Musashi - Eiji Yoshikawa [601]
“That bitch!” In two leaps, one man disengaged himself from Jōtarō and took after Otsū. He was about to bring the blunt edge of his sword down on her back when Jōtarō reached him. Jōtarō drove his sword so deep into the small of the man’s back that the blade pointed straight out from the man’s navel.
The other man, wounded and dazed, started to slink away, then broke into an unsteady run.
Jōtarō planted his feet firmly on either side of the corpse, withdrew the sword and screamed, “Stop!”
As he started to give chase, Otsū pounced forcefully on him and screamed, “Don’t do it! You mustn’t attack a badly wounded man when he’s fleeing.” The fervency of her plea astonished him. He could not imagine what psychological quirk would move her to sympathize with a man who had so recently been tormenting her.
Otsū said, “I want to hear what you’ve been doing all these years. I have things to tell you too. And we should get out of here as fast as we can.”
Jōtarō agreed quickly, knowing that if word of the incident reached Shimonoshō, the Hon’idens would round up the whole village to come after them.
“Can you run, Otsū?”
“Yes. Don’t worry about me.”
And run they did, on and on through the darkness until their breath gave out. To both, it seemed like the old days when they had been a young girl and a mere boy, making their way together.
At Mikazuki, the only lights visible were at the inn. One shone in the main building, where only a little earlier a group of travelers—a metal merchant whose business took him to the local mines, a thread salesman from Tajima, an itinerant priest—had been sitting around, talking and laughing. They had all drifted off to bed.
Jōtarō and Otsū sat talking by the other light, in a small detached room where the innkeeper’s mother lived with her spinning wheel and the pots in which she boiled silkworms. The innkeeper suspected the couple he was taking in were eloping, but he had the room straightened up for them anyway.
Otsū was saying, “So you didn’t see Musashi in Edo either.” She gave him an account of the last few years.
Saddened to hear that she had not seen Musashi since that day on the Kiso highroad, Jōtarō found it difficult to speak. Yet he thought he was able to offer a ray of hope.
“It’s not much to go on,” he said, “but I heard a rumor in Himeji that Musashi would be coming there soon.”
“To Himeji? Could it be true?” she asked, eager to latch on to even the flimsiest straw.
“It’s only what people say, but the men in our fief are talking as though it’s already decided. They say he’ll pass through on his way to Kokura, where he’s promised to meet a challenge from Sasaki Kojirō. That’s one of Lord Hosokawa’s retainers.”
“I heard something like that too, but I couldn’t find anybody who had heard from Musashi or even knew where he was.”
“Well, the word going around Himeji Castle is probably reliable. It seems the Hanazono Myōshinji in Kyoto, which has close connections with the House of Hosokawa, informed Lord Hosokawa of Musashi’s whereabouts, and Nagaoka Sado—he’s a senior retainer—delivered the letter of challenge to Musashi.”
“Is it supposed to happen soon?”
“I don’t know. Nobody seems to know exactly. But if it’s to be in Kokura, and if Musashi’s in Kyoto, he’ll pass through Himeji on the way.”
“He might go by boat “
Jōtarō shook his head. “I don’t think so. The daimyō at Himeji and Okayama and other fiefs along the Inland Sea will ask him to stop over for a night or so. They want to see what kind of man he really is and sound him out about whether he’s interested in a position. Lord Ikeda wrote to Takuan. Then he made inquiries at the Myōshinji and instructed the wholesalers in his area to report if they see anyone answering Musashi’s description.”
“That’s all the more reason to suppose he won’t go by land. There’s nothing he hates