Musashi - Eiji Yoshikawa [437]
The next day brought a whole group to heckle.
“If anything could grow here, we wouldn’t sweat under the blazing sun working our own fields, poor as they are. We’d sit home and play the flute.” “And there wouldn’t be any famines.”
“You’re digging up the place for nothing.”
“Got the sense of a pile of manure.”
Still hoeing, Musashi kept his eyes on the ground and grinned.
Iori was less complacent, though Musashi had earlier scolded him for taking
the peasants seriously. “Sir”—he pouted—”they all say the same thing.” “Pay no attention.”
“I can’t help it,” he cried, seizing a rock to throw at their tormentors.
An angry glare from Musashi stopped him. “Now, what good do you think that would do? If you don’t behave yourself, I’m not going to have you as my pupil.”
Iori’s ears burned at the rebuke, but instead of dropping the rock, he cursed and hurled it at a boulder. The rock gave off sparks as it cracked in two. Iori tossed his hoe aside and began to weep.
Musashi ignored him, though he wasn’t unmoved. “He’s all alone, just as I am,” he thought.
As though in sympathy with the boy’s grief, a twilight breeze swept over the plain, setting everything astir. The sky darkened and raindrops fell.
“Come on, Iori, let’s go in,” called Musashi. “Looks like we’re in for a squall.” Hurriedly collecting his tools, he ran for the house. By the time he was inside, the rain was coming down in gray sheets.
“Iori,” he shouted, surprised that the boy had not come with him. He went to the window and strained his eyes toward the field. Rain spattered from the sill into his face. A streak of lightning split the air and struck the earth. As he shut his eyes and put his hands over his ears, he felt the force of the thunder.
In the wind and rain, Musashi saw the cryptomeria tree at the Shippōji and heard the stern voice of Takuan. He felt that whatever he had gained since then he owed to them. He wanted to possess the tree’s immense strength as well as Takuan’s icy, unwavering compassion. If he could be to Iori what the old cryptomeria had been to him, he would feel he’d succeeded in repaying a part of his debt to the monk.
“Iori! … Iori!”
There was no answer, only thunder and the rain pounding on the roof. “Where could he have gone?” he wondered, still unwilling to venture outside.
When the rain slackened to a drizzle, he did go out. Iori had not moved an inch. With his clothing clinging to his body and his face still screwed up in an angry frown, he looked rather like a scarecrow. How could a child be so stubborn?
“Idiot!” Musashi chided. “Get back into the house. Being drenched like that’s not exactly good for you. Hurry up, before rivers start forming. Then you won’t be able to get back.”
Iori turned, as though trying to locate Musashi’s voice, then started laughing. “Something bothering you? This kind of rain doesn’t last. See, the clouds are breaking up already.”
Musashi, not expecting to receive a lesson from his pupil, was more than a little put out, but Iori didn’t give the matter a second thought. “Come on,” the boy said, picking up his hoe. “We can still get quite a bit done before the sun’s gone.”
For the next five days, bulbuls and shrikes conversed hoarsely under a cloudless blue sky, and great cracks grew in the earth as it caked around the roots of the rushes. On the sixth day, a cluster of small black clouds appeared on the horizon and rapidly spread across the heavens until the whole plain seemed to be under an eclipse.
Iori studied the sky briefly and said in a worried tone, “This time it’s the real thing.” Even as he spoke, an inky wind swirled around them. Leaves shook and little birds dropped to the earth as if felled by a silent and invisible horde of hunters.
“Another shower?” Musashi asked.
“Not with the sky like that. I’d better go to the village. And you’d better gather up the tools and get inside as fast as you can.” Before Musashi could ask why, Iori took off across the flatlands and was quickly lost in a sea