Child of Vengeance (31 page)

The small shrine was surrounded by boughs now, each crisp and dry and awaiting the flame. The cramped interior of the shrine was lined with boughs too, surrounding Munisai’s body. On his knees, he lifted his father’s legs and slotted the final bough beneath them. Then he pulled the shroud to one side and looked at the corpse.

The blow to the neck had been swift and clean and had severed Munisai’s head neatly. Dorinbo had placed the head as though it had never been harmed, the cleaned wound a dark blue smear around his neck. A fresh kimono masked the terrible wound to his stomach. It appeared that the man was merely sleeping. There was no hint of the agony and humiliation he had suffered.

Bennosuke bowed low and reverently, held it for several seconds, and then he rose and looked over Munisai’s body. It felt disrespectful, but he needed to do it. He spotted the shortsword easily, laid as it was beside Munisai’s right hand. But what he needed, he could not see.

“It’s here, Bennosuke,” said Dorinbo calmly.

Bennosuke turned to look at his uncle. The monk was holding Munisai’s longsword in both hands before him. Bennosuke slowly clambered down from the temple and then took the sword from Dorinbo’s hands. He was surprised, and he looked at his uncle.

“We both know that you are not a monk. You are Munisai’s son, not mine,” the man said quietly.

“I would have stayed, but …” said Bennosuke awkwardly. “Nakata will return and kill me if I do.”

“Is it that, or is it that you want to go and kill him?” said Dorinbo. Bennosuke remained silent. He wanted to explain himself to his uncle, but he knew it was futile, just as Dorinbo knew it was futile to try to force him to stay.

The monk rose to his feet, and then removed the paper covering from the lantern exposing the naked candle. He picked a torch from the floor, and held the oil-soaked rag to the flame. It ignited, flaring bright, and the monk slowly walked to the temple pyre. He lowered the torch to the first bough, and then the burning had begun. As flame slowly erupted around the base, Dorinbo clapped twice, bowed, and then lifted his hands high in the gesture of Amaterasu’s prayer. Then he turned to look at Bennosuke, silhouetted by the rising flames behind him.

“We are the children of Amaterasu, Bennosuke. We are born to burn to ash and then to rise again. Our bodies burn. Sometimes our cities burn. Someday even our mountains and our rivers may burn. But we always come back, and where we rise to after that is entirely our choice. That is Amaterasu’s gift to us,” said the monk. He gestured to the fire behind him, the first flames licking around Munisai.

“This is the ash of your childhood. So go now, and raise yourself to where you want to be,” he said, and then bowed.

Bennosuke thought of speaking, but realized he had no words. He looked at his uncle for a long time before he bowed back, and then he slid the longsword into the sash at his waist. It felt right. Then he turned and walked into the night, the hopes and prayers of twenty years rising into the sky behind him and the image of his father’s body as it withered in the flames burned into his eyes.

Dorinbo watched him go, and then silently he started to pray.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Snow rarely fell in the south of Japan, save for on the peaks of mountains, but the chill of winter was bitter all the same. Men and women bundled themselves in layers of thick cloth, the children barely noticed or cared, and the elderly grumbled that this was a freeze harsher than any before and was thus irrevocable proof of the encroaching doom of the world.

For the time being at least the world went on, and under a clear morning sky a peasant worked chopping wood. The light was bright and sharp enough that he had to squint at the lumber he guided his ax to. He had a pile of firewood tall enough to last the week already beside him, but he did not stop. With the earth hard and unworkable until spring, the man found himself chopping simply for something to do.

“Greetings, friend,” came a voice, and the peasant turned to find two men there.

The one who had spoken was standing about ten paces away, smiling, his breath misting in the air, while another watched from the pathway on which the pair of them had evidently been walking. They both wore heavy traveling gowns that hid the shape of their bodies, their hands tucked away from the cold.

“Greetings,” the peasant said guardedly, bowing and then resting the ax across his shoulders. The men did not carry swords and both had full heads of close-cropped hair, so fawning subservience was not required.

“This village is Miyamoto, is it not?” said the man, still smiling.

“Aye.” The peasant nodded. “If you’ve come to see the temple, it’s not being rebuilt until the spring.”

“While that is a shame, I journey instead because of the monk there—I hear he is skilled in healing,” said the man.

“He’s a clever one, yes,” said the peasant. “You don’t look sick, though.”

“Thankfully I am in good health. It is my son; the boy has developed a rash. Men say the monk’s boy had the same affliction, and that he managed to cure it.”

“You’re wrong there. That boy was flecked like the night sky with scabs and poxmarks for as long as I remember,” said the peasant.

“Perhaps it is a recent cure—have you seen the boy lately?” said the man.

The peasant thought for a few moments. “No, now that you mention it. Not since autumn, at least.”

“Well, I shall journey to the temple all the same,” said the man, but he did not seem truly dispirited. “My thanks for your time.”

He bowed, and then the pair of them left. The peasant watched them go, shrugged, and got back to work. The roads often brought strange men in with them, and it was no business of his if they had set out in the opposite direction to the temple.

An hour later the two men were hunched around a wretchedly small fire hidden in a copse of bare trees. They knew very well which village this was and where the temple was located, for they had visited it when they had first arrived four days ago in the guise of pilgrims. But though they had lingered abnormally long at the grounds—they were very pious, they had told the monk—they had not seen the boy who was supposed to be there.

That was unexpected, and so this thicket had become their home while they had watched the roads in and out of Miyamoto and had questioned as many people as they dared.

“It seems the lad truly isn’t here,” sighed the second man, aimlessly flicking ash from the fire with a stick. “What a miserable business.”

“Do not let bleakness take your heart, my brother,” said the first, though his tone was hardly a contrast.

“This whole thing is just odd.”

“Odd requests bring odd amounts of money.”

“Why don’t they just march their samurai in and take care of it?”

“This is a matter they have been warned away from. Direct action
would attract unwanted attention,” said the first. “Regardless, we have accepted the job—”

“
You
accepted the job.”

“And the people who gave it are not ones we have the luxury of failing.”

“So we’re stuck with it, then,” muttered the second. “What do we do?”

“Well, there are a few options,” said the first. “We could wait here freezing our asses to the ground until the lad comes back from wherever he has gone—if he is coming back. Or we could search every temple and monastery from here until we find him on the off chance that he has, as I was told, become a monk. Or I suppose we could go back and tell them that we couldn’t find him, waive our fee, and most likely the majority of the blood in our bodies.”

“Isn’t that wonderful?” said the second, and tossed his stick away petulantly. “This whole thing is disturbing. Slipping poison into soup is one thing, but this business with the arms? That’s just morbid. They want that sort of thing done, they should send a filthy corpsehandler.”

The first looked up, sudden inspiration in his eyes.

TWO DAYS LATER
, the body of a tall young man was found in a ditch. It appeared as if nothing was wrong with him, his face as calm as a man at meditation, save for the fact that his arms had been cleanly chopped off and spirited away somewhere. That might have caused some consternation, were it not for the fact that the man was a corpsehandler.

They were the builders of coffins, the executioners, the butchers, and the tanners—the ones mired in decay and death and carcasses and the lowest of the low because of that irrevocable contamination. Wise men estimated them to be at best one-seventh of a true human being, so the dismemberment of what was a tainted parody of a man in the first place made little difference in the scheme of things.

No one mourned for the armless body except his mother. His father, when he learned of his son’s fate, had tutted and sucked air through his teeth before he nodded and pronounced:

“Well, he must be in a better bloody life than this one.”

W
inter passed,
Amaterasu grew in strength once more, and so came the spring and a cherry blossom beautiful. The petals brought delight and then withered as they always did, and it was some weeks after the flowers had fallen that Kazuteru accompanied his lord to the estate of the Nakata.

As he expected, the grounds were opulent beyond anything he had seen. The gardens were one flowing piece of art: still, clear ponds crisscrossed by elegantly carved, arcing wooden bridges that led to immaculately raked beds of sand and gravel. Fat, pale carp swam beneath blooming lotus pads, rising to the surface with their mouths gaping and flapping expectantly as the samurai passed.

The castle hold itself, seeming like an afterthought, was guarded by men wielding long halberds with bands of gold set around the wooden shafts, each weapon inlaid with more than Kazuteru himself owned.

Before they could marvel at that ornamentation fully—or, Kazuteru suspected, perhaps notice any frailty in the fortress itself—they had been quickly led away to the mansion where the lord resided and shown to their resplendent quarters. Beautiful girls tended to each of them, and they were offered rest and relaxation in hot water that Nakata had had channeled from a natural spring almost a half mile away. Then came dinner.

Lord Nakata himself, his son Hayato, and Lord Shinmen sat centrally on a dais, and then ten bodyguards from both clans sat in rank along either side of the hall they were in. Kazuteru was on the farthest end of Shinmen’s line. Slivers of fresh, raw ocean fish sped that day to this mountain hold lay before him on a gold-leaf-painted lacquer platter. The chopsticks in his hand were plated in carved silver at the end.

Kazuteru looked at them dumbly. Still he found himself surprised to be in such situations. He knew deep down that he did not belong here surrounded by such splendor. He had not earned it. He was much younger than the other men he sat beside and of no exceptional skill with the sword, yet in the wake of Munisai’s seppuku he had been promoted to serve in Shinmen’s personal retinue.

He had accrued an accidental and unwanted fame; how he cursed the invention of the woodblock printing press. The damned machine was a recent triumph of Japanese engineering—that is to say, someone had found one in Korea half a dozen years ago in the first war and brought it back with them—and it allowed what would have taken an artist and a team of apprentices an hour to achieve to be done in a matter of moments.