Sword of Honour

by David Kirk

  Musashi smiled.

  He tossed the mushroom towards it, and quickly the dog snapped it up. One by one he continued to throw the remaining vegetables, closer each time, drawing the dog in. Eventually it was close enough that he could reach out and touch it, and to his surprise the dog allowed this. Its fur was brittle, the missing ear a ridge of hardened scar. He stroked it, soothed it, and he felt right then a profound sympathy and kinship with the dog, saw himself in it.

  Most men would prefer to think themselves the wolf, some fearsome master of the wilderness stalking the night the more pleasing and romantic image. But the truth was wolves were born wild. Dogs were bred to the leash, as Musashi had been born to the Way. He and the dog, the pair of them here had liberated themselves, earned this life of meagre subsistence and magnificent substance.

  Toughened.

  Pure.

  Words of this sort, he told himself.

  Across from him, over the fire, Ameku stirred. The woman rose to sit. He wondered if the blinded had some acuter form of hearing, if the dog’s gentle panting had not somehow disturbed her.

  ‘Here,’ he said softly.

  Her head turned slightly, but she asked no question. She understood what he meant – that it was he that was awake, and that Yae and Akiyama slept still. It was a laconic form of communication that had developed over the months together. She sat there rubbing and stretching the doze from herself in silence, not wanting to rouse the others. Musashi continued to watch her, scratching the dog on the hard scruff of its neck.

  Always Ameku put the fire between them, so that he saw her mostly through some veil of smoke. Always she turned and hid her features with the long locks of her immaculately combed hair, so that he only ever saw her jaw, her lips, and nothing more. Her face remained a mystery to him. Never had he seen her blinded eyes.

  The dog continued to pant, and her head twisted in query.

  ‘What is here with you?’ she asked.

  ‘A dog.’

  ‘A dog?’

  He grunted.

  ‘Dangerous?’

  ‘He’s an ugly old thing, but he seems friendly.’

  Ameku said nothing.

  ‘Do you like dogs?’ he asked. ‘Would you like to touch him?’

  ‘No.’

  The dog took the rejection evenly. Musashi continued to pet it. In the woods around them the insects of the summer pulsed and sang. They recognized no difference between the sun and the moon, the chirping crickets, the quavering suzumushi, the howling cicadas, offered their chorus relentlessly. Ameku fumbled around her until she found her bamboo flask. She pulled the stopper from it and drank from the stale water within.

  ‘Today – Kyoto?’ she asked.

  ‘I believe so.’

  ‘I want to sleep on bedding once more,’ she said with blunt desire. ‘You think, definitely, I can find work in the city?

  ‘You can work a loom, and here . . . It is the capital. All things come from here, so too silk or tatami mats or . . . There must be great mills. There are great mills. Someone will take you on.’

  ‘You are certain?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But never have you seen Kyoto?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Nnn,’ she said, entirely dubious.

  ‘There will be work awaiting you.’

  He tried to put confidence in his voice. Whether she believed him or not he could not tell. It had taken some convincing to get her and Yae to accompany the swordsmen to the capital. He had told her all these things many times, and furthermore insisted that with two samurai with them they would walk safely upon the roads. This had proven true – only once had Musashi seen a hostile face peering out from the cover of the trees, and the man had seen both Akiyama’s horse and the sheer size of Musashi and the look that he returned, and then had retreated. There would be others, given time, unarmed and vulnerable; banditry a game of patience.

  The dog lay down on its side, warming its belly on what was left of the fire. Musashi nestled his fingers in the warm spaces between its ribs and let his hand rise and fall with the creature’s contented breathing.

  ‘Do you have dogs on Ryukyu?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course,’ she said, and she said it as though it were absurd to be asked so. ‘Cats too. Fish and birds and—’

  ‘It was only an idle question.’

  She smiled, not quite kindly. ‘Do you think Ryukyu some . . . new world? All different?’

  ‘Your songs, the way you sing . . . It is like nothing I have heard before.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘The words . . .’ said Musashi. ‘Do you think . . . Could you speak your language for me?’

  ‘What would you have me say?’

  ‘Does it matter? Can you not just . . . speak?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I . . .’ said Musashi, and he tried to think of some fine poetic utterance that he had heard across his life, ‘“Swift as the wind. Silent as the forest. Fierce as the fire. Implacable as the mountain.”’

  Her face twisted for a moment. Then she spoke. What she said was much longer than the phrase Musashi offered, and he wondered if it was simply a difficult translation or whether she was mocking him.

  In the silence after, Akiyama’s horse offered a great sigh as it slept on its feet.

  ‘What was that you had me say?’ she asked.

  ‘Something I heard. Something my father taught me, about the way men ought to be.’

  ‘You like the sound better in my tongue?’

  Musashi did not answer.

  ‘Well, now, what matters the most?’ she asked. ‘If I sang my song in your words, words you know and understand, would you like it more? The same? Or is the, the . . .’ she said, struggled for a word, and then under her breath so as not to wake the others she hummed a wordless phrase of melody. ‘That alone, which you like? That which enters your heart? The thing that has no meaning, the thing that you can give any meaning to?’

  Musashi could not answer.

  She smiled again. ‘I will tell you this: I have known Japan. I have known Ryukyu. They are the same. Dogs are dogs, men are men, women are women. Words are different, but their meaning . . . ?’ She circled a finger over her heart, tapped her chest. ‘In there, the same. All as we are.’

  The way she said it, the way she smiled – Musashi could not gauge the level, nor define the subject of her scorn, whether it was he himself she was toying with or whether she was earnestly trying to teach him something she found so risible she took bleak amusement in it. If only he could see her eyes, he might ascertain which it was.

  ‘What of samurai?’ he asked. ‘The Way? Are these things also in Ryukyu?’

  The blind woman sucked air through her teeth, thought about it. ‘In Japan, you have much iron. In Ryukyu, little, so in Ryukyu there are few men that wear swords. In Japan, you Japanese . . . Some of you, swords the thing that you love. The star that you follow. This is true. But truly . . . do you think a small thing like a sword can shape a man? Change him?’

  ‘If it is wielded dishonestly.’

  ‘So you, Musashi, are honest?’

  ‘I am,’ he said.

  Ameku said nothing further. Musashi sat looking at her with his hand upon the dog’s flank. She was cynical, hardened by something, but what exactly had made her this way he could not begin to guess at. But he too had been hardened against all the wrongs of the world by his own circumstance, and, as the dawn fully broke above them both, he looked at her anew.

  He began to wonder if he had not found in her one who felt as he did.

  Akiyama slept in odd contortions to keep the weight of his body from pressing on the scars across his chest. He no longer had any need of bandages but the pain of the wounds remained, and a part of him wondered if it would ever truly subside. A host of old warriors he had encountered through his life moaning of the aches of decades-past battles paraded themselves through the pathways of his mind, and each time he dismissed them as no more than p
hantoms sent to drain his spirits.

  When he awoke that morning he saw that Miyamoto had somehow befriended a dog through the night. It was a wretched-looking mongrel but it was placid enough, and it stayed with them through their mean breakfast of mushrooms and tough scraps of dried fish. Yae adored the creature immediately, and it sat there with its little lungs heaving as the heat of the day began to impose itself, ambivalent to her petting. Then, when it had assured itself that there was no more food, it shrugged itself free of the girl’s arms and walked off without looking back.

  Yae was upset at what she saw as a betrayal.

  ‘Dogs are dogs,’ he said to her. ‘That’s their nature. Immediacy. Have you ever seen a dog hauling on an old piece of rope? He fights and fights and he doesn’t know why, but for those moments he has to fight entirely . . . Then he drops it, as though it never was.’

  ‘So the dog didn’t like me?’

  ‘Oh, I have no doubt that it liked you entirely for the moments that you fed it.’

  ‘But . . .’ she said, sad and stubborn, ‘the monks back at Nankodai, they told me a story about a dog that waited and waited and . . . I thought dogs were supposed to be loyal.’

  ‘Well,’ said Akiyama, ‘loyalty is a thing of many facets, and . . .’

  He did not finish. Defining loyalty had governed his thoughts these past months, and of the answer he was no longer certain.

  It led him to a dark introspection, and deepened the anxiety he felt this morning. He found himself restless. For the first time since the day he had been cut down, he was compelled to pull his hair up into a topknot. The hair upon his once-shaven scalp had grown in fully and he had no oil with which to force his longer red locks straight and dark, but even though it was a poor approximation he nevertheless felt that it had to be done.

  Miyamoto noticed him binding the queue of his hair and gave him a black look, but said nothing out loud.

  This feeling had grown the closer they got to the capital, like a hailstone gathering ice amidst the clouds. It was one thing to make a decision in isolation, it was another to confront the consequences of it. Akiyama felt in some ways like a child, nervous, wanting to hide, to deny. He had left his bloodied and torn tea-coloured jacket to rot upon the walls of the hovel they had sheltered in, but now, suddenly, he wanted nothing more than to put it on once more, to smother himself in it, to let it cover his entire body and have the colour obscure his individual self.

  His mind chose to fight this by fixating solely upon Kyoto.

  It made of the city a portent of a kind, and Akiyama now found he desperately wanted to see it exactly as he had left it. If it had not changed, if it had retained its beauty and its splendour, if serenity still reigned, then he reasoned that he himself could be serene also. In judging himself against familiar things that he had judged himself against before, he might mark and understand the change in himself better. Yet a sort of dread in this . . . He was like a man waiting to be struck, braced for some pain and yet also simultaneously wanting to feel the pain so that it could be over and done with.

  They readied themselves for travel. Yae gathered up her and Ameku’s things and Miyamoto helped Akiyama stiffly up onto his horse. The pale-eyed samurai had ridden the entirety of their journey as the others walked. He was wounded but he felt hale enough to walk and had offered many times to alternate their time in the saddle, but Ameku had never ridden and was fearful of the height, Yae would not let any other lead Ameku, and Miyamoto had simply refused.

  ‘Don’t like horses’ was all he had said. ‘Bad memories.’

  Instead Miyamoto held the horse’s bridle as they walked, led the creature as Yae led Ameku. From the saddle Akiyama looked at the waystones on the sides of the road. They had travelled upon the Sannindo road, which ran from the western tip of Honshu to Kyoto broad and flat. Every half-ri a stone offered the distance to the capital. No other great city of the southern coast was afforded recognition upon them, not Osaka, not Himeji, not Okayama; only Kyoto nestled in the centre of the nation. Things only ever looked inwards.

  They were close now and the road was busy. An irregular procession of irregular caste and fortune that approached on foot or on horseback or riding in palanquins. In the gutters that ran beside the roadway aspirant monks and destitute beggars beseeched for the same coin, voices pleading in desperation or murmuring steady prayer. People took tea in the shade of a roadside inn, kimono skirts and jerkin trousers hiked up and their bare feet set in a cool, running stream that had been channelled.

  Akiyama marked a shrine that he remembered passing those years past, a little wooden structure set upon a plinth mimicking the form of a temple yet no larger than a clothes chest. Inside was a holy stone encircled by rope. He saw this and immediately thought of a rope around his throat, and so he took to thinking instead of the sights he would see in a matter of hours. What was it that defined Kyoto most to him? Was it the sight of the rising sun breaking over the eastern mountains, or fireworks loosed at night over the arch of the Nijo bridge? Was it the delicate smell of gathered summer hydrangeas or the overwhelming grease smoke of grilled river salmon cooked over red-hot coals? Was it the sound of the sigh of a crowd as a golden festival shrine was raised magnificently aloft, or of the great bells of the Gion temple tolling with low and resonant puissance, mourning the fleetness of existence?

  Perhaps thoughts could be thought too loudly. Over his shoulder, Miyamoto asked, ‘What is Kyoto like?’

  And, for all his musing upon it, Akiyama found that he could answer no better than he could define the concept of loyalty. ‘There is great beauty there,’ he said. ‘I cannot describe it as it deserves.’

  ‘Is it as men say? The ten-thousand-year city? The capital of flowers?’

  The pale-eyed samurai grunted evasively.

  ‘How many people?’ Miyamoto insisted.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Is it . . .’ said the young swordsman, and struggled for a word, ‘populous?’

  ‘What is your meaning?’

  ‘I have walked the streets of other cities, and I have found the weight of people there channelled to feel as . . .’ said Miyamoto, and he made a vague gesture with one hand, clutching at his throat and then banging a fist on his sternum. He looked up to see if Akiyama understood him, and all Akiyama could do was stare back in confusion.

  ‘That is something I have never felt,’ he said. ‘You would do well to focus yourself upon the Yoshioka.’

  Miyamoto’s tone darkened. ‘How many, their numbers?’

  ‘I cannot say for certain. There are many adepts serving all across the country. I would expect at least fifty resident at the school, however.’

  Miyamoto spat. ‘That may be. But I only have feud with one.’

  ‘The master Kozei is a talented swordsman. It was he who taught me. You cannot rush like a boar into conflict with him. If you seek—’

  ‘Kozei?’ said Miyamoto. ‘I want the head.’

  Akiyama adjusted himself in the saddle. After some moments, he said, ‘Kozei was the one who ordered me to hunt you down.’

  ‘But who is it – you told me – him of the bloodline, who carries the name?’

  ‘Sir Seijuro reigns now that his father Sir Naokata has succumbed to his illness. He is young. Older than you, but young enough that he is likely under the sway of master Kozei still.’

  ‘Seijuro Yoshioka,’ said Miyamoto, fixated, tongue rolling out the words venomously. ‘The Lord-King Yoshioka.’

  They carried on in silence. The capital was imminent. They were sweating profusely, dark stains upon their worn and weathered clothes. The heat seemed to swell around them. Kyoto was inland, ringed by mountains that trapped the temperature and kept out wind, and the road ahead shimmered in a wet haze.

  Other cities tended to coalesce gradually, outlying hamlets increasing in their density until the city was simply declared to start at some unseen boundary. For Kyoto proper, however, there was a firm demarcation. It had been
both moated and walled by the will of the late Regent Toyotomi, vast amounts of earth packed hard and tight to stand at least five times the height of a man and the slope of them almost vertical. Gatehouse structures fifty paces long and three storeys high stood on top of the walls, and it was one of these buildings that Akiyama saw first, his first glimpse of his home in near four years.

  The gatehouse was silhouetted against the bright sky and, set athwart the light, it was robbed of form, seemed vague and indistinct, and he found no comfort in it. He looked down instead, and from the vantage of his saddle he could see the moat before the walls. It was thirty paces wide, and Akiyama thought of its waters, remembered their deep jade-green colour, luscious, tauntingly so, as though the liquid might in fact be viscous enough to coat the body in, to wear as a second impermeably cool skin against the oppression of the summer.

  But that was no more than a delusion, and there were other more tangible forms of oppression. A low bridge spanned the moat, barely above its surface, and Akiyama saw that before it a crowd of hundreds of people mobbed in sullen anger. Paper fans waved in vain, women hid beneath the shade of parasols, labourers in no more than loincloths and sandals sat with their arms around their knees, backs glistening. The lot of them were being prevented from crossing.

  ‘This is very unusual,’ he told Miyamoto. ‘Not even during the War were the gates of Kyoto barred. The city is inviolate.’

  Suspicious, he told Ameku and Yae to linger a distance away whilst he and the young swordsman went forward to investigate. At the mouth of the bridge they saw that a line of Tokugawa samurai were standing with spears, clad in full livery and conical iron helmets. Each one of them sweated piteously beneath the metal and the layers. Their leader was up on a dais, and he was shouting to the crowd, had shouted so long that his face was red and his voice was hoarse. He explained over and over, eyes bulging, that without specific permission entry to the city was barred owing to some calamitous incident he only alluded to, and the crowd seethed and murmured of explosion and fire and arson.