by David Kirk
But of course – inevitably – as he left, a hidden voice yelled at him from behind and above: ‘Why not just murder them as you murdered the Yoshioka, Edoite?’
And there it was. He was a buffoon to some and a tyrant to others.
What was a city but its people?
He didn’t look back, didn’t try to scour out the source of the voice. Whoever it was would be hidden by some bamboo blind, and probably revel in how foolish he would look trying to locate them. Goemon walked on. Over his shoulder the cherry-blossom troupe began to practise once more. The sound of the drums came to him, the pounding bass driving out a low rhythm: a-bom, a-bom, a-bombombom.
Shortly, the Goat pointed out the mouth of an alley. It was shaded and unremarkable. He had Goemon stop and wait at its mouth as he hobbled in to confirm all was according to plan. Up against one of the walls a man was sprawled as though in a drunken slumber. The Goat peered down at this apparent malingerer, prodded at him with the point of his scabbarded longsword. The man stirred angrily, yet calm words were exchanged, perhaps some codes or passwords of verification. Then the man rose to his feet, entirely sober and steady, and the Goat looked to Goemon and gestured for him to come.
‘Here he is,’ said the Goat as the captain drew near. ‘Our surreptitious riverman.’
The agent was disguised so well that Goemon wondered if it even was a disguise any longer. He wore a filthy old sleeveless jerkin and short leggings that ended at his shins. His flesh was dirty and jaundiced and his hair was short and matted. Yet in his eyes remained something of the samurai he had once been, some remnant pride, and his face was marked by a scar that could only have come from a sword, a neat straight line that parted his beard and ran from the corner of his mouth to below his ear.
‘Sir Inoue,’ the man said, bowing.
Goemon looked him up and down. ‘On your knees,’ he said.
The agent was surprised by this. He hesitated, looked to the Goat for confirmation. The Goat in turn looked to Goemon.
‘If we are discovered, if people witness this,’ said the captain, ‘I’ll not have them thinking I am conversing eye-to-eye with a vagrant.’
The agent was reluctant. It seemed he was disappointed. Perhaps he had been relishing the opportunity to talk equally with swordsmen as he once had. But he was condemned to penance and he swallowed his objections and sank to his knees, placed both palms out upon the earth.
‘Now then,’ said Goemon. ‘The man you are watching—’
‘Draw your sword,’ said the agent in a low voice, daring to look up for a moment.
‘What?’ asked Goemon.
‘Draw your sword and hold it to my throat,’ said the agent. ‘If we are discovered, it will appear you are imparting justice on some lowly scapegrace.’
Goemon looked at him for a moment, perfectly affronted.
‘Do it,’ implored the man. ‘A finer image, no?’
‘I will not relegate the sword my father wielded into becoming some prop in a clandestine charade!’ Goemon hissed.
The agent said nothing more, and the Goat looked at his captain as though it were a reasonable idea. Goemon bridled for three furious heartbeats, but then he saw it for what it was – just another facet of this absurd city and risible circumstance, and what use pride for the already disgraced, the already dead? He slid his longsword out of its scabbard, this marvellous icon that he had wielded at Sekigahara, that his father had in the campaign against the Ashina, and placed its brilliant edge at the filthy throat.
Very carefully, the Goat spread his legs and then began heaving his shoulders with his breath as though he had either just delivered some form of violence or was just about to.
‘The subject,’ said Goemon to the agent. ‘Your vigil over him is constant?’
‘Save for this sole moment, sir.’
‘He has no idea of your presence?’
‘He walks always with eyes on the horizon,’ the agent said, and Goemon could feel the man’s voice through his sword, the words humming up the length of the blade. ‘Everyone in Maruta gives him a wide berth, scared of him. He is quite safe, I believe, but I remain vigilant for any attempt upon him.’
‘Good,’ said Goemon. ‘And of the other pertinent elements as discussed with Sir Onodera?’
‘He’s found a common place, a low place, nothing suspicious growing there, I believe. I walked freely through it without challenge. Speaks often with a blight-eyed islander woman, nothing more.’
‘Blight-eyed islander?’
‘From over the seas, sir. Ryukyu. Taken of a sickness.’
‘Is he smitten with her?’
The agent shrugged. ‘He tends to her nightly. Why else would a man spend time in the company of a woman?’
‘Do you believe she will suffice?’
The agent nodded.
Goemon sniffed, rubbed the sweat from either side of the bridge of his nose. Then he made the decision that had weighed upon his mind for days. ‘Very well. When you get the order . . . make it vivid.’
The agent peeled his throat away from the sword and, through a mime of grovelling for clemency, bowed his understanding. Curtly, Goemon raised his weapon and sheathed it, and then jerked his chin away in command. Dismissed, the agent ran to the mouth of the alley as though he were terrified and vanished into the streets outside.
‘Cherish the mercy of the benevolent Shogun!’ the Goat shouted after him for good measure.
The two samurai were left standing in the murk. Goemon took a breath and steadied himself. The Goat turned to look at his captain, and there was genuine concern in his old eyes.
‘This is a desperate strategy, sir,’ he said.
‘What else is there I can do, Onodera?’
The Goat might have answered, but at that moment further into the alley something moved and caught Goemon’s attention. The Goat tensed at the sudden turn of his captain’s head, brought his sword up as if to draw it, but Goemon gestured at him for calm. It had been small, an animal of some sort. Now that he listened intently he thought he could hear its panting, and curiously he went to look for it, moving slowly so as not to startle whatever it was.
Behind a stack of old abandoned rice-straw casks he found a small dog sitting. It was evidently a stray, a mangy-looking thing of a wretchedly sparse tan hide and one of its ears torn away. It sat there with its tongue lolling and its mouth wide in what seemed an idiot’s smile, fighting its battle against the afternoon’s heat with the constant heaving of its lungs.
Goemon squatted down before it and reached out. With one hand he began to gently stroke the dog, and then, seeing its calm reaction, the second also.
The dog sat there and panted and yawned and rolled its sickly tongue, and Goemon, hidden away from the streets and all who might judge him, watched all this and smiled. He felt a rare moment of calmness. He had always felt a liking for dogs. Back in distant Mutsu, back across leagues and years, it had been his pleasure to own an entire pack of hounds, great hale things with their heads up to his waist more similar to wolves than this tattered little mongrel.
Of course, then had come the glorious summoning from his most noble Lord Tokugawa. He had left the dogs in their pen, and they had howled for him as he departed, yelped with such a clamour that he heard their cries long after his estate had passed from his sight. It would be nice to think that they remembered him still, that if his scent no longer lingered in the air some remnant trace of it remained within their hearts.
Goemon though never let himself be fooled; he knew well the nature of dogs.
The Goat stood watch. He was pleased to see some measure of contentment upon his captain. ‘Seems you’ve made a friend, sir,’ he said happily.
Goemon gave a grunt, the barest of nods. He looked at the dog, and the dog looked back.
Its sickly eyes gleamed with a sheen like spilt lantern-oil.
Goemon sighed sadly. ‘The law states quite clearly that stray dogs found within the city limits are to be killed,�
�� he said.
Beneath the captain’s hands, the dog panted on. Eventually, the Goat asked, ‘Should I fetch a spear, sir?’
Chapter Twenty-seven
Musashi slept like the hunted.
He did not trust the Yoshioka not to mount another attempt on his life, regardless of any word given to Goemon. Each night he would barricade the door of his room with the rudimentary furniture within and wedge his scabbard between the jamb and the frame. Likely the door could still be opened with enough force, but it would create a clamour and wake him should he be sleeping, and whoever was there would then have to stumble over the pile of furniture to enter, all of which would give Musashi time to rise and greet the intruder with his longsword in hand.
Barred and sealed, his room became what he imagined the inside of a stilled lung might be, tight and humid and chokingly warm, and even the walls themselves seemed to sweat. His hours of repose spent hunched up in the corner with his swords bared before him, alternating between moments of the frail slumber of expectant prey and a torpid, viscous consciousness.
Fatigue was beginning to tell, eyes bleared and heavy, but all endured, all endured.
Musashi did not know how many other rooms there were in this lodgings or how many destitute were in them. Some rooms even cheaper than the pittance Musashi was paying for his, these set with a half-dozen mats slept on inevitably by decrepit men. A lingering stench of sake and sweat and distrust abounded, pitiful things like straw sandals or copper coins scabbed entirely green guarded like jewels. Halls that bumped and breathed around him, an old man’s voice murmuring to no one.
His ribs were hurt. The impact against the gate of the Yoshioka had been harder than he thought at the time. His chest was mottled with ugly bruises, and if he took a full breath he felt a sharp pain lance along one side. Sharp enough that it stole that breath from him. The act of rising or sitting was laborious.
It was night. Ameku was singing. Her song that seemed to him to never end. With a chest of throbbing bones he sat against the wall and listened, and willed for the melody to null his pain.
She was working her loom as she sang, singing in time to the slow clacking of the levers with her back to him. He had not told her about his failure to recover Akiyama’s head. That too would hurt. Through her hair he could just about see the nape of her neck. In the candlelight her skin was the colour of something fine he hadn’t the words to describe.
He thought of that benighted lake and the red moon hovering above it. The reflection of it shimmering on the calm black and formless waters, the sound of gentle lapping. Of which thing he was to her, and which he wanted to become.
‘Tell me of Ryukyu,’ he said. ‘Tell me how you learnt to sing like that. Tell me . . . Tell me how.’
‘That you too might sing?’ she said, and still she taunted him. Still the barrier she had made for herself persisted, and it maddened him. It was a wall that stood before him, and by that very fact he was compelled to attempt to breach it even though he could not possibly know what lay upon the other side.
‘I . . .’ he said, grasping at things he could not explain to himself. ‘No. What you do . . . It is ability, and . . . A thing of worth . . . And I would . . .’
‘Ryukyu,’ said Ameku, ‘was a long time ago, and then my time ended there.’
‘But,’ said Musashi, ‘what was it you did there? Why did you leave?’ Why are you here now? Why is it we happened to meet?
Ameku just shook her head. ‘Still, Musashi, still you have to know the meaning of the words,’ she said. ‘Stubborn, you. Do not change.’
‘Tell me,’ he said.
She did not. Instead she started working back at her loom, and sang once more. He sat there listening, feeling the nag of that half-unknown, unasked, unanswered question.
The days passed in humid exhaustion, and they offered him no respite.
He set himself to the sword and the felling of the Yoshioka. One of them. All of them. Cast them down. Disperse the swarm. The fortnight until the duel passing both too slowly and too quickly, caught between savage anticipation and logical wariness, knowing that he was yet to devise a method of victory. Taunted by this also, another barrier.
But it was there, it was achievable, he was certain of it, if only he could reach out and grasp it . . .
Around him the slums of Maruta. Outside the walls of Kyoto proper, outside the cultured zone, Maruta lay upon the banks of the north-easterly forking of the river Kamo. It was the docks of the city, as much as an inland holding could possess such, for the river was an artery and brought goods of all sorts to the capital. Rice or salt or ore arriving daily, but the greatest traffic in lumber, the city so vulnerable to fire, constantly rebuilding or building anew, and also the centre of so many industries that hungered for fresh fodder to mulch into paper or shape into scabbards or palanquins or doors or ladles or umbrellas or sandals.
The wood arrived sometimes chopped and stacked in a boat, or sometimes men simply rode huge logs as vessels themselves, prodding their course with poles. Maruta itself meant ‘log’; here known as Log Town in the vernacular.
The rivermen coming, the rivermen going constant, and when they left they left with their boats just as burdened as when they had arrived, merely changed their cargo. When they departed they took the effluence of the city with them in stinking, sloppy casks, villages along the river’s course needing fertilizer for paddy fields and hamlets of the corpsehandlers needing piss for tanning. Goods in, waste out, in, out, a cycle of excretion and construction: the mouth and the arsehole of the city, as Maruta was also known in even lower vernacular.
A transitory place where men drifted in under twilight skies and were gone upon the current in the morn. Faces unnoticed, things here built cheap, hovels and slovenly lodgings crammed up against one another, no temples or garrisons or emporiums. Where Kyoto had pagodas Maruta had pyramids of casks of shit stacked high, emitting a pervading stench that was magnified in the humidity. Mistlike, never quite subsiding, all here enveloped in it, the men and women shovelling or labouring or casting off, sawing, lashing, sorting, drinking, malingering, begging.
Stagnant.
Stagnant as his mind, Maruta, and in frustration he abandoned it in search of somewhere else, as though that might suddenly grant him what he strived towards. A half-hour’s walk north of the slums Musashi found isolation on the banks of the Kamo, a little copse of trees right up by the waterside, and it was peaceful and serene and the air clean enough that one might even practise meditation here, and yet he found the exact same problem persisted.
Cranes waded past him through the shallows, and they beheld him in his futile exercise and the flashing of his longsword with their yellow eyes round and uncaring.
Summon your enemies, his father Munisai had once told him of the theories of duelling; summon them before you exact in your mind and over a thousand still breaths examine them until you have assumed their form and see out from their eyes. A wisdom indefatigable through century and nation, and yet useless here, for every time he summoned Denshichiro to his mind he simply wanted to slash the spectre to pieces.
Made him want to spit, the thought of the man’s face and all he was, and then the frustration that this was all he could summon made him actually spit, or throw a rock into the river, or kick out at the stumps of trees. A vicious and infuriating gyre from which he could not escape.
Months he had spent with Akiyama, an adept of the Yoshioka style, and never once had he thought to speak with him about its merits and philosophy. He had beaten the man and so he had innately assumed he had surpassed his entire school by virtue of this victory, and now he cursed the callousness of this.
Seek and grasp, force through, overcome: if not the spear against the numbers of the Yoshioka, if not the sword, what then, of guns?
At Sekigahara he had seen their terrible capabilities, seen them snub out entire lines of men in easy instants. If you allowed as he did that the sole point of fighting was victory, then
surely its achievement through any means was permissible, was worthy. The samurai in the city had jeered him with the idea of using foreign mechanism, but their jeers born of the Way. What Musashi fought for was no less than the Way’s entire destruction. What was the very symbol of the Way but the sword? If these two things were true then should not his first action be to abandon its fetishes, take up modern potential instead?
He stared at his longsword in his hands for some time.
Musashi realized it belonged there, belonged on some level fundamental to him, and then of course the same practical flaws arising: where would he get a gun? Or the dozen guns he would need to shoot all the Yoshioka down in quick succession? Or a longbow? Or throwing daggers? Or anything else?
He snarled, and then felt foolish for snarling. Stood there landlocked and envious of the river that flowed so effortlessly. Dragonflies were in the air before him, their wings shimmering crucifixes, the water beneath them pooled and still. Mottled blue bodies glanced upon the black surface, sent rings dilating outwards, and these rings, they had no correlation, served only to annihilate one another in their expansion again and again. Caught his eye, the way the patterns did not intersect, did not correlate. Seemed marred to him, unnatural.
Anger at his inability faded from him, only to be replaced by a separate tormenting gyre that was goaded by every pained breath he took. The bruises on his ribs led him to thinking of Akiyama’s head, and his failure to recover it.
He decided to head for the city.
The Tokugawa samurai on the gates to Kyoto stopped and searched others seeking to enter, but they did not even meet Musashi’s eyes. Turned away as though they were deliberately avoiding him, and he sneered at them for this evident cowardice and loathed them for their submission and oppression both.
Beyond them the streets of the city were rife with drumbeat, each thoroughfare throbbing with a different pulse. Pounding of the bass skins offset with the rolling patterns of the smaller drums, a quick middle timbre: atta-ta-tata, ta-tata, ta-tata.