Sword of Honour (52 page)

They bowed to one another, settled on the dais in the formal posture of kneeling. There Tadanari spoke:

‘Musashi Miyamoto has felled Denshichiro.’

‘What?’ said Matashichiro. ‘He’s dead?’

‘Yes.’

‘But,’ said the boy, ‘I . . . I heard his voice. I saw him. He was injured, his arm was skinned, but he wasn’t dead.’

‘It transpired that Miyamoto had coated his blade with poison. A lingering curse. Denshichiro died in the night. He did not die as a man ought.’

‘Are there poisons that can do that?’

‘There are, but only those black of heart could bring themselves to use them.’

‘Then he’s . . .’ said the boy, and whatever adulthood there might have been in his voice faltered, ‘like Seijuro.’

‘No tears,’ said Tadanari. ‘Not yet. First . . .’

He produced a band like the one he wore with Miyamoto’s name upon it and gave it to Matashichiro, watched as the boy wrapped it around his brow with eager compliance. He tied it clumsily,
the knot loose, the length and breadth of it cut for a man so it sat upon his ears and rose up above his crown like a priest’s hat. Nevertheless Tadanari nodded, satisfied.

‘There,’ he said. ‘Now we are avowed.’

‘Avowed to what?’ said Matashichiro.

‘Vengeance.’

‘Of course.’

‘I cannot hear force in your voice,’ said Tadanari. ‘This is the man that slew your brothers. Is that not worthy of vengeance?’

‘Yes.’

‘Still a lack,’ said Tadanari. ‘Let me tell you of Miyamoto. He is wicked. He is a man without meaning or cause. He has killed a score of our men alongside your brothers. He
kills them not for just cause of duty, not for the pure search for higher understanding of the ways of the sword, but for himself. His name alone he shouts, a leech sucking the blood of decent men,
gorging, growing fat. Is this not hateful, Matashichiro?’

‘Yes.’

‘He is a black thing. A corrupter, as malignant as a canker. He cares solely for selfish glory, fights not for Lord nor school nor father nor son nor brother nor sister nor mother, fights
solely to kill those he wants to. He gives nothing and takes everything. Lives for himself and no other. Is that not hateful, boy? Is that not the very definition of hateful?’

‘Yes!’ barked Matashichiro, as he imagined his brothers would have done should he be the one dead.

‘Good,’ said Tadanari. ‘Now, these are things that require your hand.’

He gestured to a stack of papers by his side, dozens of sheaves with columns of writing upon them. A wide shallow dish filled with liquid red ink also awaited. Matashichiro took one of the
papers and attempted to read it.

‘What are they?’ he said. ‘I don’t understand all these letters. I haven’t learnt how to read them yet.’

‘Proclamations, to go out across the city,’ said Tadanari. ‘These are the methods to draw Miyamoto to us.’

‘And they need my hand?’

‘You are the head of the school.’

‘But I do not understand them.’

‘It is my strategy,’ said Tadanari. ‘It is the wisest course. I know Miyamoto. I have read of him. I spoke to him. It is a challenge to him, to what he stands for. Once he
reads this, the dog will be unable to do anything but respond in all his vile excess. Then, when he comes . . .’

‘Vengeance,’ finished Matashichiro, at the bald samurai’s prompting.

Tadanari nodded. ‘Dignity shall be restored.’

Matashichiro looked at the unknown characters once more. ‘But—’

‘Do you not trust me, who served your father?’ said Tadanari.

‘I trust you.’

‘Then do as your father would have done.’

The mention of his father sealed the boy’s resolve. He placed his right hand into the dish of ink and then pressed it down with his fingers spread broadly upon the first of the
proclamations, anointing each the word of the scion of the Yoshioka. Crimson-fingered, on and on he worked, pressing his palm again and again, the multitude of sheaves then taken and laid out in a
long line to dry like blood there in the rising sun.

*

The high priest of the Hall of Thirty-Three Doors stood before Goemon imperious in his purple robes, the yard of the garrison stilled and silenced by the presence of the holy
man and his retinue, and how the man could shout. Had shouted for near an hour already, ordering the captain in the name of the ever-loving peace-adoring Buddha to hunt Miyamoto down, to dash him
to pieces and claim his head.

‘If you had seen this too you would understand why I speak,’ the priest said. ‘Miyamoto butchered a man where he stood, cut his arms off, slit his throat . . . All the while
with his face devoid of anything, as if he were empty inside, as if he were not seeing people before him.’

Goemon was polite as he could be: ‘You are suggesting it would be preferable if he wore a look of rage? Of joy?’

‘It would make him appear human at least. We would know the way his heart beats. This repugnant brutality of his, though, it seems born of nothing. Intolerable.’

On and on the high priest went, claiming the authority of the heavens, of the Son of Heaven who had ordained him and awarded him the purple robe and to whose court he was a regular attendant,
and Goemon stood caught in forced obsequiousness. Not wishing to offend, not permitted to offend, not permitted questions such as why the priest consented to the duel taking place on his grounds in
the first place. The sun in the sky and the tiger’s claw raking his head, cords of his helmet throttling, swords at his side, and why was it they were there? Why was it he was here?

The Goat limped into the yard as quickly as he could on his maimed leg. Uncaring of decorum or deference to the high priest, he pushed his way through the gathered mob of acolytes directly to
Goemon, bowed, and then forced a piece of paper into his captain’s hands. It had been torn down from somewhere, and on it was a child’s handprint in scarlet ink.

‘The Yoshioka are pinning these up, dozens of them all across the city,’ whispered the Goat.

Goemon read quickly:

I
NAUGURAL
P
ROCLAMATION OF
M
ATASHICHIRO
Y
OSHIOKA
, S
IXTH
H
EAD OF THE
S
CHOOL OF
Y
OSHIOKA

Goemon read it again, and then looked at the Goat. He saw the proclamation for all it truly was, and his voice was low and incredulous: ‘Would this suffice? Is his sense
of honour—’

There was further disturbance at the gate and another samurai of the Tokugawa burst into the yard. He too pushed past the high priest heaving for breath, having run half the length of the city,
and he dropped to one knee in the dust.

‘Captain!’ he said. ‘Violence at the castle!’

‘The Yoshioka?’ asked Goemon.

The man nodded.

No rest, no chance for contemplation. The castle was his Lord’s territory and any violation on it was as personal an affront as encroaching on Edo itself. Goemon quickly pulled on a
chainmail jacket, only scantly concealed it beneath his clothing, and then he was off, they were all off – he, the Goat, a score of men clutching spears – leaving the high priest
yelling in impotence in the yard, all running beneath the sun reaching its zenith in the cloudless sky above.

By time they reached the site of the castle, sweat was dripping from his nose, his brow, his chin. All the cranes and pulleys were stilled and all labour halted, the workers retreated. Great
shaped stones sitting monolithic, the mounds of seashells gleaming nacreous, above them crows circling.

There were five Yoshioka samurai standing before the scaffolding of the emergent gate. They had nailed something to it, and Goemon recognized the same scarlet handprint as upon the proclamation.
One of the samurai clutched a bloodied sword in one hand, and a severed head in the other. A lowerborn, the overseer who had protested their intrusion.

The tea-coloured men saw the Tokugawa coming, and though they were outnumbered four to one they did not flee. Indeed, they seemed delighted at their arrival.

‘Surrender!’ bellowed Goemon at them. ‘You have violated the law of the Shogunate! You have murdered his subjects and you will face justice!’

The lead samurai merely sneered. ‘This is my right, Captain,’ he said, the title an insult in his mouth. ‘Our right, our moral right. This man was cut down on account of
Musashi Miyamoto.’

He tossed the head towards Goemon. It rolled in the dust and it came to rest with the man’s dead eyes looking at him. Goemon looked into them, and then he looked at the Yoshioka samurai.
It was open challenge, and he wondered what the true meaning of this defiance was. Some planned suicidal sacrifice designed to spark a chaotic revolt, or merely men in sway to raw bloodlust? Were
they that rattled by Denshichiro’s defeat that they had lost all sense of reason?

‘You will heed my command,’ said Goemon. ‘I speak with the authority of the Shogunate.’

‘We are a long way from Edo,’ said the samurai.

‘The reach of Edo is infinite. I know this well. Surrender.’

‘And we know the dog is in your service. This, all this . . .’ said the man, and he licked the blood from his thumb. ‘All this is upon you.’

‘Surrender! Obey!’ said Goemon, and how small these words seemed as they echoed.

‘Do you not see?’ the Yoshioka samurai called to the watching crowd, perhaps two hundred people, labourers from the site or those caught in passing. ‘This is all a plot by the
Tokugawa to lay the Yoshioka low. Miyamoto is their agent!’

‘Slander and lies,’ said Goemon. ‘Miyamoto is not sworn to us.’

‘Why is it you have not brought him to justice, then? Why is it he roams free?’

‘Do not preach of justice – you are the criminal here.’

The samurai laughed, and he spoke on to the crowd, beseeched them to open their eyes and see it as they saw it. They wanted to be killed, or they knew they could not be killed, and though it was
obviously their scheme Goemon could summon no other resolution than this because in truth he
wanted
to kill. These were the men that would bring about his death and shame, and he knew
this, he had known this for months, had borne their agitations, and the weight of all this seemed now to dwarf all else.

Beneath his helmet the tiger’s claw cleft away skin and bone until it was digging right into his mind, into his memories, of how he had once thought, or known, that he would die an old and
revered bannerman of the Date and be interred in some grand crypt in a secret grove of perpetual autumn that his family would attend for generations. Not the truth apparent: that he would be
disgraced and dismembered by alien hands, his body split into two and both parts finding their ends in separate foreign cities and likely left to rot, no purity of flame to remove the mar . . .

‘Silence yourself!’ barked Goemon. All he could think of.

On the samurai spoke to the crowd, claiming Miyamoto to be Goemon’s sworn blood brother, but in truth it did not matter what he said now.

‘Heed my command!’

It was that he wore the colour of tea.

‘Damn you, heed me!’

It was that this man would live beyond Goemon, that he perhaps would sire sons and not have them robbed from him as Goemon’s had been, and this a personal affront now, the envy and the
hatred the dead have for the living.

‘Silence yourself and surrender!’

It was when the Goat had pressed that sheaf of paper into his hands that, for a brief glimpse, Goemon had thought he had seen an escape if he could only endure it for a day more, and yet this
samurai persisted in all he was.

‘With full authority of the Shogunate of the most noble clan Tokugawa,’ said Goemon, and something was welling in his throat, pulsing behind his eyes, and the heat, the heat, the
heat, ‘I hereby order you to—’

The Yoshioka samurai heard the change in Goemon’s voice, and he rounded on him: ‘Away with you, you Michinoku snow monkey.’

The Goat, standing attendant at his captain’s side, saw best the change in him. Like a gale upon a field of ashes, something just gone. Unleashed. Goemon surged forward now, tearing the
cords from his helmet and tossing it away to clatter on the earth. Screaming in his northern brogue, and what things Goemon Inoue howled at the Yoshioka samurai. How he shouted. Spat and raved and
offered every insult he knew, offered the insults he had only heard and had never uttered before, accused the man of every vice and perversion and promised a vast and terrible retribution. The
voice of Mutsu echoing before the castle of Kyoto. Goemon natural now, a northern malefic summoning curses like wind, growing in his rage and finding truth in it, and he spoke not only to the sole
samurai before him but to the city entire, to the southern clan to which he was sworn, to the fate that cast him so, everything that had festered within him these years now emerging into the sun.
Becoming the sun.

Standing there with his shoulders heaving when his gestures and his words were expended, and the Yoshioka samurai said, ‘Is that yelping supposed to have meaning? Speak proper that I can
understand you.’

In those words, Goemon found his final resolve. His head was all but forfeit already, and in that moment he saw the freedom of that where before he had seen only the doom; if all actions were
meaningless then selfishness and virtue were one and the same.