Sword of Honour (11 page)

The thought did not seem to bother him.

‘Innocent blood – I swear to you that I am innocent. My only crime is living, in wanting others to live. This the reason they would flay my skin from me.’

Silence.

‘Do you really want for our ghosts to haunt you through all the years to come?’

Something passed across the priest’s sombre face. Only a sliver, the slightest twitch of a muscle beneath one of his eyes, but Musashi saw this, saw the opening.

‘Please, I beg of you,’ he said, his voice lower now, beseeching. ‘Is there any way out of here you have kept hidden from me?’

‘No,’ said Seigan.

‘Then surely,’ said Musashi, ‘there must be something else you can think of. Anything. Please.’

The priest was reluctant, so reluctant, but he weighed the potential scenarios before him against one another and made a decision. He rose to his feet, took a lantern in his hand and went to the
rear side of the shrine. There, with some effort, he pulled a loose plank aside and revealed a space beneath the hollow wooden dais the shrine was set upon.

‘In there,’ said Seigan. ‘You can hide. I’ll open the gate, let the samurai in, tell them you knocked me on my head and when I awoke you were gone. That you’ve
probably snuck off away into the night. When they’re truly gone, then you can make good your flight.’

It occurred to Musashi, when he was nestled down in the darkness and Seigan was lowering the plank over him, that he was placing his faith entirely in this man. The priest
could very well board him up in here and go and rouse the samurai outside and deliver him like that. But he looked up at the man’s shaven head, at his impassive features, and he felt no sense
of threat.

For a moment, it was not Seigan he saw.

Seigan in turn saw the way Musashi was looking at him, and he hesitated for a moment before he lowered the plank entirely. He spoke with curt distaste:

‘Consider the path you walk.’

And that was all, and again it was not entirely he alone that spoke. The priest reset the plank and the light was stolen from Musashi, and in the complete blackness, down amidst the rocky earth
and the caresses of cobwebs and the smell of damp sawdust, Musashi lay there listening to the muffled cries from outside, thinking of the holy.

How it would go, how he had envisioned it countless times over in the years since Sekigahara, is that Dorinbo would be standing at the altar of the shrine of Miyamoto.
Standing beneath the burnished disc of the gong hung on high and the carved gaze of Amaterasu, the wood of it bright and new, and his uncle would turn and he would take in the boy that had left and
the man that was now before him and then he would come to him as though he sought not to disrupt a spectre.

‘Bennosuke,’ he would breathe.

‘Musashi now, Uncle.’

‘Musashi, Musashi!’

Dorinbo would accept this instantly and laugh then with his eyes quivering and wet. His uncle’s eyes so very visible because they were eye to eye here, perfectly level as men, although
Musashi had not encountered one of equal height to him since his early adolescence. Dorinbo, though, of course, would be so, deserved to be so, then and now continuous. And he would clap Musashi on
the arms, a warm and honest gesture like that, and the monk would say, ‘You live! You live!’

‘I do. Through it all I came, Uncle. It is over now. I understand. It is better to live.’

‘You have forsaken the Way?’

‘Yes.’

‘You understand! You see!’

‘I do.’

‘And you will follow me now?’

Musashi would not answer that, or could not.

‘But you live,’ said Dorinbo, still smiling but less exultant, his expression altering. Something behind his eyes burning less bright, something liquid subliming, ‘You
live.’

‘I live.’

‘You live.’

Repetition robbed it of its status as a word, and it became just a sound in which its emptiness was revealed.

‘Live.’

‘Live.’

Dorinbo would be amongst the sick and the maimed, of course, those he had dedicated his life to helping. Those with the twisted bodies and the festering wounds, those that Dorinbo had tended
with selfless love. They stood around him like a bodyguard, looking at Musashi through eyes missing or misted with cataracts or weeping with rheum.

‘Here are the things that I have done, that I have bettered, that stand in testament to me,’ said his uncle.

‘I live’ was all Musashi could say, but he could not bring himself to speak it aloud, and yet Dorinbo heard it nonetheless and Musashi’s silent voice had the cadence of a
child.

‘You come to me and you live,’ said his uncle, and his smile now was sad and pitying.

‘I live,’ said Musashi, and through the mended horde he looked into the eyes of his uncle, who was much taller than he now, and there was no pride in them as there ought to
be.

‘You live, Bennosuke.’

‘I am Musashi.’

‘Can you name a thing of worth that stands in testament to that name?’

Outside there were many lanterns now that roved back and forth clutched in hands, light seeping through the cracks of the planking, and the night was rent with furious cries
and the heavy thud of footsteps on the wood above him, and this went on for some time but never did Musashi feel as though he would be discovered. He was immune, cocooned away by the thoughts of
higher things that temporarily burdened him.

For a moment a form of perspective struck him. He saw the segregated triumphs of this year for what they amounted to, felt the hard, sharp forms of rocks beneath him, and he wondered if,
somewhere out there, there was not a grander path he might walk with these same furious steps, if only it might reveal itself.

Thusly the hours passed, and he drifted into some semblance of sleep thinking of Dorinbo, and yet, when he was awakened just before the dawn by Seigan prising the plank free once more, all doubt
was dismissed. There was only the flight to focus upon, another achievable challenge, and he thanked the priest, who did not bid him farewell, and then he was away, out of the town, running between
the paddy fields that erupted with the cries of frogs, and then up into the forests of the hills and safe once more.

Chapter Six

The rainy season was coming, skies greying in the day but not yet the deep charcoal colour they would become, and through the night the first waters fell. Akiyama sat huddled
in a damp stable listening to the drone of it spattering on the thatched roof above. His horse was nearby and there was a humid taste of straw and dung in the air, lining his mouth.

A feeble bracken fire burnt before him, and he stared at it sightlessly.

He struggled to understand how it was Miyamoto had managed to escape him at that temple. The lure had been sound, pitifully easy to construct. The dojo had belonged to a school who were awed by
the colour of tea, had gratefully loaned him the use of their hall. They had even paid for the proclamations of the false seppuku to go out across their realm, so eager and excited were they that
they might witness the fabled Yoshioka technique with their own eyes.

But Miyamoto had done what he had done, had chosen to run and to take the priest captive, and Akiyama had marched around that temple compound a score of times or more and verified its entirety,
had posted men at its every corner, and still somehow Miyamoto had eluded him, slipping through the lot of them in the night.

Perhaps the outlaw had the ability to simply vanish as entirely and as suddenly as he had emerged.

That boded poorly. He doubted he would see Miyamoto again. Akiyama knew he could not use the same bait to try to draw him close a second time, and if the wretch had half the wits he seemed to
possess Miyamoto would abandon his other wild assaults and keep his head down and his mouth shut in whatever nest he conspired to find. The chance to claim his head had almost certainly escaped
Akiyama, and here he sat staring at the fire, contemplating the dilemma of whether to persevere in blind hope in his hunt or to admit defeat and return to the capital and the school.

That night, such was his mood that he rued the utter pointlessness of either.

It was always ever thus. For all the malicious rumour that delighted in telling of his cuckolding by a barbarian, Akiyama’s father had remained a man of wealth and influence. He paid for
his son to be enrolled in the school of Yoshioka at the age of thirteen. Surely the colour of tea upon his shoulders would override the colour of his skin.

Akiyama was admitted, and soon found himself last in line, on the edge of the crowd, his work never praised or scorned regardless of how much or how little effort he put in. Patronized or
tolerated or endured, never trusted or confided in. That very particular shade of courteous detestation that defined his life from then to now.

Young and hopeful, he had taken this as a challenge. Surely he could make them respect him, to make them want him. Nothing worthwhile was ever given freely, and what did samurai respect more
than the ways of the sword? He threw himself into his studies of the blade and of the countenance of the warrior, staying in the dojo long after others had left, practising the strokes and
hardening his body.

Nights he spent in solitude listening to the distant merriment of others, wanting to join them but never quite having the courage to invite himself. Busying himself instead with duty or
pastiches of it, scaling and gutting fish for tomorrow’s breakfast or polishing the lacquer upon his scabbard, which was already so pure he could all but use it as a mirror, so that if others
should stumble upon him he could offer this as an excuse for his absence. A lie that was easier for both parties to accept.

The sword came to him naturally, his forearms strong and his balance uncanny. The Yoshioka had their rigid method, their style, and this he took in quickly. Yet he hungered for more, and so he
took to reading tracts of rival philosophies, hoping that maybe if he incorporated fresh techniques it might earn him recognition. That he might better their cause. In a dojo hall filled with a
dozen men mimicking the master’s moves down to the smallest muscles of the hands and feet, thus Akiyama began assuming different stances, balancing his body in new manners, holding his sword
at the opposite angles to others as they all prepared to strike the same blow. This was a taboo, and why he did this at first he did not know. Indeed, he even expected retribution, but received
none.

The master didn’t comment on his aberration. Neither did the other novices. Of course the Foreigner would have a hybrid style. It was only to be expected.

When he realized this his attitude changed. He became more obnoxiously errant, deliberately so, part of him even wanting to be chastised or punished; at least if they had to forbid him
something, they would have to recognize him as an individual. But he was permitted to stray over the course of years and so his method of the sword became a mongrel version of his own devising, and
yet, despite its oddity and their determination to render him a nonentity, his raw ability was impossible not to notice.

So, what to do with him? The school found a solution. Whilst those around him were rewarded with emissary status or embedded in fiefdoms to serve honourably under Lords the length of the nation,
Akiyama was sent to eradicate the debased. The low men – never the high men, the champions whose heads would garner esteem – who either offered insult to the school in some way, or
those of the school that disgraced its name. Akiyama became a negator, a nullifier, the school’s void that it sent after other such voids to consume them, to reduce a double aberration into a
single.

Years of his life given over to these meaningless quests, Miyamoto, the heretic Saito, the covetous Murakami, all of them, eight heads that he had brought to the masters in Kyoto, eight heads he
had presented convinced that each would be the last. His sole reward however each time was no more than the lingering, his continuing to live as the penumbra of them all, until the wheel would
inevitably turn again and everything repeated itself.

And he knew this, understood this tacitly, knew that whether he had succeeded in killing Miyamoto or not would have had the exact same effect upon the course of his life. Yet here he sat,
feeling a failure, wanting to please them yet just in case, just in case. A slave to this compulsion that governed him. This lifelong resolution to strive to belong to something that did not want
him, that he
knew
did not want him.

What was this urge that haunted his heart?

Did the leeches sucking upon the legs of paddy-field oxen long to be absorbed up into the whole of the creature too?

Of course he persevered.

He was too stubborn to relent, or too timid to confront the truth, and so he went on as he had gone before, resigned himself to sacrifice the exact same span of time that he had been prepared to
before Miyamoto had buried that man up to his neck in the spring that year. Next spring he would return to Kyoto. Next spring somehow things would be all all right; somehow his diligent but futile
pursuit would be recognized. Next spring full of all potential, as all the previous springs of his life had been, and how he hated himself for thinking this, and how some other part of him
persisted to believe it.

He went about as a shell of a man, sent his missives, rode his horse, and then, some two months after his last and presumably final encounter with the man he hunted, to Akiyama’s complete
surprise, he received word of Miyamoto once more.

Akiyama read the message over several times. No doubt that it was Miyamoto, a confrontation with local samurai, a grand act of destruction, and his name shouted over and over. He could scarcely
believe it. What was Miyamoto doing? Why would anyone persist in shouting his own name when he knew he was being hunted, and hunted by the school of Yoshioka no less?