by David Kirk
The threat hung in the air, and it was a valid one. Akiyama decided to try his luck.
‘Suppose I rain down fire upon you?’ he called. ‘A lot of hay in there. It will burn quickly.’
‘As you will,’ said Miyamoto. ‘But I think as many bales as I see gathered here have been set aside for a reason, no?’
The man had his wits about him. Frustrated by this, Akiyama stood rolling his tongue across the inside of his teeth. He waited for forty heartbeats longer before he admitted the futility of waiting. Evidently, Miyamoto was not be goaded or tricked, which left him with only one recourse.
He went back to the two samurai and his horse. He took his tea-coloured jacket off and hung it from the pommel of his saddle, and then began rolling the sleeves of his kimono up and binding them under his armpits with a length of soft tasselled cord, freeing his arms for unrestrained motion.
‘Tell me of the interior,’ he instructed the watching samurai as he tied the knots. ‘Have I room to use my longsword?’
‘I do not know your style,’ said the senior man.
‘Would it be possible to wield your longsword in there?’ said Akiyama, beginning to detest these fools.
And, of course, neither one of them answered.
‘The short it is, then,’ said Akiyama. He slid the unneeded longsword in its scabbard from his belt and replaced it within his saddlebags, then withdrew his short. The steel of the blade was oiled and polished and gleamed in the light. ‘Anything else I ought to know?’ he asked. ‘How much straw exactly is in there? Other materials? How impeded will I be in my ability to move?’
‘It will be narrow,’ said the wounded samurai. ‘I do not think you will have chance to manoeuvre around him. You will be facing him directly.’
‘And how large is he exactly?’
‘He will have reach over you, certainly,’ said the leader, and then his voice softened: ‘See sense – just wait an hour. Our men will be here then. They’ll have lances with them, and—’
‘Or the outlaw will have fled.’
That was all he would say. Akiyama rolled his shoulders, worked flexibility into them. His torso was crisscrossed and braced by the cord. He felt taut, balanced. He turned to the mill and strode over without looking back. He was pensive, for he knew that he was more proficient with his long that with his short, but then he reasoned that in there a man as big as Miyamoto reputedly was would be even more constrained. He made his strategies, took a breath, and then committed himself.
He stepped up onto the wooden platform the mill was set upon and approached the door. He stopped two paces shy of it, peered in. He could see nothing. Braced, prepared to strike at anything immediately, he broached the threshold.
Nothing attacked.
He stood there in the frame of the door, let his eyes adjust to the gloom within. He saw straw piled all around, the heavy blunted forms of blackened beams that were roughly hewn and shaped, and before him the great mechanism of the mill and all its gears hung still and disconnected from the wheel outside. There was no trapdoor that he could spy from here beneath it.
Neither could he spy Miyamoto himself.
Holding his shortsword out before him in a low defensive guard, he ventured slowly in. Murky stacks of baled hay abounded, and each of them could hide a man behind it easily. He held his breath, listened for Miyamoto’s. The beams were tight as a cage, constricting, concealing. He thought he heard something, turned, and then in his peripheral he sensed movement.
From above.
It confused him and he turned, and he looked, and he saw an open loft, a second floor that he had not been warned about, and there were bales of hay stacked there too, and one of these bales tipped now, crashed down upon him. It was larger than he was, but Akiyama was quick and writhed mostly out of the way, was not crushed under it but rather knocked from his feet, and he lost grip of his sword.
Immediately, he struggled to right himself. There was further movement from above. Miyamoto jumped down and landed roughly, scrambled over the burst bale of hay and threw himself on top of Akiyama before he could recover his shortsword. He was huge, barrelled Akiyama onto his back as easily as he would have done a child, wrestled to sit on top of him with his legs astride his chest. Akiyama struggled beneath his weight, reached up to try to gouge at the man’s eyes, but Miyamoto simply began pounding his fist down into his defenceless face, again, again, and the blows stunned Akiyama, and then he felt Miyamoto shift the position of his body, come closer, press his forearm down fiercely upon his throat.
The pressure, the terrible pressure, he was dead, Akiyama knew. Miyamoto would choke the life from him and he was too small, too feeble, too dazed to resist. Lights in his vision, an oddly disembodied feeling, and he felt as though his spirit was leaving him through the sockets of his eyes like smoke along flues. Tongue fat as a bloated fish left to rot upon the shore. Couldn’t even see his killer’s face in the darkness, and, and, and . . .
Miyamoto relented.
Akiyama sucked air through the sliver of his throat Miyamoto allowed, forearm still held there, pinning him where he was but not with intent to kill, not any longer.
‘Why are you here?’ Miyamoto hissed down into his face. ‘You come on their behalf? On account of some school? Why aren’t you as you? By yourself, for yourself?’
Then he was up, gone. He ran for the door and out. Released, Akiyama scrambled across the floor, recovered his shortsword and, still spluttering and heaving for breath, tried to rise and follow the vagrant. His left leg gave out under him and he fell, and he realized the knee had been wrenched around in the struggle, that it was in fact in agony. Frantically, he hopped across to the frame of the door and fell against it, held himself up, looked out.
Miyamoto was running and the lowerborn had scattered at his emergence exactly as before a charging boar, and the two useless samurai were simply watching as the masterless fled. Akiyama spat a low curse at their incompetence, and then he slid to the floor, sat with his back against the frame. No point going for the horse to try to give chase. If he could not stand he could not wield a sword.
He felt the throbbing of his knee and of his throat and of his face, and consented for now to Miyamoto’s escape.
Chapter Five
That summer it was all about definitions.
The youth that had defined itself and thus left childhood behind, and believed fervently that the same could be done to the world as a whole, that chaos could be mapped, that a million different forces and elements could be arrayed and ordered like wicker woven into a screen.
The definition of bruises. To look at them, to prod them, to feel their ache. Musashi would sit squeezing at his purpled forearms or probing at his cut lips. The pain gave him energy, gave him proof that he was a thing of substance, could be touched and in turn touch. In turn alter, on the path that he had set for himself, that had been set.
Food tasted better when he could scrounge it. Water tasted better mixed with his own blood. More vital, more imminent. Everything like this, that summer. Exhilarations felt higher, despair banished entirely. It was in the simple act of brazenly wearing swords once more. It was in taking the hand that would cast him down and turning it back upon itself, feeling the ligaments beneath the flesh wrenching. It was in overwhelming some pompous fool sent from the capital and throttling him amidst lowly hay, and even more than that in granting the samurai mercy.
Ultimately, it was about honesty. Musashi knew himself to be honest, innately – that he was honest as he was now in his defiance, not as he had been before, hiding away, assenting. Honest to himself, to the heart that beat within his chest and the mind that throbbed with raging thought behind his eyes. They, all of them, were dishonest, twisted away from how they ought to be by adhering to their ancient codes and dogmas. Denying themselves, denying the world all it could be.
He woke of a night for no obvious reason that he could discern. No noise, no movement, no primal sense of fear. He was in the hills,
sleeping rough in a copse of trees where soft mosses abounded. He held himself still for some time in the darkness, suspicious of why it was he had woken. The early summer air was pleasant, warm, the perfect temperature. His consciousness was not fogged in the slightest; he was awake, entirely awake.
It was as though he were simply meant to rise now, as though he were being summoned. That there was something he had to witness.
Musashi rose in thrall to this strange inkling. The sky through the branches above was afire with stars, and behind them the heavens were split by that vast celestial cloud that billowed like an instant of smoke frozen entirely still. He parted a swathe of boughs and looked down into the valley spread below, and there he saw what he knew immediately he was meant to see.
The moon was full and red and lucent and it hung above a benighted lake, and upon those black waters its reflection shimmered immaculately.
He stared, captivated, for a long time. Took it all in. Never did he think the moon could seem so vivid a colour. Never did he think it could be so beautiful. All existence seemed to hold its breath along with him, as though it were afraid to disrupt this image. Two red orbs perfectly apart, lights in the void, and Musashi looked at them, and soon enough he realized what it was he was beholding.
Here he saw himself, what he had become. They, the Way, all of it, they were the scarlet moon, and he was the reflection cast upon the surface of the lake. Before, hiding with Jiro and the others, he had simply been the black waters. Now he was a separate body of an equal boundary, of an equal shade, of an equal magnitude, one created by the other and yet never meeting, always apart. And was this not fine? Was this not the heavens blessing him?
He sat down in his solitude and continued to stare and felt a stirring in his heart.
How far could this take him? How far could he go?
Peaceful vigils, though, were things for the night, momentary breaths between great lungfuls of hatred, and in the light of day what things there were to hate. Topknots and swords and hubris, but most of all seppuku. Seppuku, the mark of ultimate acquiescence. Sometimes he imagined himself on his knees, actually performing the act, and he envisioned his own intestines in his hands as he had seen his father’s intestines, and the questions and the anger this begat in him were so hot they were blinding.
He first learnt of the seppuku of a man named Sanshiro Okita from a notice carved in wood hung up in a coastal village. The ritual was to be performed in a fortnight in a town Musashi knew to be leagues away, having passed through it some time before, and he looked at this message deeper, looked at it for what it truly was. The loathsome culture of it. The expertly carved cedar, the complex letters, the poetic respect afforded to the brutal act in the language, but most of all the galling anticipation sent out wide across the land as though this were a thing of worth and beauty – all of it amounting to what?
What better thing to oppose? Nothing so definite, so clear ahead of him, and so he doubled back upon himself, went back the way he had come. The pomp, the ceremony, the spectacle grew and grew, the seppuku also boldly proclaimed in each hamlet as he drew closer, and, after biding his time in the hills surrounding the town, on the day of the ritual Musashi witnessed an actual herald crying out the act upon the streets as though it were a joyous thing.
None could ignore it. None were permitted to ignore it. This was good, this was fine. None would ignore his opposition to it also.
A red summer moon reflected on a benighted lake.
The seppuku was to be performed in a dojo, and, when he saw the dark bulk of the hall surrounded by a white palisade, Musashi was reminded of his father’s suicide. He too had extinguished himself in such a place. The memory gave him cause to shudder, and the eerie sensation lingered as he approached the hall. The streets were quieted. No lowerborn would be permitted to witness such a thing. Conversely, no doubt the hall would be packed with samurai, all but lusting to see with the lewd eyes of voyeurs.
Musashi smelt incense in the air as he approached, saw curls of it drifting out between the top of the palisade and the overhanging eaves of the tiled roof. On the earth around the hall handfuls of salt had been scattered. From within there was silence. No death poems being read aloud, no faint utterances of contained agony, no blood spattering on callous dark wood. He had been careful to come with the sun to his fore, that his shadow would not be cast upon the palisade as he drew near, and he unsheathed his longsword on the steps leading up to the hall without any sound of alarm from within.
He hesitated for a moment, thought of all he opposed, let that harden him, and then he was committed. He ran up, slashed his sword through the silken palisade and barrelled inside.
There were samurai within, but fewer than he expected, and not one of them was wearing white, the colour of the dead. They were sitting on stools, clad in rough vestments, and though they were surprised by his sudden entry they were not startled, not outraged, recoiled momentarily and then recovered as one might at the crack of fireworks. Fearful of the bang, yet eager to see the subsequent beauty.
One man alone was standing.
‘Musashi Miyamoto,’ this samurai said, and he slid his longsword out of his scabbard.
Immediately, Musashi recognized him – it was the Yoshioka swordsman he had evaded those weeks ago. He remembered peering through the cracks of the mill’s walls, studying the man thoroughly as he stood waiting in bold challenge. Here he was again, his odd-coloured jacket that shimmered brown-green, his weird skin, his cat eyes.
His sword in his hand.
There was to be no seppuku here. He looked at the Yoshioka samurai – Akamatsu? Akitani? – and knew implicitly from the set of his face that this man would not be argued down to some test of pride with wooden swords, that Musashi’s head alone would satisfy him, and that furthermore the others watching would permit nothing less. A dozen of them, armed and prepared, and no chance for him to stand alone against such numbers.
The Yoshioka samurai stepped towards Musashi, his eyes grave. Musashi snarled, upended a brazier of incense and sent the iron frame tumbling towards the samurai, scattering coals and sands and embers that hissed and burnt and smoked, and then he turned and ran from the hall. He heard the outcry behind him, the cries of cowardice and the commands to halt, but he did not listen.
He chose to live. Always would he choose to live.
He ran back towards the hills beyond the edge of town and the safety of the forests upon them. He was a fine runner, honed from youth, and he had no doubts about his ability to outpace the men. He worried, though, about leaving some incriminating trail a tracker could follow through the wilderness, and so as he ran he turned and looked over his shoulder, that he might see if he was leaving footprints in the dust of the streets.
He saw instead that the Yoshioka samurai was chasing after him on a horse.
It was a white steed and its mane was long and shaggy and the hair flew wildly as its rider kicked it into a gallop. Musashi began to sprint, a stupid, instinctive response as though he might outrun the creature, and it seemed the samurai was upon him immediately. Yet, though he had his longsword bared in his right hand, the Yoshioka samurai made no attempt to ride Musashi down or to strike at him from the saddle as he passed. Instead he guided the creature in as wide a berth as he could around the young swordsman, and then halted perhaps twenty paces ahead.
The horse snorted and kicked at the ground, agitated, and the Yoshioka samurai stared at Musashi grimly and kept the point of his sword levelled at him. Musashi stared back. He did not know what was happening. Then the samurai swung one leg over the horse’s flank and began to dismount.
The man expected him to stop and duel in full propriety.
Musashi could have laughed. Stupid form of honour, their honour, and he turned and ran back in the opposite direction. The Yoshioka samurai shouted a curse at him, grabbed at the reins and began to haul himself up onto his horse once again, but before he could give chase Musashi ducked around the side of a buildin
g. The passage was narrow, walls close, and he hoped it was too tight for the horse to follow directly. He had no idea where he was headed.
At the mouth of the passage one of the samurai from the dojo appeared. He raised his sword, and Musashi raised his. He had no intention of stopping, of being stopped. Musashi swung as wildly as he could, led with the blunted reverse of his blade, and simply smashed it into the samurai’s weapon with all the force he could muster. There was a fierce crack and the samurai’s sword was knocked askance, but the man managed to keep his grip on his weapon. He recovered, kept his eyes solely on Musashi’s blade, began to manoeuvre his body and raise his own sword to parry any reverse blow, and, with the samurai’s focus directed so entirely, Musashi kicked the man so hard between the legs it lifted him partly off the ground.
He connected with his shin and he felt it all crushing against the bone of his leg, and the first the samurai knew of the unsighted blow was the pain, and then he was on the floor, writhing, gasping in that ultimate male agony, and Musashi left him behind. Stupid as the Yoshioka man. Fighting was fighting, more than swords. He looked around, saw no horse, kept running.
Ahead he spied a torii gate, vermilion red and standing four times the height of a man. Holy ground, a Shinto shrine, a walled compound. As he ran beneath it he heard a scream of rage that told him he had been sighted, and, as he turned to shut the far more humble iron and oak door that lay beyond the torii gate, he saw them coming, the samurai and the Yoshioka man on his horse all charging in a mad rush.
He slammed the door shut, and then he pulled the wooden beam across to bar it. The door was heavy, thick, it would not be breached by anything short of a cannon. Musashi stood back, lungs heaving, and heard the clamour outside as the samurai arrived. There was the pounding of fists, shouted threats, the sound of hoof-fall cantering back and forth.
