Sword of Honour

by David Kirk

  The Yoshioka samurai on the stairs below sank into a taut stance of combat, levelled his sword, and the ones following from above did not rush blindly down after him but rather descended slowly in similar guarded posture. They had him trapped between their jaws and they realized this. Cautiously Musashi matched their descent step for step until he was equidistant between the samurai above and below. He brought his sword down to the defensive position at his waist, realized there were ribbons of blood on it, that he had claimed a victim on his dash outward. He sought what balance there was on the narrow steps. The Yoshioka assumed their postures in turn, readied themselves, grips adjusted, blades raised or lowered. Not a word spoken, concentration ultimate.

  Behind and above them all a young face peered down, rapt.

  ‘Come on, you sons of whores,’ Musashi snarled, trying to look each of the men in the eye, gauging which would attack first. ‘Get what you came for.’

  Things happened in a flurry.

  One of the samurai above attacked as Musashi turned his gaze away from him, skittering down the steps to slash at him from over his head. Musashi was coiled, prepared, whirled his body to one side and sidestepped the blow.

  The samurai misjudged the depth of the stairs, staggered, overextended, now astride three steps with his leading leg hopelessly far forward, thigh exposed. Musashi brought his own sword down through that thigh, felt the bucking of the steel in his hands as it cut, saw man and leg fall separate.

  Fresh screams unheard, for the samurai below took his chance, lunged at Musashi instantly. His thrust was too hard, and the old stones of the stairs gave way beneath his feet, rocks and earth tumbling downwards. The samurai stumbled forwards, feet scrabbling at nothing, a hand taken from the sword to catch himself.

  Musashi lashed out with a kick, caught the man beneath the chin as he fell. Crack of bone and teeth as the jaw snapped shut. The samurai twisted and fell on his back, and began to tumble down the stairs. Musashi followed his descent dreading the quaking of the stones beneath him, making his feet as light as he could.

  The two Yoshioka samurai above gave shouting chase, and down the stairs now an avalanche cascaded, bodies, stones, swords. Ten steps from the bottom the ground went out from under Musashi, and the first he knew of this was when his shoulder met the earth. Overbalanced in his motion, he rolled completely over and rattled down the rest of the way.

  When he came to rest it took long moments to right himself, to sort his legs from his arms, to find his sword. Rising, a Yoshioka samurai was upon him. The man bounded over the last handful of the steps and the debris at the base of the stairway and rushed him, met the point of Musashi’s blade with his own and brushed it aside. He followed through the gap he made with his body, keeping Musashi’s sword away, crashed into Musashi hip to hip. The samurai sought to drive him backwards or knock him prone once more, but Musashi was heavier, stronger, absorbed the force of the blow, felt it in the hollow of his chest, and then pushed back.

  An ankle hooked behind the Yoshioka’s robbed him of his feet, the samurai’s spine to earth and his sword without strength. Musashi stabbed down, took the samurai through the chest, but rather than scream the man abandoned his longsword, reached up and grabbed Musashi’s wrists. The other Yoshioka coming – two of them, not one, how? – and the dying man hung on even though he was impaled, held Musashi tight. Fatal glee in his eyes, defiant, and Musashi snarled and put his foot on the man’s stomach and hauled, pulled his sword and his hands free.

  But too late, surrounded now by the other two samurai in the small clearing at the foot of the stairway. The pair of samurai were cautious, knew he was dangerous, kept their distance. Musashi moved one way and so would they, rotating around him, keeping him directly between them. One bled freely from the mouth, red flecks flying with the heaving of his breath; the man Musashi had kicked, likely bitten through his tongue.

  ‘Kill him,’ sputtered the dying samurai on the floor. ‘Finish him!’

  They heeded him, but they did not come blindly. They came instead probingly, one an instant after another, and frantically Musashi parried their attacks. Again. Again. He would greet the first one, turn his sword away, and then, before he could exploit the opening in a riposte, he would have to turn and swing wildly to repel the partner behind, flailing or skipping away to keep them both at distance. Defend only, no chance to finish them. Slowly they would grind him down, he knew, far more exhausting for him than them. This perhaps their strategy, not even really trying to take him, merely provoking further exhausting flurries from him at the reaches of his sword without real risk to themselves.

  No doubt they were wondering how long it would be before his hands became numb and he fumbled with his weapon. Not long, it felt. The breath was rasping between his teeth now, his shoulder thrumming where it had connected with stone, knees, ankles taut and harrowed.

  Here on a Buddhist mountain? Musashi thought. Ahh, Shinto for the living, and Buddhism for the—

  No.

  Doomed. No choice. Go. Move. Last chance. He threw himself at the samurai with the bloody mouth, screamed as he went, final cadence of his lungs. Down came his sword and up came the man’s, met, locked and Musashi snarled as though they were caught in bitter ultimate contest, he trying to force his blade into the crown of the man’s head.

  From behind the other samurai came, one pace, two paces, and then Musashi let go of his longsword with his right hand, maintained the hold with his left, spun and hurled his shortsword in the motion of its draw. The blade hit the rushing samurai, met him on his knuckles clasped on his weapon, glanced away. Not lethal, not even grievous, but blood drawn, the samurai stumbling, his sword falling.

  Instantly, Musashi’s right hand back to his longsword, attention to the first man, and in the lapse the samurai had pushed Musashi’s longsword wildly up. The samurai had not expected the vanishing of the downward force, now staggered forwards in his thrust, sought purchase in the ground, and he and Musashi whirled around each other. Musashi quicker, close, very close, down to one knee and his longsword slashed across, taking the belly from collar to point.

  The other, the last samurai, had picked up his sword, but his left hand was mangled, bleeding, unable to hold the weapon, only cradle it in his palm. Right hand only. Fear in his eyes at this. But he did not run, levelled the point of his sword at Musashi. Musashi in turn snarled and charged, and he had no mercy in his heart, only anger, drew his sword back and smashed it across, leading with the blunt edge, aiming not for flesh but for steel. Two hands against one; the Yoshioka’s sword was battered from his grip. Musashi did not prolong it, rotated the sword in his grip, drew it back and then hewed it down through the man’s shoulder.

  The blade wedged itself to rest level with the sternum.

  Perhaps the samurai screamed. Musashi could not tell, pulse rushing around his ears stealing any other sound. When the man fell he took Musashi’s sword with him, wedged still, prying it from numb hands. Musashi in turn collapsed to his knees, gasping for breath. He felt as though the length of him was trembling. Sweat warm upon his brow and yet pooled cold on his back. He pressed his head to the earth for some time, and simply enjoyed the feel of the hard stones there, the leaves.

  In the trees around him the insects had not noticed at all, singing on, the rhythm of the universe undisturbed. This calmness, this ambivalence when he heard it sent fresh rage into his heart, and he stared upwards at the sky, at the heavens and the gods to whom he had prayed.

  ‘That was your answer?’ he howled. ‘That was your answer?’

  The shouting of that ended it, left him feeling empty. Musashi could think once more. On the trail he saw other monks coming, dark robes flowing behind them. He left them the bodies. He got to his feet and hauled his longsword free of the Yoshioka corpse and ran.

  Musashi arrived at the graveyard. He called out. No one answered. He moved through the rows and columns of the tombs, exhausted feet stumbling on the worn stones. He rounded the corner
where he had left the pale-eyed samurai in peaceful contemplation.

  Took it all in. Stood there panting, sheathed his sword, put his hands upon his thighs and did no more than simply behold for some time.

  Beheld Akiyama’s corpse where it had been left.

  Ruined beyond all dignity, cut to pieces in a frenzy, dismembered utterly. All that held it in semblance of a whole were the tatters of his clothes. His crypt was spattered with the violence, gouted streaks of blood gathered in the stone gouges that formed the two characters of his name.

  Of his head, there was no sign.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The Katsura in the west and the river Kamo in the east, veins around the heart of Kyoto, as the summer star Orihime has her Hikoboshi. The surface of the Kamo a languid opal mirror set with mother ducks leading fledglings in flightless chains, breached by the poles of pagodas and the stones of bored children, and around the Shijo bridge a series of little islands upon which people gathered to watch plays from afternoon to evening.

  The land of the islands was technically the river and so legally untaxable. Troupes of aspirant actors would duly set up stages there, lay out narrow planks from shore to island to island across which the city folk would balance, coming all summer long to be entertained. No high art of the noh theatre here, the actors not in masks but in caricature makeup, the plays mostly bawdy and lewd and quick, an entire scene gone by in the time it would take a noh actor to enunciate his entrance in achingly protracted song.

  Tadanari liked this. There was art and then there was art. He was a patron of the higher theatres over in west Hongan ward, too, but for now he stood fanning himself at the back of a seated crowd watching a tale unfold with women playing men and men playing women. A courtier of rank had slept with a sea nymph, a forbidden taboo, and consequently his penis had fallen off. Now he and his servant were conducting a search through the palace covertly trying to locate it, asking others if they had seen it without revealing the proud courtier’s emasculation.

  When the phallus-errant was at last found and the play was done, Tadanari put some money into the bowl they handed around, and then, still smiling, made his way back into the city. He wanted to take it all in, a memory to last until autumn, for tomorrow he left for his estate upon the coast and the breeze there. The heat here in Kyoto’s high summer was unbearable, and so he would depart and return with the dry heat and the red leaves and the susuki grasses caressing the sky.

  Imbibe, then, the things that mattered: the streets themselves, close enough that a man could just about hold a spear horizontally. He passed a maker of noodles with his uncooked wares cut from wafer thin to wider than a thumb draped over racks of bamboo poles like willow branches; a crafter of sandals painting patterns of blue flowers upon a white field on the wooden insole of a woman’s sandal, behind him shelves and shelves of all designs; an artisan who worked in gold leaf hoping for commissions, examples of his works laid out glittering – screen doors, vases, shrine cabinets – and a big man in his employ who loomed, imposing, to anyone who stared too salaciously upon the gold.

  Look upon the noodle maker’s chopping boards, Tadanari knew, and you would see faint forms of crucifixes that the man absently scratched with his cleavers, he a devout Christian, but this concealed for fear of driving conservative customers away; the crafter of sandals and his wife were often seen to have shouting matches that carried out onto the street, sometimes tools even thrown, and yet in the quiet of the night when no one ought to be watching she rested with her head upon his shoulder and he smelt the hairs upon the back of her neck; of the man who worked with gold leaf Tadanari knew nothing yet for the business was recently opened, and yet he knew that the building the man occupied used to be a front for a gambling ring that threw dice in the backrooms, and that in the yard behind it the profits of the scattered ring might lie still buried beneath the thorny yuzu tree there.

  Did anyone else know all this, these little facts that one could wander blithely by? He hoped not. That was what made a city a city, these connections, and if they happened to come together in him alone then that made him a kind of nexus-apex, and in that uniqueness was a power and a worth that he cherished.

  Onto Muromachi avenue now, this the central divide of the old capital centuries ago but now just a street marginally wider than the others. Along the length of it a water-scarce canal ran in which people loitered, trying to escape the heat. The trenches cut as deep as the height of three men and in a month or two when the typhoon season blew in these channels would roar white and likely burst, but down there now children splashed what they could at one another, their mothers scolding them standing ankle deep, the water falling over the bodies of labourers and beggars lying down on their backs trying in vain to submerge themselves entirely

  The avenue itself was filled with stalls and shacks that sold trinkets and refections: tofu fried quickly in a shallow skillet, forming a pancake that would be wrapped around gooey rice flavoured with sweet vinegar; a nail impassively driven beneath the eye of a writhing eel, pinning it to a board so that it could be scaled, butchered and then skewered on wooden sticks to be tossed upon a cast iron grill to roast; cheap woodprints hawked, weak colours on coarse paper bleeding into one another, depicting the romance of the old Chinese kingdoms, the tale of the boy who came from a peach, of Sekigahara.

  Tadanari stopped to buy a bag of sugarcane imported from the Ryukyu isles, broke a piece of the pale, brittle flesh off and then chewed upon it as he went, enjoying the sweetness.

  Was it wrong to love a city? He did not think so.

  You love a woman, say, and the course of duty takes you from her in your youth and her from you in what comes after; what she was, all she was could never be again. All that remains of this love is an unbridgeable absence that you cannot quite fathom, and your one son who was dear to you before but now . . .

  You love a man, say, as a brother, and though this man is strong and proud the whim of fate and his own treacherous flesh conspire to lay him low, to strip him of everything in which he held pride, and then like a whisper of wind he is gone too. All that remains of this separate love is a portrait hung on a dojo wall, the dearth of a friendship once held so fundamental, the school this man guided all his life and his three sons also.

  But Kyoto . . .

  Ah, it would hurt to leave, even for a month. But she was a cruel mistress with this heat, and he supposed it would make it all the sweeter on his return.

  His meander drew its way to its zenith, and, as he crossed the long hump of the Shichijo bridge across the Kamo once more, there ahead of him the hall of the Great Buddha of the Hoko temple revealed itself like Fuji reigning over the plains of Kanto. The tallest structure in the city, likely even the nation, the great statue of the Buddha within the height of fifteen men, the hall around it a two-tiered thing worn like a mantle by the seated giant, the first tier coming up to his shoulders and the second one enshrining his colossal and serene face. The beams of the structure were red and its walls white, the two roofs black-tiled and sloping, majestic, imposing, and yet reassuring; as they always were in fair weather, the doors upon the second tier were cast wide open so that an enlightened gaze peered out endlessly across the city.

  Tadanari met the pupilless eyes of the Buddha at the peak of the bridge’s arc, and he bowed as one might to a friend, as did the people around him, an idiosyncrasy of the denizens of the city. There at the Hoko temple beneath the statue he intended to offer prayer for safe travel, for the health of his family and of his school in his absence, and then his business in Kyoto would be completed for the summer. He bowed once more at the gate, a mark of respect as he prepared to cross the liminal threshold, and he had not taken five paces within when he happened into Goemon Inoue.

  The Tokugawa samurai was in the process of leaving, but stopped as he recognized Tadanari. The pair of them stood for an uncertain moment there on sanctified ground, both bereft of the many men they could command but swords still at thei
r sides.

  ‘Captain Inoue.’

  ‘Sir Kozei.’

  They bowed to each other, formally, respectfully, rose to stand rigid. Goemon in his black Shogunate livery and Tadanari in the civic colour of tea. This observed by the lowerborn around them, illicit glances cast in passing. Tadanari made the first move: he saw that from both their belts hung smoking pipes, and so he put the sugarcane away and offered up a case of kizami tobacco to the captain.

  Goemon had to accept.

  The pair of them shuffled over to stand clear of the thoroughfare, stood beneath the eaves of some lowly building. Their pipes were long and slender things, like assassin’s darts, a metal mouthpiece and bowl either end of a thin tube of wood. Tadanari pinched a measure of kizami into each, the long fine threads of which were reminiscent of auburn cat’s hair, and then, bereft of fire, went and took a taper from a brazier that burnt nearby, this ostensibly there for the sole purpose of igniting holy incense.

  Nobody complained.

  ‘Obliged,’ said Goemon around his pipe.

  ‘A pleasure,’ said Tadanari. ‘A happy coincidence to encounter you here. What draws you to Hoko this day, Captain? What might you be praying for?’

  Goemon gave a motion with his shoulders, eyes to the distance, drew a long lungful in.

  The pair of them stood smoking in silence for some time, looked out across the expanse of the temple enclave. Opposite the hall of the great Buddha perhaps fifty paces away stood a stupa about the half its height. The hump of it was covered in grass and a stairway led to its summit, where a modest stone pagoda lay. This was called the Mound of Noses, and beneath the grass and the pretty ornaments lay thousands and thousands of trophies that had been hacked from the corpses of the enemy dead in the great invasions of the mainland almost a decade previous. Brine-preserved and stolen away from their homeland to be piled and entombed here in grand testament to a nation’s failure.