Musashi - Eiji Yoshikawa [240]
Osugi’s heart leaped as she whispered, “Now!”
At that precise moment, Musashi sprang to his feet. Jumping nimbly over a pool of water, he started walking briskly along the river’s edge. Osugi, taking care not to alert him to her presence, hurried along the dike.
The roofs and bridges of the city began to form gentle white outlines in the morning mist, but above, stars still hovered in the sky and the area along the foot of Higashiyama was as black as ink. When Musashi reached the wooden bridge at Sanjō Avenue, he went under it and reappeared at the top of the dike beyond, taking long, manly strides. Several times Osugi came close to calling him but checked herself.
Musashi knew she was behind him. But he also knew that if he turned around, she would come storming at him, and he’d be forced to reward her effort with some show of defense, while at the same time not hurting her. “A frightening opponent!” he thought. If he were still Takezō, back in the village, he would have thought nothing of knocking her down and beating her until she spat blood, but of course he could no longer do that.
In reality he had more right to hate her than she him, but he wanted to make her see that her feeling toward him was based on a horrible misunderstanding. He was sure that if he could just explain things to her she would cease regarding him as her eternal enemy. But since she’d carried her festering grudge for so many years, there was no likelihood that he himself could convince her now, not if he explained a thousand times. There was only one possibility; stubborn though she was, she would certainly believe Matahachi. If her own son told her exactly what had happened before and after Sekigahara, she could no longer consider Musashi an enemy of the Hon’iden family, let alone the abductor of her son’s bride.
He was drawing near the bridge, which was in an area that had flourished in the late twelfth century, when the Taira family was at the peak of its fortunes. Even after the wars of the fifteenth century, it had remained one of the most populous sections of Kyoto. The sun was just beginning to reach the housefronts and gardens, where broom marks from the previous night’s thorough sweeping were still visible, but at this early hour not a door was open.
Osugi could make out his footprints in the dirt. Even these she despised.
Another hundred yards, then fifty.
“Musashi!” screamed the old woman. Balling her hands into fists, she thrust her head forward and ran toward him. “You evil devil!” she shouted. “Don’t you have ears?”
Musashi did not look back.
Osugi ran on. Old as she was, her death-defying determination lent her footsteps a brave and masculine cadence. Musashi kept his back to her, casting about feverishly in his mind for a plan of action.
All at once she sprang in front of him, screaming, “Stop!” Her pointed shoulders and thin, emaciated ribs trembled. She stood there a moment, catching her breath and gathering spit in her mouth.
Not concealing a look of resignation, Musashi said as nonchalantly as he could, “Well, if it isn’t the Hon’iden dowager! What are you doing here?”
“You insolent dog! Why shouldn’t I be here? I’m the one who should ask you that. I let you get away from me on Sannen Hill, but today I’ll have that head of yours!” Her scrawny neck suggested a game rooster, and her shrill voice, which seemed set to whisk her protruding teeth out of her mouth, was more frightening to him than a battle cry.
Musashi’s dread of the old woman had its roots in reminiscences from his childhood days, the times when Osugi had caught him and Matahachi en gaged in some mischief in the mulberry patch or the Hon’iden kitchen. He had been eight or nine—just the age when the two of them were always up to something—and he still remembered clearly how Osugi had shouted at them. He had fled in terror, his stomach turning somersaults, and those memories made him shiver. He had regarded her then as a hateful, ill-tempered old