by David Kirk
‘No seppuku for me,’ said the voice. ‘I have not the implements to observe the ritual properly. I shall settle for opening my throat. It feels as though I am already in oblivion in this darkness.’
‘You can’t,’ said Musashi. ‘You mustn’t.’
‘I am of the Way. What else is there to do?’
Musashi’s body contorted itself around the sightless realm. For all his effort the voice did not sound any closer. The wound on his head was throbbing once more, the pain searing, stealing words from him: ‘Don’t. Don’t do it. Don’t!’
‘What are you, some deceptive spirit? A tengu haunting me and leading me from truth? No. That cannot be. Tengu are old and wily. You have the voice of a child.’
‘I’m sixteen. I’m a man.’
‘Indeed,’ said the voice, and it laughed cruelly. ‘How is it you think you stand in a position to advise me? I am twice your age, boy.’
‘I understand enough,’ called Musashi. ‘My father committed seppuku at command of his Lord. He thought he would save his honour, but he was betrayed and died disgraced instead. If he had chosen to live, he could have . . . No. Why wonder? He didn’t. He chose to annihilate himself.’
‘What was your father’s crime?’
‘None, he performed it on account of . . .’ Me. ‘He performed it, and now all men speak ill of him. His name was Munisai Shinmen.’
‘I have heard of him.’
‘And what have you heard?’
‘That he died a coward.’
‘He was not. I swear to you this. The agony he endured with that sword in his stomach . . . Yet, because he is dead, he cannot contest this, and that agony was for nothing. No. Stupidity was his only crime. This is what you are assenting to. Do not do it.’
‘You do not sound as though you honour your father.’
The hate that surfaced as he thought of Munisai was familiar, but could not be spoken. ‘I avenged him,’ Musashi said. ‘Just this day I killed the man responsible. After years. The clan Nakata, you know them?’
‘The burgundy men. Sworn to the Ukita.’
‘Yes. The heir. Hayato – I cut his head from him after the battle. I had the chance to kill him two years before but it would have cost me my life. But I did not, and I hated myself for living. But I lived, I chose to live and I will live, and in that I have everything I need.’ He felt exhausted, Musashi, felt hollow, but sudden energy came as he thought of what had inspired him. ‘The battle! Were you not at the battle earlier? Did you not see those thousands of bodies? Why should you aspire to be that? A corpse is not godly.’
The voice was not swayed: ‘So you will seek to shirk your honour.’
‘What honour?’ called Musashi, voice breaking with the effort and the pain. ‘The honour of a . . . The Way, the Way of death, that honour? No! It is an act of stupidity! The greatest stupidity! Nothing less than that! Nothing more! Seppuku, a-a-a mist, a black mist, that some spirit had blown into the minds of men! What is the point of birth at all if your ultimate act is to negate yourself, all you have done, all you might do? My father, ended by it! Thousands, millions, who knows how many? Ended! Think of all they could have achieved instead of casting everything aside! Choosing to cast everything aside! Bad enough that a Lord would demand it, worse still that someone would choose to give it! You have a mind of your own, do not let it be broken over ancient words and codes only to find the same worthless nothingness as all that went before you!’
He found himself shuddering, from what he could not tell, cold or exhaustion or the pulsing throbbing wound that seemed to be digging into the centre of his skull, the wound that flared fierce with each word spoken; but when the samurai spoke next it was as though Musashi had said nothing at all: ‘So you will not die this day?’
‘No,’ said Musashi. ‘No I will not. I choose to live.’
‘What do you intend, then, with this precious life of yours?’
Musashi had not considered this. ‘I shall return home.’
‘You can bear that?’ the man laughed. ‘To see your mother? To see your father? To see your wife and your sons and your friends and the men who rake your garden, see the hatred in their eyes when they learn that you live after such calamity?’
‘Why would they hate me?’
‘Because it is proper to hate those who linger after all is lost. No – not I. I cannot return home. I refuse to be hated.’
‘What if they’re wrong?’
‘They’re not wrong.’
‘But you know them to be wrong. You said it yourself – the defeat was the fault of the clan Kobayakawa.’
The rain fell relentlessly, splitting the silence between them.
‘That matters not,’ said the voice eventually. ‘Still they will hate.’
‘But you know the truth.’
‘What does that matter? A pearl that but a single person can see is no pearl at all.’
‘That’s . . .’ said Musashi, and how his head throbbed and how he wanted to vomit. But still the blackness overwhelming, still his hands formless and powerless, and the words he needed now equally invisible to him.
‘I have said all that is needed to be said,’ said the voice. ‘May my spirit find its vengeance.’
‘Don’t!’ said Musashi.
Above the rain he thought he heard a sound that was equally as wet: a hiss that settled into a gurgle that settled into nothing. Musashi called to the man but received no reply, and eventually he accepted that he was gone. He felt his way to the floor, sat down amidst the mulch and felt the ache of his entire body.
‘Why?’ he called.
The world gave him no answer.
‘Why?’ he called again.
Around Musashi was a void, broad and seamless and the extents of it unknowable, and in this expanse his voice was frail and lonely, but he was not deterred. He asked his question again and again, rain sputtering from his lips, as though he were demanding the darkness to account itself to him.
The rain fell on.
Chapter Two
Kyoto
Upon the wall a yellowed scroll was hung, its ancient paper surrounded by a textile field of black thread patterned over rivermoss green. The brushstrokes of characters etiolated through centuries formed words still adhered, still adored:
The sword gives life. The sword gives death.
Beneath the scroll the newly forged longsword was arrayed naked, free of all trappings of guard and grip and pommel. The tang remained dark and unpolished, indistinguishable almost from the black silk on which it rested, whilst the curve of the blade itself had been meticulously worked to assume the colour of calm water beneath a clouded noon sky.
Across that serene shade the reflection of the Shinto priest in his ochre robes warped as he paced his way around the sword in a slow circle, chanting long and deep. He swept a flail of paper folded into sacred lightning bolts over the unadorned weapon as he went, quick little motions, hands swift, voice sedulous. The Forger of Souls and the others there knelt and listened as formally as they would at a funeral, at a seppuku, and, though the words of the priest were so undulating and archaic that no man there save the priest himself could understand what it was exactly he intoned, they all understood that it was holy and sacred and so they listened faithfully, watched as he placed the flail down and began to scatter handfuls of salt around instead, still singing his incomprehensible hymn. It wound its way on until eventually the priest ceased abruptly, cast himself to the ground and placed his brow on the floor towards the sword.
Now the blade was purified, evil spirits banished, fit to be wielded without fear of malevolent possession.
The priest rose and retreated. The Forger of Souls moved forward on his knees, agony in his old joints yet his face entirely level, and took up the blade. He placed his gnarled right hand bare upon the dark of the tang, but with his left he took the blade in a folded length of hemp to avoid sullying it. He bore it aloft with ritual slowness, the cutting edge held towards himself t
o prevent veiled threat or insult to any other. He brought the steel close to his eyes and inspected it minutely. This examination was no more than appearance, as symbolic to the ritual as the salt. He had checked the sword countless times already since that dawn when he had held it skywards and would have not proclaimed it ready if the slightest hint of any imperfection lingered.
Duly, the Forger passed the sword on to the Polisher of Souls with ceremonial diligence, the pair of them bowing and raising the blade above their heads as they exchanged it. The Polisher then examined the blade with equal care not to level the edge or the point of the weapon at anyone else. It was he who had sharpened the weapon to its utmost keenness, he who over two weeks had taken the forge-darkened steel and made it shine with his vast collections of whetstones and buffstones and oils.
The Polisher saw something amiss, and from a small box withdrew tiny fragments of stone like ochre eggshell. These he placed on his thumb and, with the smallest of movements, rubbed them back and forth to fix a marring only his eye could see. He took a piece of cloth with oil upon it, wiped his fingerprints clean and then nodded, satisfied.
On the blade went, swaddled and passed like a holy babe to the Balancer of Souls and the Encaser of Souls, and though they did not work upon the steel itself they were just as vital in making it a sword proper. The Balancer made the collar, which sat between guard and cutting edge, copper-coated in etched gold, crucial both for weighting the sword so that it might cut true and for holding the blade suspended in the scabbard free of dulling contact with the wood. The Encaser in turn made that scabbard out of magnolia wood, as well as the accoutrements of the grip, the pommel and the guard, and, though they were all artists, he was the most artistic, his the realm of lacquer and embossing and carving.
The pair of them dressed the sword, collared it, pinned guard and grip and pommel to the steel with bamboo pegs, then slid the length of it into the scabbard. Thus the sword was placed back upon the stand and the silk, complete.
Forger, Polisher, Balancer and Encaser each produced their personal stone seal, dipped it in red ink, and the Recorder of Souls passed them his work. Yesterday he had made a rubbing of the sword, and then, freehanded, had shaded the grain and the pattern of the blade itself with impeccable detail. The drawing would be added to the annals of all the many weapons this smithy had produced, and one by one all the masters stamped their personal approval upon the paper.
A final bow from each of them, long and low and reverent, and then up to rest their weight upon their calves once more.
‘It is done,’ said the Forger of Souls.
‘It is remarkable,’ said Tadanari Kozei.
Tadanari was kneeling in impeccable formality. He was a samurai and almost entirely bald, the last vestige of hair he had clinging around the nape of his neck in a stubborn scrub. He had a sombre face, round and hard, a neatly trimmed grey-flecked beard that added weight to his jaw.
He was a master of the sword school of Yoshioka. He had brought a dozen men with him who knelt behind him in ranks, each as skilled as he was at hiding awe and respect behind the impenetrable masks of his face.
‘May I, O Forger of Souls?’ Tadanari asked.
The Forger nodded. Tadanari shuffled forward on his knees slowly, each increment of progress carefully measured, and then he bowed to the sword and spoke the proper words: ‘Humbly I receive this privilege.’
Eyes still upon the floor, Tadanari took the sword and raised it above his head before he allowed himself to look upon it. He appreciated its weight in the palms of his hands, and then drew forth the blade from the scabbard. Mindful as the masters had been in which direction he let the edge and the point fall, he rested the flat of the sword on the back of his left forearm and the silk of his jacket there. Tadanari turned to the door open to the light of day and raised the sword as though it were an arquebus, sighting his eye down the flat of the blade.
He took a breath.
Slowly he began to twist it back and forth in the light, and now the true beauty and craftsmanship of the sword revealed itself. The texture of the grain of the metal laid bare, the layers where it had been folded writ in lines and motes that flashed in silver instants. The sweeping temper line of the hard cutting edge, a milky white sash set against the darker, softer metal of the flat, running in an undulating line like an erratic wave breaking along a lethal coast from base to point of the blade.
Flawless.
The breath that he had taken caught in Tadanari’s throat. What he had paid for this sword could have bought a street full of houses, but he knew then that he was the one who had struck a scandalous bargain. What he held here was a thing for ages, for all the centuries yet to be.
‘Come,’ he said to his son. ‘See.’
Ujinari was set at the head of the Yoshioka men. He pressed his brow to the ground and then advanced on his knees. That autumn he was in his seventeenth year, and had a longer, thinner face than his father, a slighter, taller build. Ujinari took the blade from Tadanari, spoke the same deferential words, looked at it in the light in an identical manner. His breath, however, escaped him, low and long and admiring.
‘Your opinion?’ asked Tadanari.
‘I have held nothing more wonderful,’ said Ujinari.
‘It is not I you should be saying such to.’
Ujinari carefully placed the sword back on the stand and then turned and bowed low to the Forger and the other masters alongside him: ‘Truly you are men of worth. I thank you for letting me witness all you have shown me this day. I could never hope to make something so beautiful.’
‘Everything we do was taught to us, as we teach it in turn,’ said the Forger. ‘All it takes is the willingness to learn.’
‘And decades of dedication,’ said Tadanari.
The Forger bowed benevolently at the compliment.
Ujinari did not notice. He was staring at the sword wistfully. ‘I believe you shall be the envy of all Kyoto with this at your side, Father.’
The bald samurai turned his head and pronounced sternly, ‘An old man needs a sword that fine like a hag needs a cradle. The sword is yours.’
Awe unfurled behind Ujinari’s eyes as he turned to stare at Tadanari, and then he lowered his brow to the floor. He held the bow for a long time before he spoke.
‘I cannot begin to thank you,’ he breathed.
Tadanari’s face did not change in the slightest. He was the gift-giver, and he could neither express joy, for that would imply arrogant pride in his own magnanimity, nor feign some casualness or whimsy, for that would disparage the gift.
The boys who worked at the forge rolled up reed mats and stood them on their ends in the dusty yard outside, and Ujinari set to testing the blade. He cut smoothly, his form long-studied and his arms able, passing the steel on the diagonal through the mats. The other men of the Yoshioka watched on, called encouragement or congratulation, marvelled to one another at the beauty of the sword.
Tadanari was sitting on a stool outside of the glare of the noon sun. Free of the solemn ritual of the hall, he was smiling openly as he watched his son’s ability. It was he that had dictated the mood for them all, and even though he was jovial it did not mean that those beneath him were freed of any protocol. The lesser samurai there merely had to assume the protocols of joviality, the practised ways of expressing it, all that the collective might reassure itself that it was indeed in a time of ease. They slouched upon stairs, they sat cross-legged in the dust, they stood with thumbs in belts, but they were not relaxed.
The samurai standing closest to Tadanari jerked his chin at the sword Ujinari wielded.
‘Master,’ the man said, and he shuffled his shoulders and scuffed his feet as he sought some fresh-considered posture of what was accepted as casual, ‘unless I see it wrong, the engraving there upon the flat of the blade – that is the sword of Saint Fudo, no?’
The carving he spoke of lay on one side only just above the golden collar and ran half the length of the blade.
A sword within a sword, but no samurai weapon this. An ancient sword, a foreign sword, a single-handed weapon straight and double-edged.
What he asked was not a genuine question, of course, and Tadanari knew this. There was no real chance of an error in identification, not with an icon as strong as that. It was merely spoken because it offered the chance for Tadanari to say, ‘Keen eyes as always.’
This compliment in turn allowed another, returned and magnified: ‘As I thought. Houken. The Cutter of Delusions. A wise choice, master, yes, but of course you in your wisdom would choose well. Provident.’
Mutually flattered, the two of them took to nodding in satisfaction at different tempos as Ujinari continued to cut.
‘The Cutter of Delusions,’ repeated the samurai, because something further needed to be said.
‘That which purges the fallible man of the snares of the mortal dimension.’
‘A strong meaning.’
‘The great Saint judges us all.’
‘Of course. Your grandsons will hold that sword and see that mark, and know the same.’
‘My great-great-grandsons.’
They spoke as though in platitudes and smiled and nodded on, and yet inside Tadanari a well-hidden resonance hummed. He allowed himself a momentary fantasy, saw some distant descendent in place of Ujinari, and, though this conjured man might not know Tadanari as anything more than a name scrawled upon some yellowed sheaf of genealogy, he would be armed, be samurai on Tadanari’s account, and that was everything.
This the deeper satisfaction. But he did not allow himself to wallow in the conceit of centuries yet to be. Saint Fudo laughed at those who did so. Instead, Tadanari sat back and watched Ujinari for who he was, what he was, and this was fine enough.
They, all of them there. His men. His school. He did not bear the name and was not the dynastic head, but that man Naokata Yoshioka was his finest friend, and he served as the foremost teacher. Over their kimonos each of the Yoshioka samurai wore a jacket of silk dyed in the same peculiar colour. In the shade of the halls within, the garments had seemed a muted brown, but here outside in the light the peaks of folds became a vivid green. A unique dual tone, emblematic of the school, which no person could describe better than as the colour of tea.