Sword of Honour

by David Kirk

  Young and hopeful, he had taken this as a challenge. Surely he could make them respect him, to make them want him. Nothing worthwhile was ever given freely, and what did samurai respect more than the ways of the sword? He threw himself into his studies of the blade and of the countenance of the warrior, staying in the dojo long after others had left, practising the strokes and hardening his body.

  Nights he spent in solitude listening to the distant merriment of others, wanting to join them but never quite having the courage to invite himself. Busying himself instead with duty or pastiches of it, scaling and gutting fish for tomorrow’s breakfast or polishing the lacquer upon his scabbard, which was already so pure he could all but use it as a mirror, so that if others should stumble upon him he could offer this as an excuse for his absence. A lie that was easier for both parties to accept.

  The sword came to him naturally, his forearms strong and his balance uncanny. The Yoshioka had their rigid method, their style, and this he took in quickly. Yet he hungered for more, and so he took to reading tracts of rival philosophies, hoping that maybe if he incorporated fresh techniques it might earn him recognition. That he might better their cause. In a dojo hall filled with a dozen men mimicking the master’s moves down to the smallest muscles of the hands and feet, thus Akiyama began assuming different stances, balancing his body in new manners, holding his sword at the opposite angles to others as they all prepared to strike the same blow. This was a taboo, and why he did this at first he did not know. Indeed, he even expected retribution, but received none.

  The master didn’t comment on his aberration. Neither did the other novices. Of course the Foreigner would have a hybrid style. It was only to be expected.

  When he realized this his attitude changed. He became more obnoxiously errant, deliberately so, part of him even wanting to be chastised or punished; at least if they had to forbid him something, they would have to recognize him as an individual. But he was permitted to stray over the course of years and so his method of the sword became a mongrel version of his own devising, and yet, despite its oddity and their determination to render him a nonentity, his raw ability was impossible not to notice.

  So, what to do with him? The school found a solution. Whilst those around him were rewarded with emissary status or embedded in fiefdoms to serve honourably under Lords the length of the nation, Akiyama was sent to eradicate the debased. The low men – never the high men, the champions whose heads would garner esteem – who either offered insult to the school in some way, or those of the school that disgraced its name. Akiyama became a negator, a nullifier, the school’s void that it sent after other such voids to consume them, to reduce a double aberration into a single.

  Years of his life given over to these meaningless quests, Miyamoto, the heretic Saito, the covetous Murakami, all of them, eight heads that he had brought to the masters in Kyoto, eight heads he had presented convinced that each would be the last. His sole reward however each time was no more than the lingering, his continuing to live as the penumbra of them all, until the wheel would inevitably turn again and everything repeated itself.

  And he knew this, understood this tacitly, knew that whether he had succeeded in killing Miyamoto or not would have had the exact same effect upon the course of his life. Yet here he sat, feeling a failure, wanting to please them yet just in case, just in case. A slave to this compulsion that governed him. This lifelong resolution to strive to belong to something that did not want him, that he knew did not want him.

  What was this urge that haunted his heart?

  Did the leeches sucking upon the legs of paddy-field oxen long to be absorbed up into the whole of the creature too?

  Of course he persevered.

  He was too stubborn to relent, or too timid to confront the truth, and so he went on as he had gone before, resigned himself to sacrifice the exact same span of time that he had been prepared to before Miyamoto had buried that man up to his neck in the spring that year. Next spring he would return to Kyoto. Next spring somehow things would be all all right; somehow his diligent but futile pursuit would be recognized. Next spring full of all potential, as all the previous springs of his life had been, and how he hated himself for thinking this, and how some other part of him persisted to believe it.

  He went about as a shell of a man, sent his missives, rode his horse, and then, some two months after his last and presumably final encounter with the man he hunted, to Akiyama’s complete surprise, he received word of Miyamoto once more.

  Akiyama read the message over several times. No doubt that it was Miyamoto, a confrontation with local samurai, a grand act of destruction, and his name shouted over and over. He could scarcely believe it. What was Miyamoto doing? Why would anyone persist in shouting his own name when he knew he was being hunted, and hunted by the school of Yoshioka no less?

  What sort of man was he?

  Akiyama asked himself these questions as he traversed the land blighted by the direst rainy season in living memory. People spoke of the heavens suffering a flood and the excess being cast out by the gods to come falling down upon them. Rivers burst. A landslide that swept the road ahead away entirely waylaid him for days, and how frustrating those hours were when he was impeded so. He felt like a moth bouncing off a paper door at night, trying to get at the candle within, again, again, and his eagerness surprised even himself.

  Eventually he reached the town where the incident occurred. He approached the site he was pointed towards by the witnesses, sheltering beneath a waxed paper umbrella. Rain fell warm as sweat, so heavy that the earth was hidden in a mist of vapour. The light was muted by clouds and it could be anywhere between noon and twilight.

  Out of the gloom ahead coalesced the wreckage of a tree.

  Akiyama moved to stand before it. It lay like some massacred dragon, its long and slender trunk split and collapsed upon itself, the splintered inner wood vivid and pale against the grey bark. It had been shaped over the course of years so that when it stood the trunk had looped out and then back over itself unnaturally. So unnatural that it had needed bamboo tripods to support its queer balance.

  Miyamoto had cut these tripods down, and caused the tree to destroy itself.

  Akiyama stood there for some time. The churning water puddled on the earth came up to his ankles and on its surface leaves floated chaotically, caught between sinking under the downpour and rising again, and on and on, patterns woven around his feet. He told himself that he was feeling pity for the spirit of the tree, to have lived so long only to find this ignominious end, and pity for all the men who had spent so many years carefully shaping it in vain. It was an appalling act.

  And yet it captivated him.

  What compulsion drove Miyamoto? The tree had been brought down some fortnight previously, which meant that it was perhaps a month and a half after the miraculous flight from the temple, and Akiyama wondered how Miyamoto’s heart had beaten in that span of time. Had it welled and welled, this desire for confrontation, until Miyamoto could contain it no more? Until it overrode his senses?

  Was he too stricken with an urge, an urge as absurd as his own?

  Akiyama thought of Miyamoto, and thought of a wild boar charging, or imagined one, for he was city-born and had never seen such a creature. Then he recalled a dog he had seen once when he had been a child. It had been digging in the streets, its claws scrabbling frantically in the dust, digging neither to reach somewhere nor to uncover something. Merely digging, digging and digging, waging war upon the earth day after day in the same spot for no other reason than that it had to, slobber on its maw and its eyes rimmed white.

  The rain did not relent, and would not do so for a week yet.

  Akiyama circled the ruins of the tree slowly, as though viewing it from a different angle might reveal to him what he sought.

  Those who had witnessed the debacle had told him that Miyamoto had shouted something as he cut the tripods and set the tree to its ruin.

  What he had shouted was,
‘Something that cannot stand for itself should not stand!’

  This was what held Akiyama’s fascination.

  Common vandals destroyed for nothing more than the thrill of destruction, and yet, perverse though it was, it seemed that there was some consistent purpose to Miyamoto’s actions. Enemy of the Way, he pronounced himself. But which was he truly, thoughtless or thoughtful? Governed by reason or slave to mad impulse? Here a man who so thoroughly lusted to provoke that it could not be contained, even apparently supplanted any sense of self-preservation, and yet at the same time it appeared a tempered form of bloodlust that held him enchanted, if such a thing could exist.

  Maddened enough to charge into a dojo and yet not giving himself entirely over to blind carnage, retaining enough sense to flee when he saw the odds against him. A man who held a sword to the throats of priests, and yet spared Akiyama’s own life when he was entirely at his mercy.

  Was there something higher here?

  Or lower.

  Deeper.

  There, an empathy the pale-eyed samurai felt a sense of guilt for. What was it like not to care? How did it feel to have a complete disregard for the concerns and wills of others, to possess a complete faith in oneself as Miyamoto seemed to? The fierce courage, if courage was the correct word, of taking your sword and cutting as you saw fit, because you yourself willed it and believed it to be right?

  Akiyama looked at the ruined tree.

  A final tripod yet stood, supporting the base of the trunk.

  He stared at this for a long time. Then he set his umbrella down. He did not close it, and it floated inverted on the surface of the muddy water, drifted languidly away. He did not feel the rain on his brow.

  Tentatively, he drew his longsword.

  He stood there, contemplating the blow he might strike. Whether he should even strike it.

  His jacket had become sodden in a moment. The silk of it hung over his arms as dark and clinging as seaweed as he raised his sword above his head, aligned the cut.

  Akiyama levelled his spirit, managed his anticipation, and then he struck.

  Steel split the bamboo cleanly.

  The tripod fell away, but the trunk remained standing. Its roots were set well enough into the earth to support its surviving weight.

  Whatever Akiyama had expected to feel, or thought he might feel, or had longed to feel, he had not felt. He stood looking at the tree for some time. He became aware of eyes peering out at him, sheltered under eaves. Familiar expressions. Suddenly he felt foolish, realized what it was he had done. He sheathed his sword and hardened his face and assumed his false mantle of one who belonged once more.

  Rain had pooled in his upturned umbrella, had sunk it. He picked it up and shook it empty, resumed his shelter under it. He walked off, and the people of the town watched him go until the haze of the weather swallowed him.

  In his mind the words remained: ‘Something that cannot stand for itself, should not stand.’

  Chapter Seven

  Harvest time, and the dried fields were alive with rhythmic song as the rice crop was joyfully gathered in by the peasants, and Akiyama had Musashi caught upon the plains.

  Musashi did not understand how the Yoshioka man had found him, but he had, and he had been running for a half-day already. Not straight sprinting from the horse, not making that mistake again, but rather taking cover, ducking into ditches or burying himself beneath the piles of stalks and husks that lay discarded at the edges of fields, looping back upon himself, waiting, biding his time, hoping that Akiyama would follow some false signal of his passage, but the samurai was skilled in tracking and judged the situation correctly again and again.

  He longed for the hills and the forests, and they were there within his sight. But between that safety and behind him lay nothing but flat paddy fields segmented by raised pathways between them. One could all but see clear to the coast, and a lone figure navigating between the bands of peasants would stand out so obviously aberrant. Musashi was crouched down behind one of the raised pathways, and with as little of his head as he dared expose, he was watching Akiyama. The samurai was far – if Musashi raised his smallest finger at arm’s length he could blot him out with but the very last bone of it – but he was on his accursed horse, and such was the distance to the hills yet that, if he attempted a dash for them and was sighted, he could not be sure the creature would not outrun him.

  This was the most distance he had managed to put between them yet. This was the closest he had come to escaping. His heart was beating as fast as though the man were close enough to touch, the muscles of his legs shivering. He fought to overcome. If he was to get away, he needed calmness. It would be about timing and cunning, not raw physicality.

  Thus Musashi waited, watched, hidden. He saw the tiny figure of Akiyama stop on his horse. The samurai was at a crossroads of the pathways, and he remained there looking in all directions for some time. Patient and vigilant, he understood the strategy that would come into play here as well as Musashi.

  Eventually, something caught Akiyama’s attention at an opposite angle. The samurai turned on his horse, and led the creature away at a trot with his back almost entirely to Musashi.

  His chance was here and his first desperate instinct was to simply run. He did not. He kept as low to the ground as he could, and he advanced towards the hills, looking over his shoulder at Akiyama, hoping the pathways would shield him from his hunter. The paths came up to his thighs only, and he had to be at least partly exposed, but he had chosen a compromise between speed and concealment. Writhing on his belly like a serpent would take much too long.

  His luck held. Akiyama continued in the way he was going. Musashi managed to cross three fields in his crouching gait, and the hills drew ever nearer. In the field ahead there were peasants working. There were maybe sixty of them, squatting down with sickles in hand, and they were so occupied in their work that they had not spotted him approaching. He hesitated for a moment, wondering if he should avoid them entirely, and when he looked over his shoulder next he saw that Akiyama was now looking towards him.

  Musashi’s immediate instinct was to throw himself to the ground or simply to flee. So strong this desire, so innate, that he felt it almost as a spasm, yet he resisted, held himself still. Akiyama was too far to identify him, too far to be certain, and the samurai was not moving. Give him any evidence of who you are, and he will come. No, what Musashi forced himself to do was to turn his back on the Yoshioka samurai entirely, and calmly walk towards the band of peasants as though he were one of their number who had perhaps ducked aside to urinate.

  The sheer will it took not to look back. Each step seemingly of no distance at all. Halfway to the peasants he realized his swords were at his side. Distant proof of who he was to Akiyama, and fearful to the lowerborn. Slowly, as inconspicuously as he could, he slid them out of his belt one by one and tried to hide them in the folds of his kimono. The short fitted well but the long was scantly concealed, the point of its scabbard rattling between his thighs and its pommel under his chin, but at least they were to his fore. Akiyama, looking from behind, would not see them.

  The peasants were singing still, a call and response between the men and the women. Musashi did not know the words, but the melody seemed familiar, perhaps sung in the village of his childhood also. He came to edge of them and squatted down into a crouch, grasped a handful of rice stalks and drew them close as though he too were harvesting the grain. Here he allowed himself a covert look over his shoulder. Akiyama was still looking, but it was hard to tell if he had drawn closer.

  Musashi hid his longsword down in a furrow, and he shuffled his shoulders in vague time to the song. Tried to belong. For a time it worked. But Akiyama was definitely coming towards them, the samurai perhaps but three, maybe four fields over, and more and more curious glances were being cast Musashi’s way by the peasants. The man nearest to him rose to stand. He had stripped his plant bare, meant to move on to the next one, and innocently he turn
ed around stretching the strain of squatting out of his knees. As he did so he happened to look down into the furrow and saw Musashi’s longsword.

  He stepped back immediately, looked between the weapon and its owner. The peasant had a sickle in his hand, but he used this only to shield a woman next to him, perhaps his wife. Musashi hissed at him that he meant no harm, for them all to carry on as they had been, but a panic was rippling outwards now and all were turning to him. Half were drawing back in apprehension, half saw the swords and thought him samurai and dropped to their knees, and he was left alone in a widening gap like a rock amidst a field of grass blown by the wind.

  Musashi turned.

  Akiyama saw him for who he was, and kicked his horse into a gallop.

  Cursing, he grabbed his longsword from where it lay and sprinted for the hills. Nowhere else to hide but there. He kicked his way through the stalks of rice in their neat rows, vaulted over the raised pathways when they came, and through the wind in his ears he could hear Akiyama bellowing something behind him. Didn’t care for what he said, could guess at its exact extent, just kept running. There was a cleft between the hills, a gorge of sorts, and he ran for this, hoping that it might afford a gentler ascent.

  There was a bamboo grove at the foot of the slopes and he danced through the emerald trunks, tried to disrupt as little as he could. No horse could follow him through here, and maybe it might mask his trail. Beyond the bamboo, higher up the slope, he found gnarled pine trees and straight tall cedars and thick, entangling bracken everywhere. Knowing that Akiyama would not be far behind he lunged and thrust his way upwards as far as he dared, felt his legs cut and shred on old dead wood, and then threw himself down into the first viable cleft in the earth he saw.

  He lay there trying to hold his breath. After a moment he reconsidered, pulled whatever lichen and branches and leaves lay close by on top of him, and then he kept still. He looked down into the gorge, through the trees, through the bamboo. Akiyama rode up on his horse. Close enough that Musashi could see the clasp that bound his topknot. The going was dense and he was forced to stop. His horse circled about itself again and again, and the samurai calmed the animal until it was still.