by David Kirk
Again, the falling-star flicker barely seen. The encroachment of complete exhaustion perhaps, invading Musashi’s vision. No. No. Not exhausted. Gripped his swords anew.
Ahead, the grand door of the dojo.
Licked his lips, tasted his own blood, lurched inwards. There he found what must be the last of the Yoshioka, and as he saw the number of them his heart contorted. Gathered here, perhaps, the final bastion, and it cut through his calmness, his anger, so many more of them it was as though he had felled none. For an instant he saw standing amongst them the thralls of the Tokugawa and the monks of Hiei and the consenting masses of the lowerborn, scores of them, all faceless together whether in their topknots or their shaved heads or their cowed eyes, all of them together, all arrayed against him, and he did not care.
‘All of you,’ he said, his voice breaking with his breaths, ‘thralls. Where are those that killed her? Bring their throats to me.’
‘Arsonist!’ howled one of them, and he charged and aimed a slash as savage as his shout at Musashi’s neck. Up his shortsword, greeting the blow, diverting its path and sending it arcing over his head, and his longsword was already in motion in the opposite direction. It met the samurai in the side of the chest, sank in between his ribs.
‘Where?’ shouted Musashi over the scream. ‘Where?’
They came unheeding, perhaps emboldened by the surroundings, hallowed ground to them. The möbial sweep of a Yoshioka sword, arms twisting, blade from up to down then up, trying to split Musashi along the sternum, fine feint, the breeze of its whipping passage felt upon his chin, then Musashi’s shortsword hacking into the samurai’s waist.
The moments of frantic fight unfurled like the smoke that billowed from the braziers. Smashing a blade aside with the flat of his longsword, the short in perfect rhythm killing in the opening. Evading, shoulders coiling, and then the longsword around to knock a stomach out.
And here it was, and he was realizing it, and the anger had carried him this far, and now it would carry him all the way, and how could he have ever doubted it, this feeling, moments like this, for here was honesty, perfect honesty, an honesty that could not be denied by the world, and he flailed and battered with desperate speed, lunged with his shoulders and the weight of his body, weight of his heart, and on, and on, and he saw it all and he knew it all, defined it all, and a samurai attempted a familiar attack, brushing Musashi’s sword aside, rushing close, chest to chest, and Musashi repelled as he had repelled before, and slew as he had slain, and the next man who had seen it fail so thoroughly used the exact same manoeuvre, as he was taught, unable to think, to conceive of nought else, and Musashi saw it all: he creation, they entropy! He creation, they entropy! Envisioning this, enacting it, thing of pure will, bones of his wrists singing with the cumulative ache of the impacts, swords moving where they needed to be and Musashi saw the openings as and when they came, there, his shortsword at a throat, there the long cleaving across the belly, there the feel of a Yoshioka blade passing so very close. Hacking down on proffered wrists with wild strength and hewing both hands away entirely, and every sword stroke now a repudiation, cutting the world that he had been offered, cutting himself free of it, for truth was truth, felt entirely and exactly here and now, and if he could only use the raw sensation of these instants as his proof in place of fumbling with the curse of inutile verb and noun then all would be as it ought, this, what he felt, what he knew to be right, honest and good as he had ever wanted to be, achieving, achieving, let this be the definition of who he was, his proof to the world, let them see when it was done, let them know.
Stood on something fleshy with his rear foot, a hand perhaps or the roundness of a calf, and he slipped, his legs spreading wide. As he sprawled they attacked, frantic the parry he offered, a sharp crack of steel, a Yoshioka sword fulcrummed and a razor kiss down his back. Rolled, found purchase, his longsword lashed around and severed a leg beneath the knee.
Up, charging, hacking. Pure inspiration. Pure motive. He, for himself. Individual. Fighting because he chose. All that mattered. Youth offered, youth votive, everything given, everything offered for their ruination, the ruination of the hateful world that was.
Turned to find only a single samurai left, and the man was parrying, and his hands were weak, could not stand against Musashi in his rage, and Musashi struck with a downwards blow that tore the sword from the man’s grip and continued, painted a ragged wound from his collarbone to his groin. The samurai fell to his knees and then rose again out of stubborn instinct, but took no more than two steps before he fell once more.
He flailed and grabbed at what he could, and his hands found a long strip of white cloth draped around the painting of the former master Naokata. He managed to grip either end in one hand, forming a noose of sorts, yet still it was too frail to bear his weight; he tumbled and he brought the cloth and the painting down on top of him, all clattering in an ugly heap.
Clutched in the samurai’s dying hand, Musashi glimpsed what appeared to be letters smeared on the cloth, but what they were he could not read, their meaning stolen quickly away by the encroachment of fresh blood.
Through his ruined nose he snorted gore.
. . . The glow now fiercely luminescent up above the school, a column of smoke belching upwards. Tadanari stared up at it, dwarfed, powerless to stop its growth. The school was ablaze, the barracks, the dojo, all burning wild, and the pulsing corona of the fire seemed to him to mimic the shape of a lotus flower.
Buddhism. Inevitably it all returned to Buddhism. Shinto for the living, and Buddhism for the dead. Fudo apparent in his glory. He with his sword Houken, the Cutter of Delusions. Always searching, and always finding fresh targets in this world of limitless delusions conjured by limitless numbers of limitlessly fallible men. Men like Tadanari, and here and now with all the adepts of his school dead or dying and the fire burning high, Houken swung celestial through him and he was truly flensed of the last vestiges of his subjective fantasies.
Stripped from him the permanency to which he had never admitted he had been beholden.
Rendered Kozei and Yoshioka, these two things that had been like wings to him, no more than blackened remnants. Where once he had been a thing of centuries, now he was no more than a single finite body, withered down into the lowest, most detestable form:
An individual.
The only thing left to live for himself, and how black and meaningless that was.
What kind of man was it that could find pride in such a life? To be only the fire, igniting that which other hands had built over time? A wicked, loathsome man, a murderer, a bane of meaning.
Downwards, earthly now, screams drawing closer. A clamour of pain. Over quickly, and no loyal voice called that the interloper had been felled. Aching moments passed, and then a figure emerged out into the garden. A part of Tadanari thought it might be Fudo himself, summoned from the scabbard by the fire, by the destruction of all this, all Tadanari had struggled to build. All he had believed would last.
But no. No god or saint for him so humbled. What emerged from the darkness of the doorway into the inferno-painted night was just a man. A sword in either hand. Bloodied face. Lacerated rags upon his body. Staggering almost.
The killer of his son, the ruination of his vision, this despicable, decrepit thing.
‘Kozei!’ snarled Musashi.
At last he had found him, here in some neat and secret little garden, surrounded by the boughs of trees and a manicured sandbed set with boulders artfully placed. A murderer enshrined, a torturer bedecked in a garland of flowers. Musashi forced himself out towards him, feet heavy on the wooden porchway.
Tadanari stood, arms bared, band around his head, and as Musashi approached his face pinched itself into a look of sheer abhorrence, the lines formed in its creation suddenly revealing the path of time upon his features.
‘Not enough solely to slaughter,’ he spat. ‘You had to burn it too.’
Musashi did not know what the man was
talking about, did not care, matched the samurai’s venom: ‘And you had to kill her, just because you could.’
‘I have never killed a woman.’
‘Ordered it, then,’ said Musashi. ‘All the same, the same.’
The enmity upon Tadanari’s face somehow grew deeper. By his feet a figure in white knelt, a seppuku platter before him; Matashichiro, pledged to die.
It took Musashi a moment to recognize the regalia and what it all meant. Why seppuku? Why here? It was mad. They were all mad. Maddened by the Way. He looked closer at the figurehead of the Yoshioka. From what he had heard he had presumed him a boy, no more than a child, yet here Musashi saw the hardness of Matashichiro’s brow, the first signs of a beard forming on his chin, a man emergent.
‘How old are you?’ he asked.
‘Thirteen,’ said Matashichiro.
Musashi considered it: ‘Off your knees, then.’
‘I can?’ said Matashichiro, eyes rising to Tadanari, further words forming on his lips. These, though, never heard, for Tadanari slashed his longsword down and took his head in one clean blow.
The body fell, the head came to rest, the white hemp turned red.
Musashi watched it, and he wanted to feel something: a fresh snarl, a fresh outrage. But after all he had seen this night, all he had felt, there was no such spark left within him.
Tadanari too a husk. He drew back the bloody longsword and hurled it high and far beyond Musashi. Musashi watched its path as it vanished and became aware only then of the colour of the sky, of the roar of flames behind him. The sound of something collapsing distant.
The school was irrevocably ablaze.
Tadanari picked up the scabbard, intricately carved with some pattern, and hurled it in the same direction. Hurled it hellwards. It was snapped and it bent in the air as it plunged into the flames. From his side Tadanari drew another longsword, this a far humbler and far duller thing.
‘It’s all ended,’ he said. ‘Come, then. Find your end too.’
The loathing in his eyes was boundless. He waiting, longsword out by his side, and there were no more words now that Musashi could speak, not for himself, not for Ameku, not for anyone.
All there was was to do.
Musashi raised his swords. The weapons quivered in his grasp. He made for Tadanari upon the platform, and his feet moved not in the position of perfect braced balance but merely went as they could, one after another.
Tadanari stood immobile, his form in contrast immaculate, brought his sword up high, guard at his cheek with his right elbow eye level and his left elbow low. Something in his supreme calm in all the murder and fury that surrounded him gave Musashi check.
Outwards Matashichiro’s blood spread, tideburst.
Musashi changed the positions of his swords, raised his longsword high, brought his short low, trying to unsettle him as he had other members of the school. Tadanari’s eyes switched effortlessly between the blades.
Range, then. He of shorter sword, shorter arms; take him at length.
The ethereal moment, after all this, all things balanced, souls and bodies tremulous in the burning world.
And that was that, and Musashi went: led as though to stab with the shortsword, but this a feint only, the real attack the long arcing down from above.
Tadanari moved his body to the side, dodged the short, brought his sword to meet the long and turned its path around him. As Musashi’s sword descended he slid his own blade along it, stepping in, aiming a thrust at Musashi’s vulnerable stomach, and Tadanari’s composure broke as he screamed the cry of striking, voice raw and honest and terrifying.
That thing for which Musashi had no name but knew lay within guided him, turned his body for him. Torso swivelled, writhed, and Tadanari’s blade did not pierce his belly and lance up into his heart but rather slid along his flank, slicing a path across the side of his ribs. Immense immediate pain, colours flaring in his eyes, and thus dizzied the guard of Tadanari’s sword meeting his sternum almost knocked him from his feet.
Staggered, Musashi, hissed, but did not fall. Feet found purchase, and how close they were then, he and Tadanari, locked brow to brow, sword edge entwined with flesh. But a moment only this embrace, less than half a heartbeat. Tadanari snarled at seeing him still upright, and tried to saw the blade further into his chest.
This fresh movement brought fresh pain and fresh anger, and Musashi roared and thrashed his elbow across, knocking the sword free of flesh and spinning Tadanari. He lurched around in the opposite direction and found himself to the samurai’s side, and there, now his chance – it was won, it was won! – and he hammered his shortsword down across Tadanari’s exposed back from the blade of the man’s left shoulder to his right hip.
It split the silk of his tea-coloured jacket, it split the cord with which he had bound his sleeves back, but most of all it split his flesh, and at the blow’s end Musashi found his shortsword falling from his grasp. The blade rattled to the ground, the hemp it landed upon now entirely sodden crimson.
Tadanari stumbled away, fell to his knees, put his hands out to stop himself falling further, remained there on all fours. Musashi clutched his own wound with his empty left hand, felt the path of blood upon his palm, his wrist. Yet there was no pain – the pain had vanished. He looked down at his foe and the throes of victory started to heave within him. He waited to watch Tadanari collapse, waited to watch him die.
‘You killed her,’ he found himself saying over and over. ‘You killed her.’
From Tadanari’s mouth came a long shuddering sigh. Musashi watched his arms, saw the quivering in his elbows, longed to see them yield and falter. And yet somehow Tadanari began instead the torturous process of picking himself up. He led with his shoulders, his cleaved shoulders, forced one leg then the other beneath himself, and then somehow he was standing upright once more, sword still in his hand and hate still in his eyes.
Musashi stared, and Tadanari lunged.
Second hand upon his longsword now, and, as he lurched to block, the simple agony of motion made Musashi cry out. He met Tadanari’s sword with the flat of the blade, their swords locked, and the two of them all but collapsed against each other. Guard against guard, knuckles against knuckles. Tadanari twisted, brought an elbow up that met Musashi on the side of his head, knocked him back.
On the fire raged.
Wild swipe of Musashi’s sword, and Tadanari stepped around it. From overhead the samurai’s sword responded, his motion erratic but fast enough. Musashi could not dodge, had to catch it again on the flat of his sword, found the blow drove him to one knee. All things seeping from his rent side, all strength, all confidence, all ability.
Whatever he had left he put into whirling his sword around, still caught beneath Tadanari’s, not a snarl but rather a cry of utter effort escaping him. The motion of the blade made Tadanari stumble, and now the point of Musashi’s sword was facing towards him. Musashi thrust and Tadanari somehow pushed it down and the stab of it raked between his legs. The curved edge found the inside of Tadanari’s thigh, and Musashi forced the entire length of the blade at him, felt the sword sink deep up into the crevice of the pelvis, and fresh blood flowed and Tadanari collapsed on top of him.
It was dead weight; he was slain now, definitely. Musashi tipped the samurai off him, stumbled backwards, found himself up on his feet once more. Precarious his stance, the lights in his eyes now definitely born of exhaustion, yet he looked down upon Tadanari where he had fallen.
And again, Tadanari moved.
He pushed himself up onto his knees. Blood gushed visible from his thigh and yet Tadanari didn’t seem to feel it. What the samurai did was sink the point of his longsword into the wood of the pedestal beneath them and then haul himself up it. Upright, Tadanari swayed upon his feet, looked Musashi in the eye and spoke:
‘Die,’ he said, no tone in his voice but ultimate emotion. ‘Die.’
His jacket was hanging about him now unbound, flapping around the contorti
ons of his arms like the sails of an arson-struck ship. No steadiness in him, no support from his wounded leg, the onslaught like a pendulum, body swinging back and forth with each strike. All technique gone, the pair of them beyond it, no more than men with sharp metal.
Came the blow from the left, and Musashi stepped to the right. His riposte a wild overhead slash, which Tadanari batted aside. Musashi came in close, tried to barge Tadanari over but found the samurai evading, sliding corpselike around him, and on he staggered overbalanced, his stumbling foot kicked Matashichiro’s head away into the sand.
The agony of even turning back to face him; the wound at Musashi’s ribs was now a throbbing void that was consuming the entire left side of his body. Tadanari seemed to be trying to speak, his lips moving but no sound emerging, just a stream of breath, of spit. Great swipes of their swords, and then the blades met, rolled, turned into the ground. A barge with the shoulder, Musashi repulsed Tadanari, sent him stumbling backwards. The samurai was slow to raise his sword, slow to raise his guard, his arms were exposed and Musashi saw the chance, all but leapt forward.
He could not stop himself from falling to his knees as he brought his sword down and hacked through Tadanari’s arm beneath the elbow.
Tadanari’s hand remained clutching his sword for an instant, before his arm pulled free in remnant motion, separated, and the grip of the palm loosened. The samurai did not scream. Instead he looked down at his arms as though he were confused why his sword was no longer responding correctly, saw his hand upon the floor and gazed at it as though it had never been a part of his own body. But something gave within him; his shoulders slumped and he dropped the longsword from his remaining hand.
For a long moment he stood there bereft, firelit and mutilated. Musashi looked up at him from his knees and wondered whether the samurai would die thusly on his feet, perhaps just harden into some horrendous statue, remain in the world as a totem to endurance.