by David Kirk
“So you have not told the boy?” said Munisai, interrupting.
“No.”
“And he has not worked it out himself? Is he stupid?”
“No.”
“Someone surely must have told him. The peasants who tend to him or …?”
“Do you think any peasant in this village wants to get involved and risk your wrath after what you did the last time one of them interfered with your family?” said Dorinbo. “I have to plead with them to tend your gardens, for the love of heaven. They’re scared of him, because they’re scared of you. And what is really cruel about this is that the poor boy thinks this is because of a few scabs on his face.”
“You could have told him, spared him that. You had eight years.”
“So did you, and where have you been?” said the monk bitterly. “Killing. All I did was try to fill the hole you left, and that hole was there entirely because of what you did.”
Munisai bowed his head like a penitent man would. The monk was right, he knew. He could not hide in his pride forever. The samurai remembered the silence of the ruins, the wind whipping through the grass.
“Say it,” he said quietly.
“What?” said his brother.
“Stop alluding. Give me your full condemnation.”
“Can you not bring yourself to?” asked Dorinbo. “Does it shame you to even acknowledge what you did? Does it shame you to remember butchering a village, and then burning it?”
Munisai kept his head low, but his heart was pounding, his pulse throbbing through his body. He was exposed finally, someone else confronting what he alone had confronted since that night. It was as exhilarating as it was sickening, his senses heightened, and he thought he could hear his brother’s lips peel back as the monk struck the final delightful blow:
“Does it shame you to remember killing your wife?”
In the moment of silence that followed, the thin wall of the hovel creaked as weight pressed against it. Munisai looked at it from the corner of his eye, took a breath, brought his gaze back to his brother, and then spoke his ache of years.
CHAPTER FOUR
Drunk.
Too much sake, too far from home, too cold. Munisai stumbled along, the stink of cheap sex on him. It was a long walk back to Miyamoto from the nearest town, an hour at least, and on the journey the lust he thought he had already satisfied that night came back to him. The boy was staying with Dorinbo, so perhaps when he got home he would take Yoshiko in bed. That would be good.
He fell up the stairs when he got there and threw open the door to his house. There he saw the inside of his wife’s thighs, and the tanned, naked back of a peasant.
Suddenly he felt very sober.
“What is this?!” he bellowed.
On his knees, the peasant dropped Yoshiko’s legs and turned to face Munisai, shocked. He was a tall man, far taller than Munisai, and his body was lean with muscle. Yoshiko opened her eyes slowly from her lustful reverie and looked at Munisai, her hair unbound and touched with sweat. She wasn’t alarmed in the slightest. Her eyes were spiteful, proud.
“What is this?!” Munisai shouted again, storming in from the doorway.
The peasant rose to his feet and backed away slowly. He looked Munisai in the eye as he spoke.
“Please, sir, don’t …” he began.
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t harm Lady Yoshiko, she had nothing in this,” he said, and lowered his head in an attempt at deference.
Something happened then … a frenzy. He used his sword but he was not a samurai in those moments. Munisai battered and hacked and then there was blood on his face and on his hands. His chest was heaving, and what was left of the peasant was scattered around him. He turned to Yoshiko. The woman had watched impassively from the bed, not even bothering to cover herself.
“A peasant?” he said to her. “What … A peasant?”
“A tool,” she said.
“How long has this been going on?” he hissed at her. She said nothing. He lowered the point of the sword at her. “Tell me!”
There was no fear in her. Her eyes twinkled and her mouth twisted into a grin and then she started laughing.
“Have you any idea how many times you’ve come back and lain where he had been? Licked his sweat from me?” she said. “You really are a fool, Munisai Hirata!”
The sound of her laughter cut through him. The immediate reaction of blind shock and outrage was goaded into a focused fury as he realized what she had done, what she was doing. He slapped her, dragged her from the house by her hair, and threw her down the steps onto the earth, sword still in his hand and the breath hissing between his teeth. Still she laughed.
“Shut up!” he snarled, and he wanted to say something more but the construction of words eluded him. In the darkness outside the courtyard, he became vaguely aware of shapes moving. The peasant had howled and howled and now a curious crowd was approaching.
“All of you!” Yoshiko called to them from her hands and knees, and her laughter had become a maniacal, frothing cackle now. “All of you come and see what kind of a man Munisai is! See him for what he really is!”
Munisai struck her backhanded across the face, but it did not silence her. Her fine kimono was twisted around her naked body like a serpent, her breasts and her sex exposed, filthy from the dirt like she was some half-wit kept drooling in rags on a leash. From the darkness there was a dull muttering.
“Whore,” Munisai said. “How long has this been going on?”
“How old is Bennosuke?” she asked, spitting blood into the dirt.
“What does that have to do with it?” he said, and then a cold logic crept into him. Yoshiko looked up, and in her eyes Munisai found clarity.
“If he is five, then I would say that this has been going on for about five—” she began, and never finished. Munisai’s sword slashed down and took her head.
“Liar!” he screamed in vain at her corpse, and watched as her lifeblood pumped out of her neck.
When it was spent he realized there was silence; the crowd had vanished as soon as he had killed her. They were gone, but they had seen. The peasants had seen Yoshiko beat him. That could not be. The idea of someone knowing that he was fallible …
Five years? Had they known of this for five years? They must have. Had they been laughing all the while behind his back? It drove the sense from his mind. Only then did he go truly berserk, and go to visit their enclave on the far side of the village.
Then there was light, and fire, and murder …
MUNISAI SAT DEFIANTLY before Dorinbo. He had spat the memories in bitter proof at his brother, his voice cracking and spit all but flecking from his lips. Years he had waited to speak of this, and now it was all out; there was almost a manic joy in finally being able to release it.
Dorinbo was shocked. He looked at his brother and tried to think of something to say. But all he could come up with, in a quiet voice, was: “You speak so candidly.”
“There is nothing to hide from. Not from you,” said Munisai, and then slowly he turned to the wall. He looked between the cracks to the eye he could not see but knew was looking back: “And neither from our audience. Please join us, Bennosuke.”
In the darkness of the adjoining room, Bennosuke did not jump or start. The boy slowly took his hand from his mouth, his teeth leaving a line of indentations in his flesh. He had been biting the meat between his thumb and forefinger to try to keep silent as the men had spoken.
That instant of genuine confusion on Munisai’s face when they had discussed his mother in the dojo had stayed with the boy. Something was wrong, something a man who hid his emotions as part of his daily life could not disguise. The turn of his head, the furrowed brow … It had gnawed at Bennosuke until he had to know more.
In the evening Bennosuke had snuck up to his father’s estate and waited. Darkness fell, but his hunch proved true—whatever it was, it gnawed at Munisai also, and eventually the man had emerged with purpose
on his face. It had been simple to follow him, to sneak in through the rear of Dorinbo’s house, and then to start eavesdropping through the cracks in the wall.
Bennosuke had been excited at first to hear the men speaking unaware of him, but he had grown ever colder the more he had heard. Now he was caught. No thoughts of fleeing entered his head, however, no urge to yelp and scatter; there was a silent, dread inevitability to it. Of course Munisai had known he was there—he had been some implacable phantom that had haunted the boy’s life from a distance for years, and now here he was in the flesh to crush him utterly.
Wordlessly he slid open the door and entered the room.
Munisai sat, his arm in the sling and his face grim and triumphant. Dorinbo gaped, aghast at the boy’s sudden appearance. The silence held for long moments.
“Is what you said true?” said the boy. It was all he could think to say.
“Yes,” said Munisai.
“You killed my mother?”
“Yes.”
“And you are not my father?”
“I very much doubt it,” said Munisai. “Look at you.”
Bennosuke looked to Dorinbo, as though the monk might tell him that Munisai was out of his mind. But his uncle could offer nothing; he was ashamed and angry and shocked and his wits had escaped him. The boy turned back to the samurai.
“And what happens now?” said Munisai. His eyes were narrow, twinkling in the candlelight. “We know how this should end. Are you samurai, boy? Like your mother? Because her killer sits before you, and you have your little dirk at your side. Do you have the courage to do what’s right? Attack me.”
Bennosuke’s hand went to the shortsword at his waist instinctively. The room seemed to grow smaller, the swelling of his throat larger. But numb disbelief began to fade, replaced with the first inklings of hatred and anger.
Munisai was the reason why he had been cursed to solitude, exiled, and humiliated for all these years, not some affliction of the skin. The boy began to realize that—he had heard it, but now he understood it—and now the man sat here with loathing on his face as though he were not guilty. His knuckles tightened around the grip of his sword, and at that Munisai grinned the grin of a snake.
“No,” said Dorinbo, gaining some semblance of sense back—but only some, for he stammered the first words that passed through his head. “You mu-mustn’t. This is holy ground.”
“You’re right,” said Munisai, and suddenly he was up with his swords in his belt before Dorinbo could lay a hand on him. “Come on, boy.”
The samurai’s good hand clasped Bennosuke around the throat and pushed him out of the hovel. He led the boy at arm’s length out into the night and down the slope toward the gate that marked the boundary between Amaterasu’s realm and the mortal world, where hatred and human fallacy were permitted and ever present.
Dorinbo came with them, his black robe flapping as he tried to pull Munisai’s arm away, yelling at his brother to stop. The samurai ignored him, stronger than either of them, and where he chose to go the monk and the boy were condemned to go too. Bennosuke staggered and backpedaled, eyes never leaving those of Munisai, legs never thinking to resist.
“Is your heart weak, mongrel?” snarled the samurai. “Does it falter with the gutterblood of your peasant father? The man I slaughtered like the animal he was? Draw your sword and attack.”
Bennosuke longed to. He wanted to take the blade and swing wildly at the samurai, every slash cathartic and honest, years of misery and anger welling up in him. There was a sea of blind emotion before him, and to cast himself into it was so tempting, to become no more than vengeance and primal bloodlust. But something held him back.
They passed underneath the gates, and now on earthly ground Munisai pushed the boy away from him, releasing his throat. The samurai stood with his good arm wide and away from his swords and his chest pushed forward presenting his heart to the boy, his useless left hand almost a five-fingered target where the sling clasped it tight to his breast.
“Attack me!” said Munisai.
“Munisai, stop this madness. Bennosuke—go home now,” said Dorinbo, trying to put himself between them.
“Strike me! Cut me!” continued Munisai, ignoring his brother. “Kill me!”
Behind Dorinbo, Munisai’s hand grew in size. Bennosuke could all but see it pulsing with the beat of the heart. It was there and open. But he could not attack it. He knew he should, that it was proper to, but … His mind was working now, beneath the surface of outrage.
What he saw was the two swords at the man’s waist, so very close to his good, right hand.
Bennosuke knew little of pride himself, but he had read enough stories to know how it drove some men. Munisai’s armor, that magnificent suit he had cleaned all these years, was the armor of such a man. What would a peasant’s bastard, a symbol of his cuckolding written in flesh, mean to such a man? He thought of how easily Munisai had bested him in the dojo, and then it became clear:
Munisai was goading him into attacking so that he had an excuse to kill him, to rid himself of the shame.
“Do you not want to avenge your mother?” said Munisai. “Kill me!”
There was the spur, and Bennosuke felt his body tense. The shortsword seemed to sing from his side. His mother, whom he had never had a chance to say good-bye to, whose very death had been hidden from him. He remembered the few memories he had of her, the echoes of her voice as she hummed songs to him, or how she laughed and smiled at him just for his simple virtue of being.
“Attack me!” barked Munisai, and it would be right and proper to do so. “Strike me! Cut me! Kill me!”
But he hesitated. Still those two long, slender weapons right there. The boy imagined the edge of the sword flashing toward him, imagined the cut that would follow as a cold line drawn across him from which his life would seep, and he quailed. He knew that he was afraid to die, and that was not the way of samurai. Shame coursed through him. His head dropped.
“Kill me!” said Munisai a final desperate time as the boy broke from his eyes, his voice hollowing. “Kill me!”
“Enough, Munisai,” said Dorinbo.
The monk’s voice had hardened from pleading into somber command. But it was unnecessary. Whatever terrible thing might have come to be, the moment for it had passed when Bennosuke had lowered his gaze. There would be no bloodshed today, and they all sensed it. The monk straightened and looked from one to the other. Bennosuke kept his eyes to the floor. Munisai let his arm drop, his body wilted.
“What is wrong with you?” said Munisai to Bennosuke.
“There is nothing wrong with him,” said Dorinbo. “He has a chance to be something higher.”
Munisai laughed in disgust. But something was different now, something in his eyes and his voice had changed; a wall had been put back up.
“This is not what you came back for, Munisai,” said Dorinbo levelly. “Do not punish the boy for our mistakes.”
Munisai glared at his brother, seeking a new challenge, but the monk held his eyes with a coldness. It surprised Bennosuke to see such harshness in his uncle, but even more so to see Munisai relent to it.
“Very well,” Munisai could only manage. “Very well.”
He looked Dorinbo in the eye one last time and then stalked off into the night, right hand clenched around his swords and his wounded left strapped tightly to his body. The darkness swallowed him, and he was gone.
Then it was just the boy and the monk. They stood for a long time.
“He was right,” said Bennosuke. “I should have killed him.”
“It was a lure, Bennosuke. He would have killed you,” said Dorinbo. “He was goading you. His honor—”
“I know!” snapped Bennosuke. “I know—but I shouldn’t care about that! I should have tried! That’s what’s right! That’s what a samurai would do!”
“But you’d be dead.”
“It doesn’t matter—what kind of a person couldn’t attack the man who killed hi
s mother? What’s wrong with me?” said the boy, and at that moment he truly loathed himself. Tears of shame pricked at his eyes.
“Do you even know your mother?” asked the monk after a moment. “What is she to you? What do you remember?”
“I …” said the boy, and he thought back. Images, flashes of voices and smells, a vague sense of love.
“Now,” continued Dorinbo, “knowing what you learned about her tonight, about what she did—does that sound like the same woman to you?”
It did not. He was her instrument of revenge. A tool, not a son. Had she ever loved him, or loved what he would eventually do to Munisai? He did not know, and he would never know. The boy reeled.
“So tell me, why is dying for someone you never truly knew right?” said Dorinbo, his voice soft and kind as he saw the realization creep across the boy’s face. “There is nothing wrong with a person who chooses to avoid murder—you did the right thing.”
“But a samurai—” said Bennosuke, stubborn beyond reason.
“Perhaps you are something else,” said Dorinbo.
“But I should be samurai,” said Bennosuke.
Dorinbo looked at his nephew, wanting to remind the boy of his offer of an apprenticeship. But what he saw was an adult’s pain on a face still more child than man, and he could not bring himself to place another burden there.
The night was cold and long and always would be, and so with no more words he placed a hand upon Bennosuke’s shoulder and led him up to his hovel, to holy ground, where at least they could wait for morning together.
Munisai stalked home still shuddering with rage. He breathed through his nose and tried to calm himself, but it would not come. Around him the still paddy fields reflected the stars like sheets of obsidian, and the urge was to take his sword from its scabbard and slash at them. Cut the stars and cut the sky and cut the universe, just because he could.
But he didn’t.
When he reached his estate he flung the door open and then slammed it shut so hard that the twisting of his body tugged on his wound and made him cry out. As his body throbbed with pain, his numb fingers fumbled with a lantern, and then by that dim and frail light he began to prowl the silent halls restlessly.