Musashi: Bushido Code (13 page)

The Old Cryptomeria Tree

Although it was not the time of the morning when the temple bell was usually rung, its heavy, regular gouging resounded through the village and echoed far into the mountains. This was the day of reckoning, when Takuan's time limit was up, and the villagers raced up the hill to find out whether he'd done the impossible. The news that he had spread like wildfire.

"Takezō's been captured!"

"Really! Who got him?"

"Takuan!"

"I can't believe it! Without a weapon?"

"It can't be true!"

The crowd surged up to the Shippōji to gawk at the collared outlaw, who was tied like an animal to the stair railing in front of the main sanctuary. Some gulped and gasped at the sight, as though they were beholding the countenance of the dreaded demon of Mount Ō e. As if to deflate their exaggerated reaction, Takuan sat a bit farther up the stairs, leaning back on his elbows and grinning amiably.

"People of Miyamoto," he shouted, "now you can go back to your fields in peace. The soldiers will be gone soon!"

To the intimidated villagers, Takuan had become a hero overnight, their savior and protector from evil. Some bowed deeply to him, their heads nearly touching the ground of the temple courtyard; others pushed their way forward to touch his hand or robe. Others knelt at his feet. Takuan, appalled at this display of idolatry, pulled away from the mob and held up his hand for silence.

"Listen, men and women of Miyamoto. I have something to say, something important." The hue and cry died down. "It is not I who deserve the credit for capturing Takezō. It was not I who accomplished it, but the law of nature. Those who break it always lose in the end. It is the law that you should respect."

"Don't be ridiculous! You caught him, not nature!"

"Don't be so modest, monk!"

"We give credit where it's due!"

"Forget the law. We have you to thank!"

"Well, then thank me," continued Takuan. "I don't mind that. But you should pay homage to the law. Anyway, what's done is done, and right now there's something very important I'd like to ask you about. I need your help." "What is it?" came the question from the curious crowd.

"Just this: what shall we do with Takezō now that we've got him? My agreement with the House of Ikeda's representative, who I'm sure you all know by sight, was that if I didn't bring the fugitive back in three days' time, I'd hang myself from that big cryptomeria. If I did succeed, I was promised, I could decide his fate."

People started to murmur.

"We heard about that!"

He assumed a judicial pose. "Well, then, what shall we do with him? As you see, the dreaded monster is here in the flesh. Not very fearsome, really, is he? In fact, he came along without a fight, the weakling. Shall we kill him, or let him go?"

There was a rumble of objections at the idea of setting Takezō free. One man shouted, "We've got to kill him! He's no good, he's a criminal! If we let him live, he'll be the curse of the village."

While Takuan paused, seeming to consider the possibilities, angry, impatient voices from the rear shouted, "Kill him! Kill him!"

At that point, an old woman pushed her way to the front, shoving aside men twice her size with sharp jabs of her elbows. It was, of course, the irate Osugi. When she reached the steps, she glared at Takezō for a moment, then turned and faced the villagers. Waving a mulberry branch in the air, she cried, "I won't be satisfied with just killing him! Make him suffer first! Just look at that hideous face!" Turning back to the prisoner, she raised her switch, screaming, "You degenerate, loathsome creature!" and brought it down on him several times, until she ran out of breath and her arm dropped to her side. Takezō cringed in pain as Osugi turned to Takuan with a menacing look.

"What do you want from me?" the monk asked.

"It was because of this murderer that my son's life has been ruined." Shaking violently, she screeched, "And without Matahachi there is no one to carry on our family name."

"Well," countered Takuan, "Matahachi, if you don't mind my saying so, never amounted to much anyway. Won't you be better off in the long run taking your son-in-law as heir? Giving him the honored Hon'iden name?"

"How dare you say such a thing!" Suddenly the proud dowager burst into sobs. "I don't care about what you think. Nobody understood him. He wasn't really bad; he was my baby." Her fury rose again and she pointed at Takezō. "He led him astray, he made him a good-for-nothing like himself. I have the right to take my revenge." Addressing the crowd, she beseeched them, "Let me decide. Leave it to me. I know what to do with him!"

Just then a loud and angry shout from the back cut the old woman off. The crowd parted like rent cloth, and the latecomer marched quickly to the front. It was Scraggly Beard himself, in a towering rage.

"What's going on here? This isn't a sideshow! All of you, get out of here. Go back to work. Go home. Immediately!" There was shuffling, but no one turned to go. "You heard what I said! Get a move on! What are you waiting for?" He stepped threateningly toward them, his hand poised above his sword. Those in the front shrank back wide-eyed.

"No!" interrupted Takuan. "There's no reason for these good people to go. I called them here for the express purpose of discussing what's to be done with Takezō."

"You be quiet!" commanded the captain. "You have nothing to say in this matter." Drawing himself up and glaring first at Takuan, then at Osugi, and finally at the crowd, he boomed, "This Shimmen Takezō has not only committed grave and serious crimes against the laws of this province; he is also a fugitive from Sekigahara. His punishment cannot be decided by the people. He must be turned over to the government!"

Takuan shook his head. "Nonsense!" Seeing that Scraggly Beard was ready to respond, he raised a silencing finger. "That's not what you agreed to!"

The captain, his dignity seriously threatened, started to argue. "Takuan, you will no doubt receive the money the government has offered as a reward. But as an official representative of Lord Terumasa, it is my duty to take charge of the prisoner at this point. His fate need no longer be of any concern to you. Don't trouble yourself even thinking about it."

Takuan, making no effort to answer, broke into peals of laughter. Every time it seemed to subside, it would come rolling up again.

"Watch your manners, monk!" warned the captain. He started to spit and sputter. "What's so funny? Huh? You think this is all a joke?"

"My manners?" repeated Takuan, cracking up in laughter again. "My manners? Look, Scraggly Beard, are you thinking of breaking our agreement, going back on your sacred word? If you are, I warn you, I'll turn Takezō loose here and now!"

With a unanimous gasp, the villagers began edging away.

"Ready?" asked Takuan, reaching toward the rope that bound Takezō. The captain was speechless.

"And when I unleash him, I'm going to sic him on you first. You can fight it out between yourselves. Then arrest him, if you can!"

"Now hold on—just a minute!"

"I kept my part of the bargain." Takuan continued to make as if he were about to remove the prisoner's fetters.

"Stop, I say." The samurai's forehead beaded with sweat.

"Why?"

"Well, because—because—" He was almost stuttering. "Now that he's tied up, there's no point in letting him go, just to cause more trouble—now, is there? I'll tell you what! You can kill Takezō yourself. Here—here's my sword. Just let me have his head to take back with me. That's fair, isn't it?"

"Give you his head! Not on your life! It's the business of the clergy to conduct funerals, but giving away the corpses, or parts of them . . . Well, that'd give us priests a bad name, wouldn't it? No one would trust us with their dead, and anyway, if we started to just give them away, the temples would go broke in no time." Even with the samurai's hand resting on his sword handle, Takuan couldn't resist baiting him.

Turning to the mob, the monk became serious again. "I ask you to talk it over among yourselves and give me an answer. What shall we do? The old woman says it's not enough to kill him outright, we should torture him first. What do you think of lashing him to a branch of the cryptomeria tree for a few days? We could bind him hand and foot, and he would be exposed to the elements day and night. The crows will probably gouge out his eyeballs. How does that sound?"

His proposal struck his listeners as so inhumanly cruel that at first no one could answer.

Except Osugi, who said, "Takuan, this idea of yours shows what a wise man you really are, but I think we should string him up for a week—no, more! Let him hang there ten or twenty days. Then I myself will come and strike the fatal blow."

Without further ado, Takuan nodded. "All right. So be it!"

He took hold of the rope after freeing it from the railing and dragged Takezō, like a dog on a leash, to the tree. The prisoner went meekly, head bowed, uttering not a sound. He seemed so repentant that some of the softer-hearted members of the crowd felt a bit sorry for him. The excitement of capturing the "wild beast" had hardly worn off, however, and with great gusto everyone joined in the fun. Having tied several lengths of rope together, they hoisted him up to a branch about thirty feet from the ground and lashed him tightly. So bound, he looked less like a living man than a big straw doll.

After Otsū came back to the temple from the mountains, she began feeling a strange and intense melancholy whenever she was alone in her room. She wondered why, since being alone was nothing new to her. And there were always some people around the temple. She had all the comforts of home, yet felt lonelier now than she had at any time during those three long days on the desolate hillside with only Takuan as a companion. Sitting at the low table by her window, her chin resting on her palms, she reflected on her feelings for half a day before coming to a conclusion.

She felt that this experience had given her an insight into her own heart. Loneliness, she mused, is like hunger; it isn't outside but inside oneself. To be lonely, she thought, is to sense that one lacks something, something vitally necessary, but what she knew not.

Neither the people around her nor the amenities of life at the temple could assuage the feeling of isolation she now felt. In the mountains there had only been the silence, the trees and the mist, but there had also been Takuan. It came to her like a revelation that he was not entirely outside herself. His words had gone straight to her heart, had warmed and lighted it as no fire or lamp could. She then came to the innocent realization that she was lonely because Takuan was not around.

Having made this discovery, she stood up, but her mind still grappled with the problem at hand. After deciding Takezō's punishment, Takuan had been closeted in the guest room with the samurai from Himeji a good deal of the time. What with having to go back and forth to the village on this errand and that, he'd had no time to sit down and talk with her as he had in the mountains. Otsū sat down again.

If only she had a friend! She didn't need many; just one who knew her well, someone she could lean on, someone strong and completely trustworthy. That was what she longed for, craved so badly that she was nearly at her wit's end.

There was always, of course, her flute, but by the time a girl is sixteen, there are questions and uncertainties inside her that can't be answered by a piece of bamboo. She needed intimacy and a sense of partaking in, not just observing, real life.

"It's all so disgusting!" she said out loud, but voicing her feeling in no way mitigated her hatred for Matahachi. Tears spilled onto the little lacquered table; the angry blood coursing through her veins turned her temples blue. Her head throbbed.

Silently the door behind her slid open. In the temple kitchen, the fire for the evening meal burned brightly.

"Ah ha! So this is where you've been hiding! Sitting here letting the whole day slip through your fingers!"

The figure of Osugi appeared at the door. Startled out of her abstraction, Otsū hesitated a moment before welcoming the old woman and putting a cushion down for her to sit on. Without so much as a by-your-leave, Osugi seated herself.

"My good daughter-in-law . . ." she began in grandiose tones.

"Yes, ma'am," answered Otsū, cowed into bowing deeply before the old harridan.

"Now that you have acknowledged the relationship, there's a little something I want to talk to you about. But first bring me some tea. I've been talking till now with Takuan and the samurai from Himeji, and the acolyte here didn't even serve us refreshments. I'm parched!"

Otsū obeyed and brought her some tea.

"I want to talk about Matahachi," the old woman said without prelude. "Of course, I'd be a fool to believe anything that lying Takezō says, but it seems Matahachi is alive and staying in a different province."

"Is that so?" said Otsū coldly.

"I can't be sure, but the fact remains that the priest here, acting as your guardian, agreed to your marriage to my son, and the Hon'iden family has already accepted you as his bride. Whatever happens in the future, I trust you don't have any ideas about going back on your word."

"Well . . ."

"You'd never do such a thing, would you?"

Otsū let out a soft sigh.

"All right then, I'm glad of that!" She spoke as though adjourning a meeting. "You know how people talk, and there's no telling when Matahachi will be back, so I want you to leave this temple and come live with me. I've more work than I can handle, and since my daughter-in-law's got so much on her hands with her own family, I can't drive her too hard. So I need your help."

"But I—"

"Who else but Matahachi's bride could come into the Hon'iden house?" "I don't know, but—"

"Are you trying to say you don't want to come? Don't you like the idea of living under my roof? Most girls would jump at the chance!"