Musashi - Eiji Yoshikawa [5]
Matahachi lay on his stomach, eyes closed, hoping against hope they would not be trampled, but Takezō stared unblinkingly upward. The horses passed so close they could smell their sweat. Then it was over. Miraculously they were uninjured and undetected, and for several minutes both remained silent in disbelief.
“Saved again!” exclaimed Takezō, reaching his hand out to Matahachi. Still hugging the ground, Matahachi slowly turned his head to show a broad, slightly trembling grin. “Somebody’s on our side, that’s for sure,” he said huskily.
The two friends helped each other, with great difficulty, to their feet. Slowly they made their way across the battlefield to the safety of the wooded hills, hobbling along with arms around each other’s shoulders. There they collapsed but after a rest began foraging for food. For two days they subsisted on wild chestnuts and edible leaves in the sodden hollows of Mount Ibuki. This kept them from starving, but Takezō’s stomach ached and Matahachi’s bowels tormented him. No food could fill him, no drink quench his thirst, but even he felt his strength returning bit by bit.
The storm on the fifteenth marked the end of the fall typhoons. Now, only two nights later, a cold white moon glared grimly down from a cloudless sky.
They both knew how dangerous it was to be on the road in the glaring moonlight, their shadows looming like silhouette targets in clear view of any patrols searching for stragglers. The decision to risk it had been Takezō’s. With Matahachi in such misery, saying he’d rather be captured than continue trying to walk, there really didn’t seem to be much choice. They had to move on, but it was also clear that they had to find a place to lie low and rest. They made their way slowly in what they thought was the direction of the small town of Tarui.
“Can you make it?” Takezō asked repeatedly. He held his friend’s arm around his own shoulder to help him along. “Are you all right?” It was the labored breathing that worried him. “You want to rest?”
“I’m all right.” Matahachi tried to sound brave, but his face was paler than the moon above them. Even with his lance for a walking stick, he could barely put one foot in front of the other.
He’d been apologizing abjectly over and over. “I’m sorry, Takezō. I know it’s me who’s slowing us down. I’m really sorry.”
The first few times Takezō had simply brushed this off with “Forget it.” Eventually, when they stopped to rest, he turned to his friend and burst out, “Look, I’m the one who should be apologizing. I’m the one who got you into this in the first place, remember? Remember how I told you my plan, how I was finally going to do something that would really have impressed my father? I’ve never been able to stand the fact that to his dying day he was sure I’d never amount to anything. I was going to show him! Ha!”
Takezō’s father, Munisai, had once served under Lord Shimmen of Iga. As soon as Takezō heard that Ishida Mitsunari was raising an army, he was convinced that the chance of a lifetime had finally arrived. His father had been a samurai. Wasn’t it only natural that he would be made one too? He ached to enter the fray, to prove his mettle, to have word spread like wildfire through the village that he had decapitated an enemy general. He had wanted desperately to prove he was somebody to be reckoned with, to be respected—not just the village troublemaker.
Takezō reminded Matahachi of all this, and Matahachi nodded. “I know. I know. But I felt the same way. It wasn’t just you.”
Takezō went on: “I wanted you to come with me because we’ve always done everything together. But didn’t your mother carry on something awful! Yelling and telling everybody I was crazy and no good! And your fiancée Otsū, and my sister and everybody else crying and saying village boys should stay in the village. Oh, maybe they had their reasons. We are both only sons, and if we get ourselves killed there’s no one else to carry on the family names. But who cares? Is that any way to live?”
They had slipped