Sword of Honour

by David Kirk

‘You heard that from the song.’

  ‘It’s true though, isn’t it?’ says Sister, but she herself does not sound sad. ‘Women are the source of life. They are a bridge from the other world to this one. But the bridge is very long, so long and dark that we can only see one end of it. Most women look one way, but you, your sight was taken from you in this life, so . . .’

  ‘So?’ begs the girl.

  ‘When Mother took you in to old man Fija’s room,’ says Sister, ‘what did you see?’

  The girl doesn’t understand the question. She thinks for a long time how to answer, and then says honestly, ‘Nothing.’

  ‘One day, then.’

  Fija dies and becomes nothing and Sister becomes a young woman and the girl an adolescent, and that promised day of comprehension eludes her yet. Across the years Sister conspires to bring her to where she is claimed to be needed. The adolescent keeps her silence in hope that they will relent, but this in itself is greeted as some form of message.

  They will not let her be blind.

  They refuse to let her be blind.

  Around them now is a smell of smoke so overpowering, and yet beneath it, undeniable and unignorable, the scent of cooking, of roasting.

  ‘Why?’ wails the wife, her voice so harrowed with grief the word is barely formed through the tears. ‘Why?’

  ‘She has come,’ says Sister to the wife, soft, repeating her words. The shrieking of the wife lessens, and then there is frantic scrabbling across the earth. The hem of the adolescent’s skirts are grabbed, and she feels unbound hair tickling the tops of her feet.

  ‘Please,’ says the wife hysterically, ‘tell me what is the cause of this? Can you see? Is it some ghost tormenting me for its own amusement? Am I victim? Please? Can you see?’

  The adolescent cannot answer.

  ‘Or have I brought this upon myself? Is this punishment? What have I done? What essence have I offended so? How can I atone? How? Tell me! Please!’

  A way distant, a man snarls: ‘Away, you! Away!’ There follows the stomping of feet and a flurry of large wings.

  The tugging on the adolescent’s skirts grows fiercer.

  ‘Is it the spirit of the Chiyo grove?’ says the wife. ‘Does it think us desecrators? We had it pacified before we took wood from it, we thought it safe to use. It cannot be because of that! We had it blessed and sanctified!’

  The shells the adolescent wears as a necklace rattle against one another with the pulling of her clothes. The wife’s voice drops lower into a hiss almost, her depths revealed in her desperation.

  ‘Is it because of what I did?’ she says. ‘You know. You can see. You know what I did. Is it because of that? Is that sin what drew the spirits to me, all these years waiting? It is! I see! Forgive me! What can I do to make them forgive me, to make them spare me? I’ll, I’ll, shave my head, I’ll raise a cairn of a thousand stones, I’ll—’

  On she speaks, maddened, and, oh, the pure, heartbreaking agony in her voice. It is terrifying to the adolescent. To be clung to as though she were the sole outcrop of land in a sea beset by an unending typhoon. The adolescent wants to run, to be a child once more that she might hide behind Sister, but that will never be again. Sister is there, always there ready to bear witness, foremost of those awaiting. All of them silent and awed around her, willing her, willing her, and still the wife is broken by the passion of her lamentation. Still she pleads for mercy with the intensity of the burning, still she claws at the adolescent’s clothes, and no one is coming to relieve the adolescent, to tell her what to do, and now the wife finds a new level, starts offering up fingers and strips of her own flesh in appeasement, and the adolescent can bear it no longer. She speaks as they want for the first time.

  What she says – murmurs – is, ‘That will be enough. No flesh. No blood drawn. The cairn. The hair. That will be enough.’

  There is silence all around. Long heartbeats of it as her judgement is heeded. Then the adolescent feels the hair upon her feet spooling and then warm flesh, a brow perhaps, charcoal dry upon her toes.

  ‘Thank you,’ utters the wife, and does so again and again and again.

  In her voice is a piteous earnestness, a maniacal gratitude, and the adolescent can do nothing but stand there and receive these things knowing she has given false medicine to the woman. The shame wrings her innards, and still the wife persists in thanking her, over and over, and each kiss upon her feet revolts the adolescent anew. Eventually, Sister comes and coos the wife away. The adolescent is left shuddering, hoping she can return to solitude. That, her duty done, they will at last leave her be.

  But what she has done is change things irrevocably.

  ‘She shivers,’ says a man.

  ‘It’s them,’ says a woman. ‘They move her.’

  There is a low sigh of awed agreement that seems to come from every angle. Enough of them to drown in. The true pain, however, is withheld until she and Sister are walking home, hand on elbow. A monkey chirrups above, agitated or joyous. Sister has such pride in her voice, shaming enough that it blinds even the sightless.

  ‘You see them now,’ she says, overjoyed and oblivious. ‘You spoke to them!’

  The adolescent wants to cry. But neither can she bring herself to confess to Sister why she spoke, and so the words wash over her as they go, meaningless as colour.

  Now that they know she has awoken, they craft for her a headdress, somewhere between a hat and a wig. All she knows of it is that it is big and wide and heavy, hard to balance, and either dry grass or dead hair tickles at her neck constantly.

  This headdress is the anchor that binds her to what she has become, for they have awarded the adolescent a title alongside it.

  Now, they call her yuta.

  She who sees.

  PART IV

  The Two Heavens as One

  Chapter Twenty

  The heat, the heat. Even indoors, even in the shade, skin clammy and yet mouth dry, and all so formal; vestments of silk sticking, a constant sense of peeling with any motion, body contorted into the dignified pose with all weight resting on the heels tucked beneath thighs, strain on the knees threatening to tear, between calf and hamstring a pressure vile and viscous.

  But maintained, always maintained.

  ‘Captain Inoue, humbly I submit myself to your judgement,’ said the samurai before Goemon, his hands and face pressed to the floor. ‘My actions were unforgiveable. By loosing upon the Yoshioka without command, I have failed you unequivocally. I beg of you a chance to atone: my immolation through seppuku is hereby offered, should you be so merciful to grant me such.’

  The samurai forced his brow down further. He could not have been more than twenty. Goemon watched, kept the immaculate façade.

  ‘Raise your head,’ the captain said eventually.

  The young samurai did so hesitantly, a ghostly residue of his brow and the bridge of his nose left upon the varnished hardwood beneath him, fading quick.

  ‘I ordered you to loose,’ said Goemon, with low and utmost conviction. ‘Understand this. There is not a thing in this city I do not command. Therefore I gave you the command. Repeat this.’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Repeat.’

  ‘You gave me the command.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Goemon. ‘And it was a fine shot. You fulfilled your duty exact. The fate of the slain Yoshioka was entirely of their own determination. There is no need for punishment or atonement here.’

  The samurai threw his face to the ground once more, honorific gratitude spilling from his mouth unchecked. Goemon let the man speak his submission and thanks until he had satiated himself, and then ordered him to be about his duty. The young samurai left backwards on his knees, shuffling out through the doorway, which was closed by unseen hands behind him, and then Goemon was alone.

  A sort of ashen amusement took him. The mercy of the damned thus extended.

  He let it pass through him, counted thirty heartbeats of stillness in his bearing before he c
alled the Goat. The old samurai, when he appeared in the doorway, found his captain’s manner inscrutable:

  ‘Bring him up.’

  It was the lowliest of Goemon’s men who had brought Musashi to the cells the night before, this done on instinct before they had considered that their charge had not been proclaimed officially a prisoner. There they had stood in wordless debate on what to do with him, unwilling either to insult or to trust, these hard men with harder weapons at their side growing silently flustered, refusing to take an authority they had not been granted. Musashi, exhausted, had eventually crawled through the low door of the wooden cage of his own volition, collapsed upon the mat there and slept immediately.

  The Tokugawa samurai duly reached a compromise: they kept the door of the cage open, but stood guard outside it the night long.

  At some point someone had come to tend to Musashi’s wounds with a soldier’s sympathy. He had with him distilled spirits with which he soaked a rag to rub upon the grazes on Musashi’s face and arm, then peeled open his slashed calf and doused it thoroughly, grinning all the while at Musashi’s hissing and writhing. A needle and a thread closed the wound, a crude technique that Dorinbo would have scorned, and then Musashi was left to sleep once more until morning.

  And now in that morning, marked by scab and bruise and suture, he felt ecstatic.

  His body ached whichever way he tried to sit or lie, and this was the spur of his joy. His wounds prodded, his stitches picked at, the pain magnified and pleasing; all of it proof of what he had achieved, of whom he had beaten, the knowledge of it burning sunlike within him, and heliolatrous to this he sat.

  He hoped that through the mortal veil Akiyama’s spirit, wherever it may be, appreciated the achievement also.

  Rage had driven everything after he had found the pale-eyed samurai’s body. A day had passed in a blur of pulsing moments. There had been no words, no reasoning. There were only things to do. He had hacked the sleeves from his jacket and the kimono beneath, both liberating his arms for unhindered movement should any further ambush appear, and more than this because he had simply wanted to hack, to cut. The sweat sliding down his bared arms had felt as the temperature of blood and the thought of that was invigorating, and, having entered the city anonymously, driving the shortsword of one of his perished assassins into the wood to pin his challenge up, felt equally fine.

  Then came Seijuro’s reply. Had Musashi not been sodden with his fury the language of it would have made him laugh: Adept of the sword, Seijuro Yoshioka of Kyoto, commands the masterless Musashi Miyamoto to present himself for a duel. ‘Commands’! Commanding, as though Seijuro had some compulsion or control over Musashi. The pompous Yoshioka scion perhaps bred to assume so, perhaps never denied or contradicted before in his life.

  Perhaps never even had to wait for something, and in that his undoing.

  And it had worked! He had laid the smug Lord-King low, made the smug Lord-King lay himself low, and then Musashi had forced his mercy upon Seijuro. Had made the man choke on glorious clemency. Proved himself better before the eyes of those watching, a humane victor.

  How could they, all of them, fail to see the fallibility of the Way now? That morning, the logic of it was flawless. The conjecture immaculate. The worth undoubted.

  Fearlessly he met the gaze of the samurai who eventually came to escort him from his cell. Every further man he passed on the way he looked square in the face, trying to gauge the impact of what he had done. He saw not much of anything, but then here was the source of the scourge. That every face turned to him regardless was enough; his eyes bright as crimson moons above his lesions.

  Musashi expected a public hearing, perhaps out beneath the sun in the courtyard. Instead he was commanded to climb a ladder up to the second floor, and from there led to Goemon’s personal chambers. The Goat was waiting by the door, leaning on his sword. He held his hand out for Musashi’s own longsword. When it was surrendered, the old man cast a grim eye over the shambolic state of it.

  ‘A pair indeed,’ he said, and then slid open the heavy door.

  Goemon’s eyes had Musashi’s immediately, the captain sitting rigid, cross-legged. The room around him was militant, sparsely lit, large windows being indefensible in case of war or siege and so only a row of arrow-slits let the sun in. The ceiling a matrix of hard black beams like the intersections of armour, the floor beneath it just as callous. No decoration present, no vases, no paintings or tapestries, no potted plants, nothing save for the crest of the Tokugawa ensconced paramount on the wall behind the captain. Each of the three inward-facing leaves varnished proud auburn, inset into the black regal and dominating.

  On the floor was a platter of food: a bowl of rice, another of miso broth and two slim fish grilled unto cremation. Goemon gestured to Musashi that it was for him. With neither comment nor thanks, Musashi strode over, sat down and began to push the food into his mouth. The rice was old, the soup bland and lukewarm.

  The captain said nothing at his lack of manners, watched him gorge in silence. At no apparent signal he picked up a black velvet bag from his side and withdrew what lay within: Musashi’s shortsword.

  He leant forward and carefully placed it equidistant between them. The steel of it was murky in the dim light, a leather cord wrapped as crude grip around the weathered wood of the handle in place of the cultured cloth that had once been there, that long lost to rot.

  ‘Found in the street,’ said Goemon. ‘Now returned.’

  Musashi did not move for the weapon, gave it no more an interested glance than he had the captain, continued eating. He felt Goemon look closer at him, begin to study.

  ‘You are very young,’ the captain said. ‘I had not heard the name Musashi Miyamoto prior to two nights ago. You possess no renown, neither a house nor a master, and nor are you the prodigy of a rival school. I have to therefore confess to some degree of surprise that the scion of the Yoshioka bloodline would consent to duelling you.’

  Musashi kept his eyes upon his food, said nothing.

  ‘It is quite an aptitude for chaos you seem to possess. Might you explain your reasons for this debacle, this whole series of the events – the incident on Hiei also?’

  A sliver of green onion was stuck to Musashi’s lips; he sucked it in, swallowed, then dug into the rice once more. ‘Not my reasons.’

  ‘Then you lay the blame of instigation upon the school of Yoshioka?’

  Musashi grunted. The fish now held his interest, clutched between his sticks and then its head sucked right off.

  Goemon clucked his tongue. ‘Sir Miyamoto, I understand you may be suspicious, but I would take it as a courtesy if you would deign me the gift of a conversation. You in turn understand that I have the full authority of my most noble Lord Tokugawa within the boundaries of this city. I would likely be commended in Edo for having you tortured to death in the name of quelling unrest and restoring peace. Instead, I feed you, have your wounds tended, not worsened.’

  Musashi’s chewing stopped for a moment. ‘Can’t remember the last time someone called me Sir Miyamoto,’ he said.

  ‘I wonder why that would be. Rags in the silken city, a brutish temperament in the heart of all culture. You do not belong in Kyoto,’ said the captain, and his fingertips met their vague reflections upon the varnished floor, eyes down to them and then up to Musashi. ‘In this, I think, we are alike.’

  ‘Did you not just say it was your city?’

  ‘I’d raze it flat were I permitted.’

  There was conviction in him, gaze distant for a moment as though he were already beholding pillars of smoke bisecting the sky. He found something in it, a sudden inspiration, and he turned to Musashi and let loose with a long stream of language, a brogue so thick it spewed from his mouth like fog, formless and mystifying, Musashi understanding but one word in three, one word in five, and seeing this Goemon grinned wider, spoke faster, threw fresh incomprehensible idiom out with the joy of a man mid-congress.

  ‘There,’ he
said, softening, slowing now, but still a world apart from how he had spoken before. ‘That was how I was taught to speak. Them, the true words of my father, and, oh, how many the moons I’ve yearned to speak as such again. But here, for you, I’ll use the polite form. Culled and clipped for softer ears. Yet even this, here in this city, this tongue too base. Every word of mine I have to twist. To them that live here, all things that aren’t of Kyoto, they aren’t no thing at all. Improper. Fraudulent. I learnt that but quick at the time of my arrival. All the people yonder in the streets heard this voice of mine, thought me a farmer. Started calling me the “Rice Humper”. All of them, carpenters and spinsters and the coolies who lug the shit barrels about. Do they mean I just lug bushels, or do they mean I thrust my cock into them? This I haven’t scried, and like as not I never will. But these the sorts of minds abundant here, in the beams, the foundations. This, Kyoto.’

  ‘I’ve never heard men speak as you before,’ said Musashi. ‘From where do you hail?’

  ‘Province of Mutsu.’

  ‘Where’s that? Michinoku?’

  Goemon laughed blackly: ‘“Michinoku”. Another thing that’s done around here; so too in your southern heart I see. “Michinoku”. Half the country dismissed with one little word. Hundreds of leagues of land, a dozen realms of storied history and character, but no. Everything north of Edo: Michinoku. Only Michinoku. Where the snow is. Where the Ainu are and the Yamato blood falters. All truth ignored.’

  ‘I meant no slight upon you.’

  ‘No one ever does, ne’er they damn well do,’ said Goemon. ‘But always there it is, just seething away behind the eyes.’

  ‘If you’re of the north then, of Yutsu—’

  ‘Mutsu.’

  ‘—of Mutsu, why is it Tokugawa’s crest you sit before now?’

  ‘There’s a tale and no mistake,’ said the captain. ‘Clan of my birth: the Date clan. Centuries my family in service to them, and the Lord of my youth was the most noble Masamune Date. One-Eyed Dragon, as we called him. Pulled his own eye out in his childhood when rot took it – is that not the Way manifest? This I’d kithe to any man round here who doubted the samurai spirit of the north. Trusted bannermen of the Date, we Inoue, enfeoffed upon the rich plains of Mutsu and the privilege mine of riding in the personal guard of my Lord. This, how once I was cherished . . . Were you at Sekigahara?’