Musashi: Bushido Code (35 page)

"Go ahead!" he urged. "Leave him to me!"

At exactly the same time, Kizaemon and Debuchi shoved Musashi forward. He stumbled four or five paces toward Kimura. Kimura stepped back a pace, lifted his elbow above his face, and sucking in his breath, swiftly brought his sword down toward Musashi's stumbling form. There was a curious gritty sound as the sword flashed through the air.

At the same time a shout was heard—not from Musashi but from Jōtarō, who had jumped out from his position behind the pine tree. The handful of sand he had thrown was the source of the strange noise.

Realizing that Kimura would be gauging the distance so as to strike effectively, Musashi had deliberately added speed to his stumbling steps and at the time of the strike was much closer to Kimura than the latter had anticipated. His sword touched nothing but air, and sand.

Both men quickly jumped back, separating themselves by three or four paces. There they stood, staring menacingly at one another in the tension-filled stillness.

"This is going to be something to watch," said Kizaemon softly.

Debuchi and Murata, though not within the sphere of battle, both took up new positions and assumed defensive stances. From what they had seen so far, they had no illusions about Musashi's competence as a fighter. His evasion and recovery had already convinced them he was a match for Kimura.

Kimura's sword was positioned slightly lower than his chest. He stood motionless. Musashi, equally still, had his hand on the hilt of his sword, right shoulder forward and elbow high. His eyes were two white, polished stones in his shadowy face.

For a time, it was a battle of nerves, but before either man moved, the darkness around Kimura seemed to waver, to change indefinably. Soon it was obvious that he was breathing faster and with greater agitation than Musashi.

A low grunt, barely audible, issued from Debuchi. He knew now that what had started as a comparatively trivial matter was about to turn into a catastrophe. Kizaemon and Murata, he felt sure, understood this as well as he. It was not going to be easy to put an end to this.

The outcome of the fight between Musashi and Kimura was as good as decided, unless extraordinary steps were taken. Reluctant as the three other men were to do anything that suggested cowardice, they found themselves forced to act to prevent disaster. The best solution would be to rid themselves of this strange, unbalanced intruder as expeditiously as possible, without themselves suffering needless wounds. No exchange of words was needed. They communicated perfectly with their eyes.

Acting in unison, the three moved in on Musashi. At the same instant, Musashi's sword, with the twang of a bowstring, pierced the air, and a thunderous shout filled the empty space. The battle cry came not from his mouth alone but from his whole body, the sudden peal of a temple bell resounding in all directions. From his opponents, arrayed to both sides of him, to front and back, came a hissing gurgle.

Musashi felt vibrantly alive. His blood seemed about to burst from every pore. But his head was as cool as ice. Was this the flaming lotus of which the Buddhists spoke? The ultimate heat made one with the ultimate cold, the synthesis of flame and water?

No more sand sailed through the air. Jōtarō had disappeared. Gusts of wind whistled down from the peak of Mount Kasagi; tightly held swords glinted luminescently.

One against four, yet Musashi felt himself at no great disadvantage. He was conscious of a swelling in his veins. At times like this, the idea of dying is said to assert itself in the mind, but Musashi had no thought of death. At the same time, he felt no certainty of his ability to win.

The wind seemed to blow through his head, cooling his brain, clearing his vision, though his body was growing sticky, and beads of oily sweat glistened on his forehead.

There was a faint rustle. Like a beetle's antennae, Musashi's sword told him that the man on his left had moved his foot an inch or two. He made the necessary adjustment in the position of his weapon, and the enemy, also perceptive, made no further move to attack. The five formed a seemingly static tableau.

Musashi was aware that the longer this continued, the less advantageous it was for him. He would have liked somehow to have his opponents not around him but stretched out in a straight line—to take them on one by one—but he was not dealing with amateurs. The fact was that until one of them shifted of his own accord, Musashi could make no move. All he could do was wait and hope that eventually one would make a momentary misstep and give him an opening.

His adversaries took little comfort from their superiority in numbers. They knew that at the slightest sign of a relaxed attitude on the part of any one of them, Musashi would strike. Here, they understood, was the type of man that one did not ordinarily encounter in this world.

Even Kizaemon could make no move. "What a strange man!" he thought to himself.

Swords, men, earth, sky—everything seemed to have frozen solid. But then into this stillness came a totally unexpected sound, the sound of a flute, wafted by the wind.

As the melody stole into Musashi's ears, he forgot himself, forgot the enemy, forgot about life and death. Deep in the recesses of his mind, he knew this sound, for it was the one that had enticed him out of hiding on Mount Takateru—the sound that had delivered him into the hands of Takuan. It was Otsū's flute, and it was Otsū playing it.

He went limp inside. Externally, the change was barely perceptible, but that was enough. With a battle cry rising from his loins, Kimura lunged forward, his sword arm seeming to stretch out six or seven feet.

Musashi's muscles tensed, and the blood seemed to rush through him toward a state of hemorrhage. He was sure he had been cut. His left sleeve was rent from shoulder to wrist, and the sudden exposure of his arm made him think the flesh had been cut open.

For once, his self-possession left him and he screamed out the name of the god of war. He leaped, turned suddenly, and saw Kimura stumble toward the place where he himself had been standing.

"Musashi!" shouted Debuchi Magobei.

"You talk better than you fight!" taunted Murata, as he and Kizaemon scrambled to head Musashi off.

But Musashi gave the earth a powerful kick and sprang high enough to brush against the lower branches of the pine trees. Then he leaped again and again, and off he flew into the darkness, never looking back.

"Coward!"

"Musashi!"

"Fight like a man!"

When Musashi reached the edge of the moat around the inner castle, there was a cracking of twigs, and then silence. The only sound was the sweet melody of the flute in the distance.

The Nightingales

There was no way of knowing how much stagnant rainwater might be at the bottom of the thirty-foot moat. After diving into the hedge near the top and rapidly sliding halfway down, Musashi stopped and threw a rock. Hearing no splash, he leapt to the bottom, where he lay down on his back in the grass, not making a sound.

After a time his ribs stopped heaving and his pulse returned to normal. As the sweat cooled, he began to breathe regularly again.

"Otsū couldn't be here at Koyagyū!" he told himself. "My ears must be playing tricks on me.... Still, it's not impossible. It could have been her."

As he debated with himself, he envisioned Otsū's eyes among the stars above him, and soon he was carried away by memories: Otsū at the pass on the Mimasaka-Harima border, where she had said she could not live without him, there was no other man in the world for her. Then at Hanada Bridge in Himeji, when she had told him how she had waited for him for nearly a thousand days and would have waited ten years, or twenty—until she was old and gray. Her begging him to take her with him, her assertion that she could bear any hardship.

His headlong flight at Himeji had been a betrayal. How she must have hated him after that! How she must have bit her lips and cursed the unpredictability of men.

"Forgive me!" The words he had carved on the railing of the bridge slipped from his lips. Tears seeped from the corners of his eyes.

He was startled by a cry from the top of the moat. It sounded like, "He's not here." Three or four pine torches flickered among the trees, then disappeared. They hadn't spotted him.

He was annoyed to find himself weeping. "What do I need with a woman?" he said scornfully, wiping his eyes with his hands. He jumped to his feet and looked up at the black outline of Koyagyū Castle.

"They called me a coward, said I couldn't fight like a man! Well, I haven't surrendered yet, not by a long shot. I didn't run away. I just made a tactical retreat."

Almost an hour had passed. He began walking slowly along the bottom of the moat. "No point in fighting those four anyway. That wasn't my aim to begin with. When I find Sekishūsai himself, then the real battle will start."

He stopped and began gathering fallen branches, which he broke into short sticks over his knee. Shoving them one by one into cracks in the stone wall, he used them for footholds and climbed out of the moat.

He could no longer hear the flute. For a second he had the vague feeling Jōtarō was calling, but when he stopped and listened closely, he could hear nothing. He wasn't really worried about the boy. He could take care of himself; he was probably miles away by now. The absence of torches indicated the search had been called off, at least for the night.

The thought of finding and defeating Sekishūsai was once again his controlling passion, the immediate shape taken by his overpowering desire for recognition and honor.

He had heard from the innkeeper that Sekishūsai's retreat was in neither of the castle encirclements but in a secluded spot in the outer grounds. He walked through the woods and valleys, at times suspecting he had strayed outside the castle grounds. Then a bit of moat, a stone wall or a rice granary would reassure him he was still inside.

All night he searched, compelled by a diabolic urge. He intended, once he had found the mountain house, to burst in with his challenge on his lips. But as the hours wore on, he would have welcomed the sight of even a ghost appearing in Sekishūsai's form.

It was getting on toward daybreak when he found himself at the back gate of the castle. Beyond it rose a precipice and above that Mount Kasagi. On the verge of screaming with frustration, he retraced his steps southward. Finally, at the bottom of a slope inclined toward the southeast quarter of the castle, well-shaped trees and well-trimmed grass told him he'd found the hideaway. His conjecture was soon confirmed by a gate, with a thatched roof, in the style favored by the great tea master Sen no Rikyū. Inside he could make out a bamboo grove shrouded in morning mist.

Peeking through a crack in the gate, he saw that the path meandered through the grove and up the hill, as in Zen Buddhist mountain retreats. For a moment he was tempted to leap over the fence, but he checked himself; something about the surroundings held him back. Was it the loving care that had been lavished on the area, or the sight of white petals on the ground? Whatever it was, the sensitivity of the occupant came through, and Musashi's agitation subsided. He suddenly thought of his appearance. He must look like a tramp, with his disheveled hair and his kimono in disarray.

"No need to rush," he said to himself, conscious now of his exhaustion. He had to pull himself together before presenting himself to the master inside.

"Sooner or later," he thought, "someone's bound to come to the gate. That'll be time enough. If he still refuses to see me as a wandering student, then I'll use a different approach." He sat down under the eaves of the gate, leaned his back against the post and dropped off to sleep.

The stars were fading and white daisies swaying in the breeze when a large drop of dew fell coldly on his neck and woke him up. Daylight had come, and as he stirred from his nap, his head was cleansed by the morning breeze and the singing of the nightingales. No vestige of weariness remained: he felt reborn.

Rubbing his eyes and looking up, he saw the bright red sun climbing over the mountains. He jumped up. The sun's heat had already rekindled his ardor, and the strength stored up in his limbs demanded action. Stretching, he said softly, "Today's the day."

He was hungry, and for some reason this made him think about Jōtarō. Perhaps he had treated the boy too roughly the night before, but it had been a calculated move, a part of the lad's training. Musashi again assured himself that Jōtarō, wherever he was, wasn't in any real danger.

He listened to the sound of the brook, which ran down the mountainside, detoured inside the fence, circled the bamboo grove and then emerged from under the fence on its journey toward the lower castle grounds. Musashi washed his face and drank his fill, in lieu of breakfast. The water was good, so good that Musashi imagined it might well be the main reason Sekishūsai had chosen this location for his retirement from the world. Still, knowing nothing of the art of the tea ceremony, he had no inkling that water of such purity was in fact the answer to a tea master's prayer.

He rinsed his hand towel in the stream, and having wiped the back of his neck thoroughly, cleaned the grime from his nails. He then tidied his hair with the stiletto attached to his sword. Since Sekishūsai was not only the master of the Yagyū Style but one of the greatest men in the land, Musashi intended to look his best; he himself was nothing but a nameless warrior, as different from Sekishūsai as the tiniest star is from the moon.

Patting his hair and straightening his collar, he felt inwardly composed. His mind was clear; he was resolved to knock at the gate like any legitimate caller.

The house was quite a way up the hill, and it wasn't likely an ordinary knock would be heard. Looking around for a clapper of some kind, he saw a pair of plaques, one on either side of the gate. They were beautifully inscribed, and the carved writing had been filled in with a bluish clay which gave off a bronze-like patina. On the right were the words:

Be not suspicious, ye scribes,

Of one who likes his castle closed.

And on the left:

No swordsman will you find here,

Only the young nightingales in the fields.

The poem was addressed to the "scribes," referring to the officials of the castle, but its meaning was deeper. The old man had not shut his gate merely to wandering students but to all the affairs of this world, to its honors as well as its tribulations. He had put behind him worldly desire, both his own and that of others.

"I'm still young," thought Musashi. "Too young! This man is completely beyond my reach."

The desire to knock on the gate evaporated. Indeed, the idea of barging in on the ancient recluse now seemed barbarian, and he felt totally ashamed of himself.

Only flowers and birds, the wind and the moon, should enter this gate. Sekishūsai was no longer the greatest swordsman in the land, no longer the lord of a fief, but a man who had returned to nature, renouncing the vanity of human life. To upset his household would be a sacrilege. And what honor, what distinction, could possibly be derived from defeating a man to whom honor and distinction had become meaningless?

"It's a good thing I read this," Musashi said to himself. "If I hadn't, I'd have made a perfect fool of myself!"

With the sun now fairly high in the sky, the nightingales' singing had subsided. From a distance up the hill came the sound of rapid footsteps. Apparently frightened by the clatter, a flock of little birds arced up into the sky. Musashi peeped through the gate to see who was coming.

It was Otsū.

So it had been her flute he had heard! Should he wait and meet her? Go away? "I want to talk with her," he thought. "I must!"

Indecision seized him. His heart palpitated and his self-confidence fled. Otsū ran down the path to a point a few feet from where he stood. Then she stopped and turned back, uttering a little cry of surprise.

"I thought he was right behind me," she murmured, looking all around. Then she ran back up the hill, calling, "Jōtarō! Where are you?"

Hearing her voice, Musashi flushed with embarrassment and began to sweat. His lack of confidence disgusted him. He couldn't move from his hiding place in the shadow of the trees.

After a short interval, Otsū called again, and this time there was an answer.

"I'm here. Where are you?" shouted Jōtarō from the upper part of the grove. "Over here!" she replied. "I told you not to wander off like that."

Jōtarō came running toward her. "Oh, is this where you are?" he exclaimed. "Didn't I tell you to follow me?"

"Well, I did, but then I saw a pheasant, so I chased it."

"Of all things, chasing after a pheasant! Did you forget you have to go look for somebody important this morning?"

"Oh, I'm not worried about him. He's not the kind to get hurt."

"Well, that's not the way it was last night when you came running to my room. You were ready to burst into tears."

"I was not! It just happened so fast, I didn't know what to do."

"I didn't either, especially after you told me your teacher's name." "But how do you know Musashi?"

"We come from the same village."

"Is that all?"

"Of course that's all."

"That's funny. I don't see why you should start crying just because somebody from the same village turned up here."

"Was I crying that much?"

"How can you remember everything I did, when you can't remember what you did yourself? Anyway, I guess I was pretty scared. If it'd just been a matter of four ordinary men against my teacher, I wouldn't have worried, but they say all of them are experts. When I heard the flute I remembered you were here in the castle, so I thought maybe if I could apologize to his lordship—"

"If you heard me playing, Musashi must have heard it too. He may even have known it was me." Her voice softened. "I was thinking of him as I played."

"I don't see what difference that makes. Anyway, I could tell from the sound of the flute where you were."

"And that was quite a performance—storming into the house and screaming about a 'battle' going on somewhere. His lordship was pretty shocked."

"But he's a nice man. When I told him I'd killed Tarō, he didn't get mad like all the others."

Suddenly realizing she was wasting time, Otsū hurried toward the gate. "We can talk later," she said. "Right now there are more important things to do. We've got to find Musashi. Sekishūsai even broke his own rule by saying he'd like to meet the man who'd done what you said."

Otsū looked as cheerful as a flower. In the bright sun of early summer, her cheeks shone like ripening fruit. She sniffed at the young leaves and felt their freshness fill her lungs.

Musashi, hidden in the trees, watched her intently, marveling at how healthy she looked. The Otsū he saw now was very different from the girl who had sat dejectedly on the porch of the Shippōji, looking out at the world with vacant eyes. The difference was that then Otsū had had no one to love. Or at least, such love as she had felt had been vague and difficult to pin down. She had been a sentimental child, self-conscious about being an orphan, and somewhat resentful of the fact.

Coming to know Musashi, having him to look up to, had given birth to the love that now dwelt inside her and gave meaning to her life. During the long year she'd spent wandering around in search of him, body and mind had developed the courage to face anything fate might fling at her.

Quickly perceiving her new vitality and how beautiful it made her, Musashi yearned to take her somewhere where they could be alone and tell her everything—how he longed for her, how he needed her physically. He wanted to reveal that hidden in his heart of steel was a weakness; he wanted to retract the words he had carved on Hanada Bridge. If no one were to know, he could show her how tender he could be. He would tell her he felt the same love for her that she felt for him. He could hug her, rub his cheek against hers, cry the tears he wanted to cry. He was strong enough now to admit to himself that these feelings were real.

Things Otsū had said to him in the past came back to him and he saw how cruel and ugly it was for him to reject the simple, straightforward love she had offered.

He was miserable, yet there was something in him that couldn't surrender to these feelings, something that told him it was wrong. He was two different men, one longing to call out to Otsū, the other telling him he was a fool. He couldn't be sure which was his real self. Staring from behind the tree, lost in indecision, he seemed to see two paths ahead, one of light and another of darkness.