Sword of Honour (5 page)

Jiro sat alongside him rocking on his posterior, arms wrapped around his shins and his chin on his knees. His mind looped through his own familiar obsessions.

‘Is it us they hate?’ he said.

Musashi had heard him talk before and he knew exactly who it was who would despise Jiro. Two daughters, a wife, a mother, his father gloriously dead but his father’s father alive yet.
Hideously alive, a mutilated survivor, legless, Jiro’s grandfather had terrorized him through his youth, carrying his torso around on his hands, constantly vigilant. Any time Jiro would waver
or stray from his dedication to the Way, the man would thrust his naked, mangled stumps at the boy as proof of what was demanded of him, of them all, and, when he exposed his lessening, always
there had been fierce pride in his eyes.

That proper old samurai would never forgive, nor permit any other to forgive, Jiro for the audacity of surviving his Lord, and this he feared more than the tortures of those named enemy. This,
why they were exiled here.

‘Us,’ said Jiro again, shaking his head, chin glancing off his knees. ‘
Us
– you and I. Musashi Miyamoto and Jirokyuro Hori. We’re not the ones they hate.
It can’t be. We’re . . . What difference, individual difference did you and I make at Sekigahara? We two amidst thousands? Yet our army lost, and so we two must bear the shame. To be
hated. What if our army had won? We would be loved, and yet we would have had the exact same effect upon the victory. Would have had . . . what we had before. But magnified. And what would we have
done to earn it? Nothing. No. No. It is as though we . . . As though human beings are . . . buckets or, or, or . . . vessels.’

He pointed up at the helmets where they hung, filled with water.

‘That’s us, there. There’s simply a hate in the world, and a love, and it just needs to be poured,’ said Jiro, and he sort of laughed to himself and mimicked tipping a
kettle. ‘We two – us, you and I – we are incidental.’

This was a new conclusion he had reached, and Musashi watched the man with interest. ‘You think so?’

‘It seems so,’ said Jiro. ‘But . . . How did this come to be? Creatures do not have this prejudice. Is it innate in men, this? Or is it something that was created?’

Musashi thought about his answer for some time. ‘My uncle taught me men were innately good. Born without any prejudice. No. It’s the Way. It’s the Way that makes men think as
this. Twists them thusly. Must be. Deep within all there is an honesty.’

‘Uncle?’ said Jiro. ‘You’ve never spoken of him before.’

He hadn’t. Why today he should speak he did not know, but he found that he wanted to. ‘His name was Dorinbo,’ said Musashi. ‘A monk.’

‘Buddhist or Shinto?’

‘Shinto.’

‘Shinto?’ said Jiro. ‘Never much paid attention to the priest of my vale. The celestial spear dipping into the chaotic seas, wild Susano’o abroad in the heavens making it
thunder . . . It all washed over me.’

‘I know it well,’ said Musashi. ‘I helped my uncle with the ceremonies. Told the stories, read the prayers. He raised me. My father was absent, serving his Lord. My uncle
taught me . . . everything. How to read and write . . . All of it. He wanted me to become his apprentice and follow him down the holy path but I . . .’ He took a breath and thought how to
express it best. ‘I chose the sword.’

‘And the sword led you here,’ said Jiro.

Musashi did not hear him. Now, thinking of Dorinbo, he felt warmth in his heart and he was driven to speak further, if just to remember, if just to recall: ‘He was a healer. Talented.
People would come from afar to be treated by him. None were turned away. Lepers, the mutilated . . . Not all could be cured but he would try equally. There were wounds, festering wounds that smelt
so bad I ran from the room in disgust, but he would stay and lay his hands upon those vile rotting limbs with tenderness. His hands . . . His ability that he had learnt for himself, and he put his
hands on filth all to try to alleviate it. And he asked for nothing. And there are children in the village where I was born that stand upright this day because of him. Made it to adulthood because
of him. He did things of worth, and, and . . .’

His voice faded away. He could speak no further.

Jiro had noticed the change in Musashi. Rare that any kindness seeped into their voices. ‘He sounds a fine man,’ he said. ‘One that would not hate.’

Musashi did not reply. His eyes were distant now. Jiro watched him for some time. A sparrow alighted on the rim of Hayato’s helmet and bobbed its beak to the water and then threw its head
back to drink.

‘Perhaps he is different,’ said Jiro. ‘Not as my kin would be.’

Again the sparrow drank, again, again, again.

‘Why is it you do not return to him?’ Jiro pressed. ‘Do you think he is the sort of man that would hate you for what you are, for what you’ve done?’

‘How could I return to him like . . .’ snapped Musashi, and he tugged at the rags he wore and glared at Jiro for an instant. But it all hurt to say and it hurt to think of, a wet
heat behind the eyes. It could not last. Musashi’s face softened and he let the rags fall from his hand. Jiro turned away, embarrassed.

The silence resumed. The sparrow had fled to the skies at the sudden outburst. Musashi put the stalk of grass in his mouth once more and ground it between his teeth.

His eyes returned to the golden crest.

A fortnight after he had been defanged, Jiro returned from bowfishing despondent and empty-handed save for his longbow. He sat down by the bracken fire Musashi had made and
laid the stave of the weapon across his lap. He stared at nothing for a long while, probing the hollow of his gum with his tongue.

‘Bowstring snapped,’ he said eventually.

‘It had to, some time,’ said Musashi.

‘It was the last one I had,’ he said. ‘The last one. What are we to do?’

‘There’s plenty of mushrooms here,’ said Musashi, and he waved a hand at the trees, which were rife with stairs of fungi. ‘We’ll make do.’

‘No!’ shouted Jiro. ‘No! I refuse to subsist. I will forego rice, I will forego tea, but . . . I must have fish. A man must have fish.’

He repeated these words several times, his voice racked with the desperate emotion of the long-deprived, and yet his distress was a matter of more than simple food. What was an archer without a
bow? His eyes roved in furious rotations and his fingers wrung themselves around the bow’s stave.

‘There’s a town a half-day’s walk eastwards,’ he said. ‘I’ll go there. There must be a bowyer there.’

‘We don’t need a bowyer,’ said Musashi. ‘Perhaps we can make a string ourselves.’

‘Out of what?’

‘I don’t know . . . Hair. Some vine or grass we can find . . . The very first men who made bows, in the time before bowyers, they must have had exactly what we have here before us
now. Surely we can find some substitute or . . .’

‘A string as sturdy as your wicker kite, no doubt,’ said Jiro blackly.

‘What in the myriad hells do you intend by that?’

Jiro met Musashi’s eyes for a moment and the two of them swelled with imminent conflict. But before it could manifest the small man relented, looked at the ground with a sigh.

‘I apologize,’ he said. ‘An unnecessary insult to a friend, born of my disquiet. I will head into town.’

‘You can’t,’ said Musashi. ‘Remember Koresada.’

‘I’m not like . . . I’m no thief . . . I’ll . . .’

Jiro rose to his feet. He laid his longbow aside and walked over to where the helmets were hung. He placed his hands around the golden frond of Hayato’s helmet, and began trying to wrench
it off. It was loose, the joints rusted, and he yanked it again and again. Musashi placed a hand on his shoulder, tried to place his body between the man and what he sought.

‘How do you think it will look,’ he said, ‘you arriving in town two years starved and clutching a golden samurai crest? What conclusion do you think they’ll
reach?’

‘I’ll trade, they’ll trade, they’ll listen. Let me go.’

‘No.’

‘I must have a bow. I must have fish. I must, I must, I must . . .’

‘Are you mad?’

‘Let me go!’ shouted Jiro, and he snapped the crest loose and stood back with it in his hands. Musashi looked at him, and in his anger his first instinct was to strike at the man
that he might force some wits into his head. He hesitated, though, because it was Jiro, and yet Jiro saw the intent in him and his eyes tightened in response, and he made to stride around Musashi
and leave their camp.

Musashi yelled at him to halt, half-pleading, half-commanding, and Jiro shouted back a half-insult and began to half-run. Musashi grabbed him by the scruff of his clothing and tried to haul him
close, and Jiro swung around and attempted to pry himself free, and like this they began to struggle, began to dance around each other, snarling and spitting, a golden crest in their hands and a
wilderness around them.

Bigger, stronger, Musashi drew Jiro in close, and he tried to restrain him without choking or wrenching at joints as he had been taught, instead wrapped his arms around the man’s chest and
tried to pin his arms to his sides, but still Jiro fought, kicked, butted with his head. Musashi growled and brought his friend over his waist, threw him to the ground and fell with him, and there
simply kept his hold upon the man, let him struggle as he would until hopefully he would see sense.

‘Let me go!’ Jiro pleaded, trying to look over his shoulder and meet Musashi’s eye. ‘I must have fish!’ And on and on he repeated this until he was actually
weeping, tears streaming from his eyes. He spoke of fish but it was more than that, everything bared in this piteous, pathetic moment, everything mourned, and Musashi understood this, and the fact
that someone older than he could be so thoroughly broken made him want to weep also.

Thus they lay until Jiro’s struggles subsided. Musashi’s grip lessened. Jiro assured him that he was calm, and, when Musashi chose to believe him and released him entirely, he calmly
went to sit with his back against a tree. There he sat cradling Hayato’s crest, staring dumbly at his own distorted reflection barely visible upon its surface for some time.

Then he looked up at Musashi, smiled, and tossed the crest away as though it were nothing.

They ate nought but boiled mushrooms that night in silence, and the next morning, when Musashi awoke, Jiro and the crest were gone.

His longbow and his swords remained.

Musashi knew what this meant, yet he spent the morning lying to himself that the man was only twenty heartbeats away from reappearing in the camp, and perhaps for a while such was his desire for
this to be so that he even believed it. But he knew that ultimately he had no choice but to go and search for Jiro, if only to confirm. Guardedly, he brought both his and Jiro’s weapons with
him and at the very edge of the town, on the wooded slope of the hill that led down to the paddy fields, he hid the four swords and the bow between the roots of a great dead oak tree.

Musashi traversed the narrow paths that bisected the dry paddies and entered the town, trying the best he could to be inconspicuous. He wore a peasant’s straw sandals, a decrepit old
kimono and a rough jacket of hemp. These things by themselves would attract no attention. Yet he had a full head of hair that hung loose to his chin, where peasants tended to keep theirs cropped
close; his emaciated flesh was pale and dirty; and in this gauntness he stood a head taller than most.

He was wary for any staring at him, but not a single eye followed him, for the town was silent and empty. He walked along the main thoroughfare, through all the things that had long since been
relegated to memories – the smell of rice cooking, the curls of incense that warded insects and kept away stench, colours beyond pallid tones of earth, silk-threaded cushions, soft tatami
mats, roofs, walls – and found not a single person.

They were all gathered on the moor on the far side of the town, an expanse of rutted brush bordered by pine trees. Musashi joined the back of the crowd, and looked over their heads. At the fore
of them all, he saw Jiro.

Jiro was kneeling, bound by the wrists to a stake that had been driven into the ground behind him, his arms pinioned up in odd contortion. They had bled him to death by a score of deep cuts
across his body and his back, and to make a fool of him they had cut his nose and his ears off.

A samurai, swords at his side and a spear in his hands, stood nearby. The steward of the town, perhaps. An executioner from the hamlet of the corpsehandlers, his work completed, had been exiled
some distance away, where he knelt with his bloody hands upon his thighs and his eyes upon the floor. Some swordless higherborn, the headman of the town or the minister whose jurisdiction it fell
under or some other titled authority, was pronouncing final judgement.

‘Look, then, you all upon this enemy of civilization, and see justice enacted in the name of his most noble Lord Natsuka,’ said the minister, and then he realized his mistake of
habit and corrected himself quickly: ‘The justice of the most noble Lord Tokugawa, may he reign ten thousand years hale and serene. In his authority, I hereby rule that the corpse of this
degenerate shall stand for a week upon this moor that all passing on the road might heed its warning.’ He fumbled at his belt, and brought up a velvet bag noosed by a leather cord.
‘Where is the upstanding artisan known as Nobutsura?’

From the crowd a man stepped forward. He was a hardy-looking fellow with hair cropped so short he all but resembled a monk, and he dropped to his knees and pressed his brow to the ground.
‘Here, most honourable one.’

‘Rise,’ said the minister, and the artisan did so. The minister pressed the bag into Nobutsura’s hands. ‘Here, your reward. One shu of gold. Let every man and woman know
that bounties persist upon the wretched and vile masterless that served the vanquished coalition, and vigilance is a virtue upon which all the heavens shine.’

The artisan murmured his thanks, dropped into a bow again and then returned to the crowd. The minister or whoever he was had pronounced all he wished to pronounce. He gave a formal farewell,
bade the populace be about their business, and then he retired to the box of his lacquered palanquin. A dozen men bore the cabin aloft on its yoke, and the townspeople dropped to their knees in
salute as it departed.