Child of Vengeance Read online

  “What are you laughing at?” he said, stepping forward to force her against the wall.

  “My lord?” she said, her face blank and her eyes not meeting his, as was proper etiquette.

  “ ‘What are you laughing at?’ I said,” he snarled, and tried to take her wrist.

  Instead she wriggled free and dropped onto her knees, placing her hands and her brow flat on the ground as she blabbered apologies. Her companion stood shocked, but she knew she could not interfere. She clasped her hands together and turned to one side, trying to keep her face still but with worry in her eyes and in the quivering of her bottom lip.

  Hayato watched the girl grovel, the black circle of her bound hair bobbing. For a moment he considered bringing the bottle down upon the back of her head, but he stopped himself. He knew she was a particular favorite of his father, and if she turned up to serve him with shards of pottery stuck in her skull, the old letch would ask questions.

  She was just another painted crane. The young lord dismissed her with a disgusted grunt, and together she and the other scurried off down the hall backward, bowing and apologizing until they were gone.

  It was not her he was truly angry at, Hayato knew, nor the sniggering of some dullwits whose purpose in life was to bear him aloft. You could not punish crows for eating carrion, after all. She—all of them—had merely laughed. It was not they who had insulted and belittled him in front of his father. It was not they who had robbed him of a domain and condemned him to linger here.

  No, that was someone else entirely.

  That was someone worthy of anger.

  He basked in his ability for level magnanimity for a moment, and then the young Lord Nakata went to plan. He had found purpose.

  A week of tomorrows passed, but still Bennosuke could not find the courage to speak to Munisai. Instead, he and his father existed in some awkward, unspoken standoff. It was impossible to avoid each other entirely in a village so small, and sometimes the boy would feel the man’s gaze upon him from a distance. Their eyes would meet for a second, then Bennosuke would blush, bow, and walk away. Munisai never followed.

  The boy followed him, though—he was drawn to the landward ridge whenever he had a free moment in the day, to see whether Munisai was down among the ruins. And more often than not, he was. He imagined sitting beside the man in silent contemplation, that this would somehow make things better. It was a stupid fantasy with a beginning and an end, but no middle. The middle was what he needed to know, and the lack of it eluded and taunted him whenever he put his mind to it.

  BENNOSUKE WAS IN the dojo one afternoon with his arm around Tasumi’s throat. He was clinging to the samurai’s back with his legs locked around his waist, trying to wrench him to the ground. It was futile, for Tasumi was a heavy man and bore the boy easily, but Bennosuke struggled and hauled like a monkey. The absurdity of it got to Tasumi first. The samurai started laughing between his breaths, and it spread to Bennosuke until the pair of them were giggling as they struggled.

  Neither one relented, however. What stopped them was a voice, cold and balanced.

  “You should never take both feet off the ground in combat,” it said, and there was Munisai.

  He was on the outside looking in through the wide doors that were cast open in the day. Were it not for the arm in the sling he would have been the very image of samurai too; his face hard beneath a shaven scalp, his shoulders narrow and leading down to a solid, heavy abdomen, a perfect center of balance from which his two swords jutted imperiously. Bennosuke sheepishly dropped from his uncle’s back before he and Tasumi bowed in greeting.

  “Your uncle is being kind to you,” continued Munisai, returning the gesture with a snap of his chin. “Were it a real fight, he would have dropped his weight back down on top of your rib cage, and what could you have done to have stopped it? Nothing.”

  “It is only sparring, brother,” said Tasumi guardedly, for though marriage obliged him to call the man “brother,” Munisai was higher in rank than he was. “No need to go for the jugular every time.”

  “Indeed,” said Munisai, but he was looking only at Bennosuke. “Might you leave me with your student?”

  “As you wish,” said Tasumi, and he bowed twice more before he left. Bennosuke had never seen his uncle so demure.

  Then it was just the boy standing before his father. The man merely looked at him. Bennosuke knew he was being evaluated far more closely than at their first meeting. The samurai’s eyes were tracing every line of his face. He felt more naked than when he had been wearing solely the loincloth.

  Bennosuke fought the blush and forced his eyes up to the man’s gaze. Time hung between heartbeats, welling toward something. It became nothing more defined than that, though; Munisai turned away before whatever it was could come to be. There was a look in his eyes, but it was not disgust. That surprised Bennosuke. He felt his confidence grow slightly.

  “You study hard under Tasumi?” said Munisai, his back to the boy as he looked out across the village.

  “I do,” said Bennosuke.

  “Good,” said Munisai. “You bear a noble name. You must uphold it.”

  It was an oblique statement, and the boy wondered if he was being tested. Bennosuke thought for what the samurai response would be. After a moment, he asked: “Is our Lord Shinmen well?”

  “Our lord is in fine health,” said Munisai, surprised at the maturity of the question.

  He had received a missive just this morning from Shinmen. When he had twisted open the lacquer tube, he had expected at best scorn for abandoning his post and at worst a command to return and face some form of justice, but the sliver of paper had simply read:

  Continue with your duty of the stewardship of Miyamoto. All in order here.

  The samurai’s face darkened for a moment as he thought of what might be happening in his absence, the color burgundy coming to his mind, but he forced it from himself. A civil conversation with the boy, with what he represented written stark across his face, was hard enough. He struggled for something to say, and could find nothing narrower than: “If you train hard, is it because you wish to be a samurai?”

  “Yes,” said Bennosuke.

  “Tell me, then—what does it mean to you?”

  “To win battles and duels, and earn glory and honor,” said Bennosuke, this time with no deliberation. He tried to make his voice forceful, as though he might prove his conviction, but all it provoked from Munisai was a momentary turn of the head and a cruel whisper of a laugh.

  “My,” said the samurai, “you have been isolated out here, haven’t you?”

  “Well then—what does it mean?” said the boy, hotter than he would have liked. The tone did not seem to rile Munisai, however.

  “A man who wonders whether he should eat or not should not. A man who is concerned with whether he should live or die should die,” said Munisai. “I have heard it expressed no more succinctly than this.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Bennosuke.

  “A child cannot,” said Munisai.

  There was no cruelty in his voice. Bennosuke looked at the floor nonetheless, unsure if he was being castigated. Teach me, he wanted to say, but he knew that would appear pathetic. Instead he simply stood, waiting for his father to speak. Munisai said nothing, and so they lingered in silence.

  “Come, then,” Munisai eventually said, retreating to the safety of what he knew and walking over to the racks of mock swords that hung upon the walls. “Show me what you have learned of combat.”

  Bennosuke hesitated, seeing that only one hand ran over the weapons. “Your arm, Father, isn’t it—”

  “Do not call me ‘Father,’ ” said Munisai sharply, and he seemed as surprised as the boy at the harshness in his tone. He took a moment to compose himself, before he spoke once more. “You are much too old to be speaking like that. And my arm is of no concern to you—single-handed shortsword is not my preferred style, but I am adept at it.”

  That, at least, w
as honest. With a mock sword half the size of Bennosuke’s firm in his good hand, he effortlessly bested both hands of the boy. Munisai’s blows were quick and precise at first, stunting the boy’s attacks before lunging at him. Then the samurai invited the boy forward, testing him, gauging him, and when Bennosuke thought he saw a glimpse of victory it proved only to be an illusion.

  He was turned and repelled again and again, and eventually Munisai brought the blunt edge of the wood down on the boy’s wrists a final time. The sword rattled away across the floor.

  “Don’t bother to pick it up,” said Munisai as the boy went after it. Bennosuke obeyed, and stood to receive the verdict of the man: “There are inklings of promise in you. But you use your shoulders too much. The strength of the sword comes from the wrist and forearms. Scything grass and cutting a man are two different things. Think on this.”

  It was not praise, but it did not shame him either. Bennosuke had started to get angry and humiliated after his first few attempts were parried, but slowly he had begun to realize the ability of the man and found fascination in it.

  “Are you really the Nation’s Finest?” he asked.

  “I won a tournament that granted me that title, but it is a nominal title and nothing more,” said Munisai. “I did not fight every swordsman in the country—just those who deigned to attend the old Lord Ashikaga.”

  “But you must have fought some of the elite?” probed the boy.

  The samurai nodded. “Some. Five years ago now, though. Some of them are probably dead.”

  “What does that matter? You still beat them then.”

  “It means that younger men will come to fill their void, and they will look to beat me or others like me. And, well,” said Munisai, as he looked ruefully at his arm tucked up in the sling, “time is not kind to those who deal in cutting. The best … whatever you call it … the epitome is ever fleeting. But this does not concern me. This is the way of the world, and that title was just a ridiculous prize, a thing of pure vanity.”

  “Well, if you think that,” Bennosuke said, “why did you enter the tournament in the first place?”

  It was an honest question that brought another color to Munisai’s mind: the gaudy light blue of his old armor. Memories passed through him and disgust followed, dispelling whatever might have allowed him to talk further. His face darkened once more, and he stalked off to replace the mock sword from where he had taken it.

  Bennosuke saw the change come into his father. He did not understand it, but he did not want to let this chance escape. Instead of quailing at some imagined fault as he might have done, the sparring had given him a strange confidence. The boy straightened himself up and spoke to the man’s back.

  “I’ve seen you, these past days. You go to the ruins. I go there too, sometimes. Might we go together one day so that we can pay respects to my moth—” he said, and then remembered the rebuke of earlier. “To Lady Yoshiko together?”

  “Why would I pay respect to Yoshiko down there?” said Munisai, and though his face was almost entirely hidden the boy saw the man’s brow furrow momentarily.

  “She died there, in the fire,” said the boy.

  “Of course,” said Munisai, and he turned to reveal a carefully neutral face once more. “Of course. It has been some time. I … pray to her at shrines and so forth instead. Habits.”

  “Yes,” said Bennosuke. “So we can go?”

  “One day,” said Munisai. “Perhaps.”

  The gate of his estate rattled on its hinges behind Munisai, banging open again with the force. Munisai didn’t care. He didn’t even need a gate; no one in the village would rob him. It was there only for the sake of completeness, for presenting a solid wall framed against the skyline like some fortress. A perfect steward’s house, taking all beneath it in its vigil but hiding what lay within.

  His mind was occupied, in any case. Night had fallen, and the samurai walked down into the dark valley and its maze of pathways between the still paddy fields. The peasants were long retired to their hovels, the distant murmur of their voices carrying out of the basin. Insects hummed in clouds around the lanterns that burned at arbitrary intersections, and below them frogs gathered in glistening clusters at the edges of the waters to lash with their tongues at any winged thing that strayed too close.

  Perhaps they were not the only hunters that night. Munisai felt his skin prickle—more than his wounded arm, this time—and halted. He looked into the darkness, searching. After a moment he walked on.

  Down then up, through a holy gate, and then into the grounds of the temple of Amaterasu. The shrine proper was hidden against the blackness of the sky, but the lowly shack Dorinbo lived in glowed from within. The gaps between the cheap planking that formed the wall were painted in dancing orange lines on the dirt. It was an ascetic’s abode, and Munisai felt as though he might break the thin door as he rapped upon it.

  He did not wait for an answer, sliding it open and then, with more care than he had treated his own gate, closing it silently. Dorinbo emerged from one of the handful of rooms, surprised at the intrusion. He was still wearing his black robe of duty, his eyes not dulled by sleep.

  “What is it?” the monk said. “Your wound?”

  “One of them,” said Munisai, and he could not stop the bitter smirk crossing his own face. “May I enter?”

  Dorinbo, confused though he was, nodded and led his brother into what passed for his living room. A half-finished letter to some distant scholar lay upon the floor, the ink still wet. He moved it and his set of brushes and pots to one side, and then gestured for Munisai to sit. The samurai did so, cross-legged and stiff, and Dorinbo joined him in expectant silence.

  “The boy,” said Munisai eventually.

  “You finally spoke to him?”

  “I tried,” said Munisai, “but it seems that you have not.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It seems that he is confused about his mother.”

  “Indeed,” said Dorinbo. His body straightened.

  “It seems he believes she died in the fire,” continued Munisai.

  Neither spoke for a long moment. In the corner of the room a small stone image of a Buddha sat in the shade of a carefully pruned bonsai tree. It was weathered with age to little more than a vague, rounded effigy, and within the malformed indentation that was his lap lay the shears for tending the tree. The steel was blackened save for the sliver of the edge that caught the candlelight.

  “Do you remember our father?” said the monk eventually. “Do you remember his little games to harden us up, make little samurai of us?”

  “I do,” said Munisai.

  “Do you remember the feel of the edges of rocks when he made us walk barefoot through the mountains? Do you remember the ache in your stomach when he refused us food for days? Do you? Or how about the blows he watched us give each other after those long days when he made us fight for a single ball of rice or a sliver of fish?”

  “You make it sound as if he tortured us. Everything he did had a purpose,” said Munisai.

  “Do you remember the chill of the sea that morning?” said Dorinbo.

  “Ah,” said Munisai flatly, “your ‘malaise.’ ”

  “We were out there in the water for hours. I was hacking up blood with every cough that entire winter. If it hadn’t been for the skill of the monks Father sent me to, I probably would have died,” said Dorinbo.

  “You died anyway, in a way,” said Munisai, eyes cold. “The manly part of you. They put their weakness in you, and now what do you have? No swords and a shaved head. No will.”

  “Oh, I still had will, Munisai,” said Dorinbo. “Do you think Father took one of his sons becoming a monk well? Renouncing the glorious path of the warrior our ancestors have trodden from the dawn of time? He had a scourge and a bamboo sword, and a month free to devote to me. You’re not the only one who has scars.

  “But I persisted. I had seen the path that was meant for me, and he could not break me. Wh
at he did, though, with every blow and every drop of blood drawn, was put a terrible hatred into me. I hated him for what he did to me, and I hated him for the way he hated me. And I still do hate him. He’s long dead, but when I think of his face I feel something twinge deep in my guts, like a fist clenching.

  “This is my shame. Amaterasu teaches us that the world is not perfect—she alone is—but it is the duty of every right man not to sully it further with petty grievance. This is the path to serenity. I want to forgive him, I know I should. But I cannot. I see his face, imagine him standing on the other side of the Sanzu River as a ghost even, and I just want to spit. This is a terrible burden. A damning burden.”

  “And why tell me this?” said Munisai. “It’s not as though I can give you absolution.”

  “Because, my brother, I will not be the one to pass the same burden on to Bennosuke. Even if he has to face it someday, it will not be because of me. And what you did, Munisai, was more than any scourge could do.”

  Dorinbo stared at his brother in the silence that followed. Munisai turned his head to face the wall before the blush could start. Through the cracks he could just about sense movement in the adjacent room. He squinted, focused, saw black moving on black. Someone taking care not to be heard. His face hardened, and he turned back to Dorinbo.

  “You scorn it, but you don’t realize that hatred is useful,” the samurai said. “A world built on hatred would achieve far more than one built on love. Hatred focuses men, gives them the will to push themselves beyond what they thought they could endure or achieve.”

  “It maddens them, is what you mean,” said Dorinbo. “A dog will eventually gnaw its own trapped paw off when the pain becomes too great. How is that any different?”

  “The dog lives—it’s useful.”

  “A samurai condoning dismemberment,” said Dorinbo. “How shocking. A poor example, then, but you cannot—”