Child of Vengeance (15 page)

But whatever it was it was hidden within the disgust. The sight of that made Bennosuke’s blood run hot, was his entire and encompassing focus at that moment.

He nodded once, assenting.

“Good, boy,” said Munisai. “Come. We run.”

T
he rains of late summer were light that year, the rivers not even coming close to bursting their banks. The green world sucked the last of the waters up voraciously and then began to dry. The paddy fields were drained and the harvest begun, the peasants who hacked at the stalks with crooked back and heavy sickle grateful for the heat relenting from an oppressive humidity to simple, pleasing warmth.

Bennosuke was too. The boy had thought Tasumi a harsh master, but Munisai far outdid him. The samurai had enforced a ruthless regimen of fitness upon him. He introduced strange new ways of stretching, of using the body’s own weight against itself, and would constantly poke and twist the boy’s joints at awkward points.

Most of all, though, he made the boy run. Sometimes for two hours, sometimes for ten minutes carrying buckets of water, sometimes uphill, and sometimes in the surf of the bay. Wherever it was, however it was done, the man was obsessed. One time, floundering on the floor and retching from his guts, Bennosuke had angrily asked the point of such exercise.

“You cannot fight if you cannot breathe, boy,” said Munisai, looking down at him. “You cannot fight if your legs are dead. You must learn to go beyond the threshold of your muscles and your lungs. If you can fight for five minutes, you will win any fight. If you can fight for five minutes after fighting for five minutes, you will never fall on the battlefield.”

“I can fight for five minutes,” said Bennosuke.

“Prove it,” said Munisai simply.

Bennosuke tried to rise to his feet, but it was no challenge for Munisai to kick his legs out from under him. The boy attempted it twice more before he accepted defeat. Munisai looked down at him, eyes challenging, but all he could muster was a glare.

The man had been running alongside him the whole time.

W
eeks turned into months and autumn came, but it was not a time of remorse. People waited for the turning of the leaves in the same manner as they did for the cherry blossom of spring; to see a vista of reds and golds and purples was a calming affirmation of the natural progress of life. Men and women of all stations would travel distances simply to view famous panoramas of forests, poets and artists finding new inspiration within the auburn boughs while beneath them young lovers coupled among hidden beds of fallen leaves.

But such things, love and art and serenity, were alien to Bennosuke now. Asleep one night with the door of his room cast open to the world and an orange half-moon hanging huge and fat in the sky, the boy was awoken by the stamp of a foot. His eyes opened to find Munisai standing astride his chest, looking down at him.

“Defend yourself,” he said, grinning so wide that Bennosuke could see the moonlight upon his teeth.

The boy twisted, tried to leap to his feet, but it was hopeless. In an instant Munisai pushed him down with his one hand and then forced a knee down upon his throat. Bennosuke began to choke, flailing his legs feebly in an attempt to wriggle free.

“I did not mask my footfalls, fool, and yet I snuck up on you,” hissed Munisai. “How can you protect your lord from assassins if you sleep like the dead?”

Bennosuke gurgled, his fingers grasping at the man’s leg trying to steal a breath, but the samurai did not relent. He lowered his head closer to the boy’s, watching the agony and panic written upon it.

“Just a babe in a cradle,” Munisai said, “a lazy child with a head full of stone and no awareness of the world around you.”

The samurai waited until the boy’s eyes began rolling up into his skull and his tongue was protruding from his mouth before he released the pressure. Though he was free Bennosuke did not try to rise. All he could do was roll upon the floor, sputtering and clutching at his throat while Munisai watched him. After a few moments the man gave a disappointed sigh and left the boy alone with the moon once more.

Bennosuke did not sleep in Munisai’s estate again. He sought a bed inside and out where he could not be found, suspicious of every sound.

A
longsword in his hand finally, Bennosuke felt a rush come into him. The weapon was only wood, but it was something to strike and to beat with. It was the most power he had been afforded in some time.

Munisai stood before him in the dojo hall. He had shown the boy new patterns, and now he was inviting the boy to spar and demonstrate that he understood them. The samurai’s arm was still in a sling, a mock shortsword in his good hand. He made no move, waiting for the boy to attack, and though he felt exhilarated Bennosuke advanced cautiously—he could not allow himself to expose any flaw.

They traded feint and riposte, dancing around each other until eventually Munisai seemed to stagger and overextend himself, his sword high and away from his body and the length of him left vulnerable.

Bennosuke’s first instinct was to go for the opening, to drive the hard wood home on soft flesh, but then something stronger and wiser in him sensed a trap and instead of lunging he skittered backward. Munisai all but spat in rage, breath hissing through his teeth.

“No!” the man snapped. “Why do you hesitate?”

“You’d have struck me,” said Bennosuke.

“So? You had a chance to take my throat.”

“But I’d be dead, if this were real.”

“You do not know that—perhaps I would have missed. All you can be certain of is yourself. Could you have struck me there, a clean kill?”

“Perhaps,” said Bennosuke.

“I left a gap in my defense wider than an ocean—of course you could have,” said Munisai, anger turning to disgust. “But you shied away from achieving your objective—your sole purpose in a fight, your sole purpose of
being
as a samurai—afraid of getting hurt like some queer Kyoto dancer.”

Bennosuke said nothing, knowing that argument was futile. He looked away sullenly, and at that defiance Munisai rapped him around the head with the sword hard enough that the boy staggered backward. The samurai made a dismissive gesture with his hand, tossed the weapon to the floor, and walked away.

The pain of the blow stole Bennosuke’s restraint from him, and he could not stop himself from picking the man’s sword from where it had fallen to accompany his own. He snarled in fury and began to charge at Munisai’s back, longsword in his right hand and the short in his left, wanting to swing both without thought and simply annihilate.

At the clattering of his feet, Munisai turned and half drew his real shortsword from the scabbard. The sight of the metal blade checked Bennosuke and stopped the charge before it truly began. After a few moments of stillness, Munisai gave a curt nod.

“Good,” he said. “Not quite entirely the wild boar, blindly charging. A sword in either hand? No strength. No precision. I’d have flayed you alive. There was no chance for you to prevail, and so in this instance stopping yourself was the right decision.”

It was not, however, a compliment. Dark amusement crept across his face before he continued. “But I have to wonder if you heeded the lesson, or was it simply cowardice?”

He let his sword slide back into the scabbard with a clack, and then stalked out of the dojo still grinning mirthlessly to himself. Bennosuke watched him go, and when he was alone he dropped into a squat and ground his teeth together and groaned a low and bestial sound of rage and shame and frustration.

It was not the first time he had done so. The blows hurt and the
belittlement cut into his pride, but what really infuriated him was that he could not tell whom this terrible anger was directed at.

Was it at Munisai, for what he had done? It should have been, but the truth was that the longer he was around the man, the more he found himself coming to admire him. Crippled though he was, the samurai had a seemingly casual degree of excellence at everything he turned his hand to. The boy found himself wanting to learn from him, and even to earn the man’s praise as much as he thought he wanted one day to confront him.

Perhaps the anger was at himself for feeling that. This was the killer of both his parents, a ghoulish impostor of a father. What kind of a person would want to impress such a man? Always too the stinging shame that through all the years he had not been aware enough to realize that truth himself. A blind, idiot child he had been, and still was.

But then, was he blind, or blinded? Dorinbo and Tasumi had lied to him for so long, kept him naive. Was it them he hated? They were not even his family, not now. Or maybe it was the peasants for their disgust and their coddling of him through fear of his father alone, or perhaps the sun for shining and the grass for growing? The anger was so big, and he could not explain it, could not understand it, and that only maddened him further.

He could not give in to it. He thought himself a samurai, and samurai were governed by patience and reason and selflessness. The boy forced deep breaths into his lungs, until eventually he could make himself rise and, with a still face, set the wooden swords back upon the racks that lined the walls of the hall.

O
ne afternoon Bennosuke was sitting upon the dojo steps with the skirts of his kimono hiked up. He had run all morning, and now Dorinbo was before him kneading the bared flesh of the boy’s knee, prodding and probing and trying to reduce the swelling of the joint with salves and balms as he had done on a dozen different afternoons before.

“You shouldn’t push yourself so hard,” the monk tutted, thumb digging in to try to force smooth motion from the joint.

“I have to,” said Bennosuke. “He wants me to surrender.”

“And what would be so wrong about that?”

“Samurai don’t surrender.”

“You’re neglecting your studies—and the binding at the temple,” said the monk. “Did you forget what I asked of you?”