Sword of Honour (40 page)

A brothel window left open, a woman upon her back on lush tatami mats, the seven layers of her kimonos spread like the petals of lotus flowers and her body bared to the patron between her
legs.

Here, a secret glance into that floating world so unknown to him, and Musashi could do nothing but stare for a few sordid moments.

Saw the way the man tensed his back as he thrust, the curvature of his spine, heard his hisses, saw the woman’s unbound hair coiled upon the floor like the delineations of some chaotic map
to nowhere. Her legs were around him and her thighs were white and the man buried his face upon her chest as he thrust, thrust again, he contorting like the penitent and the woman bore it all,
looked up over his oblivious shoulder at nothing as he sought his ecstasy.

Musashi saw in them the fallacy of love and decried it to himself as he had done before, and yet he could not break his voyeuristic vigil. He looked at the woman, looked as well as he could not
at her body but at her face. He saw the charcoal smudges of her painted eyebrows, even and placid, barely moving. Looked beneath them, stared, and saw too that she seldom blinked. That she held her
eyes wide and sightless.

Wide and sightless, like the blinded.

It stirred thoughts in Musashi. Only then did he find that he could turn his back to it and advance, and neither of the spied-upon was aware of his intrusion or his passing.

He left wild Yanagi behind him, moved on to the desolate artisan wards and the company of cicada choirs once more. The well-ordered buildings of duplicate design and even roofing became as a
road for him, and here he advanced so quickly in his hunched posture that he found his breath escaping him.

Drawing closer, drawing nearer.

The echoes of wooden sandals from below halted him. He saw the figures of two Tokugawa samurai out upon a placid patrol. They walked a guard of mere protocol, inattentive and unmindful of
anything but what lay before them, and yet Musashi dared not move until they passed. His wariness of them and all like them was the reason he had chosen to forego the streets; curfews violently
enforced. He held his breath and watched.

Their shadows danced upon the earth as the paper lantern one of them held up before him swung pendulously on a chain, and the spears they both held became as gnomons for this erratic sun, and
Musashi looked at the weapons and thought of the Yoshioka.

If the longsword was of ill suit against a mob, then what of the spear, or another polearm like a glaive? Weapons of greater defensive potential; perhaps he could hold the Yoshioka at a distance
and kill them slowly.

No. Visions of him stabbing at a Yoshioka only for another to come in from the side to grab the shaft, entangling it and leaving him helpless came to Musashi. The cloud burst and the other
faults became apparent, he realizing that his technique with the spear was rudimentary, that in his height he had reach on the Yoshioka regardless, and finally the question of where he would even
acquire such a weapon.

Unhurried, the Tokugawa samurai segued around the corner to hunt for nothing elsewhere. Musashi’s wounded leg was reticent to move once more, congealed in the contortion in which he had
held it. He forced motion, felt the burn up to his knee, and his sigh of pain was the only breeze that blew through the humid air. Even his hands were slick with sweat, moist palmprints left
invisible in the dark.

Evidence of the coming Regent’s festival seemed to be upon each street corner. Yokes for shoulder-borne shrines were stacked against walls half wrapped with cushioning, simple carts in the
process of being painted, herds of taiko drums corralled in rows, tattooed skins hooked and lashed onto the barrels and then doused with water to pull themselves into taut tune through the
night.

All passed beneath him. This rooftop passage offered him fresh perspective on the city, and he thought how different it was to look down rather than up. No feeling of constriction, no dwarfing,
no sense of humility. Was there tacit purpose in constructing storeyed buildings so close to one another? Impossible for the street-level inhabitant to gain a sense of space or self, reminded
always of one’s smallness. Was there another Way in architecture? Was it inherent in all things?

Pondering, he slipped on guano and he overran the boundaries of the kingdoms of riled cats and his feet brushed against a lost paper kite, sent it floating back down to earth.

An apprentice sat hard at candlelight labour in the yard of his master’s property. He was young, perhaps even of an age with Musashi, and he stopped his work and looked around as Musashi
passed, searching for the sound that disturbed him. But he did not think that the source of it lay above, and he turned almost immediately back to the task that engrossed him.

Musashi, taken with his own sense of invisibility, tarried to watch a moment.

The young man was carving a slab of wood on his lap with a small chisel, scraping away thin curls bit by bit revealing letters writ in reverse awaiting ink and the press. So intricate and so
dexterous his hands, shaping out the myriad characters and their complex forms effortlessly. Musashi stared at the ability, wondered how many hours’ honing lay within the apprentice’s
flesh and bones as lay within his own at the sword, and he wondered what it was all this talent was being given over to.

He found the answer on the opposite side of the yard. There, scores of test prints had been hung over taut lines to dry, and he read the title in a myriad botched attempts:

Virtuous Manual for the Comportment of Faithful and Upstanding Wives.

His heart despaired. Hands so able forming something so trite.

Musashi moved on. He was close now, but his mind was afire. How many like the apprentice in the city? He thought of all he had seen in the days. Every trade of every possible imagining. Old men
that made no more than buckets, and young boys who earned their trade by filling such buckets with safflower oil and conveying them across the city, delivering them to ladies wise in cosmetics. So
common, so plain and yet here intersecting the accumulated expertise of woodcraft and metallurgy and agriculture and mechanism and amalgamation; the planks of the bucket sanded and shaped flush,
the ring of iron that noosed them to form the bucket, the growing of the safflower seeds, the construction of the press that squeezed the oil from them and the combining of the oil with the right
measures of powders and pigments. Then consider the production of those powders and pigments equally, the trees that were cultivated and hewn and their transport to the city also. So too the
claiming of the iron ore from the earth. See the scale of it boggle outwards. Each facet born of wisdom the depth of which Musashi could only wonder at, admire, and the result of all this?

Something for an actor to smear from his sweating brow onto a kerchief and toss away into a crowd. Something for a woman to paint her face with, that she might feign innocence.

Or consider the fabrication of that kerchief also – or that innocence – no doubt equal in mastery and scope. Consider it all, see it continue in all directions, all linking, uniting.
Clay brought whatever distance to potters who would shape and harden it using mastery of kiln, pass it off to the painter who coated and varnished it brilliant white, and what this yielded was a
spoon that would dig of gruel. Prodigies of mechanism and lever lying on their backs in the dust repairing presses that would print no more than vacuous
Virtuous Manuals
or crude erotica
shilled cheap, the lewd depictions of which were a long-trained artist’s base summation. Men able of number and mathematics instead calculating the profit of kelp, flicking abaci beads lathed
adroitly spherical, brushes dipping into ink concocted of soot and bones and the effort therein. Or consider the brushes: on distant meadows horses reared, shorn of hair that was glued to wood
lathed as the beads. Or the paper they used: mulberry bark boiled in lye and then . . .

All this effort, chasing around itself, leading nowhere. Beneath pagodas of ancient beauty and emergent castles of magnificent stature capable people instead making the icon of their lives
trivial and insubstantial things. Each ability worthy of praise and yet rendered moot by their tessellation. The intersection of their delusions of purpose shackling; fetishes of knucklebones bound
together there in the shaman’s palm, all illusory and yet interpreted as grand and meaningful conjuration.

The zero sum of all this human knowledge and ability, the waste, the indignity of it. Was that ultimately a city? Was that ultimately what he hated?

No time to map the depths of it. He had arrived and what lay ahead of him now dwarfed all in his loathing – the gates of the Yoshioka school.

They were as fine a structure as any he had seen. The gatehouse stood twice as high as the wall they broached, doors of thick wooden planks studded with iron barred for the night and
impenetrable to anything shy of a cannon. The roof was narrow and tiled, and on either end of it a stone komainu lion-dog held a vigilant and unerring guard, one snarling and one roaring.

Between their mythic forms, just visible by the light of braziers that burnt within the school, lay the mortal remnants of Akiyama.

His head was impaled upon a spike, and his face had been set to look outwards upon the street. His hair was loose behind him and shielded his features from the light, the benighted head
indefinable in anything but its ghastliness. Shooting-star flickers came and went as swarming flies caught the light for brief instants.

Musashi stared at it as he readied himself, perched predatory on the roof opposite. He wiped his hands dry, peeled back sodden strands of hair that had stuck to his brow, ensured the
sack’s mouth was pulled as wide as it could be. Speed was of the utmost necessity – jump across, place the head into the sack, jump back, escape.

This, the only real choice. He could well have tried climbing up the gatehouse from its base, stolen a ladder from somewhere even, but that would doubtlessly expose him to the Yoshioka within
the school on the ascent. The gap between this roof and the gatehouse’s was only five paces, maybe six or seven, and he had a slight advantage of height.

It was not a daunting leap.

Possible, he was certain.

He steeled himself, took a run-up and threw himself outwards.

Except he had not thought to plan his steps and so he launched himself off of his wounded leg. The limb was exhausted, had no strength whatsoever with which to propel him, and as soon as his
toes left the tiles he knew he would not make it across. He went out and down instead of up and forwards. Primal instantaneous terror surged as gravity imposed itself and in a panic he flailed and
cast his arms forward in a desperate attempt to grasp the roof opposite. His elbows clattered into the tiles and his ribs met the edge of the roof square as a hammer upon an anvil. His breath was
forced entirely from him in a low and guttural moan, and he scrabbled at clay with his fingers and kicked at air with his feet.

In the brief moment he managed to hang, Musashi saw a samurai within the courtyard turn at the noise and then cry out in alarm. Then the weight of his dangling legs swung in wild momentum and
pulled him away from the roof. He landed on his side and lay in the dust for long moments, listening to the noise that erupted within the compound.

By the time the Yoshioka unbarred the gates, he had managed to rise and drag himself into the shadows three streets away.

The failure hurt more than the breaths he struggled to gather.

Chapter Twenty-six

Each morning found Goemon fetid with sweat from the night. He slept on a mattress that retained a wet shadow of his body, rested the nape of his neck on a lacquer platter that
was crested with a narrow strip of a pillow made of dried beans. Even in sleep, his posture was rigid and set in proper etiquette.

The Goat brought him breakfast in his chambers. Goemon could manage no more than a mouthful of rice without his stomach twisting in nausea. Each time he would mutter excuses about the heat
putting him off his food, and the Goat would stand there knowing that Goemon was lying and yet not questioning him, stand there leaning on his sword and nodding his head in sympathy to his
captain’s actual plight.

He was a good man, the Goat, and Goemon appreciated his efforts. It was absurd that such a stoic and loyal retainer should be stuck with a sobriquet like the Goat and not referred to by his true
name of Kiyomori Onodera, but this too was in a way part of the old samurai’s duty.

It was his cloven foot that had first led the men of Tokugawa to call him so. The Goat would get it out when they were drunk, peel his stocking off to reveal his mangling. How they would all
gather around to peer at it as boys did at captured insects, his foot split between the toes almost all the way to his shin and healed twisted into a form fascinating in its repulsiveness.

‘It’s amazing,’ the Goat would say, when someone asked the inevitable question. ‘The ways you’ll think of defending yourself when you’re on your arse in the
mud and someone’s swinging a sword down at you.’

It was probably through one of these drunken sessions that the moniker originated, long before Goemon had arrived in Kyoto, some comparative jest that somehow got adapted in sober life also. Was
it derogatory then? Was it derogatory now? It sounded it, but men did not sneer it nor belittle him, and the Goat himself accepted its use evenly. More than this – Goemon had once seen him
cutting erratic clumps out of his beard when the old man thought he was alone, crafting it so that it curled wiry from his chin much like the animal’s. The Goat actively cultured the
Goat.

He did this, Goemon knew, because it was good for the group to have such terms. They helped to build a unity, an inner collective idiosyncrasy of no real meaning that nevertheless helped define
against the outer by its very being. In this he was faithful to the way of things. As a man of the warlord Oda, Onodera had been young and strong, had fought in the wars of conquest and had stormed
Mount Hiei and taken three rebel-heretic heads and burnt whatever icon he could find. As a man of middle years and sworn to the Regent Toyotomi he had suffered his maiming. And now, as an old man
of the Shogun Tokugawa, he was the Goat.