Sword of Honour (42 page)

Goemon though never let himself be fooled; he knew well the nature of dogs.

The Goat stood watch. He was pleased to see some measure of contentment upon his captain. ‘Seems you’ve made a friend, sir,’ he said happily.

Goemon gave a grunt, the barest of nods. He looked at the dog, and the dog looked back.

Its sickly eyes gleamed with a sheen like spilt lantern-oil.

Goemon sighed sadly. ‘The law states quite clearly that stray dogs found within the city limits are to be killed,’ he said.

Beneath the captain’s hands, the dog panted on. Eventually, the Goat asked, ‘Should I fetch a spear, sir?’

Chapter Twenty-seven

Musashi slept like the hunted.

He did not trust the Yoshioka not to mount another attempt on his life, regardless of any word given to Goemon. Each night he would barricade the door of his room with the rudimentary furniture
within and wedge his scabbard between the jamb and the frame. Likely the door could still be opened with enough force, but it would create a clamour and wake him should he be sleeping, and whoever
was there would then have to stumble over the pile of furniture to enter, all of which would give Musashi time to rise and greet the intruder with his longsword in hand.

Barred and sealed, his room became what he imagined the inside of a stilled lung might be, tight and humid and chokingly warm, and even the walls themselves seemed to sweat. His hours of repose
spent hunched up in the corner with his swords bared before him, alternating between moments of the frail slumber of expectant prey and a torpid, viscous consciousness.

Fatigue was beginning to tell, eyes bleared and heavy, but all endured, all endured.

Musashi did not know how many other rooms there were in this lodgings or how many destitute were in them. Some rooms even cheaper than the pittance Musashi was paying for his, these set with a
half-dozen mats slept on inevitably by decrepit men. A lingering stench of sake and sweat and distrust abounded, pitiful things like straw sandals or copper coins scabbed entirely green guarded
like jewels. Halls that bumped and breathed around him, an old man’s voice murmuring to no one.

His ribs were hurt. The impact against the gate of the Yoshioka had been harder than he thought at the time. His chest was mottled with ugly bruises, and if he took a full breath he felt a sharp
pain lance along one side. Sharp enough that it stole that breath from him. The act of rising or sitting was laborious.

It was night. Ameku was singing. Her song that seemed to him to never end. With a chest of throbbing bones he sat against the wall and listened, and willed for the melody to null his pain.

She was working her loom as she sang, singing in time to the slow clacking of the levers with her back to him. He had not told her about his failure to recover Akiyama’s head. That too
would hurt. Through her hair he could just about see the nape of her neck. In the candlelight her skin was the colour of something fine he hadn’t the words to describe.

He thought of that benighted lake and the red moon hovering above it. The reflection of it shimmering on the calm black and formless waters, the sound of gentle lapping. Of which thing he was to
her, and which he wanted to become.

‘Tell me of Ryukyu,’ he said. ‘Tell me how you learnt to sing like that. Tell me . . . Tell me
how
.’

‘That you too might sing?’ she said, and still she taunted him. Still the barrier she had made for herself persisted, and it maddened him. It was a wall that stood before him, and by
that very fact he was compelled to attempt to breach it even though he could not possibly know what lay upon the other side.

‘I . . .’ he said, grasping at things he could not explain to himself. ‘No. What you do . . . It is ability, and . . . A thing of worth . . . And I would . . .’

‘Ryukyu,’ said Ameku, ‘was a long time ago, and then my time ended there.’

‘But,’ said Musashi, ‘what was it you did there? Why did you leave?’
Why are you here now? Why is it we happened to meet?

Ameku just shook her head. ‘Still, Musashi, still you have to know the meaning of the words,’ she said. ‘Stubborn, you. Do not change.’

‘Tell me,’ he said.

She did not. Instead she started working back at her loom, and sang once more. He sat there listening, feeling the nag of that half-unknown, unasked, unanswered question.

The days passed in humid exhaustion, and they offered him no respite.

He set himself to the sword and the felling of the Yoshioka. One of them. All of them. Cast them down. Disperse the swarm. The fortnight until the duel passing both too slowly and too quickly,
caught between savage anticipation and logical wariness, knowing that he was yet to devise a method of victory. Taunted by this also, another barrier.

But it was there, it was achievable, he was certain of it, if only he could reach out and grasp it . . .

Around him the slums of Maruta. Outside the walls of Kyoto proper, outside the cultured zone, Maruta lay upon the banks of the north-easterly forking of the river Kamo. It was the docks of the
city, as much as an inland holding could possess such, for the river was an artery and brought goods of all sorts to the capital. Rice or salt or ore arriving daily, but the greatest traffic in
lumber, the city so vulnerable to fire, constantly rebuilding or building anew, and also the centre of so many industries that hungered for fresh fodder to mulch into paper or shape into scabbards
or palanquins or doors or ladles or umbrellas or sandals.

The wood arrived sometimes chopped and stacked in a boat, or sometimes men simply rode huge logs as vessels themselves, prodding their course with poles. Maruta itself meant ‘log’;
here known as Log Town in the vernacular.

The rivermen coming, the rivermen going constant, and when they left they left with their boats just as burdened as when they had arrived, merely changed their cargo. When they departed they
took the effluence of the city with them in stinking, sloppy casks, villages along the river’s course needing fertilizer for paddy fields and hamlets of the corpsehandlers needing piss for
tanning. Goods in, waste out, in, out, a cycle of excretion and construction: the mouth and the arsehole of the city, as Maruta was also known in even lower vernacular.

A transitory place where men drifted in under twilight skies and were gone upon the current in the morn. Faces unnoticed, things here built cheap, hovels and slovenly lodgings crammed up against
one another, no temples or garrisons or emporiums. Where Kyoto had pagodas Maruta had pyramids of casks of shit stacked high, emitting a pervading stench that was magnified in the humidity.
Mistlike, never quite subsiding, all here enveloped in it, the men and women shovelling or labouring or casting off, sawing, lashing, sorting, drinking, malingering, begging.

Stagnant.

Stagnant as his mind, Maruta, and in frustration he abandoned it in search of somewhere else, as though that might suddenly grant him what he strived towards. A half-hour’s walk north of
the slums Musashi found isolation on the banks of the Kamo, a little copse of trees right up by the waterside, and it was peaceful and serene and the air clean enough that one might even practise
meditation here, and yet he found the exact same problem persisted.

Cranes waded past him through the shallows, and they beheld him in his futile exercise and the flashing of his longsword with their yellow eyes round and uncaring.

Summon your enemies, his father Munisai had once told him of the theories of duelling; summon them before you exact in your mind and over a thousand still breaths examine them until you have
assumed their form and see out from their eyes. A wisdom indefatigable through century and nation, and yet useless here, for every time he summoned Denshichiro to his mind he simply wanted to slash
the spectre to pieces.

Made him want to spit, the thought of the man’s face and all he was, and then the frustration that this was all he could summon made him actually spit, or throw a rock into the river, or
kick out at the stumps of trees. A vicious and infuriating gyre from which he could not escape.

Months he had spent with Akiyama, an adept of the Yoshioka style, and never once had he thought to speak with him about its merits and philosophy. He had beaten the man and so he had innately
assumed he had surpassed his entire school by virtue of this victory, and now he cursed the callousness of this.

Seek and grasp, force through, overcome: if not the spear against the numbers of the Yoshioka, if not the sword, what then, of guns?

At Sekigahara he had seen their terrible capabilities, seen them snub out entire lines of men in easy instants. If you allowed as he did that the sole point of fighting was victory, then surely
its achievement through any means was permissible, was worthy. The samurai in the city had jeered him with the idea of using foreign mechanism, but their jeers born of the Way. What Musashi fought
for was no less than the Way’s entire destruction. What was the very symbol of the Way but the sword? If these two things were true then should not his first action be to abandon its
fetishes, take up modern potential instead?

He stared at his longsword in his hands for some time.

Musashi realized it belonged there, belonged on some level fundamental to him, and then of course the same practical flaws arising: where would he get a gun? Or the dozen guns he would need to
shoot all the Yoshioka down in quick succession? Or a longbow? Or throwing daggers? Or anything else?

He snarled, and then felt foolish for snarling. Stood there landlocked and envious of the river that flowed so effortlessly. Dragonflies were in the air before him, their wings shimmering
crucifixes, the water beneath them pooled and still. Mottled blue bodies glanced upon the black surface, sent rings dilating outwards, and these rings, they had no correlation, served only to
annihilate one another in their expansion again and again. Caught his eye, the way the patterns did not intersect, did not correlate. Seemed marred to him, unnatural.

Anger at his inability faded from him, only to be replaced by a separate tormenting gyre that was goaded by every pained breath he took. The bruises on his ribs led him to thinking of
Akiyama’s head, and his failure to recover it.

He decided to head for the city.

The Tokugawa samurai on the gates to Kyoto stopped and searched others seeking to enter, but they did not even meet Musashi’s eyes. Turned away as though they were deliberately avoiding
him, and he sneered at them for this evident cowardice and loathed them for their submission and oppression both.

Beyond them the streets of the city were rife with drumbeat, each thoroughfare throbbing with a different pulse. Pounding of the bass skins offset with the rolling patterns of the smaller drums,
a quick middle timbre:
atta-ta-tata, ta-tata, ta-tata.

The sound of it carried Musashi along through the meaningless noise and clamour. Lithe forms of stub-tailed cats ghosted over overhanging roofs, peered down with eyes wide and green and cynical.
The arc of a bridge lined with neophyte monks, bell-shaped straw baskets over their heads smothering the mantras they uttered low, bowls held out pleading in bony hands, they living their years of
avowed poverty seeking to learn the charity and meanness of the world. The sweet stink of a sake brewery with its broad doors cast wide open and the vats within exposed. Imposing shrieks of the
peddlers of goods, tempting potential customers to partake of sweet bean paste, of imported incense, of intricately carved netsuke beads to hang from the belt, inutile shit, inutile shit, inutile
shit.

Another shrine for the Regent’s festival was being readied. It was of a brilliant blue lacquer that had been polished to a sheen, and now men were testing the hardness of its yokes upon
their shoulders. Forty of them bore it upwards with a great wheeze of effort, and they and the watching crowd cheered as they found the weight bearable. They began to teeter it back and forth
between them, the shrine rising and falling like a boat upon rough seas, cymbals and gongs and chimes attached to it rattling in a great cacophony.

Those on the left of the mob went:
Hwaja!

Those on the right of the mob went:
Hoja!

The left went:
Hwaja!

The right went:
Hoja!

The chant went on and on, and people in the crowd clapped in time, and apart from this was Musashi, silent and watching. Always apart.

He walked on. Like a bruise to be prodded, a burn to be squeezed, the school of the Yoshioka drew him in. Surpassing all thought of danger, the grim curiosity, the necessity. He told himself
that he would look on it for but a moment, and then retreat. Glimpse and see Akiyama’s head, and in its piteous state find the inspiration he needed, or simply convince himself that he had
made some progress towards its liberation, or both, or neither.

Something, anything.

As a sealed lagoon amidst a squall, the street before the school was quieted and residual noise from elsewhere washed like spraying spume over the crowd that had gathered. They were giving the
gates a wide and fearful berth. Cautioned, Musashi peered covertly out over their heads from the corner of an alley.

Beneath the maw of their compound he saw Denshichiro sitting upon a stool. The leader of the Yoshioka had his tea-coloured sleeves bound back and his thick arms crossed, and at his side eight
adepts stood equally dressed. They had evidently been there some time, for they were standing watch over the head of Akiyama.

Still impaled upon the spike, the head had been taken down from the gatehouse and was now set on the street before them all. The sun and the heat had done to it what Ameku had not been able to
describe.

The crowd watched the head, and the head watched back.

In those few moments of his botched attempt at a righteous larceny, the Yoshioka must have recognized Musashi. Or perhaps they had simply surmised who it must have been in its aftermath, and
then duly extrapolated what it was Musashi had been seeking on top of the gatehouse, and thus they found their lure.