Free The Tokaido Road (1991)(528p) by Lucia St. Clair Robson Page A

through the gate, though. She turned and looked back toward her father’s grave, surrounded by the hundreds of other gray monuments, the ranks of the dead.
    “I will not forget you,” she whispered. “Not even for an interval as short as those between the notes of the bells.”
     
     

 
CHAPTER 7
     
     
    THE JOURNEY OF A THOUSAND RI
     
    A tall pole stood near the fence leading to the barrier in Shinagawa. One short crosspiece was lashed near the bottom of the pole and a longer one farther up. A naked man hung with feet braced on the bottom crosspiece and arms outstretched and tied to the top one.
    All his blood had drained from the ragged gashes torn in his sides by a spear blade. The ground under the pole was black with it. The executioner had been clumsy or careless or cruel. He had stabbed the man several times before puncturing enough organs to finish the business.
    The dead man had been caught trying to sneak around the barrier. His body had been hanging here for three days as a lesson to anyone with similar plans. Men of the eta, the outcasts, leaned on their shovels and puffed on their tiny pipes and joked around the open hole where the body would be thrown. The soil of the mass grave was studded with bones, hair, and teeth.
    In spite of the stench, only Cat seemed to notice. While they waited their turn, pilgrims and travelers and porters sat on their luggage near the corpse. They chatted as they munched on the rice cakes and pickles and sweet potatoes they had retrieved from their packs and big cloth bundles. Whether they considered themselves too worldly to notice another public execution or whether they were really afraid, Cat couldn’t say.
    The TMkaidM Road wove through Shinagawa like a river meandering through a low wooden canyon. Here the highway followed the line of hills on one side and the bay on the other. Shinagawa’s role as a way station for people headed somewhere else was clear. It was famous for its restaurants and its audacious “rice servers,” women who, for a fee, delivered more than rice.
    At the end of the commercial district stretched a forbidding wall. It funneled all the foot traffic, for no wheeled vehicles were allowed on the TMkaidM, through one narrow gate. Government officials checked the travel papers of everyone passing through it.
    Cat’s nerve almost failed her when she saw the early-morning crowd of travelers bunched at the barrier. A group of samurai, each with a pair of swords stuck through his sash, guarded the gate. They were separating out the women and escorting them into a nearby building.
    To keep the restive daimyM under control, the first Tokugawa shMgun, Ieyasu, had devised a form of loyalty-by-hostage called “alternate attendance.” The lords were allowed to spend time on their fiefs scattered about the country; but they had to leave their wives and children in Edo as a guarantee of their good behavior.
    If a daimyM could smuggle his family out of Edo, he could foment rebellion without fear that their heads would decorate Edo’s execution grounds. So women, especially women of the nobility, were watched very closely. Cat knew the women were being stripped and inspected by female examiners. If they didn’t match the detailed descriptions on their permits, they would be detained or sent back to Edo or punished.
    Cat wished she could stop at one of the busy, open-fronted tea houses and spend an hour or so over a steaming cup and a bowl of rice and vegetables. It would give her time to observe the barrier and the procedures there. But to drink tea and eat rice she would have to take off the basket covering her face.
    Beyond the narrow alleyways between some of the buildings, Cat could see the quartz-and-sapphire glitter of the bay. Boats bobbed on its surface. Gulls dipped and swooped overhead, unaffected by man-made barriers. Cat envied them.
    Shichisaburo had said that priests and nuns and holy men didn’t need travel permits. But what if he were