Child of Vengeance (33 page)

The Gathering. A fortnight away.

No time to waste—the boy shook his head and forced focus into his mind. He scurried out of the alleyway he had been hiding in and though he was exposed in the center of the street for only a moment, it felt like a naked lifetime. He dived in gratefully among the dark shapes of the warhorses opposite, hiding himself and dreading any call of alarm. None came.

His hair was long and wild, matted into thick strands. His clothes were rags tied to him as much as worn, his body filthy and gaunt. The nail of his ring finger on his right hand had fallen out and was only half grown back, tender and ugly. The swords at his side were bound to him with a length of rope.

The night went on around him. The horses were solid things bred and trained for the chaos of a battlefield. A wretch like him would not startle them. They were tethered in front of an inn, from within which the murmurs of dulled, drunken conversation could be heard.

The horses’ owners were samurai, and so confident were they of the impossibility of their theft that they had left the horses fully saddled and had not even bothered to tether them beyond a cursory loop. Bennosuke’s gnarled fingers untangled the reins of the closest
one and then, crouched low in a scuttling mess of elbows and knees, began to try to lead it away.

The beast was reluctant to move. It turned at first, obedience drilled into it, and it took a couple of halting paces away from the others. But something seemed odd to it, and it halted, shaking its muzzle and snorting. The boy tugged at the reins, and the horse whipped its head back with such casual power that it almost tore them from his grasp.

“Come on,” hissed Bennosuke, but the pretense of giving a command gave way to desperation. “Please.”

Haltingly, the horse came. It did not like leaving the safety and warmth of its companions, but hoof by hesitant hoof it obeyed the insistent hauling. The boy led it toward the darkness, away from the inn, which was illuminated by lantern light, all the while keeping an eye on the door of the building. Once he was enveloped by the night he would risk the noise of riding, but not until then. Time dragged, the shade beckoning him, tantalizing.

He was but paces away when he heard the door being thrown open. Bennosuke froze, and hid himself dumbly behind the horse. Peering through the beast’s legs, he saw a samurai stroll out onto the inn’s porch. His kimono was thrown open, baring a chest gleaming with musky night sweat. The man leaned against a pillar and stared out at nothing. His dull eyes fell upon the boy and the horse. It took a moment for him to realize what was happening.

“Thief!” he bellowed, and suddenly the night erupted.

Bennosuke hissed a curse and scrambled up onto the horse’s back. Other samurai were staggering out of the inn, shouting threats at him and commands to one another. Panicking, he slapped the horse on the hind with a balled fist and kicked his bony heels into its flanks. The beast screamed and bolted into the darkness much too fast, jerking and lurching blindly from side to side, tossing its rider around in the saddle like a sack of straw.

It was impossible to see where they were going—though the boy could not tell if the blackness came from the night or whether his eyes were screwed shut—and so all he could do was bend down and hold on. Abandoning the reins, he wrapped himself around the neck of the
horse, his legs behind him being thrown wildly free of the stirrups, each stride of the horse putting a hand’s width of air between his ass and the seat.

Undignified though it was, he managed to cling on, but soon the strain of having its rider in such an unusual position slowed the horse. It took a moment for Bennosuke to realize the animal was slowing; he readjusted himself in the seat and tried to spur the horse onward in a controlled manner. Instead the animal lost interest in movement at all and stopped entirely, content to let the boy kick and slap in vain as it caught its breath.

There came the sound of hooves from behind, and then Bennosuke sensed—not saw—something cannoning down the pathway toward them. His body froze, aware of approaching danger but unwilling or unable to move. The galloping sound reached its peak, and a second before the impact a shouted curse broke the air as the other rider realized instinctively that the way was blocked.

Too late. The samurai’s horse barreled into the side of Bennosuke’s with a hollow smack of rib cages and saddle frames. The impact drove the wind from the boy. It felt as though every bone in his body was vibrating. The world tipped as his horse fell onto its side, and then his back met the hard earth, half his body underneath the horse’s flank.

The landing knocked the sense from him, yet sensation remained.

The pressing weight of the horse was there and then not, as the horse scrabbled and righted itself.

Motion, pulled by the feet; his twisted body was still caught in the stirrups, dragged for a moment until he fell limply free.

What might have been his stone felt a face atop of it, or perhaps the other way around?

Something touched him, turned him over.

Warm, blowing breath, the stink of sake upon it.

Cold, hard thing against his neck.

A noise that he understood expressed anger or displeasure.

Then there was light.

Another rider came, a samurai carrying a lantern in his hand, and the restoration of sight slowly brought wits back to Bennosuke. He realized there was a man kneeling on his chest, his face muddied and
furious as he held what the boy guessed to be a sword to his throat. He lay as still as he could.

“Idiot! Damn bumpkin half-wit bastard!” the samurai on top of him was snarling. “You steal a horse and you can’t even ride?”

“Hold,” said the man on the horse. The other samurai were with him on their horses too, curling around them all like eels in a barrel, barely visible at the limit of the light’s edge.

“Could’ve snapped my neck, falling from my horse,” growled the kneeling man.

“What do you expect, charging on blindly ahead into the darkness like that?” said the rider. “You should have stayed with the light. In any case you’re fine, and you apprehended the thief. Commendable work.”

“Thank you,” said the kneeling man, mollified slightly. “What do we do now?”

“Crucifixion is the punishment for major theft,” said the rider, but the kneeling man uttered an irritated sigh.

“Agh, the execution site is a morning away. Let’s just slit his throat and toss him in a ditch,” said the man, taking his eyes off his captive for the first time and turning to the man holding the lantern.

“Crucifixion is the letter of the law,” said the rider.

“Do you feel like riding that far tomorrow? Do you want to waste more time out here in the middle of nowhere? I don’t.”

“Hmm,” said the lantern samurai, considering.

Though his life hung in the balance, his fate being determined by a simple debate of diligence or convenience, Bennosuke had neither the strength nor the presence of mind to do anything. All he could do was lie and watch the rider as he deliberated. The man’s face was cold, a scar running from under his nose breaking across his lips and then stopping at his chin.

“Swords,” said one of the other men after a moment, somewhere behind them. That broke the rider’s thought, and both he and the man on top of the boy looked to where Bennosuke’s weapons had fallen. The kneeling man uttered a single low curse.

“He stole them too, probably,” he said. “Look at him—he’s just a bloody peasant. Let’s just do it now.”

“Are you samurai?” asked the scarred rider, ignoring the man.

“Yes,” spat Bennosuke, for though he was enfeebled and filthy, the boy would not allow himself to deny that.

The kneeling samurai grunted in disgust, and removed the sword from the boy’s throat as he stood up.

“Fantastic,” he said, glaring down. “Now we
have
to crucify you.”

THEY BOUND BENNOSUKE
with heavy rope using a technique that had been perfected and ritualized over centuries. The rope restricted him entirely, crisscrossing his torso and forcing his arms to his sides and his legs together at the knees, and they slung him over the back of one of their horses like a sack of rice and cantered back to the inn. He was hoisted from the eaves of the building, and hung suspended facedown over the street he had been sneaking through not an hour before.

The boy had thought the theft would be easy. The hamlet was small enough that it lacked any sort of watch or guard. The five samurai were here only to collect taxes from the outlying countryside. He had watched them for two days before he had made his move. Though the Gathering was in two weeks, he needed time to reacquaint himself with riding a horse. His feeble attempt at escape was proof of that.

Bennosuke knew that he should have been scared, captured as he was, but the truth was it was the most comfortable night he had spent in a long time. So meticulous and intricate was the binding that he felt not a single point of uncomfortable pressure. It was as though he was floating, rocking gently back and forth like a baby in the crib. Compared to the nights of the last months, where the boy had scrabbled in the dirt and shivered on hard ground for hours, it seemed a hanging luxury.

It was a miserable existence he had eked out. When he had left Miyamoto he headed straight for the Nakata clan’s domain, certain that some god would turn favor upon him and deliver Hayato immediately. But though he lingered for a month in the shadows of the city that the Nakata called their capital, living frugally off the last of the coin he had managed to scrounge from within Munisai’s house, Hayato for the most part remained behind the fortified walls of his
estate. He might as well have been in the heavens for all that Bennosuke could get to him.

Only once had Bennosuke seen the young lord, glimpsed for a heartbeat through the bamboo blinds of a palanquin surrounded by dozens of bodyguards. He was traveling somewhere, a grand parade of course, and the boy had hidden within the kneeling crowd paying homage to their master. Even if he had had a bow and arrow, he was not confident he could have made the shot, and throwing himself into a blind charge was useless. Both would have resulted in his death while Hayato lived on.

His coin faltered and his certainty wavered, and in its place came the fear that eventually, wandering homeless on those streets, he would be recognized by some agent of the Nakata. He fled and headed to the countryside of the neighboring domain—that being of a Lord Shingo he knew nothing about—thinking that he would be able to earn food and lodgings, however meager, while he bided his time waiting for a plan to present itself.

But he had not known just how hated masterless samurai were. People saw the swords at his side and the deteriorating clothes upon his back and practically spat—if a samurai was masterless he had either disgraced himself or failed his lord utterly, and nobody wanted business with a troublemaker or an incompetent. He was shooed from town to town, the kinder hamlets offering him a bowl of rice gruel as pittance to speed him on his way, the harsher ones an escort of disgusted steward samurai.

A few times he had dared to hide his swords in the woods, wrapped his head in a cloth, and tried to pass himself off as a lowborn. He would wait with a huddle of the other bedraggled jobless corraled like a herd of goats, awaiting employers seeking men to dig or to carry loads of stone or to turn the wheels of the great threshing mills when the winds or the rivers were low. But his height or his rash or his educated accent or the simple fact that no one knew him singled him out, and while others were chosen by the dozen to shuffle off in teams of the pitifully grateful, Bennosuke was told to find work elsewhere.

How scarce food became. After the autumn harvests anything outside storerooms or the depths of the seas vanished. Bennosuke,
stranded between the two, saw the fruits of neither. He considered hunting for boar or deer—the sin of consuming red meat was allowed in times of starvation—but he had no bow and even less of a clue about how to track the animals.

The rivers too were mostly denied him, for he had no net and the choice spots that were shallow enough for him to wade in and stab fat carp or salmon had long since been claimed by nearby settlements and were guarded against poachers. Occasionally he would find some secluded spot and try for the smaller, nimble fish, but the long hours of trying would usually yield no more than one or two skinny things the length of his foot that were in any case mostly bone.

In this they were like him; the flesh upon him withered as he fed upon only what fortune delivered him, sometimes going days without anything resembling a proper meal. He began to suffer from cramps, some so strong that he would rip his kimono away from himself and stare at his belly under the jutting bones of his rib cage, convinced it was tearing itself free of his body. His insides were ruined, his bowels water, and his toilet was whatever hole he scrabbled in the dirt for himself.

The dizziness that came with this starvation was the worst, though. That feeling of complete exhaustion was his constant companion, the world rippling before his eyes. Things seemed a dream sometimes, distant and throbbing. At times lucidity would return and he would find that he was in a completely different place from where he last remembered, or that he was loudly talking to himself. He worried for his mind as well as his body.

But he had endured, and three months ago wooden boards advertising the Gathering had been posted in every town, all boasting of the one-armed man who would ride. Bennosuke knew then that what fate or destiny had withheld before was being granted him now. He could hardly believe that Hayato would consent to surrender himself to such danger, regardless of how many men he would have protecting him.

In a mass of hundreds of men and horses, in a press of bodies that swarmed and thrusted to dozens of different plots and designs, even the most vigilant of men would struggle to spot the six inches of soot-blackened steel of a concealed dagger, for example.

Oh, they would very well spot what happened after, but Bennosuke was unconcerned with that. So long as Hayato died, the boy would be content; he would have proved himself. Whatever would happen to his body after that could not harm his pure, immortal soul.