by David Kirk
Lashes, blood in his lashes, blinking red, on his lips, in his mouth, which hung open with concentration. Ignored, focus on the enemy alone, no taste, no colour. The sixth tried the same as the fifth, as he had been schooled. Musashi saw the feint coming again, let the man move his longsword and then simply held his shortsword out. The samurai impaled himself upon it to the guard, screamed, dropped his sword and clutched at Musashi’s wrists.
But Musashi, moving as steady as the tide, hauled himself free, spread his arms wide, headed for the seventh. Invited the attack but the man skittered back with his blade up before him. Two great feinting sweeps of Musashi’s longsword in time to the beat that he alone heard and then the true attack, he dropping to one knee and trying to take the samurai’s leg. The man got his sword down and braced, parried, but the inversion of his weapon left him tangled. Musashi rose to his feet, advancing, always advancing, and thrust his shortsword through the gap in the knot of his arms.
The eighth screamed as he came with his sword high above his head, committing everything to the charge with magnificent futility. His only thought was to kill, and he was fast. The blade came down and Musashi jinked backwards, twisting his body around in the air to bring the longsword to bear, and then, just as he had done to Akiyama, he leant forward at full stretch and let his reach do the killing, slicing the man upon the chest whilst inviolate himself.
How this focus took moments and dilated them. In the pirouette to right his balance, Musashi found himself with his arms crossed across his body, swords out horizontal, and upon the ground he glimpsed his shadow splayed, stretching away from his feet spread wide. It reminded him of the long sunset shadow of the torii gate at the entrance of the shrine of his youth, of Shinto, holy things, of heaven. But here was Buddhist ground, and did they too not have a heaven, an entirely separate heaven? Two heavens. Two swords. Within him, as one.
Denshichiro remained.
Eight men now scattered across the gravel. Dust in the air and gore on the earth. Musashi moving as he should not be moving, striking as he should not be striking. Blood, not his blood, dripping from Musashi’s brow. All this Denshichiro saw, could not hide from his face. Musashi dropped both his swords low, beckoned him in, daring him to attack.
And here, in Kyoto, before the people of Kyoto, Denshichiro could not refuse. Whatever he felt less than the colour of tea. He came steady, not blindly, drew his sword back above his head. Did not try to come close but sought one tremendous cleave from above and right, arms strong, body nimble, feinted as he rolled his body and brought the sword down instead from the left.
Made no difference. Musashi knew it from conception to execution, knew it perhaps without seeing it, in that moment knew everything in the world that mattered. Denshichiro’s sword came down. Musashi stepped to the side. Arms exposed, Musashi went for Denshichiro’s wrists as they found the nadir of their descent. Ran his shortsword down Denshichiro’s forearm, peeled it, held the edge of the blade there nestled at the heel of his thumb. Immobilizing. Then the longsword up and the edge of that held to Denshichiro’s throat.
The two of them, so close they could feel each other’s breath.
‘Walk into it,’ hissed Musashi, vicious triumph in his voice. ‘Walk into it like your brother.’
Upon his sword was oil, and upon this oil was blood, coiling and coalescing and, Musashi saw, as liquid as Denshichiro’s eyes.
The rhythm unbroken: a-bom, a-bom, a-bombombom.
The distant left still constant: atta-ta-tata, ta-ta-tata.
The leader of the Yoshioka whimpered, dropped his sword, and ran.
Musashi let him go. He was drained of all vigour, could not chase, could not throw his sword. Did not want to. Denshichiro disappeared around the side of the Hall. Musashi turned and looked back, took in the proof of what he had achieved. There in the gravel, glistening on his fists, across his arms, his chest, his face.
There the crowd. What did he expect of them?
They in turn saw him, saw all he had wrought, saw the grin that unfurled across his face. To the last man, the last woman, the last child amongst them, they remained as silent and still as the thousand and one Buddhas looking out from within the Hall.
Victory.
But that night the moon did not rise crimson as he had anticipated, had hoped, and, with the air of Maruta rife with the stench of piss, Musashi sat in the room of his lodgings and stared into the darkness. The thrill of triumph had faded by the time he had washed the blood from himself, the ache of the exertion enfeebling his arms. What was left now was the hollow analysis.
He had bested nine men in combat using a method of his own creation, and there was pride in that. But it was a faint concept, a painting of the sun and no more. What he saw again and again was the first man he had killed. Bereft of arms, the stumps spreading, the horror in his eyes. This Musashi had done to unsettle. This he had done for a tactical advantage.
What troubled him now was that he could not deny that he felt very little guilt about it.
He sat staring for a long time, thinking of goodness, of the definition of worthy things, and of his uncle Dorinbo.
Tadanari wept, and he did not care who saw him. He was on his knees, dust on his clothes, his hands, his face. Tenderly, he tried to fix what was broken.
How morbid his attempts. The watching men of the Yoshioka did nothing to stop him as he gathered the arms and the leg of Ujinari and placed them where they ought to be. His son slain first by Miyamoto, he had been told, and he looked at the ruin, and he saw the ruin, and racking sobs of soundless grief escaped him. Tried to wipe the blood from his son’s slit throat with his jacket, found it dried and stubborn and ugly. No dignity possible, and yet he tried to make it so, as though the Buddha Kannon was actually present in the thousand and one statues nearby, would grant divine favour and restore life should Tadanari only arrange the cradle of the soul correctly once more.
It was futile, a mad hope, and he knew it to be so but still Tadanari knelt in the attempt, there caressing his future splayed out slain and helpless. He wept and he wept and he tasted dust and the salt of his tears, and on the earth beside him lay the sword he had bestowed, unbloodied, reflecting the dying sun.
On it the sword of Fudo clear. The Cutter of Delusions, flensing Tadanari to the core.
Interlude II
Five years the young woman has worn the headdress they forced upon her in her adolescence. Five years with the hair of a dead woman tickling at her neck. Five years studying the depths of meaninglessness.
Now she is sitting upon on a cushion of a fine soft material, which she scratches her nails impulsively upon like a cat. The heat is that of the night, the scent that of split aloe. Either side of her other women are kneeling, awaiting.
The men duly come. They step as one at a sonorous pace, until they stop. Then one man continues the dirge of the sole, coming closer, closer, before there is the scraping sound of something being set down before the young woman.
‘Blessed yuta,’ says the man, voice grizzled and rasping and tremulous. ‘Are the heavens placated? Have you divined whether the season of storms has passed?’
The young woman reaches out and feels what the man has set before her. Her fingers find the unpleasant shock of the damp scales of a fish of some size, cold and dead and still, and around it other things doubtless taken from the ocean: a smooth stone, maybe even a pearl, a long feather, a curved brittle thing that might have been a whale bone. All these things her hands rove over slowly and carefully, and, as always, this alone she senses and nothing more.
Eventually she sits up, removes her hands.
‘Bounteous, the new season,’ she pronounces.
Proper words, expected words.
The men do not cheer. They never do. There is relief, but it is tempered; they are spared the teeth but they are still pinned beneath the tiger.
A length of hair is reverently cut from the young woman’s head and then tied around the beam of the prow of the
first ship to brave the deep ocean once again, bound north for the Japanese isles.
It is not the peal of warm bells or pleasant chimes that herald the coming of a yuta but rather the rattling of the bones of foxes and monkeys and devious things all lashed to totem poles, and for the first time in her life the young woman hears this morbid applause ripple out not for her.
Another yuta approaches.
This seer is much older than her, much, much older but just as blinded. She has journeyed from the far side of the island to offer her advice on the placing of warding stones, she regarded as the foremost wisdom on this. The young woman is expected to learn from her. She knows instead that this yuta will in fact expose her.
She dreads this damnation. She longs for this liberation.
The young woman wonders if it will be instantaneous. Thus she waits as the condemned, balancing her headdress with Sister nearby, the village elders fearfully present, and there is spectacle, and there is show. The old yuta hisses and howls and draws near, and sea salt is thrown, and her entourage rattle their fetishes, and then a hand lashes out suddenly and grasps the young woman by the wrist.
‘Sistren,’ the old yuta pronounces fiercely. ‘Sistren!’
It is a grasp that throttles, endures beyond physical touch, prevents the young woman from taking in anything further that day. The talk of the properties of jade and obsidian slide over her like oil, and if there is any actual wisdom in them she does not imbibe. Something has been knocked aside within her, and she is waiting solely for that moment that comes later that night, when the two of them are at last alone. When the bones are stilled and the sighted sleep far from them, then the question wells like a canker. It wells through the meagre dinner and the silence beyond, and though she wants to ask it, needs to, still she cannot bring herself to do so for an hour, longer. She wonders how to broach it, to phrase it, and wonders which answer she truly seeks, until eventually it seeps out almost as an accident, a mistake she cannot revoke:
‘Do you see them?’
Her voice is frail. The revered yuta breathes through her nose.
‘I see things as they are,’ she says.
The turn of seasons unseen. Mother walks the conduit bridge that lies within all women, joins tempest-stolen father in the other world.
‘Sister?’ says Sister, waking her from sleep. ‘Sister?’
The young woman hears her insistent voice eventually, rises. ‘What is it?’
‘I . . .’ says Sister. There is wind outside, and whatever she faintly mumbles next is stolen by its blowing.
‘I can’t hear you. You’re far. Come closer.’
Sister hesitates before she says, ‘No.’
‘What is it?’
‘I have the bamboo sickness.’
The young woman takes this in. She knows what the bamboo sickness is: growths erupting the length of body the colour and texture of the inside of a trunk of bamboo. The young woman has no conception at all of how that might appear, but of the disgust and fear in the voices that first told her of the disease she has a very clear and tacit understanding.
‘Are you certain?’ she says.
‘I have five welts upon my left arm,’ says Sister. ‘A sixth is emerging.’
‘Does your husband . . . ?’
‘He saw.’
‘Your children?’
‘They saw. They all saw, they all know, the whole village. I haven’t left the house in three days. But now . . .’
‘What?’
‘I carry it, so I am leaving. I must, before it spreads. This is law. I’m going before they drive me out. Unless . . .’
Sister hesitates.
‘Please don’t,’ says the young woman, dreading what her sister will say next. ‘Please, not you also.’
‘Can you see the cause of all this upon me?’ says Sister. ‘Why have I drawn the ire of the other world? How can I appease them? Please, Sister’ – and her voice cracks now – ‘please, tell me! I don’t want to go there. I don’t want to be amongst the filthy, I don’t want to rot, I don’t want to—’
‘Nothing! I see nothing!’ says the young woman. ‘There is nothing there!’
She feels the hot path of tears find their way to the corners of her mouth. Outside, the wind blows.
‘I understand,’ says Sister softly. ‘I am sorry. I love you. Goodbye.’
And she goes.
The bamboo sickness does not leave with her. Two dozen are stricken, three dozen. The air is rife with the scent of warding herbs burning. Some take to their boats and live anchored offshore. Many refuse to leave their houses. The young woman is amongst them, but not through fear of the disease.
A boy whose voice has not yet deepened brings her water and food daily. She hears his laborious approach, the little grunts as he struggles with the weight. Moments later he calls as he always does:
‘Blessed yuta?’
Today she hears a new dimension to the fear in his voice.
‘Bring it in,’ says the young woman.
‘Might I?’ he tries. ‘Might I leave it here? Can you find it here? In the door? May I be excused now?’
‘No. Bring it in.’
‘But—’ he says, but he cannot bring himself to argue further. The water sloshes against the clay as he hauls the jug in. His feet skitter away the instant it is set down.
‘Wait,’ she says.
The footsteps stop.
‘Why do you behave this way today?’ asks the young woman.
‘Everyone is being strange.’
‘That is no real answer,’ says the young woman. ‘Tell me, child.’
Nothing.
‘Do you think that I do not already know?’ she says. ‘Do you think that I do not already see?’
‘Forgive me,’ he whimpers. ‘It’s everything. This year, everything – the baby that was born warped and dead, the storm that destroyed the hall, that man who fell into the sea and was taken off by the seawolf, and now, and now, this, the sickness. It’s all getting worse, and yesterday, the elder, he said . . .’
‘What?’
‘That all this is because of you, blessed yuta,’ the boy says. ‘He says that some of the women like you can see the bad spirits, and some of you just let them into this world. And all this plague, it started with your sister, the closest to you, but you aren’t sick. The man that fell in the sea, he rode on a boat that carried a length of your hair, and, and . . .’
‘That is what he said?’ says the young woman.
‘Yes,’ says the boy.
‘Do you believe him?’
The boy runs away.
Two nights later they come. Though they try to be silent, a mass of people cannot truly be invisible even to the blind. The volume of sand shifted, the crackle of torches or dry driftwood under accidental foot, these the portents. She has sought out her hated headdress and sits facing where she believes the door to be, awaiting.
The headdress has its effect: she hears a faint gasp that is quickly stifled.
‘You saw our arrival,’ says a voice she recognizes as the elder himself.
‘I see many things.’
‘Then you know why we come.’
‘Speak it all the same.’
‘Know that we are prostrate before you,’ says the elder, and his voice does sound lower than it was before. ‘We come not as equals but as those entirely at your mercy. We come not with an urge for violence, for you are inviolate, seeing one, but come instead with an earnest plea for clemency.’
‘It is so,’ echoes a multitude of voices that chain all the way beyond the door and become muffled by the walls.
‘Why so many of you here?’ says the young woman.
‘It is the will of all us,’ says the elder. ‘We are in agreement.’
‘And what is it you have all agreed upon?’
‘We ask you to spare us. We ask you, humbly, to leave the village and take with you what you have . . . Take with you the beacon that shines around you in the ot
her world.’
‘Leave?’ says the young woman.
‘We beseech you,’ says the elder.
‘Where am I to go?’ she laughs bitterly. ‘How am I to get there?’
‘We have considered that,’ says the elder.
‘What?’
‘We have bought passage for you upon a ship to Japan.’
That gives the young woman pause for thought. That was no cheap fare, and the village had no rich families. All of them together, then, a collective sacrifice, such the strength of their desire to see her gone.
‘Is Tsutomu amongst you?’ says the young woman. ‘My sister’s husband, are you here?’
There is a sort of whimper, and then Tsutomu answers: ‘I am here, blessed yuta.’
‘You too agree with this? What would my sister say?’
‘Your sister is gone,’ says Tsutomu. ‘My children remain.’
‘We are all in agreement,’ says the elder. ‘We ask that you show us kindness and consent to this. We are entirely at your mercy. We will force nothing upon you. Doom us or spare us.’
‘What if I avow to dispel the spirits?’
‘There are things more powerful than vows drawn to you, seeing one. We have seen their mischief already. Please, we beg of you, for the future of the village – choose to leave.’
The young woman takes this in. This is not what she was expecting. The reason why this is unexpected takes a moment for her to find, an old piece of folk wisdom rising in her memory.
‘The ship leaves two mornings from now,’ says the leader, taking her silence for consent. ‘We shall bear you to the bay upon a palanquin.’
‘You name me a witch—’
‘We do no such thing, seeing one,’ says the elder quickly.
‘You name me witch, and yet you seek to put me upon a ship. Do you not know what is said to happen should one such as I take sail?’
‘We know,’ says the elder.
‘That a storm will come and the wind will blow and the waves will rise, and the mouth of the sea will open up and drag the ship down to the depths to hover there in the inverted world for all time? Trapped in a moment of perpetual drowning – which amongst you knows this, and is prepared to sail with me on board?’
