Sword of Honour (37 page)

But one more facet of a flawed world. The outrage spiralled ever outwards.

The old monk of course had hardened like frost forming and he went on to level a tirade at Musashi, commanded him to open his mind to the Teachings and accused him of being complicit in his own
ignorance and damnation, and Musashi watched the pyre and heard not a single word of it. He left them all behind. Left them to chant hollow names and to live on dead slopes.

‘What of Akiyama’s head?’ Ameku asked again.

Musashi rapped the wooden ladle on the rim of the pot, scratched at the back of his neck. Eventually, he admitted: ‘It did not occur to me to . . . There was nothing I could do.’

‘Ugly,’ she said, and shuddered, ‘to be not whole. Like an animal. Terrible.’

‘I honoured him in a finer way,’ said Musashi. ‘Wherever he is, he will appreciate that.’

‘He is nowhere.’

Musashi had no answer. Yae came in with a pail of water which they set to boiling for tea. Ameku continued to work, the machine clacking percussive and slow as she wove the tatami cover. Her
feet pressing pedals of the loom, her hands hooking rushes onto levers, her whole body in rhythm.

‘How is that loom?’ he asked.

‘It is . . .’ she said, and that familiar pause as she tried to translate herself, a slash in the air with a hand as it frustrated her, ‘shit, utter shit. This tatami will sell
for nothing. You tell me in the capital, many machines, many money.’

‘Well, do not fret. We have coin left over from trading the horse to those greedy bald fools, so we won’t starve for the next few weeks.’

‘“We”,’ pronounced Ameku.

‘Your meaning?’

‘We get to Kyoto. Yae and me, here is good. Why do you stay with us? Want to stay?’

Musashi felt the weight of something like fingers at the pulse points of his throat, invisible things that stole his voice.

Ameku did not press. Her mind returned to other things, for she clucked her tongue and shook her head. ‘It is a terrible thing, Akiyama. To do that to a body. Makes my skin feel cold, to
think about it. The nothing beyond is the nothing beyond where the . . .’ She did not know the correct word for soul or essence or spirit, and so she tapped over her heart. ‘That is
that, but the body – the body can be proper, can be made proper. Must be.’

‘This, the Ryukyu way?’ asked Musashi.

‘Is it not the human way?’

‘You did not much seem to like him whilst he lived.’

‘Another swordsman,’ said Ameku, and Musashi could not tell if this was a jibe at him as well. ‘But the dead are the dead, and things like this are of more . . . are more
important, no?’

Her words brought his uncle Dorinbo to mind.

Always, Dorinbo had said, the dead must be treated with complete propriety. The dead, after all, were the most helpless.

Yae spoke up as she poured dried tealeaves into clay dishes. ‘I liked Akiyama,’ she said. ‘He tried to talk to me, when you were away in the winter. But I was scared of him,
and I ran away. I wish I hadn’t, now.’

‘It is not a matter of . . .’ said Musashi. ‘The Yoshioka are not going to yield the head to me. Not that Denshichiro.’

Ameku’s fingers pinched a reed into a noose. ‘They have it still?’

‘Up above their gates, as he said it. There’ll be twenty of them there at least. There’s no method of standing against that number, and I’ll—’

For the first time then, it occurred to him that Denshichiro might bring that number of men to their coming duel. He had barely escaped Seijuro’s bodyguard when they elected to swarm him,
and then Musashi recalled the anger and hatred in Denshichiro and wondered if there would be a duel at all – if they all would not just simply rush him from the off. Their honour
nebulous.

How would he triumph? How would he survive?

He sat in grim contemplation. A mosquito landed on his irritated ankles and tried to feed where others had. It was fat and slow and Musashi slapped it, and a rivulet of watery blood coursed a
thin trail towards his sole.

Ameku shared his mood, but her thoughts ran as cyclical as the machine she worked. ‘Up above the gates?’ she said. ‘Beneath the sun? Up to the sun, in this heat . . . Left to .
. .’

Again she did not know the right words, and again her hand irately conjured nothing in the air. But then why should she know these kinds of words? What sad world was it where rot or decay or
putrefaction of a severed stolen head should ever have to be translated?

Their world. Their Way.

Musashi looked at her, and wished that she would sing this night instead of shudder. Sing for him, and him alone.

‘I’ll get his head back,’ Musashi said. ‘He will be at peace. All will be.’

Ameku did not answer; Yae did not understand.

Musashi left them, went outside and there by the light of an oil lantern stripped both his swords and sharpened them.

This was familiar and finite and gave him satisfaction.

Chapter Twenty-four

Tadanari knelt with a book before him. It was wide as the blade of a shortsword was long and fat with hundreds of sheaves of paper, the front and back covers made of thin
polished cedar. It was a thing of decades past and decades to be.

Upon each page were handprints and names all in shades of brown and red. Each a solemn vow of the adepts of the school, cast in their own blood. Tadanari remembered cutting himself upon the left
forearm and letting the blood drain into a shallow tray. The dojo hall dark, past midnight at the solemn hour of the ox with the elders watching, the hand pressed against the page designated his
and his name written in the blood left over, all the while uttering vows of utmost loyalty spoken so truthfully it felt as though his sternum was being wrung.

Each and every member of the school was recorded there. Himself, his son Ujinari, Seijuro, Denshichiro, friends current, friends gone.

He came to the page of Nagayoshi Akiyama. With great care he began to cut the sheaf of paper from the annals. No one had thought to remove it until now. When he had done so for a while he did no
more than kneel there and hold the page in his hands, contemplated the palmprint and the lines therein to the sound of distant cicadas. In truth he had come here to the archival room like a pipe to
the lips, the private garden too hot beneath the sun and he in search of solitude from the upheaval of the past days.

As his eyes languidly traced the heel of Akiyama’s thumb, something occurred to him. He summoned a servant and told him what he wanted, and within a short time the man returned carrying a
small chest of dark persimmon wood. He set this down before Tadanari, bowed with his brow to the tatami mat, and then departed and left the master alone once more. The bald samurai unhooked the
latch and cast the hinged lid back.

Inside were all the missives Akiyama had sent to the school upon his hunt of Miyamoto. There were three dozen, more than that, perhaps even fifty. Faithfully he had written at least once a
month, and on each and every one of the folded sheaves the wax seal stamped with the two characters of his name remained unbroken.

Tadanari dug his hands in and scattered a handful of them across the floor as though he were sifting through sand. All words were dust eventually, as Saint Fudo taught, but even though he knew
this, recognized this, accepted this, the fact that the severed head of the writer of all these unheeded thoughts was set above the gates of the school caused a strange melancholy to momentarily
seize Tadanari.

It was not that Akiyama had not deserved to die for his betrayal, it was that perhaps it should not have been so callous and so sudden. Or that perhaps the retribution ought to have been by
Tadanari’s hands, and not by Denshichiro’s. The young killing their elders had always struck him as an abomination.

Or that perhaps, ultimately, he should have recalled sending Akiyama out on his duty, that perhaps if he had done so he might have understood Miyamoto better, that perhaps Seijuro, whom he had
groomed so meticulously, would not have found his ruin.

Here now a chance to rectify that. Tadanari picked one of the missives at random and broke the seal. He began to read. Akiyama had exquisite calligraphy. It was a report of Miyamoto intruding
upon a seppuku, and Akiyama’s observations therein. Another letter opened. Now Akiyama was upon the southern coast certain he would encounter his target soon. Another, and the stanza of a
poem about summer’s equilibrium, which Akiyama hoped might be read and appreciated at some evening gathering at the school.

On he read, and over the course of an hour Tadanari began to learn of this strange masterless savage, this Musashi Miyamoto, until something intruded upon his solace. A sound, close and
immediate and violent. He listened, and recognized it as the whip and slap of bamboo, again, again. It persisted until he could ignore it no more.

Tadanari rose, went and sought the source of it. Outside in the courtyard an adolescent novice was on his hands and knees stripped to his waist, being lashed across his back by an adept of the
school with a training sword. The blows he struck were vicious, ribbed sword scything through the air, the crack of impact across the knobs of the spine sharp but the acolyte bore it all. He gave
no sound but the merest of whimpers.

The dead eyes of Akiyama oversaw all.

Tadanari tried to ignore the gaze.

On, the adept struck. It appeared at first to be a matter of corporal discipline, but something seemed odd to Tadanari the longer he watched. There was no measured rhythm to the adept’s
strokes, his hands clutched too tight around his ersatz lash. The novice’s eyes were red, his teeth clenched, lips murmuring something unspoken.

Tadanari stepped outside. The sunlight made him squint. ‘What is occurring here?’

‘Master Kozei!’ barked the adept, snapped his body down in a low bow. The acolyte too swivelled in the dirt, forced his brow to the ground, his back a glistening tiger’s hide
of scarlet welts and sweat. ‘Punishment!’

‘What infraction warranted it?’

‘Young Yuzen neglected his duties this morning, sir. Water was not in the troughs for the adepts to wash with when they rose. Furthermore his area of the barracks was unkempt.’

‘I sullied the premises of the school and hindered the adepts egregiously, master Kozei,’ said Yuzen, speaking into the earth. ‘This is unforgiveable. I begged the most
honourable Sokuemon to help me atone for this, and graciously he has obliged me.’

‘He came to you?’ Tadanari asked of the adult.

‘He did, sir.’

‘How is that you failed to notice the infractions yourself?’

‘I—’ said Sokuemon, and nothing further.

‘Did you not wash this morning?’ asked Tadanari. The only response he received the lowering of Sokuemon’s head. Tadanari did not care about a matter of simple cleanliness, all
attempts at it foiled by sweat in this weather regardless, and yet the man could not answer, which meant he hadn’t. Routine shattered. Tadanari turned his attention to Yuzen.

‘You,’ he said, ‘is there a reason for your dereliction?’

He too was reticent.

‘I ask of you a direct question, and expect an answer.’

‘Answer!’ shrieked Sokuemon, raised the bamboo sword needlessly.

‘Forgive me, Master Kozei,’ babbled Yuzen. ‘I am shamefully negligent and worthy of punishment, that is all.’

‘You were the one who bore Seijuro’s stool to the Rendai moor, were you not?’

‘That honour was mine, sir. Undeserved. Undeserved.’

‘And are you aggrieved by Seijuro’s fate?’

‘Of course, sir,’ said Yuzen, hesitant, heard no response, wavered, attempted. ‘No.’

Tadanari looked at the pair of them. Neither looked back. Eventually the elder of the school of Yoshioka stepped back into the shade, gave a small gesture with his hand: ‘As you
will.’

Yuzen brought his face up from the floor and spread his back level for Sokuemon to resume striking. This the adept did with the same zeal as before, little hisses of more than punitive diligence
escaping him, droplets of sweat rising from the acolyte’s back with each blow. The pair of them men, or man and boy who walked the Way, which was the Way of emptiness and denied the existence
of what might lie within a human heart. Disquiet, shame, grief . . . These ought not to be felt.

But to strike and be struck were acceptable emotions, acceptable desires. The paramount two perhaps; Yuzen and Sokuemon here channelling, paragons of a sort.

Tadanari watched them because he understood the necessity of it, watched until blood was drawn and Yuzen was forced down to his elbows, and yet behind his level eyes a worry. Something was afire
in their collective spirit – was this not the reason for his own queer mood, his sympathetic musings to a traitor? – and he began to wonder how deep the malady ran.

The steadying hand, the steadying plane; this Tadanari knew he needed to be.

For them.

For himself.

He called them all to assembly in the dojo hall. Light of the late afternoon sun streamed through the mullions of the westerly narrow windows above, half the hall lit
brilliantly and half in shadow; the adepts and novices knelt on the eastern side gifted halos of loose hairs and skin albescent, the faces of those on the west difficult to discern.

Uniform, though, the tough, dark sparring clothes, the wooden swords laid before each, the expressions.

‘Turbulent,’ said Tadanari, his words careful and slow. ‘Turbulent, these past few days. It has come to pass that Seijuro Yoshioka, first son of honoured Naokata, grandson of
honoured Naomitsu, is no longer able to lead the school. This you all know. He is not, however, dead – I beseech you all to visit shrines of whatever creed you follow to pray for his health.
Perhaps fate will bestow a miracle upon us. Such an occurrence withstanding, however, Denshichiro Yoshioka, second child of honoured Naokata Yoshioka, has assumed leadership of the school, as is
proper.’

‘Hail Master Denshichiro!’ shouted the most senior of the adepts there.

‘Hail!’

All bowed to the ancestral shrine of the school, which was set into the wall. An effigy of a red Shinto torii gate, a fat rope woven of women’s hair and two vases of pink hydrangeas, and
beneath this were hung portraits of the previous heads of the school. Two of them faded, the wood showing through the paint where the decades told, one vivid still, scowling fresh and
unyielding.