by David Kirk
‘Do you?’
Goemon said it obnoxiously innocently, too obnoxiously, and he saw the anger flare in the depths of Tadanari’s eyes. But the man was decades practised at civility and had fine composure. ‘Very well,’ he said, perfectly courteously. ‘I am certain that this shall all be clarified in Edo. We will send an emissary to your court, and when he presents this proclamation I am sure rightness will prevail.’
‘Emissary?’ said Goemon, committed to his path. ‘The head of your school shall suffice.’
‘As I have informed you, Captain, the most honourable Naokata Yoshioka is currently suffering from a sickness. He is unable to rise from his bed and so—’
‘If you think anything less than the head of your school will suffice for the head of the nation, then you are entitled to do so. Edo awaits.’
‘Edo awaits,’ repeated Tadanari.
That ended their meeting. There were other platitudes, but nothing further of substance was stated. Goemon worried about the course of it that night as he sat drinking in solitude in the hard berth of his chambers. Soon his mind wandered to distant places. He thought of his wife, now married to another man, and then of his sons and his daughters, who now carried that man’s name, and, lastly, as his conscious mind faded and sleep imposed itself upon him, he heard once more the pack of his hounds that he had left behind howling at his departure.
Chapter Ten
The first snows of winter were falling. The trees of the woodland were a wilderness of barren dark limbs punctuated by errant clouds of the proud jade needles of pine trees. Musashi hauled upon the reins of the horse, and the beast followed after him along the trail. Both their breaths were steaming.
Ahead, enveloped almost by the wild, lay an old dilapidated house. Its beams were blackened with age but the thatch on the roof remained whole. Musashi watched it cautiously for some time. It was still and silent. He looped the horse’s reins over a bough and then walked forward to explore inside.
It was a small structure, perhaps belonging to some long-departed woodsman. The door of it was lying on the ground, the desiccated husks of shed cicada skins mustered on its planking. He could see holes rotted through the walls, and the thatch was fetid with rotten dampness. He was about to step inside when he heard the sound of feet behind him.
He turned. There was a young girl swathed in frayed clothes much too big for her, she no more than eight or nine years old. Her surprise was equal to his. She froze for a moment, saw his size and his swords, and then she ran. Instead of fleeing, however, she skittered past Musashi and vanished inside the house.
Musashi could hear her whispering, hear her panicked breaths. Tentatively, he followed after her. In the shadows of the single room, he saw the girl bending at the shoulder of another person sitting against the walls. Their form was indistinct, a mess of blankets and long hair.
‘A man, a samurai,’ the girl was whispering to this adult, and then she saw Musashi entering and shouted at him, ‘Leave us alone!’
‘I mean you no harm,’ he said.
‘Then leave us!’
‘I cannot,’ he said. ‘I need shelter.’
The adult spoke now. It was a woman, her voice low and accented. ‘Then go to town. Town close.’
‘They will not have me.’
Musashi stood in the doorway. The woman did not rise, did not move at all. The girl seemed caught between wanting to hide behind her and wanting to shield her from Musashi. With great care, Musashi pulled the swords from his belt still in their scabbards and laid them on the ground between them. The girl whispered what he was doing into the woman’s ear.
‘I mean you no harm,’ he said, stepping back from his weapons. ‘I thought this house was abandoned. I am sorry for intruding. Is this your house?’
‘No,’ said the woman.
‘But you live here?’
They did not answer.
‘I need shelter,’ said Musashi. ‘I am in great need – the snows are here and I cannot spend the night outside. I do not wish to force you out. There is space enough for us all.’
Still they were scared of him. He pointed at the hearth pit in the centre of the room. Within its square depression there were old leaves and translucent snakeskins and hardened nuggets of rabbit dung, but no fresh ashes.
‘Does either of you know how to light fires?’ he said. ‘It will be cold, and colder still in the weeks to come. I know how to light fires. I would share this heat with you.’
‘Why your great need of this house?’ the woman said.
Musashi beckoned the girl outside. She left the woman behind and followed him at a cautious distance. He showed her the horse, and the pitiful litter the creature had been pulling. He had constructed it himself out of saddlebags and belts and fallen boughs, and strapped tight to it lay the delirious form of Akiyama.
‘He is in a grave state,’ Musashi told the girl. ‘Another night in the wild might kill him.’
Akiyama murmured something. His eyes were closed and his red skin was pallid and sweating. The girl watched him, and then she disappeared inside once more to tell the woman.
The snows continued to fall through the night. The flue was clotted and the smoke from the fire Musashi made curled thick around them to billow out of the door. He had stoked the fire well, and had covered Akiyama in as many covers and blankets as he could spare, but still the man’s brow felt cold. He sat cross-legged by his assassin’s side, helpless and watching.
Outside, the ground was already covered in snow. It had come weeks early and boded for a long season.
The woman sat against the wall, guarded yet. She held the girl between her legs protectively, wrapped her arms over her shoulders. It was clear that she was blinded; she would not raise her face to Musashi, hidden always by the long tresses of her hair, and the girl patiently explained everything that was happening to her.
Over the past few hours the girl, for her part, had decided in that way of children that something that was not immediately dangerous could be trusted. She sat looking at Musashi and his swords in open curiosity.
‘Why are they so dirty?’ she asked.
She spoke of the sorry state of the scabbards, the lacquer chipped and scratched, of the rusted pommel and guards, and of the shortsword’s grip, which had rotted clean away and which Musashi had replaced with a leather cord lashed and helixed over the wooden handle.
‘Hard to keep them clean,’ he said, and shrugged. ‘I keep the blades sharp and tended. That’s all that matters, as far as a sword goes.’
‘But they look so ugly.’
The woman pinched the girl’s shoulder in warning. The girl spoke to her: ‘But you can’t see how ugly they are.’
‘Yae,’ the woman said in a low voice.
The girl sighed and obeyed.
‘Your name’s Yae?’ asked Musashi.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Musashi.’
Yae squeezed the woman’s hands. ‘She’s Ameku.’ The name was odd-sounding, and Yae saw this on Musashi’s face. ‘She’s from Ryukyu.’
‘Never met a Ryukyuan before,’ said Musashi.
Ameku tutted. ‘No snows on Ryukyu.’
‘It’s hot there, she says,’ said Yae. ‘Ryukyu is just small islands, in the middle of the south sea. They don’t even speak our language there. Sometimes Ameku speaks it to me, and it sounds like yarr-rarrr-rarrr a-baa-baaa-baaa.’
Ameku muttered an irritated string of something foreign.
‘See?’ said Yae, proudly.
In the morning Musashi melted snow in a pan to wash Akiyama’s wounds. He peeled the samurai’s blankets back and revealed his body bandaged in scavenged hemp rags, and these he peeled away also. There were two lacerations, one across Akiyama’s left clavicle and a second that split the right side of his stomach from sternum to outer thigh. Caused by the same blow, Akiyama’s body perhaps twisting so that the blade glanced off the ribcage and spared it its ruin.
; Ameku turned her head away at the smell. Yae peered in morbid fascination at the suppuration Musashi washed tenderly away.
‘His wounds are festering,’ Musashi said. ‘He’s been like this for near a fortnight. The poultices he needs, they cost money. Would you please watch over him in my stead? I will head into town and see if I cannot chop firewood for someone, or . . .’
Over the next two days he ventured into the nearby town, where he was greeted with a muted hostility. He was masterless and the masterless could not be trusted. Yet it was a small, rural hamlet far from the castle of their realm and they had no steward to look to for protection and none amongst the populace possessed swords. They could not force Musashi away, and, though they would not suffer him to shelter within the boundaries of their settlement, they soon realized they had no real choice but to reluctantly submit to his helpful impositions. Under their suspicious and scornful gazes, swallowing his temper at their prejudice for the sake of Akiyama, he chopped wood, he hefted straw barrels, he scaled, gutted and salted river fish.
Those first few nights they sat more or less in silence, the blinded woman, the swordsman on the verge of death, the girl and Musashi. Ameku was wary of him, and she seemed to have coaxed the girl into caution also; Yae would look at him, smile, but not speak.
Musashi found himself uncomfortable in their presence, and he wondered over this. He recounted his isolated childhood, his years wandering on the path of foolish vengeance, his service in the army of the Lord Ukita and then his exile with Jiro and the others, and he realized that over the nineteen years of his life he had decapitated more men than he had had conversations with women.
He found the backs of his arms itching, and that he was compelled to busy himself with trite labour, or checking needlessly on Akiyama’s unaltered condition, or fidgeting with the pommels of his swords rather than simply sit there in the silence, acknowledging the discomfort. Yet it was not the pair of them he blamed but rather himself, and why this was he could not say.
On the third morning of their lodging together, Ameku rose and spoke to him directly for the first time.
‘I can use loom,’ she announced, ‘make tatami mat. Take me to town. Someone must have a loom there. Perhaps I can weave. Get money.’
‘You would help?’ asked Musashi.
‘You make fire for us.’ She shrugged.
They left Yae to tend to Akiyama and to keep the fire stoked over the hours they would be gone. Musashi and Ameku walked a slow pace, the blind woman stumbling over the snow. She started by holding onto his shoulder for guidance, but the trail grew so narrow she fell in behind him and took to clutching the scabbard of his longsword where it jutted backwards from his waist.
‘How is it a blinded woman knows how to weave?’ Musashi asked over his shoulder.
‘Worked at a place . . .’ she said. ‘Buddha people? Monks? Where monks that care for blind, for . . . people with bodies that are not good. Cannot hear, no legs. Those things, at that place, they taught me to use the loom. The monks sell the mats, buy food. On and on. Eight years.’
‘You came to Japan eight years ago?’
‘Nine.’
‘Why did you leave the care of the monks?’
‘It was the war, after the big war. The Lord of the province was killed, or dead, or killed himself, and after him – nothing. The Tokugawa came slow. No law for a year. Many men, they think the monks are rich. One night they come, and they killed the monks but there was no gold for them, only me and Yae and the others, the no legs, the weak minds. All of us, cast out to the world. Dead now, most of them, probably.’
It was not a shocking tale. Musashi had heard of many similar incidents. Ameku in turn spoke of it plainly and seemed to feel no pity for herself. He turned to guide the woman over an uneven hump of land, walked backwards and held both of her hands in his. ‘Yae is your daughter?’ he asked.
‘No. No husband for me. Like a cat, I found her. Met her three years before, she also came to the monks. No one care for her. Mother, father, I don’t know.’ She sighed, and her throat was hoarse with a weariness of years. ‘A fine world, no? Blind woman is all that care for child, and child is all that care for blind.’
‘And why is it you left Ryukyu?’
‘Why is it you heal the man that try to kill you?’ she said sharply.
He did not answer. They walked on in silence.
The people of the town were even less enthused at his bringing a marred foreigner, and yet they could not protest. They had a threshing mill that was stilled after harvest, filled only with piles of grasses drying into straw, and on one of its walls lay a loom. It was a big contraption of interlocking levers, operated with both the feet and the hands. Musashi watched Ameku as she manipulated the machine, hooked reeds with sightless fingers and swayed her body in time to the pressing of the pedals. She was not fast, not even really proficient, but she could do it.
He found that admirable.
*
It was sound that called Akiyama back, dragged him through the dreams he did not see, the slurried images that coalesced into nothing. He had known pain and cold, and on his lips were the tastes of salt and copper, and as far as he could recall this was his entire existence. How long this had been he did not know, could not know, for he was barely aware that he possessed physical form.
Yet something about this noise . . . It bound spirit to flesh once more, it gave raw sensation personal relevance. He stirred, and suddenly he remembered that he had a head that could stir, the back of it resting on what felt like a throbbing floor.
He listened to the noise. It was singing, he realized, a lulling, beautiful voice, a woman’s voice. A woman singing in a way no woman had ever sung for him before. A lullaby or something like it, its sweetness such that it bestowed consciousness rather than stole it. The melody lilting, the singer shifting through octaves in single phrases, swapping from a low, sultry quaver that guided the song to sudden high peaks of passion that crested and then fell, and her voice fell with it, fell like the paths of birds to some warm sea cast a persimmon orange in the dying of the sun.
A song of wistful remorse, or secret hope, or old agonies, or all these things and more; and he listened, Akiyama, wanted to understand and to feel these emotions, because to do so was a human thing. Wounded though it was, his body retained its form; he was human, remained human, and his mind was at last ready to agree with that once more. He was not dead, he would not die. All that remained was that final clarifying calibration between his spirit and his body.
He willed for the song to grant him such, to guide him home, and he tried to listen to the words, to glean some higher understanding. His lips quivered without his knowledge like a babe suckling at nothing. But, though he listened and listened, he could not parse a single recognizable sentence from the beautiful miasma. There were words there, definite words, but he could not understand them. It taunted him, denied what he sought so fundamentally at that moment, and he realized then that in fact he must be in a form of hell.
Personally crafted for himself: he now condemned to live as an actual Foreigner.
That could not be. He rejected the idea, fought against it, and suddenly he had sight. He was in a room he saw, darkened, lit by some crackling fire glowing in a hearth pit close by. He was covered in blankets and his breath was misting up in the air above him. He twisted his head, and over the pit through the smoke he saw a girl he did not know, and a woman with her back to him. It was she who was singing. Her shoulders rose and fell. Long hair, perfectly straight and black like his mother’s had been, like his own was not, lustrous, and he longed to touch it. But the space between them was abyssal, and he could not move and he was denied, and in his despair he looked elsewhere and then he saw his murderer Miyamoto.
It jarred him for a moment, stunned him entirely.
Except it could not be Miyamoto. It was not he. He was different. The young swordsman was swaddled in rags against the cold, sitting up against the wall of the ho
vel. He too was looking at the woman, and his face was entirely changed. No anger, as Akiyama remembered facing down upon that hillside. None of the hatred, the hostility. Miyamoto’s eyes glistened in the firelight, and in them was some composite emotion Akiyama could not describe. A humbled longing, it seemed. He too was enthralled by the song, or perhaps enchanted by the singer, and perhaps he too wished to reach across that gap as Akiyama had wanted, that he might take up the essence of the song and cram it into the space of his heart so that something significant might resonate there, and, like Akiyama, he too knew that he could not.
Eventually Miyamoto became aware of Akiyama looking at him. He turned and looked back. Something began to change on his face, and Akiyama tried to sit up.
A brilliant albescence claimed him.
He awoke next to the feeling of liquid upon his lips. A bamboo cup was pressed to his mouth and its hard, rough rim knocked against his teeth. There was water in it, tepid and delicious, and suddenly he had no desire greater than simply to drink.
‘I told you, I told you,’ the girl was saying. ‘He was talking this afternoon, calling out for someone.’
She was not speaking to him and Akiyama did not care. He drank until he was sated, no more than a few sips that somehow felt like rivers ending themselves into him, and then he looked up beyond the cup to find that it was Miyamoto who was holding the vessel to his mouth.
The singing had stopped. Miyamoto knelt back. The pale-eyed samurai looked up at him for a long time. Miyamoto looked back. The water had given Akiyama strength enough to talk.
‘I would not have been able to find you, had you not insisted upon shouting your name,’ he said. ‘Shouting your name as though it meant something.’
It took all the vigour he had left. His head fell back, and he was nothing once more.
Consciousness returned to him in greater and greater stretches over the next days, like the waxing of the moon. The fact that he was entirely vulnerable panicked him at first, and he felt a prisoner in his own body. He watched them all with the apprehension of the paralysed, his pale eyes, entirely rimmed white as they rolled in their sockets, following them about.