Sword of Honour (21 page)

‘What is this hex?’ quailed the samurai, clutching at his rosary. ‘Is she a fox-demon?’

The Tokugawa samurai had seen the disturbance and they hurried over, twelve of them with twelve cruciform spears. Harried, choking on the heat, they were all of them in a foul mood and the
points of their weapons were lowered eagerly at Musashi and the affronted samurai. Even they, however, were unsure how to treat Ameku still in her terrifying passion.

‘Desist!’ shouted their leader at her, for he did not know what else to do and it showed in his eyes. ‘Desist!’

Yae pulled on Ameku’s sleeve. Ameku let the note she was singing fade through a choking rattle into silence, but she kept her blighted eyes open and staring towards the samurai who had
taken to murmuring the name of the Amida Buddha in warding. In the wake of the commotion, Akiyama’s horse was panicked, bucking and whinnying beneath him as he spoke to the leader of the
Tokugawa samurai.

‘Good sir samurai,’ he said, speaking quickly and deferentially, for he knew that crucifixes might await. ‘You are vigil and just, but there is no crime here, only a
restlessness caused by—’

The leader ignored him. ‘Your names?’ he demanded of the two swordsman.

‘Eijun Yamanaka.’

‘Musashi Miyamoto.’

‘Eijun Yamanaka, Musashi Miyamoto,’ said the leader, and Akiyama heard the tone of his voice and dread took him as he thought of the pronouncement to come. ‘You are hereby
formally ordered by the imperially ordained Shogunate of his most noble Lord Tokugawa to remove yourselves from before these walls immediately. Disperse in peace, in separate directions.’

Musashi was seething, Eijun unimpressed.

‘We obey,’ said Akiyama, and bowed in the saddle.

Quickly he took Miyamoto by the shoulder once more, and turned him away before the Tokugawa samurai might command a graver punishment. He did not know why the man was beholden to such leniency,
but neither would he question it. Miyamoto jerked free of Akiyama’s warding hand and strode off without looking back, and the crowd parted for him. Akiyama nodded at Yae, and the girl led
Ameku through the cleared channel. The pale-eyed samurai then followed behind both of them on his horse. His instinct was to shield them, but it was unneeded. There was not a person there that
would dare to provoke the foreign woman once more.

Akiyama turned to look over his shoulder only a single time. The samurai Eijun was still there. To his surprise, however, he found that Eijun was not looking vengefully at Miyamoto or fearfully
at Ameku.

Instead, he was looking straight at him.

Akiyama returned the samurai’s gaze for a moment, then righted himself in the saddle and left the crowd behind them. Miyamoto stalked on ahead without looking back, and when they were
alone Ameku took to screaming at his back. She called him idiot, she called him fool, and then she began spitting long and vicious things in her own tongue. She seemed embarrassed more than
anything, had pulled her hair across her face once more, and it appeared she had no intention of sparing Miyamoto for making her feel such.

Akiyama did not say anything. Seeing such raw, naked anger as this was unusual to him, and he wondered if in her land they had no concept of restraint. Then he wondered if this perhaps was not
better, to simply expunge oneself of all emotion when it occurred rather than to accrue it until it combined with other furies, magnified them, all festering within until it simply could not be
contained any longer.

He kept silent, though, let the pressure of his own inner turmoil bubble away at a constant.

‘Why?’ Ameku persisted in asking Miyamoto in stunted bursts, her anger robbing her of fluency in the language. ‘Why do you make me . . . ? Why fight? Why do you want to fight?
How many men there?’

At the fifth or sixth time of asking Miyamoto was finally provoked. He stopped and turned and stood with his lean frame hunched and coiled as though he might strike at anything, and as he spoke
he looked solely at Ameku: ‘Don’t you understand?’ he said. ‘That is samurai. That is the Way. I told you. Men like that. That . . . hubris. Standing there assuming
authority, as though he were on some righteous vigil. What authority? Authority he gave himself! I see it, I see men like that, and it is as though I am burnt. Burnt with something for which there
is no balm. Do you not feel it? Knowing that what stands before you is wrong, entirely wrong.’

‘Him . . . ?
He
is wrong?’ asked Ameku.

‘Yes!’ spat Miyamoto, and he spat it with such hatred that Akiyama was moved to try to calm the situation.

‘A samurai’s first and ultimate enemy is always himself,’ he said.

Miyamoto turned his gaze to Akiyama. ‘I am no samurai,’ he uttered.

It was all he needed to say, perhaps all he could say. He turned and left. Not one of the three of them he left behind him made to follow, watched him stride off away. They were by the banks of
the river Katsura, broad and shallow, lush green grass soft and vital all around them. Akiyama’s horse flicked its tail at the minute insects that clouded around it. He could think of nothing
to say, and so he simply looked across the waters for a moment at the walls of the city on the far side, and they were dark and impenetrable and offered no comfort.

Ameku took a breath, and with that the tension slid out of her. She set her hair back over her shoulders, sniffed, and then jerked her head. Yae, who had been hiding behind her, led her onwards.
In wordless consent they followed the path Miyamoto had taken. Akiyama flicked the reins and the horse matched their gentle pace.

‘What . . . What is this?’ Ameku said. ‘Him . . . Can you believe?’

‘It was quite a reaction,’ said Akiyama.

‘This morning, he was calm. Asked gentle things. Different. And now . . .’

She was not wrong. The change in Miyamoto was startling to Akiyama both in its scale and its immediate revelation. Secluded in the wild, tending to his wounds, Miyamoto had been placid and
considered, a reticent speaker. Here, though, was the man he had hunted, the face he remembered facing down at the end of the sword, the outlaw who shouted his name and threatened priests and cut
down trees to prove his point.

‘This morning,’ said Ameku, ‘he told me he was honest. Well . . . which is it? Is this him as he truly is?’

Akiyama did not answer.

They went on in silence for a while. They passed a man thigh-deep in the waters casting out fishing nets, and he had snared already that day for on the banks a fat trout lay glistening in the
sun. Akiyama realized this was the first time he was alone with the woman and the girl. He wondered without malice why it was they were even here. He himself thought it dubious that they should
accompany the swordsmen given the ultimate purpose of their journey, but it was Miyamoto who had over the course of days insisted.

Why was this? If Miyamoto wanted witnesses to what he was attempting, the blinded were a poor choice.

Yet there were things that he wanted to ask, and his curiosity grew until it could not be contained. ‘If I might ask of you a question, lady?’ he dared to venture.

Ameku grunted.

He chose his words with care, and he asked with utmost honesty, ‘Before, as you chanted . . . were you summoning the Christ?’

‘Who?’ she said.

‘Aren’t all foreigners Christian?’

‘No!’ she said, and a hint of her anger resurfaced. ‘It is . . . old things, old words, old prayers I do not . . . It is a thing to stop storms, sea storms. I do not like to .
. . But him,’ she said, and waved to where she thought Miyamoto was. ‘Because of him, I must.’

‘A queller of tempests,’ said Akiyama, mulling it over. ‘The power of your voice belies your stature. For a woman of your size to chant in so grand a manner . . . You must have
had some form of training, no?’

Yae looked up at Akiyama and gestured silently for him to cease his questions. The samurai did not wish to pry, and heeded her.

Some time later they found Miyamoto waiting for them. He was crouched down by the river’s edge tossing pebbles into the water, and he seemed fascinated by the rings they cast out. Perhaps
it had calmed him. His anger had lessened, or he had forced it tight within himself, but regardless he offered no apology for it.

‘Where are we headed, then, if the city is denied us?’ he called as they approached.

‘There are two places as I see it,’ said Akiyama. ‘There are the slums of Maruta, which lie outside the walls of the city to the north-east. No man of the Yoshioka would risk
the dishonour of being sighted in so lowly a place. Or there is Mount Hiei, a little beyond that. The monks will provide us sanctuary.’

‘Which is your preference?’

‘Hiei, though the walk is a little more arduous. My ancestral crypt lies upon its slopes, and in truth I worry for how it has been tended in my absence,’ said Akiyama. Then he added,
‘Maruta also has a certain odour at this time of year which I am not eager to experience.’

‘Hiei, then. Show me the way.’

It was the late afternoon by the time they reached the foot of holy mount Hiei, where men had studied the Enlightened Teachings for a thousand years. There was nothing visually remarkable about
it to distinguish it from the other nearby mountains, a low and forested slope with a blunted peak. They ascended its trails shaded by the boughs of the trees that surrounded them and watched by
the time-ravaged faces of carvings of the manifold Buddhas. Salamanders striped black and white skittered before them, and above them fawn monkeys capered.

It was all calm and placid, a place of considered thought, yet Akiyama felt no contentment. He watched Miyamoto, and wondered what it was that boiled within his heart. For the first time he was
acutely aware he had made the decision to follow a man near twenty years his junior. They should have been in the city now, perhaps standing as he had stood a hundred times before beneath the gates
of the Hongan temple looking up at their inner roofs painted like lotus ponds, but Miyamoto’s temper had spoilt that hope, and they walked as exiles yet. Hiei tonight, but where was the
ultimate destination of their journey?

He sat feeling unsteady in his saddle with his faith wavering, and then at a curving of the path suddenly the trees cleared and they were afforded a view across the city of Kyoto lit by the
golden haze of the setting sun opposite them in the west. A view so remarkable that it rose Akiyama up in his saddle. Immutable, enduring, beautiful. Unlike any other city in the nation, unlike any
in this world for all he knew.

He looked and saw it all. The tiered majesty of the multitude of temple pagodas that reigned benevolent, their curved roofs set entirely symmetrical, beautiful spears that sat to catch the sun.
The broad peaks of the Son of Heaven’s palace that emerged from the high walls of his compound like celestial mountaintops through mist, crested with golden statues of peacocks and dragons
and lions. The paddy fields that capped the city to the north and the south, there in case of siege, here shimmered and reflected and seemed to hold all between them with hands of light.

This was what he had wanted to see. If something like this was in the world, then the world could not be so foul. There was hope in him suddenly, hope as warm as the light they all bathed in,
and he looked over at Miyamoto and found that hope grow. Gone was the fury. The young man was taken by wonder, and in that look Akiyama saw once more the higher thing he had believed in, had
elected to heed.

He smiled and said to the young swordsman, ‘Your mouth is flapping open like a carp’s.’

‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen trees as tall as those,’ Miyamoto said, pointing at the towers of the various pagodas. ‘How is it that men can make such
things?’

‘In truth I do not know myself. Each houses a Bodhisattva’s bones, or so I’ve heard.’

‘The mathematics behind them . . .’

He stared on. Akiyama looked over the city fondly. No words were needed.

‘I am tired,’ Ameku said from behind them. ‘Come. Move. Go. On. Up.’

Akiyama turned and saw the woman clutching Yae’s hand. He realized the folly, and felt a great pity that Ameku was denied this experience, would have had to rely on the words of a child to
sense anything at all. He nodded to the girl and made to kick his steed onwards up the path once more, when Miyamoto asked him a question.

‘What’s that in the west?’ he said. ‘Looks as though they are constructing something.’

Akiyama looked and saw there was a swathe of land that had been cleared and razed flat, like an ochre square cut out of the cityscape. A great cloud of birds were circling above it. ‘I had
heard before I departed that the Shogun was planning on erecting a castle in the city,’ he said. His lip curled. ‘What an ugly thing.’

Chapter Thirteen

Goemon stood and watched the crows circling above. They were a constant here at the emergent castle of the Shogun Tokugawa. Great mounds of shells of oysters and scallops and
mussels were stacked high before the castle, the insides of them shimmering with pink-green-blue nacre, and the birds waited to swoop down and steal one hoping that some scrap of flesh yet lingered
within.

The shells were a national tithe. They awaited burning, the ash of them a fundamental component of the mortar that would form the foundations of the castle. The mounds of them so many and so
tall that the jokes ran of a fresh range of mountains sprouting in the city: Tokugawa’s Fuji, ringed not by clouds but by carrion seekers.

Usually, boys circled in turn beneath the birds with long sticks daring the creatures to dive; they charged with the shells’ protection, and usually the street rang with the shrieks of
their struggle.

Today, though, silence.

The castle was only a year into its construction, no great spires or buttresses stood yet. The land had been cleared, the outer moat had been dug fifteen paces wide and the height of three men
deep, and now the slow process of lining the walls of it with stone was under way. All had been progressing well, until today.

Goemon watched the crows for as long as he could. They were so enviously free, moving without effort, coasting, gliding. He wished that he could do such. Motion was agony to him. Standing was
agony. The length of him hurt still from the force of the suicide blast, the flesh beneath his clothes mottled with ugly queer-coloured bruises. He rolled his jaw out of recent recuperating habit,
felt his ears still popping like the sound of wood burning.