Sword of Honour (4 page)

‘Sir Ando was present at the decisive battle,’ said Tadanari, who had cut those six slivers a decade previously. ‘He has given us a name to add to the list: Musashi
Miyamoto.’

‘I have not heard of him.’

‘Neither have I. Of no renown that I can tell.’

‘His crime?’

‘Insults to the school, offered before the watching armies of the nation. Thousands of witnesses.’

‘What words did he speak?’

‘Sir Ando did not elaborate upon their specific nature. There was much glory earned by our adepts present at the battle, and attesting to these feats occupied the majority of his writing.
But Sir Ando is not a trivial man and I trust his judgement, and the list is the list. Therefore I wish for you to find this Miyamoto, and claim his head in the name of the school.’

He spoke evenly and Akiyama listened in the same manner. There was no need for either of them to feel or feign affront at distant slurs any more than the foot needed to pull away when the hand
touched fire. Neither was there a need for debate on their response, for it was only killing. Such a thing as this was not unusual. A school possessing the esteem the Yoshioka held could not exist
without creating those who envied, who belittled, who detracted, and each of these grudges, when discovered, in turn birthed a grudge in the Yoshioka also.

A rock falls into a pond, a splash occurs, the waters settle as they were before. This, a simple matter of balance. This, the Way.

In the unshaded yard Ujinari’s sword caught the light in its motion and the steel flashed brilliantly. Akiyama looked at the earth, smoothed the folds of his tea-coloured jacket over his
thigh. A question that he had waited for months to ask welled within him.

‘Master Kozei,’ the pale-eyed man ventured, ‘I am informed that the Lord of Aki province is seeking to take on a member of our school as swordmaster.’

‘This is so.’

The sword held up, aligned, hopeful.

Tadanari said, ‘It has been decided that Sir Kosogawa shall be serving in that appointment.’

Down the blade came, dashed all before it.

Akiyama nodded. His pale eyes took in the dust at his feet, his face entirely neutral. ‘Sir Kosogawa is a worthy man and able in our techniques. He shall uphold the name of the school
faithfully.’

‘Doubtless.’

‘I will leave at once, Master.’

‘Do not return until you have avenged our honour, or can offer proof that some other fate has claimed this man,’ said Tadanari, dismissing him with a nod of his head.

Akiyama pressed his brow to the floor and then rose. He slid his longsword into his belt of broad cloth and strode off. In the frame of the gateway he turned and bowed to his fellow
swordsmen.

Not one man commented on his departure.

Spring, Eighth Year of the Era of Keicho

Two Years and a Winter Since Sekigahara

Chapter Three

‘It’s the eyetooth. The canine.’

‘Nnn.’

‘I can feel it. It’s loose. Can move it with my tongue.’

‘Nnn.’

‘Musashi, are you listening?’

‘Yes.’

‘You don’t look it. Your eyes are far.’

‘Tired, is all. Hungry.’

‘I can’t think about the hunger. I can’t think about sleep. This tooth, the pain . . . Weeks now, rotting. The gum is bleeding, it’s all I can taste. I can’t bear
it.’

‘So what am I to do about it?’

‘I need you to pull it out.’

‘How am I to do that? I have no . . . What tools do you even require to pull a tooth?’

‘It’s loose. Use your fingers.’

‘I can’t grip a tooth. Too slick. Too small.’

‘You have to.’

‘Just bear it.’

‘I can’t. Please.’

‘There’s nothing I can do.’

‘Look at me. Look. Is the entire side of my face not swollen?’

‘It is swollen.’

‘And listen to me – I can’t even speak properly. The agony of moving my jaw . . . Is my voice not marred?’

‘It is altered.’

‘And you intend to leave me this way?’

‘There’s nothing I can do.’

‘Please, Musashi. Try, at least.’

‘Try what?’

‘Try something! Please. I can’t bear it. This pain, it’ll drive me to madness if I have to endure it any longer.’

‘Nnn.’

‘It’ll madden me, like a dog with its paw in a snare. You wish to make a dog of me?’

‘Are we not as dogs already?’

There was silence for some time.

‘Maybe you could . . . Instead of pulling, could you not knock it out?’

‘That’ll hurt you, Jiro.’

‘I already hurt.’

‘What, you wish me to punch you?’

‘No. It doesn’t need . . . Something precise. Hard and quick.’

‘A rock?’

‘Why not the pommel of your shortsword?’

‘Would it work?’

‘It’s metal, is it not?’

Jiro stood up and crossed over to Musashi. His feet stirred the pallid ashes of their pitiful spent fire. They were in a copse of trees. He lay down and put his head upon the earth, tenderly
pulled back his lip to show Musashi the tooth.

‘Do you see?’ he said. ‘Just give it one hard crack, and then out it comes. It’ll work.’

Musashi looked at the tooth. It was yellowed and the gum around it was excrescent and decayed. Jiro’s breath stank of the rot. Musashi picked up his shortsword. The pommel was a squared
cap of iron that had started to rust at one edge.

‘You are certain?’ he asked.

‘Do it. Quick.’

Jiro closed his eyes and braced himself. Musashi put a hand upon the man’s chest. Tentatively he lined up the pommel to the gum.

‘Certain?’

‘Do it!’

Musashi struck. The butt of this once treasured and immaculate heirloom met the abscess. Jiro cried out. Musashi had to hit twice more before the tooth squirmed free of the gum.

Jiro’s swelling went down quickly, a half-day if even that. His face returned to its normal gaunt rictus. He was a small man with eyes that in this privation seemed to
bulge from their sockets. He had served in the army of the Lord Mitsunari, and had fled Sekigahara with a longbow strapped across his back and a spent quiver at his waist.

The longbow served him still. They made arrows for it by sharpening sticks, the shafts primitive and unfletched. He would spend his mornings at a shallow creek near to where they were sheltered,
loosing into the gently flowing waters at the small forms of fish. He was a talented and well-honed archer, had once been able to hit an unfurled fan five times out of five at two hundred paces,
and even with the crude arrows and the emaciating of his arms he read the water’s warping to spear their sustenance.

In the long empty hours whilst Jiro fished, when he was not foraging for firewood or seeking mushrooms or berries or edible mosses where they could be found, Musashi busied himself in labour. He
spent a week carving the emerald bark from trunks of bamboo into long, carefully measured strips. Then he began weaving them together. He had seen many such wicker screens and baskets in his life,
and he had thought long about their construction from those memories, and he saw no reason why he too could not make one.

The green square matrix he produced was large enough for both him and Jiro to sit under, and they were cheered when this kept the gentle rain from them for a day, and then winds came for the
first time and blew it into pieces.

Musashi looked at the strips of bark caught amidst the boughs of nearby trees flapping like gay streamers, and he fell into a foul temper. He set about kicking at clods of earth and throwing
stones at nothing.

‘How long are we to hide for?’ he demanded of Jiro.

‘They’ll never forgive us,’ said Jiro. ‘We’ll never be forgiven.’

‘I don’t need their forgiveness! I don’t want it.’

‘Do you think that Koresada thought that after six, seven hours upon that crucifix?’

That silenced Musashi. Yet the pair of them had been forced together so long it was as though they were bound by some umbilical, and emotion passed back and forth between them as wind. Jiro was
angry now.

‘We but two and they how many?’ he spat. ‘Pebbles before a mountain.’

‘And what our crime?’ said Musashi.

‘The twist of fate that casts us such, makes of us the punished for another’s failure.’

‘The Lord Kobayakawa.’

‘The Lord Tokugawa.’

‘The Way.’

‘Lay low the mountain, bring down the sky!’ shouted Jiro. ‘Call the seas to account! Line up the wind and the spirits of the earth and let each one of them stare me straight in
the eye as they condemn me!’

He was ranting now, and Musashi saw the joy of the release of it in his eyes.

‘Bring forth fresh clothes that I might spend a day without scratching at the rashes that plague me! Bring out my bed that I might sleep without a crooked back! Bring out my wife if she
lives yet, and let me know that tender softness that she once gave me!’

The thought of her broke his anger. The rant collapsed upon itself, and Jiro’s shoulders slumped.

‘But we remain pebbles, and what our choice? To live as nothing, or to become nothing.’ He plucked one of the bamboo strips from the ground, and wrapped the sodden length around his
palm, his wrist. ‘Ah, the scales, they tip further each and every day.’

Musashi looked at Jiro for a long time.

‘You and I, we both chose to live,’ he said.

‘Did we?’ Jiro said, staring at nothing. ‘Did we?’

Whether they had ever actually spoken such vows aloud to one another, Musashi could not remember. That they yet continued to breathe was their only testament to it.

He could barely recall first meeting Jiro. In the wake of Sekigahara, a fortnight after it, maybe more, he had stumbled upon their camp, the boundaries of which he had not even spotted it was
such a meagre thing. Only a few traversable paths through the wilderness perhaps, all those fleeing the battle channelled along them, and at Musashi’s arrival not one of the men there had
seemed surprised. There were five of them then, and they had looked at him with no more alarm than if he were a passing shadow cast by an errant sun.

Caught in a perpetual stupor, mired in a haze of shame and despair.

Their helmets now hung inverted from a bough of a tree to catch rainwater. There for a year or more, mosses grown over the cords where they were wrapped around the wood. Though rust had barely
beset the iron they all seemed ancient and worthless things. One had belonged to Koresada, who had tried to steal a fisherman’s net. One had belonged to Uesugi, who was caught by chance upon
the roads by a band of Tokugawa samurai. One had belonged to the man from Tosa, who had never revealed to any of them his name, who had seldom spoke beyond grunts and stared constantly with wide
and harrowed eyes, and who had borne the sickness that claimed him with a resigned acceptance, lain there shivering until he was still.

One, the grandest, the finest, had belonged to the Lord Hayato Nakata.

The Lord had been a rich man, one of the wealthiest in the nation. The bowl of the helmet was inlaid with beautiful carvings of mystical phoenixes, blighted now, and the panels of the neck and
cheek guards were bound with burgundy and silver threads that had lost their lustre and were beginning to rot. Affixed to the brow was the great symmetrical frond of a golden crest. The metal was
impermeable to marring and shone bright still, and yet it hung there alongside common ores with equal disregard.

What worth gold, when none would trade with you?

Musashi sat gnawing on a stalk of grass to try to alleviate his hunger, and as he did so he stared at the inverted golden crest. Memories took him. He
let
the memories take him. It was
all he had. It was Hayato who had sabotaged Musashi’s father’s seppuku, led to his being so thoroughly and agonizingly disgraced. Young, desperate to become samurai, mind filled with
the poison of the Way, Musashi had set out on a quest of vengeance. A quest of years, which had led all the way to Sekigahara, where at last he had held Hayato to account and had taken from the
Lord more than his helmet.

On the course of that vengeance Musashi had spent great stretches in wilderness much like he was now in, enduring starvation far worse than this. He had been a child then and had not yet learnt
what Jiro and the others had taught him, the basic methods of survival, of lighting fires, of finding sustenance, of hunting and fishing. Even so, he had not felt the hardship, or the ache of it,
if that was the word, as he did now.

Pursuing something like vengeance, or indeed anything, granted one a horizon to focus upon. To judge progress towards. Here, all there was was an emptiness and it was this that wounded the most,
a great crushing pressure that never relented. A recurrent despair, the mind caught gyring around the same agonies it could do nought but confront, because what else was there to occupy it?

Musashi chewed and chewed on the bitter grass, and he stared at Hayato’s helmet, and in his chest he felt something grow larger, bloat an incremental sliver in the same manner as whatever
this thing was had done each and every time his eyes had lingered on the golden crest over these past months. Something almost like longing, or envy for what had been.