Jiro thought of grabbing his charcoal basket for a brief second, then abandoned the idea. He sprang to his feet and nimbly hopped over the body. Then he ran down the path to the village as fast as his legs could carry him, not once looking behind him.
The samurai approached the corpse and stopped next to it. He looked at the body for several minutes, then he thoughtfully looked down the path where Jiro had neatly disappeared.
CHAPTER 2
Monkeys marching all
in a row. Fierce martial stance.
What fine samurai!
The parade was more like a comic scroll painting than a military procession.
In the lead was Ichiro, the village headman. He was a loose collection of lanky bones and oversize joints covered by yellowing skin. He carried a naginata, a type of spear with a broad sword blade for a point. He handled the weapon as if it were an alien device rather than something he had been drilled in. Ichiro was naked except for a loincloth and leather cuffs on his wrist, which were supposed to act as armor. Across his forehead he had a plate of metal strapped on by thin leather thongs. It would take a skilled swordsman, consciously trying to hit this headband, for it to provide any protection.
Behind Ichiro came Nagato Takamasu, the District Magistrate. His corpulent body strained at the cloth of his blue kimono, and the two swords that marked him as a samurai stuck out from his body like the spines of a blowfish. Nagato’s enormous belly jiggled as he waddled along. In an age when food was precious, Nagato’s fat marked him as someone of relative wealth and privilege.
Following Nagato were two guardsmen. Only one had a metal tipped spear; the other had a locally made spear of sharpened bamboo. One man wore a breastplate of chain mail as armor, but aside from this flimsy shield they both had only loincloths.
At the tail of the procession was Jiro. Jiro was supposed to lead the party, but he was put at the end as a matter of rank. As a result, every time Nagato wanted to ask how far it was to the body, the message had to be passed up and down the line by the two guardsmen. Jiro silently cursed the stupidity of the military as the conversation turned to farce.
“How far to the body?” Nagato asked.
“How far to the body?” the first guardsman repeated.
“How far to the what?” the second asked.
“The body, the body, baka!”
“Magistrate Nagato wants to know something,” the second guardsman said to Jiro.
Jiro, who couldn’t hear the telegraphed conversation, said, “Hai! Yes!”
“Where’s the body?”
“The crossroads,” Jiro answered, bewildered at why Nagato couldn’t remember what Jiro had reported when he first came to the village.
“It’s at the crossroads,” the second guardsman said.
“What’s at the crossroads?” the first asked.
“The body, the body, stupid,” the second said, mimicking the first.
The first guardsman looked over his shoulder and glared at the second. Then he turned to Nagato and said, “It’s at the crossroads, sir.”
“Of course it’s at the crossroads,” Nagato snapped. “Ask him how far from here.”
“How far from here?” the first relayed.
“How far is the body from the crossroads?” the second relayed.
Puzzled, Jiro answered, “It’s right at the crossroads.”
“To the right at the crossroads,” the second said.
The first said to Nagato, “We go to the right at the crossroads, sir.”
“To the right?” Nagato said, puzzled. “I thought he said the body was right at the crossroads. Ask him how far to the right.”
“How far to the right of the crossroads is it?”
“How far to the right?”
“How far to the right?” Jiro said perplexed. “How far to the right is what?”
“The body, stupid!”
“The body isn’t to the right of the crossroads.”
“It isn’t right.”
“He says it isn’t to the right, sir. Perhaps it’s to the left. These stupid farmers can’t tell right from left!”
“The body’s to the left at the crossroads?” Nagato said. “I thought he said it was right at the crossroads.”
The scrambled conversation would have continued for some time, except that Ichiro turned a bend and saw the body lying in the middle of the crossroads. Ichiro jerked to a halt, his naginata at the ready, as if the body would spring back to life and attack him.
Nagato almost walked into the butt of Ichiro’s naginata and came to a sudden halt himself. This unexpected stop echoed down the line as the first guardsman stopped short to avoid running into Magistrate Nagato, and the second guardsmen hit the first, bumping the first into Nagato’s back, despite the best efforts of the first guardsman not to hit the Magistrate.
At the bump of the first guardsman Nagato turned and roared in anger, “Baka! Fool! What do you think you’re doing!”
The guardsman fell to his knees in a deep bow of apology. “Excuse me, sir! Excuse me! It’s that stupid fool behind me. He pushed me! It was not my fault!”
Jiro, who had witnessed the entire sequence from his vantage point at the end of the procession, suppressed a laugh at the discomfort of the Magistrate and the guardsmen.
Nagato pointed at the body and yelled, “Don’t just sit there banging your miserable head on the ground! Get up and investigate the body!”
“Yes, sir!” The guardsman got to his feet and ran to the body, with the second guardsman nipping at his heels. When the first guardsman tried to stop as he reached the body, the second guardsman ran into him again. That tumbled both men down on top of the body, knocking over Jiro’s large basket of charcoal for good measure. The guards and body formed a wriggling bundle of hands, legs, and feet. The first guardsman, out of frustration and anger, started punching the second in the face.
As Nagato and Ichiro ran to sort out the squabbling guardsmen, a deep, ringing laugh came rolling down from the steep hillside by the crossroads. Jiro looked up the slope and was surprised to see the samurai who had startled him.
He was sitting on the supine trunk of a low-lying, windswept pine. The trunk was growing parallel to the ground, and the samurai was on it in the lotus position, his sword laying across his lap. In his hands he had a small knife and a piece of wood. His laughter was so hearty that he had to drop the wood into the lap of his kimono and place a hand down on the branch to steady himself, lest he fall off.
Nagato looked up the slope, scowling at the samurai. “What are you laughing at?” he bellowed.
The samurai’s laughter continued. Nagato, expecting an answer, demanded “Well? Well?”
The samurai’s laughter gradually died down. When it did, he grinned down at the outraged Magistrate and said, “Snow monkeys are always a source of amusement.”
The Magistrate was puzzled. “Why do you …” The meaning became clear. “Who are you to call us monkeys!” he shouted.
“You’re men who act like monkeys, so I’m just a man confused by what manner of creatures are before me: men or monkeys.”
The Magistrate, his face red with anger, kicked at the two guardsmen who were still tangled on the ground with the body. “Get up and arrest that man!” he screamed.
It took several moments for the guards to get themselves back on their feet with their weapons at the ready. They looked up the slope, then at each other. Then, with Nagato’s screams urging them on, they took a few tentative steps up the hillside toward the samurai.
As they scrambled up the hillside, all semblance of martial readiness disintegrated. Instead of holding their spears as weapons, they used them as hiking sticks. Neither guard seemed willing to lead the other, and both kept a wary eye on the samurai. When they were halfway to the samurai, he put the small piece of wood on the branch. Then he took the small knife, a ko-gatana, and slipped it into its niche in the side of his sword scabbard. He unfolded his legs and put them on the ground, standing up and shoving his sword into his sash. All this was done with an economy of movement and swiftness that mesmerized Jiro. The troops advancing up the hill were not entranced, however. This activity by the samurai was the signal for a pell-mell retreat by the guardsmen, who tumbled and slid down the slope back to the road.