Hishigawa fell to his knees and reached up with a trembling hand to touch the bamboo shaft of the cart.
“It’s all there?” he asked in wonder.
“Yes.”
“My gold.”
“I thought it would be a shame to lose the gold, but, if necessary, I knew it would be so much easier to give the bandits the strongbox. The fact that I was able to give them the strongbox in a way that caused them great effort to retrieve it was just a gift from the Gods.”
“My gold,” Hishigawa repeated, still stunned by the sudden reversal of fortunes.
“Come on,” Kaze said, “let’s get down to the barrier.”
As Hishigawa went into the guardhouse to report the bandits and arrange for an armed escort into Kamakura, Kaze took Goro and Hanzo to one of the nearby stands that served refreshments. These were simple structures made of bamboo lashed together into a crude framework, with a rough thatched roof and wooden benches that served as both seats and table for weary travelers. In one corner of this stand was a stove made of mud, where tea water was heated and food was cooked.
As he entered the stand, Kaze asked the proprietor, a wizened man with a face like old leather from working outdoors in the summer sun and winter cold, if he had seen a trio of travelers consisting of an old woman, a youth, and an old, thin servant.
“An obaasan, a grandmother, with a headband? On the headband the kanji for ‘revenge’?” the old man said.
“The same!”
“Yes. They went through here a few days ago. That was one tough old granny!” The man cackled. “I thought she was going to run me through with that spear she carries when I wouldn’t give her a discount. Argued with me for the longest time, then finally took her business next door. Heard her arguing over there, too. She was something.”
Having been so lucky, Kaze took a chance. “Is there a nine-year-old girl around here? She would have come within the past two years, possibly sold as a servant.”
The old man scratched his head. “No, sorry, Samurai, there’s nobody like that in these parts.”
Hiding his disappointment, Kaze thanked the old man for the information, sat on a bench, and ordered hot tea and roasted gingko nuts on tiny bamboo skewers. Goro and Hanzo, not used to partaking of the amenities of the world, sat together on a bench. They were curious about Kaze’s inquiries but so uncomfortable about being in the snack stand that they remained silent. The meager earnings from their farm made spending money on tea and service an unthinkable luxury.
Kaze was handed a brown earthenware cup, and then a woman with a coarse red face came by with a large copper teakettle that she used to fill it with steaming green tea. She went to serve Goro and Hanzo as Kaze lifted the cup to his face, content to drink the hot bitter liquid. He was happy he was going in the right direction to track down the trio and had decided to let his karma take him where it willed, even if it meant being recognized by the Tokugawa guards at the barrier. His mind was clear and he was unafraid.
He was in the midst of taking a second drink when he felt two men behind him. He put the cup down, stood, and turned before the men could get within a sword’s length of him.
“It’s the man who’s kind to flies,” one of the men said.
Kaze smiled. They were the two drunken samurai from the tea-house a few days before.
Since the barrier acted as a choke point for commerce, Kaze was not surprised to see fellow travelers he had met before. The chances were high that people would meet and sometimes meet again while traveling the Tokaido. Kaze relaxed his guard slightly, reaching down to pick up his teacup again. He gave a brief nod to the two samurai.
“Did you really believe that you could cut a fly?” one of the two samurai said rudely, not addressing Kaze properly or introducing himself.
Kaze cocked his head to one side.
“Cutting a fly with a sword, it really can’t be done,” his companion said.
Kaze put down his teacup. He looked about him and saw several flies buzzing lazily near the refreshment stand. Then he looked at the two samurai and again back at the flies. He was tempted but heard the voice of his Sensei. When you play with fools, you act like a fool. When you act like a fool, you are one.
Calling attention to oneself was never good. Doing it in this circumstance, while at a barrier checkpoint with Tokugawa guards, was especially foolish. Kaze picked up his cup of tea and smiled at the samurai, just as he would at a simpleminded child. “You might be right,” he said.
Kamakura is in such a beautiful setting that it surely must be loved by the Gods, Kaze thought. This love manifests itself in the fact that many Gods, spirits, and holy people have touched various spots there, dotting its hills with countless temples, nunneries, and sacred places.
Kamakura is tucked into a deep green fold in the steep hills that ring the clear waters of Sagami Bay. It is reachable by a road that branches off the Tokaido. The Tokaido Road continued to Edo, but Kaze was pleased to be able to avoid the new capital of Japan, the stronghold of his enemies, the Tokugawas.
This was the second time Kaze had visited Kamakura. The first time was when he was eleven, when he had come to the city with his Sensei. Even when Kaze was eleven, he had a sense of furyu, that aesthetic and religious love of nature that samurai strove to develop lest they be considered barbaric and uncultured.
As he walked through the narrow mountain pass that opened the way to Kamakura and caught sight of the city, Kaze recalled the first time he had seen it. That time and this time, his reaction was exactly the same. His breath caught in his throat and he paused to drink in the vista.
The city spread across the narrow valley below, with the blue sea to the south and the steep hills to the north. Fuji-san could be seen in the distance beyond the hills, its majestic, snow-covered slopes dominating the horizon. With the steep hills and narrow passes leading to the city, Kaze immediately saw the military possibilities of the location as well as its beauty and understood why it had once been a military stronghold. Nitta Yoshisada had conquered Kamakura centuries before, but it had required intervention by the Gods.
The central part of Kamakura was laid out like a grid, in the Chinese style. Another former capital, Kyoto, was also laid out in such a grid. The rigid sense of orderliness imposed by a grid almost offended Kaze’s Japanese sense of geometry, which liked some small degree of variation, much like the variations found in nature. Unlike that of Kyoto, the grid portion of Kamakura was relatively compact. It was organized along a main central avenue, Wakamiya Oji. At the head of this avenue, high on a hill, was the Tsurugaoka Shrine.
The Tsurugaoka Shrine was devoted to Hachiman, the God of War. It was the creation of the Minamotos, who ruled Japan briefly from Kamakura almost four hundred years before Kaze’s time, adopting the fiction that the palaces and villas found on the beautiful rolling hills were like a military camp. They called their government a bakufu (“government of the tent”), as if this name would indicate that they had not strayed far from their military roots. One of their number, Yoritomo, became the first Minamoto Shogun, the “barbarian-conquering general.”
Once away from the central grid, the streets and paths of Kamakura took a more Japanese twist, following the contours of the land and snaking about the countryside. Tall trees grew up and down the hillsides and blue and gray tile roofs dotted the landscape. Kaze knew from his previous trip that after a rain some of these roofs would capture the image of Fuji-san, a picture of glory reflected in a humble roof.
The sound of a temple bell filled the air, and Kaze let the deep, rolling sound of the bronze kane wash over him. Temples were everywhere in Kamakura, as well as sites important to Zen, Nichiren, and most other sects of Buddhism. Kaze watched the procession of hired samurai, Hishigawa, Goro, Hanzo, and the gold-filled pushcart pass before him and start down a side path, apparently to Hishigawa’s home. Hishigawa had hired ten samurai at the barrier, and the trip from there to Kamakura had been made without incident.