Sword of Honour (6 page)

The palanquin’s pace was ponderously slow, the six men who held the leading yoke walking backwards so that they might keep their eyes respectfully on the charge they bore aloft. The box of
it was big enough for two, and Musashi, kneeling on the very edge of the crowd, heard the sound of a woman’s laughter as it passed.

The congregation dispersed to return to the town in grim silence, save for Nobutsura, who was rattling his bounty in its pouch in satisfaction. The corpsehandler vanished unnoticed by any. The
samurai steward remained by Jiro, stood guard to ensure that none tampered with the corpse.

Musashi retreated to sit under the eaves of the wall of a smithy’s yard at the edge of the moor. He sat with his back against the stone foundations, rested his hands between his legs, sat
there suddenly exhausted with the fatigue of years. He stared at Jiro, desecrated and destroyed. He stared at the samurai, upright and immutable.

The man held a spear, wore two swords at his side. He seemed proud to be doing his duty, topknot immaculately oiled, silks upon his shoulders. At his sternum his jacket was joined by a tasselled
soft cord ended in teased white horsehair. Frail accoutrement no doubt tied and cleaned by servants’ hands.

Musashi stared at the samurai. Musashi stared at Jiro.

Musashi marked the difference between himself and the samurai. The samurai’s nails well filed, Musashi’s blackened. The samurai’s belly full and contented, and Musashi’s
lean with lack and want. One of them a torturous murderer, and the other an exile. Had that man been at Sekigahara also? What for him these two years?

He stared for a long time, able to do no more, no less.

A gate on the walls opened beside him. The smith came out, a man with a head like a rock. He was clutching his hand, burnt on a poker, and cursing to himself. He too cast his eyes over the
spectacle on the moor, and then he became aware of Musashi.

‘No,’ the smith said, rounding on him. ‘No, no, no. Away with you. No vagrants here.’

Musashi stared up at him.

‘Away with you!’ snarled the smith, slashed his hand towards that same vague distance to which he and Jiro had been condemned. ‘Away!’

Musashi rose to his feet. The smith’s eyes were level with his chin.

‘You just watched?’ he said.

The smith took a step back. Musashi followed.

‘Let them torture a man to death, for no crime at all?’

The smith’s mouth flapped.

‘Just watched,’ said Musashi, and two years welled and he drew his hand back and slapped the man across his face.

The smith yelped. Musashi slapped him again, again. Each blow considered and meant, realizing something. An inked brush flitting across fine paper, forming the outline of a long-envisioned
image.

The samurai saw the violence, abandoned his guard of Jiro and came over shouting some command. Musashi saw the man in his peripheral, and he saw this man too for everything he was, his arms, his
legs, the authority he carried, the authority he assumed, the authority Musashi also had assumed and hidden from these past two years, and it was stark and clear now.

The samurai did not expect Musashi to move with the speed or ability he did, thought him some drunk and rowdy malingerer. He barely managed to move the spear before Musashi had placed both hands
on its shaft and wrenched it around. Musashi drove the samurai backwards and forced him up against the wall, pushed the spear shaft up against his throat.

‘Was it you who cut his ears away?’ Musashi hissed into his face. ‘Was it you who cut his back and bled him dry?’

The samurai struggled but Musashi was taller and stronger and did not allow the spear’s pressure to relent, forced it onwards, began to truly choke the man. Eyes bulged and spittle flew,
and Musashi began to strike at the man without releasing him, began to drive his knees into the samurai’s belly and his brow into the samurai’s nose again and again, and each blow was
born of two years of agony and indignity.

The samurai managed to wriggle out from beneath the throttling press of the spear, but Musashi continued to hit at him, and the man collapsed to the floor and Musashi kicked and stamped at him
until he was no more than a cowering ball. Seething, he stepped back, looked at what he had wrought. He looked around and found that walls still stood and that the sky was still blue.

Why stop here, when the outrage spiralled ever outwards?

‘Where’s the one who betrayed Jiro?’ Musashi demanded of the smith, who had watched him beat the samurai in cowed incomprehension and fear. ‘The one who claimed the
bounty?’

The smith stammered something, pointed towards town. Musashi commanded him to lead with a jerk of his chin. The smith staggered off. Before he followed, Musashi wrestled the samurai’s
swords from his belt, carried them both clutched in one hand and retained the spear in the other.

Through the streets they went. Musashi’s blood was running warm, his teeth clenched, eyes wide with a furious focus. Two years of nothing, when each day was formless and endless and asked
the question of why it was even endured, and here and now the opposite, carried as a pulse, as a facet, as a thing of pure purpose, a thing that could achieve something, anything.

The smith gestured to a storefront and fell to his knees in the dust like a supplicant pleading for mercy. Musashi threw the spear and the swords to the ground, parted the navy half-curtain that
hung across the entrance and strode in. It was a bowyer’s. Three long unstrung staves were hung upon the walls.

Nobutsura knelt upon tatami mats, varnishing a fourth. He turned and looked up into Musashi’s face.

‘All he wanted was a bowstring,’ said Musashi.

Nobutsura began to say something, but Musashi stepped forward and kicked over the table of his tools. He hauled down the rack of bow staves from the wall. Nobutsura scrambled backwards on his
arse and the heels of his hands. Musashi stamped on him, once, twice, then he picked up one of the fallen staves and began to strike at him. It was long and thin and flexible and lashed like a
whip.

‘Turned him over to that torture, for what?’ he spat. ‘To keep yourself in rice for a month?’

Nobutsura tried to rise at his feet, grabbing at a chest of drawers to pull himself up. His hands yanked them open, spilled their contents out onto floor, and there the golden crest that had
once sat above Hayato Nakata’s eyes tumbled out. It fell at Musashi’s feet, and he looked down at it for a moment, and all within him flared hotter, and he looked at Nobutsura through a
veil of perfect loathing.

The bowyer fled out onto the street, whimpering and pleading. Musashi followed, slashing at his arms and his arse with the bow. A crowd had gathered now and they drew back in shock at the sight.
Musashi threw the bow at Nobutsura, and then he bent down to retrieve the spear and the swords. The bowyer began to retreat, not running but rather caught in a great confusion, alternating moment
by moment between begging Musashi for mercy and crying out for the steward who could not hear him, he lying beaten and senseless against the blacksmith’s walls.

Musashi advanced after him steadily, watching him, observing each and every little thing he hated about the man, cataloguing them like piles of coals stacked before a furnace. He pursued him
until they came to the river that bisected the town.

The bowyer stopped on the banks.

‘Keep going,’ said Musashi.

Nobutsura turned and looked down at the river. ‘But—’

‘Get in the water.’

Nobutsura hesitated.

‘Get in the damned water!’ shouted Musashi, and he pointed with the tip of the spear.

It was not a death sentence. The river was not deep and the current mild. Nobutsura jumped from the banks and stood looking up at Musashi. He commanded him to wade out into the centre, and there
the bowyer stood with the waters up to his sternum. Musashi threw both scabbarded swords at him, and the weapons vanished beneath the surface, and still he was not sated.

The outrage spiralled ever outwards: ‘Where’s the bastard in the palanquin?’

He could have demanded anything and been granted it at that moment, so shocked were the witnesses at his rampage. He was led over the arch of a bridge that crossed the river, spear clutched in
both hands, and the anger did not subside. He did not want it to. This all some wild improvisation on its behalf. He did not know why he had sent the man into the waters. He did not know why he had
thrown the swords in after him. All he knew was that this had to be, that he could make this be, and he was carried and shielded, and how far could this take him? How far could he go?

Ahead were the white plaster walls of a rich estate. The gates were oak and iron, studded and imposing. How many the men that had stood supplicant here, believed themselves supplicant? Musashi
hauled on the handle but the gates would not open, locked or barred. He pounded on the gate, kicked at it, pried at it with the head of the spear. It held firm. Inside he heard roused voices.

The walls were not high. He abandoned attempting to open the gates and instead threw the spear over the tiled eaves and then hauled himself over afterwards. There was a neat garden of grass that
ringed a pond, and he saw that the minister and a woman half his age in a peach-coloured kimono had been sitting eating rice cakes beneath the shade of a wicker screen.

A romantic little hideaway that Musashi had breached, and now the old man stared aghast, his pointed grey beard wavering.

‘You, that ordered such torture on another,’ Musashi said to him.

The woven screen the pair of them had sheltered beneath was curved and beautiful, would no doubt stand up to anything shy of a gale, and Musashi saw this and snarled in his envy and his rage and
picked it up and hurled it against the wall. The minister was not a samurai, had no swords to go for, and so he just stared. Musashi kicked the platter of rice cakes at him.

‘You can eat, after seeing that? After causing that to be? Choke on them!’

The doors of the fine foreroom of the house were wide open to the fair weather. Musashi saw a styled copper kettle whorled with patterns, a plaster orb of the limbless saint Daruma and his
benevolent scowl, the paper walls painted with a triptych view of Kyoto. Neat and beautiful things, gorgeous things, and what law was it that said such things should stand when in their shadow lay
mutilation? He could not bear their existence suddenly, and he grabbed the minister and hauled him inside and sent him hurtling through the walls. Paper split, wood splintered, Kyoto was
annihilated.

He heard the sound of footfall, saw motion in the corner of his eye. The woman charged and threw herself at Musashi, dedicated as a samurai, perhaps even born samurai herself. She had a knife
clutched in both hands and its edge cut across his forearm as he raised it to block. He hissed in pain and grabbed at her wrists, wrestled the knife away from her, and then he pushed her against a
beam. She was much lighter than he was, and she bounced off the hard wood and fell to her knees and did not rise. He looked down at her. She looked up at him.

He remembered the sound of a woman’s laughter from the palanquin.

He spat at her, and then he went and picked the old man from out of the wreckage of the walls. The minister was moaning feebly, his body jarred. Musashi wrenched his arm behind his back and bent
him double. He was helpless, and Musashi looked to the woman.

‘Do you see?’ he snarled at her, and to himself as well. ‘Do you see?’

He forced the old man outside. In the garden, a servant was staring at the wreckage of the wicker screen in complete surprise. When Musashi emerged the young man turned and whimpered, dropped
the shovel he had been holding and fled.

One more tool. One more implement. Musashi picked the shovel up and entwined the old man’s arms around it, wrapped them around the wooden shaft. He cried out in pain, and Musashi forced
him onwards. He unbarred the gates and walked back towards the town.

‘Please,’ the old man began to plead. ‘Don’t kill me. Don’t kill me.’

They crossed over the bridge. The bowyer Nobutsura was hauling himself out of the river up onto the banks.

‘Get back in the river!’ shouted Musashi at him.

The bowyer gaped.

‘Get back in there right now or I swear to the heavens I will gut you!’

He obeyed.

The minister was moaning, ‘Where are you taking me? What are you doing?’

Musashi forced them through the town, until they were back at the moor once more. The beaten steward remained slumped against the wall of the smithy, face bloodied. A gaggle of concerned
apprentices were crouched nearby, fearful to approach him. The man could barely discern his own hands before his face, let alone rise to stop Musashi.

The minister moaned when he recognized where they were, and again when he saw Jiro’s corpse. Musashi released him, pushed him towards the body. The man stumbled, then rose as straight as
he could. He looked at what the torturer had wrought, then at Musashi.

‘Cut him down, take up the body,’ said Musashi.

The minister stood there. He was repulsed and disgusted, and nor did he want to bear the shame of acting as a lowly corpsehandler would. Yet he feared Musashi more, and so he untied the lashes
and with great difficulty bore the ruined remains of Jiro up across his shoulders.

‘Walk,’ said Musashi.

There was no destination. He simply made the minister march back and forth across the moor until he collapsed beneath Jiro’s weight, exhausted. Then he threw the shovel at the man’s
feet.

‘Dig,’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’ panted the minister.

‘Dig,’ said Musashi.

The man shuddered in a half-moan. ‘I’ll pay for the corpse’s cremation, if that is what you wish. A proper cremation, at the temple—’

‘Dig!’

The minister rose and thrust the head of the shovel into the earth. Musashi watched as he worked. He realized he was bleeding, examined the knife-slash across his forearm. It was not deep. He
demanded the minister’s jacket, and when the man relinquished it he tore it into silken bandages.