Musashi - Eiji Yoshikawa [380]
Musashi noted that Gonnosuke told his story with the simple straightforward honesty of a person born and brought up in the country.
His mother became sympathetic. “I’m sure this rōnin’s worried about his friends,” she said. “Eat your dinner and take him to look for them. I only hope they’re somewhere near the pond. The hills are no place for strangers. They’re full of bandits who’ll steal anything—horses, vegetables, anything! This whole business sounds like some of their work.”
The breeze would begin as a whisper, mushroom into a violent gust, then roar through the trees and raise havoc with the smaller plants.
During a lull that left only the ominous silence of the stars above, Gonnosuke held the torch high and waited for Musashi to catch up with him.
“Sorry,” he said, “but nobody seems to know anything about them. There’s just one more house between here and the pond. It’s behind those woods over there. The owner farms part of the time and hunts the rest. If he can’t help us, there’s nowhere else to look.”
“Thanks for going to all this trouble. We’ve already been to more than ten houses, so I suppose there’s not much hope of their being around here. If we don’t find out anything at this next house, let’s give up and go back.”
It was past midnight. Musashi had expected they would at least find some trace of Jōtarō, but no one had seen him. Descriptions of Otsū had brought nothing but blank looks and long country pauses.
“If it’s the walking you’re thinking about, that’s nothing to me. I could walk all night. Are the woman and boy servants of yours? Brother? Sister?” “They’re the people closest to me.”
Each would have liked to ask the other more about himself, but Gonnosuke lapsed into silence, moved a pace or two ahead and guided Musashi along a narrow path toward Nobu Pond.
Musashi was curious about Gonnosuke’s skill with the staff and how he had acquired it, but his sense of propriety kept him from asking about it. Musing that his meeting the man was due to a mishap—and his own rashness—he nevertheless felt extremely grateful. What a misfortune it would have been to miss seeing this great fighter’s dazzling technique!
Gonnosuke stopped and said, “You’d better wait here. Those people are probably asleep, and we don’t want to frighten them. I’ll go alone and see if I can find out anything.”
He pointed out the house, whose thatched roof seemed nearly buried in the trees. A rustling of bamboo accompanied his running footsteps. Presently Musashi heard him knocking loudly on the door.
He returned a few minutes later with a story that seemed to give Musashi his first real lead. It had taken him a while to make the man and his wife understand what he was asking about, but finally the wife told him of something that had happened to her that afternoon.
A little before sundown, on her way home from shopping, the woman had seen a boy running toward Yabuhara, hands and face covered with mud and a long wooden sword in his obi. When she stopped him and asked what was wrong, he responded by asking her where the office of the shōgun’s deputy was. He went on to tell her that a bad man had carried off the person he was traveling with. She advised him that he was wasting his time; the shōgun’s officers would never on their own organize a search for a person of no consequence. If it was somebody great or important, or if they had orders from above, they would turn every dollop of horse manure, every grain of sand, but they had no use for common folk. Anyway, for a woman to be kidnapped or a traveler to be stripped clean by highwaymen was nothing unusual. Things like that happened morning, noon and night.
She had told the boy to go past Yabuhara to a place called Narai. There, at an intersection it was easy to see, he would find a wholesale house dealing in herbs. It