Child of Vengeance (9 page)

This, Bennosuke told himself, had to be.

If that is so, then why do you cower here in the dark? Why don’t you act like the samurai you say you are, and try to make the man respect you as you know you should?
said his doubt, leering and victorious.

Bennosuke knew that logic would not help him this night. He ached with self-pity, and he hated himself for it. All he could do was wrap his arms around himself, try to find a comfortable position, and long for sleep to steal thought from him.

Insects chirruped, lulling him into a doze. The constant noise created a cloud in his half-asleep mind, and when he heard human voices it was like a lantern coming through fog; though he heard them, it took long moments for the boy to recognize them as real. There were two men walking quickly, arguing with each other.

“That devil,” slurred one, “comes back, and expects what?”

“Will you be quiet?” hissed the second.

“Tell me what he expects!”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to find out either.”

They were peasants; that much was clear from their accents. Their voices were hoarse, as though they had been arguing for some time.

“We have to do it. He’s up there on that hill, alone,” said the first man again. Bennosuke rose and moved as silently as he could to peek out into the night through the bamboo slats of the dojo’s doors. It was too dark to see anything but the vaguest sense of movement. “We got tools. Don’t need a sword, a sickle’ll do just fine. We’ll just do it and go. We have to.”

“He’s not alone. His son’s up there with him.”

“Good. We’ll do him too, clean the village up.”

“Look at you—you can barely walk. Turn around, let’s go home.”

“We have to do it—he has to answer for it!”

“And suppose you fail? You want him to lose his head again and do for the rest of the village? It’s too dangerous.”

“I can do it,” said the first man, and then there was a snort that might have been a sob. “I have to do it.”

“No, you don’t. Let’s go home,” said the second voice.

“My sister …” said the first.

“I know,” said the second man.

“In the fire …” the first barely managed, and then he broke down
crying. They were drunken tears, loud and sloppy. He bawled for a few moments, until his friend started muttering soothing things to him.

“Let’s go home,” the second man said eventually, after the heaviest of the tears had passed. The first man assented with a sniffing grunt, and then slowly the sound of the pair faded into the night, leaving Bennosuke to wonder what it was he had just witnessed.

I
n the morning sun, Munisai walked where he had walked as a child, and it all seemed so alien. He barely even registered the way the peasants melted away from him, bowing low and anxiously, or the way mothers would place their children behind themselves.

Miyamoto was a village like so many hundreds of others in Japan, a great network of paddy fields carved into the slope of a valley so that it seemed to rise like some eccentric curved stairwell. Munisai’s estate was on high, the temple of Amaterasu highest of all on the opposite face, and then down on the valley floor the squat, dark shape of the dojo hall dwarfed the humble wood-and-thatch shacks the peasants lived in.

This was all spread before him, but though his eyes took it in he barely saw it. The samurai walked along the ridgeline, glancing around. There, a tree he had climbed; there, the stream he had drunk from; there, a tiny shrine for a rock spirit where he had left offerings. All that was part of what he was, and yet it seemed so distant. Had he really grown up here?

He headed for the landward valley and the ruins that must be there. They were not ruins in his memory, though. The samurai remembered them alive, and then the samurai remembered them ablaze. He hesitated just before he came to the ridge, took a breath to steel himself, and then walked over and downward.

It was quiet. Once it had been a mirror of the other valley, a hub of life and labor, but now all was left to waste. The path beneath his feet was thick with moss and grass and free of any mark of human footfall. He passed a discarded barrel that had been claimed by bees, the dull hum of the insects like some funeral choir. The wind rustled
long, ragged grass that burst forth from what remained of the dry and crumbled paddy fields.

None of this concerned him. He was no farmer nor architect nor keeper of bees. What he looked at were the blackened stumps clustered in sad communion in the base of the valley, each as dark as the night had been when he had walked this very path eight years ago.

The remains passed him by, the thickest of foundation pillars and the gnarled ends of tree stumps. All were charcoal. He noticed that on one or two of the larger ones someone had carved ancient prayers for the dead, asking that the souls find peace in the afterlife and that they not return to earth to menace the living.

Munisai reached out and touched one of the stumps softly. It felt cold and dead. He didn’t know what else he was expecting.

The samurai walked into what would have been the courtyard of a house. The paving stones, now cracked and mossy, still marked a path around a tree that was long dead. He remembered it in bloom, the pleasant smell of the cherry blossom, and the vivid pink of the petals against the soft blue skies. He remembered the tree catching alight, the blossom igniting and falling from the branches like a shower of fiery rain, taken upon the wind as they turned to ash.

Eight years ago, here.

Perhaps if he confronted this he would find the words to say to the boy. The boy, with his body and face so unlike Munisai’s, but Yoshiko’s dark eyes looking out at him as if she had never left this world. That he remembered most of all—the last time he looked into his wife’s eyes, her on her knees before him.

Munisai sighed, the tightness in his chest growing with every beat of his heart. He bowed reverently to the ruin of the cherry tree, and settled into a meditative pose. Then he went within himself, and began to think.

B
ennosuke watched from the ridgeline as his father became perfectly still, his blue kimono the one blot of vivid color among the ruins. It was jarring to the view he knew so well.

Munisai had not noticed he was being followed. The strain of forcing himself here must have been too great. When Bennosuke had woken, he had meant to go tell the man what he had overheard in the dojo last night. He had walked swiftly, but as he had approached the house his legs had slowly frozen as something dawned upon him.

He realized his father would ask why Bennosuke had not confronted the men as a samurai should, and to that Bennosuke had no answer.

Fearing that shameful interrogation, he had begun to skulk away when Munisai had emerged. When the boy realized where Munisai was headed he had followed at a distance, intrigued. The man had not stopped, heading down into the valley seemingly without the fear of trespassing on such a solemn stretch of ground.

The charred stumps around Munisai seemed to grow larger. Bennosuke found himself thinking of the peasants last night. Drunk though they had been—Bennosuke had only a vague idea of what that meant—they had revealed a kind of honesty that was seldom shown. They had spoken the words from their hearts, and they had been hateful and vehement and directed at Munisai.

Why?

He knew he should join his father, to ask this question. But though he sat for some time he could not bring himself to move.

Tomorrow, he eventually promised himself. The man needed time, and so did he; the dead today, the living tomorrow. Tomorrow they would say and do the things that they needed to, though he did not know what they were.

Tomorrow.

H
ayato Nakata stalked the hallways with purposeless resentment, looking bitterly at the exquisite art around him. The paper walls were painted in black ink, a motif of reeds around ponds and cranes taking flight. Above them carved into the wood were curling, symmetrical designs of leaves and flowers.

None of it mattered, because none of it was his.

There was no purpose to art, other than to enshrine. It was testament to a man’s wealth and nothing more, to say that he could afford to pay someone to do something that had no meaning. To admire another man’s painting, then, was to acquiesce to the statement the owner was making: “This exists at my behest, and your wonder at it proves me greater.”

This was his father’s castle, his father’s art, and he would not grant the old man that.

He thought of putting his fist through the paper, smashing one of the cranes in two, but that would be pointless. It would be remarked upon, and then his father would summon him and he would be made to confess he did it like a child. That was all he was seen as now: a child.

A child who dwelled in a nice, comfortable city. He heard the voices and the sniggers of those palanquin bearers once more. He heard them often now.

The old lord entrusted Hayato with nothing that had any real meaning. Hayato knew he was expected just to be, to endure the long days as an insurance that had no purpose in life until his father should happen to die. All he did was drink. He had a bottle of sake in his hand now, and he swigged from it with indolent rage.

He turned to look out upon the world, across the manicured vistas of his father’s gardens. He looked at everything and nothing, losing track of time, anger building in him as it always seemed to.

A door slid open behind him. Two young handmaidens were there, pretty like dolls. They were talking to each other quietly, but the sight of the lord checked them into silence. They smiled and bowed, keeping their eyes low. Hayato looked at them with a dispassionate eye, trying to remember if he had taken either of them before.

The hallway was narrow, and they had to file one after the other to pass him. They did so demurely, and he turned so that they had to brush almost face-to-face with him. The first one he did not know, but the second he suddenly recognized. It was the koto player from the palanquin after Shinmen’s battle. He remembered a lull in the music and a hot burn across his cheeks.

“What are you laughing at?” he said, stepping forward to force her against the wall.

“My lord?” she said, her face blank and her eyes not meeting his, as was proper etiquette.

“ ‘What are you laughing at?’ I said,” he snarled, and tried to take her wrist.

Instead she wriggled free and dropped onto her knees, placing her hands and her brow flat on the ground as she blabbered apologies. Her companion stood shocked, but she knew she could not interfere. She clasped her hands together and turned to one side, trying to keep her face still but with worry in her eyes and in the quivering of her bottom lip.

Hayato watched the girl grovel, the black circle of her bound hair bobbing. For a moment he considered bringing the bottle down upon the back of her head, but he stopped himself. He knew she was a particular favorite of his father, and if she turned up to serve him with shards of pottery stuck in her skull, the old letch would ask questions.