Sword of Honour
Authors: David Kirk
Also by David Kirk:
Child of Vengeance
First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2015
A CBS COMPANY
Copyright © David Kirk 2015
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
®
and © 1997 Simon & Schuster Inc. All rights reserved.
The right of David Kirk to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
Simon & Schuster UK Ltd
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Simon & Schuster Australia, Sydney
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
HB ISBN: 978-1-47110-244-8
TPB ISBN: 978-1-47110-245-5
EBOOK ISBN: 978-1-47110-247-9
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to
actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh
Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
For Rona,
As much as a book of this sort can be for her.
Contents
PART IV: The Two Heavens as One
‘Do not mindlessly follow the way and customs of the world.’
Fifteenth precept of
Dokkodo
(
The Way of Walking Alone
)
Musashi Miyamoto, 1645
Colour was everything, colour was all.
The Forger of Souls looked up into the night sky and saw only the vast blackness, the white of stars and the grey of the shadows upon the autumn moon. The night was still and endless, and
amongst it all he thought himself invisible where he sat upon the hillside.
This was good; he needed this blackness. It was a canvas to contrast against.
‘O Forger of Souls,’ came a voice, ‘I believe the temperature to be adequate.’
The Forger turned and saw the dull red outline of his apprentice, lit by what burnt behind him in the small hut. The drapes and the doors of the building were cast open, and the roar of the
furnace within could be heard.
‘Good,’ said the Forger. ‘Let us go, boy.’
The Forger was an old man, and rose stiffly. He had a name of course, which his wife and his sons and daughters knew. But to everyone else he was only the Forger; what else could they call him
without insult? The apprentice in turn was thirty-four years old, but in their art was still fit only to be called ‘boy’. This the apprentice knew, and did not disagree with.
The pair of them went to the hut and slid in, quickly closing the doors behind them and then pulling down the heavy velvet drape, sealing them in darkness within darkness save for that which
burnt. As he turned inwards towards the furnace the Forger had to shield his eyes against the light for some time, feeling the familiar heat against the back of his hand, which had long ago been
scoured of any hair.
A pair of boys – actual boys, voices unbroken – worked a huge standing bellows, using the entirety of their bodies to force it through its wheezing motion, air heaving constant into
a small pile of coals the flames of which burnt just shy of blue. From underneath this pile the blackened handle of a perfectly straight rod of metal was clasped in a long, heavy pair of tongs. A
trough of water stood nearby.
Wordlessly the Forger took an iron poker and began to concentrate the coals along the centre line, underneath which the rod lay, and he snarled at the boys to quicken the bellows. They were
sweating and exhausted, having worked for near an hour already, but now they flung their weight with renewed determination. Their eyes shimmered with youthful awe; they could hardly believe that
they had been chosen by the Forger to be a part of this.
The apprentice, who many years ago had worn the same expression as he had worked the bellows, took the pair of tongs in his hands and stood braced and ready. He and the Forger had worked on the
rod for near two months already. They had taken the ingots of tamahagane steel that looked like no more than ossified turds, had heated and hammered them and then assembled them like a mosaic into
one long line segregated by which pieces the Forger deemed would yield hard metal and those that would yield soft. More hammering, more heat, forcing the steel together, and then the resultant rod
they had flattened and folded nine times.
That was the science and labour of it; what came tonight was the art.
The Forger needed the eye of a painter now, for the metal rod needed to be heated to the exact temperature, and the only way to judge this was by the colour it glowed. He had heard some men
describe this desired shade as that of the rising sun, others as burnished gold or persimmon peel. The Forger could not say with any clarity what colour he knew to be correct because he was not a
man of words, but over the course of decades he had come to know it fundamentally.
He nodded at his apprentice, and the man pulled the rod outwards from the furnace and held it at arm’s length up against the perfect blackness at the back of the hut. The rod glowed cerise
through the ashen murk of the clay slurry with which it had been coated. The Forger shook his head, and so back in it went. The Forger tossed more coals on, rifled through those already burning,
sparking them into greater flame, and shouted at the two boys for more air. Their little bodies bounced, bruises forming on their shoulders, and the flames roared and roared until the Forger saw in
them the purple-blue of the kakitsubata iris that flowered on the slopes in the early summer.
Twice more the rod was withdrawn and examined, and twice more it went back in. The third time it was so very close, so very near that the Forger took the tongs from his apprentice and began to
move the rod back and forth underneath the coals himself, twisting it from side to side where he knew it needed to be heated just that little bit more and then . . .
He hauled it out and offered it up to the darkness, frail old arms quivering with the weight. Vivid orange leading into glorious yellow rife with shimmering albescence – the rod sang
rightness. It was time, and so the Forger swivelled on his heels and plunged the rod into the water.
Steam rose, and through the tongs he could feel the pull of the metal warping. The rod squealed, bucked first forwards and then back as hard and soft metal fought against each other, and then
finally settled into a long and elegant curve, and thus the great transubstantiation was complete.
A sword was born.
When dawn had come they had scraped the clay from the cooled metal, and the four of them knelt covered in soot and ash and their hair in sweated disarray as the Forger held
the unsharpened blade upwards to the rising sun.
There was no religion here, not for this sword just quite yet. It was simple veneration and pride; the heavens were the heavens and men were men, and yet, of all the millions and millions of
creatures upon this plane, it was men alone who had looked into the long dark chaos of the earth and sought to understand it, to improve it, to perfect it.
The Forger held the immutable symbol of this fact skywards, and all bathed in the light.
Late in the year, Fifth Year of the Era of Keicho
Chapter One
Hear it! Proclaim it!
The sundered realm is made anew, the shattered gem whole once more! Upon the dales of Sekigahara east of the Great Lake Biwa a tower of thirty thousand heads stands in testament!
The Armies of the East are triumphant! Proclaim it!
Take it to the ashen slopes of the sleeping volcanoes spread beneath the amber sunsets of Kyushu, call it to the birds there as they flock south so they too may bear it forth across the
waves! Carry it northwards, to the very tips of frigid Michinoku and the shores of alien Yezo, scream it so that the bearded Ainu hear it clustered in their frozen holes!
All of Japan! Hear it!
Oh, the very land beneath our feet hums that we should live in such a time! A Shogunate dawns once more, the progenitor of order, the bestower of benevolent peace, the way of things restored
to how they ought to be! Serenity in the heavens, joy upon the earth!
Hail his militant grace the most noble Lord Ieyasu Tokugawa! Hail his imperial and undying majesty the Son of Heaven!
Swords at his sides, armour heavy upon him, onwards Bennosuke Shinmen walked in solitude. He had left battle behind him, left all behind him.
A glancing blow from an unseen weapon had split his scalp, and the clotted wound now throbbed in time with the beat of his heart. The white of his left eye had turned crimson. The flesh upon his
legs was scraped raw by the pinching of his greaves, knees and ankles calcified as he clambered over bush and trunk and waded through scrubland.
But he was alive. That alone was important, he knew now. He smiled as he suffered. Sekigahara, his enlightenment.
What things he had endured that day. Rout and defeat and the slaughter of those men that he had called comrade for two years. The army he fought for was vanquished, the powers that army served
laid low. But it was not a defeat for him – not for himself, not for
he
as an individual. He had fled the battle and yet no words like coward nor any sense of shame at all occurred
to him because he knew that he had not left in base terror but rather because his eyes had finally been opened.