Sword of Honour
Page 38
‘We know this,’ says the elder, ‘but—’
‘But?’ presses the young woman when the elder stops himself.
It takes a moment before he speaks again, but he knows he cannot lie in front of her. Then he says something so illuminating it is as if she were a child again, on that beach, in that single memory of light.
What he says is:
‘But the Japanese do not.’
PART V
Rambo
noun, suru verb
A state of outrage, (to enact) great violence, (to go) berserk
Chapter Thirty-two
See it as a bird sees it and how peaceful the streets of Kyoto, spread out as a mosaic pattern of rooftop tile and ochre veins of earth, the only violence visible that of the jagged angles of towering pagoda tiers violating the sea of low roofs seeking to impregnate the sky. Yet down amongst these streets the breath of reason and tranquillity failed to blow, repelled by moats and walls and formative castle structures, by perhaps even the encircling mountains themselves, stillness pervading, all that was there already trapped beneath the eaves of roofs, there channelled and flowing, churning ignescent, low and rancid as the sweat it brought forth . . .
. . . the crowd glistening with this as they gathered outside a tavern. A half-curtain hung across the entrance obscuring their view, this made of green hemp and on it printed in white the two characters for evening calm. The gathered people summoned by a sound, a violent sound that had erupted as brief as thunder but had not echoed and died as thunder did, had been torn away as though the iron lid of a crypt had slammed down.
‘Did you hear? Did you hear?’
‘What?’
‘It’s them.’
‘Who?’
‘The Yoshioka.’
‘In there?’
‘Nnn.’
‘Who is it that . . . ?’
‘A swordbearer. Masterless.’
Murmurs of this sort, and then the Yoshioka re-emerged onto the street. They wore the looks of men enthralled to some otherworldly beauty. Three of them, each holding a bloody sword and in the hands of the lead man a human head held by the hair. The leader raised this trophy up and let it swing upon its tresses, uncaring of the gore that fell upon his bared arm, his shoulder.
‘Musashi Miyamoto!’ he snarled exuberant, naming the slain. ‘Musashi Miyamoto!’
The head swung back and forth and rotated in his grasp so that all saw the dead man’s face well, his mouth lolling and his tongue visible, his eyes open, the wound on the neck ragged. Sawed and pulled free of the body and offered up to the midday sun with such supreme pride and joy, rapture in the eyes.
‘Where are they?’ came the whispers.
‘Who?’
‘The black-clad men, the Edoites. The law!’
‘They . . . they’re the Yoshioka. Do they not have the right?’
The head there paramount and the Yoshioka oblivious of the shock and disgust, the gasp that scythed outwards like the breath of bellows across coals, passing into shouts the further it went, informing or warning or fascinated. The head, the head alone worthy of attention, and from Miyamoto’s lip grey moustaches so long that the tips of them were sodden red, hanging like the tails of dead foxes.
How many the men that lay with a woman and thought of another? A common sin or no sin at all, and here the Yoshioka now began to walk as men of this sort, the numb-legged aftermath of a surrogate moment of ecstasy. The crowd parted for them and their trophy, blood running sweet, blood running hot . . .
. . . and here on sanctified ground a scorching heat, dry in its fury, the funeral pyre of Ujinari burning bright. The body was hidden by a white shroud, and Tadanari stood not three paces away, watching as his hidden son was enveloped by the flames. As they grew higher he felt the coming of pain upon every inch of his bare skin, the heat scouring.
Members of the school stood behind him. Tadanari had not commanded them to help bear the body to the site. He had given no command since he had returned from the Hall. These the adepts that felt the glow of rage behind their eyes (or as a noose around the throat through which they tried to swallow comprehension of defeat, or as acid fear hidden in the belly) and yet managed to keep it suppliant had not stormed forth in thrall to it.
The most loyal of men and Tadanari unmindful of them. Ujinari’s longsword in his hands and this alone existed to him. He remembered seeing it sitting naked upon the stand on the day of its blessing, admiring the lustre of its metal, and knowing, deeply knowing then, that that lustre would hold true and would be looked at in the same awestruck manner by his descendants in centuries to come.
Fudo snarled unceasing upon the gorgeous scabbard.
What else was being cut, shed from him in that blaze? The last of the Kozei stood humbled, helpless but to stand at the mercy of the fire and let it rape him of all it pleased. And, in the aftermath of that, though brightness was before him his mind went solely to dark places.
Soon he smelt the hair upon his arms begin to singe. He relented, stepped back from the pyre not into relief but only the embrace of the liquid heat of summer. The fire roared upwards, and he looked up through its shimmering haze and saw the sky distorting as though the world were coming apart, and his sole wish was that this were true and that the destruction were the ultimate work of his hand . . .
. . . now heels burning where they slapped upon cedar sandalwood again and again, another separate band of Yoshioka on another street and they in pursuit of Musashi Miyamoto also. The masterless enemy fleeing without even drawing the swords at his side as was his cowardly wont, and they with glee in their tea-coloured hearts. Miyamoto a short man, stubby little legs in miserable little rags, and in at least one of the samurai’s minds this jarred with the image of the lithe and slender giant that had faced down Seijuro, but still they chased, still they screamed and cursed at his back.
Hammering a spectre, any spectre, into the grave vengeance had dug in them was better than leaving it empty. Necessary. Righteous.
Miyamoto rounded a corner and crashed into a line of taiko drums set on stands. They tumbled to the floor thudding loud and hollow, rolled, and he slipped and stumbled amongst them. No grace, this Miyamoto, yelped as his forearms met earth. The lowerborn moving to help him as he scrabbled desperate and then receding immediately as the Yoshioka rounded the corner, shrieked their triumph. They did not allow Miyamoto to rise, set upon him with their swords with him still on his hands and knees and hacked and hacked and hacked.
The crowd watched as again a head was eventually brought up, brandished in glory and gore for all to see . . .
. . . and a third head on a third street, a third Miyamoto, his swords scattered unbloodied in the dust of the street. The Yoshioka waving the head at Goemon Inoue, snarling in joy, taunting the captain, and the captain standing there. His iron helmet heavy, his chainmail jacket like an oven upon him, the streets around them silent and staring.
The Yoshioka samurai slung the head underarm towards Goemon and, as it rolled and left a bloody trail, the tea-coloured samurai screamed, ‘There your dog! There your dog!’
There the challenge and Goemon fit to burst already, sucking it all up like a volcanic stone sucks up bitter saltwater, and still the Yoshioka dared him. On this street, on every other street where they unleashed their chaos upon the innocent. Every instinct telling him to draw his sword and be as a samurai, and his men at his side as ravenous as a pack of wolves for the fight, and around him the alien city that loathed him smothering him with its delight at his humiliation, and the wrath of the sun even upon all.
‘Hold,’ he commanded his men, and he hated saying the word. ‘Hold.’
They obeyed and let the Yoshioka go. The tea-coloured samurai retreated jeering them as cowards, left them the head and the corpse of the masterless, and Goemon could feel the enmity of his own men at him for forcing them to yield.
But what else could he do?
He looked at the severed head, and he wond
ered what it was exactly he had unleashed in Miyamoto. A man who stood against nine and triumphed. Both an astonishing portent of this chaos that Goemon could scant contain and his last hope also, the captain here bound by the chains of his duty that he felt so hot around the wrists, the spine, the throat . . .
. . . and a saucerful of water was thrown into the brazier and the coals flared and spat and hissed and steam rose, and Musashi stalked past wanting to feel the heat once more, the heat inside his heart, that wonderful sunlike thing that assured him of all. Where was it? Where had it gone during the night? It had failed to rise with the dawn and now all seemed dimmed.
Oblivious for the moment of Yoshioka violence, shrouded in the streets of the city that became his unwitting armour, avenues and roads in the hundreds and the Yoshioka that rampaged through them few. Divers searching for a single pearl in a reef that spanned a score of leagues, and so many false pearls yet to distract them.
There was blood dried upon his clothes and his muscles still ached from the exertion, but there was no satisfaction in this pain as there had been previously. He ventured forth with no clear direction, trying to quash the doubt of the night before, but of the form of the sign he sought he was not certain. Thus he wandered for the first time as no more than a querent, witnessing the city rather than challenging, hoping that its currents would grant him reassurance in his victory.
He walked the densest alleys, these so narrow that he could spread his arms and touch either wall comfortably, overhanging roofs stealing all sight of the sky. Even here in these unseen places chains of paper bunting and lanterns hung limp and fragile in the humidity arrayed for the Regent’s festival. Here Musashi found no welcome, only a solitude, a sightless void of eyes turning away from him, turning down as men and women pressed up against beams and walls to allow him to pass breast to breast. He walking as a beast in the night, unseen but of a volatile size enough to be sensed regardless. A silence that followed him, a roaming and temporary cessation of trade as all the hawkers of the inutile shit he despised so found themselves voiceless.
This caused him no joy.
He came to the gate of the higher wards with its neat row of murderholes, the same samurai standing before it, and he looked at them. A dozen of them, maybe not the same men exactly, the faces indistinct to him but the topknots and silks and the swords identical, and he just stood there. Surely they would recognize him. Surely they would offer him proof. Surely against them which he so despised he would be able to judge some measure of progress. But that day he did not call out to them, he did not beseech them, he did not boast to them. He merely stood there and waited patiently as a fisherman for their reaction. Any reaction.
They gave him none.
His pace slowed as his thoughts drew ever inward. His eyes lost their focus and the hundreds and thousands of the city passed him by like the waters of a river around a rock. Movement drew his eye – a troupe of young women, fans twirling in their hands, stepping through the steps of a dance, practising, practising. They alone having space upon the street, they alone afforded recognition as separate from the throng, and yet they all using this space to move as one.
Musashi stopped to stare sightlessly at them.
After some time a boy appeared at his side, peered up into his face.
‘It’s you,’ the child said, delighted. ‘I saw you yesterday, at the long Hall. You killed the Yoshioka!’ He was no more than ten, wearing clothes that marked him either an urchin or a member of an impoverished family. ‘It was amazing!’ continued the boy, excitement gleaming in his eyes. ‘I’ve never seen anyone so amazing as you. Two swords! There was what, fifteen of them? And you just killed them in moments!’ He lost himself in a fit of mimicry, slicing away with two imagined blades.
Streets away there was some kind of uproar, echoes of it felt rather than heard. Too distant to carry meaning, stripped of clarifying words such as head and Miyamoto and vengeance, and so the women kept on dancing and the boy kept on talking: ‘You cut his arms off and they fell off, and his leg, and blood was everywhere, and they were all screaming and—’ And on he spoke like this until he was satisfied he had given a true account.
Only when the boy was done did Musashi look at him. ‘Is that all you took from what I did there?’ he asked. ‘The fight?’
‘What else was there?’ the child asked.
Musashi turned his eyes back to the women. He stood there trying to think of the answer, or any answer, and the dance was danced and the city flowed past him in a hot haze of colour and motion.
The boy grew quickly bored, and Musashi did not notice him leave.
Chapter Thirty-three
The hour of the ox, the dead time after midnight. The time for vows and oaths and solemnity. Denshichiro opened the door to the dojo hall with his left hand only, struggling with the weight. His right arm was swathed in a bandage, wrapped tight and pink and moist. There inside the dojo he found braziers burning bright, smoke coiling around the beams of the ceiling and the school waiting in expectant silence.
All the adepts and all the acolytes arrayed around the edge of the hall on their knees, they in their number close and intimate, elbows interlocking. He looked around at them, and they looked back.
In the centre of the hall knelt Tadanari.
The old samurai turned his face to Denshichiro. Grief had altered it, hardened it into a thing of shadows and ivory. Slowly, he reached out with one hand and gestured to the space before him. There a long pale strip of cloth was laid out upon the earth of the floor, a band for tying around the head. Before the knees of each member of the school, before Tadanari also, a similar band was spread.
The hand was held out, insistent, steady. Denshichiro approached the centre of the hall. As he drew close he saw that something was written upon the headband in black ink, the strokes savage and quick:
‘No,’ said Denshichiro.
‘Kneel,’ said Tadanari.
‘We can’t,’ said Denshichiro. ‘Have you any conception of what he wrought, what he—’
‘Kneel,’ said Tadanari.
Denshichiro obeyed, his legs folding beneath him. He looked at the headband as though it were a stretch of tanned human skin. With the characters of that name upon it the cloth had undergone transubstantiation, evolving from a thing that bound solely the hair to one that bound the soul and the will also; a profound declaration that Musashi Miyamoto would be foremost on all their thoughts until he was dead.
‘As head of the school,’ said Tadanari, ‘you must be the first to take up the mantle.’
‘That is folly,’ said Denshichiro. ‘You did not see him. We must not be his enemy. No. Impossible. We must be done with him . . . He fought as men cannot. He is unbeatable. He’ll kill whoever we send after him. Eight men he killed before me, in no more than ten heartbeats! And look, look what he did to me!’
Denshichiro raised his bandaged forearm up to Tadanari’s face. The elder samurai was unmoved.
‘Are you mad?’ said Denshichiro at the silence. ‘I am the finest swordsman in this school. And he beat me. Do you not understand? He beat me. He beat Seijuro! He beat eight of us at once! There’s no shame in saying it . . . Miyamoto is a demon, an abomination, inhuman. To pursue any further feud with him is folly. Is that not what you wanted, Sir Kozei? I bow to your will now. Let us be done with him. He will be forgotten. Snow in spring, as you said.’
The lids of Tadanari’s eyes were heavy and still as though they were carved of wax, gazing towards Denshichiro but not at him; through him, beyond him.
‘Is this because I ran?’ said Denshichiro. ‘You too, had you seen, would have run. There was no stopping him. How can I explain this to you any clearer? My duty is to live, as the scion, as the bearer of the blood. Is it not? Is it not?’
He quailed in the silence, found no respite anywhere in the hall. Command withered. Denshichiro placed his palms upon the earth and bowed as low as he could. He held it until he dared to look up once more.
He looked around the room at all the men and boys. There was no submission, only stillness. Hints of something further than that given and stolen by the whim of the firelight. Denshichiro turned back to Tadanari.
He became aware then, perhaps the last place his eyes had ventured, that the longsword resting by the elder samurai’s side was Ujinari’s. The gorgeous lacquered scabbard studded with the face of Fudo was blighted by an ugly wound. Through the sleek blackness a vein of bright magnolia wood ravaged a jagged path, the empty scabbard having snapped beneath Ujinari’s falling body. Crudely it had been reset to house the unblooded blade once more.
Denshichiro’s face hardened. ‘Do you blame me for my actions?’ he said. ‘How can you? There were eight men, and myself. Any other man but Miyamoto would have his head stuck on a spike outside the gate now, and you would be praising my bravery. You can not fault me for behaving as I should. Eight men I had! Whoever heard of one man standing against nine? The risk was minimal, the idea was sound, the tactics, the strategy. I cannot be faulted in my intentions!’
Through the mullions of the high, thin windows smoke billowed, fled.
That you of all people should cause his last words to me to be lies.
‘I meant to fight Miyamoto myself,’ said Denshichiro. ‘A duel between the two of us alone. There was to be no risk to any but myself. The eight were there merely to encircle, to prevent him fleeing. I intended to fight him one on one, truly I did. But the savage, the animal, Miyamoto – he leapt straight into combat before I could engage. There was nothing I could have done, and, and . . .’