Death at the Crossroads

CHAPTER 13

The next morning, Kaze wandered into the courtyard and approached the cage that held Jiro. The night before, he had blandly told Manase that the search had failed and that he would have to think of another stratagem for finding the bandit camp. Nagato was there as well, and he fidgeted constantly, waiting for Kaze to mention the ambush. Kaze didn’t. Instead, he started a long conversation about the relative merits of haiku poetry versus the longer tanka form of poetry. Manase loved it and kept up a lively conversation with Kaze for hours. During this whole time, Nagato was compelled by protocol to sit perched on his folded legs, supporting his considerable weight by resting on his heels and knees. He was soon in agony, praying for the boring conversation to end. But every time it looked like the discussion was about to finish, the ronin samurai would bring up some other subtle poetic point, and he and Manase would pursue that point for endless minutes. In his pain he cursed the samurai and couldn’t understand why he would pick this occasion to engage the Lord in such a long discussion and not bring up the ambush. By the end of the evening, Nagato could barely get up to walk home.

As Kaze approached Jiro’s cage, he wrinkled his nose at the stench. They didn’t let Jiro out to go to the bathroom. Jiro had tried to perform his functions in one corner of the cage, but in such an enclosed space his actions were more of a gesture than an effective measure.

The old charcoal seller looked up at Kaze with tired eyes.

“Are they giving you water?” Kaze asked.

Jiro nodded an affirmative listlessly.

“How about food?”

He shook his head no.

Kaze reached into his sleeve and pulled out a large rice ball wrapped in leaves. He handed it through the slats of the wooden cage into Jiro’s trembling hands. Jiro ripped open the leaves and started to eat the rice ravenously.

“Careful,” Kaze admonished. “It would be stupid to choke on a rice ball before I can do something to get you out of here.”

Jiro was so surprised that he stopped eating. For the first time his eyes had some life to them. Tears started forming.

“Stop that crying,” Kaze said brusquely. “I hate pathetic people. There are too many of them in our land now, and it gets wearisome. Do you know where the bandit camp is?”

“No.”

“Then you are going to stay in this cage a long time. I need to find that camp to see something. It might help me to get you out.”

Jiro thought a minute. “Aoi,” he said.

“Love?” Kaze answered. Aoi meant love.

“Not the word love. Aoi is a woman’s name. She’s the village prostitute. A widow. This is a poor village, but she has too much money and too many fine things. Only the bandits have money. Maybe she gets her money from them.”

Kaze looked at the hunched-up figure and said, “A few days in a cage has loosened both your mind and your tongue. That’s a good suggestion. Maybe you should make a similar cage for your house after I get you out of this one.” He started walking out of the courtyard.

“Careful,” Jiro called after him.

Later that afternoon, Aoi stepped out of her hut and looked up and down the village street. She knew that in a place as small as Suzaka, her comings and goings would be noticed by others, so in her arms she had a basket for gathering wild mushrooms, with a cloth covering its contents. Acting nonchalant, she wandered out of the village into the surrounding hills and woods.

She wandered for several minutes, taking a meandering route that skirted the edge of the village. She was in no hurry, and she carefully selected a route different from the last one she took to the camp. She had been schooled in precautions, and the lessons had been punctuated with curses and dire threats about what would happen if she led anyone to the camp.

In the woods, the afternoon was still and quiet, and the dry scent of the trees was a subtle combination of pine and pitch and dried sap. Although her view through the trees was limited, Aoi would stop occasionally to look around, to make sure no one was on her trail. For some reason she felt uneasy and skittish, even though this was a common journey for her. Despite her caution, she saw and heard nothing out of the ordinary.

After walking into the forest for an hour, she stopped and placed her basket down. She lifted a cloth in the basket and pulled out a colorful cotton kimono. Shrugging out of the plain kimono she was wearing, Aoi donned her working clothes. Tying the sash of her kimono snugly around her hips, she carefully arranged the collar to show the nape of her neck to its best advantage. The nape was considered elegant and erotic, and Aoi wished she had white powder to dust on her face, neck, and shoulders to spruce up her fading beauty.

When she was young, she worked the fields with her parents and nine brothers and sisters. They all sweated in the hot summer and froze in the bitter cold of winter and, like all farmers, they had the capricious weather to contend with. When Aoi was thirteen, her family faced an especially hard winter. Their dried daikon radishes were depleted, and a meal consisted of a handful of millet cooked in a common pot. They faced the prospect of slowly starving to death, one by one.

So, without telling her what they were doing, Aoi’s parents took her up a snow-clad road to the village of Suzaka. There, after a few days’ negotiation, they sold her to an old farmer for enough food to keep the rest of the family alive for a few months.

Aoi’s mother cried bitter tears as they left her in the custody of the old farmer. “He’s your husband now. Be a good wife,” was all her mother could say as they left her.

“Come on,” her father said, tugging at Aoi’s mother’s arm. “At least we didn’t sell her to a brothel just so we could make more money off her. She’ll be a respectable wife.”

Aoi stood and watched her parents leave, a flood of tears clouding her vision. The hard grip of the farmer pinched her arm to make sure she didn’t run after her parents. When her parents were out of sight, Aoi was put to work cleaning the farmer’s hut. The farmer closed the door of the hut and sat watching her work. When the cleaning was done, she made dinner for the farmer. Aoi was not allowed to eat with her husband, so she watched greedily as he shoveled mouthful after mouthful of food down his gullet. Her mouth watered at the sight of so much plenty after such a long time of want. After her new husband was done eating, Aoi was able to wolfishly eat her fill, something she hadn’t been able to do for months.

The millet and brown rice gruel was hot and satisfying, and Aoi had sweetened it with chunks of daikon radish and sweet potato. She took bowl after bowl of the gruel, reveling in the sensation of having an abundance of food that she didn’t have to share with brothers and sisters. She ate so much that before she was done, her stomach was churning with the unfamiliar sensation of excess food packed into it.

Suddenly, Aoi bolted to her feet and pushed open the door of the hut. The farmer, thinking she was trying to run away, made a grab for her, but she managed to elude his grip and burst out of the doorway. But Aoi was not intent on escaping. She was just trying to make it to the privy before she threw up from all the food she had packed into her belly. She didn’t make it.

She fell to her hands and knees halfway along the path to the privy, heaving up great gobs of undigested food onto the grass that lined the path. The farmer caught up with her and reached down to grab her hair so Aoi couldn’t escape once she stopped throwing up. After many long minutes, Aoi’s stomach emptied itself and she was able to sit, her mouth sour with her recently expelled dinner and her head hurting from the farmer pulling at her hair.

When she was able to wobble to her feet, she made her way back to the hut, the farmer right behind her, still grasping her hair. Aoi felt dizzy and sick and would have gladly curled up in a corner and fallen asleep. Instead, the farmer pulled out a dirty sleeping mat and roughly forced Aoi to lie on it. Then, with shaking hands, he pulled the clothes off Aoi and fell on her.

As a country girl, Aoi knew the basics of procreation from watching animals. She also knew about the male anatomy from living in close proximity with so many brothers, often diapering her younger brothers when they were babies. But none of Aoi’s girlish knowledge prepared her for what the farmer did to her, and she lay there with the taste of vomit in her mouth, a large, smelly body pressing down on her, and a newfound pain between her legs. She cried more tears, until the flood of them washed down her thirteen-year-old face like a stream.

When Aoi was fifteen, she made a cuckold of her husband for the first time. Like all agrarian people, the peasants of Suzaka were keenly in tune with the rhythms of life. The rising and the setting of the sun marked their workdays. When winter came and the high snows drifted into the mountains, they cherished their meager allotment of light as they sat in their darkened houses, bundled against the cold and preparing material for the coming spring. In winter they would make tools or hand-carve bowls or plait grass rope, all useful implements for the daily chores of life.

Suzaka, being a mountain village, always had a rather meager rice crop, and the people were heavily dependent on dry crops like millet, as well as the gathering of ferns, bracken, and wild mushrooms from the surrounding forest. This made Suzaka a very poor village, because in Japan rice was money. The wealth of a lord was measured by how much tax in rice was due him from the peasants of the district. When services were not exchanged or bartered, portions of rice were more commonly given than coins.

Only merchants, samurai, and the rich dealt in copper, silver, and gold, and to the common peasant, richness was equated with baskets of rice grains that could be planted or eaten.

Throughout the year an enormous number of small festivals and observances were honored in the village. When times were good, these observances became parties, often degenerating into wild bouts of drinking, with amorous couples sneaking into the forest for a romantic tryst. As with all farmers, the parties were full of earthy humor, with bawdy songs and dances that often imitated both rutting animals and people.

When times were bad and food was short, the religious observances were still held, but they were somber, not wild occasions. In the Land of the Gods, each home’s hearth, well, and kitchen had its own collection of protective deities, and when hard times and famine were felt, each and every God was implored to make the next cycle of life less harsh and less hungry.

Aoi’s husband was old and taciturn and had lost physical interest in her after the novelty of her young body had worn off. During the second Higan celebration of Aoi’s marriage, she slipped off from the revelries with a young man of eighteen, who already had a wife and a child. He and Aoi coupled for a few minutes in a quiet meadow in the woods. To Aoi’s surprise, although her partner was more pleasing physically than her old husband, she didn’t find the act itself more pleasing. To Aoi’s genuine pleasure, however, the man gave her a roughly carved comb as a present when the act was done. The possibility that lying with a man might result in tangible goods was not something she had actually worked out, and that crudely carved comb was the genesis for a career as a part-time village prostitute.

She was seventeen when her husband found out how Aoi was getting a whole collection of combs, clothes, and extra spending money that he finally noticed, but to Aoi’s surprise the old man didn’t seem to care. All he said was “Shikata ga nai. It can’t be helped.”

When Aoi’s husband finally died, she was twenty-three. She continued to farm the land and slept with villagers and the occasional traveler. She rebuffed all efforts to find her another husband as she continued to bed the husbands of others. As the bandits grew strong in the area, they became her most lucrative customers, and Aoi’s business increased to the point that she no longer had to do any farming to get food.

One thing she didn’t like about visiting the bandit camp was that she was expected to sleep with Boss Kuemon before she could sleep with any of his men. The actual act with the bandit leader took only a few minutes because it took only a few fake moans on Aoi’s part to get him to perform with the quickness of a rabbit. It wasn’t sleeping with him that she objected to. Aoi’s objections were based on the fact that Kuemon never paid her. He said it was a tax in kind for allowing her to ply her trade to the rest of his men.

Aoi straightened up and adjusted the sash on her kimono. Then, plastering a mechanical smile on her face, she put her old kimono into her basket, picked up the basket, and walked the remaining few hundred yards to the little ravine that held Boss Kuemon’s camp.

Boss Kuemon came out of the log hut that served as his shelter and headquarters. He was wearing only a loincloth, and he idly scratched his round belly. On his shoulders and back he had a large blue Chinese dragon tattooed, and he liked to walk around half-naked to show off the artwork that adorned his body. His shoulders were thick and muscular, and when he walked across the camp he had the distinctive, bent-legged, rolling gait of a palanquin porter.

Kuemon’s father had been a palanquin porter, and, for the first twenty-two years of his life, Kuemon had followed his father’s trade, often literally following his father’s footsteps as his father took the front of a palanquin pole and Kuemon took the rear.

The palanquin was used to transport cargo or people. Two porters would hoist a long pole on their shoulders, each facing forward. In the middle of the pole was a small platform, hung from the pole by ropes. For a fee, people could ride on that platform while the porters shuffled off in a rolling jog, carrying the passengers to their destination. In a mountainous land with almost no improved roads, the palanquin was more practical than a cart and cheaper than a horse.

In the normal course of things, Kuemon would have remained a porter his entire life. But things were hardly normal in Japan. First, after three hundred years of constant warfare, one particularly powerful warlord named Oda Nobunaga almost succeeded in uniting Japan. Oda was assassinated, and one of Oda’s generals, a man called Hideyoshi, the Taiko, seized power and, through diplomacy and war, did unite Japan. The astounding part was that Hideyoshi was a peasant. This was a lesson not lost on Kuemon. Where numerous hereditary warlords failed, a talented peasant was successful.

Kuemon considered himself talented. He was a good fighter and a leader of men. He abandoned his life as a porter and took up the life of a brigand. He was not sorry for his choice. Now he had a nice band of men, and he made a living a thousand times richer than any palanquin porter could make.

Hideyoshi was dead and, slowly but surely, Tokugawa Ieyasu was tightening his control on the government while Hideyoshi’s son and widow remained cowering behind the thick walls of Osaka Castle. Kuemon decided Ieyasu would kill Hideyoshi’s son when he was ready. It’s what Kuemon would do.

Despite understanding what Ieyasu would do, Kuemon did not identify with the new head of Japan. Ieyasu was an aristocrat, not a peasant. Although he affected the spartan ways of the warrior, Kuemon had heard that Ieyasu claimed a newfound family link with the Fujiwaras. This convinced Kuemon that the days of peasants rising to generals were numbered and that birth would become paramount under a Tokugawa regime. The Fujiwaras were one of the families that could claim the ancient title of Shogun, and that meant Ieyasu had a preoccupation with the trappings of birth and an interest in claiming the ancient title for himself. Because of his low birth, Hideyoshi could never claim this title, and he had had to accept the less important title of Taiko.

Kuemon’s men all called him “boss,” and that was title enough for him. The title of boss was more than he could ever hope for as a palanquin porter.

“Someone approaching!”

The voice of Hachiro pierced the peace of the camp, and every head went up to hear the identification of the interloper. Hachiro was not good for much, as his recent encounter with the samurai who killed two of Kuemon’s men showed, but he was useful for odd jobs like standing sentry, guiding people, running messages, or tending the camp. That damn samurai had eluded Kuemon’s trap, but Kuemon was a patient man, and he would have a chance to kill him again.

“It’s Aoi!”

Kuemon smiled. The tart from the village. Initially, Kuemon had insisted that she sleep with him to avoid paying her for her services, but now Kuemon was convinced that she slept with him because she liked it. He puffed out his chest like a courting pigeon and awaited her arrival in camp.