by David Kirk
You do not name him. Can you not bring yourself to?
In the face of silence, the wheel of Denshichiro’s emotions completed a full rotation: ‘Why am I facing this inquisition? This is outrageous. Fate sends a punishment like Miyamoto, and you behave as though I am at fault for the, the, the cruelty of the universe. Outrageous!’
‘Don the headband, Denshichiro,’ said Tadanari. ‘Comport yourself like a man.’
‘No!’ shouted Denshichiro. ‘I refuse! It is madness! You are not the head of the school! I am! Yoshioka! Yoshioka! Do you not hear what I am saying? Am I alone left sane? Am I alone thinking of the future?’
‘Don the headband. As your father would have done.’
‘You dare speak of my father?’ said Denshichiro. ‘Actually, it is good you do. I have tolerated this insubordination long enough – look at the portraits there hung upon the wall, and ask yourself to whom they deigned to grant command by right of birth? Whose father, whose great-uncle, whose grandfather is venerated at the shrine that we all pray to? Mine! And you will heed me when I order that we shall engage Miyamoto no further!’
Tadanari struck as he rose to one knee, rising and drawing Ujinari’s sword from its fractured scabbard in a fluid, beautifully observed motion. Decades of skill summated: he brought the edge swift across Denshichiro’s throat, followed the arc through, held the sword high and still as blood fell upon the earth. Denshichiro clutched at his neck with both hands as he fell backwards, legs kicking, fingers glistening red. No shout he made, no shout possible.
The watching samurai were as still as that crimson-spattered sword. The thrashing ceased with an intermittent, fading desperation. In its wake Tadanari rose to stand, looked around at the gathered men, held the blade up to show the blood upon it to all of them.
‘The masterless vagrant Musashi Miyamoto has felled both Seijuro and Denshichiro,’ he said. ‘This, I declare truth.’
No man contested. Those that were most loyal to Denshichiro had gone to the Hall with him, or to Mount Hiei before that. Those that were here were all pupils of Tadanari. The dead man had been the figurehead of the Way they sought, but the one that lived they knew undoubted to be its embodiment.
‘The leadership of the school,’ continued Tadanari, ‘duly falls to the third son of Naokata Yoshioka, Matashichiro.’
Silent assent.
‘Matashichiro’s reign will be long and virtuous, but for now he remains a child. I therefore propose that, until the young Master comes of a suitable age, I, Tadanari Kozei, Master of the Way of the Yoshioka, assume the mantle of plenipotentiary. This is proper. Does any man here contest this?’
Some last spark of energy forced its way out of Denshichiro, a sad little gurgle emanating from the gorge across his throat. If any man read it as an omen or a protest from the departing spirit, he did not voice it.
Tadanari shook the blood from the sword, wiped it pure again on silk as he slid it smoothly back into the scabbard. He then knelt, placed the weapon reverently on the ground, and took up the headband. With ceremonial stillness and practised motions he placed the characters of his enemy’s name against his forehead and then slowly wrapped the length of the cloth around the dome of his skull. Wrapped it tight, tied the knot over his brow so that the name within was forced up against the flesh, the mind.
The men of the Yoshioka followed his motions, hands moving in unison.
‘We are avowed,’ said Tadanari. ‘For his grievous insults to the school, Musashi Miyamoto must die.’
‘Death!’ echoed the men.
‘You have been killing already, and I say unto you: kill. There is nothing left to us but to kill. We will not use guns or arrows or even spears. We shall use the sword. We shall not take him from behind like cowards, but give him warning so that he knows his doom is upon him. We shall observe our vengeance properly, as men that our grandfathers could respect.’
‘Sir!’
‘He is no force of fate. He is no demon. He is just a man. And even if we must throw ourselves upon his blade to smother him so that another may take his head, this we vow to do, vow before each other, before all our forebears who trod this earth before us now. Do we not?’
‘Sir!’
‘I have a method to draw him to us,’ said Tadanari. ‘He will come, and we will kill him certainly. But, should fate render Miyamoto up to us before this, then kill. Kill. Do not hesitate, do not waver, do all you can to kill. I declare this now our Way.’
The men of the Yoshioka barked, bowed to the shrine of the ancestors and Tadanari dismissed them to rest for the dawn. They filed out in silence, none of them looking at the corpse of Denshichiro, at the patterns his blood had made upon the earthen floor. Tadanari was soon alone with the body, and he gazed at it.
Still and ugly as Denshichiro deserved, for the errant fortune that had granted him the privilege of being born as he was without any concurrent merit of the spirit.
Tadanari drew his shortsword. He reached down and cut the topknot from Denshichiro’s head. The end of it he dipped into the wound upon the dead man’s throat and, using the hair as a brush, wrote the names of Denshichiro and Seijuro upon the headband that Denshichiro should have worn. He cast the gore-sodden knot of hair into a brazier and bore the marked band to the shrine of the dojo and the paintings of the previous generations of the Yoshioka.
There he reached up and draped it around the portrait of Naokata, so that the band hung down as though it fell across his shoulders, Seijuro’s name on the right and Denshichiro’s on the left.
Tadanari looked up into the approximation of the face of his friend.
‘He was not your son,’ he said. ‘He was nothing like you.’
Naokata did not respond. Tadanari turned and left him with his pallid yoke.
Chapter Thirty-four
The waters of the Kamo slid effortlessly by and over their surface a shakuhachi flautist sent out a melody as lapping and lilting as all that passed before him. His bamboo pipe pale in the sunlight, his eyes closed in concentration. A young man and far from a master yet, he came to these remote banks to practise his instrument without bothering others. Thusly he was unaware that he had an audience: Musashi, Ameku and Yae sat some distance away upon a fallen tree soft with moss.
Musashi had heard the man’s playing several times when he himself, for much the same reason, had come here to practise his own silent instrument.
The music was wistful and long. The three of them, man and woman and child, listened. It was Ameku who broke their silence.
‘Why do you take us here?’ she asked.
Because I cannot abide the city. Musashi wiped sweat from the gaunt hollows beneath his eyes. ‘Because someone ought to hear this.’
‘If we are not here, the music for the river only, it is not good?’
‘Why play at all, if not to perform?’ he said. It did not feel an entire answer, and so he offered: ‘You sing, and I thought . . . All ideas from music, as you said.’
‘Ah,’ Ameku said. It was a very pointed syllable, and her lips formed themselves into a familiar formation. But the hint of mockery on them did not last, and eventually she spoke again: ‘This man – he has skill. His music is good. So . . . Thank you, Musashi.’
The woman squeezed Yae’s shoulder and the girl said her thanks also. For her part Yae seemed thoroughly bored, eyes darting around, heels drumming against the log on which they sat. It was not long before she dropped down and went to busy herself looking at stones at the water’s shallow edge.
‘Today you are changed, Musashi,’ said Ameku. ‘Still. Quiet.’
‘Nnn,’ he said, because he did not know what else to. What he even desired to.
‘You are not happy. Though you beat the Yoshioka, you are not happy.’
He had not told her. ‘You know?’
‘Drunk men in the lodgings, they speak easy, speak loud.’
‘They do.’
‘You killed,’ she said quite easily, and some vestige of dec
orum turned Musashi towards Yae for a moment. As though he might be ashamed of a child hearing the thing that he had wanted to scream to the heavens in the glory of its execution. The girl though was not listening.
‘That was their choice,’ he said.
‘How many, the Yoshioka?’ Ameku said. ‘Eight? Nine?’
‘Eight dead. One wounded and fled.’
‘Fled?’
‘Ran away.’
‘Ran away. Nine men come to you, but you stand with two swords.’
‘It felt natural,’ he said, no boast in his voice. ‘As though I were just sliding through it, sliding into the right positions again and again. As though I wasn’t trying . . . Or rather, I was trying, with so much of my essence that it became nothing. And it simply . . . was.’
He realized, though, that this was not what she had meant.
She said something to herself in her own language. It did not seem complimentary.
‘Is that how you say “revenge” in Ryukyuan?’ he asked.
Ameku let out a low hiss of a laugh.
‘Have you any trust in anything at all? Anyone?’ Musashi asked her. It was not condemnatory.
‘A blind woman must trust everyone. I am weak, yes, I am the weakest perhaps. You, Musashi, now can do the things you want to me. Anything. Any man who is with me, the same, any woman too. Even Yae, little Yae, she, holding my hand, she can take me to a bad place. If she wants.’
The girl had turned at the mention of her name, and now she wailed in genuine hurt, ‘I wouldn’t do that, Ameku.’
‘I know, I know, my cat. But this is true. No, Musashi?’
‘It is true.’
‘No argument today too.’
He struggled for words, just as he had struggled in the city, just as he had struggled to himself. He wanted to tell her the excitement he felt at his creation of his new style, of having devised and enacted something that no man had done before. But poetic proof eluded him and he could not quantify the feel of his sword splitting bone with some higher purpose. The purpose not a day ago he had been certain was there.
‘I feel hollow,’ he said. ‘I won, but there is no victory.’
‘The city, they play their drums as they did a week before.’
‘Yes.’
‘You want people to see you.’
Why play at all, if not to perform?
But it was not that, he did not think, and so they sat in silence. The flautist made a mistake, took a breath, repeated a phrase of the melody and then continued. The river flowed on. Ameku’s eyes seemed as though they were watching its passage, moving back and forth, back and forth. But they saw nothing, and they were ugly in the light.
‘If I speak, you will listen?’ she said.
‘I will listen.’
‘Yae . . . Far? Can she hear?’
The girl was now twenty paces distant and pulling the small purple flowers from the heads of reeds, casting them on the water to flow away. ‘She cannot hear,’ said Musashi.
‘Good,’ said Ameku. ‘She is too young to know this.’ The blind woman took a breath. ‘Listen well,’ she said. ‘I will tell you of Ameku. Ameku, in the Ryukyu tongue, it means the old sky . . . The forever sky. I think you have names like it in Japan. But, a bad name for me, no? Unkind. This is my family name. Mother, father, my sister also. Ameku, all of us, on Ryukyu . . .’
And she did tell him. Told him of her childhood, of her youth deprived of sight and yet supposedly possessed of another form of it that others were errantly envious and awed of. Of what they expected her to have and to be. In the telling of it she was pushed to the very limits of her ability in the language, the frustration of being unable to express herself fully and fluently adding to that of her tale, but within her voice was a growing anger that transcended grammar. Wound its way through her entire life upon those distant islands, culminating in a plague and an ultimatum and an exile.
‘I do not see the dead,’ she said. ‘But they, all of them, man and woman and the old and the young, they know I see the dead.’
‘But you don’t.’
‘This is truth. But, to them, on Ryukyu, I could not tell it.’
‘But it is truth.’
‘It is. If I shout this at them, though, what would change? They would not believe me. It was . . . I was . . . Everything set. Made of stone. What people are is . . .’ she said, and here she struggled for a word, mimed bringing something to her mouth and drinking.
‘Vessels,’ offered Musashi.
‘Cups,’ she said. ‘Cups, and others pour what they want into them. Understand – there is them that are loved and them that are hated. The loved, they do a bad thing, and people say, “He has a reason” and excuse him. The hated, they do a good thing, and people say, “It is false”, or, “Why are you not as this all times?” and hate more. This cannot be changed.’
Musashi thought of six helmets hung from the bough of a tree, rusting slowly from rainwater, and then he found himself thinking of Akiyama, of the man’s bitter laughter as he thought he lay dying, of the tales he had told across his long winter of recuperation.
‘You, Musashi,’ said Ameku, ‘you kill the Yoshioka. The Yoshioka are the loved. So the man who kills them must be . . . ?’
‘That cannot be true.’
Ameku waved a hand and with it took in the span of all before them. ‘Sadness again, over sea waves.’
The distant flautist held a high note, resonant and piercing. It brought forth a shudder or a spasm from within Musashi that set the hairs upon his arms on end and kindled something behind his eyes.
‘But how can honesty be reviled?’ he said.
‘Are you honest, Musashi?’ she asked.
She said it softly and like smoke permeating through the links of a suit of armour it invaded him, found its mark at his core in the way Tadanari asking him the same thing in hostility had not.
‘Always them you curse,’ she continued. ‘The world. The Way. Never you. Always words and words and more words. What lies beneath the words? Anger. They are wrong, perhaps. But you are wrong also, definitely – and this, you can change.’
Musashi struggled to speak. Ameku spared him the torment.
‘I did not tell you all my Ryukyu story,’ she said.
‘Then tell me,’ he said, ‘please.’
‘They, the people of my home, all of them on their knees before me,’ she said, ‘scared of me, of the sickness they say I bring. Know I bring. Tell me that they buy a place on a ship, so that I could go to Japan. And I tell them that they will die should I go on a ship with them, evil magic will do this. And they say that they know this, but . . .’
‘But what?’
‘“But the Japanese do not,”’ said Ameku. ‘That is what they say. Japanese ship, they put me on. Japanese crew, who did not know of yuta’s magic, these innocents my people are happy to, to . . . let die. Die for them, so they can live.’
‘But the ship was fine. There was no curse.’
‘It does not matter. They believed, in every heart, that if the yuta goes on a ship, the ship dies. And this was a good thing to them. A fair bargain. That is people. All people. Ryukyu, Japan, Middle Kingdoms.’
There was something in the way she said it all, a curl of her lips, a flick of her hand. He understood now what he had wondered over for all these months.
‘This is why you hate,’ he said.
But he saw immediately that he was wrong, profoundly wrong. ‘Hate?’ she said, confusion and exasperation and pity in her voice. ‘Why do you think I hate? I do not hate. This is what I am trying to tell you – if you hate for this, your hatred has no end.’
‘But,’ he said, ‘it is worthy of hate.’
‘It is . . .’ said Ameku, and she fought to find the words, relented. ‘It is! This is what is. All it is as is. You must learn this, learn not to hate it. Or the anger, it will . . . One more fight, one more fight. The Yoshioka did not kill you yesterday, but perhaps tomorrow. Or the next thing you ha
te. Or the next. Or in the end, you. Yourself. You,’ she said, and she looped an invisible noose around her throat.
‘I cannot accept that,’ said Musashi, shaking his head, blinking furiously. ‘Someone must fight it. I feel this. I know this. Someone has to—’
Ameku silenced him by reaching out and taking his wrist in her hand. ‘Fighting it changes nothing,’ she said. ‘Hating it changes nothing. The only thing that this will change is you. You will die. Did you not tell me that, after Sekigahara, you made the choice to live? Then live. Do not die. Do not. I am yuta, the people name me yuta, so me, I see the dead world, no? I tell you, there is nothing. You do not want to go there.’
Her fingers could not quite encircle his wrist, and the touch of them was warm, and she was as close to him as she had ever been.
‘Here is a truth,’ she said. ‘What you can change is you. What you master, all you master, is you. What you can touch with hands, your country. Let the city be the city and the world be the world. Know this. Know this, and then live, Musashi. Just live, far from cities, from people if you must. Live. Be happy.’
Musashi’s eyes followed her wrist up to her arm, to her shoulder, and there was her hair, combed and dark and everything her eyes were not, and he wanted at that moment to reach out with his own hand and feel those tresses upon his palm.
But he pulled his hand free of hers.
‘I’ve done nothing of worth,’ he said. ‘Why do I deserve happiness?’
The flautist drew his music to a close. His fingers were sore and his throat was tired and he had played all the notes that were there to be played. On the banks of the shore, Yae had stripped the reeds bare of flowers and all blossom was now fled upon the current.
Chapter Thirty-five
The third of the Yoshioka brothers, Matashichiro, was roused in the morning and brought to Tadanari in the rock garden at the heart of the school. The boy saw the bands the men all wore around their heads, felt the change in them; a hardening.