Sword of Honour (30 page)

Joy. Rage. Whatever he felt, whatever composite of the two, these were undignified things. There had to be propriety, as Tadanari had taught him, and he thought of the methods the master had
shown him to level his spirit, to become serene, of meditation and the search for nothingness, of mantras deigned to him since the age of fifteen, and slowly the grip on his razor lessened and he
could continue once more.

Fingers; important. Nails clipped and filed, dirt scraped out from under them.

Now armour, the only concession to armour he would make: a belt of a thousand stitches tied around his stomach. His mother had begged by the gates of the Gion temple for passing pilgrims to add
to the band of white silk, row after row of little red
x
’s threaded slowly, she not drinking, not eating, not sleeping until the thousandth stitch was achieved. He wore it now both
to honour her and because it was lined with eight gold ryo coins, ovoid, finger-length, thick and warding, protecting his stomach, which he knew to be the centre of his essence; men argued for the
head or the heart, but all pleasurable feelings he found emanated from there, of good food, of sex, of victory.

Lastly, the jacket. The symbol. The hem of it hanging to midthigh, the sleeves wide and billowing, lapels bound loose at the sternum with a single elaborate knot, the braided cord tasselled at
its ends. This as every other jacket the school wore, and of course, as every other, the silk of it the colour of tea. But here that colour only the field onto which a pattern of gold had been
woven, wreathes of leaves encircling blooming whorls of flowers. He remembered seeing his father in it, his grandfather. Only twice before had Seijuro worn this jacket, but today permitted. So
light he could barely feel it on his shoulders. Smelt old; a good smell, like faith.

In his mind Miyamoto had the face of a tengu demon and he lunged, overstepped. Seijuro slid around him, brought his longsword down through the shoulder, brought Miyamoto to his knees, felt the
tremors of the dog’s heart thrum along the length of his blade, felt them sweet as the beating of his own heart, felt them slow, stop . . .

The acolytes awaited him, a score of the boys lined up in ranks. Matashichiro was not amongst them: why waste a shining memory on someone whose loyalty was already assured? To one of the boys he
awarded the stool upon which he would sit prior to the duel. To another he awarded a platter on which a blackened iron spike had been set, this for Miyamoto’s head after. Lastly, to the one
he had ensured beforehand was most worthy, he awarded the standard of the school.

This was twice the height of a man, a frame of wood lacquered black forming a right-angle, vertical five times that of the horizontal. Affixed to the peak a banner head in the form of the flower
of the konnyaku, long petals parting vulval from which the phallic stigma jutted upwards, a humble plant of meagre sustenance to remind the school of its origins. In nature it was a deep red,
tongue red, but here a shining aureate. The banner it sat atop, pinned to the frame with metal rings, read simply:

School of Yoshioka, Head Adept Seijuro Yoshioka.

The boy clutched it reverently in his hands and they followed the standard as they set out onto the street. Seijuro, his two pages, a dozen men. The dead eyes of the Foreigner
watched them go. Each pace measured, every gaze upon the horizon. The men not identical, but to those who beheld them no detail of individual face could be recalled, no deviation in height or
weight, just them, there as a whole, unified in step and soul and colour, except for Seijuro, marked as he was, anointed.

Around them the city seemed to bend itself, the people aware of their coming without the apparent need of sight. Warping away in Seijuro’s eyes like the images within a broad copper bowl,
pulling to the sides, forced there, belonging there, and yet their colours warm and magnificent. Silence enveloped the streets like an aura around the samurai, embracing, then releasing, no words
to sully, and, though he did not look at the faces around him, eyes only ahead as was proper, as was manly, behind the gold coins of his thousand-stitch belt, Seijuro felt a stirring.

This only the prelude,
he thought.
When the sun has set, when the head is affixed, the return – that the glory yet to be.

They made their slow way north to the moor of the Rendai temple, gathering people behind as the fisherman’s net gathers weight, the sun heavy, sinking, quivering behind the haze of its
heat, the red eye of heaven descending as though eager to bear witness also. More men of the school awaited them there, having left earlier, and they had erected a palisade of tea-coloured silk.
The boy with the stool ran ahead, set it down and awaited on his knees. Seijuro took the longsword from his belt and surrendered it to the page’s waiting hands before he sat down, assumed the
militant-regal pose of legs spread wide, left palm broad upon left thigh, point of his right elbow upon the other thigh and this fist balled to cradle his chin with his knuckles.

Silently his men arrayed themselves around him. The standard was set into its waiting stand, hung above them still, no breeze to move it. Distant, the crowd gathered, and Seijuro welcomed them.
They ought to see. They ought to understand. Simple theatre with a simple moral.

The Rendai temple humble, unassuming, silent. The torii gate of its entrance monolithic, two upright pillars, two curved beams at the top, shadow cast so long it was like that of a man’s
almost, slender legs leading to the mass of shoulders. In the trees about the temple were scores of birds and Seijuro looked at them, looked at the entire span of what lay before him and thought
how wonderful it was to be alive, to be born exactly him and no other.

The hour of the rooster was imminent.

*

Imminent, then gone. Miyamoto did not appear. The edges of the coins in his belt began to dig into the flesh of his stomach. Seijuro sat back, unfolded a paper fan upon which
the cityscape of Kyoto was drawn in ink, began to fan himself. In the grass, on the trunks of the trees, the cicadas howled.

*

The sun vanished but the heat did not relent. Sweat collected in the hairs of his eyebrows, accumulating slowly, a trembling bead threatening to burst, grew and grew until it
did so, splattered salty upon the waxed surface of his fan; Kyoto blighted by sudden flood. His belt, his kimono drenched, the creep inexorable. No choice but to remove his fine jacket for fear of
sullying it. Rendered plain, Seijuro resumed his seat whilst his men lit braziers and lanterns all around.

*

The darkness behind him gradually became total; the only thing beyond the moor the city wall, the moat, and the mountains. With the creep of time what Seijuro became unavoidably
aware of was that against this vast expanse he and his palisade and his standard were lit up, and to the crowd, they clustered at the edge of the city’s light facing the void, were surely
dwarfed by the blackness, marked as feeble, small.

*

Sullied, sullied, silk and moments and potential, and the birds were no longer in the trees, or not visible to Seijuro, and he had long since abandoned sitting, stood now. His
mother’s belt sodden around his waist like a tepid noose edged with metal. His sword still held upright in the hands of his page, and the boy would not meet Seijuro’s eyes, kept his own
downcast. The shrieking of the cicadas piercing him, they bawling at the rising summer moon. Blaring, shrill, to him entirely discordant.

*

‘Master Yoshioka,’ one of the samurai dared to say eventually, ‘it is clear Miyamoto is not coming. He has fled.’

Seijuro did not answer. He was counting faces, calculating witnesses. It was a fine thing for his palms that he had filed his nails earlier.

‘I took Miyamoto’s response from the board myself,’ said another. ‘I saw it. All saw it.’

That, the manacle; abandon the field and be thought of as an equal coward. The proper length of time nebulous, but, if it was endurable, unequivocally to be endured.

The crowd had grown. Men and women, rich and poor, artisans and merchants and samurai from other schools. Some wanting to see simple carnage, some wanting to see rival methods of the sword, some
wanting to see a humbling. None of these thoughts or urges voiced, however. Just watching. A hundred conclusions being drawn. Seijuro pinned before them, certain he was being pierced.

From behind them a crier came, clacking two blocks of wood together, their tone musical.

‘Hour of the dog!’ was his call, and then he shrank at the sudden attention he garnered, he being used to being treated almost as furniture. ‘Hour of the dog . . .’

Lanterns flickered. Seijuro was not alone in his sweating. People shifted weight from foot to foot, legs growing tired of standing. A young boy dozed draped across his father’s shoulders.
One of the Yoshioka cracked the knuckles of his hand. An old man hawked and spat. Distant, the low bells of temples could be heard tolling a confirmation of the crier’s claims.

And then he came.

Oh, he was different, not the samurai the mass were expecting. An outsider, certainly, not of Kyoto. The tallest man that most of them had ever seen, young, though, face mottled more with
pox-born scars than with beard. His hair, pulled back into a wild tail that hung down to his shoulders, jutted out behind his skull a palm’s breadth where it was bound in the coils of a
leather cord, an obnoxious and deliberate opposite to the dignified topknot. Dressed like a destitute with no apparent sense of shame at it, the sleeves of his clothing cut entirely away, recently
and clumsily it seemed, coarse torn threads hanging down his bared arms over muscles lean and tight.

And yet they parted for him as they would have done the Yoshioka, followed after him without thinking as he headed towards Seijuro, he swaggering at his own pace, they wanting to hear now his
explanation as much as see. Seijuro could wait no longer, snatched his sword from his page and strode out to meet him.

‘Musashi Miyamoto!’ he snarled, fifteen paces away.

‘Seijuro Yoshioka.’

They stopped no more than a sword’s length away from each other. Neither of them bowed. Seijuro saw how young the man was, younger even than Denshichiro, it seemed, and this fresh ignominy
all but caused his shoulders to quiver.

‘The duel was set for the hour of the rooster,’ he said.

‘Loud voices,’ said Miyamoto. ‘Long necks. You chose the hour that suits you best. But this? This is my time.’

The arrogance of it; the gathered Yoshioka samurai snarled, even the young pages, moved as if to surround him. Seijuro waved them back. ‘This is the moment of your death,’ he said to
Miyamoto. ‘I’ll not visit the same insult of tarrying upon you as you have me. Prepare.’

‘Why is it you sent a man to kill me in your stead?’

‘Because you need to be fought.’

‘You could hate me so for such a reason?’

‘I could hate a man like you for much less of one. Prepare!’

A single hiss of a mocking laugh: ‘I need no preparation.’

‘I am the fourth head of the Yoshioka dynasty! You have no conception of the skill I wield.’

‘The skill of the men of yours I already killed did not impress me greatly.’

Silence then, deepening. Seijuro took a cord and began to bind his sleeves up, held it in his mouth, teeth clenched savage on the braids. The moment drew out into a long appraisal between the
two.

‘Akiyama,’ said Miyamoto, ‘was it you who took his head?’

‘My brother had that honour.’

‘Proxies. All proxies with you. Be felled on their account, then; let us call it justice. For him. For all the other thralls.’

‘Your head will rot alongside the Foreigner’s tonight, cur.’

‘I do not think so,’ said Miyamoto, and he laughed, let open disgust write itself across his features. ‘There is no challenge here. I need no more than a single strike to best
you.’

‘What?’ said Seijuro.

‘One strike,’ said Miyamoto. The sheer gall of him was staggering, him in his rags and his gaunt pox-twisted face.

‘I’ll cleave your head from your shoulders in one strike!’ said Seijuro.

‘Let’s make these the rules, then,’ said Miyamoto. ‘One strike each. Do you agree, or would you rather have one of your men here bleed for you?’

‘I agree! Prepare to die!’

‘Do you all hear that?’ said Miyamoto to the other Yoshioka samurai. ‘Do you abide by this agreement between myself and your master?’ They snarled their assent.
‘Good. Come, then, and I shall teach you.’

‘Shut your mouth and let’s end this.’

The anger in the Lord-King Yoshioka’s eyes was perfect right then. Musashi beheld it and felt a gardener’s pride, that of having carefully nourished something that
was sprouting into a full and vivid bloom.

The samurai of the Yoshioka stepped back and the crowd stepped forward eagerly. Neither Musashi nor Seijuro moved. So very close, lethally close. Seijuro spread his legs and sank into the
fighting stance. Musashi remained as he was, obnoxiously neutral.

To describe these kinds of instants was something Musashi could never do, these times that were potentially the summation of his life. The focus came, the deep focus he longed for, and with it
left feeling, and all there was was himself and Seijuro in the long and empty universe. He looked at his opponent, saw the tenseness in him, saw the blotch of a birthmark just below his ear, saw
his eyes that were yearning, yearning, yearning, and right then he knew for certain that

he

does

not

know

it

as

you

do

and Seijuro was inhumanly angry, anger entirely, and so as the Yoshioka man went for his sword, he turned his shoulders to put strength into the blow where none was needed, sucked in a fierce
hiss of breath, and with these signals it was so easy for Musashi to read. Seijuro aimed for the throat with a wild slash, trying to lop off of his head as he said he would, and though he was fast
Musashi simply stepped backwards and let the blow come to nought.