Sword of Honour

by David Kirk

  The shrine had moved on, and now men bearing taiko drums between them on a yoke were cavorting, swinging each other around and around, all but flipping over, banging out their beat synchronous and unfailing. Their clothes were bright and garish, white zigzags over citric yellow, heads bound in twisted lengths of rope, arms bare save for tasselled bands.

  ‘If they demanded my head of you,’ said Musashi, ‘would you give it?’

  ‘It would be injustice. The Yoshioka challenged you. You have committed no crime.’

  ‘Suppose, then, I said I did set a fire in the school. Suppose I confessed. Would you believe that it was my hand that caused the blaze?’

  He was looking very closely now at Goemon. The samurai did not turn his face. His eyes appeared to narrow, but lost none of their mirth.

  ‘I could see why people might think it arson,’ said Musashi. ‘The fire rose quickly. The incident, the fight was not long. A matter of minutes from first to last. And yet by the end of it buildings at either end of the school were ablaze. As though it had not spread from one point outwards.’

  ‘The destruction was entire,’ said Goemon.

  ‘I recall that there were lights in the air that night. I thought them exhaustion, tricks of the eye. But those lights that lie within the eye, they rise upwards on an erratic path, or have no path at all. Thinking back now, the lights there in the school, they each followed the same direction, unwavering. A downwards arc. Like the path of arrows.’

  The crowd was clapping along. The beat was relentless. Only the two of them remained immune to it. Goemon’s expression did not alter.

  ‘Was I even supposed to survive in this scheme of yours?’ Musashi asked.

  Not a flicker upon the captain’s face.

  ‘And what of Ameku?’

  ‘Ameku?’

  ‘The blind woman in the slums,’ said Musashi. ‘I was told that she was dead by the hands of the Yoshioka, saw blood. And yet, Kozei . . . all of them, all of the Yoshioka there, never once tried to taunt me about it. They hated me. Utterly. But not one mention of her.’

  ‘Was she a lover of yours?’

  ‘What does that matter?’ said Musashi. ‘She was innocent. She was blind.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘Is she truly dead?’ said Musashi. ‘Did you kill her?’

  ‘Do you believe that I would have her killed?’ said Goemon, and his face grew serious, turned to face Musashi.

  ‘Did you kill her, for the sake of an illusion?’

  ‘Whatever I say is irrelevant here,’ said Goemon. ‘You will believe as you believe. And if you believe that I had her killed, I have returned both your swords to your side, and there are far fewer than twenty of my men here.’

  He held Musashi’s eyes, stood up to the challenge of them. Dignity in his indignation, a proper samurai face. If it was an act, it was flawless. Musashi relented. Goemon smiled once more.

  ‘Thank you for your faith,’ he said. ‘It was an agent of mine that spoke to you, smashed her loom. Pig’s blood, I do believe he used. The blind woman is well. She is headed for Edo now. The little girl too. The Nishijin guild are opening a branch there, looking for hundreds to work their looms. She carries with her a sincere recommendation from the Shogunate that she be hired.’

  ‘And she just went?’ said Musashi, and immediately he thought to himself, Of course she would go.

  The captain saw the change in him: ‘If you like, I could arrange for you to meet her there.’

  Musashi thought about it.

  ‘No,’ he said eventually.

  And that was all he would say. He prepared to let go of the beam of the gate, gathered his strength that he might not show weakness before the captain. He was interrupted, however, by sudden barking from behind him.

  Musashi clung on to the frame, turned to look back. Across the yard was a small wooden side gate, a yard within the yard, and it was rattling in its own frame as a dog on the other side of it attacked it savagely. Barking and barking, the sound of frantic scratching, and the creature would not relent. Goemon left Musashi and went over to the gate and unhooked the latch.

  A little mangy mongrel pushed its way out through Goemon’s legs, squeezed its lithe body through the sliver of the opening, so desperate for its victory that it could not wait for it to open fully. The dog’s hide was rotten and it was missing an ear. It ran a few paces out, looked around, scratched at the earth . . .

  And then immediately it went back to where it had come from.

  Goemon sighed in fond amusement. He closed the door and reset the latch, and returned to Musashi’s side. ‘I give it all it needs in there. Food. Water. Shade. But still it has to struggle to escape.’ The captain settled to lean on the frame opposite Musashi. ‘That is the nature of dogs, though, is it not?’ he said. ‘They are creatures of complete immediacy. Each and every moment, a dog feels as separate and infinite. What it feels then it feels fully. A dog that howls in loneliness has been alone for ever and will always be alone . . . Until it is not.’

  Passing before the pair of them on the street a troupe of women danced, women and girls, elaborate wooden crowns on their heads, paper fans twirling in their hands.

  ‘Dogs are like this in all things,’ said Goemon. ‘Unending love – ended. Boundless rage – evaporated. Or that dog – it fights and it fights and it scratches up against the gate with all its heart, white-eyed and slavering at its boards, even though it hasn’t even the slightest conception of what may lie on the other side. All it knows is that it stands, and that this must not be. And then the gate is opened and it gets there, and . . .

  ‘I suppose there’s something to admire in that. The totality of it. Honesty, you might call it, or some form of it. But ultimately?’ said the captain, and he looked out across the festival, across the street, across the city, across it all. ‘This is a dishonest world.’

  Goemon turned his eyes to Musashi. Musashi looked back. At his topknots. At his livery. At his swords.

  He felt no hatred.

  The swordsman sucked in a breath, let go of the gate of the garrison of the Tokugawa. He was done there. He forced himself to stride, headed for the street.

  ‘Miyamoto,’ Goemon called after him.

  He turned. The captain was holding out a folded sheaf of paper towards him.

  ‘Papers of travel. My most noble Lord is erecting checkpoints upon the roads. These will see you through upon his authority.’

  Musashi thought of ignoring him, of walking away, but what would one more empty gesture atop of all the others achieve? He reached out to take them, and as his fingers closed upon them Goemon held on for a moment:

  ‘You should not be dispirited,’ the captain said. ‘In truth, you did enact change here: you took Kyoto from the Yoshioka, and awarded it to us.’

  He grinned, and Musashi could not tell if the smile was mocking or whether it was simply joyous. The captain released the papers. Musashi slipped them into the breast of his kimono. Without another word he turned and stepped onto the streets, slid amongst the crowd and did not look back.

  Goemon watched Musashi go, the back of his head visible above the crowd, and the captain could not remove the smile upon his face. The parade, the festival went on before him, and he saw the crowds, saw the faces of all the people of Kyoto, old and young and men and women, all together here, all in order.

  He remembered the paper windmill in his hand, looked at the bright blue spokes unmoving. He suddenly wanted to see it in motion, raised the toy above his head, above the crowd, sought the deserved wind that would come to caress the sweat from his body. Up he stared, saw the shade of the paper matched the cloudless sky exact, and wondered if this was perhaps a sign, if this thing he held somehow was actually a totem of nature perfectly attuned, if it was not summoning now, and he stared and stared, certain it was imminent . . .

  Of course it remained still. There was no breeze, weeks of the summer left yet. But that was fine, that was more than fine, for Goemon I
noue no longer needed mercy. He could bear the heat now. He had learnt to bear it.

  He spun the spokes with his finger and smiled as if he were back in Mutsu.

  Epilogue

  Kyoto, golden Kyoto.

  See it thrive, see its beauty, its streets now swept, its buildings cleaned and polished and arrayed in streamers, frail gay paper hung from the web-scoured eaves made of wood enamelled by time. See the people as they dance, teams of women, scores of them with their fans ever moving, rotating, they sweating and smiling and ever diligent to follow the exact steps their grandmothers danced. See the men with the shrines upon their shoulders, or see them up balancing upon the beams of the yokes themselves, riding the shaking of those below like mariners in a storm, the glimmering and impassive faces of Buddhas and Shinto wisps staring outwards beyond them. See the drums in their multitude, hear them.

  The right hand beats the rhythm: bom, a-bom, a-bombombom.

  The left hand beats the urgency: atta-ta-tatta, ta-tatta, tatata-atta-ta-tatta.

  The girls all go: Sore! Sore! Sore sore sore sore sore!

  And they were flawless in their rhythm, all of them together, but it was not his rhythm, Musashi knew now.

  The narrow streets were crowded. He made his way along squeezing between the back of the crowd and the walls of buildings. Those that turned to him turned only when he brushed up against them, and dismissed him just as quickly, captivated by the spectacle of the festival. On he passed unnoticed.

  Victory a barren word in his mouth. He had overcome, had triumphed, had passed what he had thought the great trial of his conviction, and yet it was no trial at all. Even the simple thrill of its accomplishment had been denied him; that great rush of wellbeing that made his soul sing usurped by exhaustion and pain.

  He thought of Ameku, of her words.

  The wooden jaws of the costumes of tigers and dragons snapped and flapped and chased each other, chased their tails, the legs of the men hidden beneath the serpentine silk body moving regimented and insect-like. A great gong was struck as people cried out the name of the Regent, he seven years dead, and as the peal of it scintillated into nothing its reverberation within himself revealed to Musashi his hollowness.

  What had been certain he now realized to be vapour. His sky for the past years now benighted unto nothingness. He felt betrayal and then failure that at the age of twenty the meaning of existence yet eluded him.

  And yet there was no anger.

  Not at himself, not at Goemon, not at the world. It had gone. The thing that had driven him since Sekigahara had turned to smoke and fled him in the ruins of the Yoshioka compound. Bled out into the sand, perhaps. He wondered what was left inside of him in the wake of this great sublimation.

  What was left before him to achieve?

  Through the penumbrae of pagodas and the seething sides of crowds he forced his way onwards. The crowd around him only seemed to grow, slowing his progress with its whims. He found himself pinned up against the balustrade of a canal, looked down into it, remembered plummeting into one. The water was shallow, shadow-patterns of the surface rippling over the cobblestones.

  How effortlessly it all flowed.

  At his side, as always, were his swords. Unyielding and tangible. He looked at them, and he knew that he could not return home yet. That he could not yet look his uncle in the eye. But of the swords, the long and the short? He knew their extent, and they his. However dubious or minuscule the worth of what it was he had achieved, he had achieved it because of the blades. These the things with which he had spoken the keenest.

  Worthy of trust. Of dedication.

  Musashi forced his way along to the nearest set of stone stairs and descended into the bed of the canal. The water was cool upon his calves. He revelled in the space free of the press of people, breathed it in, felt his lungs brush up against the wound at his side. The water tugged at his trousers, pulled the wide folds of them downstream. Musashi watched their billowing, saw the direction of the gentle current. The canal would lead to a river, and the river would lead away.

  He followed.

  On he went, left Kyoto behind him. That which was venerated remained venerated and that which was burnt remained burnt. Over his shoulder all the temples and pagodas and palaces, so many great and towering constructs of man. The vast bronze shells of century-blackened sanctified bells that tolled impermanence in dolorous swells. Coils of incense curling before ten thousand aureate idols and icons, rising in ephemeral arcane patterns that would never be again and yet in the method and reason of their creation exist for ever unchanging.

  Not far from him, yet the distance unknown and unbridgeable, a long and slender boat set out upon the river heading for Osaka and the docks there, all aboard bound ultimately for Edo; a bald head in a salt-lined casket, and a young girl’s smile offered upwards as a whalebone comb parts her hair, a smile unseen but felt and known.

  Over the noise of unfelt festival rhythms that pulse upon the surfaces of great vats of soy sauce and sake and set rings to destroying rings, a dog is barking.

  It is a mongrel of a mangy tan hide, with but a single ear remaining, and the sole obsession of this dog is the gate that bars it inside. The dog scratches furiously at it, black eyes rimmed white. The gate is iron and oak. It will not yield. But the dog is up against it, fighting it, barking and barking and barking.

  This is the nature of dogs.

  Before the man lies nothing now. Musashi’s eyes only forward, only at the world that lies ahead wide and empty. He as one with the course of the water, flowing onwards, ever onwards, and then he is gone.

  ‘The world is as it is. Blind rebellion against it solves nothing.’

  First precept of Dokkodo (The Way of Walking Alone)

  Musashi Miyamoto, 1645

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks and gratitude to the following:

  John Drake, for providing information about gunpowder and arquebuses of the era.

  Shitsuo Tanaka, for showing me around her home, Mount Hiei.

  Adam Mackie, for telling me the difference between a gyaku ude-gatame and an omoplata/omniplatter, even if it was subsequently cut out of the novel.

  Takumi Otomo, for her beautiful calligraphy.

  And lastly,

  Ayako Sato, for everything.