Sword of Honour

by David Kirk

  Yet they were irrevocably commanded to do so.

  Duty was duty, and samurai obeyed. Who, then, to bestow this gift upon? There were divisions between them all, old rivalries and grudges between families started in their grandfathers’ time, but none so big and encompassing as nineteen men against one. Slowly heads turned towards that individual, and in silence the sacrifice was chosen.

  ‘Gratefully I accept this venerable charge,’ said Goemon, and cast his brow to the floor.

  Proper words, expected words.

  And here he was now, Captain Goemon Inoue, reading auguries in his vomit.

  Captain.

  How it stuck like a bone in his throat, that he had not even been awarded the position of minister so that at least his terminal plummet might be gilded with a comet’s tail of ice and diamond. That title hoisted off on some cousin of a cousin within the clan who ruled in name only. The fop stayed in the splendour of the estates around the famed Silver Pavilion out in the hills west of the city where he larked about the many gardens like some addled young buck stag, all directionless and lustful, fucking whomsoever he should come across.

  Goemon knew this because the gardening workforce harangued him every time he visited to make his reports. They demanded coin in return for secrecy, and this he reluctantly had to pay them. Though the minister was of noble blood and was within his right to do as he pleased to lowerborn, if the story of this had escaped how easy and vivid a metaphor it would make as it spread and exaggerated across the city – the Insatiably Rapacious Tokugawa.

  This, the duty of a captain.

  So far below what he once had. He put it from his mind. He had lingered here in the alley too long. He straightened and then limped back towards the light of the Goat’s lantern, wiping bile from his chin.

  ‘You are well, sir?’ his adjutant asked.

  ‘I am fine,’ said Goemon, and struggled for an excuse. ‘My stomach has not set well since the explosion.’

  ‘Of course, sir.’

  The captain took the lantern once more, and on they walked. The Goat’s sword rattled in its scabbard as he pressed it into the earth again and again. The old samurai spat and then said, ‘I saw that fire, sir, it spread far too quickly to be caused solely by the detonation. Then all those tea-coloured Yoshioka dogs arrive so quickly, so prepared? Saboteurs, my bet. Where did those swordless men get the black powder from to begin with? They couldn’t have smuggled it in themselves. If you wish to root out sedition . . .’

  ‘Any definite proof of that is nought but ash now,’ said Goemon, and a smile crept across his face, almost of the kind that he had worn when the swordmaster of his youth had pierced his defence. Pain from the blow and yet a simultaneous envious admiration at the ability. ‘That sly knave.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  Ameku sang that night on Hiei.

  Ostensibly it was for Yae, who lay verging upon sleep after a meal of warm rice for the first time in months, but Musashi sat close to the hearth also. The blind woman knew that he was there and did not protest his presence. If she had not forgiven him for his outburst before the gates of the city, she did not continue to persecute him for it. Perhaps she held no grudges, or perhaps she held such a fundamentally large one that she had no room to bear the petty also.

  Thus she sang with her alien beauty and ability, and the smoke of fading coals was in the air, and as always he became captivated by the song. He could not explain his enchantment fully. When he listened, an ache formed within him that he never felt at other times. And yet it was a good ache, an ache like prodding a hard-won bruise. A deep satisfaction.

  There were moments, a few fleeting moments, when he had experienced something akin to this before. Moments that were not remembered coherently with logical memory as much as felt. Known. To try to describe them was like trying to examine the darkness by a holding a torch to it. Moments invariably that came in that somnolent interval where the body kicks at the first images of dreams. The period of hovering consciousness, the mind unneeding of the flesh, yet the escape from it not quite completed.

  Caught in the depths of night, say, insects singing as they sang in the forest outside now. Lying nestled in some soft cleft in the earth surrounded by noise so loud, life in the fullest splendour of the year, and he fading into slumber, becoming no more than another aspect of that life enveloped in the grand darkness that stole all sense of shape and barrier. Lay there listening to the insects that thrived in the trees and the grasses. Listening to the smallest crickets tick, to the hum of the larger suzumushi, to the howls of cicadas that fervently beseeched in unerring dedication. Listening to it all come together, each disparate sound unified by the unfettered mind, the egoless thing that defined itself by seeking order and recognition in all it objectively imbibed.

  The crickets became the percussion keeping time, the suzumushi insects the chorus holding all in tune, and the cicadas loudest of all the melody, the thing around which the others arranged themselves. When their final rising-falling-rising vibrato trilled itself out the entire thing looped around and began again, a loop as long as the night, as long as the summer.

  There was rhythm there, the pulse of creation that all things unwittingly shared. The unwitting mind absorbed into it, perhaps the beat of his heart changing without his consent, and how wonderful to be carried so, to feel without any hint of doubt or higher reason that things had meaning and purpose, that at some fundamental point all connected.

  Listening to her sing, it was like an observance of this. It was humbling. The beauty of the song revealed to him in contrast what a low thing he himself was, a skull atop a spine atop a pelvis and no more, and yet despite this – because of this – it was exalting at the same time. A joy felt vibrating within the bones each and every time her voice slid between notes so fluidly, a joy at the fact that there was something higher in the world, a joy that, even though they were low and crude things, here was proof that they were capable of raising themselves.

  The ache, sweet ache. An indescribable, lonely longing. He sat enthralled, watching, listening in his strange piety, and it came to him then that no man could hold this power. This was a thing of women and women alone. He watched the moving of her lips and the movement of her throat, and for the first time he became aware on a deeper level that she was a woman. Saw her such.

  Ameku’s song trailed out, the last note held until it was no more than a sigh. Yae stirred in her sleep. All was peaceful.

  He had to speak to her. He could not bear the silence. But all he could think to say was, ‘What do the words mean?’

  Part of him was surprised that she obliged him. The slight tilt of her head as she considered the translation. ‘Many words,’ she said eventually. ‘But this is the main words: Storm comes. Flowers fall. Sadness again over sea waves. Storm comes. Men all drown. Women find new love at spring.’

  ‘It sounded happier.’

  ‘Ryukyu song,’ she said. ‘True, no?’

  ‘Nnn.’

  A mirth of gentle cruelty upon her lips: ‘You like it more or less, knowing?’

  The needle stung him, and he was glad that she was unable to see him as he sat there embarrassed at his inability to summon a riposte. But any words eluded him and so Ameku presumed him satisfied for the night. The woman made as if she were about to sleep herself, hands searching for the pillow of dried beans the monks had provided for them.

  This could not be.

  ‘Would you comb my hair for me?’ he blurted.

  ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘My hair.’

  Before she had a chance to answer or refuse he rose and crossed the small room to sit with his back to her. She adjusted herself for a long time, perhaps caught in indecision. He held himself tense, drew a breath in, and then he felt her fingers reach out to touch him between the shoulder blades, searching.

  They were harder than he would have thought.

  Up those fingers went to the nape of his neck. She began to run them tentat
ively through his hair from the roots to the tips. Unbound, his hair hung to below his clavicle. He had shaved his head entirely after Sekigahara to tend to the wound on his scalp, and had simply let it grow back fully after that; never would he wear a topknot again. The tresses were coarse and Ameku’s fingers found many knots. She parted these before she brought out her whalebone comb, and then the woman began to brush its fine teeth through the hair.

  There was a lot of resistance, and yet somehow it felt smooth and soothing. The teeth grazed his scalp, caressed it, and he felt a hot flash of prickling sensation run down from the crown of his head all the way to the hairs of his arms.

  Suddenly he was embarrassed, ultra-conscious of himself.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said as she continued to work, trying to muster some excuse. ‘I must look fine. Tomorrow I face the Yoshioka.’

  She said nothing for a while, brought the comb through a matted patch. Then she said, ‘Do you like to kill?’

  ‘What?’ he asked, surprised. ‘No.’

  Ameku took the answer evenly and continued to comb as though it made no difference to her.

  ‘Why would you think that?’ he asked her.

  ‘A man that wants to look good, have fine hair as he kills . . . Killing must be a thing he likes.’

  ‘It’s not . . .’ said Musashi, and he tried to turn to face her. ‘I did not mean it in that manner.’

  ‘Today, you wanted to kill.’

  ‘You’re wrong,’ he said. ‘No, I wanted to fight that samurai. To cast him down. Humble him, not cut him down. Different entirely.’

  She gave a little gesture of ambivalence and took another lock of hair in her hands. She did not seem invested in the conversation, not as he was, and he wanted her attention. Her agreement. ‘Don’t you understand the difference?’ he pressed.

  ‘A sword is a sword,’ she said simply.

  ‘No.’

  ‘It . . .’ she said, and struggled for a word, ‘lives to cut.’

  ‘What it cuts . . . Why it cuts matters.’

  ‘So, why do you come to cut the Yoshioka?’

  ‘Because . . .’ he said, and now it was he that struggled for words in his own language, ‘they too need humbling. They sent Akiyama to kill me, over some slight years ago I do not recall, that they do not recall. That is the Way. Killing because they cannot do anything but kill. If I cut, if I . . .’ kill ‘. . . that is different. It is my hand against them, me choosing to raise my hand for myself. That is . . . Look at Akiyama. He sees this. He’s awake now. Alive. Truly alive, and . . . honest, as am I, and . . .’

  His words faded away. She said nothing, and it was maddening in a way that he had never felt before. Not the kind of rage that the sight of topknots drew from him. It was that long ache of her songs magnified. He needed to know if he was right, if what he suspected was true: if she was truly like him and hated as he hated.

  But he did not want to argue about the meaning of swords and justify himself any longer, not with her, and so he thought about what to say, and eventually he announced: ‘Love is a delusion.’

  He thought it was a fine statement and he spoke it with as much profundity as he could muster, and yet there it hung in the air without response. He waited for as long as he could bear it, three slow strokes of her comb, before he realized he was exposed, that he was committed now to explaining it lest it seem meaningless.

  ‘Your song,’ he said, ‘the words. How did it go . . . ? Flowers fall, and the women find new love in spring? Love – it’s not real. Not between a man and a woman. It is no more than an idea. Something for fools to believe in, to write poems about. To drown themselves with. Don’t you agree? No more than a delusion . . . Like the Way. Something to fool yourself into believing has relevance, or significance, or worth. No?’

  Ameku thought about her answer for some time.

  ‘It is something that I have never felt,’ she said eventually.

  ‘Neither have I,’ said Musashi.

  And there was union in that, and he was satisfied, or told himself that he was. He sat there with his legs crossed, nodding slowly to himself, and he felt her hands and he heard her breathing. The teeth of the comb dug deep and parted. Yae rolled over in her sleep with her eyes moving beneath her lids, perhaps seeing some dream, and outside the insects hummed with the pulse of creation entirely ambivalently.

  In the morning Musashi was woken by the single toll of a great bell. The strike of it was low and resonant as it unfurled over the slopes of Hiei, and it raised him back into the world as if he were borne upwards on the languid surging bloom of some metallic bubble.

  It was a strange awakening. Hiei had an aura about it that he had only sensed briefly yesterday, but now in the sober light of morning it seemed to him to hang heavy as mist. He found himself guarded, but he could not tell if this was due to the Mount itself or the fact that he could not stop thinking of the conversation the night before. He took to wondering if it had gone as well as he had convinced himself before he slept, and he brooded on it as he dressed and left his dormitory.

  Musashi found that the grounds outside were already thriving with the ordained brothers going about their duties, the bell that had woken him in fact the end of the morning sermon and they having risen with the dawn. They ignored him as they had mostly ignored him the day before. The monks had welcomed their party into their enclave willingly, but with little warmth. Charity was part of their doctrine but not their enthusiasm.

  The devout men had abandoned their formal black robes for plain grey jerkins as they worked now, shaven heads glistening beneath the morning sun. Musashi watched them for a while, and saw that they had a focus and determination not unlike that of samurai: sweepers swept the garden paths mindful of the precision of the strokes of their brooms, dust beaten from tatami flooring mats with a thorough, contained aggression, holy artefacts cleaned and polished almost as lovingly as swords.

  Scarce those artefacts, though, and scarce any sense of grandeur here. The buildings were not as any temple he had seen before, ornate or imposing, but rather squat utilitarian things of plain grey wood and thatched roof. There were no Zen gardens, no ponds of lotuses, no shaped trees, the belfry no more than a humble platform with a plain iron bell weathered brown and a log on a rope hung from a gallows.

  Across the way he saw a group of near twenty young men stripped almost naked pacing around and around an idol of the Amida Buddha. The men were deep in the throes of a circumambulatory rite, had been since before the dawn, their hands clasped before their faces, their eyes shut tightly as they chanted feverishly over and over, voices hoarse and dry, words compressed and coalescing:

  ‘PraisebetotheinfinitelightofAmida, praisebetotheinfinitelightofAmida, praisebetotheinfinitelight . . .’

  The rough straw sandals they wore cut into the flesh of their feet, blood and sweat mixing, yet on they marched in solipsistic obliviousness both of the pain and of any onlookers. They were in search of the Pure Land, where Amida waited to shepherd their souls, and on this long walk they would call his name ten hundred thousand times, a hundred hundred thousand times, and perhaps by the end he would have heard them, acknowledged them, shown them enlightenment.

  Musashi turned from them and his eye fell upon a tender and expertly sculpted statue of the Bodhisattva Jizo, the kindly old saint who cared for the souls of children in the afterlife. From his outstretched hand hung a dozen smooth stones nestled in little red slings, each a prayer for Jizo to care for a stillborn or a child who had died before his soul could affix on the forty-ninth day of life.

  Men circling blind in search of the next world, the anonymous grief of a dozen bereaved mothers . . .

  Shinto for the living, Buddhism for the dead, as the saying went.

  He went and found Akiyama, who had slept secluded.

  ‘The woman and the girl?’ he asked Musashi.

  The memory of a comb, and a quick dismissal: ‘They are tending to themselves this morning.’

  A
kiyama did not pry. The two swordsmen breakfasted together, a humble gruel of miso broth and dried seaweed. It was the finest thing either of them had eaten in weeks. Musashi ate quickly, and when his bowl was empty he said, ‘Let us venture down to the city. The gates must be open. Show me to the school of the Yoshioka.’

  Akiyama shook his head. ‘You need to steady yourself first. You are gaunt. A week of food and rest upon actual bedding here will put some flesh back upon you, muscle you will need.’

  ‘I don’t need a week.’

  ‘Do not underestimate the Yoshioka.’

  ‘I am not. I know how to beat them. There is no point waiting.’

  Akiyama’s brow furrowed. He looked at his soup. ‘What is it you intend to do afterwards, should you triumph? What do you think it is that will happen?’

  ‘He needs to be beaten,’ said Musashi, and nothing more.

  The expression on Akiyama’s face did not change, but he raised his pale eyes up to peer at Musashi. ‘Strategy is vital,’ he said. ‘The art of strategy is anticipating both your next five steps and the enemy’s. Do you not know this?’

  Musashi looked away. His arms were itching, and the voices of the circumambulators droned on, agitating him. ‘Let us just leave this place,’ he said. ‘I don’t like it here. There is an odd aura.’

  ‘Do you not know the history of Hiei?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It used to be that forty thousand people lived upon these slopes. Hundreds of shrines and the grand temple Enryaku at the summit. Then, thirty years ago, the warlord Oda set his armies loose. A great battle, the brothers here armed and well studied in strategy, and when it was done Oda’s men burnt any building they could find and slaughtered whoever had survived. I was a child then. I remember it rained ash down upon the city for days.’

  All knew of the Lord Oda, famed for his military genius and his brutality. It was he who many thought fated to take the mantle of Shogunate and unite the nation, were it not for one of his sworn generals betraying him in his ascendancy and forcing him to commit seppuku. The killing of holy men and women however was an outrage that surprised Musashi: ‘Why did Oda turn upon Hiei?’