Sword of Honour (20 page)

Akiyama slept in odd contortions to keep the weight of his body from pressing on the scars across his chest. He no longer had any need of bandages but the pain of the wounds
remained, and a part of him wondered if it would ever truly subside. A host of old warriors he had encountered through his life moaning of the aches of decades-past battles paraded themselves
through the pathways of his mind, and each time he dismissed them as no more than phantoms sent to drain his spirits.

When he awoke that morning he saw that Miyamoto had somehow befriended a dog through the night. It was a wretched-looking mongrel but it was placid enough, and it stayed with them through their
mean breakfast of mushrooms and tough scraps of dried fish. Yae adored the creature immediately, and it sat there with its little lungs heaving as the heat of the day began to impose itself,
ambivalent to her petting. Then, when it had assured itself that there was no more food, it shrugged itself free of the girl’s arms and walked off without looking back.

Yae was upset at what she saw as a betrayal.

‘Dogs are dogs,’ he said to her. ‘That’s their nature. Immediacy. Have you ever seen a dog hauling on an old piece of rope? He fights and fights and he doesn’t know
why, but for those moments he has to fight entirely . . . Then he drops it, as though it never was.’

‘So the dog didn’t like me?’

‘Oh, I have no doubt that it liked you entirely for the moments that you fed it.’

‘But . . .’ she said, sad and stubborn, ‘the monks back at Nankodai, they told me a story about a dog that waited and waited and . . . I thought dogs were supposed to be
loyal.’

‘Well,’ said Akiyama, ‘loyalty is a thing of many facets, and . . .’

He did not finish. Defining loyalty had governed his thoughts these past months, and of the answer he was no longer certain.

It led him to a dark introspection, and deepened the anxiety he felt this morning. He found himself restless. For the first time since the day he had been cut down, he was compelled to pull his
hair up into a topknot. The hair upon his once-shaven scalp had grown in fully and he had no oil with which to force his longer red locks straight and dark, but even though it was a poor
approximation he nevertheless felt that it had to be done.

Miyamoto noticed him binding the queue of his hair and gave him a black look, but said nothing out loud.

This feeling had grown the closer they got to the capital, like a hailstone gathering ice amidst the clouds. It was one thing to make a decision in isolation, it was another to confront the
consequences of it. Akiyama felt in some ways like a child, nervous, wanting to hide, to deny. He had left his bloodied and torn tea-coloured jacket to rot upon the walls of the hovel they had
sheltered in, but now, suddenly, he wanted nothing more than to put it on once more, to smother himself in it, to let it cover his entire body and have the colour obscure his individual self.

His mind chose to fight this by fixating solely upon Kyoto.

It made of the city a portent of a kind, and Akiyama now found he desperately wanted to see it exactly as he had left it. If it had not changed, if it had retained its beauty and its splendour,
if serenity still reigned, then he reasoned that he himself could be serene also. In judging himself against familiar things that he had judged himself against before, he might mark and understand
the change in himself better. Yet a sort of dread in this . . . He was like a man waiting to be struck, braced for some pain and yet also simultaneously wanting to feel the pain so that it could be
over and done with.

They readied themselves for travel. Yae gathered up her and Ameku’s things and Miyamoto helped Akiyama stiffly up onto his horse. The pale-eyed samurai had ridden the entirety of their
journey as the others walked. He was wounded but he felt hale enough to walk and had offered many times to alternate their time in the saddle, but Ameku had never ridden and was fearful of the
height, Yae would not let any other lead Ameku, and Miyamoto had simply refused.

‘Don’t like horses’ was all he had said. ‘Bad memories.’

Instead Miyamoto held the horse’s bridle as they walked, led the creature as Yae led Ameku. From the saddle Akiyama looked at the waystones on the sides of the road. They had travelled
upon the Sannindo road, which ran from the western tip of Honshu to Kyoto broad and flat. Every half-
ri
a stone offered the distance to the capital. No other great city of the southern
coast was afforded recognition upon them, not Osaka, not Himeji, not Okayama; only Kyoto nestled in the centre of the nation. Things only ever looked inwards.

They were close now and the road was busy. An irregular procession of irregular caste and fortune that approached on foot or on horseback or riding in palanquins. In the gutters that ran beside
the roadway aspirant monks and destitute beggars beseeched for the same coin, voices pleading in desperation or murmuring steady prayer. People took tea in the shade of a roadside inn, kimono
skirts and jerkin trousers hiked up and their bare feet set in a cool, running stream that had been channelled.

Akiyama marked a shrine that he remembered passing those years past, a little wooden structure set upon a plinth mimicking the form of a temple yet no larger than a clothes chest. Inside was a
holy stone encircled by rope. He saw this and immediately thought of a rope around his throat, and so he took to thinking instead of the sights he would see in a matter of hours. What was it that
defined Kyoto most to him? Was it the sight of the rising sun breaking over the eastern mountains, or fireworks loosed at night over the arch of the Nijo bridge? Was it the delicate smell of
gathered summer hydrangeas or the overwhelming grease smoke of grilled river salmon cooked over red-hot coals? Was it the sound of the sigh of a crowd as a golden festival shrine was raised
magnificently aloft, or of the great bells of the Gion temple tolling with low and resonant puissance, mourning the fleetness of existence?

Perhaps thoughts could be thought too loudly. Over his shoulder, Miyamoto asked, ‘What is Kyoto like?’

And, for all his musing upon it, Akiyama found that he could answer no better than he could define the concept of loyalty. ‘There is great beauty there,’ he said. ‘I cannot
describe it as it deserves.’

‘Is it as men say? The ten-thousand-year city? The capital of flowers?’

The pale-eyed samurai grunted evasively.

‘How many people?’ Miyamoto insisted.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Is it . . .’ said the young swordsman, and struggled for a word, ‘populous?’

‘What is your meaning?’

‘I have walked the streets of other cities, and I have found the weight of people there channelled to feel as . . .’ said Miyamoto, and he made a vague gesture with one hand,
clutching at his throat and then banging a fist on his sternum. He looked up to see if Akiyama understood him, and all Akiyama could do was stare back in confusion.

‘That is something I have never felt,’ he said. ‘You would do well to focus yourself upon the Yoshioka.’

Miyamoto’s tone darkened. ‘How many, their numbers?’

‘I cannot say for certain. There are many adepts serving all across the country. I would expect at least fifty resident at the school, however.’

Miyamoto spat. ‘That may be. But I only have feud with one.’

‘The master Kozei is a talented swordsman. It was he who taught me. You cannot rush like a boar into conflict with him. If you seek—’

‘Kozei?’ said Miyamoto. ‘I want the head.’

Akiyama adjusted himself in the saddle. After some moments, he said, ‘Kozei was the one who ordered me to hunt you down.’

‘But who is it – you told me – him of the bloodline, who carries the name?’

‘Sir Seijuro reigns now that his father Sir Naokata has succumbed to his illness. He is young. Older than you, but young enough that he is likely under the sway of master Kozei
still.’

‘Seijuro Yoshioka,’ said Miyamoto, fixated, tongue rolling out the words venomously. ‘The Lord-King Yoshioka.’

They carried on in silence. The capital was imminent. They were sweating profusely, dark stains upon their worn and weathered clothes. The heat seemed to swell around them. Kyoto was inland,
ringed by mountains that trapped the temperature and kept out wind, and the road ahead shimmered in a wet haze.

Other cities tended to coalesce gradually, outlying hamlets increasing in their density until the city was simply declared to start at some unseen boundary. For Kyoto proper, however, there was
a firm demarcation. It had been both moated and walled by the will of the late Regent Toyotomi, vast amounts of earth packed hard and tight to stand at least five times the height of a man and the
slope of them almost vertical. Gatehouse structures fifty paces long and three storeys high stood on top of the walls, and it was one of these buildings that Akiyama saw first, his first glimpse of
his home in near four years.

The gatehouse was silhouetted against the bright sky and, set athwart the light, it was robbed of form, seemed vague and indistinct, and he found no comfort in it. He looked down instead, and
from the vantage of his saddle he could see the moat before the walls. It was thirty paces wide, and Akiyama thought of its waters, remembered their deep jade-green colour, luscious, tauntingly so,
as though the liquid might in fact be viscous enough to coat the body in, to wear as a second impermeably cool skin against the oppression of the summer.

But that was no more than a delusion, and there were other more tangible forms of oppression. A low bridge spanned the moat, barely above its surface, and Akiyama saw that before it a crowd of
hundreds of people mobbed in sullen anger. Paper fans waved in vain, women hid beneath the shade of parasols, labourers in no more than loincloths and sandals sat with their arms around their
knees, backs glistening. The lot of them were being prevented from crossing.

‘This is very unusual,’ he told Miyamoto. ‘Not even during the War were the gates of Kyoto barred. The city is inviolate.’

Suspicious, he told Ameku and Yae to linger a distance away whilst he and the young swordsman went forward to investigate. At the mouth of the bridge they saw that a line of Tokugawa samurai
were standing with spears, clad in full livery and conical iron helmets. Each one of them sweated piteously beneath the metal and the layers. Their leader was up on a dais, and he was shouting to
the crowd, had shouted so long that his face was red and his voice was hoarse. He explained over and over, eyes bulging, that without specific permission entry to the city was barred owing to some
calamitous incident he only alluded to, and the crowd seethed and murmured of explosion and fire and arson.

‘The Tokugawa hold authority over the city now?’ Akiyama said, and he was genuinely surprised by this development. ‘How can they dare to assume that mantle? This is the realm
of the Son of Heaven.’

He turned to Miyamoto, and found that the young man was not listening. His eyes were locked upon a samurai who was equally fixated upon him. The samurai wore a wide-brimmed straw hat that kept
his face in shadow, stood with his arms crossed. He wore a kimono of fine black silk and a jacket of teal, and from the handles of his swords hung a long chain of Buddhist rosaries. He took in
Miyamoto, blistered and gaunt, his hair pulled back into a wild tail, and made no attempt to mask his disdain.

‘Kyoto is no place for the masterless,’ the samurai said.

‘This world is no place for the mastered,’ said Miyamoto.

‘What?’ said the samurai, and he sneered. ‘There are relics of the Teacher within that city. They shall not be sullied by the presence of a degenerate soul that persists in
living beyond all dignity.’

‘I am not here for temples.’

Akiyama interjected. ‘Neither are we here to spread disharmony,’ he said, and bowed to the samurai as politely as he could through his wounds and his seat upon the saddle.
‘There is no conflict here. I humbly apologize for upsetting the tranquillity of your spirit such.’

‘
You
have no cause to apologize,’ said the samurai, eyes not leaving Miyamoto.

‘And I do?’ Miyamoto asked.

The man said nothing more. He simply persisted in staring, as though he were a warden. Miyamoto continued to stare back, matching the man in this contest. Akiyama felt the change as much as saw
it. Something in the young swordsman hardened, something welled. A hatred in his eyes as he looked at this man and all he was. The samurai, and his beads of his rosary’s lacquered ebony. The
set of his jaw. The look in his eyes that outshone the shadow of his hat.

Miyamoto surged towards the samurai.

There was an outcry and the crowd drew back. Akiyama reached down and tried to take Miyamoto’s shoulder, but he could only slow him. The samurai did not move, spread his legs into the
balanced fighting stance. Put his hands to his longsword, left on the scabbard, right on the grip, waited for Miyamoto to enter his range of attack, and Miyamoto’s hands were at his longsword
also, and Akiyama snarled at him unheard, hauled at the scruff of his clothes and was nearly pulled from his saddle, a wrench of pain as his torso twisted, and there were five paces between them,
four, and then Ameku silenced the crowd.

The woman gave a low hiss and spread her arms wide. Panicking, Yae had brought her close, yet even the girl drew back at the sound. Ameku’s face was to the floor, and her hair obscured her
features. She began to shudder and to sing in a low ululation, and the sheer alien sound of her words jarred and then began to terrify the crowd. Akiyama stared. Miyamoto stared. Ameku continued,
rhythmic and low, an aggressive conjuration. She brought her hands to her face and caught the tresses of her hair between her fingers. She sang into her palms as she slowly brought them upwards,
and then in one savage gesture she snapped her head back and tossed her hair behind her, and revealed her eyes opened wide and staring at the samurai.

They were not the flawless orbs of some statue but marked and misted as though they were being consumed by chrysalis-thread, fogged of an ugly sick colour, and still she sang. Sang like a witch,
like a ghoul, held her clawed hands out before her. Her in the throes of this dark foreign orison, its higher meaning unheeded, but in the primal gut of all those witnessing it a complete knowledge
that she was pleading for some doom or malice conceived in outer places to manifest itself here and now.