Child of Vengeance (24 page)

I
n the darkest hours of the night Lord Shinmen slept soundly, a belly full of alcohol. Four samurai stood guard in the gardens outside, while Munisai prowled the black hallways of his house. An assassin would have to be prescient to think of attacking Shinmen here, but protocol demanded a watch, and so it was done.

The shadows being empty, inevitably he came once again to where his old suit of armor hung. Shinmen had laughed in disbelief when he had seen it.

“You honestly wore this once?” he had said.

“Munisai Hirata did, my lord,” Munisai replied.

“Ah; sincerest apologies, my dearest name-sworn,” said the lord in slurred, mock seriousness.

He was acting like he had previously, before the rot of Nakata had set in. He was open, a warmth in his eyes that was rare in the nobility. Munisai had never met another lord prepared to joke as Shinmen did, nor another who seemingly trusted as he did. Lords were supposed to have a healthy streak of fox’s blood in them, a thousand different faces for a thousand different allies and a thousand different plans for a thousand different sacrifices.

But Shinmen—Shinmen made you believe.

His mind wandered back to his last night as Munisai Hirata, the eve of the final of the Grand Tournament. He had been in a cheap tavern, drinking bad sake by the bottle, not caring that tomorrow he had to fight one of the finest swordsmen in the country. That was a dawn away, and that was more than he needed. But then men in fine blue had come for him.

It had been a little over three years since he had killed Yoshiko and left Miyamoto; his kimono was a shade of grime, his hair and beard wild. Long, matted strands that had long grown out of the samurai style fell from his head, while his beard straggled off his chin in curly wisps. He had not bathed in weeks, and he could see disgust at the stench written across the faces of the men as they bundled him out into the street.

Good. Let the miserable pricks suffer
.

The rage and hurt that had been so fierce in the weeks and months immediately after killing Yoshiko had by then settled into a dull, seething resentment of everything. He eyed everyone suspiciously, kept his jaw permanently clenched and his sword loose in its scabbard. He just wanted to kill and it took restraint not to fight the blue men, but he had no wish to spend the next day getting tortured to death for breaching the peace.

The streets of Osaka were always busy, but now they were packed because of the tournament. The samurai had to push their way through the crowd, and they were not helped as some stopped and stared at Munisai, whispering to one another. He had become infamous; it was a wooden-sword tournament, a test of skill and not a
display of gore, and the competing samurai were expected to show some level of restraint. Munisai—a masterless, bedraggled warrior in the midst of immaculate soldiers—had managed to crack two ribs, fracture an arm, and finally strike a man so hard on the side of his skull that his eye had filled with blood and then gone blind.

Though many protested none could stop him, and he learned the level of his notoriety from the morbid eyes of the onlookers. The angry part of him took a certain antagonistic pride, but the hidden, honest part hurt. It reminded him of his youth, when he had walked proudly while men looked at him with admiration and women with lust.

There was no ease to be found in his guards either; Munisai recognized the shade of blue his escorts wore. His family, the Hirata, had been sworn to the clan Shinmen for generations, and he had shirked that duty when he had fled to wander the wilderness. The lord was not famed for forgiveness.

The samurai led him to the castle at the heart of the city; it was newly built, its walls still pristine white and unmarked by battle. It was labyrinthine and well designed, a series of concentric battlements layered upon a man-made hill, and their little group passed through many bottleneck checkpoints until they reached the noble guest quarters. There they stopped outside the doors of a residence—not the biggest and yet not the smallest—where more samurai in blue stood guard.

An old samurai, his hair cloud white, awaited. The richness of his kimono told Munisai that he was important. He looked at Munisai disdainfully, eyes running up and down him until they met Munisai’s challenging glare.

“I want you to know that if you make one move toward our lord, you’ll be killed,” the man said curtly. “I don’t care how good you are, I’ve enough men to drown you in bodies if need be.”

“While you would be, I should imagine, running very quickly in the other direction,” growled Munisai, and the samurai’s face tightened in disgust.

“You will keep a civil tongue in your head, and I am warning you if you so much as look at my Lord Shinmen in the wrong way …” the man said.

“I won’t attack your lord if he doesn’t attack me first. Let’s get this done with,” said Munisai.

He surrendered his longsword, but custom permitted him to keep the short one at his side. The elder samurai looked at that warily as he made a coded knock upon the door, waited for the several locks to be undone, and then gestured for Munisai to follow him in.

It was a small, plain hall, a cursory potted tree in one corner and the walls bare wood, but there were at least twenty samurai crammed into it. They sat in tight rank, glaring at Munisai as he entered. The lord upon the dais took his attention, for it was not the Shinmen he was expecting.

The old lord had been—well—old, and so he must have died while Munisai had been gone. This new, younger one watched Munisai with interest as he made his way through the narrow space and sat himself down in the center of the room. The gathered samurai made a pantomime of disgust at Munisai’s appearance, but Lord Shinmen’s face was inquisitive, and he rubbed his chin as he looked Munisai over.

“They say after decades of practice some great masters of ki can summon their energies from within and strike a man a deathblow using only their will before he has even had a chance to draw his sword. But you, Munisai Hirata,” said the lord, in a tone so grave it was practically subterranean, “you, I suspect, strike a deathblow to the nose before the man has even had a chance to see you.”

“What do you want?” asked Munisai gruffly, angered by the playful twinkle that had jumped into Shinmen’s eyes.

“Show respect!” snapped the white-haired samurai, who had settled cross-legged on Lord Shinmen’s right. He slapped his hand down on the floor for emphasis, and it echoed around the room.

“I want to know why you have shirked your duty to me, Hirata,” said the lord smoothly, holding Munisai’s gaze. “I want to know why the first I hear of you in years is when you materialize at this tournament. You are sworn to me, are you not?”

“I am no man’s vassal,” said Munisai.

“But Miyamoto falls within my lands, does it not?”

“I am no man’s vassal,” repeated Munisai, flatly. His tone seemed to goad Shinmen into probing further.

“Your family has been sworn to govern Miyamoto village for decades now, a village within my domain, and so it holds that you by your very blood serve the Shinmen clan, does it not?” the lord asked. Munisai glared at the floor, unsettled and irritated.

“That may have been true once. But now things are different. The Hirata serve no one any longer. I am the last of them, and if this is all you had to say, I am going to go now,” he said slowly and definitely, and made to rise.

“You will leave when you are dismissed!” snapped the man by Shinmen’s side, and once more he struck the floor.

“Have you any idea how annoying that is?” growled Munisai, lips still loosened by alcohol and unable to keep it from slipping out. There was a threat in his voice, and so the samurai behind him leapt to their feet and made to draw their swords with cries of outrage. Munisai had barely gotten off the floor—he had grossly misjudged how drunk he was and found his legs sluggish and unsteady—when Lord Shinmen’s voice rose above the others.

“Hold!” he barked. “All of you, hold!”

The samurai obeyed, barely. Munisai faced them warily. He saw just how badly outnumbered he was, and his mind raced for any kind of solution, any form of escape.

“Lord Shinmen, why order us to hold? Let us put an end to this farce,” said the elder samurai. “The other lords will thank us. We’ll save them the embarrassment of this savage wretch even having a chance of winning the tournament.”

“That, or we could raise the wretch higher,” said Shinmen calmly.

“What do you mean?” asked Munisai, his back to the lord. His eyes were darting from samurai to samurai, trying to guess which one would strike first, which one had the strongest bloodlust in his eyes.

“Would you walk with me, Hirata? I promise there will be no tricks, no poison blade waiting for you,” said Shinmen.

“Lord!” hissed the commander, “I have endured your scheme thus far, but surely even you can see the folly of it now? How could you hope to reason with this animal?”

“Hold your tongue, and stay back,” said Shinmen with a dismissive gesture.

Munisai risked a quick glance backward. Shinmen merely nodded and beckoned a hand toward the paper screen door at the back of the room. It was a strange, bold move for a lord to invite anyone to be alone with him, let alone a potential enemy, and the curiosity this aroused in Munisai moved him to raise himself slowly out of his fighting crouch.

The gathered samurai watched him cautiously as he slowly took one reverse step after another into the room beyond the hall, refusing them the chance to strike him from behind. Shinmen slid the door closed, and then they were gone from his sight. The lord nodded to an even smaller door leading outside, and together they walked.

They passed from the orange of lanterns into the blue of the night, up onto the battlements of the castle that overlooked the city, lights glimmering before them and the murmur of a hundred thousand voices on the breeze. Shinmen leaned his elbows upon the parapet and took it all in. Guardedly, Munisai moved to stand beside him. The air was cool and refreshing, and he found his mind began to function on more than base, hostile thoughts. He waited in silence for Shinmen to speak.

“I apologize for my commander,” said Shinmen after a moment, eyes not leaving the nightscape. “He is diligent, but there is diligence and then there is zealousness, I suppose. But it doesn’t matter: he doesn’t trust me. He thinks me ‘unpredictable.’ So he’ll be gone soon. It’s being seen to. We must stand as one in this clan, or we shall not stand at all.

“In any case, I will soon be in need of another in his role,” he said, and he turned to look at Munisai then, eyes giving a wordless proposal. Munisai looked away, more out of shock than anything.

“I am not a commander,” he said.

“Your father was,” said Shinmen, returning his gaze to Osaka. His voice became warm and wistful with memory. “Shogen Hirata. Now
there
was a samurai. Did you know he was the only man my father permitted to touch me when I was growing up? He certainly loved to prove the point. He knocked two of my milk teeth out once; cracked me across the face with a spear butt because I’d been in the paddocks startling the horses. He scared me, but I grew to respect him. I’d see the way he
protected my father, or the way he’d organize things, and I’d just … 
know
that things were safe, that they were under control. Do you understand? It’s hard to explain.

“I was there the day he died. I wasn’t sad, but I wasn’t happy … I don’t know if melancholy is the right word. I … It was a good death. If I had a choice I would hope to die like it one day, not lingering and sick and just waiting in bed for my soul to flutter out like my father did. No, your father … Do you know how he died?”

“Why are you telling me this?” said Munisai uncomfortably. Of course he had heard the story, but like most of his past life he had tried to numb its memory and consign it to oblivion. Yet he said nothing as Shinmen carried on speaking.

“It was a battlefield like any other, I suppose. It wasn’t my first battle, but it must have been early, because I remember my face was burning with spots. I was excited, though. I had a new horse, a man’s horse, and I wanted to see how fast it could run. Of course, then the killing began and I started feeling sick and scared. Bodies everywhere, men screaming, the stink of blood and fear, you know … It’s funny how we get used to it, isn’t it? How we lose that common sense.

“Anyway, your father sees me going green, and he rides over and slaps me around the head, and tells me to pull myself together. Yelling at me about composure of a lord in public, to pull my armor tighter, not to jerk the reins of my horse so hard … It’s all good advice, but it’s going in one ear and out the other, and then the arrows came.

“Archers on the battlefield loose their arrows high and arcing into one great cloud, and people say you can hear them whipping and cracking through the air as they come, but that’s not true. You catch a glimpse of movement in the sky, and your first instinct is that it’s just a flock of birds. But then your eye can’t ignore this flock of birds that is getting larger and larger, and then you realize it’s heading right for you. And then they drop down among you
—into
you.

“Your father leapt on top of me, pushed me from my saddle, and shielded me with his body until the last had fallen. He made no sound, but when he let me up I could see them sticking out of him. That was the first time I realized how big war arrows really are, the length of your arm with that big heavy blade to punch through armor—they
seem a lot smaller notched on a bowstring. But your father’s got two in his back straight through his plate, and the one that killed him, I’m sure, that had snuck under the lip of his chest piece and down into him. Into his lungs, maybe, or lower. The shaft is barely visible; it’s deep down into him wherever it went. He doesn’t make a sound, just looks me up and down as we get to our feet. He sees I’m fine, and then he hops back on his horse and signals the attack on the archers who fired on us.

“We win the battle, and hours later he’s still in the saddle. He’s bound the sword into his hand so it wouldn’t fall. He’s gone gray and cold, but his eyes are still open, still fierce. The arrows are still sticking out of him, but no one wants to touch him because it’s
perfect
. Soundless, loyal, on the battlefield. The immaculate death for a samurai. People kneel to him. Kneel to his memory. Shogen Hirata …