Sword of Honour

by David Kirk

  ‘Miyamoto!’ called the Yoshioka samurai, the sound of his voice moving with the sound of those hooves. ‘Come out and face me!’

  Musashi ignored him, ignored all of them. He stood looking at the walls of the compound, gauging their worth. They were not imposingly high. He supposed if he jumped he might grab the top, and that meant the shorter samurai outside could certainly do so if they raised one of their number upwards on their shoulders. Or if they went and found a ladder in the town.

  Or if they leapt from the saddle of a horse.

  The walls were vulnerable, suddenly of no worth at all, and he felt a panic begin to form. The samurai continued to pound upon the door, but the number of blows was beginning to lessen, and they too must be peering up at the walls, they too realizing what Musashi had realized. From behind him came the priest of the temple, striding over with his mauve robes flowing

  ‘What is going on here?’ he demanded of Musashi. ‘What is this madness?’

  Musashi silenced him with a slash of his hand. The priest obeyed out of sheer confusion.

  ‘Make no attempt to enter here,’ Musashi called over the walls to the samurai outside. ‘My blade is at the throat of the priest. If any of you try to scale the walls, I swear that I will kill him.’

  There was a fierce outrage. ‘Dog! Cur!’ they shouted, and more insults besides, and then they silenced themselves, a tense, worried hush stealing over them. One of them spoke up after a moment: ‘Seigan, wise Seigan? Are you harmed? Do you yet live?’

  The priest looked at Musashi. His momentary confusion had passed, and now he was stern, unafraid, cynical. Musashi’s eyes narrowed.

  ‘Must I actually raise my blade?’ he hissed.

  The priest sighed in irritation. ‘I am fine,’ he called over the walls. ‘The wretch has not harmed me. Heed his words. I wish for no violence here.’

  There was a further roar, further threats and vows, and Musashi shouted over all of them.

  ‘Leave this place now!’ he commanded. ‘Away from the walls!’

  ‘If the priest is defiled the slightest, Miyamoto,’ one of them called, ‘you will be flayed and crucified. I promise you this.’

  ‘Then do not test my resolve!’

  Reluctantly, the samurai retreated. Musashi pressed his eye to the seam above the hinges of the gate, checked to ensure they were not merely feigning. Yet he could see no trickery – the lot of them were going, including the Yoshioka samurai on his horse. The concern in their voices for the priest had sounded genuine, something beyond mere protocol and respect for the holy, and this pleased Musashi. That meant they would be less callous, less likely to try to force a resolution.

  But that simply left him trapped here. He had bought himself time with the ruse, but not escape.

  The priest Seigan stood watching: ‘What is it you intend now? They will surround this compound, you know.’

  ‘I promise that I will not harm you,’ said Musashi. He sheathed his longsword.

  ‘It is not myself I am worried for.’

  Hours passed.

  Musashi scoured every sliver of the temple grounds. The shrine was modest, larger than the one of his home village, but far from grand. The gong that hung above the altar was dented, scabbed green with age. There was a hovel where the priest lived his ascetic life. Opposite in the easterly corner was a pond where placid carp mouthed nothing at him, and a spring of water that had been channelled so that it turned a little wheel. The grass was short and lush and emerald.

  There were no further exits or entrances that he could find, concealed or otherwise.

  The priest sat on the steps of the shrine with his hands on his thighs and his back straight. He watched Musashi cautiously, but it seemed he was not prone to panicking. A man of austere countenance, and the longer he stared the more Musashi began to feel a sense of being judged. Eventually, when no avenue of flight revealed itself after the fourth time of inspection, he relented and went and spoke to the man.

  ‘You must help me,’ Musashi said.

  The priest shook his head. ‘I refuse to aid an outlaw.’

  ‘Please,’ said Musashi, his voice low. ‘I cannot die here.’

  The priest looked at him for a long moment, looked at him deeply, and then his eyebrows moved the slightest amount. He rose to his feet. Musashi watched as he went over to his hovel and went inside. When he emerged he had in his hands two peaches. He tossed one to Musashi. Then he sat down where he had been before, and began to peel his own fruit with his thumb.

  Musashi looked at the man in disbelief. The priest did not look back. His concentration in the peeling was either entire, or a pointed dismissal. The peach in Musashi’s hand was half green, unripe, and, since there was nothing else he could see to do, he took a bite, skin and all. The flesh had little flavour. It sat poorly in Musashi’s stomach, and soon he regretted eating at all.

  Time crawled on like a tightening noose, and the shadows began to grow, distend, and so too his wariness. There came a noise, an innocuous single knock, and Musashi leapt into startled action, convinced the samurai were trying to scale the walls. He screamed at them not knowing if they were truly there, repeated his threats, and though he received no response nor saw no enemy emerge it took the longest time before he could admit that they were not near.

  Twilight fell, and still he had conjured no escape. The sky was a serene shade of lavender and bats were in the air.

  Over the wall came the calm voice of the Yoshioka samurai.

  ‘Miyamoto,’ he called, ‘it is I, Nagayoshi Akiyama.’

  Musashi gave him no response. But the samurai was determined and steady, and he persisted in his communication until Musashi could deny him no longer. He went and stuck his eye to the seam of the gate once more, and saw that the man had come alone, was standing not ten paces away in his jacket that seemed brown in the fading light.

  ‘Away with you, Nagayoshi Akiyama,’ said Musashi, ‘lest you want this priest’s death to stain your conscience.’

  Akiyama was not deterred. ‘You cannot stay in there for ever,’ he said. ‘Come out. Behave as a man and let us settle what must be with dignity before the light departs.’

  There was something in his voice that surprised Musashi. There was no hatred. There was almost a sadness, a resignation, as though there were no personal desire in him to kill. Musashi stepped back from the gate, stared at the constellation of the iron studs upon its surface, thought of how he might respond.

  Above his head two bats passed spiralling frantically around each other, hissing at the limit of human hearing, and whether they were at war or in some mad dance of courtship he could not tell.

  ‘Why is it you have come?’ Musashi asked eventually. The simplest question. The most potent.

  ‘I told you before,’ said Akiyama. ‘Insults at Sekigahara.’

  ‘No,’ said Musashi. ‘Tell me why you have chosen to come and kill on your school’s behalf? Don’t you understand if a man asks you to do something for him he is weak? Don’t you understand if he is incapable he is unworthy of your service?’

  There was silence that stretched on long enough that Musashi began to wonder with a burgeoning confusion if his words were not being contemplated. A span of time alive with a potential he had not expected.

  Who was this Akiyama? In truth he was surprised to have encountered him again. He had assumed after being shamed and humbled in the mill that the samurai’s pride would have consumed him. But here he was, uncaring of any accrued dishonour in being bested by what the Way considered a subhuman, imploring Musashi to fight as though he were an equal. A man who had not run him down mercilessly when he had the chance.

  A man, Musashi realized for the first time just then, who must have constructed the supposed seppuku that afternoon as a lure for him and no other, and the complete specificity of this and what this implied Akiyama knew about him set him reeling.

  He stood there considering all this, wishing he could see the man’s face clearly
that he might better gauge his supposed assassin, and then he thought he heard Akiyama sigh, a sad sigh, and subsequently the Yoshioka samurai spoke.

  ‘Nevertheless,’ Akiyama said, ‘your head has been demanded.’

  The statement quashed all, the gate was a gate once more and boundaries were boundaries. ‘Away with you!’ Musashi snarled. ‘Away!’

  The pale-eyed samurai did not obey. He stood there continuing to beseech Musashi sporadically without any reply until it was undeniably night. Then, at some point Musashi could not be certain, Akiyama retreated into the darkness, and was gone. Only then in turn did Musashi abandon the gate, returned to sit on the steps of the shrine beside the priest.

  Seigan had busied himself lighting oil lanterns, and by their frail light Musashi sat with his longsword resting between his thighs. He was unsettled, one heel bouncing nervously off the earth. Even though Akiyama was gone he felt as though the man watched him yet.

  He was being watched. The priest Seigan had turned his eyes to him.

  The stern gaze grounded Musashi, focused his thoughts.

  ‘Wise one, hear me fairly, without prejudice,’ he said to the priest, as honestly as he could. ‘I do not want to die, and neither do I want to kill. But these men will not release me, and I fear before dawn they will attempt to storm the grounds. Do you wish for that to occur?’

  The priest did not respond.

  ‘Do you want to see these fine grounds sullied with blood?’

  The thought did not seem to bother him.

  ‘Innocent blood – I swear to you that I am innocent. My only crime is living, in wanting others to live. This the reason they would flay my skin from me.’

  Silence.

  ‘Do you really want for our ghosts to haunt you through all the years to come?’

  Something passed across the priest’s sombre face. Only a sliver, the slightest twitch of a muscle beneath one of his eyes, but Musashi saw this, saw the opening.

  ‘Please, I beg of you,’ he said, his voice lower now, beseeching. ‘Is there any way out of here you have kept hidden from me?’

  ‘No,’ said Seigan.

  ‘Then surely,’ said Musashi, ‘there must be something else you can think of. Anything. Please.’

  The priest was reluctant, so reluctant, but he weighed the potential scenarios before him against one another and made a decision. He rose to his feet, took a lantern in his hand and went to the rear side of the shrine. There, with some effort, he pulled a loose plank aside and revealed a space beneath the hollow wooden dais the shrine was set upon.

  ‘In there,’ said Seigan. ‘You can hide. I’ll open the gate, let the samurai in, tell them you knocked me on my head and when I awoke you were gone. That you’ve probably snuck off away into the night. When they’re truly gone, then you can make good your flight.’

  It occurred to Musashi, when he was nestled down in the darkness and Seigan was lowering the plank over him, that he was placing his faith entirely in this man. The priest could very well board him up in here and go and rouse the samurai outside and deliver him like that. But he looked up at the man’s shaven head, at his impassive features, and he felt no sense of threat.

  For a moment, it was not Seigan he saw.

  Seigan in turn saw the way Musashi was looking at him, and he hesitated for a moment before he lowered the plank entirely. He spoke with curt distaste:

  ‘Consider the path you walk.’

  And that was all, and again it was not entirely he alone that spoke. The priest reset the plank and the light was stolen from Musashi, and in the complete blackness, down amidst the rocky earth and the caresses of cobwebs and the smell of damp sawdust, Musashi lay there listening to the muffled cries from outside, thinking of the holy.

  How it would go, how he had envisioned it countless times over in the years since Sekigahara, is that Dorinbo would be standing at the altar of the shrine of Miyamoto. Standing beneath the burnished disc of the gong hung on high and the carved gaze of Amaterasu, the wood of it bright and new, and his uncle would turn and he would take in the boy that had left and the man that was now before him and then he would come to him as though he sought not to disrupt a spectre.

  ‘Bennosuke,’ he would breathe.

  ‘Musashi now, Uncle.’

  ‘Musashi, Musashi!’

  Dorinbo would accept this instantly and laugh then with his eyes quivering and wet. His uncle’s eyes so very visible because they were eye to eye here, perfectly level as men, although Musashi had not encountered one of equal height to him since his early adolescence. Dorinbo, though, of course, would be so, deserved to be so, then and now continuous. And he would clap Musashi on the arms, a warm and honest gesture like that, and the monk would say, ‘You live! You live!’

  ‘I do. Through it all I came, Uncle. It is over now. I understand. It is better to live.’

  ‘You have forsaken the Way?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You understand! You see!’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘And you will follow me now?’

  Musashi would not answer that, or could not.

  ‘But you live,’ said Dorinbo, still smiling but less exultant, his expression altering. Something behind his eyes burning less bright, something liquid subliming, ‘You live.’

  ‘I live.’

  ‘You live.’

  Repetition robbed it of its status as a word, and it became just a sound in which its emptiness was revealed.

  ‘Live.’

  ‘Live.’

  Dorinbo would be amongst the sick and the maimed, of course, those he had dedicated his life to helping. Those with the twisted bodies and the festering wounds, those that Dorinbo had tended with selfless love. They stood around him like a bodyguard, looking at Musashi through eyes missing or misted with cataracts or weeping with rheum.

  ‘Here are the things that I have done, that I have bettered, that stand in testament to me,’ said his uncle.

  ‘I live’ was all Musashi could say, but he could not bring himself to speak it aloud, and yet Dorinbo heard it nonetheless and Musashi’s silent voice had the cadence of a child.

  ‘You come to me and you live,’ said his uncle, and his smile now was sad and pitying.

  ‘I live,’ said Musashi, and through the mended horde he looked into the eyes of his uncle, who was much taller than he now, and there was no pride in them as there ought to be.

  ‘You live, Bennosuke.’

  ‘I am Musashi.’

  ‘Can you name a thing of worth that stands in testament to that name?’

  Outside there were many lanterns now that roved back and forth clutched in hands, light seeping through the cracks of the planking, and the night was rent with furious cries and the heavy thud of footsteps on the wood above him, and this went on for some time but never did Musashi feel as though he would be discovered. He was immune, cocooned away by the thoughts of higher things that temporarily burdened him.

  For a moment a form of perspective struck him. He saw the segregated triumphs of this year for what they amounted to, felt the hard, sharp forms of rocks beneath him, and he wondered if, somewhere out there, there was not a grander path he might walk with these same furious steps, if only it might reveal itself.

  Thusly the hours passed, and he drifted into some semblance of sleep thinking of Dorinbo, and yet, when he was awakened just before the dawn by Seigan prising the plank free once more, all doubt was dismissed. There was only the flight to focus upon, another achievable challenge, and he thanked the priest, who did not bid him farewell, and then he was away, out of the town, running between the paddy fields that erupted with the cries of frogs, and then up into the forests of the hills and safe once more.

  Chapter Six

  The rainy season was coming, skies greying in the day but not yet the deep charcoal colour they would become, and through the night the first waters fell. Akiyama sat huddled in a damp stable listening to the drone of it spattering on the thatched roof above
. His horse was nearby and there was a humid taste of straw and dung in the air, lining his mouth.

  A feeble bracken fire burnt before him, and he stared at it sightlessly.

  He struggled to understand how it was Miyamoto had managed to escape him at that temple. The lure had been sound, pitifully easy to construct. The dojo had belonged to a school who were awed by the colour of tea, had gratefully loaned him the use of their hall. They had even paid for the proclamations of the false seppuku to go out across their realm, so eager and excited were they that they might witness the fabled Yoshioka technique with their own eyes.

  But Miyamoto had done what he had done, had chosen to run and to take the priest captive, and Akiyama had marched around that temple compound a score of times or more and verified its entirety, had posted men at its every corner, and still somehow Miyamoto had eluded him, slipping through the lot of them in the night.

  Perhaps the outlaw had the ability to simply vanish as entirely and as suddenly as he had emerged.

  That boded poorly. He doubted he would see Miyamoto again. Akiyama knew he could not use the same bait to try to draw him close a second time, and if the wretch had half the wits he seemed to possess Miyamoto would abandon his other wild assaults and keep his head down and his mouth shut in whatever nest he conspired to find. The chance to claim his head had almost certainly escaped Akiyama, and here he sat staring at the fire, contemplating the dilemma of whether to persevere in blind hope in his hunt or to admit defeat and return to the capital and the school.

  That night, such was his mood that he rued the utter pointlessness of either.

  It was always ever thus. For all the malicious rumour that delighted in telling of his cuckolding by a barbarian, Akiyama’s father had remained a man of wealth and influence. He paid for his son to be enrolled in the school of Yoshioka at the age of thirteen. Surely the colour of tea upon his shoulders would override the colour of his skin.

  Akiyama was admitted, and soon found himself last in line, on the edge of the crowd, his work never praised or scorned regardless of how much or how little effort he put in. Patronized or tolerated or endured, never trusted or confided in. That very particular shade of courteous detestation that defined his life from then to now.