Sword of Honour (59 page)

He thought of Ameku, of her words.

The wooden jaws of the costumes of tigers and dragons snapped and flapped and chased each other, chased their tails, the legs of the men hidden beneath the serpentine silk body moving regimented
and insect-like. A great gong was struck as people cried out the name of the Regent, he seven years dead, and as the peal of it scintillated into nothing its reverberation within himself revealed
to Musashi his hollowness.

What had been certain he now realized to be vapour. His sky for the past years now benighted unto nothingness. He felt betrayal and then failure that at the age of twenty the meaning of
existence yet eluded him.

And yet there was no anger.

Not at himself, not at Goemon, not at the world. It had gone. The thing that had driven him since Sekigahara had turned to smoke and fled him in the ruins of the Yoshioka compound. Bled out into
the sand, perhaps. He wondered what was left inside of him in the wake of this great sublimation.

What was left before him to achieve?

Through the penumbrae of pagodas and the seething sides of crowds he forced his way onwards. The crowd around him only seemed to grow, slowing his progress with its whims. He found himself
pinned up against the balustrade of a canal, looked down into it, remembered plummeting into one. The water was shallow, shadow-patterns of the surface rippling over the cobblestones.

How effortlessly it all flowed.

At his side, as always, were his swords. Unyielding and tangible. He looked at them, and he knew that he could not return home yet. That he could not yet look his uncle in the eye. But of the
swords, the long and the short? He knew their extent, and they his. However dubious or minuscule the worth of what it was he had achieved, he had achieved it because of the blades. These the things
with which he had spoken the keenest.

Worthy of trust. Of dedication.

Musashi forced his way along to the nearest set of stone stairs and descended into the bed of the canal. The water was cool upon his calves. He revelled in the space free of the press of people,
breathed it in, felt his lungs brush up against the wound at his side. The water tugged at his trousers, pulled the wide folds of them downstream. Musashi watched their billowing, saw the direction
of the gentle current. The canal would lead to a river, and the river would lead away.

He followed.

On he went, left Kyoto behind him. That which was venerated remained venerated and that which was burnt remained burnt. Over his shoulder all the temples and pagodas and palaces, so many great
and towering constructs of man. The vast bronze shells of century-blackened sanctified bells that tolled impermanence in dolorous swells. Coils of incense curling before ten thousand aureate idols
and icons, rising in ephemeral arcane patterns that would never be again and yet in the method and reason of their creation exist for ever unchanging.

Not far from him, yet the distance unknown and unbridgeable, a long and slender boat set out upon the river heading for Osaka and the docks there, all aboard bound ultimately for Edo; a bald
head in a salt-lined casket, and a young girl’s smile offered upwards as a whalebone comb parts her hair, a smile unseen but felt and known.

Over the noise of unfelt festival rhythms that pulse upon the surfaces of great vats of soy sauce and sake and set rings to destroying rings, a dog is barking.

It is a mongrel of a mangy tan hide, with but a single ear remaining, and the sole obsession of this dog is the gate that bars it inside. The dog scratches furiously at it, black eyes rimmed
white. The gate is iron and oak. It will not yield. But the dog is up against it, fighting it, barking and barking and barking.

This is the nature of dogs.

Before the man lies nothing now. Musashi’s eyes only forward, only at the world that lies ahead wide and empty. He as one with the course of the water, flowing onwards, ever onwards, and
then he is gone.

‘
The world is as it is. Blind rebellion against it solves nothing
.’

First precept of
Dokkodo
(
The Way of Walking Alone
)

Musashi Miyamoto, 1645

Acknowledgements

Thanks and gratitude to the following:

John Drake, for providing information about gunpowder and arquebuses of the era.

Shitsuo Tanaka, for showing me around her home, Mount Hiei.

Adam Mackie, for telling me the difference between a gyaku ude-gatame and an omoplata/omniplatter, even if it was subsequently cut out of the novel.

Takumi Otomo, for her beautiful calligraphy.

And lastly,

Ayako Sato, for everything.