Sword of Honour (55 page)

A glimpse of orange light like a shooting star as he went, seen out of the corner of his eye and quickly gone, vanished somewhere behind him. Ignored. Meaningless.

The Yoshioka howling in confusion and he drifted through them, amongst them, and he could not believe how quickly he alone had caused them to descend into panic and scatter. They charged past
him without realizing, and he could not be caught, and he was invincible, and he was truth.

He found himself broaching the main courtyard. There braziers burning so bright he had to squint for a moment, forms of the Yoshioka blurred. Perhaps six of them, and they looked so thoroughly
shaken it was as though they were surrounded, facing not one enemy but an unseen horde the origin of which they could not fathom.

A systolic instant of surprise, even, where it seemed Musashi’s arrival drew their attention away from some other threat.

He went for them without hesitation. The closest samurai held a bucket of water, which he dropped to spill into the dust, drew forth his own longsword and rushed to meet him. His eyes were upon
Musashi’s longsword and so Musashi cleaved with the short. The second man came through his comrade, barging him out of the way in a desperate frenzy to get at Musashi, succeeded only in
staggering himself, died in the arc of Musashi’s longsword.

‘It was Kozei that ordered it, wasn’t it?’ spat Musashi, weaving his way around the braziers, the sting of smoke in his eyes, embers rising, keeping the building to his back
and the remaining Yoshioka before him. ‘Where is he? Bring him out to face me! Bring him out to face me! Bring him out to—’

And he broke the rhythm of his words and lunged at the nearest man mid-sentence, he reading the heaving of Musashi’s lungs and the movement of his lips. He caught Musashi’s longsword
upon the flat of his own inverted sword but fell to the short, and outwards Musashi threw himself, heading for the centre of the yard.

He rushed inside the arc of the next samurai’s sword before it could descend and hammered his longsword into the side of the Yoshioka chest, the edge sinking deep enough to surely cut the
heart. Spun, crossed his blades, caught the subsequent sword from the subsequent man with gore-gobbed steel, twisted, stabbed with the short and the blade slid in below the collar bone.

Fatigue was starting to rob his motions of any grace, Musashi aware of this on a visceral level, and yet he felt no sense of desperation. A warmness pervaded, the warmness of the lack of
identity. He was barely Musashi any longer; all there was was the fight, and he was no more and no less than a participant in it, a wave of its ocean. Nameless, formless

unfindable

and he felt drool upon his chin, or perhaps blood.

A flurry of motion, a parry, his own elbow driven into his side and his breath escaping him, and then Musashi’s longsword looping from above guided barely by thought or intention. Aimed
for the Yoshioka’s shoulder but found the crown of his head and the crack of the skull’s splitting was wet. The Yoshioka samurai’s headband, cut through, fell to earth before he
did, the man collapsing and twisting split-legged.

. . . Above Tadanari and Matashichiro both, the wide boughs of a spreading pine were lit like veins of bronze through thick smoke, the tree taller than the school itself and
its branches reaching out over the walls of the garden, so massive and encompassing, and yet Tadanari remembered it, saw it, as no more than a seed, and every stage between.

Did any of those years hold meaning?

The cry of victory did not come this night and the mouths that howled were growing as Miyamoto killed, and now Tadanari stood in time’s abrogation and from this vantage he looked at his
Way anew, the Way in which he had held a complete faith for his entire life, and thus found himself akin to a man who felt his feet sinking into stone.

With as much of his soul as he could give he begged for the men of the Yoshioka to kill Miyamoto. To prove to him that the decades of his instructing them had not been in vain; that the dozens
of the pairs of arms that he had strengthened and imbued with skill had not been set with false ability; that although his progeny was slain he, Tadanari Kozei, had managed to create something that
would outspan his flesh. How he begged, and Fudo on the scabbard and his infinite snarl . . .

Such was Musashi’s frenzied elation that the night itself seemed to be glowing; the paper doors and walls of the corridor he loped along now lucent, his footsteps heavy
and his breath ragged. Screams constant from outside, of panic, of agony.

Into this building scouring them out wherever they might be hiding, every last one, and he was rewarded – a single samurai delivered himself to Musashi. Charged at him immediately along
the hallway, and Musashi jerked onwards to meet him, knees stiff, sutured calf throbbing. Could not hesitate, to hesitate was to be surrounded, and Musashi feinted with the short, tried to provoke
the Yoshioka into lunging, and the samurai fell for it, drew his sword back to strike, and Musashi snarled delighted, and then the Yoshioka samurai drove forward with the pommel of his sword.

A feint of his own that had duped Musashi entirely, and the blunt steel smashed into his unbraced face clean. Musashi both heard and felt his nose break, and as he staggered blinded the Yoshioka
samurai screamed his triumph, let it rule him, and brought his sword around in a decapitating slash only to find the sword burying its edge into the beam of a constricting pillar.

A spastic form of combat now, one of them weaponless and one of them sightless. Musashi slashed wildly with his sword, slow and heavy and the Yoshioka read the path of it and caught him by the
wrists. They grappled, wrestled, and though the samurai was smaller he knew the methods of unarmed combat and found Musashi unbalanced, and so the Yoshioka man rolled his hip, drove on with his
feet and sent the pair of them crashing through the door to their side.

Paper tearing, frail wood of the frame shattering. Musashi’s swords fell from his hands as they landed, scattered amongst the wreckage, and he kicked and thrashed and tried to find them.
The Yoshioka samurai writhed to his knees, drew his shortsword and stabbed it down desperately towards Musashi with no concern for finesse. It was Musashi, now weaponless, who caught the wrist, he
pinned on his back, struggled to keep the point from finding his throat.

The Yoshioka samurai managed to squirm on top of Musashi as he tried to force the blade down, and, spluttering in blind pain, Musashi tried to resist. Blood in his mouth, blood behind his nose,
the sensation of drowning, yet Musashi fought, held him, and then the stomp of footsteps coming, closing in.

‘I’ve got him!’ the Yoshioka samurai was screaming. ‘I’ve got him! Cut through me! Kill him! Cut through me!’

Little grunts escaping Musashi born of savage will. Relinquished his right hand from the struggle, sought a weapon on the floor beside him. The Yoshioka samurai now with his freed left hand took
Musashi’s skull and grasped at it, clawed, thumb gouging at the eye, footsteps coming, imminent, Musashi groping, groping, found a splinter of wood.

Thrust upwards at the head and the point of it met skull, too soft to pierce bone, to kill, yet sharp enough to rake the flesh. Bashed with it, bashed with it, heel of hand on temple, Yoshioka
samurai screams now wordless, splinter gouging its way along, footsteps coming, had to be here, had to be here, and the point of the splinter sank somewhere soft. Eye or ear or mouth.
Samurai’s strength faltered and Musashi kicked out from under.

New samurai in the doorway.

Shortsword stolen from the splinter-stabbed foe, Musashi on his knees, rising.

Blade up into the standing man’s throat, he not even cognisant of the scene before him.

Musashi turned, intending to bring the shortsword down upon the first.

Bloodslick hands slipped upon the handle, came away empty, and the second samurai vanished backwards into the corridor, his throat still rent with the weapon.

Bereft, Musashi saw the first man seizing Musashi’s own fallen longsword.

Hands closing.

Theft complete.

No time, no time, samurai rising.

There – there! Upon the floor, dark form of rock.

Rock taken up with both hands.

Up behind head and then down into the back of the Yoshioka’s.

Before he could stand, before he could bring the blade to bear.

Hollow crack, again, again, frantic, frenzy of motion, stone to skull, stone to skull.

Not stopping until the samurai abandoned all hope of using the sword upon its owner.

Not stopping until the Yoshioka abandoned hope of breath.

Body down, body suppliant, body still.

The paper walls glowing and Musashi looked down at the corpse, he on his knees panting, struggling to conceive of his survival. Then sudden motion in his hands: somehow the rock itself was
squirming in his grasp, and he looked at it and realized that the rock in fact had legs, a head, and that these stubby things were all writhing and kicking. Shocked, revolted, he dropped it.

The rock continued to thrash upon the floor, and Musashi peered at it in the gloom. It was alive, he realized, a creature he had never seen before, some kind of land turtle. It had fallen on its
back, and now it kicked and kicked in a vain attempt to right itself with its pale and segmented belly rocking back and forth.

A snort of disbelieving laughter escaped him.

How far could this take him? How far could he go?

Slowly Musashi rose to his feet, touched his shattered nose, found the pain too much. Spat blood, sucked it from his sinuses. Arms numb, felt hollow from the shoulder down, yet he bent and
forced them to retrieve his swords.

There was noise yet. Not finished.

At his feet, the land turtle continued to thrash. Before he advanced Musashi hooked a foot beneath its shell and flipped it over.

It began to crawl away, and he wished it life.

. . . Kozei and Yoshioka, Yoshioka and Kozei, revealed to Tadanari the mutuality of the two. One had fitted within the other and both had served the opposite, both living in
their entwined reflections.

Had it always been such? When he was a young man, he had been bound by friendship to Naokata, and such was that friendship that he might even have had held a belief that Yoshioka held the
greater place within in his heart. He had served willingly, obsequiously, as men who have nought but themselves can pledge.

But in a memory Naokata lay on his death bed and pulled on strands of light and howled of precedent and Tadanari’s heart broke anew, and Naokata’s sons had proven false,
thoughtlessly provoking or shamelessly running, and the screams were coming still and they said that Miyamoto lived yet, sacred ground trampled and sundered and how many men had he killed, how many
of Tadanari’s disciples were slain in the desecration of his faith in them?

The Yoshioka his buoyancy and his shield – the honour fine enough second in line, for him and for his bloodline, but spared the full indignity should the jewel shatter. At least so he had
thought. At least so he had been certain. But the jewel had been struck, and now everything was perilous and vibrating fit to fragment. Kozei and Yoshioka, Kozei and Yoshioka, one of these might
endure, must endure, and in that one both survived.

He looked up into the sky, did Tadanari Kozei, as if to find certainty from the nacre of the moon. A reassurance the twin of that found by boneless oddities that ventured up from ocean depths on
nocturnal egressions to stare at that same orb with their eyeless gazes. But the moon was robbed of pre-eminence and what he saw put him in mind of a skyline that he had seen twice in his life
before, skylines that followed great shakings of the earth. A hue of red and orange, a hint of it there forming. He tried to discern its emergence above the roofs of the school, his school, his
last hope, felt inevitability come like a wind . . .

Again, the falling-star flicker barely seen. The encroachment of complete exhaustion perhaps, invading Musashi’s vision. No. No. Not exhausted. Gripped his swords
anew.

Ahead, the grand door of the dojo.

Licked his lips, tasted his own blood, lurched inwards. There he found what must be the last of the Yoshioka, and as he saw the number of them his heart contorted. Gathered here, perhaps, the
final bastion, and it cut through his calmness, his anger, so many more of them it was as though he had felled none. For an instant he saw standing amongst them the thralls of the Tokugawa and the
monks of Hiei and the consenting masses of the lowerborn, scores of them, all faceless together whether in their topknots or their shaved heads or their cowed eyes, all of them together, all
arrayed against him, and he did not care.

‘All of you,’ he said, his voice breaking with his breaths, ‘thralls. Where are those that killed her? Bring their throats to me.’

‘Arsonist!’ howled one of them, and he charged and aimed a slash as savage as his shout at Musashi’s neck. Up his shortsword, greeting the blow, diverting its path and sending
it arcing over his head, and his longsword was already in motion in the opposite direction. It met the samurai in the side of the chest, sank in between his ribs.

‘Where?’ shouted Musashi over the scream. ‘Where?’

They came unheeding, perhaps emboldened by the surroundings, hallowed ground to them. The möbial sweep of a Yoshioka sword, arms twisting, blade from up to down then up, trying to split
Musashi along the sternum, fine feint, the breeze of its whipping passage felt upon his chin, then Musashi’s shortsword hacking into the samurai’s waist.

The moments of frantic fight unfurled like the smoke that billowed from the braziers. Smashing a blade aside with the flat of his longsword, the short in perfect rhythm killing in the opening.
Evading, shoulders coiling, and then the longsword around to knock a stomach out.

And here it was, and he was realizing it, and the anger had carried him this far, and now it would carry him all the way, and how could he have ever doubted it, this feeling, moments like this,
for here was honesty, perfect honesty, an honesty that could not be denied by the world, and he flailed and battered with desperate speed, lunged with his shoulders and the weight of his body,
weight of his heart, and on, and on, and he saw it all and he knew it all, defined it all, and a samurai attempted a familiar attack, brushing Musashi’s sword aside, rushing close, chest to
chest, and Musashi repelled as he had repelled before, and slew as he had slain, and the next man who had seen it fail so thoroughly used the exact same manoeuvre, as he was taught, unable to
think, to conceive of nought else, and Musashi saw it all: he creation, they entropy! He creation, they entropy! Envisioning this, enacting it, thing of pure will, bones of his wrists singing with
the cumulative ache of the impacts, swords moving where they needed to be and Musashi saw the openings as and when they came, there, his shortsword at a throat, there the long cleaving across the
belly, there the feel of a Yoshioka blade passing so very close. Hacking down on proffered wrists with wild strength and hewing both hands away entirely, and every sword stroke now a repudiation,
cutting the world that he had been offered, cutting himself free of it, for truth was truth, felt entirely and exactly here and now, and if he could only use the raw sensation of these instants as
his proof in place of fumbling with the curse of inutile verb and noun then all would be as it ought, this, what he felt, what he knew to be right, honest and good as he had ever wanted to be,
achieving, achieving, let this be the definition of who he was, his proof to the world, let them see when it was done, let them know.