Sword of Honour

by David Kirk

  Yet they seemed to bear him no malice, and Akiyama studied them and quickly learnt the pattern. Miyamoto would leave in the morning with the woman Ameku, and the pair of them would not return until the evening, always with food and sometimes with a fresh poultice when it was needed. The girl Yae was left to tend to him. Without either of the adults there she seemed to find Akiyama fearsome, and he would not see her for hours at a time. Then she would dash in and pile fresh wood into the hearth, or force water down his throat, and then she would go again.

  He did not blame her. His wound was nothing he would choose to be around, either. He struggled to view his injuries when Miyamoto tended to them, pushed his chin into his neck, but all he could see was a vague ugly cleft and a sense of something white and gummed within. It made him shudder to think that this was how it appeared in a state of healing, that weeks before it might have somehow been more unpleasant to behold.

  Akiyama thus abided long hours of solitude, lying with his jaw shivering or feeling the beads of sweat pool in the hollow of his philtrum. There was nought else for him but introspection.

  On the wall was hung his jacket. The colour of tea was stained by his blood. He would stare so long that the patterns of the stain would swim and coalesce before his feverous eyes. He wondered if any in the school of Yoshioka thought of him, contemplated or sympathized with this potential suffering of his. He wondered if his name was spoken at all, if his absence was even noted.

  He knew the answer.

  His strength returned gradually. Of a dawn, Akiyama managed to roll himself onto his side and wriggle across the floor so that he might see outside through a hole rotted clean through the wooden walls. The exertion was agony, but he saw light that was sharp and pure and reflected by snow, and he could feel the cold of it in his lungs. Outside he saw Miyamoto, practising the methods of the sword before he left for the day’s labours. Akiyama watched him both critically and enviously, examining what fundaments made up Miyamoto’s style and wishing that he himself could move so once more.

  To his surprise he saw Miyamoto begin swinging the longsword one-handed. That was the extraordinary manoeuvre that had killed him, or would have killed him, and yet to see Miyamoto repeating it here it seemed a barely realized thing. There was a curiosity in the tall man’s gait, a tentativeness in his movements as though he were slowly working out the balance and the combination of the muscles as he repeated the motion over and over again.

  It set Akiyama to thinking of their duel over the lonely hours in solitude that day. He ran through the stages of the fight over and over, and he was surprised anew by his loss each time. Who was this man of no renown who did things that ought to be impossible, cut as he should not be able to cut? More surprising to him was that, the more he considered it, he found in truth he bore Miyamoto no hatred for cutting him down. The colour of tea hung above him on the wall, and Akiyama stared at it and realized somehow that innately he felt this fate was inevitable. Miyamoto’s arm – his single arm! – was incidental in its part.

  When he accepted this, Akiyama’s guardedness began to fade. He took instead to studying Miyamoto not as a captor or a tormentor, but rather for who he was. He saw a young man who carried himself in relative silence, and gave his hours over to tending another nominally his enemy. The questions he had asked himself about Miyamoto’s nature over the months of the hunt resurfaced.

  ‘Why is it you cut down trees?’ Akiyama asked him one evening.

  Miyamoto gave him an odd look. ‘I am no woodsman,’ he said.

  Again he failed to remember, as he had failed to remember on that hillside before they duelled. A gesture that had fascinated Akiyama so, perhaps to him simply envisioned and enacted and then gone. He, free of the brooding contemplation that had guided Akiyama through the years and led him here.

  Young.

  On a subsequent day he asked Miyamoto his age. Miyamoto told him.

  ‘Nineteen,’ repeated Akiyama, and he laid his head back and closed his eyes. ‘Cut down by a child.’

  Ameku was a suspicious woman, particularly when Yae was present. Her distrust, however, did not seem to Akiyama to be levelled subjectively against him alone. She kept her hands upon the girl incessantly, brought her close, and Yae in turn would whisper to her all that she saw. He wondered blackly what words the child used to describe him and his wretched state.

  ‘You’re actually foreign?’ he asked Ameku, when he learnt that she was from Ryukyu. ‘You were born outside the nation?’

  She grunted.

  ‘But . . .’ he said, ‘your skin is so pale.’

  She grunted again, thought him a fool. She did not understand the import of that to him, and nor did she seek to learn anything about him beyond whether he had died or lived yet.

  His wounds healed slowly. Of an afternoon deep into the winter, on his fifth attempt he managed at last to rise to his feet for the first time in months and stumble to the frame of the door. The girl was nowhere to be found, but beyond the wandering lucent specks of exertion in his eyes he was surprised to see his horse amidst the snows outside. It was stripping a trunk of its bark, chewing noisily.

  ‘You’re fending for yourself?’ he said, fondly.

  The horse did not react to the sound of his voice. It had lost weight, ribs visible on its pale flanks. It was not tethered, wore no bridle or saddle, and yet it remained close. Akiyama smiled. The thought of loyalty warmed him through the day and into the night also. He lay sprawled straight-backed on a plank of wood set at a gentle angle, the pain too great for him yet to sit forward cross-legged. He had a steaming bowl of soy leaf broth in his hands, and the taste was good and the clay was hot upon his palms.

  Ameku was combing Yae’s hair with a whalebone comb, the one thing of any value she possessed, in silence. Miyamoto sat across the way preparing the poultice for Akiyama’s wound, grinding herbs with the steel pommel of his shortsword upon a broad piece of flat shale he had scavenged from the woods.

  The pale-eyed samurai watched him for some time.

  ‘I am in your debt,’ he said.

  Miyamoto looked up for a moment. Then he clucked his tongue and took to rolling the sword harder.

  ‘Fortunate for me that my killer should be so adept at healing,’ said Akiyama.

  ‘I am not your killer,’ said Miyamoto.

  ‘I know that,’ said Akiyama. ‘And I thank you for your mercy.’

  Miyamoto grunted. Yae was looking at Akiyama, and for the first time there was no fear in her eyes. She was not, however, yet ready to return the smile he gave her.

  ‘How is it one so young as you knows the ways of medicine?’ asked Akiyama of Miyamoto.

  The young swordsman’s grinding stopped. He stared down at the sword, and after a moment he began to scrape the moist green-black salve from off the pommel. ‘I had an uncle who taught me.’

  ‘An uncle?’

  ‘A monk of Amaterasu. A great healer. A man of worth. This, one of his remedies.’

  ‘Then I am in his debt also.’

  Miyamoto grunted again, and gave no further answer. He pushed the salve around with his finger as though he were checking it for consistency.

  There was something in his demeanour that he tried to hide, and in search of further warmness, in hope of bringing it forth, Akiyama pried: ‘If you revere him such, how is it you did not return to him after the War?’

  Miyamoto did not respond as he expected. He seemed to grow flustered. ‘He . . . he died,’ he murmured eventually, spoken without much conviction in either tone or the young man’s eyes. This wavering seemed only to gall him further, and his face hardened and he spoke in challenge: ‘Why is it the Yoshioka sent you to take my head?’

  The bracken branches squealed faintly as they burnt in the hearth, and the smell of pine was rife. Akiyama met his gaze. After a moment Miyamoto’s eyes dropped, and the desire for confrontation departed.

  ‘I told you before,’ Akiyama told him. ‘At the battle of Sekigahara you insul
ted our school.’

  ‘And I told you before – you lie.’

  ‘It is the truth.’

  He held Miyamoto’s gaze, and the look in his eyes must have convinced Miyamoto. ‘Insulted?’ the young man said, and now he seemed genuinely confused. He thought about it before he spoke again. ‘Insulted – I insulted you, yourself, you?’

  ‘I was not at the battle.’

  ‘Then . . . ?’

  ‘A man named Sir Ando witnessed your offence.’

  ‘I never . . .’ said Miyamoto, and again he seemed to think deeply. After a long while, he offered a hesitant nod. ‘I recall now that I killed one of your men before the battle in a duel.’

  Now it was Akiyama who was surprised. Miyamoto did not seem to be feigning his trouble recollecting. How was it that he could forget felling one of a school as renowned as the Yoshioka before near every samurai in the nation? Men earned swathes of land and status for less. What other things must he have witnessed that day that taking a Yoshioka head was relegated to an afterthought?

  Miyamoto spoke on: ‘He was wounded, your man, but the duel was of his urging. I killed him cleanly and offered no insult to his body after that I can recall.’

  ‘You’ve killed a man?’ asked Yae.

  Akiyama ignored the girl. ‘It is claimed you did.’

  ‘And not one man can recall these words?’

  ‘Perhaps Sir Ando can.’

  ‘Regardless . . . For this, they sent you all this way, across all these years to claim my head?’

  ‘They did.’

  Miyamoto sucked air through his teeth. His eyes were unseeing for a moment. Then he shook his head and began tearing leaves from the stems of the various herbs he had collected and placing them on the slate ready for grinding. His fingers wrapped around his shortsword, and, with his shoulders hunched and his teeth clenched, began to work once more.

  ‘Yoshioka,’ he said, perhaps to none but himself, ‘there in the heart of the nation . . . Of all things . . . All aspiring to become them . . . Be as them . . .’

  Akiyama saw his mood and did not try to speak to him again that night. He sipped on his broth and watched as the pommel mulched all beneath it.

  There were many more hours to fill that winter, long dark hours, and as his body mended Akiyama found returning alongside his health an energy he was not accustomed to.

  ‘Nineteen, nineteen,’ he said, and this was how it felt to speak, to be heard. ‘At nineteen, what was I doing? A long time ago. I was an acolyte of the school. Four years in. Every spring, at the time of the cherry blossom, the school holds the annual assessments. Up at the Rendai moor, in the north of Kyoto. No cherry trees there, though, but this was before the Regent built his great wall and the moat, so you could see the river Katsura flowing past. The Yoshioka . . . We . . . The Yoshioka grade practically. One advances in rank through beating a superior twice in three bouts. Bamboo blades.’

  Though the woman and the girl were present it was Miyamoto to whom he truly spoke, the swordsman, the one who might relate the keenest.

  ‘At nineteen I beat every one of my contemporaries in consecutive victories. I was permitted to challenge a senior adept. Sir Mogami. He won the first, I the second and the third. The third was perfect. I stabbed him with the point of my sword in the hollow of the throat, struck clean, breached his guard as though it were not there.’

  Here he gestured with his hands, mimed the lunge, rapped the fore- and middle finger of his right hand on the flesh beneath the knob of his throat.

  ‘You understand the achievement of that, no? You, one of your skill, you too must have struck similar blows. The cleanest strike, the hardest point to attack. Were he wearing armour I’d have killed him still, and he did not strike me in return, his blow wasted upon the air. That I could have seen the manoeuvre with eyes not of my own, appreciate it from another angle. But I knew its worth. Felt it. Pride in the victory, pride I cannot describe it to you, I . . .’

  His body shuddered with the memory, of the achievement that the long years of study had yielded up to him.

  ‘But of course,’ he said, ‘all kept within. I bowed to Sir Mogami, and Sir Mogami bowed to me. One had to present oneself before the masters of the school, who were all sitting witnessing upon a dais. Sitting on stools like generals observing battle. There was the old dynastic head of the school, Naokata Yoshioka, and the master Tadanari Kozei. Both of them there, and I knelt before them, and I could hear the blood flow through my ears, such was my nervousness. I knew recognition was here, that moment for which I had strived imminent at last. After my bow, I looked up and they were both looking down at me. Faces of stone. Did not see me, acknowledged nothing further than my physical state of being.’ He sniffed, and his eyes were bleak and distant. ‘They killed me with those gazes.’

  Yae was running the whalebone comb through Ameku’s hair, and it stuck for a moment on a knot that her small fingers quickly found and parted.

  ‘There was a third man there also, I remember,’ said Akiyama. ‘A visiting guest from some other school on Kyushu, too old for anything but frittering about in vacuous diplomacy. He was a, a . . .’ – and these next words had waited decades to be spoken aloud – ‘a drunken old sot, and his face was florid with sake. Him. What he did was, he began to clap at me. At me, not for me. Clapped as enthusiastically as he would have done for a child, and what he said was, “Isn’t it astounding how you’ve managed to learn our ways so well?”’

  Akiyama threw a fresh handful of branches into the hearth pit.

  ‘Sir Mogami went to serve as swordmaster for the Lord of Tajima, and my reward was . . .’

  His words trailed off.

  ‘That is the Way,’ said Miyamoto.

  ‘Of which you claim to have freed yourself.’

  Miyamoto nodded.

  The depths of winter came and went. The snows began to melt. Akiyama’s wounds ceased to weep, and formed scars. They were his first, or rather his first of any real size, and their hard pale ridges stood out brazen on his dark flesh. He realized how close it was he had come to death, of how much blood he had shed, of how he had wandered through the delirium of infection.

  Of how he had been guided through.

  Akiyama was holding his horse by the bridle as Miyamoto picked ticks from its haunches with a short knife. Yae was kicking clods of thawing ice around and laughing. It was then that the pale-eyed samurai asked the question that had hovered unspoken the winter long.

  ‘Why is it you spared me?’ he said.

  Miyamoto thought about it some time, as though he too had been pondering the answer over the months. ‘Because after I cut you down,’ he said, ‘you lay there laughing on that hill. A bitter laugh as you died. I do not think I have seen anything more honest.’

  ‘Honest,’ repeated Akiyama. He thought about it, and could not disagree.

  The horse clacked its teeth, shook its head. Akiyama patted it on the nose.

  ‘And where now from here, you and I?’ he asked.

  ‘You owe me nothing,’ said Miyamoto.

  Akiyama looked at him.

  ‘Nothing,’ Miyamoto repeated.

  ‘What are your intentions, then?’

  Miyamoto rose and wiped the blood from the dagger on the sleeve of his jacket. ‘I intend to head to Kyoto and force whoever it was that sent you to kill me to fight his own duels.’ He patted the horse’s neck, then looked his assassin in the eyes. ‘The question is you, Nagayoshi Akiyama. Will you return, and hold those who ruled your life so callously to account?’

  The spring sun shone in the heavens, lit up the new and emergent life so brilliantly.

  PART III

  The Colour of Tea

  Summer. Ninth Year of the Era of Keicho

  Seven years since the death of the Regent Hideyoshi Toyotomi

  Approaching four years since Sekigahara

  The first year of the imperially ordained Shogunate of the clan Tokugawa, may it last ten thousand more

/>   Chapter Eleven

  There were moments Goemon Inoue found when he felt not as himself, jarring slivers of some higher lucidity where he could simply see what lay before him as though from some distance away and behind his own eyes, see it all as the absurd circumstance of another. A black, mocking play put on by actors and he merely a spectator that had somehow ended up on the stage, surrounded and overwhelmed by it.

  The heat of the humid high summer swirling, churning, trapped in the crowded forehall of the garrison of the Tokugawa, Goemon feeling sweat coursing from his brow, down the back of his neck, from the pits of his arms, stagnating on his stomach, his thighs, and yet for an instant suddenly he was cool, apart, feeling nothing. He saw the beseeching guild master who stood before him with perfect objectivity, and from that unknown void he temporarily inhabited Goemon wanted to laugh.

  The guild master had umbrage in his eyes, honest umbrage, and he held himself as though he wore swords, or at the least as though he were adorned with some form of armour that the actual blades at Goemon Inoue’s side could not penetrate. ‘Captain, I demand of you to explain yourself to me. This is intolerable. Never before have taxes of this sort been levied. You demand what? A full third of our profits over that which we already pay? This is unheard of . . . I simply cannot believe that you would intend to . . .’

  On he droned, on and on, such that it pulled Goemon back into his own flesh. Heat was felt and his pulse at his temples was felt and sweat salt was on his lips, and Goemon had to make a conscious effort to hide the disdain from his face. The guild master was a portly man with too much face for his skull, froglike almost, draped in fine silks in gaudy shades of chequered blue and flower-patterned burgundy, and he, this gold-hungry merchant, this lowerborn, stood brazenly speaking as though he had the authority of samurai.