Sword of Honour (32 page)

Three of them did. Goemon lashed his hand forward in clear command and they were riddled with arrows instantly. Two collapsed before they had taken but a step, the third reached Musashi but
there was no strength in his arms; Musashi turned his sword aside and the samurai followed after it as though it were his anchor, guiding him down into the water’s embrace.

The remaining three Yoshioka howled their anger, demanded the Tokugawa to come down and fight them fairly, but they had judged it impossible to reach Musashi and thus attain glory a moment prior
and they did not change their minds now. They backed away, sheathed their swords. The other few men of the Yoshioka came down from the street and together they bore the bodies away, up and out of
the canal all the while with the arrows of the Tokugawa aimed at them, and where they went after that Musashi could not care.

Only when they were out of sight did he allow himself to slump backwards, rest his weight against the wall, sheathe his sword. Suddenly he could feel the water flowing around his toes and the
pain of all his wounds, his leg, his head, he realized the skin upon the back of his left arm had been grazed clean away, sticky with blood, and how wonderful that was.

‘You,’ called Goemon down to him, opening his eyes. ‘You would be the duellist Miyamoto, correct?’

‘Yes,’ said Musashi. His voice was rasping, his throat still clicking oddly.

‘You should come, spend the night in the garrison with us,’ said Goemon, the rim of his circular helmet lit up like a halo. ‘For your own safety.’

‘Have I a choice?’ said Musashi, looking up at him and all his men.

‘No,’ said Goemon, and he smiled. ‘I rather think you haven’t.’

Interlude I

The sky is blue and the sea is blue, but different types of blue, the names of which she never learns. Only half-remembered this chain of images, soundless, she so very young,
the figures on the white gold of the beach distended and blurry in her recalled sight, but she remembers the shape: two legs, two arms, five fingers, two eyes, one nose, one mouth, yellow teeth,
black hair blowing in the wind, white gulls eddying above. All these things she knows she has seen, actually seen, that she could not have possibly conjured in a pleading dream.

Then darkness.

‘In we go,’ comes Mother’s voice. On the girl’s shoulder a hand materializes, tender, ushering her forwards. Toes feel the pebble-edges of earthen steps, and she
descends.

‘Who’s here?’ says the girl, after the gentle squeeze of Mother’s hand tells her to stop.

‘Kind old lady Rimi,’ says Mother, ‘who brings us the ropes she weaves. Tamagusuku, who brought us that nice turtle shell he found last summer. Wibaru, who brings us the fruit
from his tree. Arakachi, who brings us the razor clams he finds upon the beach. And Shimabuku, who cuts the lumber for us.’

‘Can you help us?’ says a man in front of her.

There is something in the voice that the girl has not heard before, that she does not like; a desperate deference. She waits for Mother to answer. Mother, though, does not, and the discomfort
grows as the girl starts to wonder in the silence just to whom the man, the adult, is being deferent and desperate to.

‘What’s wrong?’ the girl asks eventually.

‘It’s old Fija,’ says Mother, above and behind. ‘He’s sick. He’s been sick for a long time now. We all want to help him. Do you want to help him?’

‘Yes,’ says the girl out of childish instinct to please before she actually considers it, and then she quails. ‘How?’

Mother places a hand on either one of her shoulder blades and leads her forward once more. After a few shuffled steps, soles on ash and sand, the girl is pressed gently down to her knees. Hands
take her hands and place them upon something clammy and coarse; the girl’s fingers slowly map out and recognize a palm much larger than her own, find a thumb onto which they clasp.

‘Closer,’ says Mother.

Fingertips on the back of her head. The girl’s face is lowered. She hears a wheezing, sad, short, like the tiniest length of paper being torn again and again. Closer, because she still
does not understand. What assaults her then is a smell, so revolting that it takes a moment for the scale of the disgust to register, vile, violating in its closeness.

‘She grimaces!’ came old lady Rimi’s sudden voice, hysteric and loud. ‘Oh, she sees them upon him! Devil-spirits clinging to him, dragging him away from this life!
He’s doomed! He’s doomed!’

Later the girl sniffles into Sister’s lap. The difference in the scent of the salt of her own tears and the sea salt worn into Sister’s clothes is stark.
Sister’s fingers feel like lapping lagoon waves as they run through her hair again and again, soothing in their repetition.

‘I wanted to help,’ says the girl. ‘I really did.’

‘It’s over now,’ says Sister.

‘They didn’t tell me how.’

‘They didn’t tell you because they don’t know either.’

‘But that’s not fair.’

‘It’s not, is it?’ says Sister, and now her fingers part and straighten, the girl feeling a familiar tugging on her scalp as she begins to plait.

‘Is Fija going to die?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘Because I couldn’t help him?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘What?’ wails the girl. Fresh sobbing.

‘You’re wiping your nose all over my skirts,’ says Sister soon enough. ‘Please stop.’

‘It’s not fair,’ says the girl again.

‘You mustn’t be angry about it. It is what it is. The sadness repeats itself across the waves.’

‘You heard that from the song.’

‘It’s true though, isn’t it?’ says Sister, but she herself does not sound sad. ‘Women are the source of life. They are a bridge from the other world to this one.
But the bridge is very long, so long and dark that we can only see one end of it. Most women look one way, but you, your sight was taken from you in this life, so . . .’

‘So?’ begs the girl.

‘When Mother took you in to old man Fija’s room,’ says Sister, ‘what did you see?’

The girl doesn’t understand the question. She thinks for a long time how to answer, and then says honestly, ‘Nothing.’

‘One day, then.’

Fija dies and becomes nothing and Sister becomes a young woman and the girl an adolescent, and that promised day of comprehension eludes her yet. Across the years Sister
conspires to bring her to where she is claimed to be needed. The adolescent keeps her silence in hope that they will relent, but this in itself is greeted as some form of message.

They will not let her be blind.

They refuse to let her be blind.

Around them now is a smell of smoke so overpowering, and yet beneath it, undeniable and unignorable, the scent of cooking, of roasting.

‘Why?’ wails the wife, her voice so harrowed with grief the word is barely formed through the tears. ‘Why?’

‘She has come,’ says Sister to the wife, soft, repeating her words. The shrieking of the wife lessens, and then there is frantic scrabbling across the earth. The hem of the
adolescent’s skirts are grabbed, and she feels unbound hair tickling the tops of her feet.

‘Please,’ says the wife hysterically, ‘tell me what is the cause of this? Can you see? Is it some ghost tormenting me for its own amusement? Am I victim? Please? Can you
see?’

The adolescent cannot answer.

‘Or have I brought this upon myself? Is this punishment? What have I done? What essence have I offended so? How can I atone? How? Tell me! Please!’

A way distant, a man snarls: ‘Away, you! Away!’ There follows the stomping of feet and a flurry of large wings.

The tugging on the adolescent’s skirts grows fiercer.

‘Is it the spirit of the Chiyo grove?’ says the wife. ‘Does it think us desecrators? We had it pacified before we took wood from it, we thought it safe to use. It cannot be
because of that! We had it blessed and sanctified!’

The shells the adolescent wears as a necklace rattle against one another with the pulling of her clothes. The wife’s voice drops lower into a hiss almost, her depths revealed in her
desperation.

‘Is it because of what I did?’ she says. ‘You know. You can see. You know what I did. Is it because of that? Is that sin what drew the spirits to me, all these years waiting?
It is! I see! Forgive me! What can I do to make them forgive me, to make them spare me? I’ll, I’ll, shave my head, I’ll raise a cairn of a thousand stones,
I’ll—’

On she speaks, maddened, and, oh, the pure, heartbreaking agony in her voice. It is terrifying to the adolescent. To be clung to as though she were the sole outcrop of land in a sea beset by an
unending typhoon. The adolescent wants to run, to be a child once more that she might hide behind Sister, but that will never be again. Sister is there, always there ready to bear witness, foremost
of those awaiting. All of them silent and awed around her, willing her, willing her, and still the wife is broken by the passion of her lamentation. Still she pleads for mercy with the intensity of
the burning, still she claws at the adolescent’s clothes, and no one is coming to relieve the adolescent, to tell her what to do, and now the wife finds a new level, starts offering up
fingers and strips of her own flesh in appeasement, and the adolescent can bear it no longer. She speaks as they want for the first time.

What she says – murmurs – is, ‘That will be enough. No flesh. No blood drawn. The cairn. The hair. That will be enough.’

There is silence all around. Long heartbeats of it as her judgement is heeded. Then the adolescent feels the hair upon her feet spooling and then warm flesh, a brow perhaps, charcoal dry upon
her toes.

‘Thank you,’ utters the wife, and does so again and again and again.

In her voice is a piteous earnestness, a maniacal gratitude, and the adolescent can do nothing but stand there and receive these things knowing she has given false medicine to the woman. The
shame wrings her innards, and still the wife persists in thanking her, over and over, and each kiss upon her feet revolts the adolescent anew. Eventually, Sister comes and coos the wife away. The
adolescent is left shuddering, hoping she can return to solitude. That, her duty done, they will at last leave her be.

But what she has done is change things irrevocably.

‘She shivers,’ says a man.

‘It’s them,’ says a woman. ‘They move her.’

There is a low sigh of awed agreement that seems to come from every angle. Enough of them to drown in. The true pain, however, is withheld until she and Sister are walking home, hand on elbow. A
monkey chirrups above, agitated or joyous. Sister has such pride in her voice, shaming enough that it blinds even the sightless.

‘You see them now,’ she says, overjoyed and oblivious. ‘You spoke to them!’

The adolescent wants to cry. But neither can she bring herself to confess to Sister why she spoke, and so the words wash over her as they go, meaningless as colour.

Now that they know she has awoken, they craft for her a headdress, somewhere between a hat and a wig. All she knows of it is that it is big and wide and heavy, hard to balance,
and either dry grass or dead hair tickles at her neck constantly.

This headdress is the anchor that binds her to what she has become, for they have awarded the adolescent a title alongside it.

Now, they call her yuta.

She who sees.

Chapter Twenty

The heat, the heat. Even indoors, even in the shade, skin clammy and yet mouth dry, and all so formal; vestments of silk sticking, a constant sense of peeling with any motion,
body contorted into the dignified pose with all weight resting on the heels tucked beneath thighs, strain on the knees threatening to tear, between calf and hamstring a pressure vile and
viscous.

But maintained, always maintained.

‘Captain Inoue, humbly I submit myself to your judgement,’ said the samurai before Goemon, his hands and face pressed to the floor. ‘My actions were unforgiveable. By loosing
upon the Yoshioka without command, I have failed you unequivocally. I beg of you a chance to atone: my immolation through seppuku is hereby offered, should you be so merciful to grant me
such.’

The samurai forced his brow down further. He could not have been more than twenty. Goemon watched, kept the immaculate façade.

‘Raise your head,’ the captain said eventually.

The young samurai did so hesitantly, a ghostly residue of his brow and the bridge of his nose left upon the varnished hardwood beneath him, fading quick.

‘I ordered you to loose,’ said Goemon, with low and utmost conviction. ‘Understand this. There is not a thing in this city I do not command. Therefore I gave you the command.
Repeat this.’

‘Sir?’

‘Repeat.’

‘You gave me the command.’

‘Indeed,’ said Goemon. ‘And it was a fine shot. You fulfilled your duty exact. The fate of the slain Yoshioka was entirely of their own determination. There is no need for
punishment or atonement here.’

The samurai threw his face to the ground once more, honorific gratitude spilling from his mouth unchecked. Goemon let the man speak his submission and thanks until he had satiated himself, and
then ordered him to be about his duty. The young samurai left backwards on his knees, shuffling out through the doorway, which was closed by unseen hands behind him, and then Goemon was alone.