Musashi - Eiji Yoshikawa [227]
“Wait!” she said.
“Wait? All right, I’ll wait,” he said, mistaking the warmth of her feverish
body for passion. “But don’t try to run away, or I’ll really get rough.”
With a sharp grunt, she twisted her shoulders and shook his hand off her.
Glaring into his face, she slowly rose. “What are you trying to do to me?” “You know what I want!”
“You think you can treat women like fools, don’t you? All you men do! Well, I may be a woman, but I’ve got spirit.” Blood seeped from her lip where she had cut it on a miscanthus leaf. Biting the lip, she burst into fresh tears.
“You say the strangest things,” he said. “What else can you be but crazy?”
“I’ll say whatever I please!” she screamed. Pushing his chest away from her with all her might, she scrambled away through the miscanthus, which stretched as far as she could see in the moonlight.
“Murder! Help! Murder!”
Yasoma lunged after her. Before she had gone ten steps, he caught her and threw her down again. Her white legs visible beneath her kimono, her hair falling around her face, she lay with her cheek pressed against the ground. Her kimono was half open, and her white breasts felt the cold wind.
Just as Yasoma was about to leap on her, something very hard landed in the vicinity of his ear. Blood rushed to his head, and he screamed out in pain. As he turned to look, the hard object came crashing down on the crown of his head. This time there could hardly have been any pain, for he immediately fell over unconscious, his head shaking emptily like a paper tiger’s. As he lay there with his mouth slack, his assailant, a mendicant priest, stood over him, holding the shakuhachi with which he had dealt the blows.
“The evil brute!” he said. “But he went down easier than I expected.” The priest looked at Yasoma for a time, debating whether it would be kinder to kill him outright. The chances were that even if he recovered consciousness, he would never be sane again.
Akemi stared blankly at her rescuer. Apart from the shakuhachi, there was nothing to identify him as a priest; to judge from his dirty clothes and the sword hanging at his side, he might have been a poverty-stricken samurai or even a beggar.
“It’s all right now,” he said. “You don’t have to worry anymore.”
Recovering from her daze, Akemi thanked him and began straightening her hair and her kimono. But she peered into the darkness around her with eyes still full of fright.
“Where do you live?” asked the priest.
“Eh? Live … do you mean where’s my house?” she said, covering her face with her hands. Through her sobs, she tried to answer his questions, but she found herself unable to be honest with him. Part of what she told him was true—her mother was different from her, her mother was trying to exchange her body for money, she had fled here from Sumiyoshi—but the rest was made up on the spur of the moment.
“I’d rather die than go back home,” she wailed. “I’ve had to put up with so much from my mother! I’ve been shamed in so many ways! Why, even when I was a little girl, I had to go out on the battlefield and steal things from the bodies of dead soldiers.”
Her loathing for her mother made her bones tremble.
Aoki Tanzaemon helped her along to a little hollow, where it was quiet and the wind less chilly. Coming to a small dilapidated temple, he flashed a toothy grin and said, “This is where I live. It’s not much, but I like it.”
Though aware that it was a little rude, Akemi could not help saying, “Do you really live here?”
Tanzaemon pushed open a grille door and motioned for her to enter. Akemi hesitated.
“It’s warmer inside than you’d think,” he said. “All I have to cover the floor with is thin straw matting. Still, that’s better than nothing. Are you afraid I might be like that brute back there?”
Silently Akemi shook her head. Tanzaemon did not frighten her. She felt sure he was a good man, and anyway he was getting on—over fifty, she thought. What held her back was the filthiness of the little temple and the smell of Tanzaemon