Sword of Honour
Page 22
Between these two monuments, dwarfed, all the people walked.
‘The Regent Toyotomi had vision, did he not?’ said Tadanari.
‘I am aware the Regent ordered these built,’ said Goemon. He sounded like a child professing the ability to read.
‘I did not claim otherwise, Captain,’ said Tadanari. ‘But, yes, both of these monuments were his work. I assume you know that, though the great Buddha is carved of wood, the segments of it are pinned together by stakes forged from the steel of all the swords and spears he captured on his conquests?’
‘I am aware.’
‘These things here then he built, and all the bridges that span the broad Kamo, the walls that surround the city, the moats . . . Truly, the Regent enriched Kyoto immeasurably.’
‘Your tone does not ring deep with admiration.’
A slow blue ribbon emerged from Tadanari’s mouth, coiled upwards. ‘Will you permit me to speak something of my true thoughts upon your master’s master?’
‘I stand currently in your debt.’
‘About seven, eight years ago now, our city was struck by a terrible earthquake. The worst that I can remember. Perhaps you and your folk, though, could not feel it, way up in . . . In any case, that great Buddha was destroyed. The stakes could not hold and it shook itself to pieces. The hall collapsed around it. Can you imagine something of such colossal stature being scattered as though it were no more than dice? Its head, it rolled forty paces away. I could scarcely believe it, but I swear to you it is truth. I saw it lying there afterwards, red beams and tiles all around. It was obscene, face down there in the dirt. The Regent himself came to see the damage, stood just over yonder. This was the last year of the Bunroku era, just before the second invasion of Korea . . . The Regent was not enfeebled, but he was old, small.
‘Our school contributed to the construction of the hall, and to its restoration. But we were permitted to witness him only, not permitted to be acknowledged. I and the dear late Naokata Yoshioka stood towards the back of the crowd, and over that crowd what we saw was the most honourable Regent Toyotomi’s anger – real honest anger, unbridled, unhidden. I could not hear all his words, but some came clear, and what I remember him saying most is, “Accursed thing! Accursed thing! I formed your legs that you might sit! Why do you defy me? Raise yourself! Raise yourself!” There was little dignity to him. An old man’s futility like a fish trying to thrash itself free of a barbed hook . . . Please remember, good Captain, this is just my small observation upon what I witnessed of your master’s master.’
Goemon’s eyebrows absolved him.
‘The Buddha did not raise itself, but nor was the Regent entirely powerless: he ordered thousands of men to work upon its repairs immediately, and before he died he saw the statue restored and the hall stand again as it had been. But I knew that day, seeing him, that for all the effort, all the thought, all the money he put into elevating Kyoto higher still, he did not understand the city. The essence of it. Let us say a fire came . . . Forgive me, Captain, I understand the thought of fire must be a sore point for you at this time.’
Goemon’s teeth clacked upon the metal of his pipe’s mouthpiece.
‘But a fire comes say – and it will come one day – and eradicates all, spreads from east to west to north to south, and all the ashes of the temples mix with all the ashes of the brothels. Is that the end of Kyoto? No. One act ends, the scenery upon the stage is changed, the next one begins. Men will rebuild and Kyoto will continue to be. The form of it altered, the incidental shapes collude into fresh arrangement, but the soul of it . . . The Regent sought to make the city indelibly his by pinning it into place with structures wrought by his hand, and screamed and raged when those structures failed him, and, though this hall stands so wonderfully tall and I marvel at it, it is not Kyoto. Wood and iron are not Kyoto. Kyoto endures in hearts, is summoned and defined by those who know it, an immortal with a million different facets and yet the same conclusion reached. Therein lies the truth the Regent never realized: what is a city but its people?’
Tadanari drew in the last glowing remnants of his pipe, exhaled, then smiled slyly: ‘How fares your master’s castle over at Nijo?’
‘Construction advances,’ said Goemon, and he even managed to return the smile.
The torment in him! The captain yearning to simply draw his sword and cut at the man who he knew was undoubtedly responsible for all his troubles, his yearning to be as samurai. Yet there he stood, had to stand, a half-man gelded by his allegiances to distant despots.
Tadanari could feel it, see it, and he revelled in it. Never would he forget the arrogance of the man who had come to his school those years back and refuted the iron-clad right of the Yoshioka to their rightful office. Never would he grant him respite. He opened a separate compartment on his case of kizami and held it up to Goemon with a flourish. So small a thing and yet the captain, forced to fulfil his part, could do nothing but empty the ash of his pipe as a supplicant would.
Magnanimity sometimes the keenest insult, complicity the greatest humiliation.
Tadanari emptied his own pipe and then placed the case neatly away in its velvet bag. Then he and Goemon bowed politely to each other, traded perfectly insincere farewells, and went their opposite ways.
At the altar of the temple Tadanari dropped a golden coin into the waiting chest, the ovoid ryo of enough value to keep a family in rice for a year, and then he clasped his hands and bowed his head and asked what he would ask of the Buddhas and the Bodhisattvas, the serene faces of which stared back at him. He could read no hint of favour of scorn upon them, but in the mood he was in he could do nothing but assume the former. Then he started on his journey back to the school.
Before he had reached the Shichijo bridge once more, the children saw him and came up to him, and to them he gave the rest of the sugarcane that he still had about himself. Children saw things, and over their sticky mastication he expected them to tell him perhaps of a scandal of some local drunk who had vomited over himself, or of a shamed wife forced to shave herself bald in public, things of the sort they always told him.
They brought to him instead the first winds of a storm that was beginning to blow over the city. Something that would be met with shock or outrage or illicit amusement by every tongue that passed it on until it had reached even the meanest of gutters and the most gilded of chambers.
They told him of a band of Yoshioka violating the sanctity of holy Mount Hiei to try to kill a masterless swordsman, and failing.
Chapter Seventeen
The head of the Foreigner was set upon a spike above the gates of the Yoshioka school. There was no breeze to blow the shaggy locks of red hair. His eyes and his mouth were open, and his dead skin seemed to sweat.
‘Do you see?’ said Denshichiro.
He spoke to his younger brother, Matashichiro. They stood beneath the gates looking up at the head. Near a decade separated the pair of them but the blood of the Yoshioka was strong and the resemblance was budding keen. Matashichiro had been a heavy child, a round face without definition of cheek or nose or chin, arms that seemed fat, and this softness was only just starting to harden into muscle like that of both of his brothers, his shoulders widening, ears growing callused from wrestling, lithic masculinity forcing its way onto his brow as the dimple of his smile grew shallower.
‘Do you see?’ said Denshichiro again. He had both his hands on the boy’s shoulders.
‘I see,’ said Matashichiro.
‘What do you see?’
‘A head. I have seen heads before. I am not afraid of it.’
‘Good. But this is much more than that.’
‘The Foreigner.’
‘Yes.’
‘Was his blood a different colour?’
‘No. Red as yours or mine.’
‘Then why do you make me stare at it?’
‘Because he was a traitor, and now the city can mark him as such.’
‘Is that important?’
Matashichiro did not want to admit any fallibility. Stubbornly he tried to formulate an answer but the words did not come. Denshichiro spun the boy around to face him.
‘In my dreams, I dream of flying,’ he said, reciting his father’s words as he saw them in his memory, even the tone of his voice warping to try to replicate the profundity he had felt as a child. ‘I am certain I can fly. I soar with such grace that even the birds envy me, and all the world is mine to traverse.’
Denshichiro spread his arms and flapped them as though they were the frantic wings of a startled pigeon. Matashichiro did not laugh as the child Denshichiro had laughed, but a glimmer of mirth appeared in the boy’s eyes.
‘There is my actual flight,’ said Denshichiro. ‘What I feel of myself, of my own existence or my own virtue in my own heart is of the exact same worth. The only place you find true existence is in the hearts of others.’
Above them a fly landed on the Foreigner’s lower lip, furtively broached the ridge of his teeth and crawled inside the fetid cavern of his mouth.
Denshichiro spoke on in warm reminiscence: ‘I remember when I was young, very young, well before your birth, I stood outside those gates and I watched our father return from a duel. The sun was setting and everything was orange. The man he had killed was called Mitsusue Watari. I remember that well, I have a fine memory for names. Father came up the avenue with Watari’s head held in one hand. Blood was dripping from the neck onto the earth, and the spatters of it were treated like clusters of fragile flowers by the crowd that followed him, things to be stepped delicately around.
‘I swear to you, though, Father looked as though he deserved that wake behind him. What finer thing had been done in the city that day, that year? He did not look at Seijuro or me as he approached the gates. What mattered to him was the head of Watari and the very same spike up there that now holds that traitor’s head. That alone. When he pressed Watari’s head down on the spike his mouth opened, and I swear to you again I felt the breath of glory blow from it. Felt it pass across my face, and it blew through all those watching people too. Father turned to them, and he said, “Naokata Yoshioka, proud servant of Kyoto!”’
Denshichiro had dropped into a squat now to look levelly into his brother’s eyes. ‘Then and there, he lived. Lived not in the manner of drawing breath or eating food, but lived. I understood what he meant. If he had killed Watari in solitude and had no witness but for himself, what worth his ability? As substantial as a dream of flight. Father, though, brought his own existence into being, enkindled it in every watching heart. The blood on his hands was not blood, but the chrism of the city. Do you understand, Matashichiro?’
The boy thought about it. ‘A crime is not a crime, then, unless others are there to witness it?’
A momentary irritation flickered across Denshichiro’s face. ‘Sin is sin,’ he said. ‘What the Foreigner did was unpardonable. A crime regardless. What I have humbly done is ensure that all will remember the traitor how one such as he ought to be remembered . . .’ and the worth of my own hand substantiated. ‘This is right and just.’
‘And what of the six men that failed to return with you?’ called Seijuro.
The eldest of the Yoshioka brothers was sitting within earshot on the wooden steps of the forehall, both hands resting on the pommel of his longsword and the point of its scabbard in the dirt. He had the same eyes as Denshichiro, the same line of his jaw, but he was slightly leaner and taller and his features settled more naturally into a cold expression rather than the permanent simmering glower that beset his brother.
He had been staring grimly up at the head of the Foreigner since it had been raised.
Denshichiro rose to stand. ‘As I told you, brother, when I became aware of their failure, the monks were already roused into a furore, and I assume the masterless was amongst them.’
‘Heed this lesson, Matashichiro,’ said Seijuro. ‘When you commit to something, see it through to its entire completion. Vague resolve, dishonest resolve is the scourge of this world.’
‘What was I to do?’ said Denshichiro. ‘Cut down the holy men to get to him?’
Seijuro sucked air through his teeth scornfully. ‘You made the initial choice to broach the holy mountain.’
The brothers looked at each other. Words went unspoken in the blackening silence. It was then that Tadanari entered the yard. He was staring at the head of the Foreigner, his eyes wide and scandalized.
‘What madness has gone on this day?’ he breathed.
‘That one returned in the company of a masterless,’ said Denshichiro jerking his chin at the trophy. ‘I punished him for his renunciation. You needn’t concern yourself.’
‘On Mount Hiei,’ stated Tadanari.
Denshichiro’s pupils vanished up into his skull for a moment. ‘You as well?’ he said. ‘Our right of vengeance supersedes any stigma. The Lord Oda scoured Hiei. Why not I also?’
‘A million voices proclaimed Hiei holy before the Lord Oda raised his sole objection. Which of them lives yet, the mountain or the man?’
Denshichiro grunted, waved a dismissive hand.
Tadanari said, ‘The city speaks of outrage, of desecrators and violators. Streets ringing with it. I have heard laughter also, mockery of a pompous hubris.’
‘Let them talk,’ snarled Denshichiro. ‘They will come to their senses when they realize the cause. Let them look upon that head. Faithful to the Way, I.’
Tadanari could put an authority of years in his eyes when he so desired. He let silence break those words apart. Denshichiro looked away, crossed his arms and stared up at the head of the Foreigner.
‘Very soon,’ said Tadanari to the side of his skull, ‘you and I shall talk. But now your negligence to your own wild desire has left us with an issue of a greater urgency. I heard that this masterless overcame ten of our adepts in a single encounter. I shall assume that this is an exaggeration.’
‘Six,’ said Seijuro.
‘Six?’ said Tadanari. ‘Impossible.’
‘Apparently not.’
‘What is his name?’
‘Musashi Miyamoto.’
‘Of which school?’
Seijuro shrugged.
‘Do we know anything of him at all?’ Tadanari demanded, aghast.
‘Were you not the one who sent the Foreigner out after this man?’ sneered Denshichiro.
‘Years prior,’ said Tadanari. ‘It is not my duty to delve into the pasts of the low men that earn their place upon the list, only to assure myself of their end.’
‘Well,’ said Denshichiro, turning his eyes back to the flies that clouded about the Foreigner, ‘the boys who scoured Miyamoto out for me told me he was as tall a man as they had ever seen, but slender like he was starved. Long arms, big reach, but frailty in this I should expect.’
Tadanari clasped his hands before him, took a breath and looked at the dust at his feet to level himself. ‘Miyamoto must have been aided by an unknown agent. Overcoming six men is absurd. But neither can we dismiss him as unskilled. How long were they in collusion, Sir Akiyama and this masterless? How much of our Way did Akiyama divulge, how many secrets?’
‘Revered counsel,’ said Seijuro to Tadanari, and Denshichiro seethed inwardly at the obsequiousness, ‘what course do you think the school should pursue?’
‘I am not the head of the school,’ said the bald samurai. ‘Here is the weight you must learn to bear, Seijuro. How is it you intend to steer us through another’s tempest?’
A group of adepts came into the yard through the main gate. They were agitated, striding quickly, all of them wearing expressions of varying degrees of anger. At their head was Ujinari. He saw his father and the three Yoshioka brothers, and came over immediately. In his hands he carried a folded bolt of cloth.
‘We found this nailed to the publ
ic notice board by the gates of the Hokyo temple,’ he said. ‘Nailed with a shortsword.’
Ujinari unfurled what he held. It was a jacket of the school, bloodied and torn. He held it by the shoulders and spread it wide, and then showed them the back of it. There, written in a wild hand, black on the colour of tea, were the words:
Violated Hiei to try to kill Musashi Miyamoto.
Failed, with five other men.
Musashi Miyamoto awaits you now, Seijuro Yoshioka!
‘It was quite a crowd that beheld it,’ said Ujinari.
Seijuro looked at the slashes that had split the silk, at the stains that had crisped it.
‘Well,’ he said, and took a slow, deep breath, ‘the resolution to this seems fairly obvious.’
Chapter Eighteen
The city saw them nailed up where bloodied jackets had hung not hours before and on each and every street beside. Written in two dozen neat and cultured hands, the curvature of the letters different but the message the same:
Tomorrow
The Moor at the Temple of Rendai
The Hour of the Rooster
Adept of the sword, Seijuro Yoshioka of Kyoto, commands the masterless Musashi Miyamoto to present himself for a duel, to account for the recent disturbance he caused at Mt Hiei.
Should he not appear, all will know his cowardice.
These up before the coming of night and with the dawn a response was found beneath the eaves of the grand gate of the Hongan temple where it could not be missed. None dared touch it, not even the priests, all staring at it until tea-coloured samurai came and tore it down, bore it away:
The time of your humbling is nigh, Seijuro!
Await me!
*
It began, for Seijuro, with earth. Earth of the dojo hall, which he stood barefoot upon, clawed his toes into. Squatted down, pushed his fingers through it, brought it up to his cheeks, his brow, his lips.