Child of Vengeance Read online

  “I thought that—”

  “You thought wrong, brother. Why didn’t you go to a proper healer?”

  “They were busy,” said Munisai. He could feel Dorinbo behind him. Before his brother could draw another blush from him, he continued. “Also, it would not be good for men to see their commander wounded.”

  “Spare me, Munisai,” sighed Dorinbo. “You mean it’s not good for you for them to see you wounded. Eight years and you haven’t changed in the slightest.”

  Munisai said nothing. Dorinbo began a thorough examination of his brother’s body, his fingers probing and prodding, eyes gauging the color of the samurai’s flesh and tongue. Then the monk took the arm gently in his and began checking for the many telltale pulses across the length of it, darting across to the healthy arm now and then for comparison.

  “Mmm,” the monk muttered, his fingers barely felt by Munisai as they pressed between the knuckles of his lamed hand. “Your heart and your organs are strong, your spirit quick. But the wound has stanched the flow of the healing ether to this side of your body. This, we can try to remedy.”

  The monk busied himself with his art. Sweet herbs were ignited in a brazier to mask the smell of decay. A kettle was boiled and a tonic mixed from powders and pastes, which Munisai was told to drink. The taste was bitter, and it tingled on his gums as his brother began to clean the inside of the wound with a damp cloth. The stench of pus and the aroma of the herbs fought an even battle in the air around them.

  Dorinbo settled himself, facing his brother’s back once more. Carefully he drew a map in his mind. Around the ugly ridges of the gash, the monk began to see the patterns of the stars in the sky, which the ancient healers of the Chinese had realized coincided with the median points of the body’s natural flow of energy. From a bundle of needles of many different sizes, he chose a specific one to act as the anchor, and then he began to impale Munisai’s flesh again and again, damming and diverting the vitality of his body toward the wound.

  “I suppose,” said the monk as he worked, “I should ask where you have been all this time?”

  “In the service of Lord Shinmen,” said Munisai.

  “We are not entirely isolated, here—news carries, you know,” said Dorinbo. “You entered his service five years ago, after that tournament you won. I was wondering about the three before that.”

  “That time is unimportant,” said Munisai curtly, for again the monk was prying at something he could not yet face. “Concentrate upon the wound.”

  “As you wish,” said the monk.

  The sensation of the needles being worked into him made his skin crawl. Perhaps it was only the tingle of the healing energy, he hoped. His mind wandered, seeking a distraction, and though he tried not to it settled on the boy.

  “Bennosuke stays with you now?” Munisai forced himself to ask.

  “No, he stays here—is he not here now?” said Dorinbo.

  “No,” said Munisai, and then took a breath. “But, wherever he is, it seems Yoshiko was not lying about him.”

  Dorinbo’s hands froze, a needle as thin as a spider’s thread twisted halfway into muscle. After a moment, the monk spoke.

  “Time dispels all delusions. Are you surprised?”

  “No. But I was hoping …” said Munisai, and the words hung in the air as heavy as the scent of herbs and rot.

  “Bennosuke is a fine young man, Munisai,” said Dorinbo, resuming his work and pushing the needle down. “He is clever, and keen to learn. Tasumi tells me he is talented and growing strong with weaponry.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That he would be a fine son to any man, regardless.”

  “Regardless,” said Munisai.

  The brothers sat in silence once more, the needles remaining in Munisai’s back for the long minutes they needed to have their effect. They waited until the herbs had burned themselves out, and then the monk removed the pins one by one, applied a poultice to the wound, and bound it once more in fresh bandages.

  “We shall have to do this many times. Healing will be slow—if it heals at all,” he said as he began to replace his instruments in the bundle he had brought.

  “Is there anything I can do to help it along?” asked Munisai.

  “Pray, perhaps.”

  “Maybe I’ll do that.”

  “We both know you won’t,” said Dorinbo. Munisai nodded and smiled wryly. Slowly the smile withered, and then he turned his head to look his brother in the eye.

  “Did they rebuild the far side of the village?” he asked.

  “No. It’s still in ruins. Nobody dares interfere with them. Some of the peasants say they are haunted,” said the monk.

  “Then tomorrow I will go there.”

  “That might be good,” said Dorinbo. He finished packing, rose, and walked to the door. There he paused with his back to his brother, and then spoke again.

  “It’s not the boy’s fault, Munisai. Remember that before anything,” he said, and gently slid the paper door closed.

  Munisai listened to his quiet footsteps retreat into the night. When he was sure he was alone, he blew the candle within the lantern out, and then went to stand before the armor again.

  In the dark, only the brilliant white characters of his old name could be seen in pale blue.

  The night was darkest deep in the valley of Miyamoto, where the dojo lay. The hardwood floor made a poor bed. Bennosuke lay uneasily upon it, though the texture of the wood was the least of the reasons sleep would not come to him.

  His father had returned.

  That afternoon Munisai had exchanged courteous words with Tasumi, and the boy had stood there in his loincloth with river water dripping off his back like a tongueless half-wit. He had almost quailed in shame when his father had eventually turned his eyes upon him; all but naked before him, skinny and gangly and marked with welts. Munisai—the samurai, handsome, strong—had measured him up and down, and although the man had nodded eventually it was impossible to tell what he was thinking.

  He had clapped his son on the shoulder with his one good arm, and had said, quite simply: “We will talk further later. For now, I shall retire to my house.”

  Bennosuke had nodded like an idiot, not having the courage to tell him that he still lived there too. He had watched dumbly his father go, and then had lingered, cursing himself for his timidity. Not knowing where else to go, too ashamed to go to Dorinbo or Tasumi and admit his cowardice, when night fell he had eventually resorted to sneaking into the dojo.

  Now he lay, their meeting playing over in his head. He had imagined it before, many times. There had been childish fantasies of Munisai presenting him with the longsword of adulthood and the two of them growing strong together, all his problems magically righted, and there had also been bleaker ones of disgrace and exile. Neither had been true. There had been no drama or resolution. It had just happened, and now he was alone and in the dark, both in body and in spirit. He felt the entire night was the cuirass of his father’s armor, reflecting his failure back at him.

  “We will talk further.”

  He heard those words again, short and blunt. The same cruel voices he heard when he cleaned the armor whispered to him, telling him that this was all Munisai could bear to say to him, all he could stomach of looking at what had become of his heir.

  The boy tried not to listen. He chided himself for expecting anything more than curtness. He knew that his father was samurai and samurai did not give themselves over to blind emotion. He remembered his father smiling only at the very edges of his memory, when he had been small enough for Munisai to hold him in his arms.

  Since his departure there had been only brief missives delivered sporadically from Lord Shinmen’s stronghold; instructions for the managing of his estate, the change in their family name, nothing more. Never once had he asked about Bennosuke, because he knew the boy was being raised by others, and he had other things to attend to.

  Seeing to your own duty, and having faith i
n others to do theirs. This was being samurai, and samurai like his father kept their word—in time they would talk, and the boy would learn to become samurai too.

  This, Bennosuke told himself, had to be.

  If that is so, then why do you cower here in the dark? Why don’t you act like the samurai you say you are, and try to make the man respect you as you know you should? said his doubt, leering and victorious.

  Bennosuke knew that logic would not help him this night. He ached with self-pity, and he hated himself for it. All he could do was wrap his arms around himself, try to find a comfortable position, and long for sleep to steal thought from him.

  Insects chirruped, lulling him into a doze. The constant noise created a cloud in his half-asleep mind, and when he heard human voices it was like a lantern coming through fog; though he heard them, it took long moments for the boy to recognize them as real. There were two men walking quickly, arguing with each other.

  “That devil,” slurred one, “comes back, and expects what?”

  “Will you be quiet?” hissed the second.

  “Tell me what he expects!”

  “I don’t know. I don’t want to find out either.”

  They were peasants; that much was clear from their accents. Their voices were hoarse, as though they had been arguing for some time.

  “We have to do it. He’s up there on that hill, alone,” said the first man again. Bennosuke rose and moved as silently as he could to peek out into the night through the bamboo slats of the dojo’s doors. It was too dark to see anything but the vaguest sense of movement. “We got tools. Don’t need a sword, a sickle’ll do just fine. We’ll just do it and go. We have to.”

  “He’s not alone. His son’s up there with him.”

  “Good. We’ll do him too, clean the village up.”

  “Look at you—you can barely walk. Turn around, let’s go home.”

  “We have to do it—he has to answer for it!”

  “And suppose you fail? You want him to lose his head again and do for the rest of the village? It’s too dangerous.”

  “I can do it,” said the first man, and then there was a snort that might have been a sob. “I have to do it.”

  “No, you don’t. Let’s go home,” said the second voice.

  “My sister …” said the first.

  “I know,” said the second man.

  “In the fire …” the first barely managed, and then he broke down crying. They were drunken tears, loud and sloppy. He bawled for a few moments, until his friend started muttering soothing things to him.

  “Let’s go home,” the second man said eventually, after the heaviest of the tears had passed. The first man assented with a sniffing grunt, and then slowly the sound of the pair faded into the night, leaving Bennosuke to wonder what it was he had just witnessed.

  In the morning sun, Munisai walked where he had walked as a child, and it all seemed so alien. He barely even registered the way the peasants melted away from him, bowing low and anxiously, or the way mothers would place their children behind themselves.

  Miyamoto was a village like so many hundreds of others in Japan, a great network of paddy fields carved into the slope of a valley so that it seemed to rise like some eccentric curved stairwell. Munisai’s estate was on high, the temple of Amaterasu highest of all on the opposite face, and then down on the valley floor the squat, dark shape of the dojo hall dwarfed the humble wood-and-thatch shacks the peasants lived in.

  This was all spread before him, but though his eyes took it in he barely saw it. The samurai walked along the ridgeline, glancing around. There, a tree he had climbed; there, the stream he had drunk from; there, a tiny shrine for a rock spirit where he had left offerings. All that was part of what he was, and yet it seemed so distant. Had he really grown up here?

  He headed for the landward valley and the ruins that must be there. They were not ruins in his memory, though. The samurai remembered them alive, and then the samurai remembered them ablaze. He hesitated just before he came to the ridge, took a breath to steel himself, and then walked over and downward.

  It was quiet. Once it had been a mirror of the other valley, a hub of life and labor, but now all was left to waste. The path beneath his feet was thick with moss and grass and free of any mark of human footfall. He passed a discarded barrel that had been claimed by bees, the dull hum of the insects like some funeral choir. The wind rustled long, ragged grass that burst forth from what remained of the dry and crumbled paddy fields.

  None of this concerned him. He was no farmer nor architect nor keeper of bees. What he looked at were the blackened stumps clustered in sad communion in the base of the valley, each as dark as the night had been when he had walked this very path eight years ago.

  The remains passed him by, the thickest of foundation pillars and the gnarled ends of tree stumps. All were charcoal. He noticed that on one or two of the larger ones someone had carved ancient prayers for the dead, asking that the souls find peace in the afterlife and that they not return to earth to menace the living.

  Munisai reached out and touched one of the stumps softly. It felt cold and dead. He didn’t know what else he was expecting.

  The samurai walked into what would have been the courtyard of a house. The paving stones, now cracked and mossy, still marked a path around a tree that was long dead. He remembered it in bloom, the pleasant smell of the cherry blossom, and the vivid pink of the petals against the soft blue skies. He remembered the tree catching alight, the blossom igniting and falling from the branches like a shower of fiery rain, taken upon the wind as they turned to ash.

  Eight years ago, here.

  Perhaps if he confronted this he would find the words to say to the boy. The boy, with his body and face so unlike Munisai’s, but Yoshiko’s dark eyes looking out at him as if she had never left this world. That he remembered most of all—the last time he looked into his wife’s eyes, her on her knees before him.

  Munisai sighed, the tightness in his chest growing with every beat of his heart. He bowed reverently to the ruin of the cherry tree, and settled into a meditative pose. Then he went within himself, and began to think.

  Bennosuke watched from the ridgeline as his father became perfectly still, his blue kimono the one blot of vivid color among the ruins. It was jarring to the view he knew so well.

  Munisai had not noticed he was being followed. The strain of forcing himself here must have been too great. When Bennosuke had woken, he had meant to go tell the man what he had overheard in the dojo last night. He had walked swiftly, but as he had approached the house his legs had slowly frozen as something dawned upon him.

  He realized his father would ask why Bennosuke had not confronted the men as a samurai should, and to that Bennosuke had no answer.

  Fearing that shameful interrogation, he had begun to skulk away when Munisai had emerged. When the boy realized where Munisai was headed he had followed at a distance, intrigued. The man had not stopped, heading down into the valley seemingly without the fear of trespassing on such a solemn stretch of ground.

  The charred stumps around Munisai seemed to grow larger. Bennosuke found himself thinking of the peasants last night. Drunk though they had been—Bennosuke had only a vague idea of what that meant—they had revealed a kind of honesty that was seldom shown. They had spoken the words from their hearts, and they had been hateful and vehement and directed at Munisai.

  Why?

  He knew he should join his father, to ask this question. But though he sat for some time he could not bring himself to move.

  Tomorrow, he eventually promised himself. The man needed time, and so did he; the dead today, the living tomorrow. Tomorrow they would say and do the things that they needed to, though he did not know what they were.

  Tomorrow.

  Hayato Nakata stalked the hallways with purposeless resentment, looking bitterly at the exquisite art around him. The paper walls were painted in black ink, a motif of reeds around ponds and cranes taking fligh
t. Above them carved into the wood were curling, symmetrical designs of leaves and flowers.

  None of it mattered, because none of it was his.

  There was no purpose to art, other than to enshrine. It was testament to a man’s wealth and nothing more, to say that he could afford to pay someone to do something that had no meaning. To admire another man’s painting, then, was to acquiesce to the statement the owner was making: “This exists at my behest, and your wonder at it proves me greater.”

  This was his father’s castle, his father’s art, and he would not grant the old man that.

  He thought of putting his fist through the paper, smashing one of the cranes in two, but that would be pointless. It would be remarked upon, and then his father would summon him and he would be made to confess he did it like a child. That was all he was seen as now: a child.

  A child who dwelled in a nice, comfortable city. He heard the voices and the sniggers of those palanquin bearers once more. He heard them often now.

  The old lord entrusted Hayato with nothing that had any real meaning. Hayato knew he was expected just to be, to endure the long days as an insurance that had no purpose in life until his father should happen to die. All he did was drink. He had a bottle of sake in his hand now, and he swigged from it with indolent rage.

  He turned to look out upon the world, across the manicured vistas of his father’s gardens. He looked at everything and nothing, losing track of time, anger building in him as it always seemed to.

  A door slid open behind him. Two young handmaidens were there, pretty like dolls. They were talking to each other quietly, but the sight of the lord checked them into silence. They smiled and bowed, keeping their eyes low. Hayato looked at them with a dispassionate eye, trying to remember if he had taken either of them before.

  The hallway was narrow, and they had to file one after the other to pass him. They did so demurely, and he turned so that they had to brush almost face-to-face with him. The first one he did not know, but the second he suddenly recognized. It was the koto player from the palanquin after Shinmen’s battle. He remembered a lull in the music and a hot burn across his cheeks.