by David Kirk
Musashi thought about his answer for some time. ‘My uncle taught me men were innately good. Born without any prejudice. No. It’s the Way. It’s the Way that makes men think as this. Twists them thusly. Must be. Deep within all there is an honesty.’
‘Uncle?’ said Jiro. ‘You’ve never spoken of him before.’
He hadn’t. Why today he should speak he did not know, but he found that he wanted to. ‘His name was Dorinbo,’ said Musashi. ‘A monk.’
‘Buddhist or Shinto?’
‘Shinto.’
‘Shinto?’ said Jiro. ‘Never much paid attention to the priest of my vale. The celestial spear dipping into the chaotic seas, wild Susano’o abroad in the heavens making it thunder . . . It all washed over me.’
‘I know it well,’ said Musashi. ‘I helped my uncle with the ceremonies. Told the stories, read the prayers. He raised me. My father was absent, serving his Lord. My uncle taught me . . . everything. How to read and write . . . All of it. He wanted me to become his apprentice and follow him down the holy path but I . . .’ He took a breath and thought how to express it best. ‘I chose the sword.’
‘And the sword led you here,’ said Jiro.
Musashi did not hear him. Now, thinking of Dorinbo, he felt warmth in his heart and he was driven to speak further, if just to remember, if just to recall: ‘He was a healer. Talented. People would come from afar to be treated by him. None were turned away. Lepers, the mutilated . . . Not all could be cured but he would try equally. There were wounds, festering wounds that smelt so bad I ran from the room in disgust, but he would stay and lay his hands upon those vile rotting limbs with tenderness. His hands . . . His ability that he had learnt for himself, and he put his hands on filth all to try to alleviate it. And he asked for nothing. And there are children in the village where I was born that stand upright this day because of him. Made it to adulthood because of him. He did things of worth, and, and . . .’
His voice faded away. He could speak no further.
Jiro had noticed the change in Musashi. Rare that any kindness seeped into their voices. ‘He sounds a fine man,’ he said. ‘One that would not hate.’
Musashi did not reply. His eyes were distant now. Jiro watched him for some time. A sparrow alighted on the rim of Hayato’s helmet and bobbed its beak to the water and then threw its head back to drink.
‘Perhaps he is different,’ said Jiro. ‘Not as my kin would be.’
Again the sparrow drank, again, again, again.
‘Why is it you do not return to him?’ Jiro pressed. ‘Do you think he is the sort of man that would hate you for what you are, for what you’ve done?’
‘How could I return to him like . . .’ snapped Musashi, and he tugged at the rags he wore and glared at Jiro for an instant. But it all hurt to say and it hurt to think of, a wet heat behind the eyes. It could not last. Musashi’s face softened and he let the rags fall from his hand. Jiro turned away, embarrassed.
The silence resumed. The sparrow had fled to the skies at the sudden outburst. Musashi put the stalk of grass in his mouth once more and ground it between his teeth.
His eyes returned to the golden crest.
A fortnight after he had been defanged, Jiro returned from bowfishing despondent and empty-handed save for his longbow. He sat down by the bracken fire Musashi had made and laid the stave of the weapon across his lap. He stared at nothing for a long while, probing the hollow of his gum with his tongue.
‘Bowstring snapped,’ he said eventually.
‘It had to, some time,’ said Musashi.
‘It was the last one I had,’ he said. ‘The last one. What are we to do?’
‘There’s plenty of mushrooms here,’ said Musashi, and he waved a hand at the trees, which were rife with stairs of fungi. ‘We’ll make do.’
‘No!’ shouted Jiro. ‘No! I refuse to subsist. I will forego rice, I will forego tea, but . . . I must have fish. A man must have fish.’
He repeated these words several times, his voice racked with the desperate emotion of the long-deprived, and yet his distress was a matter of more than simple food. What was an archer without a bow? His eyes roved in furious rotations and his fingers wrung themselves around the bow’s stave.
‘There’s a town a half-day’s walk eastwards,’ he said. ‘I’ll go there. There must be a bowyer there.’
‘We don’t need a bowyer,’ said Musashi. ‘Perhaps we can make a string ourselves.’
‘Out of what?’
‘I don’t know . . . Hair. Some vine or grass we can find . . . The very first men who made bows, in the time before bowyers, they must have had exactly what we have here before us now. Surely we can find some substitute or . . .’
‘A string as sturdy as your wicker kite, no doubt,’ said Jiro blackly.
‘What in the myriad hells do you intend by that?’
Jiro met Musashi’s eyes for a moment and the two of them swelled with imminent conflict. But before it could manifest the small man relented, looked at the ground with a sigh.
‘I apologize,’ he said. ‘An unnecessary insult to a friend, born of my disquiet. I will head into town.’
‘You can’t,’ said Musashi. ‘Remember Koresada.’
‘I’m not like . . . I’m no thief . . . I’ll . . .’
Jiro rose to his feet. He laid his longbow aside and walked over to where the helmets were hung. He placed his hands around the golden frond of Hayato’s helmet, and began trying to wrench it off. It was loose, the joints rusted, and he yanked it again and again. Musashi placed a hand on his shoulder, tried to place his body between the man and what he sought.
‘How do you think it will look,’ he said, ‘you arriving in town two years starved and clutching a golden samurai crest? What conclusion do you think they’ll reach?’
‘I’ll trade, they’ll trade, they’ll listen. Let me go.’
‘No.’
‘I must have a bow. I must have fish. I must, I must, I must . . .’
‘Are you mad?’
‘Let me go!’ shouted Jiro, and he snapped the crest loose and stood back with it in his hands. Musashi looked at him, and in his anger his first instinct was to strike at the man that he might force some wits into his head. He hesitated, though, because it was Jiro, and yet Jiro saw the intent in him and his eyes tightened in response, and he made to stride around Musashi and leave their camp.
Musashi yelled at him to halt, half-pleading, half-commanding, and Jiro shouted back a half-insult and began to half-run. Musashi grabbed him by the scruff of his clothing and tried to haul him close, and Jiro swung around and attempted to pry himself free, and like this they began to struggle, began to dance around each other, snarling and spitting, a golden crest in their hands and a wilderness around them.
Bigger, stronger, Musashi drew Jiro in close, and he tried to restrain him without choking or wrenching at joints as he had been taught, instead wrapped his arms around the man’s chest and tried to pin his arms to his sides, but still Jiro fought, kicked, butted with his head. Musashi growled and brought his friend over his waist, threw him to the ground and fell with him, and there simply kept his hold upon the man, let him struggle as he would until hopefully he would see sense.
‘Let me go!’ Jiro pleaded, trying to look over his shoulder and meet Musashi’s eye. ‘I must have fish!’ And on and on he repeated this until he was actually weeping, tears streaming from his eyes. He spoke of fish but it was more than that, everything bared in this piteous, pathetic moment, everything mourned, and Musashi understood this, and the fact that someone older than he could be so thoroughly broken made him want to weep also.
Thus they lay until Jiro’s struggles subsided. Musashi’s grip lessened. Jiro assured him that he was calm, and, when Musashi chose to believe him and released him entirely, he calmly went to sit with his back against a tree. There he sat cradling Hayato’s crest, staring dumbly at his own distorted reflection barely visible upon its surface for some time.
Th
en he looked up at Musashi, smiled, and tossed the crest away as though it were nothing.
They ate nought but boiled mushrooms that night in silence, and the next morning, when Musashi awoke, Jiro and the crest were gone.
His longbow and his swords remained.
Musashi knew what this meant, yet he spent the morning lying to himself that the man was only twenty heartbeats away from reappearing in the camp, and perhaps for a while such was his desire for this to be so that he even believed it. But he knew that ultimately he had no choice but to go and search for Jiro, if only to confirm. Guardedly, he brought both his and Jiro’s weapons with him and at the very edge of the town, on the wooded slope of the hill that led down to the paddy fields, he hid the four swords and the bow between the roots of a great dead oak tree.
Musashi traversed the narrow paths that bisected the dry paddies and entered the town, trying the best he could to be inconspicuous. He wore a peasant’s straw sandals, a decrepit old kimono and a rough jacket of hemp. These things by themselves would attract no attention. Yet he had a full head of hair that hung loose to his chin, where peasants tended to keep theirs cropped close; his emaciated flesh was pale and dirty; and in this gauntness he stood a head taller than most.
He was wary for any staring at him, but not a single eye followed him, for the town was silent and empty. He walked along the main thoroughfare, through all the things that had long since been relegated to memories – the smell of rice cooking, the curls of incense that warded insects and kept away stench, colours beyond pallid tones of earth, silk-threaded cushions, soft tatami mats, roofs, walls – and found not a single person.
They were all gathered on the moor on the far side of the town, an expanse of rutted brush bordered by pine trees. Musashi joined the back of the crowd, and looked over their heads. At the fore of them all, he saw Jiro.
Jiro was kneeling, bound by the wrists to a stake that had been driven into the ground behind him, his arms pinioned up in odd contortion. They had bled him to death by a score of deep cuts across his body and his back, and to make a fool of him they had cut his nose and his ears off.
A samurai, swords at his side and a spear in his hands, stood nearby. The steward of the town, perhaps. An executioner from the hamlet of the corpsehandlers, his work completed, had been exiled some distance away, where he knelt with his bloody hands upon his thighs and his eyes upon the floor. Some swordless higherborn, the headman of the town or the minister whose jurisdiction it fell under or some other titled authority, was pronouncing final judgement.
‘Look, then, you all upon this enemy of civilization, and see justice enacted in the name of his most noble Lord Natsuka,’ said the minister, and then he realized his mistake of habit and corrected himself quickly: ‘The justice of the most noble Lord Tokugawa, may he reign ten thousand years hale and serene. In his authority, I hereby rule that the corpse of this degenerate shall stand for a week upon this moor that all passing on the road might heed its warning.’ He fumbled at his belt, and brought up a velvet bag noosed by a leather cord. ‘Where is the upstanding artisan known as Nobutsura?’
From the crowd a man stepped forward. He was a hardy-looking fellow with hair cropped so short he all but resembled a monk, and he dropped to his knees and pressed his brow to the ground. ‘Here, most honourable one.’
‘Rise,’ said the minister, and the artisan did so. The minister pressed the bag into Nobutsura’s hands. ‘Here, your reward. One shu of gold. Let every man and woman know that bounties persist upon the wretched and vile masterless that served the vanquished coalition, and vigilance is a virtue upon which all the heavens shine.’
The artisan murmured his thanks, dropped into a bow again and then returned to the crowd. The minister or whoever he was had pronounced all he wished to pronounce. He gave a formal farewell, bade the populace be about their business, and then he retired to the box of his lacquered palanquin. A dozen men bore the cabin aloft on its yoke, and the townspeople dropped to their knees in salute as it departed.
The palanquin’s pace was ponderously slow, the six men who held the leading yoke walking backwards so that they might keep their eyes respectfully on the charge they bore aloft. The box of it was big enough for two, and Musashi, kneeling on the very edge of the crowd, heard the sound of a woman’s laughter as it passed.
The congregation dispersed to return to the town in grim silence, save for Nobutsura, who was rattling his bounty in its pouch in satisfaction. The corpsehandler vanished unnoticed by any. The samurai steward remained by Jiro, stood guard to ensure that none tampered with the corpse.
Musashi retreated to sit under the eaves of the wall of a smithy’s yard at the edge of the moor. He sat with his back against the stone foundations, rested his hands between his legs, sat there suddenly exhausted with the fatigue of years. He stared at Jiro, desecrated and destroyed. He stared at the samurai, upright and immutable.
The man held a spear, wore two swords at his side. He seemed proud to be doing his duty, topknot immaculately oiled, silks upon his shoulders. At his sternum his jacket was joined by a tasselled soft cord ended in teased white horsehair. Frail accoutrement no doubt tied and cleaned by servants’ hands.
Musashi stared at the samurai. Musashi stared at Jiro.
Musashi marked the difference between himself and the samurai. The samurai’s nails well filed, Musashi’s blackened. The samurai’s belly full and contented, and Musashi’s lean with lack and want. One of them a torturous murderer, and the other an exile. Had that man been at Sekigahara also? What for him these two years?
He stared for a long time, able to do no more, no less.
A gate on the walls opened beside him. The smith came out, a man with a head like a rock. He was clutching his hand, burnt on a poker, and cursing to himself. He too cast his eyes over the spectacle on the moor, and then he became aware of Musashi.
‘No,’ the smith said, rounding on him. ‘No, no, no. Away with you. No vagrants here.’
Musashi stared up at him.
‘Away with you!’ snarled the smith, slashed his hand towards that same vague distance to which he and Jiro had been condemned. ‘Away!’
Musashi rose to his feet. The smith’s eyes were level with his chin.
‘You just watched?’ he said.
The smith took a step back. Musashi followed.
‘Let them torture a man to death, for no crime at all?’
The smith’s mouth flapped.
‘Just watched,’ said Musashi, and two years welled and he drew his hand back and slapped the man across his face.
The smith yelped. Musashi slapped him again, again. Each blow considered and meant, realizing something. An inked brush flitting across fine paper, forming the outline of a long-envisioned image.
The samurai saw the violence, abandoned his guard of Jiro and came over shouting some command. Musashi saw the man in his peripheral, and he saw this man too for everything he was, his arms, his legs, the authority he carried, the authority he assumed, the authority Musashi also had assumed and hidden from these past two years, and it was stark and clear now.
The samurai did not expect Musashi to move with the speed or ability he did, thought him some drunk and rowdy malingerer. He barely managed to move the spear before Musashi had placed both hands on its shaft and wrenched it around. Musashi drove the samurai backwards and forced him up against the wall, pushed the spear shaft up against his throat.
‘Was it you who cut his ears away?’ Musashi hissed into his face. ‘Was it you who cut his back and bled him dry?’
The samurai struggled but Musashi was taller and stronger and did not allow the spear’s pressure to relent, forced it onwards, began to truly choke the man. Eyes bulged and spittle flew, and Musashi began to strike at the man without releasing him, began to drive his knees into the samurai’s belly and his brow into the samurai’s nose again and again, and each blow was born of two years of agony and indignity.
The samurai managed to wrigg
le out from beneath the throttling press of the spear, but Musashi continued to hit at him, and the man collapsed to the floor and Musashi kicked and stamped at him until he was no more than a cowering ball. Seething, he stepped back, looked at what he had wrought. He looked around and found that walls still stood and that the sky was still blue.
Why stop here, when the outrage spiralled ever outwards?
‘Where’s the one who betrayed Jiro?’ Musashi demanded of the smith, who had watched him beat the samurai in cowed incomprehension and fear. ‘The one who claimed the bounty?’
The smith stammered something, pointed towards town. Musashi commanded him to lead with a jerk of his chin. The smith staggered off. Before he followed, Musashi wrestled the samurai’s swords from his belt, carried them both clutched in one hand and retained the spear in the other.
Through the streets they went. Musashi’s blood was running warm, his teeth clenched, eyes wide with a furious focus. Two years of nothing, when each day was formless and endless and asked the question of why it was even endured, and here and now the opposite, carried as a pulse, as a facet, as a thing of pure purpose, a thing that could achieve something, anything.
The smith gestured to a storefront and fell to his knees in the dust like a supplicant pleading for mercy. Musashi threw the spear and the swords to the ground, parted the navy half-curtain that hung across the entrance and strode in. It was a bowyer’s. Three long unstrung staves were hung upon the walls.
Nobutsura knelt upon tatami mats, varnishing a fourth. He turned and looked up into Musashi’s face.
‘All he wanted was a bowstring,’ said Musashi.
Nobutsura began to say something, but Musashi stepped forward and kicked over the table of his tools. He hauled down the rack of bow staves from the wall. Nobutsura scrambled backwards on his arse and the heels of his hands. Musashi stamped on him, once, twice, then he picked up one of the fallen staves and began to strike at him. It was long and thin and flexible and lashed like a whip.
‘Turned him over to that torture, for what?’ he spat. ‘To keep yourself in rice for a month?’
