Child of Vengeance Page 12

  The man’s eyes asked if he understood. The boy did, but it did not make him feel any stronger. There was a coldness creeping through him.

  “Just do it, boy. He is nothing to you,” said Munisai, loud enough for everyone to hear, and then gestured with his head for the boy to get to it. Bennosuke took an uneasy step down toward the earth.

  “What is he to you?” said Munisai again, his voice loud and harsh but now directed at Arima. “This piece of horseshit? This vermin who comes here and calls himself a sword-saint? This tiny-assholed, gurgling vessel of frailty and sodomy, not fit to lick the piss of dogs from the dirt beneath them? Kihei Arima, who—”

  “Stop this madness!” cried Dorinbo at Munisai, and then he threw himself into Arima’s path. The samurai had risen to Munisai’s insults and was making toward him with his sword half out of its scabbard, wanting simply to kill rather than duel. Dorinbo tried to force the blade back in with one hand, the other vainly attempting to push him back, painting dark handprints of the peasant’s blood upon the samurai’s chest.

  “Please, Sir Kihei—I beg you to reconsider. Bennosuke is but a boy! What purpose is there in slaying him? I beg you to stop!” pleaded the monk, but Arima had only murder on his mind. Seeing that, Dorinbo desperately thrust the samurai backward with all his weight, and did the one thing that would distract Arima—he made for the samurai’s lord.

  “Please, Lord Nakata,” said Dorinbo, his bared arms imploring, “I understand you have grievance with Munisai, but Bennosuke is not part of it! What kind of duel is it when a man fights a boy?”

  “The best kind,” said Hayato with relish, and he tried to wave Dorinbo away. The monk instead fell to his knees and buried his head in the dirt at Hayato’s feet. He grabbed ahold of the lord’s foot and continued to plead.

  “Please! I beg you! I beg you! I’ll do anything you ask of me. I’ll kill myself! Take my life, not his!” Dorinbo blabbered furiously. Hayato tried to step back from the monk, but Dorinbo clung on.

  “Arima,” the lord said disgustedly.

  The samurai, eager to get back to Munisai, strode up and kicked Dorinbo hard in the ribs. The monk fell on his side wheezing, and Arima kicked him again just to make sure. Dorinbo curled up into a ball. The Lightning Hand hovered over him, seeking any sign of defiance, then finally he spat on him.

  History is changed by the smallest of things; a single drop of rain, say, is blown by a freak gust of wind into the eyes of a ship’s captain, so that in the blink that follows he misses the sign of the reef ahead, and thus a shipload of men are doomed to the depths of the sea. What left Arima’s mouth was no more than a pale green gob of phlegm, but within it was the catalyst that put fire in Bennosuke’s soul.

  When it struck the prone monk on the side of the head, the boy felt a crazed surge of … he didn’t know what shudder through him. His body felt warm again. The anger of months seemed clear to him then; it had no direction, and it needed none. It just was, and so he used it. It was how he wanted to feel when he had learned the fate of his mother. His heart pumped beautifully. He was no longer afraid.

  With a cry of rage so vicious that it hurt his lungs, Bennosuke sprang forward and struck a blow that was more worthy of the title Lightning Hand than anything Arima could ever muster. The staff whipped around and struck the man on the side of the head with a dull crack, just as he turned back to Munisai. The man blinked, and then his jaw came loose, the bone jutting awkwardly into the flesh of his cheek.

  But Arima was good; his first instinct was not to scream in pain, but to reach for his longsword and strike. Bennosuke anticipated that, and by the time the man had the weapon but a finger’s breadth out of the scabbard the boy had already rapped the staff down quickly. It struck either flesh or steel, Bennosuke didn’t care which, and then the sword was loose and skittering on the floor.

  Arima grabbed for it desperately, but he was dizzy from the first blow and so again Bennosuke was quicker and flicked it away with the end of the wooden pole. It flashed along the ground toward the dojo, where it came to rest at the foot of the steps. One of the burgundy samurai made a move for it, but Munisai stepped over it. They glared at each other, but their focus quickly turned back to the fight.

  Arima leapt back to afford himself the time to draw his shortsword. There was no legendary drawing strike this time, just a man desperately trying to defend himself. The sword slid into his hand and he raised it as a shield while he circled, all the while his jaw spasming uncontrollably.

  The boy attacked warily, jabbing low at the man and keeping his distance. Arima dodged and parried, and then tried an attack of his own. Were it a longsword, it might have had some hope of striking Bennosuke, but the short blade was woefully lacking in range. It hissed by a hand’s length in front of him, and it may as well have been an ocean’s width for all it mattered.

  Spurred on by the man’s weakness and desperate for the kill, Bennosuke attacked once more, ringing in blows from a distance. He soon became aware of the irony of the situation—if Arima’s weapon was too short, his was too long. The man was regaining his wits and his balance, and read every distant incoming blow well. He needed to get closer. He considered going for his own shortsword, but he had no doubt the gap he would leave as he changed weapons would be exploited lethally by Arima. They circled, and then an answer came to Bennosuke.

  The boy arched the pole around once, deliberately slowly to draw Arima’s guard up, and then after he had parried he made as if to barge Arima in the chest with the pole held in two hands like an oar. The man’s eyes leapt with joy, and his sword arced down to strike the staff directly on its proffered center. The metal dug in deep, Bennosuke pushed with all his strength up against it, and then with a harsh snap the wood fractured and the staff was suddenly in two pieces. Arima let loose a small grunt of triumph, and Bennosuke let him savor it. It would be the last joy he felt in this life.

  Casting one half of the staff aside, Bennosuke closed in and let the man slash at him. The arc of the blade seemed so slow and so clumsy, and to snatch the man’s wrist as it lingered before him so very easy. He jerked Arima’s arm toward him and then smashed the remaining half of the staff savagely into the sword-saint’s forearm.

  Though a sword might cut through a war staff with ease, a human arm is not hardened, folded steel. Arima screamed as his wrist shattered and his hand went limp. The sword slipped from his powerless fingers and Bennosuke kicked it away disgustedly.

  The joyous, terrible ecstasy of his first victory came upon the boy then, and he smashed the man on the bridge of the nose with the butt of the staff. That too shattered and erupted in blood, and suddenly Arima, with his jaw hanging off and his nose flattened, looked unrecognizable.

  His eyes were spinning in wild panic, and widened further as Bennosuke grabbed him by the collar in an iron grip with his left hand. He drew back the staff and struck him three times in the head, each blow horrendous. The man’s skull reverberated like a pot, and then his eye socket shattered on the second blow, and then he was on his knees at the third. But Bennosuke would not let him fall. He held on to the collar, blood dripping onto his fist, keeping the man from cowering into a ball.

  “Please … Don’t kill me …” Arima managed through a mangled face, eye flapping on its stem, his voice pathetic in the silence.

  Bennosuke struck him remorselessly again and again until he was more than dead, the man’s skull caved in and the pink of his brains glistening in the midday sun. Only then did he drop the corpse. It hit the ground with a sad, dull thump, and then the blood soaked into the dust and turned it dark. The Lightning Hand, who had killed six men, was no more.

  Moments passed. Bennosuke looked at his shaking hands. They were covered in gore. A fragment of skull winked at him from his knuckle that was wrapped around the bloody remnants of the staff. He flicked the chip away with his free hand as though in a dream, his lungs bellowing from somewhere distant, and then he slowly became aware of the onlookers once more.
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br />   Munisai on the steps, his face unreadable. The rest of the burgundy samurai, eyes wide in shock, banner flapping in the breeze and swords undrawn. The crowd of peasants gathered around, once again witnessing the terrible results of a Shinmen’s anger. Dorinbo, on his knees, staring riveted in horror at the mangled corpse of Arima.

  “You are Munisai’s son,” the monk breathed quietly.

  He thought of going to his uncle, of picking him up and tending his wounds, but then he saw Hayato standing behind the monk, and the fury within him was suddenly renewed. With the bloodied half-staff in one hand he drew his shortsword with the other, and stalked toward the lord. He held the weapons to either side of him, exposing his body and inviting—daring—the lord to strike.

  “Are you samurai?” the boy hissed, looking down into the shorter man’s face. Hayato’s rigid expression of terror and outrage seemed … right. The lord made no attempt to answer, nor to go for his swords.

  “Are you samurai?!” Bennosuke asked again, and then he spat in Hayato’s face as his champion had to Dorinbo. That seemed to wake him from his shock. The lord rubbed the gob away, and his eyes started to dart between Bennosuke and what was left of Arima as he backed slowly away.

  “You …” he began.

  “Yes,” whispered Bennosuke, and then Hayato’s courage gave in. He turned and fled, mounting his horse at a scrambling canter and barreling through the crowd. Wordlessly his retinue of samurai followed after him in disarray, the herald casting the banner aside to fall in the dirt. They kicked their horses as fast as they dared go through the narrow paths, and Bennosuke guessed faster still once they were over the ridge and gone.

  He didn’t care at that moment, for suddenly a great weariness came into him. He turned to look at Munisai. The man nodded once. Bennosuke nodded back, and then slowly staggered off. His legs had grown weak without him noticing. The crowd of peasants, as always, parted and bowed before him like a gust of wind blowing through a field of long grass. Blood-splattered and bruised, a man’s brains on his fists, for the first time he could understand why they did it.

  THE PEASANT HAD his stump cauterized and bound, and as he lay upon a hard mat passing in and out of fevered consciousness, his fellow villagers helped Dorinbo take Arima’s body and burn it on a small pyre. It was a proper and decent ceremony, and though it was begrudging they did it because they knew they were not gods but men, and so it was not their place to pass judgment.

  That evening, a band of ravens clustered around the patch of earth where Arima had died. They had come for the tiny scraps of meat that had been left upon the ground, but though they were long devoured the birds remained, cawing and circling.

  Munisai sat watching them, his arm unbound once more. The cool evening air felt good upon it. His mind was occupied, mulling over the day’s events. Thus at first he didn’t notice Dorinbo walking slowly toward him, but when his brother was close enough Munisai could smell the charnel smoke upon him. Deliberately, slowly, Munisai let his eyes meet the monk’s.

  “Are you happy?” said Dorinbo angrily.

  “Yes,” he said. “Now I know the boy is good. Now I know that Yoshiko’s bastard is worthy of my name.”

  “Your name,” said Dorinbo, and a grim, disbelieving smile appeared on his face. “I don’t suppose you considered Bennosuke could have died?”

  “I did. But, as I said, now we know that he is good.”

  “He’s thirteen years old, Munisai.”

  “My point exactly.”

  “There is something wrong with you,” said Dorinbo, accusingly. “Even for a samurai, there’s only death and murder in your mind.”

  Munisai merely looked at his brother, seeing the hostility on his face. A voice within him urged him to tell the monk that he was wrong—to speak of the parts of his mind that were not filled with slaughter, but rather with the dreams he had of Yoshiko, of how she haunted him, of how he longed to set things right. But, as he always was, he was samurai, and so he kept quiet. Dorinbo waited for a response, and upon receiving none sighed and turned away.

  “Fine. So be it. Gain a son, lose a brother. Do not look to me anymore,” he said, and walked away into the darkening night. Munisai watched him go. Dorinbo would see sense, eventually. Hopefully.

  It had been the monk who had opened Munisai’s eyes, after all. The samurai knew that he could not have faced Arima’s drawing strike wounded as he was, and so he had tried to goad him into senseless anger, to draw his sword out of the scabbard before Munisai was anywhere near it. Putting Bennosuke forward to fight had been a calculated insult, nothing more. Had it gone wrong and come to Arima attacking the boy, Munisai would have leapt in from the side, honor be damned, and taken his throat out with the shortsword—but it hadn’t. Arima had been about to lose himself to his fury, to charge Munisai, and then Dorinbo had intervened.

  And so it turned out that it had been Bennosuke who had charged blindly, and seeing what came after that had put something deep and warm within Munisai. When he had started to train the boy, he had hoped merely to raise him right so that he might earn Yoshiko’s forgiveness, but now … Oh, the boy was strong. The boy was fast. That would make him good, certainly. What was better was that he was clever. That might make him great. His future was bright, and the thought of being able to be part of that dazzled Munisai.

  Yet one thing kept flashing in his mind. Bennosuke had spat in Nakata’s face. He had spat in the face of the son of a great lord. It was the crudest, strongest of insults. Given how Nakata had reacted over one little barb after the battle with the Kanno, Munisai found himself wondering how the lord would react to this. What would it sow?

  That was a problem for tomorrow. Tonight, there was just a profound sense of satisfaction he had not felt in years—not since he had held the infant Bennosuke in his arms, or marveled as the boy unsteadily took his first steps, or excitedly made the boy repeat his first word.

  Perhaps Dorinbo was right. Perhaps there was something wrong inside him. Today he had seen the death of a man, and the truth was it had made him feel like a father again.

  Over the far side of the valley’s ridge, down around the burned ruins of the village, the fireflies danced in the darkness.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Bennosuke sat rolling a stalk of grass between his fingers emptily. The sun above him was there in appearance only and a chill had worked its way into him. That was good. Two days had passed since the duel with Arima, and ever since he had felt a desire for solace, a desire for numbness.

  Memories were hazy; Arima’s corpse he could recall with perfect clarity, but since then it was as though his head were dulled with some form of poison. Focus came and went, came and went.

  Surprisingly, Tasumi had been the first to be with him in the evening after the fight; the samurai had been away in the afternoon collecting fees from neighboring villages. Bennosuke was sitting in the garden of Munisai’s estate, not knowing where else to go, his clothes still streaked in gore. Wordlessly Tasumi entered and began to check the boy over for wounds.

  “What are you playing at, you little maniac? Leaping into battle … You could have been killed,” he muttered. His hands were warm. Bennosuke said nothing.

  “A staff, your father tells me. A staff. Says you cracked his jaw with your first strike,” Tasumi continued, and then a smile came to his lips. “Wish I could have seen it. You should be dead, a boy of your age fighting a man—but I suppose you’re our Musashi, eh?”

  Musashi Benkei was an ancient warrior of legend, a huge man who wielded a staff like no other. The tale went that he held a bridge single-handedly in order to buy time for his lord and his family to perform dignified seppuku, slaying dozens of the enemy as they came to him. He died on his feet with his staff still in his hands, run through a score of times and riddled with arrows. Not one man had passed him, and both his and his lord’s honor were ensured. It was held as a paragon of a good death.

  Bennosuke wondered whether Musashi had ever hit a man u
ntil his skull burst open. But then, the slaughter was always so very clean in the old tales: evil men came to the hero, and then they were dead. As Tasumi’s hands traced his flesh, Bennosuke looked upon the blood spattered across his kimono, and saw it had dried a dirty, muddy brown.

  The night passed, and most of the morning too, and then he found himself at the temple alongside Dorinbo once more. Instead of binding, though, he was doing something taboo: looking at one of the prayers. The characters upon the yellowed paper seemed alien to him, perhaps because they were civilized and he was not sure if he had the right to read them any longer.

  He looked up to find his uncle watching him. It took a moment for the boy to remember he was doing something forbidden.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “It matters little in the end,” Dorinbo said casually. “How are you feeling?”

  “I don’t know … The same, I think,” said Bennosuke. “Is that good?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” he said.

  “It wasn’t like I expected … Was it cruel?” asked Bennosuke.

  “All death is cruel, Bennosuke.”

  “But he was beating you,” said the boy. “I saved you.”

  “And that makes it righteous, does it?”

  “Yes.”

  “The strong protecting the weak?” said Dorinbo.

  “I’m not calling you weak, I—” began Bennosuke, but the monk interrupted him.

  “That’s not what I meant at all,” Dorinbo said. “What of the man Arima cut the hand from? His name is Akatani. Did you know that? Or was he just a peasant to you? He has three children. He’s a thatcher—or he was. Where was your righteous slaughter in his defense?”