Sword of Honour (29 page)

‘Do you see?’ said Denshichiro.

He spoke to his younger brother, Matashichiro. They stood beneath the gates looking up at the head. Near a decade separated the pair of them but the blood of the Yoshioka was strong and the
resemblance was budding keen. Matashichiro had been a heavy child, a round face without definition of cheek or nose or chin, arms that seemed fat, and this softness was only just starting to harden
into muscle like that of both of his brothers, his shoulders widening, ears growing callused from wrestling, lithic masculinity forcing its way onto his brow as the dimple of his smile grew
shallower.

‘Do you see?’ said Denshichiro again. He had both his hands on the boy’s shoulders.

‘I see,’ said Matashichiro.

‘What do you see?’

‘A head. I have seen heads before. I am not afraid of it.’

‘Good. But this is much more than that.’

‘The Foreigner.’

‘Yes.’

‘Was his blood a different colour?’

‘No. Red as yours or mine.’

‘Then why do you make me stare at it?’

‘Because he was a traitor, and now the city can mark him as such.’

‘Is that important?’

Denshichiro patted his shoulders. ‘Here is a thing our father told me when I was your age: you have no true existence of your own. Do you understand that?’

Matashichiro did not want to admit any fallibility. Stubbornly he tried to formulate an answer but the words did not come. Denshichiro spun the boy around to face him.

‘In my dreams, I dream of flying,’ he said, reciting his father’s words as he saw them in his memory, even the tone of his voice warping to try to replicate the profundity he
had felt as a child. ‘I am certain I can fly. I soar with such grace that even the birds envy me, and all the world is mine to traverse.’

Denshichiro spread his arms and flapped them as though they were the frantic wings of a startled pigeon. Matashichiro did not laugh as the child Denshichiro had laughed, but a glimmer of mirth
appeared in the boy’s eyes.

‘There is my actual flight,’ said Denshichiro. ‘What I feel of myself, of my own existence or my own virtue in my own heart is of the exact same worth. The only place you find
true existence is in the hearts of others.’

Above them a fly landed on the Foreigner’s lower lip, furtively broached the ridge of his teeth and crawled inside the fetid cavern of his mouth.

Denshichiro spoke on in warm reminiscence: ‘I remember when I was young, very young, well before your birth, I stood outside those gates and I watched our father return from a duel. The
sun was setting and everything was orange. The man he had killed was called Mitsusue Watari. I remember that well, I have a fine memory for names. Father came up the avenue with Watari’s head
held in one hand. Blood was dripping from the neck onto the earth, and the spatters of it were treated like clusters of fragile flowers by the crowd that followed him, things to be stepped
delicately around.

‘I swear to you, though, Father looked as though he deserved that wake behind him. What finer thing had been done in the city that day, that year? He did not look at Seijuro or me as he
approached the gates. What mattered to him was the head of Watari and the very same spike up there that now holds that traitor’s head. That alone. When he pressed Watari’s head down on
the spike his mouth opened, and I swear to you again I felt the breath of glory blow from it. Felt it pass across my face, and it blew through all those watching people too. Father turned to them,
and he said, “Naokata Yoshioka, proud servant of Kyoto!”’

Denshichiro had dropped into a squat now to look levelly into his brother’s eyes. ‘Then and there, he lived. Lived not in the manner of drawing breath or eating food, but
lived.
I understood what he meant. If he had killed Watari in solitude and had no witness but for himself, what worth his ability? As substantial as a dream of flight. Father, though,
brought his own existence into being, enkindled it in every watching heart. The blood on his hands was not blood, but the chrism of the city. Do you understand, Matashichiro?’

The boy thought about it. ‘A crime is not a crime, then, unless others are there to witness it?’

A momentary irritation flickered across Denshichiro’s face. ‘Sin is sin,’ he said. ‘What the Foreigner did was unpardonable. A crime regardless. What I have humbly done
is ensure that all will remember the traitor how one such as he ought to be remembered . . .’
and the worth of my own hand substantiated.
‘This is right and just.’

‘And what of the six men that failed to return with you?’ called Seijuro.

The eldest of the Yoshioka brothers was sitting within earshot on the wooden steps of the forehall, both hands resting on the pommel of his longsword and the point of its scabbard in the dirt.
He had the same eyes as Denshichiro, the same line of his jaw, but he was slightly leaner and taller and his features settled more naturally into a cold expression rather than the permanent
simmering glower that beset his brother.

He had been staring grimly up at the head of the Foreigner since it had been raised.

Denshichiro rose to stand. ‘As I told you, brother, when I became aware of their failure, the monks were already roused into a furore, and I assume the masterless was amongst
them.’

‘Heed this lesson, Matashichiro,’ said Seijuro. ‘When you commit to something, see it through to its entire completion. Vague resolve, dishonest resolve is the scourge of this
world.’

‘What was I to do?’ said Denshichiro. ‘Cut down the holy men to get to him?’

Seijuro sucked air through his teeth scornfully. ‘You made the initial choice to broach the holy mountain.’

The brothers looked at each other. Words went unspoken in the blackening silence. It was then that Tadanari entered the yard. He was staring at the head of the Foreigner, his eyes wide and
scandalized.

‘What madness has gone on this day?’ he breathed.

‘That one returned in the company of a masterless,’ said Denshichiro jerking his chin at the trophy. ‘I punished him for his renunciation. You needn’t concern
yourself.’

‘On Mount Hiei,’ stated Tadanari.

Denshichiro’s pupils vanished up into his skull for a moment. ‘You as well?’ he said. ‘Our right of vengeance supersedes any stigma. The Lord Oda scoured Hiei. Why not I
also?’

‘A million voices proclaimed Hiei holy before the Lord Oda raised his sole objection. Which of them lives yet, the mountain or the man?’

Denshichiro grunted, waved a dismissive hand.

Tadanari said, ‘The city speaks of outrage, of desecrators and violators. Streets ringing with it. I have heard laughter also, mockery of a pompous hubris.’

‘Let them talk,’ snarled Denshichiro. ‘They will come to their senses when they realize the cause. Let them look upon that head. Faithful to the Way, I.’

Tadanari could put an authority of years in his eyes when he so desired. He let silence break those words apart. Denshichiro looked away, crossed his arms and stared up at the head of the
Foreigner.

‘Very soon,’ said Tadanari to the side of his skull, ‘you and I shall talk. But now your negligence to your own wild desire has left us with an issue of a greater urgency. I
heard that this masterless overcame ten of our adepts in a single encounter. I shall assume that this is an exaggeration.’

‘Six,’ said Seijuro.

‘Six?’ said Tadanari. ‘Impossible.’

‘Apparently not.’

‘What is his name?’

‘Musashi Miyamoto.’

‘Of which school?’

Seijuro shrugged.

‘Do we know anything of him at all?’ Tadanari demanded, aghast.

‘Were you not the one who sent the Foreigner out after this man?’ sneered Denshichiro.

‘Years prior,’ said Tadanari. ‘It is not my duty to delve into the pasts of the low men that earn their place upon the list, only to assure myself of their end.’

‘Well,’ said Denshichiro, turning his eyes back to the flies that clouded about the Foreigner, ‘the boys who scoured Miyamoto out for me told me he was as tall a man as they
had ever seen, but slender like he was starved. Long arms, big reach, but frailty in this I should expect.’

Tadanari clasped his hands before him, took a breath and looked at the dust at his feet to level himself. ‘Miyamoto must have been aided by an unknown agent. Overcoming six men is absurd.
But neither can we dismiss him as unskilled. How long were they in collusion, Sir Akiyama and this masterless? How much of our Way did Akiyama divulge, how many secrets?’

‘Revered counsel,’ said Seijuro to Tadanari, and Denshichiro seethed inwardly at the obsequiousness, ‘what course do you think the school should pursue?’

‘I am not the head of the school,’ said the bald samurai. ‘Here is the weight you must learn to bear, Seijuro. How is it you intend to steer us through another’s
tempest?’

A group of adepts came into the yard through the main gate. They were agitated, striding quickly, all of them wearing expressions of varying degrees of anger. At their head was Ujinari. He saw
his father and the three Yoshioka brothers, and came over immediately. In his hands he carried a folded bolt of cloth.

‘We found this nailed to the public notice board by the gates of the Hokyo temple,’ he said. ‘Nailed with a shortsword.’

Ujinari unfurled what he held. It was a jacket of the school, bloodied and torn. He held it by the shoulders and spread it wide, and then showed them the back of it. There, written in a wild
hand, black on the colour of tea, were the words:

Violated Hiei to try to kill Musashi Miyamoto.

Failed, with five other men.

Musashi Miyamoto awaits you now, Seijuro Yoshioka!

‘It was quite a crowd that beheld it,’ said Ujinari.

Seijuro looked at the slashes that had split the silk, at the stains that had crisped it.

‘Well,’ he said, and took a slow, deep breath, ‘the resolution to this seems fairly obvious.’

Chapter Eighteen

The city saw them nailed up where bloodied jackets had hung not hours before and on each and every street beside. Written in two dozen neat and cultured hands, the curvature of
the letters different but the message the same:

Tomorrow

The Moor at the Temple of Rendai

The Hour of the Rooster

Adept of the sword, Seijuro Yoshioka of Kyoto, commands the masterless Musashi Miyamoto to present himself for a duel, to account for the recent disturbance he caused at Mt
Hiei.

Should he not appear, all will know his cowardice.

These up before the coming of night and with the dawn a response was found beneath the eaves of the grand gate of the Hongan temple where it could not be missed. None dared
touch it, not even the priests, all staring at it until tea-coloured samurai came and tore it down, bore it away:

The time of your humbling is nigh, Seijuro!

Await me!

*

It began, for Seijuro, with earth. Earth of the dojo hall, which he stood barefoot upon, clawed his toes into. Squatted down, pushed his fingers through it, brought it up to his
cheeks, his brow, his lips.

Earth my father walked,
he said within,
Earth my grandfather walked. Do you contain some remnant echo of their spirits?

Daubed in dust, he knelt now before the shrine upon the wall, before the portraits of those two men, as well as his great uncle Naomoto. There Seijuro stayed for a long time.

Though he remembered little of his great-uncle he knew that this was the man who had raised the Yoshioka to their pinnacle, who had won the admiration and the patronage of the Ashikaga
Shogunate, and this he revered.

His grandfather he tangibly recalled, he the man who had first let Seijuro hold the longsword, the old man wrapping his hands around his own still infant soft, showing him the method of grip
with the little finger, the ring finger, the squeeze of Grandfather’s hands strong then but in the memory now an infallible strength, an eternal strength.

And his father, he whom Seijuro had followed more than any other man, literally followed with every muscle of the body as he memorized taught technique, methods of the blade, no kindness given,
none asked, only knowledge, raw knowledge with which Seijuro had adorned himself, let form around him as surely as the flesh atop his bones.

I need not your strength this day,
he said to the three of them,
I wish only for your acknowledgement.

To his sword, then, which lay stripped and naked by a large vat of water. He set his whetstone into the liquid, then let it rest upon a thin plank dripping down, circles forming on the surface,
receding, vanishing. The blade he wrapped in tough cloth and then took in both hands, and so Seijuro set about sharpening the steel upon the stone, using short little buff-strokes that gradually
became long and slow, long and slow from base to glistening wet point, the sound like the seething of the sea.

The sea,
he thought,
Miyamoto is tall and he has reach. Picture him as the rock, the cliff unmoving, and I the sea. Surging closer, breaching, dashing myself against him,
unstoppable, unrelenting force. The sea shall consume all eventually. The sea is indefatigable.

The steel dried now, powdered, oiled, the blade set back with grip and guard and scabbarded. Time for himself. He washed his body, washed his hair, combed it out meticulously, then shaved his
scalp. The tresses oiled, drawn up into the topknot. He looked in the copper mirror and decided to shave his beard, too, so that he would look entirely unmarred. Fresh. The opposite of what a
vagrant would be.

Drawing the blade across his flesh suddenly he felt a thrill twisting through him, a base rush of blood, the shimmering warmth of which was indescribably wonderful. He saw it flare in his own
reflected eyes, his jaw tight as though it were biting, and why not bite? Today he could kill, today he was permitted to kill, today a day in which he was allowed to fulfil what he was honed to be,
to avenge himself against those who doubted and scorned, unleash every slight he bore within him garnered over the vast span since the last such permitted moment, a day to show himself as he was,
truly was, in the tearing of the head from the neck and in the feeling of the edge of steel biting through flesh and the dull clip of it parting bone and . . .