Sword of Honour (36 page)

‘I am acting in a worthy manner. Are not the Tokugawa to be hated?’

‘They are. But you must not make hatred your entire definition; it is a vile and short thing to live in thrall to.’

‘You read the reports of our men in Edo just as I did. The Tokugawa are going to move the capital there. This aberration cannot come to pass.’

‘It cannot be stopped.’

‘Our prestige will be lessened.’

‘Lessened, but not entirely vanquished. Skill will always be respected. Our school will continue to send our swordmasters out elsewhere across the nation, speaking in halls to Lords and
samurai who will listen keen and attentive, and there they can start whispering against the Tokugawa. One man turns another, that man turns two, their sons are many and learn their lessons well,
and eventually, though it may take generations, the numbers will balance out. Then the Tokugawa can be punished.’

‘But I want—’

‘Is not the concept of “I” itself against the Way? You bear the name Yoshioka. Your duty is foremost to that. You and I are bested. Accept this, bear the humiliation. We
– the school, the Yoshioka, the Kozei – will endure long after you and I are individually dead, and that is the “we” that will prosper. Unless you dash all that attempting
to seek a selfish, violent satisfaction you cannot achieve.’

The thought of being denied enkindled the rage anew in Denshichiro, eyes flaring, lip curling. Tadanari said, ‘And you have Miyamoto. As the Tokugawa are to us, we are to him.’

That quelled him. His eyes went distant, no doubt images of tremendous violence calming him. It in turn brought forth the swordsman in Tadanari, the teacher who had made countless assessments of
the ability of men. He asked Denshichiro earnestly, ‘Can you beat him?’

‘Of course I can. You doubt me?’

‘The sword free of thought cuts with the keenest meaning. Are these not your father’s words?’

‘I know them.’

‘So sit,’ said Tadanari, indicated the dais, the bed of sand. ‘Consider.’

Denshichiro obeyed. He sat on the dais and assumed a meditative pose with his legs entwined, soles and palms upwards. This the posture of inner peace, and yet upon Denshichiro it looked a
crossbow primed to fire, his shoulders taut and coiled. Diligently he set his eyes upon the foremost boulder in front of him, stared waiting to see beyond, to see nothing.

The boulder he looked at was crested with a knife-ridge of obsidian, set like a sundial so that at noon either side would be illuminated equal but here in the morning a shadow cast on the
western face, black and blacker, differences in the black that Tadanari knew would guide and lull the conscious mind into egoless contemplation.

But no peace in Tadanari. Not the obsidian he looked at now but rather Denshichiro. Could he truly be taught? Seijuro had only earnestly listened to Tadanari’s urgings for meditative
discipline only after he had returned from Edo and whatever disgrace he had faced there, when he had been made aware of something lacking in him.

Even then what good had that done? Provoked by the simplest trick, and now maimed.

And here, Denshichiro. Denshichiro who had heard that haunting final tirade of his father’s, the toneless invective against the Tokugawa, which had degenerated into no more than a rattle
of pure pathetic anger, feeble and heart-destroying. What chance for him to forget that? Or in those hisses had he found the definition of his nature calcified, had his fury made indelible?

Denshichiro turned from the rock, looked up at Tadanari: ‘I already know the answer here. Twelve of the thirteen boulders only visible – no man can achieve everything. Humility,
things like that. Must I sit here longer?’

‘Do you really think,’ said Tadanari, ‘your father, and his father before him, would have sat here for so long, if the answer was so simple?’

Even if he didn’t, Denshichiro turned back, rolled his shoulders, stared into the obsidian once more.

Patience. Patience a virtue.

Chapter Twenty-three

Unleashed from the Tokugawa garrison, Musashi walked the streets of Kyoto on his wounded leg. Into the crowds that swarmed as thick as he had ever seen he went as an
individual, and he went in search of evidence of his achievement.

The day before on the way to the Rendai moor he had barely noticed the city around him, focus entirely on the duel. It overwhelmed him now. Between the buildings the heat was channelled,
billowing, a swaddling embrace like a pillow across the mouth, the nose. Musashi felt drops of sweat begin to collect in his eyebrows, taste the salt of it on his lips. Unrelenting, turning corners
expecting the relief of a breeze and finding none, hundreds of fans in hundreds of hands fighting hundreds of battles in vain.

Around him colour: brocades and silk curtains covering the entrances to storefronts, myriad designs; there three white ume plum blossoms atop a field of red; there a great crane with its wings
flaring atop a striped ivory-blue background; there a pattern of small circles arrayed around a larger one, black on green. These family or guild crests, their trades oblique, knowledge of what
they purveyed like a code of the city, proof of belonging. Ribbed paper lanterns of white and red hung unlit from roofs of jade-green tiles beneath which courtesans draped in panchromatic layers of
silk passed. Even the heat itself seemed to add a shade to all that he saw, a subtle glow of reflection from stone or metal making his eyes feel as though they were burning.

All these tones a disparate collection that in their fleeting incongruence never truly coalesced into a whole, like a shattered handful of coloured glass atop a mound of ashes. The underlying
colours, the primary colours of Kyoto as it seemed to him, were plain and lowly: the greys and deep blues of the common hemp clothing of the lowerborn, beams of buildings, charcoal-black,
smoke-hardened to protect against flame, dusty and tan the earthen streets starved of rain.

A sense of containment began to fester, at his throat, at his ribs. Each of the structures here was of two storeys and the thoroughfares no more than eight or nine strides across, the sky above
devoured either side by cantilever ribs of eaves. Always someone looking down from beneath these, their arms draped across bamboo railings or fingers parting wooden blinds, they idly drinking or
eating or simply watching, and every time his eyes met theirs, man or woman, they looked away, and then looked back when he looked elsewhere.

This was the wondrous golden city he had looked across from the slopes of Hiei?

A heavy gate lined with murderholes that obliged the thrusting of spears at interloping stomachs loomed, and he thought that he had come across what he sought. This marked the boundary to the
higher wards where distant Lords held estates they seldom visited and samurai bodyguards congregated before it, their eyes as murderholes also as Musashi approached them.

He cast his arms wide and told them of how he had beaten Seijuro, and he expected from these swordsmen at the very least a form of martial respect. Instead they jeered him, jeered his clothes,
his wounds. Swords restrained by mandate of peace upon the streets, voices their only weapons. Accents as disparate as the extents of the nation but the words the same.

Jeered him for abusing the sanctity of the duel by arriving late.

Jeered him for running from a dozen men who would have surely cut him down.

Each of them oblivious of the arguments that Musashi repeated hotter and hotter, that it was better to live, that he was not afraid of death for if he was he would not have attended the duel at
all, that he fled because the sole point of fighting was victory and victory alone and, this achieved, he had nothing more to gain upon the moor of Rendai.

How they tore these reasons down, or rather repelled them without sinking any cognizant part of themselves into them, spat that by his reckoning the rabbit was worthier than the tiger, that if
he believed what he said then surely he ought to abandon the sword entirely and resort to European knavery, arm himself with pistols alone and put holes in people at inviolate distance and proclaim
himself the mightiest warrior the world had ever known, a charlatan champion.

He looked at them all, at their topknots and their swords, and he did not understand. How could this be? How was it they were failing to see? He felt some part within himself tarnish. It was as
though he were back in his exile with Jiro, that he was nothing, that he was the black and formless waters once more.

Seething, he left them by their iron and oaken barriers as solid as ever.

A cumulative aggravation now swelled within Musashi, born of every step he had to clip for the passing of another oblivious of him. The braying laugh of some drunk drifting from above, the
sounds of an old man sucking his sickly sinuses into the back of his throat, the shriek of a young woman entreating people to come and sample her family’s konyakku gelatin. Sweat now in the
corners of his eyes, stinging, the wiping only exacerbating, a snarl threatening to break across his lips.

He rounded a corner and there revealed to him was the vast form of a pagoda that towered upwards. Five tiers of symmetrical beauty, the sheer size of it stopped him in his place and he gazed up
at it. He wondered how many years it had stood – decades? centuries? – and then thought of all the earthquakes, all the bolts of lightning, all the great fires and all the wars that
could have possibly occurred and yet had failed to consume it in that span of time.

He had marvelled at it from a distance, and yet how different the pagoda seemed in such close proximity. Near like this Musashi could not avoid how the tower dwarfed him, both in stature and in
everything that it stood proudly athwart to, and suddenly he could not bear to look at the beautiful thing, and he turned from it as the eye shirks the fullness of the sun.

A street away he happened across an exhumation; a great shrine brought out into the clearing of a square and peeled from under layers of hemp sheets. The shrine was made to be borne aloft on
shoulders, yokes long enough that four score men would share the weight. A beautiful thing hung with bells and cymbals, the wood lacquered vermillion, a sloped roof from which a spire styled like a
pagoda thrust upwards and around the eaves of which a slender dragon was carved clutching its orbs of wisdom. The shrine itself aureate, torii gates and whorls of clouds dazzling.

There were murmurs in the crowd, first of wonder and admiration, then of the memory of the last time it was seen and those who had carried it then. Calls of good-natured rivalry began, men and
women claiming that theirs would be grander, would be raised higher, and those who owned this shrine calling back they were undoubtedly wrong. This, they said, was the pride of Daikokuya ward and
nothing else could compare.

To things of this sort were the people drawn, falling into bands and teams possessed of purpose, inspired. A street away from the shrine wide circles of tanned hide were being hung across
laundry poles. These the skins of taiko drums awaiting lashing to the wooden barrels of the instruments now being rolled or carried out into the sun, soon to be washed and polished until they
gleamed. Already men were practising the strokes they would play, beating out the patterns on the floor, on tables, on walls with the heavy sticks, remembering how it ought to go, how it always
went.

Tentative, the rhythm:
attata-attata-ta-ta attata-ta-ta.

A joyous industry waking and coalescing, and through all this emerging beauty and effort Musashi walked, ignored in his rags and his wounds. Two boys ran around him wielding drumsticks as
swords, oblivious of the real ones at his side. He asked a passing man what was occurring, he with a bolt of vivid blue cloth in his arms. The man bowed, spoke demurely, no recognition of Musashi
in his eyes.

‘Lord Regent Toyotomi’s commemoration festival at the end of the month, sir,’ the man said, ‘seven years ago to the day he died.’

He bowed again and quickly left. Musashi watched him go, rubbed sweat from the corner of his eye.

Dead men and dogma; all he had achieved ignored for dead men and dogma.

‘What of Akiyama’s head?’ asked Ameku in the evening.

Musashi sat at her feet stirring a pot of rice gruel over a hearth. The blind woman was sitting at a crude loom, a mat half-woven already. Yae and she had sought and found work and lodgings in
quick time.

They were in the slums of Maruta, where Akiyama had said they would find shelter away from the Yoshioka, a low and ignoble place. Musashi had brought them down from Hiei before the duel. The
Yoshioka had attacked the mountain before and it did not feel safe to him to return there, and more than that he found the monks now repulsed him.

The ordained brothers had proven themselves as selfless as merchants. They had come to him like carrion birds in the wake of the Yoshioka ambush, had taken Akiyama’s remains for cremation
and then had demanded payment. Only when Musashi had surrendered Akiyama’s horse in lieu of coin had they lit the pyre and sung the prayers that needed to be sung.

But this was to be expected. The true insult came whilst the flames were blazing and ash was upon the air. One of the brothers had come to speak to Musashi, an old man all taut motion as he
strode up, his feet bare and calloused and on his head the square-topped white cowl of a warrior zealot.

‘You!’ he said to Musashi, exultant. ‘A great thing you have done, repelling desecrators in defence of what is holy. Six men you overcame! A true feat, the will of the heavens
no doubt! Something higher moves your hand!’

Musashi had rounded on him, held his palm up before the man’s face and hissed, ‘This is mine and mine alone, and what moves it is my will alone, you old fool.’

He spoke with the profound fury of betrayal. In that small temple prior to the Yoshioka ambush he had knelt and prayed to the heavens, prayed with the kind of fervent earnestness it embarrassed
him to think about, and in reply immediately the heavens had sent men with swords to kill him. If that was how they chose to communicate, then he was done with them. From here on only on himself
and himself alone could he rely, he saw this now, and so he had no more time for cruel or absent things, or those that chose to worship them.