Musashi - Eiji Yoshikawa [90]
“Did you think you could keep me from tracking you down just by changing your name? How stupid! The gods in heaven have guided me to you, as I knew they would. Now fight! We’ll see whether I take your head home with me, or you manage somehow to stay alive!”
Uncle Gon, in his withered voice, issued his own challenge. “It’s been four long years since you gave us the slip, and we’ve been searching for you all this time. Now our prayers here at the Kiyomizudera have brought you into our grasp. Old I may be, but I’m not going to lose to the likes of you! Prepare to die!” Whipping out his sword, he cried to Osugi, “Get out of the way!”
She turned on him furiously. “What do you mean, you old fool? You’re the one who’s shaking.”
“Never mind! The bodhisattvas of this temple will protect us!”
“You’re right, Uncle Gon. And the ancestors of the Hon’idens are with us too! There’s nothing to fear.”
“Takezō! Come forward and fight!”
“What are you waiting for?”
Musashi did not move. He stood there like a deaf-mute, staring at the two old people and their drawn swords.
Osugi cried, “What’s the matter, Takezō! Are you scared?”
She edged sideways, preparing to attack, but suddenly tripped on a rock and pitched forward, landing on her hands and knees almost at Musashi’s feet. The crowd gasped, and someone screamed, “She’ll be killed!”
“Quick, save her!”
But Uncle Gon only stared at Musashi’s face, too stunned to move.
The old woman then startled one and all by snatching up her sword and walking back to Uncle Gon’s side, where she again took a challenging stance. “What’s wrong, you lout?” Osugi cried. “Is that sword in your hand just an ornament? Don’t you know how to use it?”
Musashi’s face was like a mask, but he spoke at last, in a thunderous voice. “I can’t do it!”
He started walking toward them, and Uncle Gon and Osugi instantly fell back to either side.
“Wh-where are you going, Takezō?”
“I can’t use my sword!”
“Stop! Why don’t you stop and fight?”
“I told you! I can’t use it!”
He walked straight ahead, looking neither right nor left. He marched directly through the crowd, without once swerving.
Recovering her senses, Osugi cried, “He’s running away! Don’t let him escape!”
The crowd now moved in on Musashi, but when they thought they had him hemmed in, they discovered he was no longer there. Their bewilderment was acute. Eyes flared in surprise, then became dull patches in blank faces.
Breaking up into smaller groups, they continued until sunset to run about, searching frantically under the floors of the temple buildings and in the woods for their vanished prey.
Still later, as people were going back down the darkened slopes of Sannen and Chawan hills, one man swore that he had seen Musashi jump with the effortlessness of a cat to the top of the six-foot wall by the western gate and disappear.
Nobody believed this, least of all Osugi and Uncle Gon.
The Water Sprite
In a hamlet northwest of Kyoto, the heavy thuds of a mallet pounding rice straw shook the ground. Unseasonal torrents of rain soaked into the brooding thatched roofs. This was a sort of no-man’s-land, between the city and the farming district, and the poverty was so extreme that at twilight the smoke of kitchen fires billowed from only a handful of houses.
A basket hat suspended under the eaves of one small house proclaimed in bold, rough characters that this was an inn, albeit one of the cheapest variety. The travelers who stopped here were impecunious and rented only floor space. For pallets they paid extra, but few could afford such luxury.
In the dirt-floored kitchen beside the entranceway, a boy leaned with his hands on the raised tatami of the adjoining room, in the center of which was a sunken hearth.
“Hello! … Good evening! … Anybody here?” It was the errand boy from the drinking