Child of Vengeance (49 page)

Slowly the sound of the rout behind them faded, but never left quite entirely. Hayato did not look back—he was just determined to go, and so he barreled on without any concern for grace and decorum or waiting for his companions. Bennosuke shouted encouragement to him, offering advice and directions as though he knew where they were going.

His head throbbed, the wound there pulsing with every beat of his heart. He felt as though he wanted to vomit, his bowels tight and aching also, but he could not tell if this desire to expel everything was because of injury or exhaustion or because of what he now had within his grasp. Three years of suffering welling within him, and what he felt was terrible confusion and uncertainty.

What had moved him to come seek the lord out? He asked himself that question as they headed onward. Sitting in that horse’s entrails down in the valley of Sekigahara, what he had realized—no, not realized, finally allowed himself to admit, for it had always been with him—was that death should not be cherished.

That was it. That was everything. It sounded so small and so stupid that such a thing should have to be stated. But this was what he had freed himself from. He wanted to ask, Who was the first man to see a corpse and consider it godly? How did he persuade others to feel the same?

Munisai the samurai had chosen it, yet he could not prevent the disgrace that Hayato visited on him, nor avenge it afterward because of his choice. Shuntaro the peasant had chosen it, but could not prevent his son and his friends from spurning his sacrifice by making exactly the same choice. No, death defined not samurai, but all men—and defined them only in that they could never define themselves again.

But Bennosuke had seen all that carnage and slaughter, and he had vowed that he was done with it all; from now he would define himself, by and for himself. The quest that Munisai had set him, the shame that followed—he no longer cared. He had thought it all obscene.

And yet, so quickly had he forgotten that. This opportunity had presented itself, and he had taken it.

Why?

If death should not be cherished, then surely neither should it be inflicted on others. That seemed logical.

Was it the instinct of years, driving his hand? He still wore armor, still carried Munisai’s swords—did the man’s ghost have some kind of hold of him?

No, he had chosen. To deny that was cowardly—he had chosen to leave the battlefield and he had chosen not to flee into the forest, and now he was here.

But you can still choose to let him go. Leave this all behind, return to Dorinbo and Miyamoto at last, just live for yourself …

The bodyguard was struggling, trailing red-faced behind Hayato and Bennosuke. He was not an agile man, and he was slipping and stumbling on hidden roots and mossy stone and earth. Bennosuke waited for him on top of a fallen log, and offered a hand down to help the man over.

The man took it, but rather than haul himself up he held it and looked Bennosuke squarely in the face, examining him. Recognition crept across his features, turning quickly to surprise, and he began to open his mouth. Before any sound escaped him the boy’s hand lanced out and stabbed him in the side of the neck with the throwing dagger Tasumi had given him years ago.

The samurai made a desperate gurgling noise, and as the man died Bennosuke realized that the burns that marked him were each about the size of a lump of coal.

“What is it? What?” called Hayato, so far ahead he was almost out of sight.

“Arrows, my lord! An arrow has taken him! Go! Run!” shouted Bennosuke. “They’re close!”

Hayato gave a yelp and ran onward, downward, not even bothering to check. The specters of assassins were in his mind already, probably flitting from tree to tree all around him like mountain demons. He grew smaller, his lopsided body weaving between the trunks.

Bennosuke let the lord run as he watched the bodyguard die, and then gently he lowered the corpse onto the log.

He followed Hayato at a measured pace, never letting the lord leave his sight. They soon came to a stream. Ten paces wide and barely calf height, clear, fresh water streaming over ocher stones. They followed it—easier to walk over wet rocks than scramble over brush—and gradually Hayato calmed down. His loping canter slowed into a walk. They went on silently for some time, the lord first and the boy a short distance behind.

Bennosuke ran his fingers along the wound on his scalp. Dull agony. The boy reached down and scooped handfuls of the water from the stream onto his head. He half hoped it would clear his head as much as it would clear his face of blood.

Hayato did not look back once. Bennosuke could just vanish into the woods, and the lord would be left utterly alone. The water was cold on his brow, an autumn chill in the air.
Wake up
, he told himself,
this is not your world any longer
. But still he followed, a gore-streaked somnambulist.

He asked himself, Do you hate this man enough to kill him? How long have you actually spent in his presence? A handful of hours? He made you endure nothing—you forced all this upon yourself.

Go
.

Leave
.

Be a child of Amaterasu. Go back to Dorinbo, lead a good life helping others
.

“How much farther?” Hayato asked, again not turning his head.

“Not much, my lord,” said Bennosuke.

“My father is truly dead?”

“Yes, my lord.”

“How?”

“Surrounded and overwhelmed on the battlefield, my lord.”

“How unfortunate,” said Hayato, and on the side of his face Bennosuke saw the dimple of a malicious, triumphant smile.

So small a gesture, but Bennosuke found clarity within that smile. Something within him hardened.

To Hayato, death was something others offered for his benefit—Arima, the men in Aramaki, the thousands on that battlefield, the bodyguard, even his own father. Death to him was a boon, a convenience, an expedient end to his own betterment. Death should not
be cherished, but equally it should be understood. But this lord did not, and never would. Men may all be trapped in that little stratum of corpses between the heavens and the hells, but on the wave of those bodies men like Hayato were borne aloft. Why would they ever look downward?

Let him go, walk away, and how many more would have to throw themselves into oblivion to keep the clan Nakata buoyant, to sate their regal and bloody maw?

Do not hate him as an individual; hate him for all that he represents.

Was Bennosuke to be a child of vengeance, or a child of Amaterasu? He thought, Why not both? Why not use the choice Amaterasu gave him to enact this vengeance because he, as a human,
chose
to do so?

As right as banishing the dark with fire, as natural as the thaw of rivers in spring, it could be the act of a conscious being thinking for the first time for himself—and that perhaps was as saintly as men could ever be. Bennosuke licked his lips, tasted the dried blood there.

“You haven’t looked at me once this entire time, have you, my lord?” he said to Hayato’s back.

“What are you talking about?” said Hayato, irritated. “Who do you think you’re talking to?”

“Are you samurai, my lord?” said Bennosuke.

Hayato stopped and turned at that, and then he saw.

“No,” Hayato breathed. “No.”

He did not go for his sword. Instead he turned and ran. Bennosuke chased after him, kicked his legs out from under him, and then Hayato was on his hands and knees scrabbling in the water.

“No,” said Hayato, his voice breaking. “Oh no no, you’re dead, you’re dead, they said you were dead, they told me they killed you, they showed me your arms, no no no …”

Bennosuke grabbed the lord by his armor, hauling him over so he lay on his back looking up at what stood over him. Water soaked into the fine threads that coated his armor. Bennosuke drew his sword, and Hayato flinched pathetically.

“Do you remember how my father died, my lord?” said Bennosuke.

He began to cut the thick cords that bound Hayato’s armor
together, wrenching it away piece by piece. The lord fumbled backward when Bennosuke’s hands left him for an instant here, a heartbeat there, a crab slowly being stripped of its shell. But he hadn’t the wit to bring himself to his feet, and always Bennosuke caught him, always another layer went.

The lord was soon in his underclothes, and Bennosuke slashed them open too so that his torso and the sad stump of his arm were revealed. The boy picked Hayato’s shortsword from where it had fallen beneath the water—never once had the lord gone for it—and tossed it to him in its scabbard. It bounced off his chest and was submerged once more.

“On your knees,” Bennosuke said. “Perform seppuku and I’ll take your head in an instant.”

“Please, let me go,” said Hayato. “I’ll give you—”

“I don’t want anything,” said Bennosuke.

The tip of his longsword was in the water, a little chevron of a wake forming around it. Hayato stared at it, watched as an auburn leaf caught upon the current brushed up against it and spiraled away past them both. Tears formed in his eyes as with his one hand he picked up his shortsword, and rose unsteadily into a quivering kneel.

What to say now to Hayato? Bennosuke was no great orator, young still, unable to construct some grand speech. All he could do was spread his arms wide and say what he felt.

“It’s all of it shit,” he said. “I see it now. It had to be written so large for me, but I see it now. All of it a death cult built to serve men like you. And people just assent to it … just tread the same paths that have been trodden a million times before.”

He laughed, once, as he realized he was quoting his uncle Dorinbo, imagined his face. Slowly Bennosuke moved to stand beside Hayato. On the lord’s shaven scalp beads of water shivered a glimmering constellation.

“What happens when one man doesn’t assent?” said Bennosuke. “I suppose that makes me a bad samurai. I suppose that doesn’t make me a samurai at all. So what am I? I don’t know, but I really, really don’t care. I’m alive. And as far as you’re concerned, I am going to live forever.”

Hayato was sobbing, the shortsword feeble in his grasp. The stars
upon his pate were dashed as the lord looked up, pleading. Bennosuke tapped him on the stomach with the flat of his blade.

“Do it,” he said. “Do it, samurai.”

WHEN IT WAS
done, Bennosuke walked upstream looking skyward. Somewhere behind the clouds was Amaterasu. Around his feet darted the fingerlings of fish. Hidden by grass, cicadas sang their song. A swallow dived into the boughs of a tree, autumn leaves falling. The water and the clouds flowed on, ever on. It was all imperfect and wonderful. Tears streamed from his eyes as he realized it was over, and that of all this he was still a part.

He stripped off his gauntlets and beheld his hands; a dragonfly, mottled black and jade, settled on his wrist.

EPILOGUE

The clouds gathered and darkness fell, and on the corpse-strewn slopes of Sekigahara great bonfires were lit, lighting the faces of the dead and the living alike. The only men who rested were those who slept the slumber from which there was no waking. For the thousands still breathing there was work to be done through the night, for their Lord Tokugawa wanted to make a tower to commemorate the great victory he had won today.

He was lacking stone and mortar, so he had decided instead to use the heads of the enemy.

It was a command ghoulish only in the sheer scale of the work imposed on exhausted men. Other lords had been known to make far more capricious and macabre displays of might—stripping the enemy of their eyes, or their hands, or their manhood, or even all three, and then leaving them alive as an enduring, shambling warning. Tokugawa was indeed magnanimous in this, and so the men went about the task with a sense of pride at their lord’s virtue.

Indeed, they were making a celebration of it. Men sang the old songs as they searched in packs, smiling and passing bottles of sake among themselves, turning over corpses where they lay to see whether they were friend or foe. Friend they revered and shed tears for, foe they severed the head, stripped the body of armor and valuables, and then bore the cadaver to one of the bonfires. This was war—no time for priests or corpsehandlers.

The captured survivors of the Western army were rounded up beside the tower, more being brought in all the time as stragglers were caught in the hills. These men looked at their guards with hatred, for many of them had been their allies in the morning. For them, though,
there was to be no mercy—either a dignified seppuku or a blubbering decapitation.

Fifty men waited to behead them, famed swordsmen all. The soil around their feet had grown marshlike with blood, the hair upon their arms and the back of their necks burned away by the sheer heat of the fire they stood next to, but still their strikes were perfect, clean. There was no hesitation, no pause as they whittled down the thousands; a great machine into which the cowards and the unfortunate were fed.

Three of these swordsmen were of the Yoshioka school.

An enemy samurai was led up to them. He was calm, unafraid, and he dropped to his knees smoothly. He bowed to the Yoshioka, pushed a dagger up into himself, and then the leftmost one slashed his sword down and took his head.