Sword of Honour (28 page)

Look upon the noodle maker’s chopping boards, Tadanari knew, and you would see faint forms of crucifixes that the man absently scratched with his cleavers, he a devout Christian, but this
concealed for fear of driving conservative customers away; the crafter of sandals and his wife were often seen to have shouting matches that carried out onto the street, sometimes tools even
thrown, and yet in the quiet of the night when no one ought to be watching she rested with her head upon his shoulder and he smelt the hairs upon the back of her neck; of the man who worked with
gold leaf Tadanari knew nothing yet for the business was recently opened, and yet he knew that the building the man occupied used to be a front for a gambling ring that threw dice in the backrooms,
and that in the yard behind it the profits of the scattered ring might lie still buried beneath the thorny yuzu tree there.

Did anyone else know all this, these little facts that one could wander blithely by? He hoped not. That was what made a city a city, these connections, and if they happened to come together in
him alone then that made him a kind of nexus-apex, and in that uniqueness was a power and a worth that he cherished.

Onto Muromachi avenue now, this the central divide of the old capital centuries ago but now just a street marginally wider than the others. Along the length of it a water-scarce canal ran in
which people loitered, trying to escape the heat. The trenches cut as deep as the height of three men and in a month or two when the typhoon season blew in these channels would roar white and
likely burst, but down there now children splashed what they could at one another, their mothers scolding them standing ankle deep, the water falling over the bodies of labourers and beggars lying
down on their backs trying in vain to submerge themselves entirely

The avenue itself was filled with stalls and shacks that sold trinkets and refections: tofu fried quickly in a shallow skillet, forming a pancake that would be wrapped around gooey rice
flavoured with sweet vinegar; a nail impassively driven beneath the eye of a writhing eel, pinning it to a board so that it could be scaled, butchered and then skewered on wooden sticks to be
tossed upon a cast iron grill to roast; cheap woodprints hawked, weak colours on coarse paper bleeding into one another, depicting the romance of the old Chinese kingdoms, the tale of the boy who
came from a peach, of Sekigahara.

Tadanari stopped to buy a bag of sugarcane imported from the Ryukyu isles, broke a piece of the pale, brittle flesh off and then chewed upon it as he went, enjoying the sweetness.

Was it wrong to love a city? He did not think so.

You love a woman, say, and the course of duty takes you from her in your youth and her from you in what comes after; what she was, all she was could never be again. All that remains of this love
is an unbridgeable absence that you cannot quite fathom, and your one son who was dear to you before but now . . .

You love a man, say, as a brother, and though this man is strong and proud the whim of fate and his own treacherous flesh conspire to lay him low, to strip him of everything in which he held
pride, and then like a whisper of wind he is gone too. All that remains of this separate love is a portrait hung on a dojo wall, the dearth of a friendship once held so fundamental, the school this
man guided all his life and his three sons also.

But Kyoto . . .

Ah, it would hurt to leave, even for a month. But she was a cruel mistress with this heat, and he supposed it would make it all the sweeter on his return.

His meander drew its way to its zenith, and, as he crossed the long hump of the Shichijo bridge across the Kamo once more, there ahead of him the hall of the Great Buddha of the Hoko temple
revealed itself like Fuji reigning over the plains of Kanto. The tallest structure in the city, likely even the nation, the great statue of the Buddha within the height of fifteen men, the hall
around it a two-tiered thing worn like a mantle by the seated giant, the first tier coming up to his shoulders and the second one enshrining his colossal and serene face. The beams of the structure
were red and its walls white, the two roofs black-tiled and sloping, majestic, imposing, and yet reassuring; as they always were in fair weather, the doors upon the second tier were cast wide open
so that an enlightened gaze peered out endlessly across the city.

Tadanari met the pupilless eyes of the Buddha at the peak of the bridge’s arc, and he bowed as one might to a friend, as did the people around him, an idiosyncrasy of the denizens of the
city. There at the Hoko temple beneath the statue he intended to offer prayer for safe travel, for the health of his family and of his school in his absence, and then his business in Kyoto would be
completed for the summer. He bowed once more at the gate, a mark of respect as he prepared to cross the liminal threshold, and he had not taken five paces within when he happened into Goemon
Inoue.

The Tokugawa samurai was in the process of leaving, but stopped as he recognized Tadanari. The pair of them stood for an uncertain moment there on sanctified ground, both bereft of the many men
they could command but swords still at their sides.

‘Captain Inoue.’

‘Sir Kozei.’

They bowed to each other, formally, respectfully, rose to stand rigid. Goemon in his black Shogunate livery and Tadanari in the civic colour of tea. This observed by the lowerborn around them,
illicit glances cast in passing. Tadanari made the first move: he saw that from both their belts hung smoking pipes, and so he put the sugarcane away and offered up a case of kizami tobacco to the
captain.

Goemon had to accept.

The pair of them shuffled over to stand clear of the thoroughfare, stood beneath the eaves of some lowly building. Their pipes were long and slender things, like assassin’s darts, a metal
mouthpiece and bowl either end of a thin tube of wood. Tadanari pinched a measure of kizami into each, the long fine threads of which were reminiscent of auburn cat’s hair, and then, bereft
of fire, went and took a taper from a brazier that burnt nearby, this ostensibly there for the sole purpose of igniting holy incense.

Nobody complained.

‘Obliged,’ said Goemon around his pipe.

‘A pleasure,’ said Tadanari. ‘A happy coincidence to encounter you here. What draws you to Hoko this day, Captain? What might you be praying for?’

Goemon gave a motion with his shoulders, eyes to the distance, drew a long lungful in.

The pair of them stood smoking in silence for some time, looked out across the expanse of the temple enclave. Opposite the hall of the great Buddha perhaps fifty paces away stood a stupa about
the half its height. The hump of it was covered in grass and a stairway led to its summit, where a modest stone pagoda lay. This was called the Mound of Noses, and beneath the grass and the pretty
ornaments lay thousands and thousands of trophies that had been hacked from the corpses of the enemy dead in the great invasions of the mainland almost a decade previous. Brine-preserved and stolen
away from their homeland to be piled and entombed here in grand testament to a nation’s failure.

Between these two monuments, dwarfed, all the people walked.

‘The Regent Toyotomi had vision, did he not?’ said Tadanari.

‘I am aware the Regent ordered these built,’ said Goemon. He sounded like a child professing the ability to read.

‘I did not claim otherwise, Captain,’ said Tadanari. ‘But, yes, both of these monuments were his work. I assume you know that, though the great Buddha is carved of wood, the
segments of it are pinned together by stakes forged from the steel of all the swords and spears he captured on his conquests?’

‘I am aware.’

‘These things here then he built, and all the bridges that span the broad Kamo, the walls that surround the city, the moats . . . Truly, the Regent enriched Kyoto immeasurably.’

‘Your tone does not ring deep with admiration.’

A slow blue ribbon emerged from Tadanari’s mouth, coiled upwards. ‘Will you permit me to speak something of my true thoughts upon your master’s master?’

‘I stand currently in your debt.’

‘About seven, eight years ago now, our city was struck by a terrible earthquake. The worst that I can remember. Perhaps you and your folk, though, could not feel it, way up in . . . In any
case, that great Buddha was destroyed. The stakes could not hold and it shook itself to pieces. The hall collapsed around it. Can you imagine something of such colossal stature being scattered as
though it were no more than dice? Its head, it rolled forty paces away. I could scarcely believe it, but I swear to you it is truth. I saw it lying there afterwards, red beams and tiles all around.
It was obscene, face down there in the dirt. The Regent himself came to see the damage, stood just over yonder. This was the last year of the Bunroku era, just before the second invasion of Korea .
. . The Regent was not enfeebled, but he was old, small.

‘Our school contributed to the construction of the hall, and to its restoration. But we were permitted to witness him only, not permitted to be acknowledged. I and the dear late Naokata
Yoshioka stood towards the back of the crowd, and over that crowd what we saw was the most honourable Regent Toyotomi’s anger – real honest anger, unbridled, unhidden. I could not hear
all his words, but some came clear, and what I remember him saying most is, “Accursed thing! Accursed thing! I formed your legs that you might sit! Why do you defy me? Raise yourself! Raise
yourself!” There was little dignity to him. An old man’s futility like a fish trying to thrash itself free of a barbed hook . . . Please remember, good Captain, this is just my small
observation upon what I witnessed of your master’s master.’

Goemon’s eyebrows absolved him.

‘The Buddha did not raise itself, but nor was the Regent entirely powerless: he ordered thousands of men to work upon its repairs immediately, and before he died he saw the statue restored
and the hall stand again as it had been. But I knew that day, seeing him, that for all the effort, all the thought, all the money he put into elevating Kyoto higher still, he did not understand the
city. The essence of it. Let us say a fire came . . . Forgive me, Captain, I understand the thought of fire must be a sore point for you at this time.’

Goemon’s teeth clacked upon the metal of his pipe’s mouthpiece.

‘But a fire comes say – and it will come one day – and eradicates all, spreads from east to west to north to south, and all the ashes of the temples mix with all the ashes of
the brothels. Is that the end of Kyoto? No. One act ends, the scenery upon the stage is changed, the next one begins. Men will rebuild and Kyoto will continue to be. The form of it altered, the
incidental shapes collude into fresh arrangement, but the soul of it . . . The Regent sought to make the city indelibly his by pinning it into place with structures wrought by his hand, and
screamed and raged when those structures failed him, and, though this hall stands so wonderfully tall and I marvel at it, it is not Kyoto. Wood and iron are not Kyoto. Kyoto endures in hearts, is
summoned and defined by those who know it, an immortal with a million different facets and yet the same conclusion reached. Therein lies the truth the Regent never realized: what is a city but its
people?’

Tadanari drew in the last glowing remnants of his pipe, exhaled, then smiled slyly: ‘How fares your master’s castle over at Nijo?’

‘Construction advances,’ said Goemon, and he even managed to return the smile.

The torment in him! The captain yearning to simply draw his sword and cut at the man who he knew was undoubtedly responsible for all his troubles, his yearning to be as samurai. Yet there he
stood, had to stand, a half-man gelded by his allegiances to distant despots.

Tadanari could feel it, see it, and he revelled in it. Never would he forget the arrogance of the man who had come to his school those years back and refuted the iron-clad right of the Yoshioka
to their rightful office. Never would he grant him respite. He opened a separate compartment on his case of kizami and held it up to Goemon with a flourish. So small a thing and yet the captain,
forced to fulfil his part, could do nothing but empty the ash of his pipe as a supplicant would.

Magnanimity sometimes the keenest insult, complicity the greatest humiliation.

Tadanari emptied his own pipe and then placed the case neatly away in its velvet bag. Then he and Goemon bowed politely to each other, traded perfectly insincere farewells, and went their
opposite ways.

At the altar of the temple Tadanari dropped a golden coin into the waiting chest, the ovoid ryo of enough value to keep a family in rice for a year, and then he clasped his
hands and bowed his head and asked what he would ask of the Buddhas and the Bodhisattvas, the serene faces of which stared back at him. He could read no hint of favour of scorn upon them, but in
the mood he was in he could do nothing but assume the former. Then he started on his journey back to the school.

Before he had reached the Shichijo bridge once more, the children saw him and came up to him, and to them he gave the rest of the sugarcane that he still had about himself. Children saw things,
and over their sticky mastication he expected them to tell him perhaps of a scandal of some local drunk who had vomited over himself, or of a shamed wife forced to shave herself bald in public,
things of the sort they always told him.

They brought to him instead the first winds of a storm that was beginning to blow over the city. Something that would be met with shock or outrage or illicit amusement by every tongue that
passed it on until it had reached even the meanest of gutters and the most gilded of chambers.

They told him of a band of Yoshioka violating the sanctity of holy Mount Hiei to try to kill a masterless swordsman, and failing.

Chapter Seventeen

The head of the Foreigner was set upon a spike above the gates of the Yoshioka school. There was no breeze to blow the shaggy locks of red hair. His eyes and his mouth were
open, and his dead skin seemed to sweat.