by David Kirk
Munisai looked to Lord Shinmen, who nodded once. He moved to the side of the general and drew his longsword. The elegant weapon was dulled with use, and so it did not gleam as Munisai held it high, ready to flash the killing stroke.
“I am ready, General,” he said simply.
“Are you watching, my lord?” asked Ueno. The boy uttered a small affirmative. Ueno took a few deep breaths, licked his lips, and steeled himself.
“This is how a samurai dies,” the old man said, and suddenly threw himself backward at Munisai.
It was impressively fast for an old, exhausted man. He had sprung onto his feet and thrust the bulk of his weight upward into Munisai before the samurai had a chance to react. Munisai was knocked off balance, and barely managed to catch the dagger as Ueno spun and stabbed it downward, seeking the gap in the armor at his neck.
Munisai was staggering and encumbered with holding his sword, and there was a hanging second where it seemed to the onlookers that the tip of the blade would surely split his throat. But he found his footing once more, and then it was simply a matter of age and but the work of a moment to roll himself around and throw Ueno over his hip. The general landed heavily, and before he could rise Munisai had stabbed savagely downward with his sword, impaling him through the chest.
It was a brutal blow, deliberately crude as to be insulting. The two locked eyes as the general lay dying, and Munisai knew Ueno understood the affront. But the old man did not make a single sound. He merely mouthed wordless curses at Munisai as his strength left him. Eventually his lips ceased to move, his eyes glazed over, and then Ueno was still.
“Disgusting,” said Munisai in the silence.
He withdrew his sword, wiped the blood off the blade, and then sheathed the weapon. Only at that signal did the bodyguards release Lord Shinmen; they had thrown themselves around him as a human shield as soon as Ueno had pounced. Munisai had trained them well.
“He hated you,” said Lord Kanno quietly. He hadn’t moved from where he knelt. “You killed his son last summer, Munisai.”
“Then he let that cloud his judgment,” said Munisai. “What of his honor? His son died well, in equal combat. He did not. We gave him the chance of an honorable death, and … That was not the way it should be done, Lord Kanno.”
“Then what is?” asked the boy. Munisai hesitated, but then he saw the look of worry in the child’s face. The earnestness of it sparked something within him that he had not felt in many years, and slowly he began to speak in a soft tone.
“We are samurai, Lord. Death defines us. We must become a master of dealing it to our enemies, yes, but most of all lose all fear of our own. Seppuku is the ultimate test of this. You must draw the blade across your stomach. Some rare men will complete the ritual in its entirety, turn the blade, and draw it back across. But rare men indeed, for there must be complete silence. If you whimper or cry out, it proves that you are afraid, and thus not samurai and never were. If you are too cowardly to force the blade up, or if you lose yourself to blind emotion like Ueno, then all the worse.”
He cast another scornful gaze at the general’s body, and then nodded for the boy to take in the ugliness of the thing—the way it lay twisted in the mud, the hatred still upon the face, bestial and fragile and spiritless. After a few moments Munisai turned and gave another gesture. A brush, ink, and a scroll of silk affixed to an easel were brought forth and placed before Lord Kanno.
“Ueno hated me?” said Munisai. “Then he should have damned me in his death poem. The ritual must have dignity. The ritual must have calm. To write the death poem is to cleanse yourself of all emotion. Put all your fear, or your anger, or your sadness into the poem, and then you are empty and free to do the act as it should be done.”
“A poem?” said Kanno. “I’ve never written a poem.”
“It is not difficult, Lord,” said Munisai. “It does not have to be a poem proper, no rhyme or rule … Just say what you want.”
Kanno thought for some long moments. All watched silently as the boy dipped the brush into the black ink and began to slowly write. His brow furrowed in concentration as he did so, taking care to be perfect.
Kazuteru watched Munisai as the boy wrote. He had never heard his commander speak more than curt orders, let alone give a speech. Now the man was staring at the child with a strange intensity. It looked almost like longing.
Eventually the boy sat back on his knees and placed the brush aside. Munisai looked over his shoulder.
“Is it good?” the boy asked anxiously.
Munisai nodded. Kanno smiled happily, proud of his work. He withdrew his clan’s centuries-old seal and stamped it below the letters. Then the silk was folded and sealed, placed into a lacquer box, and whisked away. It would be joined, after the ritual, by a lock of the lord’s hair and sent to the boy’s mother as proof that he died well. She would smile as she wept.
A sheet of white hemp was laid on the muddy ground while Lord Kanno stripped out of his armor. The ceremonial blade was pried from Ueno’s death grip, cleaned in a pail of water, and then given to Kanno. It seemed the size of a sword in his hands. He knelt, and pointed it toward himself.
“From one side to the other?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Munisai. “It won’t hurt for long, I promise, Lord.”
Munisai drew his sword once more, and this time, because it was the boy, he dribbled water along his blade also. A pure blade for a pure young soul, the weapon glistened in the afternoon sun as he raised it now, a bar of light almost. He nodded at Kanno.
“Your ancestors depend on you, Lord. So be brave,” he said.
“Thank you, Munisai,” said the boy.
He turned and bowed deeply to Lord Shinmen and the gathered samurai one last time, rose to his knees, and then thrust the dagger into his belly. He doubled over and his eyes went wide.
Of course they did not expect a child to force the blade across himself. Munisai heard the boy’s sharp intake of breath, and before Kanno could cry out and shame himself, he slashed the sword down perfectly and struck the boy through the neck. There was a dull thump as the head rolled free, and then the small body toppled sideways. The white hemp turned red.
The gathered samurai, whether lord or common soldier, bowed deeply to the corpse, and a sigh of admiration ran through them all. Such immaculate bravery from one so young.
“What did his death poem say, Munisai?” asked Lord Shinmen.
“That is not for me to say, my lord,” said Munisai, and though Shinmen could have ordered him to do so, he gave his lord such a look that Shinmen questioned him no further.
When the bleeding stopped, they took Kanno’s head and his body and cleaned them. Then they wrapped them in a white funeral shroud, anointed them properly, and cremated the boy. They spread his ash on the wind so that it might travel to the ends of Japan, and then his name was added honorably to the centuries of names on his clan’s gravestone. It would be the last to ever be chiseled. Years later a tree had sprung from near the spot of the seppuku, and the local peasants knew their brave lord must have returned to them. They wove a sacred rope and tied it around the tree so that Kanno’s spirit might never leave again, and for centuries after pregnant noblewomen would visit the place and pray that their children might have the same courage as the young lord.
General Ueno, however, was left for the crows.
The war had been the fault of the old Lord Kanno. The summer before, the old man had suddenly decided to try to recapture his youth and play soldier again. Lord Shinmen was engaged in a war with a neighbor to the north, and so Kanno reasoned that Shinmen could not protect the valuable paddy fields on his eastern border. He was right, for a while.
Kanno’s mistake was to go riding in winter. Buoyed by the successful annexation of the paddy fields, the old lord felt twenty in his heart again. In his knees, however, he was still very much his seventy years, and the frozen mountain paths were treacherous at the best of times. Borne from the bottom of the canyon
where it was found, his corpse was anything but regal.
Kanno had been a lecherous old goat. He had fathered many sons to many embittered women, and he harbored a great fear that his boys loved their mothers more than him. Not one of his four previous heirs had lived beyond nineteen, by accident or design, and now his fifth would not see ten.
The newly installed boy lord’s advisors had offered a truce in the springtime. Shinmen had feigned acceptance of the ridiculous terms—no mention of returning the stolen land—and so two days ago, with the coming of the summer, Shinmen had launched a lightning raid. His small force had overrun the watchtowers and outposts with such speed that Kanno’s army had barely had time to rally here in the very heart of their domain.
Were it not for the rain the day before slowing them, there would not have been time at all for Kanno’s men. But those few bogged-down hours had given Ueno time to entrench his army around the castle and force Shinmen into a bitter uphill fight. Hundreds of men had died simply because of the vagaries of weather.
But what was victory without sacrifice? Blossom without fragrance, nothing more.
Munisai sat down among the flowers. He held a man’s hand as the samurai oozed his last breaths out. He had been run through by a lance, the blade entering at his collarbone and exiting at his pelvis. Skewered entirely, but somehow the man had lingered this long with the wood of the shaft still wedged through him. He gurgled and writhed. His eyes met Munisai’s for a moment, desperate and pleading.
“It’ll be over soon,” said Munisai. “You did well. We won.”
There were many like this man here where the healers worked their art, a mass of mangled men encircled by a ringed white palisade fifty paces across. The air was rent with moaning and the stench of purifying herbs burning as doctors dashed from man to man, trying to do what they could. Healthy men knelt or stood by as friends died, the filth smeared across their faces slashed by the path of tears.
Munisai had been here many times before. It was strange to him how the land partitioned to the healers was always worse, always more frantic after victory. After all, if you ceded a battlefield, you ceded every man left there upon it. Loss brought silence and contemplation, triumph only misery and despair and guts in your hand.
Blossom and fragrance, he told himself. The man whose hand he held hacked up a fresh shower of petals.
Munisai was in a strange mood. Something was different this time. He had never felt joy after victory for more than a few vital, visceral seconds, but neither had he felt lingering doubt like he did now.
The samurai looked up and saw the smoke from Kanno’s castle drifting lazily across the evening sky. Memories came to him. He saw his home village on fire, the night aglow the color of persimmon peel, and then the charnel stink in the morning as thick, greasy plumes hung low across the valleys.
But that was not it entirely. He had seen fire before on the battlefield, and he remembered that terrible day of his past more than he cared to admit.
The eyes of the boy lord, Kanno. Determined and innocent. Those were what haunted him, for in them he saw another boy, one whom he had left behind and tried to forget about, a boy who was through no fault of his own the bane of his life.
He wondered what the face around those eyes looked like now, many years since he had seen it last. Children, boy or girl, were feminine; the father did not truly show until adolescence. Hatred coursed through him at that thought, both for the face he imagined and for himself. But still he imagined it, for the unanswered ache within him knew that he needed to see.
“Bennosuke,” murmured Munisai.
“His name is Aoki,” said a healer, gesturing at the man with the spear through him who lay by Munisai’s side. “Was Aoki.”
Munisai barely heard him.
He let go of Aoki’s hand. He dropped to both knees and bowed to the corpse as a mark of respect, and the men watching quivered with pride as they saw their commander humble himself so.
When he stood, he saw that atop the slopes alongside the inferno of Kanno’s castle a great palanquin had arrived to pomp and fanfare and waving banners. It was decked in burgundy and it shimmered like a peacock. Munisai looked at it with disgust. Dozens of men had carried it—dozens of men who could have carried spears and helped in the battle instead.
The clan Nakata had arrived.
There was a dull, throbbing pain underneath his left shoulder that he did not want to think about, but the very sight of the palanquin made it pulse anew. He would be expected to visit that gaudy thing, to bow and prostrate himself before men he hated, and the thought filled him with loathing.
But the Nakata were allies of his Lord Shinmen, so he would have to endure it. This was duty, he knew, and duty was distraction. Duty meant that he did not have to feel or think of wounds of both the flesh and the heart.
He looked around once more. Those warriors who could bowed to him as his eyes passed across them. The doctors, shaven-headed and sweating, were too frantic to worry about him. Saying nothing, he rooted around in a wooden chest and took some bandages and a small envelope of what smelled like salve, and left them to tend to their macabre and glorious garden.
ON THE WAY to the palanquin, Munisai found himself giving commands that did not need to be given, dallying to supervise that which needed none. But he could not avoid it forever, and when he finally arrived he stood before it for a few moments. Night was all but here already, and the burgundy silk glowed from lanterns lit within. A mobile palace brought to reign over a place that other men had fought and died for. He had to force the scowl from his face before he ducked his head and passed through the curtains.
As soon as he entered, he was hit by the smell of incense. Wisps of it hung in the air, no doubt to mask the stench of the battlefield. He held back in the shadows of the entrance and looked inward.
All was silk or lacquer wood painted in gold leaf. When it was carried, the hall was big enough for perhaps a half dozen to sit in comfortably. But set down, the palanquin’s hidden panels and curtains could be opened and unfurled so it grew, and now it was big enough for Lord Shinmen and the Nakata to sit on a raised dais while a few ranks of bodyguards and courtiers from either clan knelt around them. A woman plucked quietly on a koto harp in the background, the music lilting and soothing.
Lord Shinmen’s wound had been treated in a way that Munisai did not know how to describe without talking ill of his lord. The bruise where the arrow had struck certainly didn’t warrant a sling, but now the lord’s left arm was tightly bound to a body swathed in bandages, and he made a show of having difficulty drinking.
There were two of the Nakata with him. Both wore rich kimonos in burgundy, patterns traced upon the garments in threads of silver. The man closest to Shinmen was Lord Nakata; an old, squat man with a doughy, round face and eyes that were constantly pinched into a squint. The jokes ran that he was always looking for the last coin in the room, so scared was he of missing wealth.
Munisai recognized the other man as Nakata’s eldest son and heir, Hayato. He was burning the incense, idly poking stick after stick to stand in a small bowl of sand. He looked little like his father, being a slight man with a long face. His eyes were wide and dulled, the incense holding him in its sway.
Indeed, Hayato seemed oblivious to anything but the smoke. He ignored his father and Shinmen as they spoke. The pair of lords had chosen a polite, inoffensive topic as etiquette required.
“It is believed the slaughter was great, that the enemy were dashed to pieces upon the rocks of your brave men like a great wave of filth and pestilent vermin, Lord Shinmen?” asked Lord Nakata, eyes blinking around blindly.
“Indeed, Lord. Were guessing required, it is not unreasonable to think that even their distant descendants will still have nightmares of this day,” replied Shinmen.
“Quite so, quite so. No wonder, if even one such as a lord should sustain such a grievous wound as you have. Would it be rude to inquire of the combat, my stalwart ally? It is t
rusted the wretch who struck you paid with his life?”
“Unfortunately not, Lord. He was but a cowardly archer, so his fate is unable to be ascertained. But with this sword alone, three enemy were sent to their graves. The last one was barely worth calling a man! Have you heard the cry a pig makes as it dies, Lord? The cry this man made was not dissimilar!”
“Regrettably that pleasure has yet to be experienced, Lord. Were it only that all our enemies could suffer such a fate, gorging on their own entrails and drowning in their own blood.”
“If that were so, Lord, one might be happy. But then what would we do? We are samurai. It is our nature to slay our enemies. Peace is only the gasp of breath before we can plunge back into that rapturous ocean known as war.”
“Quite so, Lord. Quite so!” said Lord Nakata, and raised his cup of sake politely. Shinmen returned the gesture.
Munisai saw what he had feared—his lord had changed again. Gone was the man from the battlefield of today, confident and trustworthy and the one he had followed for five years. Here now was the new Lord Shinmen, who had been seeping in more and more these past months, the closer he drew to Nakata and his promise of wealth.
Ambition, they said, was a virtue. Once it had been, when Shinmen’s was a desire for honest struggle, for he and his forces to prove themselves upon the battlefield, as samurai ought. But now it had festered, rotted him from within, and drew him instead to shrines of affluence like the one he sat in now. Munisai could not bear seeing the man behave like this.
No one here would stop them, though, for it was regal mouths speaking and so all had to acknowledge it as profound rather than what it was—ridiculous. His face unreadable, Munisai made as if he had just arrived, swinging the curtain aside wildly and ensuring his armor rattled. He approached the dais and then dropped to his knees before Shinmen, placed his forehead to the floor, waited the respectful length of time, and then rose.
“My lord, forgive my lateness. There is still much work to be done,” he said.
“Like extinguishing fires?” said Hayato venomously, suddenly rising from his stupor to look at Munisai.
