Sword of Honour (54 page)

Musashi ran a ragged and desperate lurch on his wounded leg. The samurai, hale and fleet, had long since vanished from his sight, but that was irrelevant. He ran not in
pursuit, but instead to Maruta. Those he passed either coming or going upon the road saw his determination and gave him a wide berth.

Night had fallen by the time he returned to the slums.

The long boats were all drawn up on shore and the sentinel pyramids of the casks of effluence stood stoic in the dark. The only noise that of the river’s flowing and the few trees there
were rattling brittle with the cries of insects. No drunks, no gamblers, no men returning exhausted from their toil, no women squatting down in doorways and talking as they fanned themselves, no
children chasing. The street leading up to Musashi’s lodgings was desolate and petrified.

A sense of wrongness twisted down his spine. Musashi had his eye upon every shadow, his shoulders rolling with his breath. The door of the building revealed itself smashed, utterly smashed, far
beyond simply gaining entry but rather ruined in some fit of rampant destruction, the entirety of it splintered and scattered about. No light burnt within the halls inside. He peered inwards,
seeking some skulking form, and then out at the street itself.

Seeing nothing, he took a street lantern down from the post it was hung from, tossed its ribbed paper cover aside and moved to stand in the doorway.

‘Ameku?’ he called inside. ‘Yae?’

There was no response. The light of the oil lantern stuttered and hissed. He caught his breath and called again.

‘Ameku?’

Musashi ducked his head and stepped inside. His footsteps rang dead upon the wood of the floor. Slowly he advanced, anticipating, anticipating. He came to the workroom and cast the light of the
flame in. A chaos of pots and pans thrown everywhere, a sack of rice split open and the little white grains forming an erratic starscape across the floor. Even the hearth had been dug into, coals
and ash scattered wantonly.

These things he had no interest in. His eyes were drawn to the loom where Ameku had worked these past days, and it was revealed to him now entirely destroyed. Pulled from the wall, the bench
upended, the ruins of the mechanism spread about still attached by the gears like a serpent’s skeleton.

The basket of rushes that had sat by her feet had fallen over, and on the pale bundle of the stalks he saw the vivid red of blood.

The colour of it, lantern-lit, stole Musashi’s thought for a while.

When he walked back out onto the street he found a man waiting for him. He was a lowerborn in patched-up hemp clothing, glancing around fearfully.

‘You,’ he said. ‘You’re Sir Miyamoto, are you not?’

‘Yes.’

‘I am bound to tell you something.’

‘What?’

‘That it was the Yoshioka who did this. They told me I had to tell you this, that you had to know it was them.’

‘What did they do?’

‘They . . .’ said the man, and he cringed. ‘Do you really want to know?’

‘Yes.’

‘They . . ,’ he said, and he stopped and steeled himself, and then spoke on quickly, as though he thought speed might spare him any reprisal: ‘A mob of them came. They told us
all to stay out of their way. They were looking for you. They knew you stayed here. But they found her, the blight-eyed islander, and, and . . . What they did was . . .’

‘What?’

‘They thought you were hiding. So what they did was they . . . They brought her out here onto the street. And they called out to you to reveal yourself. And when you didn’t, they . .
. They cut her hand off. And you didn’t come, so they did it again. More and more. Small parts. Bit by bit. And . . . We all heard her screaming. We all saw. And, and you didn’t come.
So . . .’

‘So?’

‘It was a long time. My children heard, they were crying and . . . When it was finally over, they threw her body in the river,’ said the man, and then his courage broke and he
dropped to his knees. ‘Please do not grow angry with me, sir. They told me to tell you this, all of it. They said they would come back for me and my family if I didn’t.’

The lantern sputtered and hissed in Musashi’s hand.

‘You all just watched,’ he said, looking down at him.

The lowerborn quivered, a scar that parted his beard twisting ugly, but he remained prostrate.

Musashi turned his eyes away. ‘What of the girl?’

‘Girl?’

‘A young girl stays with her. Yae, she’s called.’

‘Fled. She must have fled. I . . . It was the blight-eyed woman they slew, sir.’

Just visible at the end of the street was the hall where he and Kozei had watched the cockfight together. The Yoshioka master’s offerings of peace false, and he knowing where Musashi
abided. This Musashi had known but had not thought of it beyond risk to himself, built his little nightly barricade just big enough for his room alone.

And now . . .

His eyes turned towards the city. The glow of it visible over the walls, constant, eternal, the ten-thousand-year city, and he of twenty years only with a single torch in his hand.

When was it ever any different?

When was it ever any purer?

He left the lowerborn on his knees, and headed for Kyoto.

Chapter Thirty-seven

The pale rising moon was on the wane, just past full, a sliver taken, imperfect. Hour of the dog, most likely.

It hung above Tadanari Kozei where he stood in the garden at the centre of his school. He was upon the dais overlooking the thirteen boulders set neat in the sand. Beneath the band lashed around
his brow his eyes were on the ridge of obsidian, marking distinctions in the blackness.

In his hands he held Ujinari’s sword in its scabbard.

The sword marked with the sword of Fudo. The devil-saint. The purger of delusions, enemy of greed, of ego, of lust, of ignorance.

Of permanency.

In the vast abyss of these past days Tadanari had come to realize something about himself. He saw that for all his life until this point he had held himself timeless, thought himself free of the
doom of the mere handful of decades of life that other men were condemned to, because the more of him belonged to two things he thought immortal:

The name Kozei and the name Yoshioka.

One of these was dashed already. One of these was marred but could prove itself true yet.

How he pleaded.

Matashichiro knelt at his feet, dressed in white, a sheet of white hemp out before him. Upon a platter a dagger awaited, this too wrapped in a white length of silk. The youth knew all the
regalia, what it all meant, but he had swallowed his surprise at the sight of it, had donned the garments, had come without protest. These were the paths of manliness.

There they waited moments of no end together, drowning in the cries of the cicadas, until a bellowing voice burst the shroud of night.

‘My name is Musashi Miyamoto!’ it echoed. ‘Here I am, you sons of whores! I have come, so let us end this as it needs to be ended! You murderers! You cowards! You
thralls!’

In the main courtyard of the compound there was confusion. There the adepts of the school had been waiting, eyes upon the gate, muscles quivering, stomachs humming like the reverberation of
bells as they imagined the man that would appear and the cuts they would rend him with. The shouting, however, had come from behind them, from within the compound of the school.

‘I await you!’ yelled the voice. ‘Come and die, for I await you!’

The braziers burnt bright, crackled and spat embers upwards. Then decision: the seniormost adept barked command and the group splintered, adepts running to find the source of the noise,
disbelieving that they had been bypassed.

In the garden, Tadanari closed his eyes. He had wavered, thought that the lure of Matashichiro’s suicide might prove resistible, but no – here the self-righteous young fool had
presented himself, ready to kill and die for the sake of his maddened ideas of justice and his vainglorious pride.

When he opened his eyes he found Matashichiro looking up at him.

‘Do I do it now?’ asked the boy.

‘No,’ said Tadanari. ‘Not yet.’

He had meant to say
you may not have to
, but those words had not come.

The ordeal was now at hand, all his hopes votive. He willed with every mote of his being to overcome, and as he heard the night erupt in sound and motion he found himself breaking loose of time,
roaming the length of what he had been damned to, all vivid and present.

His hands grew tight around his sword as though he might throttle the image of Fudo there.

Musashi rushed into the darkness. They had made it about darkness. They had killed her in darkness.

Moving even before his cry had finished, knowing they would be coming. Knowing as he had known they would be crowding the front gate, expecting him to present himself into their maw like a
samurai braced for death. Not a samurai, he, everything in his life offered in proof of this. Hauled himself over the low wall at the rear of the compound, and now what he wanted to become, what he
needed to become, was chaos.

Chaos against their order, their Way.

Loping as fast as his sutured leg would carry him, not knowing where he was heading, listening to the shouts of the Yoshioka as they converged upon where he had been, their footsteps, the
rattling of doors being thrown open, the sounds of the scattering of their swarm. Round the corners of buildings, pressed up into the shadows, and the first of the samurai appeared, two of them
running to where they thought he was, oblivious of him until he stepped out with his longsword in his right hand and his shortsword in his left.

The steel of his blades was cerise in the low light and the first of them yelped at his sudden appearance. Musashi swung his longsword into the side of that man’s throat, silenced his cry.
The samurai dropped his own sword and cut his palms and his fingers open as he grasped at the edge of the weapon, fumbled in vain against it, and as the second man did nought but gape at this
Musashi lunged forward with his shortsword and stabbed up under his sternum and twisted savagely.

He left the pair screaming, a fresh lure.

Up he went through the building he had hidden against, blood dripping from either blade. A long hall set with dozens of simple mats of bedding. A barracks. The nest. The hive.

He thought of Ameku on her knees in the street and knowing pain, pain only – was it worse to be blind to your mutilation, to be spared seeing your fingers or limbs or whatever they took
taken away, or was it a form of hell to exist in a realm where your only sensation was ever-increasing agony?

Enact it upon them, let them all see, feel. The other side of the building revealed the space of a communal wash trough, the light of a brazier and three Yoshioka samurai heading across his
path. Focused on the distant commotion, they too were blind to his emergence.

‘Here!’ he snarled.

He leapt down on them before shock had even passed across their faces, and he saw that one of them was old and two of them were young, perhaps as young as himself. The first youth he cast down
with his falling strike, splitting the length of his ribs, and before this man had fallen Musashi stabbed immediately into the second’s throat with his shortsword. The third, the old one,
managed to get his legs braced and his sword up to parry Musashi’s blow, but, though their longswords locked and negated one another, Musashi’s short remained free. Down into a crouch,
then the blade of that lashed across the samurai’s taut old stomach.

‘Was it you who killed her?’ he snarled at the samurai as he collapsed. ‘Was it you?’

No answer was given. Blood on his fist, now, warm, warmer than sweat. Musashi shook it off, surged onwards, for the outrage spiralled ever outwards.

These the trail of sensations the mind wanders down when it is loosed such: Tadanari saw hydrangeas blooming wild before him in a remote meadow he had discovered by chance on
the travels of his youth, and he remembered a separate time and the taste of them drunk as tea far too sweet for his tongue, and also his hand reaching out to cup a head of the flowers and bring
them closer to his eyes.

The feel of their petals on his sword-calloused palms and the blooming of pity and loathing within himself at their frail beauty.

Frail and soft as well the long tresses of hair pressed upon the hardness of chainmail that rattled in the night.

The bloody palms of a hundred different men pressed into a book and oaths to the Yoshioka uttered, filling the pages over years and so many pages empty yet, so many yet to be, which must come to
be, that could not fail to come to be.

Faith in this.

Matashichiro, the heir, knelt at his side. His palm red also, red with ink from earlier. No one had told him to wash it. Wearing white and hearing from within the school screams of a type that
he had never heard before, screams that grew in their number . . .

Musashi spoke of her and thought of her and yet it was more than she. This was everything. Akiyama and Jiro and the Way and all the world. Everything as simple as it needed to
be. He had thought himself honest before the Hall of Thirty-Three Doors, but that paled to the truth. That paled to now. Let the anger carry him and realize itself, a moment that none could deny in
its earnestness.

His longsword bucked as it bit into the flesh of another throat, lodged itself against the knobs of the spine. The Yoshioka samurai collapsed thrashing, but Musashi did not see him fall, left
him behind, eyes always ahead.

A tea-coloured thrall rounded the corner of a building and Musashi hurled a stolen shortsword through the air. The man was screaming something even before he was struck, not of Musashi, not at
Musashi, and then the spinning sword impaled him through his chest, silenced him and forced him to his knees, and as Musashi ran past he struck the samurai across the face with his longsword.

No drumbeat now but the rhythm of the universe was within him, he was sure. He carried it, the spark, whatever it was it was within him. Drove him, his scope solely upon the finite range of his
swords, and this he understood and could control. Could communicate with as clearly as he needed to this night.