Musashi - Eiji Yoshikawa [376]
“Yeah, and now I know why you were drinking yourself silly. You were living with some old bitch and you didn’t have the guts to stand up to her. Isn’t that the truth?”
Jōtarō couldn’t have touched a more tender spot.
“You snot-nosed runt!” Matahachi snatched at his collar, but Jōtarō ducked and came up on the other side of the cow.
“If I’m a snot-nosed runt, what does that make you? Snot-nosed oaf! Scared of a woman!”
Matahachi darted around the cow, but again Jōtarō slipped under the animal’s belly and came up on the other side. This happened three or four times before Matahachi finally managed to latch on to the boy’s collar.
“All right, just say that one more time.”
“Snot-nosed oaf! Scared of a woman!”
Jōtarō’s wooden sword was only half drawn when Matahachi got a good grip and sent him sailing well away from the road into a clump of bamboo. He landed on his back in a small stream, stunned and only barely conscious.
By the time he recovered enough to crawl like an eel back to the road, it was too late. The cow was loping heavily along the road, Otsū still on her back, Matahachi running ahead with the rope in his hand.
“Bastard!” moaned Jōtarō, stung by his own helplessness. Too dazed to get to his feet, he lay there fuming and cursing.
On a hill a mile or so ahead, Musashi was resting his feet and idly wondering whether the clouds were moving or, as they seemed, were permanently suspended between Mount Koma and the broad foothills below.
He started, as though at some wordless communication, shook himself and straightened up.
His thoughts were really on Otsū, and the more he thought, the angrier he became. Both his shame and his resentment had been washed away in the swirling basin under the falls, but as the days passed the doubts kept coming back. Had it been wicked of him to reveal himself to her? Why had she rebuffed him, shrunk from him as though she despised him?
“Leave her behind,” he said out loud. Yet he knew he was only deceiving himself. He had told her that when they reached Edo, she could study what was best for her, while he followed his own path. Implicit in this was a promise for the more distant future. He had left Kyoto with her. He had a responsibility to stay with her.
“What will happen to me? With two of us, what will happen to my sword?” He raised his eyes to the mountain and bit his tongue, ashamed of his pettiness. To look at the great peak was humbling.
He wondered what could be keeping them and stood up. He could see the forest a mile back, but no people.
“Could they have been held up at the barrier?”
The sun would be setting soon; they should have caught up long ago.
Suddenly, he felt alarmed. Something must have happened. Before he knew it, he was tearing down the hill so fast that the animals in the fields scurried off in all directions.
The Warrior of Kiso
Musashi had not run very far when a traveler called to him, “Hey, weren’t you with a young woman and a boy before?”
Musashi stopped abruptly. “Yes,” he said with sinking heart. “Has something happened to them?”
Apparently he was about the only person who had not heard the story that was fast becoming common gossip along the highroad. A young man had approached the girl … kidnapped her. He had been seen whipping the cow… driving her down a side road near the barrier. The traveler had barely finished repeating the tale before Musashi was on his way.
Racing at top speed, he still took an hour to reach the barrier, which had closed at six, and with it the tea shops on either side. Looking rather frantic, Musashi approached an old man who was piling up stools in front of his shop.
“What’s the matter, sir? Forget something?”
“No. I’m looking for a young woman and a boy who passed here a few hours ago.”
“Would that be the girl who looked like Fugen on a cow?”
“That’s the one!” Musashi answered without thinking. “I’m told a rōnin took her off somewhere. Do you know which way they went?”
“I didn’t actually see the incident myself, but I heard they left the main road