Sword of Honour

by David Kirk

  At his waist he wore the longsword that Tadanari had bestowed upon him those years past. Walking behind him, Denshichiro cast an unseen envious eye over the weapon as he did every time he saw it. Even the scabbard was a gorgeous thing, misted lacquer capped in burnished copper and set with studs along its length, each one a carved and varnished blonde-wood image of the fierce face of Saint Fudo.

  Seijuro, the head, the scion, got the fine things in the Yoshioka family, the cherished heirlooms and the gold-threaded jackets and the ancestral blades.

  When they arrived Ujinari set his beautiful sword casually on a waiting stand, and then he quickly searched through the chests of drawers that lined the wall of the archives. He found the scroll he was after, knelt and unrolled it on the tatami mats. He revealed a long row of names written in black ink, most of which were crossed out in red slashes denoting resolution.

  Ujinari glanced through the names, and then pointed at one. ‘As I thought. Here. Miyamoto is upon the list.’

  ‘An enemy?’ said Denshichiro on his feet, squinting down on the document. ‘Who did he offend?’

  ‘Sir Ando. Added four years prior. Nothing else is written.’

  Nothing else needed to be written, not for Denshichiro. The list was the list, and all fated to have their name written upon it were to be killed without question. The circumstance beyond that did not concern him in the slightest. But who cared for the decapitation of some unheralded knave when something much more troubling presented itself?

  ‘Do you think . . . ?’ he barely managed to ask Ujinari.

  Ujinari nodded his agreement. ‘I would presume Sir Akiyama must have been sent to enact our vengeance upon this Miyamoto. That was often his duty.’

  ‘And now he returns with the cur?’ said Denshichiro. ‘How is that possible? Why . . . how is that he could abandon the colour of tea?’ He put his hand to his face and massaged his cheeks for a stupefied moment. ‘He gave oaths. He made vows written in his own blood. How is it that he could break them? What kind of a man . . . ?’

  Ujinari sucked air through his teeth. ‘You ought to inform my father.’

  Denshichiro looked down at him. ‘Am I not Yoshioka?’

  He summoned eight men to him and led them out towards Hiei. His fingers were rapping off his palms in the first fitful stages of his anger, and he strode at a quick pace.

  This was his imperative, and his alone. No need to involve his elder brother or Tadanari. He had seen the way the bald samurai had curbed Seijuro, had made some aspirant monk out of him with his insistence upon meditation and contemplation. These things were like blunting a blade. The Way was one of immediacy; for every problem, the neatest response.

  In moods like this everything was an affront. People who did not move out of his way fast enough. People who moved out of his way too fast, lacking the proper reverence. The road that did not shorten itself and draw him immediately to his destination. The crow that flew against his course and offered a poor auspice, rather than flying with him.

  At the north-east gate of the city stood a troop of Tokugawa samurai, and the sight of them was akin to throwing bales of straw on a bonfire. The sheer thought of them in his city enough to madden him. They who had killed his father, and not even killed him with honourable blades as the man deserved but with such an insidious and cowardly thing as an insult. He thought of his harrowed father writhing upon his ignominious deathbed, remembered the sweat and the death stench, and Denshichiro stared his hatred at the Tokugawa samurai brazenly. Every time he wanted them to attack, to oblige him in the ecstasy of unrestrained combat, but as always the cowards looked away as though they were trained to do so, and he hated them further for this, and now his fists were clenched.

  It was a long walk to the holy mountain and he had time to refocus his thoughts upon the Foreigner. Had time to chase the apparent logic and facts of this absurd and unbelievable scenario that he could scant believe around his head many times over. One made one’s vows. One kept one’s vows. This was as fundamental as water flowing downhill. Denshichiro had a fighter’s eyes that were narrow and difficult to gouge at and usually equally difficult to gauge, but as Hiei rose before them he had worked himself into such a black fury that they shimmered with malice. His broad shoulders tense, his left hand tight upon the scabbards of his swords.

  The boy, Yamanaka’s squire, was sitting in the shade of a small shrine. He leapt to his feet when he saw the Yoshioka samurai coming and waved to them. Excitedly he told them of everything he had seen. His awe of the colour of tea seemed to shield him from perceiving Denshichiro’s mood. Denshichiro commanded the boy to lead, and he set off running up the wide stone stairway that began the ascent.

  Denshichiro marched after the squire. He had climbed five stairs when he realized his men had not moved. He turned and looked down at them.

  ‘Why do you falter?’ he asked.

  ‘Here is Mount Hiei,’ said one of the men.

  Denshichiro had not told them their destination. It had not occurred to him to do so, because he should not have to. He did nothing but stare at the man who had spoken.

  ‘Forgive me, Sir Yoshioka,’ said the samurai, and he bowed low. ‘I pray here. My family has prayed here for generations. If the brothers mark me as a murderer—’

  ‘You cannot murder a dog,’ said Denshichiro.

  He stated it with such simple, enunciated violence that it quelled any misgiving. The eight men barked their compliance and followed after him. The squire led them to another boy, who had had word from another boy. A little temporary network of spies.

  ‘The strange one, the barbarian, he’s in the graveyard, Sir Yoshioka,’ the boy said, staring fascinated at Denshichiro’s longsword. ‘The tall Lord-shirker went away on the trails with another monk. Gengoro knows exactly where . . . I can show you to the graveyard, or I can show you to Gen.’

  ‘I know the way to the graveyard,’ said Denshichiro.

  He made the decision instantly – ordered six of his men to go with the boy and deal with Miyamoto. He and the remaining two would head to find the Foreigner. He felt no sense of risk in this unbalanced division. The six men were only facing some vagrant of no renown. Denshichiro himself was of the bloodline; he knew that he was worth six men on his own.

  *

  The conversation between Akiyama and the dead had been long and internal and one-sided. His apologies were manifold and if they were heard they were unanswered.

  The glowing ember of the incense worked its way down the stick.

  Apologies became justifications. If they could sense his memories, his father, his mother, his grandfather, the legion behind them, then he willed them to share in lying upon that autumn hillside, cut and bleeding and knowing it all to be worthless. Of seeing their own blood seeping into the thirsting earth and realizing their entire transience and simultaneously knowing, fundamentally knowing, the utter waste.

  If they experienced that too, then they would understand the path he navigated now. That though he may not know its ultimate destination, he had been granted his reprieve and he would not squander it. Did not the whole world marvel more at shooting stars than the titled constellations through which they blazed?

  He thought and thought, and he could not offer them any substantial proof of the worth of this decision, save for what it meant to his own soul. The most profound and personal of urges, of having a similar fundamental knowledge of what was right, or what was desired, or what needed to be, without knowing the exact shape or boundaries of it. Of the act of placing all faith in that.

  Yet what were the dead faithful to but silence?

  The incense burnt itself out. The ash fell into the bed of sand, arrayed itself into a withered spiral.

  ‘You,’ came a voice.

  Akiyama stirred.

  He turned to find Denshichiro and two other samurai of the Yoshioka standing there between the other gravestones. They had spread themselves out, one at either end of the narrow passage between cryp
ts. Their faces were grim and the colour of tea was a sombre brown upon their shoulders.

  The pale-eyed samurai passed through his surprise immediately and instinct took him to his feet. He bowed and he offered them the expression he had given them and all the others his life long, the expression he had cultured in his attempts to belong. A look that he thought friends might give, eager and faithful.

  He hated himself for it.

  Denshichiro was unmoved. ‘What happened to your jacket?’ he said. ‘What happened to your colours?’

  Akiyama straightened his back. He set his face in neutral enmity. He had left the bloodied garment to rot hanging on the wall of the hovel they had spent the winter in. He offered no reply, and wordlessly Denshichiro understood.

  Above them, through the boughs, a hawk circled silent and silhouetted.

  ‘I cannot believe this,’ Denshichiro said. ‘You have forsaken all worth that you might once have held. You. Have you no sense of shame?’

  Akiyama held his silence.

  ‘Did you forget the vows you made? Of loyalty unto death?’

  Akiyama looked to the two adepts. They looked back. Eyes full of disdain. He did not recognize either. Much younger than he. Denshichiro’s generation.

  Rage began to reveal itself in Denshichiro’s voice. ‘Did that mean nothing to you? Is your word hollow? Does a malformed heart beat within your chest? You.’

  Akiyama felt the pulling ache of the wounds at his stomach and his shoulder. Even were he perfectly hale, Akiyama doubted he could have triumphed over all three.

  ‘Did you forget my father?’ said Denshichiro

  Could perhaps kill them all before he succumbed, if he were fortunate. Here, though, enfeebled and surprised, they had him entirely, all advantage theirs.

  Trapped amidst them, and hated. What a consummate summation of his life.

  ‘Did you forget my grandfather Naomitsu?’ said Denshichiro, shaking his head in disgust and disbelief. ‘My great-uncle, Naomoto the progenitor? The Yoshioka dynasty? These great men who took the colour of tea and over the course of a hundred years caused it to mean something? Spat upon by you. You.’

  Akiyama had not forgotten. He saw Denshichiro and he saw the lot of them beside him, Seijuro, the master Kozei too, remembered all their myriad expressions. The disdainful commands and the withheld esteem. All the loyalty they had drunk up, drunk never to be quenched. As perpetually thirsting and unchanging as the earth that had drunk his blood.

  ‘You,’ said Denshichiro, repeating the word and putting a fresh venom on each utterance, finding new ways to illustrate his anger with each movement of his tongue. ‘You. You. You.’

  Immune to all this, the hawk, hovering on the whim of an eddy.

  ‘How few the men that are granted the honour of wearing the colours of our school?’ said Denshichiro. ‘And you, you ghost, you renounce all that? To do what? Return to this city, our city, as a vagrant and a, a . . . ? You pale-eyed freak. You horse-haired knave.’

  The hawk brought its wings in to its body and dived, vanished from sight.

  ‘My family bestows the kindness of admitting an aberration such as you, and you, you wretched degenerate, you—’

  Akiyama spoke for the first time.

  ‘What is my name?’ he said.

  Denshichiro stared at him.

  ‘What is my name?’ he asked again.

  Silence, save for the insects. Denshichiro stood there unrepentant. Akiyama looked at him, at them, and found his resolution.

  A bitter grin of hatred twisted his face, resigned and defiant. Let it rot. Let it all rot, the jacket, the school, the entire colour of tea.

  ‘You damned idiot,’ he said. ‘We are standing before the grave of my family, and you cannot tell me my name?’

  He slid his longsword out of its scabbard.

  *

  Outside the temple of Monju and Raijin and Fujin where he had prayed, down the ancient stairway Musashi could just about see a group of men. It was their voices that had disturbed him, alerted him, and through the boughs of the trees he counted five, six of them, led by a panting boy. He saw the topknots, saw the bared swords, recognized the colour of tea they all wore. They were crazed with the anticipation of violence, shouting Musashi’s name, demanding of the monk who waited diligently still to confirm his location.

  Panic. Instant panic. So too the monk. He began gesticulating up the stairs, and before the samurai could turn and see him Musashi had slid back out of sight. Suicide to fight that many. The forest around him too thick to flee through. Inside, back inside the temple, like a rabbit to the hole. Too cramped in here to swing a longsword . . . He looked up at Raijin, his leer mocking, and then he saw the great panel of stylized wind behind him. Big enough? Only one way to see: he clambered up onto the dais and squeezed himself behind it.

  His spine was braced against the wall, his nose all but up against the wood of the statue, swords twisted in his belt, guards digging into the flesh of his waist and the scabbard of the longsword tight against his ankle. A haze of questions surrounded him unanswered, ignored.

  He heard the Yoshioka coming, footsteps on stone, spreading out as they reached the summit, the panting of their breath.

  Then voices.

  ‘Where?’ shouted one of them.

  ‘Is he here?’ shouted another, his voice outside, then inside, then outside the temple.

  ‘I don’t see him.’ A third.

  ‘Inside?’

  ‘Empty.’

  ‘In the trees?’

  ‘I see nothing. He could be . . . It’s too thick.’

  ‘Up the trees?’

  ‘What is he, a damned monkey?’

  ‘Where else could he be?’

  ‘I’ll search the . . .’ And this followed by the sounds of branches and boughs being attacked.

  ‘Stop, stop! There’s no path beaten through – he’d have made one.’

  ‘He has to be here!’

  Reverberating all these sounds in the tight little interior of the temple, the trails of their individual noises tying knots around the building. Musashi held his breath. Beneath his feet, he realized the wood he stood upon was sodden. Malleable.

  ‘Where’s the . . . ?’ said one of the samurai, outside still, angry. ‘Get the lad up here.’

  Breaths steadied. Gestures perhaps given; the sound of fresh footsteps soon, these lighter upon the stone.

  ‘You are certain he is here?’ said one of the samurai. ‘You saw him come up here?’

  ‘That’s definitely the monk he left with, sir,’ said the new voice, thick with squawking adolescence. ‘And he told us he was up here.’

  ‘Then where is he?’

  ‘Is he not here?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Then I don’t know!’

  ‘You followed them?’

  ‘Not all the way.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I had to come and get you!’

  Musashi felt the wood beneath his feet begin to move. A poor word. Distort. Give. He tried to spread his weight, but could not do so without revealing himself. He braced his palms on the statue, felt it now pressing on the tip of his nose.

  ‘Are you pulling a jape on us, lad?’

  ‘No! He has to be here!’

  ‘Do you see him?’

  ‘Perhaps he has returned to the enclave,’ said another of the samurai. ‘He must have slept there. Perhaps we should seek him there.’

  ‘That seems the wisest course.’ A third.

  ‘In the enclave proper?’ A fourth. ‘That’s . . . Here on the slopes is foul karma, but . . .’

  ‘We have our orders.’

  ‘Do not doubt my conviction. Just . . . On sanctified ground? Before the monks themselves?’

  Leave, bastards! And the wood now wet against Musashi’s lip, soft against his feet and he certain, certain that some revealing wooden howl from the statue’s strain was imminent.

  ‘You don’t have to!’ said the boy. ‘
He’s here, he must be!’

  ‘He’s not. Are you blind?’

  ‘Have you looked inside?’

  ‘Yes! There’s nothing there. Are you suggesting he melted into the shadows?’

  ‘What about those statues? They’re big.’

  Musashi’s heart was bisected a dozen ways by ice.

  Footsteps slowly coming in.

  One pair only, no doubt the leader gazing up with slow acknowledgement that the size of Raijin or Fujin was great enough to conceal a man.

  Which was he looking at? Did it matter? He was here, would check both.

  Indecision tortuous.

  And then Musashi felt the statue start to tip irrevocably backwards, the groaning of the wood clear.

  What a delusion, decision.

  Doomed to it, Musashi pushed back with all his strength in his arms, one foot flat on the wall behind him. Teeth gritted, he shoved the statue forwards, and he felt the weight lift from him suddenly; it lurched away and then toppled forwards. The samurai saw the sickly face of Raijin rush down to meet him, and what Musashi heard was an impact like a bag of wet sand bursting open.

  Everything bursting, rushing outwards: fragments of rotten wood, the cauldron of sand and incense shattered, the chest of coins scattered vomiting forth its wealth, Musashi hurling himself off the dais already going for his longsword. He hurtled out of the door of the temple and slashed at the first thing he saw, figures all around him, and kept going, heading for the stairway.

  Shouts and screams and none of them moved, too slow, too shocked, and Musashi knew he would leave them behind, felt the thrill of escape until he crested the stairs and saw a samurai standing halfway down them. The motion of his body took him down a half-dozen of the steps before he could stop himself, and there he was, pinned. One Yoshioka in front, and then he turned back and saw three from behind.

  From within the temple the sound of screaming, true agony, pleading.