by David Kirk
He thought about simply leaving without a final word, simply drifting out of her life as erratically as they had come together. But he knew that he would not permit this of himself. That was simply fleeing. A definite farewell, a definite ending, that demarcated it as a firm decision, and that was worthy, what he wanted. Yae, Yae would be easy. Or hard. Perhaps she would cry. He did not know which, nor which he would prefer.
He remained in his room fretting, restless and yet not wanting to move. The longer this went on, the more he started to feel foolish.
Why was it so hard to tell someone that you were heeding their advice?
Eventually, he simply decided to commit. The day was passing by and he needed to be out upon the roads. Just throw himself in, and let it happen. He took a breath, opened the door, stepped out of his room. There was a tightness in his chest, beneath his purpled ribs. Before the doorway to the hearth room where Ameku worked the loom again he hesitated. He hung there inertly, debating whether to stride in with purpose or simply watch in silence for a while.
It was the sound of a door opening down the corridor behind him that spurred him into movement. He quickly stepped inside, hoped his first words would not waver, and found instead the room entirely empty.
Musashi looked around. The ashes in the hearth pit were cold. The tatami mat Ameku had been weaving hung suspended on the levers of the mechanism, all but finished. But where were the hands to weave those last few reeds?
He called out for her, for Yae. He went to their room and knocked on the door. There was no answer.
They were nowhere to be found.
He went and sought out the owner of the lodgings, the coarse ageing man beating the dust out of a futon mat with an iron poker down by the banks of the river.
‘Where’s Ameku?’ Musashi asked him.
‘Who?’
‘The blinded woman.’
‘Is she not on the loom?’
‘No.’
The owner shrugged.
‘What about the girl, the young girl with her?’
Again, the same nonplussed gesture. ‘Neither of them I haven’t seen all day.’
‘They haven’t departed, have they?’ he asked.
‘They best not have,’ said the owner. ‘That tatami she is weaving is due tomorrow.’
Musashi gave a low grunt of puzzlement. He stood scratching at the hairs upon his cheeks as he thought, sucked the inside of his lower lip. In truth he did not know their usual routine, he having been focused on his sword these past weeks. He knew they bathed together. Perhaps they were off to the river to find a measure of privacy.
This felt wrong. He felt denied. Yet perhaps it was better this way. Perhaps even fated to be so – had she not told him of the futility of such gestures, that what was known and what was right and what was ultimately good did not need to be said?
The owner stood there with his poker in his hand as Musashi deliberated, wanting to return to his work. He saw the sack that was slung over the swordsman’s shoulder. ‘Are you on your way, sir?’ he prodded politely.
Roused, Musashi grunted affirmation. He paid what was owed to the man, and then, after a moment’s consideration, he also gave him half of the coins he had left over. ‘You see that the blind woman gets this.’
‘Of course, sir.’
The man had agreed too eagerly. Musashi looked down at him, adjusted the swords at his hips. ‘I’ll be coming back through here in a month or so,’ he lied. ‘I’ll check with her then that she received it.’
The owner understood what was implicit there, and this time he bowed a more compliant, respectful bow. ‘Have you a message for her along with the coin?’
Musashi thought about it again for a final longing moment. Then he simply shook his head and went.
He left Maruta and headed north-east on the Nakasendo road. His swords were at his sides. His hair was matted with salt. His bare arms sweated and the threads of his cutaway sleeves curled like the marks of tattoos.
He did not stride. There was no confidence in his steps. The road ahead ran all the way to Edo, but that was not his destination. He had none – he was simply going. Could not face his uncle, not yet. Merely leaving Kyoto and the Yoshioka behind, as Ameku had told him.
Better to live.
He repeated this to himself as he walked.
Live.
Live.
Repetition robbed it of its status as a word.
He tried to hum one of the songs Ameku had sung. His voice was crude and it made a mockery of the melody as it was in his mind, as he knew and felt it, and he did not find the solace he wanted to find in it, and eventually he admitted this and resigned himself to silence, and longed for inner emptiness.
But such a thing was impossible. All the while he tried not to look back at the city he could no longer see. His fingers wrung at the rope lashes of his pack. He told himself that it was done, that he had proven all he could, and yet for all this at his most inner place something still rebelled against this notion. He saw in his mind the duel, remembered both his arms in their perfect unison, and the rightness of this . . .
He was west of Mount Hiei when he stopped of no particular spur.
He turned and looked back down the road. He was caught in indecision. Surely there had to be something he could do. He had been so certain these prior weeks. Certain in himself, in his course. What if felling Denshichiro was not quite enough? What if he admitted to himself that some part of him was not entirely honest? What if there was a further gesture, a gesture of complete and utter honesty that none could fail to recognize as such? If only he had dug further, fought harder; if only he had rejected the black and formless waters of the night.
It had to be there.
Somewhere
But then Akiyama was dead, and all was chaos, and what Ameku said made sense, and there was no clarity. He had no conception of the meaning of all this any more, and yet he stubbornly persisted that either he did, or he did not need to. Did he heed her words because they were sound, or did he heed them purely because she said them? And he stood there on the road with pilgrims and merchants passing him, rejecting those words, accepting them, rejecting them, on and on and on and if only there was some conviction either way, and he thought all this, and he was so tired, just then.
It was as though some damming wall within gave out, vanished in an instant, and suddenly he was unavoidably aware of just how exhausted he truly was. The travail of the past weeks weighed down upon him. Eyes so heavy that holding them open was like chiselling away at stone. Sutured leg and all his other wounds oozing and aching in their various ways, beseeching him to rest.
Musashi became aware that he was standing before the stone gates of a temple. The wooden sign hung from the crossbeam gave its name as Ichijo. Musashi had not heard of it. It was of no particular holy renown, and in such proximity to the vast halls within the city the modest shrine he could see nestled in a grove of trees was diminished.
Just inside the gates, he saw a pond that shimmered green, reflected light where it played between the leaves of trees. Musashi limped over to its banks. He set his pack and his swords down, and then dropped to his knees and brought handfuls of water to his face. The water was cool and felt fine upon his brow, his lips, and yet it bought no decision forth.
Cicadas howled and marked the crawl of time.
Within the grounds there was also a great spreading pine tree, centuries old, needles the length of his hand and its bark ridged and mossed. Beneath its boughs was shade. Face glistening, he went and sat on one of its roots, and stared at nothing.
If only he had said farewell.
He thought of this, thought of everything, and the heat persisted warm as his body, as his blood. He placed his elbows on his thighs, and he found that perhaps the heat was sharing his blood, his body, for his pain was receding, growing distant, and on the insects sang.
A hand shook him roughly awake. Musashi started. He had slept sitting and almost tipped b
ackwards off the root.
‘Up, you,’ an old man was saying. ‘Up.’
It was daylight still, but the shadows had grown long. The old man had on the sombre dragonfly-green robes of a Shinto priest, and he persisted in his shaking.
‘What do you want?’ said Musashi, pushing the priest’s hand from his shoulder. ‘I’ve no coin to throw in prayer, if that’s what you desire, you covetous old wretch.’
The priest blew air from his cheeks and stood up, affronted. ‘Got a temper on you, don’t you?’ he said. ‘Ungrateful shit of a pup.’
Musashi grunted an inchoate retort, rubbed the doze from his eyes.
‘If you’ve a mind for it,’ said the priest, ‘that fellow bade me wake you. Said he wished to speak with you.’
The priest pointed over to the gates. Standing beneath the double beams beyond the holy threshold was a samurai, and he wore a jacket the colour of tea.
Musashi rose immediately. He drew both his swords and strode over, blades held ready for ambush. The samurai though was perfectly level, mockingly level. He did not even go for his own sword. He simply stepped backwards again and again, keeping a clear ten paces between them. The road was wide around him, and no other seemed to be with him. Musashi’s aggression seemed to amuse him blackly.
‘Leaving Kyoto, Miyamoto?’ he called. ‘You think it finished?’
Musashi moved cautiously to stand just outside the gate, looked along either wall. He held his longsword out in guard before him and had the short above his head readied to strike. Yet no swarming attack revealed itself.
‘I felled your master,’ Musashi called eventually, ‘and your subsequent master proved himself a coward. What more is there for me to do?’
‘Matashichiro reigns now.’
A moment of confusion, wondering what it was that had happened to Denshichiro. Then Musashi said, ‘The third one is just a child. If he has umbrage with the manner I dealt with his brothers, tell him to find me later in his life – he and himself alone.’
The man tilted his head to one side. ‘You’re leaving with less than you came with, no?’ His smile widened. ‘The master Kozei bids you farewell.’
Then the samurai turned and ran back down the road towards Kyoto.
The oddness of his flight masked the meaning of his words for but a moment.
Musashi ran a ragged and desperate lurch on his wounded leg. The samurai, hale and fleet, had long since vanished from his sight, but that was irrelevant. He ran not in pursuit, but instead to Maruta. Those he passed either coming or going upon the road saw his determination and gave him a wide berth.
Night had fallen by the time he returned to the slums.
The long boats were all drawn up on shore and the sentinel pyramids of the casks of effluence stood stoic in the dark. The only noise that of the river’s flowing and the few trees there were rattling brittle with the cries of insects. No drunks, no gamblers, no men returning exhausted from their toil, no women squatting down in doorways and talking as they fanned themselves, no children chasing. The street leading up to Musashi’s lodgings was desolate and petrified.
A sense of wrongness twisted down his spine. Musashi had his eye upon every shadow, his shoulders rolling with his breath. The door of the building revealed itself smashed, utterly smashed, far beyond simply gaining entry but rather ruined in some fit of rampant destruction, the entirety of it splintered and scattered about. No light burnt within the halls inside. He peered inwards, seeking some skulking form, and then out at the street itself.
Seeing nothing, he took a street lantern down from the post it was hung from, tossed its ribbed paper cover aside and moved to stand in the doorway.
‘Ameku?’ he called inside. ‘Yae?’
There was no response. The light of the oil lantern stuttered and hissed. He caught his breath and called again.
‘Ameku?’
Musashi ducked his head and stepped inside. His footsteps rang dead upon the wood of the floor. Slowly he advanced, anticipating, anticipating. He came to the workroom and cast the light of the flame in. A chaos of pots and pans thrown everywhere, a sack of rice split open and the little white grains forming an erratic starscape across the floor. Even the hearth had been dug into, coals and ash scattered wantonly.
These things he had no interest in. His eyes were drawn to the loom where Ameku had worked these past days, and it was revealed to him now entirely destroyed. Pulled from the wall, the bench upended, the ruins of the mechanism spread about still attached by the gears like a serpent’s skeleton.
The basket of rushes that had sat by her feet had fallen over, and on the pale bundle of the stalks he saw the vivid red of blood.
The colour of it, lantern-lit, stole Musashi’s thought for a while.
When he walked back out onto the street he found a man waiting for him. He was a lowerborn in patched-up hemp clothing, glancing around fearfully.
‘You,’ he said. ‘You’re Sir Miyamoto, are you not?’
‘Yes.’
‘I am bound to tell you something.’
‘What?’
‘That it was the Yoshioka who did this. They told me I had to tell you this, that you had to know it was them.’
‘What did they do?’
‘They . . .’ said the man, and he cringed. ‘Do you really want to know?’
‘Yes.’
‘They . . ,’ he said, and he stopped and steeled himself, and then spoke on quickly, as though he thought speed might spare him any reprisal: ‘A mob of them came. They told us all to stay out of their way. They were looking for you. They knew you stayed here. But they found her, the blight-eyed islander, and, and . . . What they did was . . .’
‘What?’
‘They thought you were hiding. So what they did was they . . . They brought her out here onto the street. And they called out to you to reveal yourself. And when you didn’t, they . . . They cut her hand off. And you didn’t come, so they did it again. More and more. Small parts. Bit by bit. And . . . We all heard her screaming. We all saw. And, and you didn’t come. So . . .’
‘So?’
‘It was a long time. My children heard, they were crying and . . . When it was finally over, they threw her body in the river,’ said the man, and then his courage broke and he dropped to his knees. ‘Please do not grow angry with me, sir. They told me to tell you this, all of it. They said they would come back for me and my family if I didn’t.’
The lantern sputtered and hissed in Musashi’s hand.
‘You all just watched,’ he said, looking down at him.
The lowerborn quivered, a scar that parted his beard twisting ugly, but he remained prostrate.
Musashi turned his eyes away. ‘What of the girl?’
‘Girl?’
‘A young girl stays with her. Yae, she’s called.’
‘Fled. She must have fled. I . . . It was the blight-eyed woman they slew, sir.’
Just visible at the end of the street was the hall where he and Kozei had watched the cockfight together. The Yoshioka master’s offerings of peace false, and he knowing where Musashi abided. This Musashi had known but had not thought of it beyond risk to himself, built his little nightly barricade just big enough for his room alone.
And now . . .
His eyes turned towards the city. The glow of it visible over the walls, constant, eternal, the ten-thousand-year city, and he of twenty years only with a single torch in his hand.
When was it ever any different?
When was it ever any purer?
He left the lowerborn on his knees, and headed for Kyoto.
Chapter Thirty-seven
The pale rising moon was on the wane, just past full, a sliver taken, imperfect. Hour of the dog, most likely.
It hung above Tadanari Kozei where he stood in the garden at the centre of his school. He was upon the dais overlooking the thirteen boulders set neat in the sand. Beneath the band lashed around his brow his eyes were on the ridge of obsidian, markin
g distinctions in the blackness.
In his hands he held Ujinari’s sword in its scabbard.
The sword marked with the sword of Fudo. The devil-saint. The purger of delusions, enemy of greed, of ego, of lust, of ignorance.
Of permanency.
In the vast abyss of these past days Tadanari had come to realize something about himself. He saw that for all his life until this point he had held himself timeless, thought himself free of the doom of the mere handful of decades of life that other men were condemned to, because the more of him belonged to two things he thought immortal:
The name Kozei and the name Yoshioka.
One of these was dashed already. One of these was marred but could prove itself true yet.
How he pleaded.
Matashichiro knelt at his feet, dressed in white, a sheet of white hemp out before him. Upon a platter a dagger awaited, this too wrapped in a white length of silk. The youth knew all the regalia, what it all meant, but he had swallowed his surprise at the sight of it, had donned the garments, had come without protest. These were the paths of manliness.
There they waited moments of no end together, drowning in the cries of the cicadas, until a bellowing voice burst the shroud of night.
‘My name is Musashi Miyamoto!’ it echoed. ‘Here I am, you sons of whores! I have come, so let us end this as it needs to be ended! You murderers! You cowards! You thralls!’
In the main courtyard of the compound there was confusion. There the adepts of the school had been waiting, eyes upon the gate, muscles quivering, stomachs humming like the reverberation of bells as they imagined the man that would appear and the cuts they would rend him with. The shouting, however, had come from behind them, from within the compound of the school.
‘I await you!’ yelled the voice. ‘Come and die, for I await you!’
The braziers burnt bright, crackled and spat embers upwards. Then decision: the seniormost adept barked command and the group splintered, adepts running to find the source of the noise, disbelieving that they had been bypassed.