Child of Vengeance (11 page)

“What is it?” the monk said. “Your wound?”

“One of them,” said Munisai, and he could not stop the bitter smirk crossing his own face. “May I enter?”

Dorinbo, confused though he was, nodded and led his brother into what passed for his living room. A half-finished letter to some distant scholar lay upon the floor, the ink still wet. He moved it and his set of brushes and pots to one side, and then gestured for Munisai to sit. The samurai did so, cross-legged and stiff, and Dorinbo joined him in expectant silence.

“The boy,” said Munisai eventually.

“You finally spoke to him?”

“I tried,” said Munisai, “but it seems that you have not.”

“What do you mean?”

“It seems that he is confused about his mother.”

“Indeed,” said Dorinbo. His body straightened.

“It seems he believes she died in the fire,” continued Munisai.

Neither spoke for a long moment. In the corner of the room a small stone image of a Buddha sat in the shade of a carefully pruned bonsai tree. It was weathered with age to little more than a vague,
rounded effigy, and within the malformed indentation that was his lap lay the shears for tending the tree. The steel was blackened save for the sliver of the edge that caught the candlelight.

“Do you remember our father?” said the monk eventually. “Do you remember his little games to harden us up, make little samurai of us?”

“I do,” said Munisai.

“Do you remember the feel of the edges of rocks when he made us walk barefoot through the mountains? Do you remember the ache in your stomach when he refused us food for days? Do you? Or how about the blows he watched us give each other after those long days when he made us fight for a single ball of rice or a sliver of fish?”

“You make it sound as if he tortured us. Everything he did had a purpose,” said Munisai.

“Do you remember the chill of the sea that morning?” said Dorinbo.

“Ah,” said Munisai flatly, “your ‘malaise.’ ”

“We were out there in the water for hours. I was hacking up blood with every cough that entire winter. If it hadn’t been for the skill of the monks Father sent me to, I probably would have died,” said Dorinbo.

“You died anyway, in a way,” said Munisai, eyes cold. “The manly part of you. They put their weakness in you, and now what do you have? No swords and a shaved head. No will.”

“Oh, I still had will, Munisai,” said Dorinbo. “Do you think Father took one of his sons becoming a monk well? Renouncing the glorious path of the warrior our ancestors have trodden from the dawn of time? He had a scourge and a bamboo sword, and a month free to devote to me. You’re not the only one who has scars.

“But I persisted. I had seen the path that was meant for me, and he could not break me. What he did, though, with every blow and every drop of blood drawn, was put a terrible hatred into me. I hated him for what he did to me, and I hated him for the way he hated me. And I still do hate him. He’s long dead, but when I think of his face I feel something twinge deep in my guts, like a fist clenching.

“This is my shame. Amaterasu teaches us that the world is not perfect—she alone is—but it is the duty of every right man not to
sully it further with petty grievance. This is the path to serenity. I want to forgive him, I know I should. But I cannot. I see his face, imagine him standing on the other side of the Sanzu River as a ghost even, and I just want to spit. This is a terrible burden. A damning burden.”

“And why tell me this?” said Munisai. “It’s not as though I can give you absolution.”

“Because, my brother, I will not be the one to pass the same burden on to Bennosuke. Even if he has to face it someday, it will not be because of me. And what you did, Munisai, was more than any scourge could do.”

Dorinbo stared at his brother in the silence that followed. Munisai turned his head to face the wall before the blush could start. Through the cracks he could just about sense movement in the adjacent room. He squinted, focused, saw black moving on black. Someone taking care not to be heard. His face hardened, and he turned back to Dorinbo.

“You scorn it, but you don’t realize that hatred is useful,” the samurai said. “A world built on hatred would achieve far more than one built on love. Hatred focuses men, gives them the will to push themselves beyond what they thought they could endure or achieve.”

“It maddens them, is what you mean,” said Dorinbo. “A dog will eventually gnaw its own trapped paw off when the pain becomes too great. How is that any different?”

“The dog lives—it’s useful.”

“A samurai condoning dismemberment,” said Dorinbo. “How shocking. A poor example, then, but you cannot—”

“So you have not told the boy?” said Munisai, interrupting.

“No.”

“And he has not worked it out himself? Is he stupid?”

“No.”

“Someone surely must have told him. The peasants who tend to him or …?”

“Do you think any peasant in this village wants to get involved and risk your wrath after what you did the last time one of them interfered with your family?” said Dorinbo. “I have to plead with them to tend your gardens, for the love of heaven. They’re scared of him,
because they’re scared of you. And what is really cruel about this is that the poor boy thinks this is because of a few scabs on his face.”

“You could have told him, spared him that. You had eight years.”

“So did you, and where have you been?” said the monk bitterly. “Killing. All I did was try to fill the hole you left, and that hole was there entirely because of what
you
did.”

Munisai bowed his head like a penitent man would. The monk was right, he knew. He could not hide in his pride forever. The samurai remembered the silence of the ruins, the wind whipping through the grass.

“Say it,” he said quietly.

“What?” said his brother.

“Stop alluding. Give me your full condemnation.”

“Can you not bring yourself to?” asked Dorinbo. “Does it shame you to even acknowledge what you did? Does it shame you to remember butchering a village, and then burning it?”

Munisai kept his head low, but his heart was pounding, his pulse throbbing through his body. He was exposed finally, someone else confronting what he alone had confronted since that night. It was as exhilarating as it was sickening, his senses heightened, and he thought he could hear his brother’s lips peel back as the monk struck the final delightful blow:

“Does it shame you to remember killing your wife?”

In the moment of silence that followed, the thin wall of the hovel creaked as weight pressed against it. Munisai looked at it from the corner of his eye, took a breath, brought his gaze back to his brother, and then spoke his ache of years.

CHAPTER FOUR

Drunk
.

Too much sake, too far from home, too cold. Munisai stumbled along, the stink of cheap sex on him. It was a long walk back to Miyamoto from the nearest town, an hour at least, and on the journey the lust he thought he had already satisfied that night came back to him. The boy was staying with Dorinbo, so perhaps when he got home he would take Yoshiko in bed. That would be good
.

He fell up the stairs when he got there and threw open the door to his house. There he saw the inside of his wife’s thighs, and the tanned, naked back of a peasant
.

Suddenly he felt very sober
.

“What is this?!” he bellowed
.

On his knees, the peasant dropped Yoshiko’s legs and turned to face Munisai, shocked. He was a tall man, far taller than Munisai, and his body was lean with muscle. Yoshiko opened her eyes slowly from her lustful reverie and looked at Munisai, her hair unbound and touched with sweat. She wasn’t alarmed in the slightest. Her eyes were spiteful, proud
.

“What is this?!” Munisai shouted again, storming in from the doorway
.

The peasant rose to his feet and backed away slowly. He looked Munisai in the eye as he spoke
.

“Please, sir, don’t …” he began
.

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t harm Lady Yoshiko, she had nothing in this,” he said, and lowered his head in an attempt at deference
.

Something happened then … a frenzy. He used his sword but he was not a samurai in those moments. Munisai battered and hacked and then there was blood on his face and on his hands. His chest was heaving, and what was left of the peasant was scattered around him. He turned to Yoshiko. The woman had watched impassively from the bed, not even bothering to cover herself
.

“A peasant?” he said to her. “What … A peasant?”

“A tool,” she said
.

“How long has this been going on?” he hissed at her. She said nothing. He lowered the point of the sword at her. “Tell me!”

There was no fear in her. Her eyes twinkled and her mouth twisted into a grin and then she started laughing
.

“Have you any idea how many times you’ve come back and lain where he had been? Licked his sweat from me?” she said. “You really are a fool, Munisai Hirata!”

The sound of her laughter cut through him. The immediate reaction of blind shock and outrage was goaded into a focused fury as he realized what she had done, what she was doing. He slapped her, dragged her from the house by her hair, and threw her down the steps onto the earth, sword still in his hand and the breath hissing between his teeth. Still she laughed
.

“Shut up!” he snarled, and he wanted to say something more but the construction of words eluded him. In the darkness outside the courtyard, he became vaguely aware of shapes moving. The peasant had howled and howled and now a curious crowd was approaching
.

“All of you!” Yoshiko called to them from her hands and knees, and her laughter had become a maniacal, frothing cackle now. “All of you come and see what kind of a man Munisai is! See him for what he really is!”

Munisai struck her backhanded across the face, but it did not silence her. Her fine kimono was twisted around her naked body like a serpent, her breasts and her sex exposed, filthy from the dirt like she was some half-wit kept drooling in rags on a leash. From the darkness there was a dull muttering
.

“Whore,” Munisai said. “How long has this been going on?”

“How old is Bennosuke?” she asked, spitting blood into the dirt
.

“What does that have to do with it?” he said, and then a cold logic crept into him. Yoshiko looked up, and in her eyes Munisai found clarity
.

“If he is five, then I would say that this has been going on for about five—” she began, and never finished. Munisai’s sword slashed down and took her head
.

“Liar!” he screamed in vain at her corpse, and watched as her lifeblood pumped out of her neck
.

When it was spent he realized there was silence; the crowd had vanished as soon as he had killed her. They were gone, but they had seen. The peasants had seen Yoshiko beat him. That could not be. The idea of someone knowing that he was fallible …

Five years? Had they known of this for five years? They must have. Had they been laughing all the while behind his back? It drove the sense from his mind. Only then did he go truly berserk, and go to visit their enclave on the far side of the village
.

Then there was light, and fire, and murder …

MUNISAI SAT DEFIANTLY
before Dorinbo. He had spat the memories in bitter proof at his brother, his voice cracking and spit all but flecking from his lips. Years he had waited to speak of this, and now it was all out; there was almost a manic joy in finally being able to release it.

Dorinbo was shocked. He looked at his brother and tried to think of something to say. But all he could come up with, in a quiet voice, was: “You speak so candidly.”

“There is nothing to hide from. Not from you,” said Munisai, and then slowly he turned to the wall. He looked between the cracks to the eye he could not see but knew was looking back: “And neither from our audience. Please join us, Bennosuke.”

In the darkness of the adjoining room, Bennosuke did not jump or start. The boy slowly took his hand from his mouth, his teeth leaving a line of indentations in his flesh. He had been biting the meat between his thumb and forefinger to try to keep silent as the men had spoken.

That instant of genuine confusion on Munisai’s face when they had discussed his mother in the dojo had stayed with the boy. Something was wrong, something a man who hid his emotions as part of his daily life could not disguise. The turn of his head, the furrowed brow … It had gnawed at Bennosuke until he had to know more.

In the evening Bennosuke had snuck up to his father’s estate and waited. Darkness fell, but his hunch proved true—whatever it was, it gnawed at Munisai also, and eventually the man had emerged with purpose on his face. It had been simple to follow him, to sneak in through the rear of Dorinbo’s house, and then to start eavesdropping through the cracks in the wall.