Child of Vengeance (40 page)

There was a snapping sound, and Bennosuke imagined for a moment that it was his mare’s legs popping with the strain, but it was too loud and too brittle to be bone. His body shot up suddenly free, and he felt lighter. He turned, and down through the legs of the horse he could just see the vivid color of his banner held in a hand frantically trying to shield itself. The man had clung to whatever he could, and the weight of a body was too much for mere bamboo.

The remnants of the splintered standard stood up behind him like a primitive spear as he twisted in the saddle, disoriented and alone. Somewhere Kumagai was still laughing, but he was gone from Bennosuke’s sight. So too for a horrible few moments were Nakata’s banners, but they were tall and gaudy and eventually he saw them—and then beneath them Bennosuke saw Hayato Nakata. The lord was not thirty paces away. The dagger throbbed on his wrist.

Knowing that his father was watching, that the forces of the world that believed in righteousness were with him, he forgot about Kumagai and the Ukita. He needed their shielding no longer. He tried to turn, to make for his goal, but he was held in limbo, pressed
and pinned by the whirling embrace of the throng. It was a form of torture to see Hayato so close, and he found himself screaming in frustration and anger at his immobility. He dug his fingers into the manes of the horses nearby, as though he might drag himself and his mount across the gap.

Then without warning, the vagary of the crowd suddenly favored him, and he burst forth on a wave of bodies. People seemed to part for him, and he was carried to Hayato so fast that their armor clattered together with a slap. The lord turned quickly, and Bennosuke saw that under his helmet his eyes were wide and terrified, darting around in their sockets.

“Get away from me!” he mewled, his voice high and pathetic. He did not recognize Bennosuke; he just saw another unknown entity in a world the lord did not understand. That was not good enough. Hayato had to know who was killing him. Bennosuke pushed his head so close that the brows of their helmets touched.

“You! Away from him! Away!” growled one of Nakata’s bodyguard, but he was too far to intervene. He gestured in vain, as trapped as Bennosuke had been a moment before.

“Are you samurai?” hissed Bennosuke, ignoring the shouting as though it were a world away.

His eyes bored into Hayato’s, and he could see confusion come into Nakata for just one moment. The lord pulled his head back to try to examine the face before him, close enough still that the boy could smell his breath. Bennosuke knew that this was his ultimate moment. His right hand went up the sleeve of his left, wrapped around the hardness of the dagger’s handle. The boy closed his eyes, and willed the image of Munisai to spur him forward, to vindicate him …

Instead, what he saw was five small men in a distant bath of boiling oil, naked and flailing. He saw the sky and the earth and a ring of crucifixes around a dirty little hamlet, and he saw no meaning to any of it. The little figures writhed and writhed forever …

“Away! Away!” came the bodyguard’s voice.

Hayato’s eyes held his, and the lord’s throat was there, exposed and soft. The blade was strong, but the hand that tried to grasp it was weak. Bennosuke could not bring the weapon forth. His body was
cold, paralyzed by a chill, and though his father’s ghost and righteous entities of heaven must be screaming, he knew then that he could not kill Hayato, because he was too afraid to die.

“Away!” said a voice in his ear.

The bodyguard had managed to squirm close enough to the boy to put a rough hand on him, and then he forced his body between the boy and the lord. Still Bennosuke could not move, but he knew his chance was gone. He had failed.

“Who is he?” asked Hayato. “Who is he?”

The lord never found out. Bennosuke forced his horse around before he could be unmasked, and then he pushed and pushed until he was free of the swarm, and then the mare ran, galloped out of the arena with the joy of the unshackled, past wounded men and horses with broken bodies, through the crowds and the vain shouts of guards until they were gone. Gone from the Gathering and gone from the town, and once he was out of sight of other men he fell from the saddle, moaning and sobbing in wracked, wretched shame, put his hands on the back of his head, curled himself into a ball and then forced his brow down into the dirt where he knew it belonged.

T
he bowl of noodles grew cold before him. Two boiled eggs split in half floated in the frothy, orange soup. Bennosuke watched the soft yolks within them slowly harden with the heat. He had wandered into an inn, still wearing the old cuirass from the Gathering, and had spent the last of his coin on the meal. But he could not eat it.

He was an empty thing pretending to be a human, and he sat blankly. This was not a moment he should be feeling, not a future he had considered. He wondered what he should do.

Well
, something thought,
you know what you should do. You know what a coward like you deserves. But then, you’re too weak for that, aren’t you? That’s why you’re here. That’s why you linger
.

The boy tried to ignore the voice, but he knew it spoke the truth. He lived that moment again and again, saw the gap in Hayato’s armor
and his jugular pulsing once more, and each time he tried to imagine a reality in which he had had the courage to strike. But always his arms were weak, always he pulled away, always he fled.

Why? Why this sudden outbreak of animal self-preservation? Why this sudden care for flesh when he had neglected his body for the year before in sole pursuit of that moment? He couldn’t answer. Was it simple fear and cowardice? If that was so, why had he seen Shuntaro and his men at that crucial moment, and not some primal image of death or decay?

It didn’t matter. Whatever the reason, he had failed Munisai utterly, and his sullied soul remained anchored to this world of shame.

The yolks of the eggs coagulated before his dead eyes.

There was a clatter of heavy boots at the door, the curtain that hung across the entrance cast aside. Kumagai was standing there, half stripped out of his own armor, his swords back at his side. He scanned the room quickly, and almost missed Bennosuke tucked cross-legged into the corner of the inn.

“There you are, Musashi, you mad little bastard,” the man said, and he stomped across to stand before the boy. Bennosuke met his gaze, but said nothing. It was like looking upon a memory from a dream.

“Been looking for you,” said Kumagai, expecting an apology, but the boy offered none. “Where’d you go? Hmm? Why’d you run away? Thought you’d got killed or something. Been searching the wounded tents for you, all of us have.”

Still the boy kept silent. Kumagai shrugged and sat down. He shuffled under the small table, picked up a pair of chopsticks, and then helped himself to one of the halved eggs. He sucked it down with relish.

“Didn’t win, in any case. Never even touched the ball. Some gang of fools from the south got it out. Found that bastard who was telling us to eat shit, though, afterward. Didn’t find out why he was after us, but he won’t be … besmirching us again,” said Kumagai, a dark, satisfied grin on his face. He licked his lips of the sauce, and waited for the boy to share his mirth. When he did not, the man looked at him suspiciously.

“What’s wrong with you, eh?” he said. “Horse crush your balls or something? Where is your horse, anyway? We were looking for it hitched somewhere, but it’s not outside here.”

Bennosuke just looked back. The words meant nothing to him. Kumagai looked at him again for a few moments, and then he cast his eyes down and nodded somberly.

“Ah, I understand,” he said. “It fell in the Gathering? It snapped its neck in a fall? I see. Well, it’s a hard thing to do, to lose a horse. Love them, don’t you? Like a woman, but a horse won’t complain if you ride it for hours. Or ride another one, eh? Aye. I understand. It’s hard, lad. Hard. I’ve done it myself. But it’s just a horse, Musashi. Not the end of the world. Unless … Was that your father’s horse? Well, that’s … I can’t say anything there. But memories are more than things, you understand? That was his, but it was not him, right? Just remember him, and you’ll learn to live with it. Perhaps. I don’t know.”

Bennosuke had set the animal free once he had found the strength to stand without feeling the crushing weight of shame. He had ripped the saddle and the reins from it, slapped it on the hind, and watched it gallop off. What right had he to put binds upon another living thing?

That, and she knew
.

“Hard though it is,” Kumagai said after what he gauged to be a pensive pause, “you can’t let it get the better of you. You have to think. You forgot these, didn’t you?”

Bennosuke realized the man had been carrying his swords. The samurai slid them along the floor to him. The sight of those, of the longsword that had once been at Munisai’s side, drove a fresh spasm of pain into his heart. The boy did not dare touch them. Kumagai took another egg for himself, this time with his fingers.

“You’ll need them, lad,” the samurai said, sucking his fingers clean. He looked around the inn suspiciously, though there were no other samurai present, and then leaned in conspiratorially. “The Regent Toyotomi is dead.”

He sat back as though to let the magnitude of that sink in. Still Bennosuke did not speak. What was that news to him? That was the world of samurai, and he did not belong to it any longer.

“A week ago.” Kumagai nodded. “We only just heard after the
Gathering. Our spies from Kyoto are the best. No one else here knows. You know what that means, right?”

War. The War
.

“We have to return to Takeyama. Our Lord Ukita no doubt has a plan. We’ve wasted enough bloody time looking for you—we have to leave now. It’s time for us to stop being sportsmen, and to be soldiers.”

He jerked his head at the door and sat back as if to rise. Bennosuke considered it. A soldier did not have to think. A soldier just did. That might be good. He was not dead, and nor could he die today, and there was food and a bed and warmth. A moth, primal and banging around the flame of simple sensation. That was what he was.

He nodded, picked up the weapons he was not fit to wield, and rose with Kumagai. The two of them exited the inn into a country that was at war but did not know it. People enjoying a last day of merriment before lines were drawn and chaos came as it had not done for decades.

“Cheer up, you miserable bugger,” said Kumagai as they passed through the door, and he pushed him playfully on the back of the head. “It was only a bloody horse.”

A Day of Glory and Rebirth; The Sundered Realm Made Anew

The Twenty-First Day of the Tenth Month, Fifth Year of the Era of Keicho

(The Year Four Thousand Two Hundred and Ninety-Six by the Old Chinese Methods, Sixteen Hundred Years Exactly After the Europeans Killed Their God)

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The hawk skated upon a sea of cloud, so close to the surface Bennosuke thought he could see tendrils of mist whip around its claws. It circled, circled, circled in elegant stillness, the silhouette navy on steel blue in the dawn light.