by David Kirk
“I don’t want anything,” said Bennosuke.
The tip of his longsword was in the water, a little chevron of a wake forming around it. Hayato stared at it, watched as an auburn leaf caught upon the current brushed up against it and spiraled away past them both. Tears formed in his eyes as with his one hand he picked up his shortsword, and rose unsteadily into a quivering kneel.
What to say now to Hayato? Bennosuke was no great orator, young still, unable to construct some grand speech. All he could do was spread his arms wide and say what he felt.
“It’s all of it shit,” he said. “I see it now. It had to be written so large for me, but I see it now. All of it a death cult built to serve men like you. And people just assent to it … just tread the same paths that have been trodden a million times before.”
He laughed, once, as he realized he was quoting his uncle Dorinbo, imagined his face. Slowly Bennosuke moved to stand beside Hayato. On the lord’s shaven scalp beads of water shivered a glimmering constellation.
“What happens when one man doesn’t assent?” said Bennosuke. “I suppose that makes me a bad samurai. I suppose that doesn’t make me a samurai at all. So what am I? I don’t know, but I really, really don’t care. I’m alive. And as far as you’re concerned, I am going to live forever.”
Hayato was sobbing, the shortsword feeble in his grasp. The stars upon his pate were dashed as the lord looked up, pleading. Bennosuke tapped him on the stomach with the flat of his blade.
“Do it,” he said. “Do it, samurai.”
WHEN IT WAS done, Bennosuke walked upstream looking skyward. Somewhere behind the clouds was Amaterasu. Around his feet darted the fingerlings of fish. Hidden by grass, cicadas sang their song. A swallow dived into the boughs of a tree, autumn leaves falling. The water and the clouds flowed on, ever on. It was all imperfect and wonderful. Tears streamed from his eyes as he realized it was over, and that of all this he was still a part.
He stripped off his gauntlets and beheld his hands; a dragonfly, mottled black and jade, settled on his wrist.
EPILOGUE
The clouds gathered and darkness fell, and on the corpse-strewn slopes of Sekigahara great bonfires were lit, lighting the faces of the dead and the living alike. The only men who rested were those who slept the slumber from which there was no waking. For the thousands still breathing there was work to be done through the night, for their Lord Tokugawa wanted to make a tower to commemorate the great victory he had won today.
He was lacking stone and mortar, so he had decided instead to use the heads of the enemy.
It was a command ghoulish only in the sheer scale of the work imposed on exhausted men. Other lords had been known to make far more capricious and macabre displays of might—stripping the enemy of their eyes, or their hands, or their manhood, or even all three, and then leaving them alive as an enduring, shambling warning. Tokugawa was indeed magnanimous in this, and so the men went about the task with a sense of pride at their lord’s virtue.
Indeed, they were making a celebration of it. Men sang the old songs as they searched in packs, smiling and passing bottles of sake among themselves, turning over corpses where they lay to see whether they were friend or foe. Friend they revered and shed tears for, foe they severed the head, stripped the body of armor and valuables, and then bore the cadaver to one of the bonfires. This was war—no time for priests or corpsehandlers.
The captured survivors of the Western army were rounded up beside the tower, more being brought in all the time as stragglers were caught in the hills. These men looked at their guards with hatred, for many of them had been their allies in the morning. For them, though, there was to be no mercy—either a dignified seppuku or a blubbering decapitation.
Fifty men waited to behead them, famed swordsmen all. The soil around their feet had grown marshlike with blood, the hair upon their arms and the back of their necks burned away by the sheer heat of the fire they stood next to, but still their strikes were perfect, clean. There was no hesitation, no pause as they whittled down the thousands; a great machine into which the cowards and the unfortunate were fed.
Three of these swordsmen were of the Yoshioka school.
An enemy samurai was led up to them. He was calm, unafraid, and he dropped to his knees smoothly. He bowed to the Yoshioka, pushed a dagger up into himself, and then the leftmost one slashed his sword down and took his head.
“In another life, we shall be friends,” he said to the corpse, as he and his comrades bowed respectfully.
Lesser samurai bore the head reverently to the tower, placed it face outward so that all might look upon and know the image of a brave man, and his body was added to the pyre behind them where space could be found. The Yoshioka swordsmen watched the body ignite, consumed and quickly hidden by the well-stoked flames.
The rightmost of them turned away first and pinched bloody fingers to the bridge of his nose. He was a gruff man, short and compact, and now he was scowling, angry. He had been muttering for some time.
“That’s it—that’s the Yoshioka school?” the man growled in imitation. “I cannot believe Seibei fell to that dog. What was his name?”
“Musashi Miyamoto, I believe he called himself to his own army,” said the centermost man. He was calm, his voice gentle, a young man of slight build and sharp cheekbones. “That whole series of events was very strange, wasn’t it?”
“Is it any wonder we won, with behavior such as that among their ranks?” said the leftmost. He was the eldest of the group, hair starting to gray, eyes sunken and narrow. “The first rule of constructing a house states … Well, I suppose that’s a simile rather too morbid to continue, given the circumstances.”
Another samurai was brought before them with tears streaming down his face, begging incoherently to be spared. He squealed and raised his hands as the blade came down. The rightmost samurai kicked the head toward the tower desultorily. It was hurled to the top of the pile, where soon the man’s cowardly visage would be buried, hidden and forgotten from the world.
“Bastard,” the rightmost man said. He picked the severed fingers from the earth, the product of the man’s futile attempt at defense, and tossed them one by one into the fire. “Have they found Miyamoto’s corpse yet? I feel the need to shit coming on.”
“No,” said the leftmost man. “Seibei’s has been found, thankfully—both the head and the body, I might add—and it is on its way back to the school with some of the students. We’ll pay our respects to him soon. But this Miyamoto …”
“He was caught in the charge of our spearmen,” said the centermost man. “He’d have to be lucky to survive that.”
“He had to have been lucky to have beaten Seibei. Really—wrestling like that? How crude.”
“A strange one, indeed.”
“But the spirits sometimes smile on those kind of men,” said the leftmost, nodding. “Something tells me he survived.”
“Well, I don’t care how strange or how lucky he is,” snarled the rightmost. “He insulted our school in front of every samurai in Japan—we’re adding him to the list, right?”
“Oh, naturally,” said the centermost man.
“Good,” spat the rightmost. “If he ever comes to Kyoto, I’ll spill his guts across the street and leave him for the crows.”
“We all will,” said the leftmost. “We are of the Yoshioka.”
Yet another samurai was brought before them. The ranks of the captured did not seem to diminish. The rightmost man blinked as a rain drop splashed upon his brow. He looked up, eyes squinting, as above him and the dead and this newborn country of Tokugawa’s Japan, the clouds began to burst.
The pyres burned on regardless.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am greatly indebted to and would like to thank Ayako Sato, who not only helped with translation and research but also endured increasingly ludicrous questions about Japanese culture and history with a patience and grace worthy of any samurai. She also kicked my arse into gear as
and when it was needed with a ferocity to match.
DAVID KIRK
Glowing faintly with Cesium-137,
Sendai, Japan, March 2012
About the Author
David Kirk, twenty-seven, grew up in Stamford, Lincolnshire. He studied media arts at Royal Holloway, University of London, with a major in screenwriting. Currently he lives and works in Sendai, Japan.
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