Child of Vengeance (12 page)

Bennosuke had been excited at first to hear the men speaking
unaware of him, but he had grown ever colder the more he had heard. Now he was caught. No thoughts of fleeing entered his head, however, no urge to yelp and scatter; there was a silent, dread inevitability to it. Of course Munisai had known he was there—he had been some implacable phantom that had haunted the boy’s life from a distance for years, and now here he was in the flesh to crush him utterly.

Wordlessly he slid open the door and entered the room.

Munisai sat, his arm in the sling and his face grim and triumphant. Dorinbo gaped, aghast at the boy’s sudden appearance. The silence held for long moments.

“Is what you said true?” said the boy. It was all he could think to say.

“Yes,” said Munisai.

“You killed my mother?”

“Yes.”

“And you are not my father?”

“I very much doubt it,” said Munisai. “Look at you.”

Bennosuke looked to Dorinbo, as though the monk might tell him that Munisai was out of his mind. But his uncle could offer nothing; he was ashamed and angry and shocked and his wits had escaped him. The boy turned back to the samurai.

“And what happens now?” said Munisai. His eyes were narrow, twinkling in the candlelight. “We know how this should end. Are you samurai, boy? Like your mother? Because her killer sits before you, and you have your little dirk at your side. Do you have the courage to do what’s right? Attack me.”

Bennosuke’s hand went to the shortsword at his waist instinctively. The room seemed to grow smaller, the swelling of his throat larger. But numb disbelief began to fade, replaced with the first inklings of hatred and anger.

Munisai was the reason why he had been cursed to solitude, exiled, and humiliated for all these years, not some affliction of the skin. The boy began to
realize
that—he had heard it, but now he
understood
it—and now the man sat here with loathing on his face as though he were not guilty. His knuckles tightened around the grip of his sword, and at that Munisai grinned the grin of a snake.

“No,” said Dorinbo, gaining some semblance of sense back—but
only some, for he stammered the first words that passed through his head. “You mu-mustn’t. This is holy ground.”

“You’re right,” said Munisai, and suddenly he was up with his swords in his belt before Dorinbo could lay a hand on him. “Come on, boy.”

The samurai’s good hand clasped Bennosuke around the throat and pushed him out of the hovel. He led the boy at arm’s length out into the night and down the slope toward the gate that marked the boundary between Amaterasu’s realm and the mortal world, where hatred and human fallacy were permitted and ever present.

Dorinbo came with them, his black robe flapping as he tried to pull Munisai’s arm away, yelling at his brother to stop. The samurai ignored him, stronger than either of them, and where he chose to go the monk and the boy were condemned to go too. Bennosuke staggered and backpedaled, eyes never leaving those of Munisai, legs never thinking to resist.

“Is your heart weak, mongrel?” snarled the samurai. “Does it falter with the gutterblood of your peasant father? The man I slaughtered like the animal he was? Draw your sword and attack.”

Bennosuke longed to. He wanted to take the blade and swing wildly at the samurai, every slash cathartic and honest, years of misery and anger welling up in him. There was a sea of blind emotion before him, and to cast himself into it was so tempting, to become no more than vengeance and primal bloodlust. But something held him back.

They passed underneath the gates, and now on earthly ground Munisai pushed the boy away from him, releasing his throat. The samurai stood with his good arm wide and away from his swords and his chest pushed forward presenting his heart to the boy, his useless left hand almost a five-fingered target where the sling clasped it tight to his breast.

“Attack me!” said Munisai.

“Munisai, stop this madness. Bennosuke—go home now,” said Dorinbo, trying to put himself between them.

“Strike me! Cut me!” continued Munisai, ignoring his brother. “Kill me!”

Behind Dorinbo, Munisai’s hand grew in size. Bennosuke could
all but see it pulsing with the beat of the heart. It was there and open. But he could not attack it. He knew he should, that it was proper to, but … His mind was working now, beneath the surface of outrage.

What he saw was the two swords at the man’s waist, so very close to his good, right hand.

Bennosuke knew little of pride himself, but he had read enough stories to know how it drove some men. Munisai’s armor, that magnificent suit he had cleaned all these years, was the armor of such a man. What would a peasant’s bastard, a symbol of his cuckolding written in flesh, mean to such a man? He thought of how easily Munisai had bested him in the dojo, and then it became clear:

Munisai was goading him into attacking so that he had an excuse to kill him, to rid himself of the shame.

“Do you not want to avenge your mother?” said Munisai. “Kill me!”

There was the spur, and Bennosuke felt his body tense. The shortsword seemed to sing from his side. His mother, whom he had never had a chance to say good-bye to, whose very death had been hidden from him. He remembered the few memories he had of her, the echoes of her voice as she hummed songs to him, or how she laughed and smiled at him just for his simple virtue of being.

“Attack me!” barked Munisai, and it would be right and proper to do so. “Strike me! Cut me! Kill me!”

But he hesitated. Still those two long, slender weapons right there. The boy imagined the edge of the sword flashing toward him, imagined the cut that would follow as a cold line drawn across him from which his life would seep, and he quailed. He knew that he was afraid to die, and that was not the way of samurai. Shame coursed through him. His head dropped.

“Kill me!” said Munisai a final desperate time as the boy broke from his eyes, his voice hollowing. “Kill me!”

“Enough, Munisai,” said Dorinbo.

The monk’s voice had hardened from pleading into somber command. But it was unnecessary. Whatever terrible thing might have come to be, the moment for it had passed when Bennosuke had lowered his gaze. There would be no bloodshed today, and they all sensed
it. The monk straightened and looked from one to the other. Bennosuke kept his eyes to the floor. Munisai let his arm drop, his body wilted.

“What is wrong with you?” said Munisai to Bennosuke.

“There is nothing wrong with him,” said Dorinbo. “He has a chance to be something higher.”

Munisai laughed in disgust. But something was different now, something in his eyes and his voice had changed; a wall had been put back up.

“This is not what you came back for, Munisai,” said Dorinbo levelly. “Do not punish the boy for our mistakes.”

Munisai glared at his brother, seeking a new challenge, but the monk held his eyes with a coldness. It surprised Bennosuke to see such harshness in his uncle, but even more so to see Munisai relent to it.

“Very well,” Munisai could only manage. “Very well.”

He looked Dorinbo in the eye one last time and then stalked off into the night, right hand clenched around his swords and his wounded left strapped tightly to his body. The darkness swallowed him, and he was gone.

Then it was just the boy and the monk. They stood for a long time.

“He was right,” said Bennosuke. “I should have killed him.”

“It was a lure, Bennosuke. He would have killed you,” said Dorinbo. “He was goading you. His honor—”

“I know!” snapped Bennosuke. “I know—but I shouldn’t care about that! I should have tried! That’s what’s right! That’s what a samurai would do!”

“But you’d be dead.”

“It doesn’t matter—what kind of a person couldn’t attack the man who killed his mother? What’s wrong with me?” said the boy, and at that moment he truly loathed himself. Tears of shame pricked at his eyes.

“Do you even know your mother?” asked the monk after a moment. “What is she to you? What do you remember?”

“I …” said the boy, and he thought back. Images, flashes of voices and smells, a vague sense of love.

“Now,” continued Dorinbo, “knowing what you learned about her tonight, about what she did—does that sound like the same woman to you?”

It did not. He was her instrument of revenge. A tool, not a son. Had she ever loved him, or loved what he would eventually do to Munisai? He did not know, and he would never know. The boy reeled.

“So tell me, why is dying for someone you never truly knew right?” said Dorinbo, his voice soft and kind as he saw the realization creep across the boy’s face. “There is nothing wrong with a person who chooses to avoid murder—you did the right thing.”

“But a samurai—” said Bennosuke, stubborn beyond reason.

“Perhaps you are something else,” said Dorinbo.

“But I should be samurai,” said Bennosuke.

Dorinbo looked at his nephew, wanting to remind the boy of his offer of an apprenticeship. But what he saw was an adult’s pain on a face still more child than man, and he could not bring himself to place another burden there.

The night was cold and long and always would be, and so with no more words he placed a hand upon Bennosuke’s shoulder and led him up to his hovel, to holy ground, where at least they could wait for morning together.

M
unisai stalked home still shuddering with rage. He breathed through his nose and tried to calm himself, but it would not come. Around him the still paddy fields reflected the stars like sheets of obsidian, and the urge was to take his sword from its scabbard and slash at them. Cut the stars and cut the sky and cut the universe, just because he could.

But he didn’t.

When he reached his estate he flung the door open and then slammed it shut so hard that the twisting of his body tugged on his wound and made him cry out. As his body throbbed with pain, his numb fingers fumbled with a lantern, and then by that dim and frail light he began to prowl the silent halls restlessly.

Soon enough, without even thinking about it, he came to stand before the armor once more.

It taunted him; the extravagance of it reminded him of how obscene a man he had once been, and of course that name that he had damned always there, stitched in white. It was too much to bear. He kicked it, and sent the suit clattering across the floor. He watched as the helmet rolled around and around until it finally came to rest, and in the silence afterward he let a single, low curse escape his lips.

Why would the boy not kill him?

Maybe if he had told the fullness of the story, Bennosuke might have. Maybe if he had told of the crucial moment. But that moment … That, Munisai knew he could never admit before another. Here, though, here in the solitude of the house where it all happened—here, he could remember.

T
here was once a girl who was beautiful, and more than that had a beautiful heart. Her name was Yoshiko
.

It meant child of glee, child of joy, and this was the perfect name for her, for every man she crossed paths with fell in love with her. It was said that she had a grace that she must have inherited from a past life, and from the very moment she started to grow into her womanhood she was fawned over. Many an evening she spent dining with men of wealth and renown, hearing boastful stories of bravery, intelligence, wit, and war, and so generous was she that she pretended to believe them
.

The offers of marriage duly came, and yet so little differentiated them—the size of estates, the number of maids she would have, the titles her children would inherit … Her father listened to each carefully, biding his time for the most prudent choice, but to her it meant nothing
.

Sixteen and still she wore the long-sleeved, gaily patterned kimono of the maiden. She lived in a dream and she dreamed of love, and because the gods and spirits were mostly men and Yoshiko was Yoshiko, they allowed her to find it
.

Munisai Hirata was introduced to her first at an afternoon of poetry. Two dozen of them, samurai men and women all, sat by a stream on soft grass, with the women beneath paper parasols and the men squinting in the light. A servant would release a floating cup of sake from upstream, and by the time it reached them one by one they had to compose a few lines on a given theme—the flight of birds or the warmness of the wind, say
.