Child of Vengeance

by David Kirk

  Bennosuke slept, and then he found himself standing on the landward ridge of the village the next morning, a traveling pack strapped across his back and the swords at his side. The sun was still rising, the sky peach and yellow, and the warmth felt strange upon his newly exposed scalp. For the first time he wore his hair in the adult style, his crown shaved and the remaining hair oiled, bound, and folded upward to lie atop his head in a thin dark line.

  Tasumi, Dorinbo, and Munisai were there with him. Though they had stopped ostensibly to have a final look across Miyamoto, instead he found himself looking at them.

  Here were the three men who had shaped his life: the samurai, who had put muscle to bone, sword to hand. The monk, who had taught him of goodness and the wonder of the world. The father, who … The father.

  Munisai became aware of the boy’s gaze, turned, and spoke flatly: “You shouldn’t linger.”

  None of them really knew how best to begin, and so Tasumi took the initiative as well as he could, awkwardly stepping forward and bowing to Bennosuke while he murmured platitudes of health and good fortune. They were vague and uncertain, and after Bennosuke returned them equally tentatively there was an uncomfortable pause between them, until the samurai suddenly exclaimed, “Ah, I should give you a gift, shouldn’t I?”

  He patted around himself, flustered, searching for something appropriate, and soon he reached up one of his billowing sleeves. He emerged eventually with a small throwing dagger held in a sheath that could be bound to the arm.

  “Here, you can never have too many,” he said, handing it to Bennosuke. “Do us proud, eh?”

  “I’m your Musashi, remember?” said Bennosuke, and his uncle smiled. The dour samurai clapped the boy on the shoulder once, bowed, and then stepped back.

  Dorinbo came next. His face was hard and his eyes grave. They bowed to each other, and then Bennosuke handed the monk a folded sheet of paper.

  “It’s a prayer, Uncle. Please don’t read it. Burn it with the others,” said the boy. Dorinbo nodded. He bowed and then made to step back without saying anything, but he stopped himself.

  “What you told me you wanted to be … perhaps you can. All you can do is try,” he said. “And remember … do not follow a creed or others blindly. You have a choice in everything.”

  “I understand, Uncle. Thank you,” said Bennosuke, and though he smiled Dorinbo remained tense.

  “Remember that the only choice you have is to do as Captain Tomodzuna bids,” Munisai said as Bennosuke turned to him, and there seemed to be rare mirth in his eyes. They flickered toward Dorinbo, but the monk acted as though no one had spoken. The amusement withered and for a moment the boy became aware of a coldness between the two men, but he ignored it. He bowed to Munisai and said:

  “I shall serve him faithfully, Lord.”

  “I’ve given you everything you need already,” said Munisai, and nodded at the sword at the boy’s side. “Keep your head down in labor, keep it up if others question your honor—try to be samurai, Bennosuke.”

  “I will, Lord,” said Bennosuke, who bowed once more and then said in a low voice, “I hope that your mission does not hinder you too long, also.”

  “It shall be accomplished,” said Munisai, face entirely straight. “But it is no concern of yours any longer. Nothing here is. Focus on what is ahead of you, boy.”

  “I understand and obey, Lord,” said Bennosuke, and then they looked each other in the eye. For the first time, Bennosuke realized he was taller than Munisai.

  After a moment the samurai jerked his chin toward the path leading away from Miyamoto, and the country beyond it. Bennosuke turned and took a few hesitant steps toward it. It was not the first time he had left the village, but it would be the last time that he would call it home. The boy looked back.

  “Too scared?” asked Munisai, before anyone else could speak.

  Bennosuke clenched his jaw. He bowed low one final time and forced himself to walk.

  “Good,” said Munisai at the boy’s back, and turned back toward the village. Tasumi soon followed.

  Before Miyamoto vanished entirely from his sight, Bennosuke stopped one last time. He turned for a final look, unsure of when he would see the village again—if he would see it again—and he found that Dorinbo was still watching him, small as he was in the distance. The boy waved a hand to the monk, who clasped his hands together into the prayer position and raised them high to the sun in farewell.

  Bennosuke swallowed and carried on walking. Perhaps Amaterasu would be watching over him.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The first pang of true loneliness hit Bennosuke that night. He had used some of the modest amount of coin Munisai had given him to pay for a bed in a small country inn. Other men slept alongside him, snoring contentedly, but Bennosuke felt his guts twist and thought he might vomit.

  He had thought himself alone in the village, but the fact was he had simply been ignored. Dorinbo and Tasumi had been there each day for him. That night he had eaten dinner in a crowded room and he had never felt more isolated. Everyone seemed to belong to a group but him, and he was certain people were glancing at him, whispering about this strange, rash-marked supposed samurai.

  It did not help that he did not feel like himself. It was more than just the new styling of his hair; for the first time he was dressed like a man. In addition to the sword, Munisai had given him some of his clothes as well, so that now instead of a practical, rough dark kimono, frayed around the edges, he wore garments of fine silk—the underclothes beige and patterned subtly with interlocking zigzags, the overjacket that left his arms free and hung down beneath his waist a deep dragonfly green. Gone from his feet were the comfortable straw sandals of youth, and in their place were square wooden ones that raised his soles a finger’s length above the earth to keep his stockings free of any dirt and keep his posture dignified.

  He was out of place in body and mind, and it would get worse, he knew. These were simple strangers, most of them traveling merchants or artisans, barely a sword among them. When he got to Captain Tomodzuna and his barracks, he could scarcely imagine how other samurai who knew his father would treat him.

  This, he realized, was the price of the longsword. He had thought earning the weapon would be liberating, but instead it was exactly the opposite. Freedom had been afforded to him as a child—the freedom to vanish when he felt shy and to work as hard or as little as he liked. His only masters had been himself and his family until now, but now the sword anchored him to the world and bound him to serve.

  Munisai served Shinmen—more than that, trusted him. This was being a man, and this he would have to endure. He had entered the realm of death when he had killed Arima, and now he would have to adjust himself to resigning any individual claim to his body. His soul was his own, and with his body Shinmen or Tomodzuna or whoever above him could do as they pleased, command what they liked of it. Bennosuke would prove himself samurai, and worthy of Munisai’s legacy.

  His father’s legacy, he meant. He would have to get used to saying that. The summer had passed so quickly, and his world of this autumn was not the same as the one of spring. Everything still felt strange, and he hoped that time away from the man would allow him to gather his thoughts and for a new mind-set to calcify.

  The legacy of his actual father bore down on him also. Every samurai could trace his bloodline back through a dozen generations; surely that meant that ancestry mattered. Bennosuke knew he could fight, but so could a mad dog. Would the peasant blood in him reveal some innate cowardliness or ignobility?

  A shiver passed through him. It felt as though cold and heavy shackles were around his arms and legs and neck, and these he knew were the ones of adulthood. In response to this he, the supposed man, pulled the blanket over himself like a child hiding from imagined monsters, and waited for morning.

  THE TOWN OF Aramaki was the closest settlement of any size to Miyamoto, and though it paled in scope to a city proper, it had grown prosperous enough to b
anish any trace of the rural. Its great fortune was that it was sited upon the major road that led from the western tip of the isle of Honshu to Kyoto, golden Kyoto, and so the wealth of a quarter of a nation’s worth of merchants and traders passed through it.

  So audacious had this made the town that they had paved the streets in stone, wide and flat to ease the use of carts—actual carts with great wheels and pulled by oxen or horse, not litters hoisted aloft on the shoulders of men, as was the norm—and these teams of man and beast lined up at clogged intersections.

  Throngs of people flowed around and between them, a thousand different missions for the day; there an apprentice seeking raw material for his master, there a messenger skittering on his heels bearing a sealed lacquer tube as fast as he could, there a courtesan worrying that the waxpaper parasol above her brow was held at the perfect alluring and feminine angle. To see and be among them all was bewildering for Bennosuke.

  He had been to the town a few times before, but he had been young and had simply sat on Tasumi’s horse while the samurai had gone about his business. The place had seemed a lot less smothering sitting above the thrust and press of the crowd, and now he struggled to tell the difference between one street and the next. To him it seemed there was only one building after another; another inn, another blacksmith, another merchant loudly hawking his goods to all passing by.

  Eventually he stumbled upon the guardhouse, though it would have been easy to miss it. It was a squat, ugly thing, the dark tiled roof of it emerging above eaved stone walls blackened by the years, humbled by the surrounding merchant warehouses and inns that displayed their wealth in lurid paint and elaborate carvings.

  The moat surrounding it had once been five paces across, but the widening of the roads for ease of commerce had not taken the economics of sieges into consideration, and so what was left was essentially a gutter the depth of which was twice the height of a man. The original bridge remained, though, arcing out into the street and providing a small amount of shade for laborers to sit in and doze.

  Atop the gateway were two severed samurai heads upon spikes, their hair immaculate and their faces as clean as men just bathed. Beneath them carved on slabs of wood were their names. The pair must have been executed in the morning and they would be gone by the evening most likely, for to let any sign of rotting or corruption show would be an obscene disgrace to even the gravest of enemies.

  Indeed, a man waited diligently with a long pole to swat at any bird that might try to peck at them, as the two were not displayed to be humiliated; they were there to show from the cleanness of the cuts to their necks that they had died a dignified seppuku and all shame was therefore expunged. It was no hanging threat of law, but an example of fine men who believed in it and the moral order of all things, and who had demonstrated that belief in the purest fashion.

  Redeemed though the pair might have been, their dead gaze did nothing for Bennosuke’s nerves. He stood before them for a few moments summoning the courage to enter. First impressions counted a lot, and he knew that his rash already counted against him. These were the men who would hold his life as theirs, and he needed to convince them that he was worthy of that trust. He clutched his hand around the longsword at his side, and pushed on over the hump of the bridge.

  The courtyard within was practical in design, square and hard and bereft of tree or sand or art, but also, mercifully, of the crowd of the street. A handful of Shinmen’s samurai were there, engaged in labor or drills or hearing the complaints and disputes of storeowners and travelers who felt themselves wronged. Lining one wall was a low, wooden cage in which miserable men sat in filthy sawdust awaiting judgment.

  Bennosuke had no eyes for any of them. He had set his face in what he thought was confidence, somewhere between earnestness and a scowl, and he marched directly to the guardhouse proper. An aging samurai sat cross-legged in a room open to the day, a small forecourt in which people could stand without removing their sandals before him.

  The man was leafing slowly through a ledger of yellowed paper, and did not look up as Bennosuke approached. The boy swallowed as he strode, his stomach squirming. In his head, he practiced the lines he had been muttering under his breath all morning and ran through the motions of his hands as he would present Munisai’s missive. When he came before the man he snapped out a bow he hoped was appropriately military.

  “Sir,” he said, “I seek Captain Tomodzuna.”

  “You’re out of luck, then, I’m afraid,” said the samurai, eyes not leaving the ledger. “The earthquake last week caused a landslide up in the hills. He’s away assessing damage to the roads.”

  “Oh,” said Bennosuke. Suddenly his preparation was for naught; Munisai had told him to report to the captain alone, so what now? He found his throat growing tight and he barely managed to croak, “Ahh, when will he back?”

  “Tomorrow, most likely,” said the man. “I’m the lieutenant here, though—can I help you with anything?”

  “Ah, no,” said Bennosuke, and as his face began to warm he put all his concentration into keeping a stammer from his voice, hoping not to betray any hint of indecision. “I’ll, ah, I’ll come back tomorrow, then.”

  The lieutenant looked up at him for the first time, putting the document down. “Are you all right, lad?” he asked, seeing the unease of the boy. “Are you in trouble?”

  “No, no, I’m fine, really,” said Bennosuke, his mind whispering to him that he was a fool and it was going wrong and he had to leave, he had to flee. “I’ll be going, ah, thank you.”

  The boy bowed twice like a lowly courtier opening a door for a noble would, and then scuttled back across the courtyard and out of the gate as fast as he dared, feeling the back of his neck burning.

  The lieutenant rose to his feet stiffly, slid his feet into a pair of sandals, and slowly walked out into the courtyard trying to work the crick from his back. He watched the strange boy until he was gone, and though he was merely bemused by the encounter, he became aware that someone had taken a far more vivid interest in the lad—in the cage, one of the prisoners was pressed up against the bars.

  “Friend of yours?” the lieutenant asked, strolling to stand before him.

  “You have to let me out now,” said the prisoner, eyes locked on the space where the boy had been.

  “It seems you have a fundamental misunderstanding of the way jails function,” said the lieutenant.

  “I’ve sobered up. You can’t keep me here—I’ve committed no crime.”

  “Is that so?”

  “A few tables overturned,” muttered the prisoner.

  “You struck that girl, and don’t even try to deny it. Face was all swollen up, the poor thing.”

  “It was a backhand, I didn’t punch her …” said the captive, and when that simply hardened the lieutenant’s face, he sighed and waved a resigned hand. “Then I’ll give her a handful of coins, or a bucketful—do you know who my master is?”

  “Yes,” grunted the lieutenant ruefully. “There’s a reason you’re better off than some of your friends in there.”

  Within the cage the handful of other captives glowered through bruises and scabbed blood. The prisoner, an empty stomach the worst of his maladies, ignored them.

  “If you know who he is, then you know to let me out now,” he said to the lieutenant, and for all he wanted to deny it, the lieutenant knew this was so.

  After a few moments he reluctantly produced a bundle of iron keys from his waist and began to search through them.

  “Think that could be you up there?” he asked, nodding at the backs of the two heads over the gateway as he flicked the keys around the ring one by one. “That kind of dignity? There’s a place, you know, where they send the savages—the thieves and the arsonists and the ravagers of women—and you don’t get that kind of respect. There’s scourges and nails and red-hot iron and all kinds of things, and if you’re not careful, lad, no matter who your friends are—”

  “Will you shut up and f
ind that damned key, you old fool?” snapped the prisoner. “I need to get out now!”

  The keys froze in the lieutenant’s hands. He looked at the prisoner for one dark moment, and then he casually tossed the bunch of them to one side. “Oh, would you look at that? I seem to have misplaced the keys,” he said, and then, scratching his head in pantomime, he ambled over to scoop a cup of water from a cistern. “Perhaps a cool drink of water might clear my head and help me remember where I put them, hmm?”

  He took a pointedly small sip, his eyes not leaving those of the prisoner. The man in the cage’s hands tightened on the bars, his lips becoming thin. The lieutenant counted twenty heartbeats before he took another tiny mouthful from the wooden cup.

  The prisoner understood, held his tongue, and sat back. He was not an idiot or a lowborn—he was samurai, and beneath the filth and the flecks of sawdust that stuck to him, he wore a rich burgundy kimono.

  ALMOST AS SOON as he left the guardhouse, Bennosuke was cursing his stupidity and his timidity. It was some great warrior who got flustered by nerves and a conversation that did not follow the minutiae he expected. Mighty was the soldier who was sickened with shyness, indeed. He would have to wait until tomorrow to return. Sidling back sheepish and asking for lodgings would just make him appear weaker yet, and so now he would have to find somewhere to stay on his own.

  He wandered around, as lost as he was before. Inns were easy to find, but here in the center of the town and upon the merchant’s road, they were all too rich for his meager purse. Men stood outside offering him fine shellfish and beds warmed by beautiful girls and songs played by master musicians and all manner of things, but not one could give him simply a mat and a roof and a bowl of rice.

  Bennosuke walked and walked with no success, growing ever more despondent. His feet began to ache, the thongs of the sandals between his toes grating raw the soft flesh there, and eventually he admitted defeat. He stopped and sighed, casting his eyes round dejectedly as the people pushing past him muttered about his obstruction of their passage.