Sword of Honour (51 page)

‘Sir!’

‘I have a method to draw him to us,’ said Tadanari. ‘He will come, and we will kill him certainly. But, should fate render Miyamoto up to us before this, then kill. Kill. Do
not hesitate, do not waver, do all you can to kill. I declare this now our Way.’

The men of the Yoshioka barked, bowed to the shrine of the ancestors and Tadanari dismissed them to rest for the dawn. They filed out in silence, none of them looking at the corpse of
Denshichiro, at the patterns his blood had made upon the earthen floor. Tadanari was soon alone with the body, and he gazed at it.

Still and ugly as Denshichiro deserved, for the errant fortune that had granted him the privilege of being born as he was without any concurrent merit of the spirit.

Tadanari drew his shortsword. He reached down and cut the topknot from Denshichiro’s head. The end of it he dipped into the wound upon the dead man’s throat and, using the hair as a
brush, wrote the names of Denshichiro and Seijuro upon the headband that Denshichiro should have worn. He cast the gore-sodden knot of hair into a brazier and bore the marked band to the shrine of
the dojo and the paintings of the previous generations of the Yoshioka.

There he reached up and draped it around the portrait of Naokata, so that the band hung down as though it fell across his shoulders, Seijuro’s name on the right and Denshichiro’s on
the left.

Tadanari looked up into the approximation of the face of his friend.

‘He was not your son,’ he said. ‘He was nothing like you.’

Naokata did not respond. Tadanari turned and left him with his pallid yoke.

Chapter Thirty-four

The waters of the Kamo slid effortlessly by and over their surface a shakuhachi flautist sent out a melody as lapping and lilting as all that passed before him. His bamboo pipe
pale in the sunlight, his eyes closed in concentration. A young man and far from a master yet, he came to these remote banks to practise his instrument without bothering others. Thusly he was
unaware that he had an audience: Musashi, Ameku and Yae sat some distance away upon a fallen tree soft with moss.

Musashi had heard the man’s playing several times when he himself, for much the same reason, had come here to practise his own silent instrument.

The music was wistful and long. The three of them, man and woman and child, listened. It was Ameku who broke their silence.

‘Why do you take us here?’ she asked.

Because I cannot abide the city.
Musashi wiped sweat from the gaunt hollows beneath his eyes. ‘Because someone ought to hear this.’

‘If we are not here, the music for the river only, it is not good?’

‘Why play at all, if not to perform?’ he said. It did not feel an entire answer, and so he offered: ‘You sing, and I thought . . . All ideas from music, as you said.’

‘Ah,’ Ameku said. It was a very pointed syllable, and her lips formed themselves into a familiar formation. But the hint of mockery on them did not last, and eventually she spoke
again: ‘This man – he has skill. His music is good. So . . . Thank you, Musashi.’

The woman squeezed Yae’s shoulder and the girl said her thanks also. For her part Yae seemed thoroughly bored, eyes darting around, heels drumming against the log on which they sat. It was
not long before she dropped down and went to busy herself looking at stones at the water’s shallow edge.

‘Today you are changed, Musashi,’ said Ameku. ‘Still. Quiet.’

‘Nnn,’ he said, because he did not know what else to. What he even desired to.

‘You are not happy. Though you beat the Yoshioka, you are not happy.’

He had not told her. ‘You know?’

‘Drunk men in the lodgings, they speak easy, speak loud.’

‘They do.’

‘You killed,’ she said quite easily, and some vestige of decorum turned Musashi towards Yae for a moment. As though he might be ashamed of a child hearing the thing that he had
wanted to scream to the heavens in the glory of its execution. The girl though was not listening.

‘That was their choice,’ he said.

‘How many, the Yoshioka?’ Ameku said. ‘Eight? Nine?’

‘Eight dead. One wounded and fled.’

‘Fled?’

‘Ran away.’

‘Ran away. Nine men come to you, but you stand with two swords.’

‘It felt natural,’ he said, no boast in his voice. ‘As though I were just sliding through it, sliding into the right positions again and again. As though I wasn’t trying
. . . Or rather, I was trying, with so much of my essence that it became nothing. And it simply . . . was.’

He realized, though, that this was not what she had meant.

She said something to herself in her own language. It did not seem complimentary.

‘Is that how you say “revenge” in Ryukyuan?’ he asked.

Ameku let out a low hiss of a laugh.

‘Have you any trust in anything at all? Anyone?’ Musashi asked her. It was not condemnatory.

‘A blind woman must trust everyone. I am weak, yes, I am the weakest perhaps. You, Musashi, now can do the things you want to me. Anything. Any man who is with me, the same, any woman too.
Even Yae, little Yae, she, holding my hand, she can take me to a bad place. If she wants.’

The girl had turned at the mention of her name, and now she wailed in genuine hurt, ‘I wouldn’t do that, Ameku.’

‘I know, I know, my cat. But this is true. No, Musashi?’

‘It is true.’

‘No argument today too.’

He struggled for words, just as he had struggled in the city, just as he had struggled to himself. He wanted to tell her the excitement he felt at his creation of his new style, of having
devised and enacted something that no man had done before. But poetic proof eluded him and he could not quantify the feel of his sword splitting bone with some higher purpose. The purpose not a day
ago he had been certain was there.

‘I feel hollow,’ he said. ‘I won, but there is no victory.’

‘The city, they play their drums as they did a week before.’

‘Yes.’

‘You want people to see you.’

Why play at all, if not to perform?

But it was not that, he did not think, and so they sat in silence. The flautist made a mistake, took a breath, repeated a phrase of the melody and then continued. The river flowed on.
Ameku’s eyes seemed as though they were watching its passage, moving back and forth, back and forth. But they saw nothing, and they were ugly in the light.

‘If I speak, you will listen?’ she said.

‘I will listen.’

‘Yae . . . Far? Can she hear?’

The girl was now twenty paces distant and pulling the small purple flowers from the heads of reeds, casting them on the water to flow away. ‘She cannot hear,’ said Musashi.

‘Good,’ said Ameku. ‘She is too young to know this.’ The blind woman took a breath. ‘Listen well,’ she said. ‘I will tell you of Ameku. Ameku, in the
Ryukyu tongue, it means the old sky . . . The forever sky. I think you have names like it in Japan. But, a bad name for me, no? Unkind. This is my family name. Mother, father, my sister also.
Ameku, all of us, on Ryukyu . . .’

And she did tell him. Told him of her childhood, of her youth deprived of sight and yet supposedly possessed of another form of it that others were errantly envious and awed of. Of what they
expected her to have and to be. In the telling of it she was pushed to the very limits of her ability in the language, the frustration of being unable to express herself fully and fluently adding
to that of her tale, but within her voice was a growing anger that transcended grammar. Wound its way through her entire life upon those distant islands, culminating in a plague and an ultimatum
and an exile.

‘I do not see the dead,’ she said. ‘But they, all of them, man and woman and the old and the young, they
know
I see the dead.’

‘But you don’t.’

‘This is truth. But, to them, on Ryukyu, I could not tell it.’

‘But it is truth.’

‘It is. If I shout this at them, though, what would change? They would not believe me. It was . . . I was . . . Everything set. Made of stone. What people are is . . .’ she said, and
here she struggled for a word, mimed bringing something to her mouth and drinking.

‘Vessels,’ offered Musashi.

‘Cups,’ she said. ‘Cups, and others pour what they want into them. Understand – there is them that are loved and them that are hated. The loved, they do a bad thing, and
people say, “He has a reason” and excuse him. The hated, they do a good thing, and people say, “It is false”, or, “Why are you not as this all times?” and hate
more. This cannot be changed.’

Musashi thought of six helmets hung from the bough of a tree, rusting slowly from rainwater, and then he found himself thinking of Akiyama, of the man’s bitter laughter as he thought he
lay dying, of the tales he had told across his long winter of recuperation.

‘You, Musashi,’ said Ameku, ‘you kill the Yoshioka. The Yoshioka are the loved. So the man who kills them must be . . . ?’

‘That cannot be true.’

Ameku waved a hand and with it took in the span of all before them. ‘Sadness again, over sea waves.’

The distant flautist held a high note, resonant and piercing. It brought forth a shudder or a spasm from within Musashi that set the hairs upon his arms on end and kindled something behind his
eyes.

‘But how can honesty be reviled?’ he said.

‘Are you honest, Musashi?’ she asked.

She said it softly and like smoke permeating through the links of a suit of armour it invaded him, found its mark at his core in the way Tadanari asking him the same thing in hostility had
not.

‘Always them you curse,’ she continued. ‘The world. The Way. Never you. Always words and words and more words. What lies beneath the words? Anger. They are wrong, perhaps. But
you are wrong also, definitely – and this, you
can
change.’

Musashi struggled to speak. Ameku spared him the torment.

‘I did not tell you all my Ryukyu story,’ she said.

‘Then tell me,’ he said, ‘please.’

‘They, the people of my home, all of them on their knees before me,’ she said, ‘scared of me, of the sickness they say I bring.
Know
I bring. Tell me that they buy a
place on a ship, so that I could go to Japan. And I tell them that they will die should I go on a ship with them, evil magic will do this. And they say that they know this, but . . .’

‘But what?’

‘“But the Japanese do not,”’ said Ameku. ‘That is what they say. Japanese ship, they put me on. Japanese crew, who did not know of yuta’s magic, these
innocents my people are happy to, to . . . let die. Die for them, so they can live.’

‘But the ship was fine. There was no curse.’

‘It does not matter. They believed, in every heart, that if the yuta goes on a ship, the ship dies. And this was a good thing to them. A fair bargain.
That
is people. All people.
Ryukyu, Japan, Middle Kingdoms.’

There was something in the way she said it all, a curl of her lips, a flick of her hand. He understood now what he had wondered over for all these months.

‘This is why you hate,’ he said.

But he saw immediately that he was wrong, profoundly wrong. ‘Hate?’ she said, confusion and exasperation and pity in her voice. ‘Why do you think I hate? I do not hate. This is
what I am trying to tell you – if you hate for this, your hatred has no end.’

‘But,’ he said, ‘it is worthy of hate.’

‘It is . . .’ said Ameku, and she fought to find the words, relented. ‘It
is
! This is what is. All it is as is. You must learn this, learn not to hate it. Or the
anger, it will . . . One more fight, one more fight. The Yoshioka did not kill you yesterday, but perhaps tomorrow. Or the next thing you hate. Or the next. Or in the end, you. Yourself.
You,’ she said, and she looped an invisible noose around her throat.

‘I cannot accept that,’ said Musashi, shaking his head, blinking furiously. ‘Someone must fight it. I feel this. I know this. Someone has to—’

Ameku silenced him by reaching out and taking his wrist in her hand. ‘Fighting it changes nothing,’ she said. ‘Hating it changes nothing. The only thing that this will change
is you. You will die. Did you not tell me that, after Sekigahara, you made the choice to live? Then live. Do not die. Do not. I am yuta, the people name me yuta, so me, I see the dead world, no? I
tell you, there is nothing. You do not want to go there.’

Her fingers could not quite encircle his wrist, and the touch of them was warm, and she was as close to him as she had ever been.

‘Here is a truth,’ she said. ‘What you can change is you. What you master, all you master, is you. What you can touch with hands, your country. Let the city be the city and the
world be the world. Know this. Know this, and then live, Musashi. Just live, far from cities, from people if you must. Live. Be happy.’

Musashi’s eyes followed her wrist up to her arm, to her shoulder, and there was her hair, combed and dark and everything her eyes were not, and he wanted at that moment to reach out with
his own hand and feel those tresses upon his palm.

But he pulled his hand free of hers.

‘I’ve done nothing of worth,’ he said. ‘Why do I deserve happiness?’

The flautist drew his music to a close. His fingers were sore and his throat was tired and he had played all the notes that were there to be played. On the banks of the shore, Yae had stripped
the reeds bare of flowers and all blossom was now fled upon the current.

Chapter Thirty-five

The third of the Yoshioka brothers, Matashichiro, was roused in the morning and brought to Tadanari in the rock garden at the heart of the school. The boy saw the bands the men
all wore around their heads, felt the change in them; a hardening.

They skirted him around the dojo hall rather than through it as they normally would. Of this he asked no questions.

The thirteen boulders were there in the sand arrayed as they always had been. When he had been younger Matashichiro had imagined the centremost boulder peaked as it was with that sharp band of
obsidian to be a shed dragon’s tooth. Or perhaps his father had told him that, he could not remember. Regardless, he knew that this was a childish thought, and so he put it away, straightened
his back, tried to stand before Tadanari as a man. The elder samurai’s comportment was grave, his eyes beneath the knot of his band as black as that of the tortoise that looked on.