Sword of Honour (22 page)

He sighed, and brought his eyes downwards, to what the crows now circled above waiting for a chance to feast upon nine severed heads raised up on spears.

Lowerborn men all, heads full of hair and all blood within drained upon the dust beneath, they were solemn totems of a desolate scene. Around them the wooden pulleys and cranes of construction
were stilled. Bamboo scaffolds stood skeletal. There was that familiar, queer hush of death across the entire site.

‘Tell me, then,’ said Goemon, and through his damaged ears his own voice sounded distant, ‘what happened here?’

He spoke to one of his own men, clad in Tokugawa black, kneeling in the dust at his feet. His helmet was discarded and the samurai’s shaven scalp glistened with sweat, and blood was dried
upon his hands and the sleeves of his clothes. The man held his gaze downwards as the etiquette of contrite submission demanded. The Goat stood by this man’s shoulder, both hands on the
pommel of his longsword grinding the point of it into the ground, ready to enforce any deviation from this.

‘There was a disturbance, sir,’ the samurai said.

‘A disturbance?’

‘A riot.’

‘A riot.’

‘Yes, sir.’

This was all he offered. Goemon looked at him until the man was compelled to speak again.

‘The instigator . . . He assaulted one of the architects. The man was lowerborn, a drunkard, staggering on his feet. He’s . . . up there,’ said the samurai, meaning the row of
heads. ‘Third from the left.’

‘Why is he up there?’

‘When I accosted the man for assaulting the architect, he was . . . He spat in my face, and said, “Why don’t you and all the other whores of Edo choke on your own
shit?”’

The Goat grunted in mild affront.

‘So you took his head?’ asked Goemon.

‘What else am I to do? I will not suffer . . .’ said the samurai, and his voice trailed off.

‘Why are there eight more beside him?’ Goemon pressed. His voice was growing lower, so low in his throat that he found a fresh pain.

‘When I took the instigator’s head,’ said the samurai, ‘the gathered city folk reacted unfavourably. They have been gathering more and more recently. Malingerers. There
was a rush of them, which I and my men had to quell. They were soon dispersed, and peace restored.’

‘Peace,’ said Goemon blackly. ‘Doubtless now in a hundred homes whispers of barbarity and murder are spoken, but you – you talk to me of peace.’

‘Captain.’

‘Was it deliberate insubordination, or was the urge to countermand my order idiotic negligence on your part?’

‘Captain.’

The Goat rapped the point of his scabbard on the ground and snapped, ‘Answer!’

The samurai licked his lips, considered his words before speaking thinly. ‘Am I to stand by and let drunks spit insult at me? Am I supposed to forego my honour?’

‘Obedience is the highest form of honour,’ said Goemon. ‘And you were ordered not to draw blood within the city limits lest you have my explicit permission, let alone to
slaughter a crowd.’

‘Sedition,’ said the samurai. ‘You also commanded that any case of sedition found was warranting of immediate death. And tell me, is a man of low stature speaking thus to me,
to us – is that not sedition?’

‘Your judgement is marred.’

‘Why? Why stay our swords? They are our most noble Lord’s to control, this city is, and they should all be made to recognize this truth.’

The samurai in his anger chose to look up then, met Goemon’s eyes in defiance, and the Goat cried out in rage. ‘Yours is not the place to question!’ the hard old man shouted,
and he raised his sword and drove the point of the scabbard into the back of the man’s head, forced his face downwards into deference once more.

The samurai seethed on his knees, but obeyed.

‘Have there been any instances of this before?’ asked Goemon.

‘No, sir. Not openly.’

‘Then why today?’

The samurai could offer no answer. Goemon thought about it. He looked over to the distant crowd of citizens. They were witnesses, all on their knees, marshalled by a cadre of samurai with
spears. Some of them expected death. Others still glowered with residual fury. The captain limped over stiffly and looked them over.

Only one stood out to him. It was a woman wearing a fine kimono of peach patterned with clouds of pear green, sullied with dust now, and though her face was hidden to the floor her shoulders
were shuddering with her silent weeping.

‘You,’ he said, ‘stand.’

She obeyed, though she stood as frailly on her feet as Goemon did. She kept her head down and tried to hide her face and her tears with her hands.

‘Why is it you weep?’ he asked her.

She was terrified of Goemon, fearing some reprisal on top of her misery, and it stole all words from her. She simply pointed to the severed heads with a shaking hand.

Goemon looked. ‘Your husband?’ he asked.

She nodded.

‘Which one?’

‘Third . . .’ She faltered. ‘Third from the left. I tried to stop him, sir, I did, but ever since that day, ever since, ever since, he’s been drinking
and—’

‘Murderous Edo bastards!’ howled a hidden voice from outside of the crowd, and Goemon became aware that they were being watched by the city, marked by it. ‘Leave her
be!’

The Tokugawa samurai bridled at the insult and the vulnerable crowd at their feet shuddered, but the captain gestured at them for calm. The woman had fallen back to her knees, and he did not
want to press her further. He had but one question left to ask: ‘Why?’

‘We lived in Shinmachi’ was all she said.

Shinmachi, the ward opposite the garrison of the Tokugawa. The ward that had been burnt down in the fire a week previous.

Goemon said nothing further, left her to her weeping. She bore no bruises as he did from the incident, but her wounds were far more grievous. He turned and limped back towards the severed heads,
the setting sun, the Goat and the samurai in the dust still dank with blood. The captain stood over the man he commanded and made his pronouncement:

‘We shall pay for the cremations of these men,’ he said. ‘Your duty now is to liaise with their families to oversee the funerary rites. You will do so with our explicit
apologies. These are my orders. Adhere to them exact.’

‘I understand and obey, sir,’ said the samurai, and pressed his head to the earth.

The Goat gave a curt gesture for the man to rise and be about his work, called to his back, ‘Ensure you match the heads and the bodies correct. No further scandal here.’

Night fell. Goemon remained at the site of the castle until the moon was proud in the sky on pretence of securing the area and ensuring it was properly manned and guarded, but
in truth the exertion of the day had drained all vigour from his battered body. Night and its curfew also offered a passage home bereft of witnesses, and when all seemed quiet the captain and his
adjutant hobbled off together to return to the garrison. Their pace through the empty streets was slow. The Goat could see the effort even walking took from Goemon, each little movement stiff, his
weight shunted from foot to foot.

‘Good you’re up, sir,’ he said. ‘Better to face the pain than wallow in thrall to it.’

‘Indeed,’ said Goemon, though there was no conviction in his voice. The Goat noticed his accent had slipped away from that of the proper tongue, reverted. A sort of sigh escaped the
captain. ‘So the city blames the clan Tokugawa for the fire?’

‘That is apparent, sir.’

‘We are as the hornet here, and now the hive of bees is stirring. Heads on spears will only anger them further. What tomorrow? A fresh riot? Agh, how do I . . . ?’

He never finished. For a long time he remained silent, the pulsing of insects all around. The heat unyielding even at night, the sweat drenching his topknot so that the hairs of it formed little
points that curled downwards, met the skin of his shaven scalp, tickled, no, scratching constant: a tiger’s claw atop his head. He looked around for something to distract him, even for a
moment, found nothing. Here was still and silent, the mercantile wards desolate at night, the honest folk that worked and lived here homebound by dark and up with the dawn.

Honest? A vestigial word used only through habit, one ingrained from when the lowerborn to him were no more than things he passed on the way from the keep to the field of battle.

The things he had learnt. See all the stores pressed together, see the fronts of them only a pace or two or across. This, Goemon now knew, was because only the space the property took up on the
actual street itself could be taxed, a theoretical infinite depth behind that space permissible. A devious little ploy, which he knew and the ‘honest’ craftsmen knew was immoral, and
which he knew and they knew he could do nothing about because that was how it had always been, all these buildings here compacted slender and deep like rows of larcenous razor clams embedded in the
sand.

Embedded in his throat, squeezing, pressing.

This just another facet of these streets that never seemed to end, through which he was doomed to prowl staring at the wooden lattices of the shutters over windows and doors, these like the bars
of a cage not imprisoning him but instead keeping him – the captain, the supposed master and commander of this city – out. He could recite facts of ownership and land usage and special
permissions all cadastre-precise, and all truly meaningless.

Without comment he handed the lantern he held off to the Goat and limped his way into the shadow of an alley. There he vomited, the arcing of his back and the convulsing of his body agony. Sweat
fell from his brow, stars swam in his eyes, the tiger’s claw rapped its knuckles on his scalp. He stood there bent double, a hand out upon a wall, stood there secreted and anonymous for as
long as he dared.

Formal, very formal.

The year before last, a mansion blanketed with a finger’s depth of snow within the myriad ramparts and moats of the grand castle at Edo.

Twenty of them, high-ranking retainers of the Tokugawa all, wearing leggings so long they trailed along the floor behind them, in which they could only shuffle or become entangled, hobbling them
and preventing any sudden movement. The shoulders of their sleeveless overjackets stood out exaggerated, wired with bamboo so that the silhouette of their torso was an inverted, blunted triangle.
So too their spines wired, vertebrae affixing upright as they settled to kneel in ranked and painful repose upon their calves.

They were made to wait. The walls around them were painted with mythical peacocks, the feathers of their tails gold leaf and vivid lapis blue, flowing wide, enveloping, embracing. This was the
antechamber designated for receiving friends. There was an antechamber for neutral guests Goemon knew, adorned with the devils of judgement inviting the guests there to think upon any
transgressions they might have, and one for enemies also – the largest, grandest hall, where each wall was dominated by a single huge tiger coiling to pounce, facing inwards and dwarfing
whomsoever would be sitting between them.

With no given signal the door to the main chamber was slid silently open. Behind it was revealed the cadre of the most private guard of the clan kneeling in similar ranks, old men all, for true
loyalty took decades to prove, but these samurai were neither enfeebled by their age nor divested of their longswords nor encumbered by effete robes.

And there, behind their fierce barrier, the Great Lord Ieyasu Tokugawa himself sat cross-legged upon a dais.

Goemon could barely see him. The antechamber where he and the others knelt was at a right angle to where the Lord faced and the corner of the wall obscured him. Not daring to turn his head,
Goemon could only discern the far hand of his current master where it lay resting upon a knee covered in the black skirts of his stiffly pleated trousers.

‘There are fine tidings,’ said the Lord Tokugawa, his voice thinner and older than Goemon expected. ‘In the spring I am to be proclaimed by his most holy Emperor formally as
Shogun and the high protector of the nation.’

‘May the reign last for ten thousand years!’ barked one of the inner guards.

‘Ten thousand years!’ all the samurai shouted, and pressed their heads to the floor.

‘I shall travel to Kyoto and receive the blessing of his undying majesty,’ said Tokugawa when they had risen. ‘And then I shall hopefully never return.

‘I have no purpose lingering in Kyoto. None can rule Kyoto. Kyoto has never had a formal Lord for Kyoto is the Emperor’s city. The Emperor cannot rule Kyoto because he is
heaven-touched, and cannot understand the realities of this savage plane. Kyoto is as it is. To try to grasp it is to flail in the river with the tail of the eel slicking between your fingers.

‘Hear then, this proclamation of mine: I vow unto thee, unto the skies and the heavens, that my first act as Shogun will be to make Edo the true capital of this nation.’

‘May the moss grow thick upon the never-falling walls of Edo!’ bellowed the guard.

Oblique, that. Goemon chose to shout, ‘Forever Edo!’, others ‘Glorious strategy!’, ‘The walls shall never fall!’, ‘Moss!’ Tokugawa let them fall
silent. The words were not important. The vigour and obedience were.

The Lord continued: ‘This proclamation, however, will never be announced outside the walls of this hall. Kyoto and the Son of Heaven cannot be seen to be lessened. But everything of worth
– policy, trade, law – all will have their centres moved here where I and my scions can control them. I concede the hallowed beast its own cage, but therein lies the problem: Kyoto
cannot
not
be my city.’

Utter silence, save for the crackling of wood where it burnt in braziers, keeping the winter out, and then a rustling, a choked cry. At the back of the Lord’s hall a man stood with a
hooded falcon upon his arm, the bird agitated for but a moment, the wings then stilled.

Did birds dream, Goemon thought, or was it simply attuned?

‘How do you wish us to bring it in line, most noble Lord?’ asked one of the men to Goemon’s right. ‘Shall we dispatch an army to occupy it? It shall be an honour to lead
such a force in your name.’