Child of Vengeance (20 page)

M
unisai watched Bennosuke go, determination in the boy’s eyes. He smiled to himself. How easy the young were to fool—“secret orders” indeed. He had had no word from Lord Shinmen. These “orders” were given by himself to himself and they were but one word: heal.

His enfeeblement had dragged on too long; he needed to be strong again. He reasoned that training Bennosuke every day, with the exertions tearing constantly at the wound, must have been hindering any progress, and his hope was that given a few weeks to rest and tend to it gently in solitude, the flesh might start to mend.

The alternative, that perhaps it was mangled beyond repair already …

The other worry—that of the Nakata—was also taken care of by sending Bennosuke to Aramaki. Once he joined Captain Tomodzuna,
the samurai’s cadre of men would become a shield for the boy. An attack on one of them would be an attack on all of them, and though the captain kept his men well drilled and Munisai did not doubt their courage or ability to physically protect the boy, the real strength of their shelter was that they were Shinmen’s men in Shinmen’s town.

Hayato would not be able to get at Bennosuke without starting a bloodbath with allies of his father, and that was a political affront the brat would not be afforded. Going for Munisai as an individual as he had done was an entirely different thing, for it was expected that one who held the title of Nation’s Finest would receive challenges from time to time—why not Arima, on behalf of his master?

Neither would he be able to seek Bennosuke out as he had done with Munisai, for the notion of a lord calling a thirteen-year-old without rank or prestige to duel was so absurd it would invite ridicule. Though Bennosuke had spat in his face and that might draw some long enmity, that was a lingering trouble for the future. This was now, and for now the boy was safe under Tomodzuna.

In any case, Munisai expected that the young lord was back at his father’s side safe in his court, refusing to admit to anyone what had happened and how badly he had lost his gamble. Reputation was everything to a vain coward like Hayato, he well knew.

Everything to men who carry swords
, the sneering ache of his wound reminded him. Munisai set his face and concentrated on squeezing his fist tight enough that he might hold a blade, and he found that he could not feel his fingertips upon his palm.

T
he owning of the sword put Bennosuke into another daze; trying its weight and searching for the balance of it, obsessing over its every inch like a blind man reading lines upon a face. He allowed himself the conceit of swaggering through the village with it at his side several times, but was disappointed when the reactions of the peasants were much the same—to them he was still one who controlled their life and death at a whim, only now he had a slightly longer reach.

Bennosuke slept, and then he found himself standing on the landward ridge of the village the next morning, a traveling pack strapped across his back and the swords at his side. The sun was still rising, the sky peach and yellow, and the warmth felt strange upon his newly exposed scalp. For the first time he wore his hair in the adult style, his crown shaved and the remaining hair oiled, bound, and folded upward to lie atop his head in a thin dark line.

Tasumi, Dorinbo, and Munisai were there with him. Though they had stopped ostensibly to have a final look across Miyamoto, instead he found himself looking at them.

Here were the three men who had shaped his life: the samurai, who had put muscle to bone, sword to hand. The monk, who had taught him of goodness and the wonder of the world. The father, who … The father.

Munisai became aware of the boy’s gaze, turned, and spoke flatly: “You shouldn’t linger.”

None of them really knew how best to begin, and so Tasumi took the initiative as well as he could, awkwardly stepping forward and bowing to Bennosuke while he murmured platitudes of health and good fortune. They were vague and uncertain, and after Bennosuke returned them equally tentatively there was an uncomfortable pause between them, until the samurai suddenly exclaimed, “Ah, I should give you a gift, shouldn’t I?”

He patted around himself, flustered, searching for something appropriate, and soon he reached up one of his billowing sleeves. He emerged eventually with a small throwing dagger held in a sheath that could be bound to the arm.

“Here, you can never have too many,” he said, handing it to Bennosuke. “Do us proud, eh?”

“I’m your Musashi, remember?” said Bennosuke, and his uncle smiled. The dour samurai clapped the boy on the shoulder once, bowed, and then stepped back.

Dorinbo came next. His face was hard and his eyes grave. They bowed to each other, and then Bennosuke handed the monk a folded sheet of paper.

“It’s a prayer, Uncle. Please don’t read it. Burn it with the others,”
said the boy. Dorinbo nodded. He bowed and then made to step back without saying anything, but he stopped himself.

“What you told me you wanted to be … perhaps you can. All you can do is try,” he said. “And remember … do not follow a creed or others blindly. You have a choice in everything.”

“I understand, Uncle. Thank you,” said Bennosuke, and though he smiled Dorinbo remained tense.

“Remember that the only choice you have is to do as Captain Tomodzuna bids,” Munisai said as Bennosuke turned to him, and there seemed to be rare mirth in his eyes. They flickered toward Dorinbo, but the monk acted as though no one had spoken. The amusement withered and for a moment the boy became aware of a coldness between the two men, but he ignored it. He bowed to Munisai and said:

“I shall serve him faithfully, Lord.”

“I’ve given you everything you need already,” said Munisai, and nodded at the sword at the boy’s side. “Keep your head down in labor, keep it up if others question your honor—try to be samurai, Bennosuke.”

“I will, Lord,” said Bennosuke, who bowed once more and then said in a low voice, “I hope that your mission does not hinder you too long, also.”

“It shall be accomplished,” said Munisai, face entirely straight. “But it is no concern of yours any longer. Nothing here is. Focus on what is ahead of you, boy.”

“I understand and obey, Lord,” said Bennosuke, and then they looked each other in the eye. For the first time, Bennosuke realized he was taller than Munisai.

After a moment the samurai jerked his chin toward the path leading away from Miyamoto, and the country beyond it. Bennosuke turned and took a few hesitant steps toward it. It was not the first time he had left the village, but it would be the last time that he would call it home. The boy looked back.

“Too scared?” asked Munisai, before anyone else could speak.

Bennosuke clenched his jaw. He bowed low one final time and forced himself to walk.

“Good,” said Munisai at the boy’s back, and turned back toward the village. Tasumi soon followed.

Before Miyamoto vanished entirely from his sight, Bennosuke stopped one last time. He turned for a final look, unsure of when he would see the village again—if he would see it again—and he found that Dorinbo was still watching him, small as he was in the distance. The boy waved a hand to the monk, who clasped his hands together into the prayer position and raised them high to the sun in farewell.

Bennosuke swallowed and carried on walking. Perhaps Amaterasu would be watching over him.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The first pang of true loneliness hit Bennosuke that night. He had used some of the modest amount of coin Munisai had given him to pay for a bed in a small country inn. Other men slept alongside him, snoring contentedly, but Bennosuke felt his guts twist and thought he might vomit.

He had thought himself alone in the village, but the fact was he had simply been ignored. Dorinbo and Tasumi had been there each day for him. That night he had eaten dinner in a crowded room and he had never felt more isolated. Everyone seemed to belong to a group but him, and he was certain people were glancing at him, whispering about this strange, rash-marked supposed samurai.

It did not help that he did not feel like himself. It was more than just the new styling of his hair; for the first time he was dressed like a man. In addition to the sword, Munisai had given him some of his clothes as well, so that now instead of a practical, rough dark kimono, frayed around the edges, he wore garments of fine silk—the underclothes beige and patterned subtly with interlocking zigzags, the overjacket that left his arms free and hung down beneath his waist a deep dragonfly green. Gone from his feet were the comfortable straw sandals of youth, and in their place were square wooden ones that raised his soles a finger’s length above the earth to keep his stockings free of any dirt and keep his posture dignified.

He was out of place in body and mind, and it would get worse, he knew. These were simple strangers, most of them traveling merchants or artisans, barely a sword among them. When he got to Captain Tomodzuna and his barracks, he could scarcely imagine how other samurai who knew his father would treat him.

This, he realized, was the price of the longsword. He had thought earning the weapon would be liberating, but instead it was exactly the opposite. Freedom had been afforded to him as a child—the freedom to vanish when he felt shy and to work as hard or as little as he liked. His only masters had been himself and his family until now, but now the sword anchored him to the world and bound him to serve.

Munisai served Shinmen—more than that, trusted him. This was being a man, and this he would have to endure. He had entered the realm of death when he had killed Arima, and now he would have to adjust himself to resigning any individual claim to his body. His soul was his own, and with his body Shinmen or Tomodzuna or whoever above him could do as they pleased, command what they liked of it. Bennosuke would prove himself samurai, and worthy of Munisai’s legacy.

His father’s legacy, he meant. He would have to get used to saying that. The summer had passed so quickly, and his world of this autumn was not the same as the one of spring. Everything still felt strange, and he hoped that time away from the man would allow him to gather his thoughts and for a new mind-set to calcify.

The legacy of his actual father bore down on him also. Every samurai could trace his bloodline back through a dozen generations; surely that meant that ancestry mattered. Bennosuke knew he could fight, but so could a mad dog. Would the peasant blood in him reveal some innate cowardliness or ignobility?

A shiver passed through him. It felt as though cold and heavy shackles were around his arms and legs and neck, and these he knew were the ones of adulthood. In response to this he, the supposed man, pulled the blanket over himself like a child hiding from imagined monsters, and waited for morning.

THE TOWN OF
Aramaki was the closest settlement of any size to Miyamoto, and though it paled in scope to a city proper, it had grown prosperous enough to banish any trace of the rural. Its great fortune was that it was sited upon the major road that led from the western tip of the isle of Honshu to Kyoto, golden Kyoto, and so the wealth of a quarter of a nation’s worth of merchants and traders passed through it.

So audacious had this made the town that they had paved the streets in stone, wide and flat to ease the use of carts—actual carts with great wheels and pulled by oxen or horse, not litters hoisted aloft on the shoulders of men, as was the norm—and these teams of man and beast lined up at clogged intersections.

Throngs of people flowed around and between them, a thousand different missions for the day; there an apprentice seeking raw material for his master, there a messenger skittering on his heels bearing a sealed lacquer tube as fast as he could, there a courtesan worrying that the waxpaper parasol above her brow was held at the perfect alluring and feminine angle. To see and be among them all was bewildering for Bennosuke.

He had been to the town a few times before, but he had been young and had simply sat on Tasumi’s horse while the samurai had gone about his business. The place had seemed a lot less smothering sitting above the thrust and press of the crowd, and now he struggled to tell the difference between one street and the next. To him it seemed there was only one building after another; another inn, another blacksmith, another merchant loudly hawking his goods to all passing by.