Sword of Honour

by David Kirk

  Around him colour: brocades and silk curtains covering the entrances to storefronts, myriad designs; there three white ume plum blossoms atop a field of red; there a great crane with its wings flaring atop a striped ivory-blue background; there a pattern of small circles arrayed around a larger one, black on green. These family or guild crests, their trades oblique, knowledge of what they purveyed like a code of the city, proof of belonging. Ribbed paper lanterns of white and red hung unlit from roofs of jade-green tiles beneath which courtesans draped in panchromatic layers of silk passed. Even the heat itself seemed to add a shade to all that he saw, a subtle glow of reflection from stone or metal making his eyes feel as though they were burning.

  All these tones a disparate collection that in their fleeting incongruence never truly coalesced into a whole, like a shattered handful of coloured glass atop a mound of ashes. The underlying colours, the primary colours of Kyoto as it seemed to him, were plain and lowly: the greys and deep blues of the common hemp clothing of the lowerborn, beams of buildings, charcoal-black, smoke-hardened to protect against flame, dusty and tan the earthen streets starved of rain.

  A sense of containment began to fester, at his throat, at his ribs. Each of the structures here was of two storeys and the thoroughfares no more than eight or nine strides across, the sky above devoured either side by cantilever ribs of eaves. Always someone looking down from beneath these, their arms draped across bamboo railings or fingers parting wooden blinds, they idly drinking or eating or simply watching, and every time his eyes met theirs, man or woman, they looked away, and then looked back when he looked elsewhere.

  This was the wondrous golden city he had looked across from the slopes of Hiei?

  A heavy gate lined with murderholes that obliged the thrusting of spears at interloping stomachs loomed, and he thought that he had come across what he sought. This marked the boundary to the higher wards where distant Lords held estates they seldom visited and samurai bodyguards congregated before it, their eyes as murderholes also as Musashi approached them.

  He cast his arms wide and told them of how he had beaten Seijuro, and he expected from these swordsmen at the very least a form of martial respect. Instead they jeered him, jeered his clothes, his wounds. Swords restrained by mandate of peace upon the streets, voices their only weapons. Accents as disparate as the extents of the nation but the words the same.

  Jeered him for abusing the sanctity of the duel by arriving late.

  Jeered him for running from a dozen men who would have surely cut him down.

  Each of them oblivious of the arguments that Musashi repeated hotter and hotter, that it was better to live, that he was not afraid of death for if he was he would not have attended the duel at all, that he fled because the sole point of fighting was victory and victory alone and, this achieved, he had nothing more to gain upon the moor of Rendai.

  How they tore these reasons down, or rather repelled them without sinking any cognizant part of themselves into them, spat that by his reckoning the rabbit was worthier than the tiger, that if he believed what he said then surely he ought to abandon the sword entirely and resort to European knavery, arm himself with pistols alone and put holes in people at inviolate distance and proclaim himself the mightiest warrior the world had ever known, a charlatan champion.

  He looked at them all, at their topknots and their swords, and he did not understand. How could this be? How was it they were failing to see? He felt some part within himself tarnish. It was as though he were back in his exile with Jiro, that he was nothing, that he was the black and formless waters once more.

  Seething, he left them by their iron and oaken barriers as solid as ever.

  A cumulative aggravation now swelled within Musashi, born of every step he had to clip for the passing of another oblivious of him. The braying laugh of some drunk drifting from above, the sounds of an old man sucking his sickly sinuses into the back of his throat, the shriek of a young woman entreating people to come and sample her family’s konyakku gelatin. Sweat now in the corners of his eyes, stinging, the wiping only exacerbating, a snarl threatening to break across his lips.

  He rounded a corner and there revealed to him was the vast form of a pagoda that towered upwards. Five tiers of symmetrical beauty, the sheer size of it stopped him in his place and he gazed up at it. He wondered how many years it had stood – decades? centuries? – and then thought of all the earthquakes, all the bolts of lightning, all the great fires and all the wars that could have possibly occurred and yet had failed to consume it in that span of time.

  He had marvelled at it from a distance, and yet how different the pagoda seemed in such close proximity. Near like this Musashi could not avoid how the tower dwarfed him, both in stature and in everything that it stood proudly athwart to, and suddenly he could not bear to look at the beautiful thing, and he turned from it as the eye shirks the fullness of the sun.

  A street away he happened across an exhumation; a great shrine brought out into the clearing of a square and peeled from under layers of hemp sheets. The shrine was made to be borne aloft on shoulders, yokes long enough that four score men would share the weight. A beautiful thing hung with bells and cymbals, the wood lacquered vermillion, a sloped roof from which a spire styled like a pagoda thrust upwards and around the eaves of which a slender dragon was carved clutching its orbs of wisdom. The shrine itself aureate, torii gates and whorls of clouds dazzling.

  There were murmurs in the crowd, first of wonder and admiration, then of the memory of the last time it was seen and those who had carried it then. Calls of good-natured rivalry began, men and women claiming that theirs would be grander, would be raised higher, and those who owned this shrine calling back they were undoubtedly wrong. This, they said, was the pride of Daikokuya ward and nothing else could compare.

  To things of this sort were the people drawn, falling into bands and teams possessed of purpose, inspired. A street away from the shrine wide circles of tanned hide were being hung across laundry poles. These the skins of taiko drums awaiting lashing to the wooden barrels of the instruments now being rolled or carried out into the sun, soon to be washed and polished until they gleamed. Already men were practising the strokes they would play, beating out the patterns on the floor, on tables, on walls with the heavy sticks, remembering how it ought to go, how it always went.

  Tentative, the rhythm: attata-attata-ta-ta attata-ta-ta.

  A joyous industry waking and coalescing, and through all this emerging beauty and effort Musashi walked, ignored in his rags and his wounds. Two boys ran around him wielding drumsticks as swords, oblivious of the real ones at his side. He asked a passing man what was occurring, he with a bolt of vivid blue cloth in his arms. The man bowed, spoke demurely, no recognition of Musashi in his eyes.

  ‘Lord Regent Toyotomi’s commemoration festival at the end of the month, sir,’ the man said, ‘seven years ago to the day he died.’

  He bowed again and quickly left. Musashi watched him go, rubbed sweat from the corner of his eye.

  Dead men and dogma; all he had achieved ignored for dead men and dogma.

  ‘What of Akiyama’s head?’ asked Ameku in the evening.

  Musashi sat at her feet stirring a pot of rice gruel over a hearth. The blind woman was sitting at a crude loom, a mat half-woven already. Yae and she had sought and found work and lodgings in quick time.

  They were in the slums of Maruta, where Akiyama had said they would find shelter away from the Yoshioka, a low and ignoble place. Musashi had brought them down from Hiei before the duel. The Yoshioka had attacked the mountain before and it did not feel safe to him to return there, and more than that he found the monks now repulsed him.

  The ordained brothers had proven themselves as selfless as merchants. They had come to him like carrion birds in the wake of the Yoshioka ambush, had taken Akiyama’s remains for cremation and then had demanded payment. Only when Musashi had surrendered Akiyama’s horse in lieu of coin had they lit the pyre and sung
the prayers that needed to be sung.

  But this was to be expected. The true insult came whilst the flames were blazing and ash was upon the air. One of the brothers had come to speak to Musashi, an old man all taut motion as he strode up, his feet bare and calloused and on his head the square-topped white cowl of a warrior zealot.

  ‘You!’ he said to Musashi, exultant. ‘A great thing you have done, repelling desecrators in defence of what is holy. Six men you overcame! A true feat, the will of the heavens no doubt! Something higher moves your hand!’

  Musashi had rounded on him, held his palm up before the man’s face and hissed, ‘This is mine and mine alone, and what moves it is my will alone, you old fool.’

  He spoke with the profound fury of betrayal. In that small temple prior to the Yoshioka ambush he had knelt and prayed to the heavens, prayed with the kind of fervent earnestness it embarrassed him to think about, and in reply immediately the heavens had sent men with swords to kill him. If that was how they chose to communicate, then he was done with them. From here on only on himself and himself alone could he rely, he saw this now, and so he had no more time for cruel or absent things, or those that chose to worship them.

  But one more facet of a flawed world. The outrage spiralled ever outwards.

  The old monk of course had hardened like frost forming and he went on to level a tirade at Musashi, commanded him to open his mind to the Teachings and accused him of being complicit in his own ignorance and damnation, and Musashi watched the pyre and heard not a single word of it. He left them all behind. Left them to chant hollow names and to live on dead slopes.

  ‘What of Akiyama’s head?’ Ameku asked again.

  Musashi rapped the wooden ladle on the rim of the pot, scratched at the back of his neck. Eventually, he admitted: ‘It did not occur to me to . . . There was nothing I could do.’

  ‘Ugly,’ she said, and shuddered, ‘to be not whole. Like an animal. Terrible.’

  ‘I honoured him in a finer way,’ said Musashi. ‘Wherever he is, he will appreciate that.’

  ‘He is nowhere.’

  Musashi had no answer. Yae came in with a pail of water which they set to boiling for tea. Ameku continued to work, the machine clacking percussive and slow as she wove the tatami cover. Her feet pressing pedals of the loom, her hands hooking rushes onto levers, her whole body in rhythm.

  ‘How is that loom?’ he asked.

  ‘It is . . .’ she said, and that familiar pause as she tried to translate herself, a slash in the air with a hand as it frustrated her, ‘shit, utter shit. This tatami will sell for nothing. You tell me in the capital, many machines, many money.’

  ‘Well, do not fret. We have coin left over from trading the horse to those greedy bald fools, so we won’t starve for the next few weeks.’

  ‘“We”,’ pronounced Ameku.

  ‘Your meaning?’

  ‘We get to Kyoto. Yae and me, here is good. Why do you stay with us? Want to stay?’

  Musashi felt the weight of something like fingers at the pulse points of his throat, invisible things that stole his voice.

  Ameku did not press. Her mind returned to other things, for she clucked her tongue and shook her head. ‘It is a terrible thing, Akiyama. To do that to a body. Makes my skin feel cold, to think about it. The nothing beyond is the nothing beyond where the . . .’ She did not know the correct word for soul or essence or spirit, and so she tapped over her heart. ‘That is that, but the body – the body can be proper, can be made proper. Must be.’

  ‘This, the Ryukyu way?’ asked Musashi.

  ‘Is it not the human way?’

  ‘You did not much seem to like him whilst he lived.’

  ‘Another swordsman,’ said Ameku, and Musashi could not tell if this was a jibe at him as well. ‘But the dead are the dead, and things like this are of more . . . are more important, no?’

  Her words brought his uncle Dorinbo to mind.

  Always, Dorinbo had said, the dead must be treated with complete propriety. The dead, after all, were the most helpless.

  Yae spoke up as she poured dried tealeaves into clay dishes. ‘I liked Akiyama,’ she said. ‘He tried to talk to me, when you were away in the winter. But I was scared of him, and I ran away. I wish I hadn’t, now.’

  ‘It is not a matter of . . .’ said Musashi. ‘The Yoshioka are not going to yield the head to me. Not that Denshichiro.’

  Ameku’s fingers pinched a reed into a noose. ‘They have it still?’

  ‘Up above their gates, as he said it. There’ll be twenty of them there at least. There’s no method of standing against that number, and I’ll—’

  For the first time then, it occurred to him that Denshichiro might bring that number of men to their coming duel. He had barely escaped Seijuro’s bodyguard when they elected to swarm him, and then Musashi recalled the anger and hatred in Denshichiro and wondered if there would be a duel at all – if they all would not just simply rush him from the off. Their honour nebulous.

  How would he triumph? How would he survive?

  He sat in grim contemplation. A mosquito landed on his irritated ankles and tried to feed where others had. It was fat and slow and Musashi slapped it, and a rivulet of watery blood coursed a thin trail towards his sole.

  Ameku shared his mood, but her thoughts ran as cyclical as the machine she worked. ‘Up above the gates?’ she said. ‘Beneath the sun? Up to the sun, in this heat . . . Left to . . .’

  Again she did not know the right words, and again her hand irately conjured nothing in the air. But then why should she know these kinds of words? What sad world was it where rot or decay or putrefaction of a severed stolen head should ever have to be translated?

  Their world. Their Way.

  Musashi looked at her, and wished that she would sing this night instead of shudder. Sing for him, and him alone.

  ‘I’ll get his head back,’ Musashi said. ‘He will be at peace. All will be.’

  Ameku did not answer; Yae did not understand.

  Musashi left them, went outside and there by the light of an oil lantern stripped both his swords and sharpened them.

  This was familiar and finite and gave him satisfaction.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Tadanari knelt with a book before him. It was wide as the blade of a shortsword was long and fat with hundreds of sheaves of paper, the front and back covers made of thin polished cedar. It was a thing of decades past and decades to be.

  Upon each page were handprints and names all in shades of brown and red. Each a solemn vow of the adepts of the school, cast in their own blood. Tadanari remembered cutting himself upon the left forearm and letting the blood drain into a shallow tray. The dojo hall dark, past midnight at the solemn hour of the ox with the elders watching, the hand pressed against the page designated his and his name written in the blood left over, all the while uttering vows of utmost loyalty spoken so truthfully it felt as though his sternum was being wrung.

  Each and every member of the school was recorded there. Himself, his son Ujinari, Seijuro, Denshichiro, friends current, friends gone.

  He came to the page of Nagayoshi Akiyama. With great care he began to cut the sheaf of paper from the annals. No one had thought to remove it until now. When he had done so for a while he did no more than kneel there and hold the page in his hands, contemplated the palmprint and the lines therein to the sound of distant cicadas. In truth he had come here to the archival room like a pipe to the lips, the private garden too hot beneath the sun and he in search of solitude from the upheaval of the past days.

  As his eyes languidly traced the heel of Akiyama’s thumb, something occurred to him. He summoned a servant and told him what he wanted, and within a short time the man returned carrying a small chest of dark persimmon wood. He set this down before Tadanari, bowed with his brow to the tatami mat, and then departed and left the master alone once more. The bald samurai unhooked the latch and cast the hinged lid back.

  Inside were all the m
issives Akiyama had sent to the school upon his hunt of Miyamoto. There were three dozen, more than that, perhaps even fifty. Faithfully he had written at least once a month, and on each and every one of the folded sheaves the wax seal stamped with the two characters of his name remained unbroken.

  Tadanari dug his hands in and scattered a handful of them across the floor as though he were sifting through sand. All words were dust eventually, as Saint Fudo taught, but even though he knew this, recognized this, accepted this, the fact that the severed head of the writer of all these unheeded thoughts was set above the gates of the school caused a strange melancholy to momentarily seize Tadanari.

  It was not that Akiyama had not deserved to die for his betrayal, it was that perhaps it should not have been so callous and so sudden. Or that perhaps the retribution ought to have been by Tadanari’s hands, and not by Denshichiro’s. The young killing their elders had always struck him as an abomination.

  Or that perhaps, ultimately, he should have recalled sending Akiyama out on his duty, that perhaps if he had done so he might have understood Miyamoto better, that perhaps Seijuro, whom he had groomed so meticulously, would not have found his ruin.

  Here now a chance to rectify that. Tadanari picked one of the missives at random and broke the seal. He began to read. Akiyama had exquisite calligraphy. It was a report of Miyamoto intruding upon a seppuku, and Akiyama’s observations therein. Another letter opened. Now Akiyama was upon the southern coast certain he would encounter his target soon. Another, and the stanza of a poem about summer’s equilibrium, which Akiyama hoped might be read and appreciated at some evening gathering at the school.