there? We’d better move fast. The old man at the teahouse back there said a samurai woke him up before dawn this morning, ordered a box lunch, then ran off toward Kaga Valley.”
“Kaga Valley?”
“That’s what he said. But whether he goes that way or crosses Mount Tsuchi to Minakuchi doesn’t matter. The roads come