by David Kirk
No. Visions of him stabbing at a Yoshioka only for another to come in from the side to grab the shaft, entangling it and leaving him helpless came to Musashi. The cloud burst and the other faults became apparent, he realizing that his technique with the spear was rudimentary, that in his height he had reach on the Yoshioka regardless, and finally the question of where he would even acquire such a weapon.
Unhurried, the Tokugawa samurai segued around the corner to hunt for nothing elsewhere. Musashi’s wounded leg was reticent to move once more, congealed in the contortion in which he had held it. He forced motion, felt the burn up to his knee, and his sigh of pain was the only breeze that blew through the humid air. Even his hands were slick with sweat, moist palmprints left invisible in the dark.
Evidence of the coming Regent’s festival seemed to be upon each street corner. Yokes for shoulder-borne shrines were stacked against walls half wrapped with cushioning, simple carts in the process of being painted, herds of taiko drums corralled in rows, tattooed skins hooked and lashed onto the barrels and then doused with water to pull themselves into taut tune through the night.
All passed beneath him. This rooftop passage offered him fresh perspective on the city, and he thought how different it was to look down rather than up. No feeling of constriction, no dwarfing, no sense of humility. Was there tacit purpose in constructing storeyed buildings so close to one another? Impossible for the street-level inhabitant to gain a sense of space or self, reminded always of one’s smallness. Was there another Way in architecture? Was it inherent in all things?
Pondering, he slipped on guano and he overran the boundaries of the kingdoms of riled cats and his feet brushed against a lost paper kite, sent it floating back down to earth.
An apprentice sat hard at candlelight labour in the yard of his master’s property. He was young, perhaps even of an age with Musashi, and he stopped his work and looked around as Musashi passed, searching for the sound that disturbed him. But he did not think that the source of it lay above, and he turned almost immediately back to the task that engrossed him.
Musashi, taken with his own sense of invisibility, tarried to watch a moment.
The young man was carving a slab of wood on his lap with a small chisel, scraping away thin curls bit by bit revealing letters writ in reverse awaiting ink and the press. So intricate and so dexterous his hands, shaping out the myriad characters and their complex forms effortlessly. Musashi stared at the ability, wondered how many hours’ honing lay within the apprentice’s flesh and bones as lay within his own at the sword, and he wondered what it was all this talent was being given over to.
He found the answer on the opposite side of the yard. There, scores of test prints had been hung over taut lines to dry, and he read the title in a myriad botched attempts:
Virtuous Manual for the Comportment of Faithful and Upstanding Wives.
His heart despaired. Hands so able forming something so trite.
Musashi moved on. He was close now, but his mind was afire. How many like the apprentice in the city? He thought of all he had seen in the days. Every trade of every possible imagining. Old men that made no more than buckets, and young boys who earned their trade by filling such buckets with safflower oil and conveying them across the city, delivering them to ladies wise in cosmetics. So common, so plain and yet here intersecting the accumulated expertise of woodcraft and metallurgy and agriculture and mechanism and amalgamation; the planks of the bucket sanded and shaped flush, the ring of iron that noosed them to form the bucket, the growing of the safflower seeds, the construction of the press that squeezed the oil from them and the combining of the oil with the right measures of powders and pigments. Then consider the production of those powders and pigments equally, the trees that were cultivated and hewn and their transport to the city also. So too the claiming of the iron ore from the earth. See the scale of it boggle outwards. Each facet born of wisdom the depth of which Musashi could only wonder at, admire, and the result of all this?
Something for an actor to smear from his sweating brow onto a kerchief and toss away into a crowd. Something for a woman to paint her face with, that she might feign innocence.
Or consider the fabrication of that kerchief also – or that innocence – no doubt equal in mastery and scope. Consider it all, see it continue in all directions, all linking, uniting. Clay brought whatever distance to potters who would shape and harden it using mastery of kiln, pass it off to the painter who coated and varnished it brilliant white, and what this yielded was a spoon that would dig of gruel. Prodigies of mechanism and lever lying on their backs in the dust repairing presses that would print no more than vacuous Virtuous Manuals or crude erotica shilled cheap, the lewd depictions of which were a long-trained artist’s base summation. Men able of number and mathematics instead calculating the profit of kelp, flicking abaci beads lathed adroitly spherical, brushes dipping into ink concocted of soot and bones and the effort therein. Or consider the brushes: on distant meadows horses reared, shorn of hair that was glued to wood lathed as the beads. Or the paper they used: mulberry bark boiled in lye and then . . .
All this effort, chasing around itself, leading nowhere. Beneath pagodas of ancient beauty and emergent castles of magnificent stature capable people instead making the icon of their lives trivial and insubstantial things. Each ability worthy of praise and yet rendered moot by their tessellation. The intersection of their delusions of purpose shackling; fetishes of knucklebones bound together there in the shaman’s palm, all illusory and yet interpreted as grand and meaningful conjuration.
The zero sum of all this human knowledge and ability, the waste, the indignity of it. Was that ultimately a city? Was that ultimately what he hated?
No time to map the depths of it. He had arrived and what lay ahead of him now dwarfed all in his loathing – the gates of the Yoshioka school.
They were as fine a structure as any he had seen. The gatehouse stood twice as high as the wall they broached, doors of thick wooden planks studded with iron barred for the night and impenetrable to anything shy of a cannon. The roof was narrow and tiled, and on either end of it a stone komainu lion-dog held a vigilant and unerring guard, one snarling and one roaring.
Between their mythic forms, just visible by the light of braziers that burnt within the school, lay the mortal remnants of Akiyama.
His head was impaled upon a spike, and his face had been set to look outwards upon the street. His hair was loose behind him and shielded his features from the light, the benighted head indefinable in anything but its ghastliness. Shooting-star flickers came and went as swarming flies caught the light for brief instants.
Musashi stared at it as he readied himself, perched predatory on the roof opposite. He wiped his hands dry, peeled back sodden strands of hair that had stuck to his brow, ensured the sack’s mouth was pulled as wide as it could be. Speed was of the utmost necessity – jump across, place the head into the sack, jump back, escape.
This, the only real choice. He could well have tried climbing up the gatehouse from its base, stolen a ladder from somewhere even, but that would doubtlessly expose him to the Yoshioka within the school on the ascent. The gap between this roof and the gatehouse’s was only five paces, maybe six or seven, and he had a slight advantage of height.
It was not a daunting leap.
Possible, he was certain.
He steeled himself, took a run-up and threw himself outwards.
Except he had not thought to plan his steps and so he launched himself off of his wounded leg. The limb was exhausted, had no strength whatsoever with which to propel him, and as soon as his toes left the tiles he knew he would not make it across. He went out and down instead of up and forwards. Primal instantaneous terror surged as gravity imposed itself and in a panic he flailed and cast his arms forward in a desperate attempt to grasp the roof opposite. His elbows clattered into the tiles and his ribs met the edge of the roof square as a hammer upon an anvil. His breath was forced entirely fro
m him in a low and guttural moan, and he scrabbled at clay with his fingers and kicked at air with his feet.
In the brief moment he managed to hang, Musashi saw a samurai within the courtyard turn at the noise and then cry out in alarm. Then the weight of his dangling legs swung in wild momentum and pulled him away from the roof. He landed on his side and lay in the dust for long moments, listening to the noise that erupted within the compound.
By the time the Yoshioka unbarred the gates, he had managed to rise and drag himself into the shadows three streets away.
The failure hurt more than the breaths he struggled to gather.
Chapter Twenty-six
Each morning found Goemon fetid with sweat from the night. He slept on a mattress that retained a wet shadow of his body, rested the nape of his neck on a lacquer platter that was crested with a narrow strip of a pillow made of dried beans. Even in sleep, his posture was rigid and set in proper etiquette.
The Goat brought him breakfast in his chambers. Goemon could manage no more than a mouthful of rice without his stomach twisting in nausea. Each time he would mutter excuses about the heat putting him off his food, and the Goat would stand there knowing that Goemon was lying and yet not questioning him, stand there leaning on his sword and nodding his head in sympathy to his captain’s actual plight.
He was a good man, the Goat, and Goemon appreciated his efforts. It was absurd that such a stoic and loyal retainer should be stuck with a sobriquet like the Goat and not referred to by his true name of Kiyomori Onodera, but this too was in a way part of the old samurai’s duty.
It was his cloven foot that had first led the men of Tokugawa to call him so. The Goat would get it out when they were drunk, peel his stocking off to reveal his mangling. How they would all gather around to peer at it as boys did at captured insects, his foot split between the toes almost all the way to his shin and healed twisted into a form fascinating in its repulsiveness.
‘It’s amazing,’ the Goat would say, when someone asked the inevitable question. ‘The ways you’ll think of defending yourself when you’re on your arse in the mud and someone’s swinging a sword down at you.’
It was probably through one of these drunken sessions that the moniker originated, long before Goemon had arrived in Kyoto, some comparative jest that somehow got adapted in sober life also. Was it derogatory then? Was it derogatory now? It sounded it, but men did not sneer it nor belittle him, and the Goat himself accepted its use evenly. More than this – Goemon had once seen him cutting erratic clumps out of his beard when the old man thought he was alone, crafting it so that it curled wiry from his chin much like the animal’s. The Goat actively cultured the Goat.
He did this, Goemon knew, because it was good for the group to have such terms. They helped to build a unity, an inner collective idiosyncrasy of no real meaning that nevertheless helped define against the outer by its very being. In this he was faithful to the way of things. As a man of the warlord Oda, Onodera had been young and strong, had fought in the wars of conquest and had stormed Mount Hiei and taken three rebel-heretic heads and burnt whatever icon he could find. As a man of middle years and sworn to the Regent Toyotomi he had suffered his maiming. And now, as an old man of the Shogun Tokugawa, he was the Goat.
The tree bears fruit until it fails to do so, and then it is cut down and made into furniture to enthrone and comfort the young.
This was fact, this was duty. All they could do was endure it.
The familiar sound of the Goat’s scabbard-cane rattling across the wooden floor preceded his arrival. Goemon heard it approaching his chambers, and he wondered for a moment if the man did not exaggerate his limp also. The old samurai barked his presence from outside. Goemon gave him permission to enter. He slid the heavy door open and stepped inside, bowed. It was still before midmorning.
‘Something has arrived for you, sir,’ he said. ‘From Edo.’
‘Edo?’
‘Yes, sir.’
That was odd, and the Goat’s expression did nothing to encourage Goemon. ‘Bring it up to my chambers.’
A team of men hauled the arrival up the ladder and placed it reverently upon the hard floor of Goemon’s room, bowed to it and then to their captain, and left. It was a cube of about knee-height and even sides, wrapped in a sheet of blackened hemp patterned with the Tokugawa crest.
He and the Goat looked at it for some time.
‘A gift,’ said Goemon.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Specifically addressed to me?’
‘Yes.’
‘To whom do I owe gratitude?’
‘No name was attached.’
‘From the clan itself, perhaps.’
The Goat said nothing.
Goemon cast back the sheet. Revealed within was a thing of beauty. It was ostensibly a board for playing go, but that would be doing a disservice to the craft and art that had gone into its construction. It was a perfect cube of matte ebony wood, the grid of the game carved into the topmost surface barely seen black-on-black. Wrapping around three of the sides was the image of a tree painted in vivid gold leaf, the trunk of it gnarled and curved and its branches wide, grasping and bare.
The captain beheld the wonderful object for a long moment, and then a low groaning sigh escaped him. He sank down into a squat and wrapped his hands over the back of his neck, clawed his fingers into his flesh. ‘You may as well line a cask with salt now, Onodera,’ he said. ‘It seems my head is due in Edo imminently.’
The gift was a veiled message. A game board indicated strategy. It had been given to him in pointed anonymity, save for that it had come from the Tokugawa, and that designated Goemon’s strategy in relation to the duty he had been assigned by that body. The tree so elegantly depicted upon its sides was bare, meaning they believed his strategy was failing, or had failed. Had withered and died. Was entirely fruitless.
All these things it meant, and Goemon did not move, just crouched there with his hands now upon his cheeks, pulling the lower lids of his eyes down.
‘It must be the riot at the castle, they must have heard about it,’ he muttered. ‘The architects told them, or some spy, or . . . Did the scandal truly reach that far?’
The Goat did not reply. He read the hidden message just as well as his captain. Yet, faithful adjutant that he was, eventually the old samurai was compelled to move forward and examine the go board more closely. Stiffly, he sank down to his knees.
‘Ah,’ he said happily. ‘Look here, sir.’
‘What?’
‘The branches of the tree – don’t you see? They are rife with buds about to bloom.’
His gnarled finger ran itself over a swathe of branches at the very extremities of the tree’s reach. Goemon looked carefully. There were little nubs there, perhaps, but whether they were intended or simply mistakes in the manufacture of it, a brush slipped or a twist of gold that fell unwanted, he could not tell.
‘Do you not think this is encouragement, sir?’ said the Goat. ‘That they are faithful in the imminent flowering of your strategy?’
It was a mercy he was offering, another lie he was pretending to believe. The kindness of it hurt Goemon such that he dismissed the man, and sat in baleful solitude for the rest of the morning staring at the portent of his doom.
In the afternoon he set out upon the streets. The Goat accompanied him. Goemon’s mood had not relented and he felt alien to the sun. His belt was tight around his waist and beneath the iron of his helmet the tiger’s claw of his sodden topknot toyed with his scalp, ran its needle points back and forth with a malicious joy at his helplessness.
The level countenance the captain maintained upon his own face almost faltered. He took to fidgeting to try to distract himself, pulling at the cords of the helmet beneath his chin, setting his thumbs into his belt, rippling his fingers across the grip of his longsword.
‘Where are we meeting this fellow?’ he asked the Goat, eyes roving back and forth in search of nothing.
�
�Somewhere furtive, sir. Can’t have a man such as he present himself in the higher wards.’
‘You are certain he is trustworthy? Men of this calibre . . .’
The Goat sucked air through his teeth. ‘He was drunk when he suffered his disgrace. That’s why he was spared seppuku. In the years since then, he has served faithfully. Perhaps he’ll be given his swords back soon.’
‘Or perhaps he has been forgotten.’
‘The clan never forgets, sir.’
‘No,’ said Goemon, ‘it doesn’t.’
On the intersection of Kamanza and Koromonotana there was violence brewing. Two teams of taiko drummers were squaring up to one another, and all was rendered absurd because they were growling grave curses into the faces of one another whilst wearing the gaily coloured jackets and head-scarves they would wear in the coming Regent’s festival. For weapons they had the thick drumsticks they clutched in either hand, and their instruments stood silent and ignored. The band clad in striped yellow were accusing the cherry-blossom-pink gang of stealing a jar of polishing wax from them overnight, and threats were uttered and shoulders were rolled and some grave pugilistic rhythm was threatening to break out until Goemon bellowed for order.
The sight of samurai and swords quelled them, and they stood before him like sullen children. The striped yellow men were obstinate and would not disband until their wax was returned to them, that their drums might shine to properly honour the Regent, they said, and they were entirely unafraid of Goemon. Stood there demanding petty justice of a blooded warrior, and the captain simply looked at them in disgusted disbelief.
These were the kinds of men and these were the kinds of things he would be beheaded for.
The captain could bear it no longer, and neither did he have the time to investigate and resolve some probably errant suspicion. He reached into his pouch of money and threw a handful of coins at their feet, many times over what a new jar of wax would cost, and turned and left the striped yellow men scrabbling in the dust.