Sword of Honour (24 page)

‘A sword is a sword,’ she said simply.

‘No.’

‘It . . .’ she said, and struggled for a word, ‘lives to cut.’

‘What it cuts . . .
Why
it cuts matters.’

‘So, why do you come to cut the Yoshioka?’

‘Because . . .’ he said, and now it was he that struggled for words in his own language, ‘they too need humbling. They sent Akiyama to kill me, over some slight years ago I do
not recall, that they do not recall. That is the Way. Killing because they cannot do anything but kill. If I cut, if I . . .’
kill
‘. . . that is different. It is my hand
against them, me choosing to raise my hand for myself. That is . . . Look at Akiyama. He sees this. He’s awake now. Alive. Truly alive, and . . . honest, as am I, and . . .’

His words faded away. She said nothing, and it was maddening in a way that he had never felt before. Not the kind of rage that the sight of topknots drew from him. It was that long ache of her
songs magnified. He needed to know if he was right, if what he suspected was true: if she was truly like him and hated as he hated.

But he did not want to argue about the meaning of swords and justify himself any longer, not with her, and so he thought about what to say, and eventually he announced: ‘Love is a
delusion.’

He thought it was a fine statement and he spoke it with as much profundity as he could muster, and yet there it hung in the air without response. He waited for as long as he could bear it, three
slow strokes of her comb, before he realized he was exposed, that he was committed now to explaining it lest it seem meaningless.

‘Your song,’ he said, ‘the words. How did it go . . . ? Flowers fall, and the women find new love in spring? Love – it’s not real. Not between a man and a woman. It
is no more than an idea. Something for fools to believe in, to write poems about. To drown themselves with. Don’t you agree? No more than a delusion . . . Like the Way. Something to fool
yourself into believing has relevance, or significance, or worth. No?’

Ameku thought about her answer for some time.

‘It is something that I have never felt,’ she said eventually.

‘Neither have I,’ said Musashi.

And there was union in that, and he was satisfied, or told himself that he was. He sat there with his legs crossed, nodding slowly to himself, and he felt her hands and he heard her breathing.
The teeth of the comb dug deep and parted. Yae rolled over in her sleep with her eyes moving beneath her lids, perhaps seeing some dream, and outside the insects hummed with the pulse of creation
entirely ambivalently.

In the morning Musashi was woken by the single toll of a great bell. The strike of it was low and resonant as it unfurled over the slopes of Hiei, and it raised him back into
the world as if he were borne upwards on the languid surging bloom of some metallic bubble.

It was a strange awakening. Hiei had an aura about it that he had only sensed briefly yesterday, but now in the sober light of morning it seemed to him to hang heavy as mist. He found himself
guarded, but he could not tell if this was due to the Mount itself or the fact that he could not stop thinking of the conversation the night before. He took to wondering if it had gone as well as
he had convinced himself before he slept, and he brooded on it as he dressed and left his dormitory.

Musashi found that the grounds outside were already thriving with the ordained brothers going about their duties, the bell that had woken him in fact the end of the morning sermon and they
having risen with the dawn. They ignored him as they had mostly ignored him the day before. The monks had welcomed their party into their enclave willingly, but with little warmth. Charity was part
of their doctrine but not their enthusiasm.

The devout men had abandoned their formal black robes for plain grey jerkins as they worked now, shaven heads glistening beneath the morning sun. Musashi watched them for a while, and saw that
they had a focus and determination not unlike that of samurai: sweepers swept the garden paths mindful of the precision of the strokes of their brooms, dust beaten from tatami flooring mats with a
thorough, contained aggression, holy artefacts cleaned and polished almost as lovingly as swords.

Scarce those artefacts, though, and scarce any sense of grandeur here. The buildings were not as any temple he had seen before, ornate or imposing, but rather squat utilitarian things of plain
grey wood and thatched roof. There were no Zen gardens, no ponds of lotuses, no shaped trees, the belfry no more than a humble platform with a plain iron bell weathered brown and a log on a rope
hung from a gallows.

Across the way he saw a group of near twenty young men stripped almost naked pacing around and around an idol of the Amida Buddha. The men were deep in the throes of a circumambulatory rite, had
been since before the dawn, their hands clasped before their faces, their eyes shut tightly as they chanted feverishly over and over, voices hoarse and dry, words compressed and coalescing:

‘
PraisebetotheinfinitelightofAmida, praisebetotheinfinitelightofAmida, praisebetotheinfinitelight . . .’

The rough straw sandals they wore cut into the flesh of their feet, blood and sweat mixing, yet on they marched in solipsistic obliviousness both of the pain and of any onlookers. They were in
search of the Pure Land, where Amida waited to shepherd their souls, and on this long walk they would call his name ten hundred thousand times, a hundred hundred thousand times, and perhaps by the
end he would have heard them, acknowledged them, shown them enlightenment.

Musashi turned from them and his eye fell upon a tender and expertly sculpted statue of the Bodhisattva Jizo, the kindly old saint who cared for the souls of children in the afterlife. From his
outstretched hand hung a dozen smooth stones nestled in little red slings, each a prayer for Jizo to care for a stillborn or a child who had died before his soul could affix on the forty-ninth day
of life.

Men circling blind in search of the next world, the anonymous grief of a dozen bereaved mothers . . .

Shinto for the living, Buddhism for the dead, as the saying went.

He went and found Akiyama, who had slept secluded.

‘The woman and the girl?’ he asked Musashi.

The memory of a comb, and a quick dismissal: ‘They are tending to themselves this morning.’

Akiyama did not pry. The two swordsmen breakfasted together, a humble gruel of miso broth and dried seaweed. It was the finest thing either of them had eaten in weeks. Musashi ate quickly, and
when his bowl was empty he said, ‘Let us venture down to the city. The gates must be open. Show me to the school of the Yoshioka.’

Akiyama shook his head. ‘You need to steady yourself first. You are gaunt. A week of food and rest upon actual bedding here will put some flesh back upon you, muscle you will
need.’

‘I don’t need a week.’

‘Do not underestimate the Yoshioka.’

‘I am not. I know how to beat them. There is no point waiting.’

Akiyama’s brow furrowed. He looked at his soup. ‘What is it you intend to do afterwards, should you triumph? What do you think it is that will happen?’

‘He needs to be beaten,’ said Musashi, and nothing more.

The expression on Akiyama’s face did not change, but he raised his pale eyes up to peer at Musashi. ‘Strategy is vital,’ he said. ‘The art of strategy is anticipating
both your next five steps and the enemy’s. Do you not know this?’

Musashi looked away. His arms were itching, and the voices of the circumambulators droned on, agitating him. ‘Let us just leave this place,’ he said. ‘I don’t like it
here. There is an odd aura.’

‘Do you not know the history of Hiei?’

‘No.’

‘It used to be that forty thousand people lived upon these slopes. Hundreds of shrines and the grand temple Enryaku at the summit. Then, thirty years ago, the warlord Oda set his armies
loose. A great battle, the brothers here armed and well studied in strategy, and when it was done Oda’s men burnt any building they could find and slaughtered whoever had survived. I was a
child then. I remember it rained ash down upon the city for days.’

All knew of the Lord Oda, famed for his military genius and his brutality. It was he who many thought fated to take the mantle of Shogunate and unite the nation, were it not for one of his sworn
generals betraying him in his ascendancy and forcing him to commit seppuku. The killing of holy men and women however was an outrage that surprised Musashi: ‘Why did Oda turn upon
Hiei?’

‘The monks here claim he was a rasetsu demon manifested,’ said Akiyama. ‘An enemy of enlightenment that shepherded the barbarian Christ onto our shores. Believe that if you
will. However, as I said, this used to be home to many warrior brethren. Thousands in their white cowls and with their great glaives, driven to interfere with courts and creeds not of their own.
They would march down carrying Buddhas above them, march to surround the city in one big snake chasing its tail. This before the Regent built the walls and the moats, so you could get up on the
roofs and look out and see the holy warriors every which way you looked, at the height of noon or at night with their lanterns glimmering. Broaching rivers uncaring of the current. They would chant
together, so loud, things like, “Break what is bent and widen the path!” over and over. Fearsome . . . And they had a particular umbrage with the ascent of the Lord Oda.’

Musashi heard all that and said, ‘So this is a dead place.’

‘It seems to live once more to me.’

Musashi shook his head. ‘I don’t like it.’

Akiyama placed his bowl down, swallowed his last mouthful. ‘I have duty to attend to. Let me see to it first.’

They left Ameku and Yae in the enclave whilst one of the monks courteously led the pair of them to the graveyard. He was a young man and he cast glances at Akiyama when the
samurai was not looking, staring at his odd appearance. Musashi stared in turn at him until the man became aware that he was caught, and from then on he looked only ahead. The three of them walked
in silence.

Musashi found himself looking around the slopes and all that enveloped them. Hiei continued to unsettle him. Not green upon the floor but dark, last year’s leaves and this year’s
petals an entropic carpet through which the nooses of roots emerged. Boughs of ferns compacted into strata as they clambered upwards over one another, those pushed beneath withering into nothing. A
raised vein of earth set with stones that held memories of definite edges, once a stairway perhaps, the bulging ground beneath it pushing what remained of the order apart and devouring the rocks
themselves. Tall trunks of bamboo, etiolated grey at their bases, the emerald blush of vitality growing rib by incremental rib upwards. Insects upon his flesh drew blood before he could slap them
away, the silhouette of a bird of prey gliding silent and eternal.

The nature of this forest, he saw, was to consume.

They passed an obelisk robbed of its dignity, set with some form of parable the letters of which fingers would struggle to feel, let alone eyes perceive a meaning. Up upon the slopes he began to
see the burnt remnants of temples and shrines, ugly charcoal smears and stunted beams that were throttled by ivy.

The graveyard was set on a slope where hundreds of square pillars of dark stone stood in erratic rank and file, weathered by years. Evidently they had escaped Oda’s desecration. Akiyama
led them through the narrow paths. Chiselled names surrounded them, some forgotten and faded or the neat gouges of the recently deceased filled in by fresh red paint. A cat yowled at them as they
passed, stub-tailed, grown fat off woodland vermin and the offerings of food that people left for their beloved departed, a contented king basking in his morbid little empire.

They came to the crypt of Akiyama’s family. It was in a sorry state. A colony of spiders had woven thick webs between the namestone and its neighbours, the green and yellow creatures the
size of a man’s palm. Water had pooled and scummed in the hollows of the empty stone candelabras that stood either side of the crypt, itself small and rife with moss.

Akiyama sighed in dismay. The pale-eyed samurai found a stick and began to run it through the webs, scattering the spiders. He swept the moss away, and together he and Musashi picked up the
heavy candelabras the best they could and tipped the filthy water from them. Their hands were slick with slime and they rubbed them on leaves and grass until they were clean. Akiyama then produced
two pears, yellow and fat, and placed them on the altar. Then he set the candles and incense he had brought before the crypt and lit both.

Smoke curled.

Musashi watched as Akiyama sat down cross-legged preparing to pray, saw the wince his wounds still drew from him. Saw the diligence and sincerity in the man’s eyes. Saw what he was
faithful to, and felt a twist in his own heart.

‘I will grant you solitude. I will meet you back at the enclave with the women,’ said Musashi. Akiyama nodded his agreement.

The monk was waiting at the entrance of the graveyard. ‘Are there any remaining temples upon Hiei? An altar that I might . . . ?’ Musashi asked him.

‘There is the hall back from whence we came,’ said the monk. ‘That is the centre of Hiei now.’

‘No. That looks like a stable.’

‘It was a stable. All that was left.’

Musashi shook his head. ‘It must be . . . proper.’

The monk nodded his head and led him back along the trail. Now that they were but two young and able men, he led Musashi up an arduous shortcut. They wound their way up a steep and narrow little
crevice filled with loose rocks and smooth pebbles, what must have once been a stream but the mountain having long since sucked it dry. It led back to the well-travelled trail, and there the monk
stopped by the foot of an old stone stairway and pointed upwards.

‘There,’ he said. ‘One of Hiei’s last remaining temples.’

Musashi peered through the trees. He could see nothing but the vague sliver of a small roof appearing above the slope of the stairs. ‘There’s an altar there?’