by David Kirk
In the garden, Tadanari closed his eyes. He had wavered, thought that the lure of Matashichiro’s suicide might prove resistible, but no – here the self-righteous young fool had presented himself, ready to kill and die for the sake of his maddened ideas of justice and his vainglorious pride.
When he opened his eyes he found Matashichiro looking up at him.
‘Do I do it now?’ asked the boy.
‘No,’ said Tadanari. ‘Not yet.’
He had meant to say you may not have to, but those words had not come.
The ordeal was now at hand, all his hopes votive. He willed with every mote of his being to overcome, and as he heard the night erupt in sound and motion he found himself breaking loose of time, roaming the length of what he had been damned to, all vivid and present.
His hands grew tight around his sword as though he might throttle the image of Fudo there.
Musashi rushed into the darkness. They had made it about darkness. They had killed her in darkness.
Moving even before his cry had finished, knowing they would be coming. Knowing as he had known they would be crowding the front gate, expecting him to present himself into their maw like a samurai braced for death. Not a samurai, he, everything in his life offered in proof of this. Hauled himself over the low wall at the rear of the compound, and now what he wanted to become, what he needed to become, was chaos.
Chaos against their order, their Way.
Loping as fast as his sutured leg would carry him, not knowing where he was heading, listening to the shouts of the Yoshioka as they converged upon where he had been, their footsteps, the rattling of doors being thrown open, the sounds of the scattering of their swarm. Round the corners of buildings, pressed up into the shadows, and the first of the samurai appeared, two of them running to where they thought he was, oblivious of him until he stepped out with his longsword in his right hand and his shortsword in his left.
The steel of his blades was cerise in the low light and the first of them yelped at his sudden appearance. Musashi swung his longsword into the side of that man’s throat, silenced his cry. The samurai dropped his own sword and cut his palms and his fingers open as he grasped at the edge of the weapon, fumbled in vain against it, and as the second man did nought but gape at this Musashi lunged forward with his shortsword and stabbed up under his sternum and twisted savagely.
He left the pair screaming, a fresh lure.
Up he went through the building he had hidden against, blood dripping from either blade. A long hall set with dozens of simple mats of bedding. A barracks. The nest. The hive.
He thought of Ameku on her knees in the street and knowing pain, pain only – was it worse to be blind to your mutilation, to be spared seeing your fingers or limbs or whatever they took taken away, or was it a form of hell to exist in a realm where your only sensation was ever-increasing agony?
Enact it upon them, let them all see, feel. The other side of the building revealed the space of a communal wash trough, the light of a brazier and three Yoshioka samurai heading across his path. Focused on the distant commotion, they too were blind to his emergence.
‘Here!’ he snarled.
He leapt down on them before shock had even passed across their faces, and he saw that one of them was old and two of them were young, perhaps as young as himself. The first youth he cast down with his falling strike, splitting the length of his ribs, and before this man had fallen Musashi stabbed immediately into the second’s throat with his shortsword. The third, the old one, managed to get his legs braced and his sword up to parry Musashi’s blow, but, though their longswords locked and negated one another, Musashi’s short remained free. Down into a crouch, then the blade of that lashed across the samurai’s taut old stomach.
‘Was it you who killed her?’ he snarled at the samurai as he collapsed. ‘Was it you?’
No answer was given. Blood on his fist, now, warm, warmer than sweat. Musashi shook it off, surged onwards, for the outrage spiralled ever outwards.
These the trail of sensations the mind wanders down when it is loosed such: Tadanari saw hydrangeas blooming wild before him in a remote meadow he had discovered by chance on the travels of his youth, and he remembered a separate time and the taste of them drunk as tea far too sweet for his tongue, and also his hand reaching out to cup a head of the flowers and bring them closer to his eyes.
The feel of their petals on his sword-calloused palms and the blooming of pity and loathing within himself at their frail beauty.
Frail and soft as well the long tresses of hair pressed upon the hardness of chainmail that rattled in the night.
The bloody palms of a hundred different men pressed into a book and oaths to the Yoshioka uttered, filling the pages over years and so many pages empty yet, so many yet to be, which must come to be, that could not fail to come to be.
Faith in this.
Matashichiro, the heir, knelt at his side. His palm red also, red with ink from earlier. No one had told him to wash it. Wearing white and hearing from within the school screams of a type that he had never heard before, screams that grew in their number . . .
Musashi spoke of her and thought of her and yet it was more than she. This was everything. Akiyama and Jiro and the Way and all the world. Everything as simple as it needed to be. He had thought himself honest before the Hall of Thirty-Three Doors, but that paled to the truth. That paled to now. Let the anger carry him and realize itself, a moment that none could deny in its earnestness.
His longsword bucked as it bit into the flesh of another throat, lodged itself against the knobs of the spine. The Yoshioka samurai collapsed thrashing, but Musashi did not see him fall, left him behind, eyes always ahead.
A tea-coloured thrall rounded the corner of a building and Musashi hurled a stolen shortsword through the air. The man was screaming something even before he was struck, not of Musashi, not at Musashi, and then the spinning sword impaled him through his chest, silenced him and forced him to his knees, and as Musashi ran past he struck the samurai across the face with his longsword.
No drumbeat now but the rhythm of the universe was within him, he was sure. He carried it, the spark, whatever it was it was within him. Drove him, his scope solely upon the finite range of his swords, and this he understood and could control. Could communicate with as clearly as he needed to this night.
A glimpse of orange light like a shooting star as he went, seen out of the corner of his eye and quickly gone, vanished somewhere behind him. Ignored. Meaningless.
The Yoshioka howling in confusion and he drifted through them, amongst them, and he could not believe how quickly he alone had caused them to descend into panic and scatter. They charged past him without realizing, and he could not be caught, and he was invincible, and he was truth.
He found himself broaching the main courtyard. There braziers burning so bright he had to squint for a moment, forms of the Yoshioka blurred. Perhaps six of them, and they looked so thoroughly shaken it was as though they were surrounded, facing not one enemy but an unseen horde the origin of which they could not fathom.
A systolic instant of surprise, even, where it seemed Musashi’s arrival drew their attention away from some other threat.
He went for them without hesitation. The closest samurai held a bucket of water, which he dropped to spill into the dust, drew forth his own longsword and rushed to meet him. His eyes were upon Musashi’s longsword and so Musashi cleaved with the short. The second man came through his comrade, barging him out of the way in a desperate frenzy to get at Musashi, succeeded only in staggering himself, died in the arc of Musashi’s longsword.
‘It was Kozei that ordered it, wasn’t it?’ spat Musashi, weaving his way around the braziers, the sting of smoke in his eyes, embers rising, keeping the building to his back and the remaining Yoshioka before him. ‘Where is he? Bring him out to face me! Bring him out to face me! Bring him out to—’
And he broke the rhythm of his words and lunged at the nearest man mid
-sentence, he reading the heaving of Musashi’s lungs and the movement of his lips. He caught Musashi’s longsword upon the flat of his own inverted sword but fell to the short, and outwards Musashi threw himself, heading for the centre of the yard.
He rushed inside the arc of the next samurai’s sword before it could descend and hammered his longsword into the side of the Yoshioka chest, the edge sinking deep enough to surely cut the heart. Spun, crossed his blades, caught the subsequent sword from the subsequent man with gore-gobbed steel, twisted, stabbed with the short and the blade slid in below the collar bone.
Fatigue was starting to rob his motions of any grace, Musashi aware of this on a visceral level, and yet he felt no sense of desperation. A warmness pervaded, the warmness of the lack of identity. He was barely Musashi any longer; all there was was the fight, and he was no more and no less than a participant in it, a wave of its ocean. Nameless, formless
unfindable
and he felt drool upon his chin, or perhaps blood.
A flurry of motion, a parry, his own elbow driven into his side and his breath escaping him, and then Musashi’s longsword looping from above guided barely by thought or intention. Aimed for the Yoshioka’s shoulder but found the crown of his head and the crack of the skull’s splitting was wet. The Yoshioka samurai’s headband, cut through, fell to earth before he did, the man collapsing and twisting split-legged.
. . . Above Tadanari and Matashichiro both, the wide boughs of a spreading pine were lit like veins of bronze through thick smoke, the tree taller than the school itself and its branches reaching out over the walls of the garden, so massive and encompassing, and yet Tadanari remembered it, saw it, as no more than a seed, and every stage between.
Did any of those years hold meaning?
The cry of victory did not come this night and the mouths that howled were growing as Miyamoto killed, and now Tadanari stood in time’s abrogation and from this vantage he looked at his Way anew, the Way in which he had held a complete faith for his entire life, and thus found himself akin to a man who felt his feet sinking into stone.
With as much of his soul as he could give he begged for the men of the Yoshioka to kill Miyamoto. To prove to him that the decades of his instructing them had not been in vain; that the dozens of the pairs of arms that he had strengthened and imbued with skill had not been set with false ability; that although his progeny was slain he, Tadanari Kozei, had managed to create something that would outspan his flesh. How he begged, and Fudo on the scabbard and his infinite snarl . . .
Such was Musashi’s frenzied elation that the night itself seemed to be glowing; the paper doors and walls of the corridor he loped along now lucent, his footsteps heavy and his breath ragged. Screams constant from outside, of panic, of agony.
Into this building scouring them out wherever they might be hiding, every last one, and he was rewarded – a single samurai delivered himself to Musashi. Charged at him immediately along the hallway, and Musashi jerked onwards to meet him, knees stiff, sutured calf throbbing. Could not hesitate, to hesitate was to be surrounded, and Musashi feinted with the short, tried to provoke the Yoshioka into lunging, and the samurai fell for it, drew his sword back to strike, and Musashi snarled delighted, and then the Yoshioka samurai drove forward with the pommel of his sword.
A feint of his own that had duped Musashi entirely, and the blunt steel smashed into his unbraced face clean. Musashi both heard and felt his nose break, and as he staggered blinded the Yoshioka samurai screamed his triumph, let it rule him, and brought his sword around in a decapitating slash only to find the sword burying its edge into the beam of a constricting pillar.
A spastic form of combat now, one of them weaponless and one of them sightless. Musashi slashed wildly with his sword, slow and heavy and the Yoshioka read the path of it and caught him by the wrists. They grappled, wrestled, and though the samurai was smaller he knew the methods of unarmed combat and found Musashi unbalanced, and so the Yoshioka man rolled his hip, drove on with his feet and sent the pair of them crashing through the door to their side.
Paper tearing, frail wood of the frame shattering. Musashi’s swords fell from his hands as they landed, scattered amongst the wreckage, and he kicked and thrashed and tried to find them. The Yoshioka samurai writhed to his knees, drew his shortsword and stabbed it down desperately towards Musashi with no concern for finesse. It was Musashi, now weaponless, who caught the wrist, he pinned on his back, struggled to keep the point from finding his throat.
The Yoshioka samurai managed to squirm on top of Musashi as he tried to force the blade down, and, spluttering in blind pain, Musashi tried to resist. Blood in his mouth, blood behind his nose, the sensation of drowning, yet Musashi fought, held him, and then the stomp of footsteps coming, closing in.
‘I’ve got him!’ the Yoshioka samurai was screaming. ‘I’ve got him! Cut through me! Kill him! Cut through me!’
Little grunts escaping Musashi born of savage will. Relinquished his right hand from the struggle, sought a weapon on the floor beside him. The Yoshioka samurai now with his freed left hand took Musashi’s skull and grasped at it, clawed, thumb gouging at the eye, footsteps coming, imminent, Musashi groping, groping, found a splinter of wood.
Thrust upwards at the head and the point of it met skull, too soft to pierce bone, to kill, yet sharp enough to rake the flesh. Bashed with it, bashed with it, heel of hand on temple, Yoshioka samurai screams now wordless, splinter gouging its way along, footsteps coming, had to be here, had to be here, and the point of the splinter sank somewhere soft. Eye or ear or mouth. Samurai’s strength faltered and Musashi kicked out from under.
New samurai in the doorway.
Shortsword stolen from the splinter-stabbed foe, Musashi on his knees, rising.
Blade up into the standing man’s throat, he not even cognisant of the scene before him.
Musashi turned, intending to bring the shortsword down upon the first.
Bloodslick hands slipped upon the handle, came away empty, and the second samurai vanished backwards into the corridor, his throat still rent with the weapon.
Bereft, Musashi saw the first man seizing Musashi’s own fallen longsword.
Hands closing.
Theft complete.
No time, no time, samurai rising.
There – there! Upon the floor, dark form of rock.
Rock taken up with both hands.
Up behind head and then down into the back of the Yoshioka’s.
Before he could stand, before he could bring the blade to bear.
Hollow crack, again, again, frantic, frenzy of motion, stone to skull, stone to skull.
Not stopping until the samurai abandoned all hope of using the sword upon its owner.
Not stopping until the Yoshioka abandoned hope of breath.
Body down, body suppliant, body still.
The paper walls glowing and Musashi looked down at the corpse, he on his knees panting, struggling to conceive of his survival. Then sudden motion in his hands: somehow the rock itself was squirming in his grasp, and he looked at it and realized that the rock in fact had legs, a head, and that these stubby things were all writhing and kicking. Shocked, revolted, he dropped it.
The rock continued to thrash upon the floor, and Musashi peered at it in the gloom. It was alive, he realized, a creature he had never seen before, some kind of land turtle. It had fallen on its back, and now it kicked and kicked in a vain attempt to right itself with its pale and segmented belly rocking back and forth.
A snort of disbelieving laughter escaped him.
How far could this take him? How far could he go?
Slowly Musashi rose to his feet, touched his shattered nose, found the pain too much. Spat blood, sucked it from his sinuses. Arms numb, felt hollow from the shoulder down, yet he bent and forced them to retrieve his swords.
There was noise yet. Not finished.
At his feet, the land turtle continued to thrash. Before he advanced Musashi hooked a fo
ot beneath its shell and flipped it over.
It began to crawl away, and he wished it life.
. . . Kozei and Yoshioka, Yoshioka and Kozei, revealed to Tadanari the mutuality of the two. One had fitted within the other and both had served the opposite, both living in their entwined reflections.
Had it always been such? When he was a young man, he had been bound by friendship to Naokata, and such was that friendship that he might even have had held a belief that Yoshioka held the greater place within in his heart. He had served willingly, obsequiously, as men who have nought but themselves can pledge.
But in a memory Naokata lay on his death bed and pulled on strands of light and howled of precedent and Tadanari’s heart broke anew, and Naokata’s sons had proven false, thoughtlessly provoking or shamelessly running, and the screams were coming still and they said that Miyamoto lived yet, sacred ground trampled and sundered and how many men had he killed, how many of Tadanari’s disciples were slain in the desecration of his faith in them?
The Yoshioka his buoyancy and his shield – the honour fine enough second in line, for him and for his bloodline, but spared the full indignity should the jewel shatter. At least so he had thought. At least so he had been certain. But the jewel had been struck, and now everything was perilous and vibrating fit to fragment. Kozei and Yoshioka, Kozei and Yoshioka, one of these might endure, must endure, and in that one both survived.
He looked up into the sky, did Tadanari Kozei, as if to find certainty from the nacre of the moon. A reassurance the twin of that found by boneless oddities that ventured up from ocean depths on nocturnal egressions to stare at that same orb with their eyeless gazes. But the moon was robbed of pre-eminence and what he saw put him in mind of a skyline that he had seen twice in his life before, skylines that followed great shakings of the earth. A hue of red and orange, a hint of it there forming. He tried to discern its emergence above the roofs of the school, his school, his last hope, felt inevitability come like a wind . . .