After the fall of Osaka, Kanbei has only one goal left: get Sadayuki home to Mino alive. Wounded by a spear and carrying an infection no doctor can stop, Sadayuki grows weaker with every mile north. As roads close, doors are shut against them, and hope slips away, Kanbei never leaves his side. Some promises are kept to the very end.
---
Content warnings: major character death, suicide, graphic injury, fever
---
They left Osaka with the smoke still standing over the castle, two men among thousands walking north to get away from the city, and Tokugawa troops moved through the ruined town behind them like water filling a broken bowl.
Kanbei found Sadayuki at a burned-out storehouse on the last day of the battle, after he'd already spent an hour certain he was dead. Sadayuki was sitting against the wall with his hand pressed to his side, gray in the face, and he looked up and produced the same crooked grin he had worn since they were seven years old and first became friends.
"You look like you've seen a ghost."
"I thought I had."
"Not yet." He put out his free hand. "Help me up."
Kanbei did, and they walked out of Osaka together. Kanbei didn't look too closely at the hand pressed to that side because Sadayuki said the spear had gone in shallow and come out clean and there was no time at any rate, there was never any time; the road north was full of men in a hurry to stop being samurai of a defeated house.
They had been born a few streets apart in a castle town in Mino, and Kanbei could not remember a time before he had known Sadayuki. He remembered instead all the evenings he had spent not at his own house but at Sadayuk's, the long summers in the garden, because his own home was unsafe whenever his father was drinking, which was most nights, and the sound of breaking cups and his mother's thin voice followed him as he ran out the gate.
Sadayuki's family had never once asked why he came so often or stayed so late. They simply set out another portion for dinner and laid out a spare futon, and Sadayuki's mother mended the tears in his kimono without comment.
So the two boys had grown up more like brothers than friends, and then, when they were grown and had taken their places among their lord's retainers, into something more that lasted. Such bonds between young men were common enough and were meant to end when the younger took his adult name. Theirs did not. Eight years on, the men they stood watch with had stopped remarking on it.
---
It was three days before Kanbei made Sadayuki show him the wound.
They stopped at midday in a stand of bamboo off the road, and Sadayuki lowered himself down with the particular care of a man who worked out exactly which movements he can afford, and Kanbei watched him do it and said, not unkindly but also not in a way that was a request that could be refused, "Let me see."
"It's nothing."
"Then it costs you nothing to show me."
"Kanbei—"
"You've been favoring it since Osaka. You sleep on your right. You went white going up that bank this morning and thought I didn't see." He knelt in front of him. "Sada. Please. Let me see it."
Sadayuki looked at him a long moment. Then, with a sigh that was half a laugh, he began working to take off his kobakama and shitagi. "You were always like this. Do you remember, when I broke my wrist and hid it, and you told my mother."
"You'd have kept using it."
"I would have." His hands slowed. He got the clothes loose and then paused over the poorly wrapped bandage made from strips of cloth that, Kanbei realized, had come from the bottom hem of his undergarment. "It isn't pretty."
"I don't need it to be pretty."
Sadayuki undid the bandages. Below the ribs on the left side was a wound the width of two fingers that had not closed. The edges were pulled apart and dark, the flesh around them swollen and hot-looking, and the whole of it wept a thin fluid onto the cloth. The smell that came off it when the wrappings came away was not the smell of a wound healing.
Kanbei looked at it and did not let his face change.
"Well?" said Sadayuki lightly.
"It wants a doctor." He was already getting to stripping off his own undergarment, tearing strips from the hem, which was cleaner than what Sadayuki had been using. "That's all. It wants a doctor and it wants to be kept clean, and you've been walking with it for three days and telling me it's nothing."
"There's a doctor in every post town."
"Then we'll easily find one." Kanbei wrapped it, gently, his hands careful, and drew the cloth snug and no tighter. "Lift your arm." He tucked the end securely. "There."
Sadayuki caught his wrist as he pulled away. He said, "It's not so bad as your face says it is."
"My face says nothing."
"Your face," Sadayuki said, "has never in its life said nothing," and Kanbei bent his head and pressed a kiss to his forehead, briefly, and got up to see about a fire.
---
The first doctor was in a post town on the Ise road, an old man with ink-stained fingertips, and he took one look at the two of them — filthy, carrying swords, their clothing stiff with somebody's blood still — and asked where they had come from.
Kanbei said, "The south."
"How far south?"
"Far enough."
The old man's face did not move at all. "I have a wife," he said. "There are men riding through here twice a week asking after Osaka men, and they've burned two houses in this town already for less than sheltering one." He looked at Sadayuki, at the way he was standing, and something in the look was not unkind. "I'm sorry. But go on quickly, and don't say you stopped here."
The second was two days further, and would not open the door at all.
The third took their money, every last mon they had between them, which was little enough, looked at the wound and pressed at it with his fingers until Sadayuki's winced, and said that the flesh had turned and wanted drawing, and gave them a paper packet of powdered something to make a poultice with, and told them to come back in a week. They could not come back in a week, they'd be a week closer to home by then.
Kanbei made the poultice anyway, every night for six nights, kneeling over Sadayuki in whatever shelter they had found, working the paste warm between his palms first so it would not shock him with the cold.
It did nothing.
On the seventh night, unwrapping him, Kanbei saw that the redness had spread past the width he could measure with his own hand, and that at the lower edge of it the skin had gone a dusky purple, and that there were fine, dark lines running up toward the ribs like the veins in a leaf.
He sat back on his heels.
"That bad?" Sadayuki said. He was watching Kanbei's face, as he had always been able to read Kanbei's face.
"It's spreading."
"Ah." Sadayuki closed his eyes. After a moment he said, "I'm sorry. I should have told you at Osaka. I thought—" He stopped. Breathed. "I thought if we just kept moving, I'd get home, and my mother would—"
His mother, who had set an extra bowl at the table for a frightened boy all those years ago, and laid out a spare futon, and mended his kimono without comment.
"I just wanted to make it home," Sadayuki said.
"I know." Kanbei's voice was steady, which cost him something. "We're not finished yet. Sleep."
They tried the temples after that.
At the third temple the gate did not open. There was a notice pasted to the post beside it, in a clean official hand, listing what would be done to those who sheltered the any men of the fallen house, and Kanbei read it twice and then took Sadayuki's arm and turned him around and led him back down the steps.
At the first, a young monk gave them rice and let them sleep in the temple hall and said, apologetically, that there was no one there with any healing skill.
At the second, an older monk looked at Sadayuki's face and told Kanbei quietly, out of earshot, to think about where he wanted his friend to be when he died. Kanbei told him to keep his mouth shut. Then he begged his pardon and asked him for prayers, and the old monk did, and gave them what rice he could spare, and stood at the gate watching them go.
He offered his sword to a pawnshop in a village whose name he never learned, and the clerk, who was not a bad man, said, "Where's a ronin going to be without his sword?" and gave him some rice anyway, and told him to keep the blade.
---
By the fifth week Sadayuki could not walk more than half a ri without stopping, and by the end of that week he could not walk at all, so Kanbei carried him.
He carried him on his back, arms hooked under his thighs, Sadayuki's forearms crossed loose at his collarbone and his cheek against the back of Kanbei's shoulder, and Sadayuki's breath went in and out against his neck, and Kanbei counted his own steps and stopped every two hundred to rest, and hated the stopping, because getting Sadayuki up again was worse each time. He weighed almost nothing by then. That was the thing Kanbei could not stop thinking about, the whole of that last week, the terrible lightness of him — this man who had once thrown him into the Nagara river on a dare, who had carried a wounded ashigaru a full ri at Osaka without complaining, folded now onto his back like a child.
"Put me down," Sadayuki said, sometimes, into his neck. "You'll ruin yourself."
"Be quiet."
"Kanbei."
"Be quiet and hold on."
Once, half asleep, he murmured something about the persimmon tree in his mother's garden, and Kanbei answered him as though the question had been sensible, and told him yes, it would be flowering now, cream and pale yellow petals, and they would see it soon.
He kept walking. There was nothing else in the world to do but keep walking.
He found the hollow on the sixth day of carrying Sadayuki, in the rain. He had seen the abandoned farmhouse from the grade above an hour earlier and walked past it, because they did not stop in daylight if they could help it; and then it had begun to rain, a steady drizzle still cold with early spring, and Sadayuki had begun to shiver against his back in a way that would not stop, and Kanbei put a hand back to feel his forehead and found him feverish, and turned around.
He carried him down. The path was mud and he went down twice onto one knee and did not let him fall, and did not put him down, not once, not even to rest, and by the time he ducked through the doorway into the dark of the old house his arms had gone into a kind of numbness, and his knees stung, and his own breath was sobbing in his chest.
The house must have stood empty for years. There was a single main room stepping up from the entrance with its packed earth floor, a sunken irori choked with old ash, and a roof that held over perhaps half the space and let the rain through the rest. Pegs on the wall where tools had hung. A broken loom in a corner. Mouse droppings along the walls. But the ground by the hearth was dry, and it was out of the wind.
Kanbei laid Sadayuki down there as carefully as he had ever done anything, and then knelt over him a moment with his hands on either side of him, getting his breath, water running off his hair onto Sadayuki's face.
Sadayuki opened his eyes. "You're crying," he observed.
"It's raining."
"Mm," said Sadayuki, and closed his eyes again, and Kanbei went to make a fire.
---
Those were the last days.
There was a stream at the bottom of the hollow and that first evening Kanbei settled Sadayuki besides the fire, his own shitagi folded under his head as a pillow, and said he would be gone the length of a hundred breaths. Sadayuki, already sliding under, nodded; and Kanbei went out into the wet blue dusk with the dented pot he'd found in the house and ran the whole way there and the whole way back with his heart going like a hoofbeat, certain that in the little time he had been gone Sadayuki's breathing would have stopped.
It had not. Kanbei stood in the doorway and watched the rise and fall of Sadayuki's chest for a moment before he could trust his legs to carry him the rest of the way in.
Kanbei gave him water first. He knelt and got an arm under his shoulders and lifted his head into the crook of it and tipped the pot to his mouth a little at a time — wet the lips first, then let him drink, a swallow, a rest, a swallow — because the throat of a man that weak can drown from a mouthful. Half of it ran into his face. Kanbei wiped his chin with his sleeve between swallows and talked to him the whole time, low, the way you speak to a horse or a frightened child or a man you love. "There. Slowly. There's no hurry, we've all night. Little more. Good."
Kanbei cooked the last of the rice down soft, long past what anyone would call done, into a thin white gruel a man too weak to chew could take, and fed it to Sadayuki off the ends of his fingers because he had nothing else for utensils; and later, when Sadayuki roused enough, let him drink it slowly from the tilted pot the way he had taken the water. Three mouthfuls was a good evening. Kanbei told him it was a good evening and ate what was left himself so none went to waste. Then he went to refill the pot with water and set it by the edge of the fire to warm again for whenever the next waking came.
The wakings came less and less. That was what he watched, in those days — how the clear stretches shortened and the fever lengthened, how Sadayuki would surface and know him and even, once, make some ghost of a joke.
"You've turned into a decent nursemaid."
"I've had practice. You were a sickly child."
"I was not. I was delicate."
And then the fever would pull him back down into the muttering country where he was not always certain where he was or which year.
Kanbei learned the tides of it. He learned when a word would reach him and when nothing would. He kept the fire fed. When the shivering came, teeth going, Sadayuki's whole body shaking hard enough to wrench at the wound, Kanbei lay down alongside him and put his own warmth against him and held him through it with his hand spread flat on his chest to feel it rise, and did not sleep, and did not move.
And still he had to leave. Water did not fetch itself and the fire ate wood faster than he could gather it. He learned the shortest path to the stream and exactly how long an armful of dry-enough wood cost him, and he was never gone a breath longer than he had to be, and all the time he was gone some part of him strained back toward the house, listening for a silence he was afraid to come home to.
Once he came back to find Sadayuki lying twisted in a way that must have hurt, calling — not for him, but for his mother, in a small lost voice that went through Kanbei like cold water. He dropped the wood in the doorway and crossed the room in two strides and gathered him up against his chest.
"I'm here. Sada. I'm here, I only went for wood, I'm here."
"Kanbei?"
"Yes."
"Don't—" His hand moved, found a fistful of Kanbei's kimono, and held it. "Don't go far."
"No," Kanbei said. "No. Nowhere."
He did not go far after that, and he went fast, and he came back faster.
---
The wound went past anything the eye should have to see. The dark of it spread up under the ribs. The smell got into everything, into Kanbei's own hair and clothes, so that he stopped being able to smell it at all and only knew it was worse because each time he opened the dressing the marks had climbed higher.
He talked to him while he did it. About the persimmon tree and the garden. About a festival when they were fifteen and Sadayuki had somehow lost one of his geta in the crowd and walked home barefoot, singing. About the Nagara river. He was not always certain he was heard, but he thought a man might hear such things even so.
There was nothing to be done for it. He changed the bandages anyway, gently, warming his hands first; and washed the used cloths in the stream and dried them at the fire and used them again, because there were no others; and he did all of it with his face perfectly still, because Sadayuki could read his face even at the bottom of the fever, and Kanbei was not going to let the last thing he read there be despair.
On what he thought was the fourth or fifth day — he had stopped being sure — Sadayuki came up clear one last time, clearer than he had been since the road, the way a lamp will flare just before the oil is gone. His eyes found Kanbei and knew him completely, and there was something in them that was almost calm.
"Kanbei."
"I'm here." He came and knelt and took his hand.
"You should go on. Home." His voice was a thread. "Before the passes close. Tell my mother—" He stopped, and something crossed his face, and he let that go, because there was nothing to tell her that would be any use to her. He tried again. "You could still make it."
"I'm not going anywhere."
"I knew you'd say that." A breath of the old grin, the seven-year-old's grin, the one Kanbei had first seen across a garden wall. "I only thought I ought to give you the chance to be sensible. Once. In your life."
"You've never given me a sensible thing in your life," Kanbei said, "and I've never wanted one," and lifted his hand and held it against his own cheek.
Sadayuki's fingers moved a little there. There was almost no strength in them.
"Stay," he said.
Kanbei was never afterward certain whether he had meant stay here, or stay with me, or something older, some request from far back down the long road of the two of them, from a garden in Mino twenty years gone. It did not matter. The answer was the same to all of it.
"I'm not going anywhere," he said. "Do you hear me? Not anywhere."
And Sadayuki, satisfied, let his eyes close.
---
The fever took him back down after that and did not give him up again.
His breathing changed toward the end of that night, going shallow, then labored, each breath dragged in and let out slow, with long frightening pauses between where Kanbei counted his own heartbeats and waited.
He did not let go of him. He held him against his chest with his Sadayuk's head at the hollow of his shoulder, the way they had slept a hundred nights on campaigns, and he talked to him, low and steady, the whole night through — about the persimmon tree, about the festival, about the green hills of Mino and how good it would be to see them again, though he no longer believed either of them would.
The rain had stopped by the time it was over. In the gray before dawn the pauses grew longer, and longer, and then there was one that did not end.
Kanbei went on holding Sadayuki a long while after. He could not be the one to say it was finished.
---
When at last he laid him down, he did it carefully, straightening his limbs, drawing the ruined shitagi over the wound so that it was hidden, closing his eyes as one is meant to.
Sadayuki's face had lost the drawn grayness of the last weeks. In the dim light he looked almost young again, almost the boy from over the garden wall, and Kanbei sat beside him a long time and looked at that face and did not think much of anything at all.
Then he thought about the road.
It was still there. North and east through the hills, and he could take it. He could walk out of this hollow and follow the Nakasendo home to Mino and stand at Sadayuki's gate and tell a woman who had once fed him and mended his kimono that her son had died in an abandoned farmhouse in the mountains, and that he, Kanbei, had lived.
He did not want it because there was no shape to it. A road without Sadayuki at the end of it was not a road, only a distance; and he had spent the whole of his life going toward wherever Sadayuki was — four streets over, an extra bowl, a spare futon, the far side of a bad night — and there was no such place anywhere in the world now, and would not be again.
The fire had burned to nothing. Outside, the first birds had started, and pale light was coming into the hollow, and far off across the wet, green hills a temple bell was ringing the hour.
Kanbei drew his sword and laid it across his knees, sitting a while in the quiet beside Sadayuki, and was not afraid. It seemed a small thing, and a simple one, next to everything else.
He had never wanted to be anywhere Sadayuki was not.
He did not intend to start now.
---
They were found by a woodcutter who wandered down into the hollow, and then by the men he brought back from the nearest village: two samurai of the losing side, dead in an abandoned farmhouse far from any road that went anywhere. Nobody knew their names or their domain. The villagers, being kind, buried them together at the edge of the old overgrown field and set a single stone, and in time the brush grew up around it, and the names of the two men who had known each other their whole lives and had wanted only to go home were lost entirely, as such names usually are.
But the village remembered, for a generation or so, that the two had been buried side by side because it had seemed to the woodcutter who found them, that one had lain himself down very deliberately close to the other, as near as he could get, the way a man lies down beside someone he does not intend to leave.
A young ronin answers a wealthy Osaka merchant's notice for a bodyguard and finds the position is nothing of the kind.
Stripped of his swords, his name, and every road out, Tachibana Shiro learns exactly how much a man can be made to bear when there is nothing else left, and how little it costs a rich man to take him apart by inches.
The notice had been pinned to the board outside the rice broker's on Dotonbori, one sheet among many, and Shiro might have passed it over entirely had the paper not been of such noticeably good quality: thick and bright, the ink well-ground, the characters brushed by someone who had been taught to write well. Guard wanted. Sober, discreet, competent with a blade. Room and board provided, and a wage in addition that made him read the line twice to be certain.
He had been in Osaka for three months by then, and in that time had eaten, on average, once a day, and sometimes not even that. His swords were his father's swords, and his grandfather's before that, and he had told himself a hundred times that he would sooner starve than surrender them to the pawnbroker on Nagahori who had eyed the fittings with such open greed. He was beginning to suspect that the resolution would soon be tested in earnest, because his kimono had begun to feel loose across the chest in a way it had not when he came to the city, so that he wrapped it more tightly across himself each morning and cinched his obi a little further, and his cheeks had gone hollow in a way he noticed now whenever he caught his reflection.
He held the district in his head from the notice and walked out past the edge of the city until the townhouses thinned, and where the road forked he asked a woman drawing water at a well which way to the wholesaler's estate. She looked him over — the two swords, the worn hakama, the hollow face — and pointed without a word, as though she had already decided what such a man wanted at such a house and had judged it none of her concern.
The estate belonged to a man named Kihei, of the Iseya, a wholesaler of both cotton and oil whose name Shiro had heard spoken with the particular flatness people reserved for the very rich. The main house stood perhaps half a ri beyond the last of the townhouses, screened from the road by a wall of stone and plaster topped with grey tile, and when the gate was opened to him Shiro understood at once that the wage listed on the notice had not been a mistake. The garden alone would have swallowed the yearly income of the minor retainer his father had once been: a pond fed by a diverted stream, stone lanterns furred with moss that had been encouraged rather than merely permitted, a pine trained over the course of some patient lifetime into the shape of a cresting wave.
He was received with a courtesy that, at the time, he mistook for respect.
"You'll want to wash off the road," said the steward, a narrow man of middle years named Tobei whose smile never quite reached the flat of his eyes. "The master keeps a particular household. He'll receive you properly once you're presentable. Leave your things here — they'll be looked after."
It was ordinary enough. Any well-run house would offer a bath to a guest come dusty off the highway, and it was not unreasonable that a merchant of Kihei's standing would prefer that an armed man not track the filth of the road across his floors. Shiro slid the daisho from his obi and passed the two swords across with the small reluctance he always felt, watching to see that they were laid down with care rather than propped carelessly in a corner. Tobei set them on a lacquered rack as though he handled such things every day, and perhaps he did.
The bath was very fine. The water had been heated to just short of scalding and scented faintly with something Shiro could not name, and he lay in it until his fingers wrinkled, feeling the cold of three months leach out of the deep muscle of his back for the first time. When he climbed out there was no sign of his own worn clothing. In its place, folded on the changing bench, lay a kimono of soft grey and a juban of undyed cotton, both clean, both better than anything he had worn since leaving home.
He should have understood then. He turned it over afterward many times, lying in the dark, the exact moment he might have understood and did not. The clothes were the moment. A house that wished to dress its bodyguard would leave him his own garments and add a haori with the shop's crests; a house that wished a man to have nothing of his own took the clothes away entirely.
But he was warm, and clean, and had been hungry for a long time, and so he dressed in what was given and followed the maidservant down the corridor toward the room where he was told the master waited.
Kihei was seated on a raised dais at the far end, and he did not rise. He was a soft-bodied man past his fiftieth year, with the smooth hands of someone who had never done violence to anything he could not pay another to do violence to, and he looked at Shiro the way a man looks at a horse he has already bought — assessing not whether to acquire it but what use he would put it to now that it was his.
"Sit," Kihei said.
Shiro sat, because there seemed no reason not to.
"You're younger than I'd hoped," Kihei said. "But that's no matter. The face is good — better than good. What's your name and your house?"
"Tachibana Shiro. My father served the—"
"I didn't ask who your father served." Kihei's voice did not rise. That was the thing Shiro would remember: how little the man raised his voice, ever, through all of it. "A ronin's father is nobody. If his son were anybody he wouldn't be standing in my genkan begging work off a merchant. Isn't that so?"
The words landed somewhere beneath the ribs. Shiro kept his face still — his father had taught him that much, before the sickness took him and the stipend went with him — but he felt the color come up in his neck.
"I've come about the position of guard," he said carefully. "If the terms have changed, I'll trouble you no further."
"Sit down. I haven't dismissed you." Kihei folded his soft hands in his lap. "There's no position of guard. I've no enemies who'd trouble a house like mine, and no fool would rob a man with the machi-bugyo's ear the way I have it. The notice was to bring in a certain kind of man. A samurai kind of man. Do you understand me yet?"
"No," said Shiro, though the first cold finger of it had begun to trace up his spine.
"My grandfather was a farmer," Kihei said, in the pleasant tone of a man settling in to a favorite story. "He knelt in the mud when the tax-samurai rode through, and if he was slow to press his forehead to the earth they'd lay a horse whip across his back for it. My father knelt too. I've knelt, in my time — smiled and knelt and paid, while some hungry sword-carrier with holes in his hakama looked down his nose at me as though the rice I grew and the cloth I sold weren't the only reason his kind didn't starve." He smiled. "And now here you are. Hungry. And no one in the world who'll come looking."
Shiro was on his feet before he had decided to be. "I'll take my swords and go."
"Tobei," Kihei said, not loudly.
The fusuma behind Shiro had opened without his hearing it. There were four of them — big men, dockhands' shoulders, the sort of muscle a wholesaler kept to move bales and, evidently, for other work besides. He had no blade. He had trained since he could stand, but he had no blade, and four men in a room against one man with no blade is not a fight; it is only a delay.
Still, he made them work for it. He was fast, and he put one of them on the floor gasping with a heel driven up beneath the short ribs and opened another's lip against his knuckles, but there were four, and the room was small, and in the end they had his arms wrenched up behind him hard enough that he felt the joint of the left shoulder give a warning creak, and a knee in the small of his back had him bent double toward the fine floor he'd been so careful not to dirty.
"There," said Kihei, who had not moved. "That temper. That's exactly the thing. I paid to see that."
"You're mad," Shiro said, into the tatami.
"I'm rich," said Kihei. "It's very nearly the same, and considerably safer. Now. I'll explain your situation once, and you'll do me the courtesy of listening, because I dislike repeating myself.
"Your swords are mine. Your name is nobody's — I told you that already. No one saw you come, and the men who might have read that notice have long since forgotten it. You'll stay in this house, and you'll do as you're bid, and in return you'll eat better than you've eaten in a year and you'll have clean futons and clothes and the nice bath, which is more than the world was offering you this morning. Or." He paused, and the pause was worse than any shouting. "Or you'll go into the storehouse, and my men will teach you the manners your father should have. I'm patient. I've waited most of my life for this. I can wait for you to break in whatever way suits you, quick or slow." He tilted his head. "But understand that a man with no hands is no use to me and no use to himself. If you make me spend you, I'll spend you all at once and turn what's left out the back gate to beg on the temple steps with your stumps in a bowl. There are beggars like that at every gate in Osaka. No one asks how they came to it."
Shiro said nothing. There was, he understood, nothing to say. The whole shape of it had closed over him as neatly as the bath water, warm and total and impossible to climb out of, and the worst of it was how reasonable Kihei made it sound — how the arithmetic of it left no answer but the one the man had already written down.
"Take him to the small room," Kihei said. "Feed him. He'll want his strength."
◇
They did feed him. That was the strangeness of the first days — that the food was good, rice with real fish and tsukemono and once even a suimono with fowl in it, more than he'd been given at the wretched inn where he'd been sleeping four to a room. He ate all of it. He was ashamed of how much he wanted it and he ate all of it anyway, because a body that has been hungry does not listen to pride, and because some cold clerk's part of his mind had already begun keeping accounts: eat while you can, keep the strength in you, the chance will come and you will need to be able to run when it does.
The room they kept him in had no window he could fit through and a door that barred from the outside, and the walls were the good thick earthen kind that didn't carry sound. He tested all of it the first night, quietly, methodically, the way his father had taught him to survey any ground he might have to fight or flee across. There was nothing. There was never going to be anything; the house had been built by a careful man, and a careful man does not leave gaps.
The unmaking of him, when it began, did not begin with the storehouse. It began with his hair.
"You'll not cut it," Tobei told him, the first time Shiro reached in the morning after washing up, out of long habit, to neaten the front of his own scalp where a man kept himself shaved. "Master's orders. You'll let it grow, all of it, and you'll thank him for the privilege." And when the crown grew in over the following weeks, itching and strange, an ill-tempered woman was sent to oil it and comb it and bind it up — not into the proper topknot of a grown man, but forward and high and soft, the maegami left long at the brow, the whole of it dressed in the manner of a boy who had not yet had his genpuku, a wakashu still years short of taking his adult name. Shiro was twenty-three. He sat rigid under her hands and stared at the wall and felt each pull of the comb as a separate small humiliation, and could do nothing, because doing something meant the storehouse, and he was learning — they were teaching him well — exactly what the storehouse cost.
Then came the clothes. Kihei presented them himself, laid across the arms of a servant like an offering: a furisode of deep plum silk, its sleeves hanging long and swinging as a teenage boy's, worked at the hem with a pattern of pine and plover; a hakama of fine grey; an obi of figured silk. The clothing of a lord's page. The clothing of a pampered, painted boy kept about a great house for his prettiness and nothing else.
"You'll wear this," Kihei said, "when I have company. A samurai, dressed as befits his beauty. My guests will find it charming." He let the sleeve of the furisode pour through his fingers. "You'll not shame me by wearing it badly."
And last, the swords — for a samurai must have his swords, and Kihei's whole pleasure required that the thing he paraded look, to the eye, exactly like what it had been. The daisho he set into Shiro's obi were beautiful: the fittings gold decorated and worked with the same pine and plover as the kimono, the tsuka wrapped in plum silk to match, the saya lacquered to a black mirror-shine. Shiro's hand closed on the hilt of the longer one before he could stop himself — the oldest reflex he had — and he knew at once, by the wrongness of the weight, by the way it rode too light and too high in the obi, that there was no steel in it. He drew it a hand's width. Beneath the splendid fittings, where the blade should have been, there was only a length of bamboo, planed smooth and slid into the saya, mounted with a real habaki so that it would sit and seat and draw like a sword and be, for any purpose a sword existed to serve, nothing at all.
"You see the joke of it," Kihei said, watching his face with open enjoyment. "You'll walk the city beside me looking every inch the warrior. Two swords in your obi, and the whole world stepping aside for you. And not a soul will know that the proud young samurai couldn't cut a stalk of grass to save his own throat." He smiled. "Wear them well. If you shame me in the street — if you let anyone see what you carry — you'll wish very much that you hadn't."
So Shiro went into the city on the merchant's errands, and it was its own particular torture, worse in some ways than the dark of the storehouse. He walked a pace behind Kihei's palanquin through the Osaka crowds in his plum silk and his boy's hair, the useless swords riding in his obi, and men of his own class passed him on the street and gave him the small nod one warrior gives another, or stepped aside for the two blades as men had always stepped aside, and had no idea that the thing they saluted was a costume with a hollow man inside it. He kept his eyes forward and his face still. He learned the streets. He counted the turns and marked the bridges and filed away which gates stood open at which hours, because the cold clerk in the back of his mind never stopped keeping its accounts, even here, even dressed as this; and some days that patient accounting was the only thing that carried him from one end of the humiliation to the other.
◇
The evening he came to regret longest began, like the rest of it, gently.
Kihei had six guests that night, merchants all, men grown fat and easy on the traffic of the Osaka wharves, and the sake had gone round three times before the master clapped his soft hands and had Shiro brought out to kneel in the lamplight of the zashiki in his plum furisode with his hair dressed like a boy's.
"My samurai," Kihei announced, and the word drew the laugh he'd wanted. The guests leaned in, pleased, appraising, passing their eyes over him the way they might over a length of good gold brocade or a fine horse led out for sale.
"He's a pretty thing," said one, a fleshy man with a wine-flush already high in his cheeks — Kahei, who dealt in dried fish and laughed at his own jokes before he had finished them. "Where did you find him, Iseya?"
"On the street, where they're to be had for the asking these days." Kihei was enjoying himself enormously. "There's no end of them since the wars ended — proud swordless sons of proud swordless fathers, and no lord left in the world with any use for them. This one had a name, once."
"A pet like that wants a collar," said Kahei, delighted with himself, and the group took the notion up at once. "A red one, with a little bell, so you'll hear him coming."
"And a name," put in a lean rice-broker named Magobei, who had drunk less than the others and smiled more. "You can't keep a creature about the house with no name to call it. What does one call a tame samurai?"
"Musashi," someone suggested, to a gust of laughter, the great swordsman's name hung on the swordless boy like a bell on a cat. "No — Benkei. Look at the shoulders on him, and not a thing he can do with them."
"Too grand," said Kahei. "He wants something a man calls across a garden, not something he bows to. Shiro." He grinned and slapped his knee. "There's your name. Every white dog from here to the barrier answers to Shiro. Here, Shiro. Sit, Shiro. Roll over."
"Ah," said Kihei mildly, into the laughter, turning his cup in his soft fingers, "but that's the beauty of it. He is called Shiro. Tachibana Shiro — a true name, a warrior's name, brushed on his father's roll beside all the dead fathers before him." He let the coincidence settle over the group and savored what it did to the faces around it as they understood him. "The same sound a farmer whistles at his dog. I needn't rename the creature at all — his own people did it for me, and never once heard the joke in it. Was there ever such a piece of luck?" He smiled at Shiro across the mats, warm and fond, the way a man smiles at a cat asleep on his account-books. "You see how it was only waiting to be understood correctly."
The men roared. Magobei, wiping his eyes, said something about the gods keeping tidy ledgers, and another guest took it up at once — Shiro, more sake, Shiro — trying the name in its new collar, pitching it high and coaxing as one calls a dog to heel, and finding it fit. It would fit for years. It was the last night any of them said Tachibana with it.
Kihei let them wear the joke smooth, then set his cup down.
"Show my guests how you're made, Shiro." The name came off his tongue gentled and proprietary, the way a man speaks to a dog whose rope he holds. "Off with it."
The room went warm and expectant. Shiro did not move.
He had knelt, and carried zori, and let himself be dressed as a child and shown in the street as a hollow thing, and told himself each time that a man could bear one thing more and remain, somewhere underneath it, himself. But this — to strip in the lamplight for six fat strangers, to stand naked and be pointed at and laughed over like a courtesan — some last stubborn thing in him set its heels against it, and would not.
"No," he said.
The word dropped into the room and the laughter guttered out around it, and for a moment there was only the small hiss of the lamps. Kihei's pleasant face did not change at all, and that was how Shiro knew, even before the master spoke, exactly how badly he had erred.
"No?" Kihei said softly, and turned to his guests with the delight of a host whose entertainment has just exceeded its billing. "You see? You see the spirit in him. It's what one pays for." He inclined his head toward the fusuma. "Tobei."
They came in the same efficient silence as that first day. Shiro came off his knees fighting — there was nothing else left in him to do — and the plum silk tore across the shoulder as they bore him down, sleeve ripping loose with a sound like a gasp, and the boy's careful coiffure came apart under a big man's palm so that his half-grown hair fell into his eyes. It made no difference. Four to one on a floor with no blade had one ending, and he knew the ending already, and still his body would not let him simply submit to it; he thrashed and drove an elbow into something soft and heard a grunt and was rewarded with a knee ground into his back that drove the wind clean out of him.
They stripped him there in front of the company. Not the furisode alone — everything, the torn plum silk and the grey hakama and the juban beneath, drawn off him and carried away out of the room, until there was nothing left on him at all and nothing of his own within reach, and the laughter had gone louder than before, because this — the fighting, the tearing, the flush of shame and rage on the beautiful, useless samurai — was so much finer a show than mere obedience could ever have been.
The cord was scarlet, and it had been made ready long before, which he understood only when he saw how easily it came to the big man's hands. They drew his arms behind him and set his wrists one over the other, and then they bound him — not in the plain fashion of a prisoner, but slowly, with attention, the red silk wound in ordered turns around his forearms and carried up to cross his chest and frame it, looped and knotted at intervals into small deliberate ornaments, so that the whole of the binding, when they had finished, was not a restraint so much as a wrapping. He had seen bolts of cloth done up so for a daimyo's gift. He had seen the first fruits of a season tied just that way to be carried to a shrine. That was the intention, and the guests understood it at once and were delighted by it: the samurai trussed and knotted like a present, offered up on the tatami for their pleasure.
He cursed them while they worked, because his voice was the last thing they had not yet taken. That, too, had been prepared for. One of them took up a short length of green bamboo, smoothed at the edges and pierced through and strung on a cord, and when Shiro drew breath to curse again they pressed it crosswise between his teeth and drew the cord back and knotted it behind his head, so that his jaw was forced open around the wood and what came out past it was no longer words — only a thickened, wordless sound, spit shining at the corners of his stretched mouth, which pleased them better than any curse could have.
Then, when the fight was done and he knelt bound, bitted and bare among them, the ill-tempered woman was brought in, and she gathered up his fallen hair and oiled it and combed it and dressed it back into its soft boy's shape, tugging his head this way and that by it while he knelt rigid and could not stop her, restoring the pretty arrangement the struggle had undone — because the point was never a naked bound man merely, but this particular one, the warrior made into a wakashu made into a gift, every part of the picture returned to its proper order for the length of the evening.
And the evening went on. That was the worst of it, worse than the stripping and the cord and the wood between his teeth: that after the first great laugh they did not send him away, nor keep their eyes fixed on him, but simply let him be there, kneeling in the middle of the floor while the banquet resumed around him and through him. They talked of the price of cotton and the failings of the new intendant and a courtesan of the Shinmachi one of them had ruined himself over. They drank. Now and again a guest, rising to relieve himself or stepping across for the sake bottle, would let a hand fall to him in passing — trail his fingers down the line of the scarlet cord where it crossed the bare chest, or turn his chin up to look at the stretched mouth and the wet wood, or press a thumb into the meat of his shoulder to feel him flinch — and then withdraw it and return to the conversation as though he had done no more than test the ripeness of a fruit at market. None of it was in anger. None of it was even, particularly, in lust. It was only that he was a thing that had been set out for the touching, and so, idly, between cups, they touched.
"There," the merchant said, well satisfied, lifting his cup again. "You wanted a samurai. This is what one is worth, in the end. All that pride." He drank. "Not enough steel in the whole class to fill one honest blade."
The guests laughed and drank, and the night wore itself out around him, and Shiro knelt in the center of it with the wood spreading his jaw and the red cord snug across his chest and his eyes fixed on the middle distance, and let no part of what he was feeling reach his face, and kept — because it was the only thing on earth still wholly his — the accounts.
◇
He paid for the no in the storehouse later, and he paid for a week.
They took him down there that same night, still bound, and Shiro understood as the door barred behind him that the thing he had refused in the zashiki was almost beside the point now; what was being answered was the refusal itself, the fact of it, the no spoken aloud in front of company. A thing like that could not be allowed to have been free.
They were careful, as they were always careful. That was the horror of it, the part he had never grown able to make his peace with — that none of it was done in anger. A man beaten by a furious enemy could at least understand himself to have provoked a passion; there was a kind of terrible fellowship even in that. But these men were not angry. They came to him in the mornings the way other men came to a field or a ledger, and did their work, and stopped for rice at midday, and came back.
There was a beam at a convenient height. They wrapped his wrists in cloth before they bound him to it with rope — not from mercy but from care, so that it would not cut the skin and leave a mark that might turn bad and spoil the master's property — and then they drew his arms up until his weight came onto his shoulders, and left him. The first while was sharp, a bright pull through the joints. Then it became a deep grinding ache that spread down into the chest and crept up the back of the neck into the base of the skull, and then, worst of all, the arms went from pain to a dead absence, the hands swelling and darkening far above him until he could no longer feel them at all, and it was the not-feeling that frightened him most, because he had seen what became of men whose arms were left too long. They knew it too. They knew, the way a farrier knows a hoof, precisely how long a man could hang before the harm went past mending, and each time they cut him down a careful margin short of it — and the returning of the blood, when they did, was like molten iron poured in at the wrist and driven the whole length of each arm, so that he curled on the cold floor and shook and could not have closed his hand on anything to save his life.
The bamboo they used across the backs of his thighs and the broad muscles of his back, never the kidneys, never the spine — they knew where a man could be struck a hundred times and only suffer, and where he could be struck once and die, and they were paid to keep to the former. They counted the strokes under their breath. They aimed to bruise deep without breaking the skin, because broken skin in the damp cold of the storehouse festered, and a festering wound brought fever, and a fever might carry off the very thing they had been set to preserve. So the marks they left him bloomed and did not bleed: first the flat red of the fresh blow, then, over a day, the deep aubergine of a rotten plum, then a sick yellow-green creeping in at the edges as the bad blood shut beneath the skin began at last to break apart and be carried off. The muscle under it stayed stiff and hot to the touch for days, so that he moved like a man three times his age, and could not lie on his back on the futon they eventually allowed him, and could not lie on his front for the shoulders, and so passed the nights on his side, curled around the ache, counting his own breaths in the dark to keep from counting other things.
An old woman of the household came to him when the worst of each day was done, sent down with a lamp and a box. She was called Oten, and she did not speak to him kindly, exactly, but she did not speak cruelly either, which in that house was its own strange mercy. She knew her work. She pressed her thumbs along the swollen ridge of each shoulder, feeling how the bone sat in the socket, and grunted when she was satisfied it had not slipped its place; and once, when the left had been left too long and the arm hung wrong, she braced her small hard foot against his ribs and drew it back into its seat with a wet click that whited out his vision and left him retching against the gag she had not been permitted to remove.
She ground dried dokudami and something bitter he did not know into a paste and bound it over the deepest bruising to draw the bad blood up out of the flesh. She set little cones of mogusa smoldering along the great knotted muscles beside his spine where they had clenched and would not let go, and the moxa's small deep burn eased the clench of them in a way that shamed him for the sound of relief it dragged out of him.
She brewed a decoction, foul and brownish, that she said would keep the swelling down and the heat out of the wounds, and she held it to his mouth when they let the gag out at night and made him drink it whether he wanted to or not.
"Why," he asked her, on the third or fourth night, his voice hoarse. "Why mend me at all. He need only say the word and be done."
Oten did not look up from the strip of cloth she was tearing. "He kept a bird once," she said. "A fine one. Paid a stupid sum for it. Fed it from his own hand — then one evening, in front of his guests, he wrung its neck at the table, laughing, to show them that he could." She tied off the binding with a small hard jerk. "You're a more expensive bird. That's all. He'll keep you as long as the keeping amuses him more than the wringing would. Tonight you made the keeping very amusing." She gathered her box and rose. "Which is why you're alive to be angry about it. Drink the rest of that."
He drank the rest.
They brought out of the storehouse after seven days, and by then something in him had gone quiet that had not been quiet before. He was not, he decided later, broken by that week — or if he had broken, he had broken the way green wood breaks, splitting along the grain into something with a harder edge than it had owned whole. He knelt when he was told to kneel. He wore the plum silk when it was called for. He let the company laugh. And beneath all of it the cold clerk in the back of his mind went on keeping its accounts, patient as a man laying stones, because the belief that had left him in the storehouse — that the world owed a decent reckoning to a man who kept faith with it — had been replaced by something more useful, which was the intention to survive long enough to collect what he was owed himself.
◇
Not every night was a night for the plum silk. There were evenings when Kihei wanted the opposite thing entirely, and those Shiro came in time to dread in a different, colder way, because they held out to him a door and then made certain he could not walk through it.
Word came down one afternoon from Tobei: the master would be receiving the machi-bugyo that evening, and two or three samurai of rank besides, men come out from the castle to be flattered and fed by a merchant who found it useful to keep such men warm toward him. There would be no furisode tonight. Tonight Shiro was to be a bodyguard, and to look like one — his grown-out hair oiled and drawn back and bound into the plain topknot of a grown man, the long maegami that framed his brow on the furisode nights swept up and folded away out of sight, a sober kimono and hakama of dark grey with no ornament to them at all, and the fine hollow swords in his obi so that he might kneel in the back corner of the zashiki through the evening as any wealthy man's retained sword would kneel, silent and watchful and entirely ordinary. It unsettled him, how well it worked — how a comb and a change of grey cloth could set him back for a few hours into the very likeness of the man he had been, so that a stranger glancing over would have seen nothing at all amiss.
He understood the shape of the cruelty as soon as he understood the guest. Here, a stride away across the matting, sat the machi-bugyo of Osaka — the very magistrate whose law ran over this house and every house, the one man in the city with the power and the duty to hear what was done here and to end it. Shiro had only to cross the floor and kneel and say it. My lord, I am no bodyguard. I am a free man of the warrior class held against my will, stripped and beaten and dressed for the amusement of merchants, my swords taken and false ones given me. That was all. A dozen sentences. The magistrate might disbelieve him, might have him thrown out, might even side with the rich man who kept his table — but the words could be said, and once said could not be unsaid, and Kihei had gone to the trouble of putting the man in the room regardless. That was the whole of the point. It was not enough that Shiro be silenced. He had to be silenced with the remedy sitting close enough to touch, and be seen to keep silent, and know himself that he was keeping silent, so that the silence became one more thing done not to him but by him.
But Kihei, being a careful man, did not trust the lesson to pride alone.
The tea he had been given before the guests arrived had tasted faintly wrong — a bitterness under the bitterness, a green sharpness that caught at the back of the throat. He had drunk it because refusing food and drink in that house had its own price and he had learned to choose his prices. By the time the magistrate was seated the wrongness had bloomed. His throat had begun to itch and then to burn, a raw scraped feeling low down where the voice is made, so that each swallow was an effort and speech, when one of the guests asked him some idle question, came out of him as a cracked rasp he scarcely recognized and had to force.
And there was more than the throat. The room had taken on a slow, tilting unsteadiness, the lamp-flames smearing at their edges when he turned his head too quickly, a thickness settling behind his eyes and in his tongue, so that even holding himself upright and still in the corner took a concentration that used up everything he had. Oten, binding a cut on his arm some days later, would tell him without being asked that there were roots and leaves enough in any hill country that could do such a thing — swell a throat, cloud a head, steal the steadiness from a man's legs — and were known to those who knew herbs, and that a great house could get whatever it liked. She did not say Kihei's name. She did not need to.
So he knelt in the corner through the long evening with the cure for his misery a few mats away and could not have reached it if he had tried. Twice the conversation turned, idly, to the sorry state of the masterless men clogging the city, and once the machi-bugyo himself remarked, over his cup, that a ronin with no lord and no stipend was a sad thing, a sword with no direction, and the merchants murmured their agreement, and Kihei glanced across the room at Shiro with the faintest curve at the corner of his mouth. Shiro looked at the middle distance and breathed slowly through his raw throat and did not move, because his head was swimming and his voice was a ruin and there was nothing, nothing at all, that he could do — and that, he understood, was the entire and only reason he had been invited to sit where he sat this night, when he otherwise simply could have been locked in the storehouse.
When the guests had gone, Kihei paused over him on his way to bed. "You were very good tonight," he said, kindly, as one praises a pet dog. "I did wonder if you'd try. I'm glad you've more sense than that."
He had not, of course, more sense than that. He had only a swollen throat and a swimming head and two useless swords, and Kihei knew it perfectly well, and that was the praise.
◇
The merchant lent him out, sometimes, to the houses of his particular friends, the way a man might lend a fine horse or a set of good lacquer to a peer he wished to oblige. It was at one of these — the villa of an oil-broker named Zenbei, out along the river — that the matter of his hands was decided.
He had been dressed as a wakashu again for the evening — not in the plum silk, which stayed at the Iseya, but in a furisode Kihei had had made for lending him out, grander even than the first: a deep kingfisher blue shot through with woven gold, cranes worked across the shoulders and down the swinging sleeves, an obi of stiff brocade elaborately at his back, the whole of it more befitting a daimyo's catamite than any samurai's son. His hair was oiled and dressed, the maegami long at his brow.
And in this finery he had been set to pouring drinks, which was its own studied humiliation stacked atop the rest: the ornamented samurai on his knees at the elbows of drunken merchants, sleeves tied back with a silk cord, filling and refilling their cups, bowing his head, murmuring the small polite words of a serving-boy. He had learned by then to do it with his face smoothed to nothing. He moved down the row of guests with the flask, and he had nearly reached the end of it when one of them — a heavy man far gone in drink, his face slack and shining — caught him by the wrist as he poured.
"Sit a moment," the man said thickly, and pulled.
Shiro came off balance, half into the man's lap, and the guest laughed and got an arm about him, and the other hand came down heavy on his knee and slid up the inside of his thigh, groping, the thick fingers pushing at the fold of his hakama. It was nothing he had not endured on the plum-silk nights, when hands fell on him idly between cups and he had knelt and let them. But the old reflex was faster than his judgment: he set his palm against the man's chest and shoved, hard, and was on his feet and a pace clear before he had decided anything at all, the sake bottle still in his other hand, his breath coming quick.
The room had gone quiet. The drunken man blinked up at him, more surprised than angry. And Shiro understood, in the silence, looking at Kihei's face across the mats, that he had done something very bad.
But Kihei was laughing.
"Forgive him, forgive him," he said warmly, spreading his hands, all indulgence. "He's a shy creature, my samurai, and ticklish as a girl. And you know how they are, these sword-proud boys, so delicate about their dignity." He was smiling, easy, smoothing it all over, turning the thing into a jest so that his friend Zenbei's guest need feel no shame and the evening might go on. The drunken man laughed too, mollified, and reached again for his cup, and the talk resumed, and it was as though nothing had happened at all.
Shiro knelt back down and took up the bottle and poured, and let himself believe, for the space of that evening, that it had cost him nothing.
It cost him three days' wait, which was worse than any beating, because he knew by then that Kihei never let a thing go and never struck in heat, and so the not-knowing-when was itself part of the punishment.
On the third night they came for him and took him down to the storehouse, and it was not the beam this time, and not the bamboo. They bound his forearms flat to a plank, palms up, fingers spread and lashed apart so that the hands lay open and still under the lamp. And Kihei himself came down after them, which he almost never did — settled onto a folding stool a servant carried for him, arranged his fine kimono, and watched, because this was a lesson he wanted to give with his own voice.
"I want you to understand that tonight is not about the fat fool at Zenbei's table," Kihei said pleasantly. "He forgot you before his palanquin reached the bridge. I've forgotten him. This isn't for that."
He nodded, and Tobei crouched over the pinned hands with a small keen blade — a fine thing, better suited to a carver's bench than a torturer's — and waited on his master's word.
"This is so that you're clear on the terms, since you seem to have grown confused about them. There is no part of you that is yours. Not your hands. Not your name, not your hair, not the hours you sleep, not the food in your bowl. I let you keep these things the way I let a tenant keep a field — because it suits me this season, and for no other reason, and I can take any of them back whenever the whim moves me, and there is no magistrate, no lord, no god, and no man living who will lift a finger on your behalf. You proved that to yourself the night you knelt beside the machi-bugyo with your mouth shut." He folded his soft hands. "Tonight I'll prove the rest of it. I'm going to take a small thing — a thing you'll scarcely be able to point to. Not because I need you crippled. Because I want you to carry the knowing of it in your hands for the rest of your life: that I reached in and took a piece of you for no better reason than that you displeased me, and paid nothing, and answered to no one." He smiled. "Begin."
"The master says a man who won't keep his hands to himself should be reminded, every time he reaches for a thing, to whom the hands belong," Tobei said, conversationally, laying the edge of the knife to the soft place low on the forearm, above the wrist crease and a little to the thumb side, where a certain cord runs up beneath the skin from the palm. He pressed, and drew, and it was a small cut, shallow and exact, no longer than a grain of rice — and Shiro felt the strange deep tug of it, a plucked-string sensation running up into the meat of the thumb, and then the tip of the thumb would not answer him. The thumb itself still moved; it swung at its base, it lay where he set it. But the last joint, the one nearest the nail, had gone slack and would not bend, so that when he strained to curl the tip down against his palm it stayed obstinately straight, dead to his will though the pain of the little cut was slight enough as such things went. Tobei blotted the welling blood, considered his work with a craftsman's detachment, and moved to the right forearm and did the same, one clean draw of the blade, and the tug came again, and the tip of the second thumb went as straight and unanswering as the first.
It was so small. That was the cleverness of it, laid beside the storehouse week — two cuts a child's fingernail could have hidden, scarcely any blood, and no ruin anyone could see. His hands, held up to the lamp, looked like any man's hands. He could still close them; he did, slowly, and watched the thumbs fold in alongside the fingers as they always had — but when he tried to press each thumb-tip to the pad of its forefinger, to make the small precise pinch a man uses a hundred times a day and never thinks of, the tips would not come down to meet the fingers, and the pinch closed clumsy and weak and wrong.
And he understood that this was the true shape of the lesson, and that Kihei had told him so plainly and meant every word. It was not about the thumbs, though the thumbs were what had been taken. It was about the sword, which was what Shiro most valued still, and thumbs that did not bend damaged his ability to wield a sword. Taking a man's most valued thing for no reason but the wanting was the entire demonstration.
It was the same lesson as the food: they could stop feeding him, and had, for stretches long enough to teach him that his next bowl was a gift and not a right. The same as the small room with the barred door, which they could shut on him for a day or a week at their pleasure and no one would come. The same as the scarlet cord and the wood between his teeth and the long banquet spent kneeling naked among strangers' idle hands: every one of them a way of saying the single thing, over and over, until it was written into the deepest part of him. There is no recourse. There is nothing we cannot take, no floor beneath which you are safe, no door you can knock on.
A great physician might one day mend the hand; no one on earth could mend the fact of it, that a rich man had reached into him with a knife and paid nothing and answered to no one, and could do it again tomorrow, to any part of him he chose, and would.
Oten, when they let her down to him, drew her breath in through her teeth at the two neat cuts, and did not scold him. She bandaged them with a paste to keep the heat out of the wounds. "These will close in a few days and look like nothing," she said, low. "That is not the harm."
She took his hand and pressed her thumbnail to the tip of his, watching the last joint stay stubbornly straight when he strained to bend it.
"The cord that pulls the end of the thumb down is parted, up inside the arm. That is a thing that does not knit the way skin does." She set the hand down. "Hear me, though, before you grieve it. You have not lost the hand. You will grip, and carry, and eat, and dress, and no one who watches you cross will see anything wrong. What you have lost is the fine edge of it — the little exact things, the pinch and the delicate hold, the certainty at the very tip. A farmer would curse a few days and forget about it. A swordsman feels it every day of his life. That is why he chose it. He does nothing by accident, that man. Guard what is left, and do not let him see you mourn."
He looked at his hands a long while after she had gone, and made the fingers of each close, slowly, into the palm — thumbs and all, for they still folded in as they always had, only the last joint of each thumb riding straight and stiff where once it had curled — and made them open, and closed them again, and began, that night, to take the true measure of what had been taken.
◇
The thumbs healed as Oten had said they would. The two small cuts closed within a few days and faded to a pair of pale nicks that a man would have to be shown to notice, and the harm of them stayed hidden underneath, where nothing could be shown at all. To look at, his hands were a swordsman's hands still. It was only in the using that the theft revealed itself, in a hundred small daily frustrations, the tip of the thumb standing straight and stupid whenever some fine and thoughtless motion asked it to bend.
He learned to work around it — to catch small things against the side of the thumb, to press with the joint nearer the hand, to cradle a cup in the palm rather than trust the fingertips to hold it. A stranger watching him eat or dress or cross a room would have seen nothing wrong. He knew that. It was, in its way, the worst of it: that the wound which had gutted the center of his craft was one no one would ever grant him the dignity of seeing.
He could still close a hand about a hilt — both hands, even, and the two-handed grip lost the least of it, for the palms and fingers did the holding and the maimed thumb-tips could lie along the tsuka and be carried. But the certainty was gone out of it: the fine seating of the weapon in the hand, the small constant corrections of thumb and wrist by which a trained man governs the edge without thought, the security of a single-handed draw and the quick sure work of the short blade in close. The thing his father had spent twelve years burning into him below the level of thought — the hand that knew the blade the way it knew itself — had been quietly spoiled with a carver's knife, and no amount of grief would call it back.
◇
There were nights that asked nothing of him but to be, in some new way, a thing to be laughed at, and one of these Shiro remembered afterward less for any pain than for the particular helplessness of it, which was a kind he had not been made to feel before.
He was given no furisode that evening, and no hakama, and nothing beneath — only a plain yukata of unlined cotton, wrapped and tied and worn against bare skin the way a man wears one coming out of the bath, so that he knelt among Kihei's guests aware with every movement of how little there was between himself and the room, how a careless turn would let the front fall open, how the thin cloth clung and shifted and gave him nothing to hide behind. That was the first of it. The second he understood only slowly, because it came on him from inside.
The cup of tea he had been made to drink before the guests arrived had left a strange thickness on his tongue, and by the time he was set to carrying the sake round the assembled men the thickness had spread. It was not the throat-poison of the magistrate's night; there was no burning, no swelling. This was something else, something that reached down into the strings of him and cut them one by one. The lamplight had gone soft and doubled at its edges. The floor, when he tried to fix his eyes on it, tilted gently, the way the ground tilts under a man who has stood up too fast, except that it did not right itself. His own hands seemed to belong to someone a little distance off, and when he lifted the bottle to pour he had to watch it the whole way, willing the tremor out of it, because the sake stood trembling at the lip of each cup and he knew past any doubt what the spilling of it would cost him later, in the storehouse, when the guests had gone home.
So he crept from man to man on his knees with the enormous fragile concentration of the very drunk, pouring by force of will, the sweat starting on his lip, and the men watched him sway and fight the swaying and were delighted, because a beautiful creature struggling with great gravity to perform a simple thing is a comedy as old as sake itself, and they had paid, in their way, for a comedy.
And the hands came, as the hands always came. As he knelt at one man's elbow to fill his cup, fingers found the opening of the thin yukata and slid up beneath it along the bare skin of his thigh; at the next, a hand pushed in past the loose front to move flat and unhurried across his chest and side while its owner went on with his conversation and did not so much as glance at him. On another night, a lifetime ago, at Zenbei's table, his body had answered such a thing before his mind could stop it — had shoved a groping guest away and paid for the reflex with two small cuts and everything they took. He did not shove now. He had learned the lesson, learned it all the way down into the meat of him, and the learning meant that when a stranger's hand went wandering under his clothes he held still and kept his eyes on the bottle and did not spill the sake, because the hand on his thigh was not the thing that would hurt him and the spilled cup was, and he had at last been made to understand the difference.
That the drug loosened him, made the holding-still easier, was almost a mercy; it meant he did not have to spend the whole of himself on not flinching, and could keep a little back for the sake and the trembling lip of each cup. He poured. The hands moved on him as idly as men warm their palms at a brazier without looking at the coals, and he let them, and poured, and did not spill, and that was the whole of what he had become.
"He's had more than his guests," one of them said, and the others laughed.
"Give him something to do," said another, wiping his eyes. "Let's have a dance. Surely a pretty thing like that can dance."
There was a general noise of approval, and Kihei, who missed nothing and denied his friends nothing, gestured, and a fan was fetched and pressed into Shiro's hand — a folding fan of the kind a dancer opens and turns and hides behind, the small properties of an art that took years to learn and that he had never in his life been taught. He knelt there holding it, the lacquered ribs slippery against his thumb, and understood dimly that he was meant to rise, and to be graceful, and to be funny in his failure to be graceful, and that there was no version of the next few minutes in which he was not laughed at, so it hardly mattered what he did.
He tried to stand. That was almost the whole of the entertainment, and it was enough for them. His legs had become things read about in a letter from far away. He got one foot flat beneath him and pushed, and the room swung grandly around, and he came down again — not hard, they had drugged him too well for real harm, just a slow boneless folding back onto the mats that set the whole company roaring. He tried again, because trying was better than the alternative of simply lying there and letting them see he had given up, and this time he got nearly upright, the fan waving vaguely in his fist as he fought for the vertical, before his knees dissolved beneath him and put him down once more amid fresh gales of it.
Someone was pounding the floor. Someone else called encouragement, the way one cheers a child. And Shiro, kneeling swaying in his open yukata with a fan in a hand that struggled to hold it correctly for what was asked, felt the laughter break over him warm and meaningless as water and found, from very far away, that he could not even summon the shame he knew he ought to feel — that the drug had taken that too, had left him too loose and unmoored to do anything but blink up at the blurry, bright faces and wait for it to be over.
It was one of the guests who ended it, a big florid man who rose from his cushion still laughing and crossed the mats and hauled Shiro up off the floor, one thick arm clamped around his chest, holding him upright against his own bulk.
"Like this," the man announced to the room, "like this, watch—" and he began to work Shiro's slack body through the motions of a dance, swaying him side to side, lifting the arm that held the fan and flapping it about, turning the two of them in a lurching circle while he sang a snatch of some bawdy Osaka warehouse song in a tuneless bellow. Shiro's feet dragged and stumbled and found no purchase; his head lolled against the man's shoulder; the fan jerked in his numb fingers at the end of an arm someone else was moving. He was scenery in his own humiliation, a beautiful limp thing being made to caper by a stronger man's hands, and the zashiki howled and clapped time, and Kihei watched from his place with the warm proprietary pleasure of a host whose entertainment has surpassed itself, and somewhere under the drug and the noise and the arm crushing the breath out of him Shiro let it happen, because there was nothing in his body that night with which to do anything else.
They let him fold back down to the floor when the man tired of it, and he stayed where he was put, the fan still in his hand, and the banquet went on over his head and around him for a long while more.
He was sick, later, in the small locked room, when the worst of the swimming had begun to ebb and his body wanted the poison out of it; and he lay on the futon afterward in the dark with his heart going too fast and his limbs still not wholly his own and thought, with the strange flat clarity that sometimes surfaced through the ruin, that of all the things they had done to him this was nearly the gentlest, and that he minded it, in some ways, more than the storehouse — because in the storehouse he had at least been himself, suffering, present, gathering his hate; and this had reached in and taken even that, and made of him for an evening a pretty senseless thing to be swung about for a song, and he had not even been able to be angry while it happened.
◇
There was one thing he had not yet tried, and he tried it in the end, and it was the trying that closed the last door of all.
Kihei had a friend named Denzo, a paper-and-wax merchant from Sakai who came often to the Iseya and who had looked at Shiro across the zashiki on more than one evening with a particular fixed attention that the others did not have. One night, well into his cups, the man asked for him — asked to take him home, the way a guest admiring a piece of a host's collection might be pressed to carry it off and enjoy it a while — and Kihei, expansive with wine and pleased to oblige a useful friend, gave him. Just so. A gift for the night, sent across the city in a hired palanquin with two of the big men walking alongside to see the loan delivered and, in the morning, returned.
Shiro understood what he was to be used for the moment the door of Denzo's inner room slid shut and the man turned to look at him with that fixed and hungry attention, and he understood, too, in the same moment, that he was for one night outside the walls of the Iseya — beyond Kihei's roof, beyond Tobei and the storehouse, in the house of another man entirely. And something in him that he had thought the thumbs had killed lifted its head and would not lie back down. He had sworn, kneeling beside the machi-bugyo with his throat swollen shut, that he had learned the lesson. He found now that he had not, not all the way down; that hope is a weed with a very deep root, and that a man will believe against all his own hard evidence that this stranger, this once, might be different.
So he begged. He went down onto his knees before the paper merchant and put his forehead to the tatami and begged the man to help him — told him in a low, fast voice everything, what the Iseya was, what was done to him there, that he was a man of the warrior class held against all law and right, that he asked nothing but an unbarred gate and an hour's head start, that the man need only look away and he would be gone and no trouble to anyone ever after. He begged with everything he had, with no pride left to stop him.
Denzo heard him out. That was the cruelest part — that he let him finish, watching with his head tilted, something almost like sympathy moving in his soft face. And then he said, not unkindly, "Kihei told me you might do this. He said to let you say your piece."
And Shiro understood that there had never been a door here at all; that he had been sent to this house precisely so that he might try this thing and fail at it, and that the failure was the gift Kihei had truly given his friend — the pleasure of being begged by a samurai, and of refusing.
He begged again then, differently. Not to be freed — he saw there was no freeing — but only that the man not tell. Please. Please don't tell him I asked. He'll— and he could not even finish it, because he did not know the shape of what Kihei would do and his mind shied from filling it in. Denzo patted his shoulder, and had his pleasure of him that night regardless of the tears, and in the morning sent him back across the city in the hired palanquin with a courteous note of thanks folded into his obi, and told Kihei everything.
◇
Kihei was not angry. Shiro had learned by now to dread the man's evenness far more than any rage, and this was the evenest he had ever been.
"I did wonder how long it would take you," the merchant said, almost fondly, when they brought Shiro before him. "The hands weren't enough, then. You still thought there was someone. Some door. I find that touching, in a way — I do. But it can't go on. You'll ask the next one, and the next, and one fine day you'll pick a man who isn't my friend, who makes trouble for me out of pity or principle, and I won't have it. So." He folded his soft hands. "We'll see to it that you don't ask again."
What they did to him for it was, like the thumbs, a small and careful and deniable thing, and it was done in the storehouse over the course of an afternoon by a man Kihei sent for who was not Tobei — an older man, close-mouthed, with a physician's bag and a physician's unhurried hands, which was somehow the worst of it, that a healer's craft could be turned so exactly to this. They did not cut out his tongue; Kihei wanted him able to answer when addressed, to murmur the serving-boy's courtesies, to say yes, master and forgive me and all the small required words. What they wanted gone was the other thing — the carrying voice, the voice that could be raised to more than a strained whisper to be heard by a stranger, the voice that could beg loud enough for a passerby to hear.
The man worked at the front of Shiro's throat with his careful fingers and a thin heated iron, finding by touch the place where the voice was made, and burned it — a deep, deliberate scarring of the cords within, judged as finely as the thumb-cut had been judged, enough to ruin and not enough to kill. The pain of it was a white unspeakable thing; Shiro's whole body arched against the ropes and the smell of it filled his own nose and he could not even scream properly, which was the point, which was already the point taking effect.
For days after, he could make no sound at all but a thread of air. When a voice came back to him at last it was a wrecked and breathy rasp, pitched low and carrying no further than a pace or two, a voice for close quiet obedient murmurs and nothing else. He could speak and he could not call out. He could kneel at a magistrate's elbow for the rest of his life and never make enough of a sound that would reach the man, and Kihei — who did nothing by accident — had known precisely that when he chose it.
Oten tended the burn as best it could be tended, cooling paste and a decoction to keep the heat from settling into a fever, though there was nothing to be done for the ruin underneath. She did not tell him it would heal because she had never told him things that were not true.
"That's the last of it, I think," she said quietly, on the second night, when he lay unable to answer her at all. "He's taken the thumbs so you can't fight, and the voice so you can't call. There's little left in you now that threatens him. Men like Kihei stop, once a thing can't threaten them." It was not comfort, exactly. But she meant it as the nearest thing to comfort the truth allowed, and he took it as that.
For a while he kept the accounts still. He drank Oten's foul brown tonic and let his shoulders heal as straight as they were going to and taught his hands, over the long patient months, to do without the fine tips of the thumbs. He marked which floor boards spoke when he stepped on them and which were quiet, and which of the big men went home across the river on which nights, and how the damp had worked at the storehouse bar. He told himself he was waiting for the one hour — the hour when the house would be careless and his hands would be enough — and for a while the telling was true enough to live on.
But the hour is a thing that must be seized when it comes, and it did not come, and a man cannot hold himself drawn like a bowstring across months and then years without the string, in the end, beginning to slacken of its own weight. That was the last theft, and the quietest, and Kihei did not even have to lift a hand for it: time did the work.
The accounts he had kept so carefully went dim at the edges. Some nights he could not remember why he had thought the storehouse bar mattered. He still noted things out of the old habit, the way a man's fingers will go on shaping a craft long after the heart has gone out of it, but the noting no longer pointed anywhere. It had become simply how he passed the time between one requirement and the next.
There was a great deal of time to pass now, and much of it was spent in other men's houses.
Denzo, it turned out, was not a discreet man. He told the story of his night with the paper merchant's borrowed samurai everywhere, embroidered finer with each telling, and the other men of Kihei's circle heard it and wanted the same, and Kihei — who found it useful to have friends in his debt for small pleasures — was happy to oblige them. So the lending became a common thing.
A palanquin would come in the evening, and Shiro would be dressed and sent, and one of the big men would go along and settle himself outside the sliding door of whatever room he was taken to, and wait there through the night, patient as a post. That waiting figure was the whole of the argument. On the nights when something in Shiro rose up and refused — when he could not, this once, make himself go soft and pliable for a stranger's hands — he had only to look at the door, behind which the big man sat, to be reminded of what lay on the other side of refusal: the storehouse, and the careful men, and the small knife that had already proven twice how much of him could be taken and how little it cost to take it. Mostly the reminder was enough. On the few nights it was not, the door would slide open, and the big man would step in, and it would be made enough. He learned not to make them step in. It was one more thing his body learned to do without consulting the rest of him.
Once — only once, and late, when the numbness had already taken most of him — he tried the last refusal left to a man who has no others. He stopped eating. He turned his face from the tray and set his teeth and thought, with a flat, gray satisfaction, that here at last was a door that opened outward, and that no servant sitting in a corridor could stop him walking through it.
It did not even inconvenience them. When he had missed enough meals to worry the household that its property might spoil, they simply bound him — wrists and ankles, and worked open his jaw with the same smoothed bamboo bit as ever — and Oten came with a bowl of thin rice gruel and millet-water sweetened with a little mizuame, and fed him, patiently, a mouthful at a time, holding his nose when he tried to refuse the swallow so that he must take it or drown on it.
It was not even done cruelly. That was the worst of it. She did it the way she did everything, with her close hard competence and her unspeakable mercy, and when she was finished she wiped his mouth and said, low, "Don't. He'll only keep you alive to spite you, and make you sorry you tried it, and you've enough to be sorry for already. Eat, and keep what strength the eating gives you, and let it be yours and not his."
And Kihei, when he heard of it, was delighted — genuinely, warmly delighted, the way a man is charmed by a half-wild cat he has fed into staying, that still hisses and lays its ears back and bites the hand, and does his bidding all the same. He came down to look at Shiro bound and hand-fed on the storehouse floor and laughed with real affection. "There he is," he said. "There's my samurai. Still in there after all." It was the fondest thing anyone had said to Shiro in three years, and it came from the man who owned him, and that was the whole of what his life had become.
Three years. It might have been a little more. He had stopped marking the seasons with any care, but he knew it by his own body — by the way the plum furisode, adjusted for fit twice at the seams by then, sat differently on a frame that had gone lean and quiet and biddable, a body more like a boy's than a swordsman's; by the old ache in his shoulders that spoke before rain; by the two thumbs that no longer grieved him because he had forgotten, mostly, that they had ever done otherwise. He was not the man who had walked out past the edge of the city to answer a notice for a guard. That man had kept accounts and waited for an hour. This one waited for nothing, and kept nothing, and did as he was bid, and was, he understood in his clearer and worse moments, exactly the thing Kihei had set out those years ago to make.
And then, as such things do, it ended — not because Shiro did anything, but because Kihei, at last, was bored.
A more expensive bird, Oten had called him once. But no bird holds a rich man's eye forever, and the pleasures of this one had grown familiar, and a familiar pleasure in a house like Kihei's is only a cost with nothing coming back against it. There was no scene. There was never any heat in the man. One autumn night word simply came down that the samurai was to be made ready, and made beautiful, one last time.
They dressed him in the finest furisode the house owned — not the plum, nor the kingfisher blue, but a thing kept folded in paper for grand occasions, black silk sewn over with maple leaves in every color of the turning, scarlet and gold and russet spilling down the long sleeves like a river of autumn, an obi of white and silver knotted at his back. They oiled and dressed his hair. They painted his lips. They made of him, with real care, the most beautiful thing they could contrive, and Shiro sat through all of it with the stillness that had become the whole of him and did not ask why, because he no longer asked things, and because some quiet part of him had already understood and was not afraid.
Then they bound him — the scarlet cord again, the ornamental knots, wrists crossed at the small of his back — and put the bamboo bit between his teeth, and set him inside a plain, covered palanquin with the blinds drawn down, the way a man of means moves anything he would rather the street did not see: a daughter going to a match she has not agreed to, a debt being carried quietly across the city, a thing precious and shameful both. Two of the big men took up the poles, and he was borne out through the sleeping city swaying in the dark behind the blinds, unseen and unremarked, and not a soul who passed them in the small hours could have dreamed that the costly, well-guarded burden riding hidden inside was a man being carried to his own drowning.
He understood it fully by then, and found that Oten's mercy had been the truest thing in that house after all, because there was no terror left in him to spend. He understood the whole neat shape of it: how they would take him down to the black water and hold him under until he was still, and then draw the cord off him and let him go, so that when he washed into the shallows at first light he would be only a beautiful drowned young man in a splendid furisode, a sight to make the washerwomen gasp and murmur a hasty namuamida and say nothing — and any man who knew the face, who had seen it painted and pouring wine at a friend's table, would know better than to say where he had seen it, and would hold his tongue, and Kihei would answer, as ever, to no one. Even his death was to be a discreet and tasteful thing. Even in the end he was to be got rid of the way one disposes of a garment gone out of fashion: quietly, and well, and with an eye to appearances.
They set the palanquin down among the reeds at the water's edge, in a lonely place well downstream of the last houses, and drew him out of it. The river was very cold. They waded him out past the reeds to where it ran deep and black under the moon, and turned him, and bore him down, and the water closed over his face and filled his mouth around the wood, and Shiro did not fight them, because there was nothing left in him, and because a part of him that he was not proud of was simply tired, and glad, in a low and shameful way, that the long account was closing at last.
He looked up through the moving water at the blurred silver of the moon and let the burning in his chest build toward the end of it.
He did not see the man under the willow on the near bank. He could not have. But the man was there — a ronin come down from somewhere north, footsore and low of coin, much like Shiro had been three years ago, who had judged a night under a tree by the water cheaper than a night at any inn and had been lying wakeful in the roots watching the moon when a palanquin was set down among the reeds and two large men drew a third figure out of it and waded into the river with it — a slight figure that did not struggle, in the long swinging sleeves and the ornately tied obi of a woman dressed for some grand occasion — and bent it down beneath the surface and held it there.
It was not a thing any decent man could watch and go on lying still — two men drowning a bound woman in the dark — whatever it might cost him, and he did not. He was in the water before he had finished deciding to be, calling out in a voice that cracked across the river like a whip, and the two big men — who were bought muscle and not warriors, and who had come to drown a bound and beaten thing, not to fight an armed stranger coming at them fast and furious out of the dark — did the arithmetic that men like them always did, and let go, and ran.
And the ronin got his arms around the limp shape in its river of autumn silk and hauled it up and back toward the bank, and it weighed more than he had thought, and the arms he gripped were harder and the shoulders broader than the sleeves had promised. He got the sodden weight up onto the mud and turned the face to the moon to clear the water from it — and stopped, for the space of a breath, at what he found. A young man. The painted mouth and the oiled hair and the woman's splendid furisode all belonged to a young man, slight and starved beneath the finery, his lips gone bluish and the whole of him cold as the river.
The ronin had the space of that one breath to be startled, and then it did not matter in the least what he had pulled from the water, because the person had not breathed yet and every moment he did not was a moment against him. He forced the bamboo bit out from between the clenched teeth, and turned the slack body on its side, and struck between the shoulder blades with the heel of his hand — once, twice, hard — until the black water came up out of in a long tearing heave and the man dragged in a breath, a thin, whistling, wrecked and terrible breath, and coughed, and breathed again, and lived.
The order came the evening before from the local field commander, in an abandoned farmhouse that smelled of cold ash, the cheap fish oil used in farmers’ lamps, and the damp of a building standing empty for weeks.
The brief was given quickly by a man with a great deal else to arrange: Hygonosuke’s unit would go up the eastern road at first light, through the wooded slopes, and push the rebels off the high ground above the millet fields while the main force came in from the west and broke them. Hyogonosuke's forty would then hold the far side and take any of the rebels who were trying to run.
He understood his unit’s part and found it a good one.
Nobody told him his forty men were the distraction, the noise the rebels would be looking at while the soldiers who were coming to kill them came from the other side.
Hyogonosuke carried the orders back to his own fire the way a man carries good news, and sat down with Daisaburo to think it through.
Daisaburo was his lead ashigaru, a tall, broad-shouldered man who had been fighting since he was fifteen and knew more than Hyogonosuke about nearly everything that mattered in the field, though he never said much about it. He listened, deep in thought, with a dried grass stem shifting between his teeth, a small fidget he had developed at some point. His eyes were on the dark in the direction of the fields and the hill, and when Hyogonosuke said they would go up on foot he nodded, because he had been thinking it already. The hill was steep and wooded, with dense undergrowth. A man on a horse there would not get far.
They went over the plan twice: the order of the men, the pace, what to do if the rebels gave ground, and Daisaburo said little, agreed with most, and let the small part he did not agree with pass, because it was not worth the breath to mention it when the commander had already made his decision.
Hyogonosuke found Tasuke afterward and told him to stay back in camp, taking care of his horse, and keeping the fire going for their return, which would likely come late in the day when the temperature had already dropped and when a stoked fire would be most welcome. Tasuke complained good-naturedly about being left behind to tend the fire like an old woman, and Hyogonosuke assured him an old woman who kept a good fire would be the most welcome thing in the valley, more welcome after battle than all the tea houses of the capital. Tasuke conceded the point and went to gather more firewood.
In the morning, Hyogonosuke put on his armor. It was a plain suit with dark blue lacing, simple and unadorned, well-made but new, without the age or ornament armor took on over the years. He had had it made in Kumamoto, choosing the kind of pattern his grandfather would have selected for himself, simple and meant for use, not appearances, like the rebuilt mansion in the valley, like the way Hyogonosuke had been taught to hold a sword.
He did not put on a helmet. He had thought about it and he’d thought about the woods, the underbrush, and the way his kabuto narrowed what he could hear and see, and then he had decided against it, instead opting for a hachigane, an armored headband, which was what most of his men wore. So dressed he was nearly one of them, a plain man in plain armor among a unit of plain men, which was not a thing he thought about, but which would not have troubled him either way.
He marched out with his forty strung behind him in the thin autumn light. The valley was beautiful. The millet on the slopes had mostly been cut by this time of year, but the fields still smelled of it, dry and faintly sweet, and on the hillsides the maples had turned, their reds and yellows brilliant against the pale morning sky.
A pair of cranes lifted from a harvested rice paddy as the column passed, hanging white over the blue before vanishing behind the ridge.
"The cranes will come back," Hyogonosuke said, to say something.
"Mn," Daisaburo agreed, still watching the ridge.
The open ground ran out where the fields met the foot of the slope, and the road became a lane that climbed up into the trees between two wooded rises. It was already narrow, wide enough only for two men abreast and not three, and as it climbed it grew steep, so that the forty bunched on it, the men behind closing on the men in front where the ground slowed them, packing tight on the one strip of open ground between the brush.
Hyogonosuke felt something was wrong before he could have articulated the feeling and thought for a split second that he had spent much time studying swordsmanship and not much, by comparison, studying the military arts. Beside him, Daisaburo's grass stem had gone still in his teeth. They both knew, in the same moment, that men should not be stacked up like this on steep ground with cover to either side, and both of them knew it too late. There was no order to give that would unmake it. The column was already on the lane, the lane was already climbing, and you cannot pour forty men backward down a hill in good order on a word.
The attack came before they reached the high ground.
The first volley fired down out of the brush above them, and three men dropped before the sound had finished rolling across the hillside. The ashigaru to Hyogonosuke’s left took a shot through the gap between the do of his armor and the shoulder. He did not so much fall as simply stop, upright one instant, sitting in the road the next, legs awkawardly underneath him, hands pressed flat to his chest in the reflexive gesture of a man trying to keep inside him what no longer wished to stay there.
His name is Matsuda. He has two sons in Higo. These were facts Hyogonosuke had carried for nine months without once giving them much thought, and now they arrived all at once with specific weight.
The man beside Matsuda took a shot through the lower jaw, which came away from the rest of his face, tearing the flesh and sending the bone into lane, and he neither sat nor fell but stood, producing a sound unlike anything Hyogonosuke had heard a human mouth make, high and wet and unbroken, until the second volley came and put him down. The sound stopped on its own.
Move, something said, very far back in Hyogonosuke’s mind. Move, or you will sit down in the road and die where Matsuda is sitting.
He drew his sword and shouted the advance up the hill.
The men in front pressed back into the men behind as the next volley tore through them, and an elbow caught Hyogonosuke across the face hard enough to make his vision go white. A dead man fell against him with that particular slack and heaviness of something that had, until seconds ago, been a person. The weight brought him down, falling sideways, his knee striking the road, his shoulder catching something that drove the air out of him. He got a hand under the body to push it off and it would not move the way a thing should. It was only weight, dense and unhelpful, the arms swinging loose, and he had to brace and shove twice before it rolled.
Somewhere in that shoving against the dead weight, the day came loose from him.
He could not afterward have said when it happened, only that the world drew off to a small distance and stayed there. Everything in the gun smoke and the shadowy dark of the woods became unreal, far and slightly slow, the movement reaching him in pieces rather than a flow, as though he were blinking a beat too long and losing the middle of every movement, so that men came at him already halfway through their coming, jumping from one shape to another without crossing the space between.
His body went on without him. The sword knew the work. The part of him that should have chosen each cut stood behind his eyes and watched the cuts be made, watching and doing having come apart, and after that he was not entirely there.
He had made himself, across twenty years of training his muscle memory, into a very good sword, and a sword does not deliberate. It goes through what is in front of its edge and asks nothing.
The people stopped being people and became shapes. A shape with a spear held low, male, older than him. A smaller shape that swung something, cut across where its neck would be. He did not look at the faces, or rather, he didn't see the faces. Even his own men, when they came near him in the murk, reached him only as fragments that did not add to anything; a shape with a blade of grass at its teeth, working a long weapon in wide arcs off to his right, there one minute, and then, when the wide whistling of it stopped, not there the next. A shape going down with a lacquered comb spilling from the front of his clothing. None of it had names. The names were waiting for him further down the day, and he did not know it.
His injuries accumulated as he moved forward through the fight without his noting any of them. A bamboo spear-point scraped along his forearm; he did not feel it. A small blade laid a line across the back of his hand. A branch, or something like it, tore his cheek. None of them deep, none of them mattering on their own, but all of them adding up, a tax taken in small coins, so that he bled from a dozen places without knowing it as he went on.
Then the old man came at him from the left, low and fast, a long-handled kama held in both hands, the heavy rice sickle lashed to a pole; a farm tool, but a man who has swung one through thirty seasons of harvest has arms like braided rope and no waste in him at all. He came in under Hyogonosuke's guard, and the curved blade went into the outside of the thigh and pulled, raking down through the meat of it in a long deep stroke, and this one Hyogonosuke felt: a hot wide line that gaped when he moved and let the blood come fast and dark down his leg, the muscle of the thigh showing pale at the edges of it before the blood filled the wound and ran over. The sword answered the old man without Hyogonosuke's asking it to, and he went down among the leaves with the kama handle still in his hands, and disappeared in the blur. But the leg was wrong now, Hyogonosuke could feel it but not consciously understand why. It would still carry him, on the day's terror if nothing else, but it had gone uncertain, and every step was a step taken on something that might fold.
The fog had risen off the wet valley floor and come down off the high ground at midday, swallowing the gun-smoke, much thicker than the smoke had been, and the air had gone cold and close with it, the first word of weather. Then the sky opened and the rain came down hard and straight, bitterly cold, hissing in the leaves, and within minutes the ground was slick mud underfoot and the brush poured water and the world closed down further still.
Hyogonosuke’s hair came loose and plastered itself across his face. The blood from a dozen small wounds thinned and ran pink, soaking down through the lacing of the do into the clothing beneath, so that he was wet to the skin with rain and blood, and the leg's long wound ran freely in the wet and would not clot.
He moved through the downpour and fog as through hanging curtains, one and the next and the next, the leg failing a little under him on the slick ground, and sometimes the curtain held a person, and sometimes the person held a weapon, and the sword answered and the curtain closed again.
The woman came from his right. He had a half-instant of seeing her: not old, a farmer's work kimono hitched up and her hair bound back, a matchlock gun braced low against her hip, and then she fired, and he threw himself left, but the bad leg betrayed him in the throwing. The bullet did not pass him. It caught him along the side of the face, a hot iron laid from the corner of his eye back across to the ear, the burn of the muzzle arriving with it, the powder so close it drove into the skin of his cheek. Then he was down, and the right side of the world had changed. The eye filled and streamed and would not clear, stinging, the lid fighting to shut and stay shut, the whole right of his sight gone to water and blur. A high ringing started deep in that ear, the ear itself gone strange and far, sounds reaching it as though he was at the bottom of a well. The right half of him had dropped away into water and noise.
She did not give him the ground. She came at him with the matchlock swung up like a club, brought it down across his shoulder and then the side of his head, and he went flat. His sword was gone from his hand, lost in the mud and the dark where he could not see for the streaming eye and the rain. Then she was on him with a short blade and he had nothing. He caught her wrists and they fought for it on the ground, her weight on him, the blade coming down by inches, held off by inches. She was strong in the particular inexhaustible way of someone who has stopped caring whether she will die. He was bleeding and half-blind and exhausted. He heard himself make a sound meant to be a word, low, almost a plea, torn and broken in his hoarse throat but shaped by home, by the speech of the valley above Nara: "Stop."
It did not stop her. In the struggle the blade turned, he never knew by whose strength, his or hers, or the two together, and went into her. The fight left her by degrees and then all at once, and she settled onto him heavy and still. He had to push her off the way he had pushed the dead man off, against the same unhelpful weight, and got up onto his knees in the mud, gasping, scrabbling with his broken-fingered right hand for the sword he had lost.
The boy came while he was still down. He came out of the brush small and fast, the sword he held too big for him, gripped in both hands wrong, the way a person holds a sword when he has never been shown how to do it correctly. Hyogonosuke, on his knees in the mud with one eye streaming and his broken hand painfully closing on the grip of his own found sword at last, knew only that the shape was small and did not know how to hold a blade. It was not a fight. It was the brutal short arithmetic of a trained man on the ground and an untrained child rushing him, and the arithmetic worked itself out the way it had to; the small shape went down. Only when it was down and still did the smallness of it finally reach him, the wrongness of how small, how light it had been against the sword. He knelt over the dead boy, breathing in great gasps he could not get the bottom of, then pushed himself up on the failing leg and stumbled forward away from it, because his legs would carry him forward and not back, out through a last curtain of fog into a thinning of the trees, a slight clearing, the ground opening a little to the sky.
The clouds broke, tearing open overhead, the rain falling off to nothing, and the moon came through full and sudden, drenching the world below in silver light and stark shadows that, for a minute, left him stunned in the brightness, as if the world had suddenly come into focus for the first time.
He turned, trying to get his bearings after hours of dark, wet, and fog, and the first thing the moon showed him was the face of the boy he had just killed, turned up out of the leaves a few feet behind where he had stumbled clear.
The face was his little brother's face. It could not be. His brother was four hundred ri away, whole and asleep in the valley, but Hyogonosuke's mind, breaking, handed him the first face it had available, and the face it had for a dead young boy was his brother's. Hyogonosuke made a sound and went backward from it, the sword falling out of his hand into the mud, his heels skidding, scrambling away on the ground from the small, upturned face the moon would not stop showing him.
He went downhill.
He did not decide to; his body turned from the clearing and the face and went down, away from the high ground, and he did not look back up the slope to where the worst of the late fighting had been, where the dead lay in the dark under the trees where he would never have to see them. He went down, and the moon came with him, riding clear in the sky the rain had emptied, laying its cold complete light over everything, and as he went it showed him the remnants of the day.
The woman was next. She lay a little down the slope on her back, her hair come loose, the short blade still in her chest, and the moon gave her the face of the woman who sold daikon and pickles at the market below the castle at Nara. She had the same square set to the jaw, so that he had killed the daikon-seller, who had surely never in her life held a blade meant for anything besides cutting vegetables.
Then the others, in whatever order the descent gave them.
The old man with the kama still in his hands, his thigh-stroke paid back to him in kind, his belly opened where the sword had gone in, and the yellow of the fat showing at the lips of the wound. The moon gave his deep-lined face to the man whose house stood by the bridge in Yagyu village, who mended his baskets in the doorway and waved to the children going past, so that Hyogonosuke went by him knowing he had killed the man by the bridge and knowing at the same time it was not the man by the bridge, but unable to hold the two apart.
And one of his own. A shape with a young face. Hyogonosuke knew this one, the knowing arriving all at once with the name and everything attached to it: this was a man of his forty, who had come at him in the fog as confused and blind as everyone else, and it had been Hyogonosuke's own sword that had answered the shape and put him down. The man had given him a persimmon once, in the practice yard in Kumamoto, held out in both hands with an embarrassed grin the way young men offer things to their commanders, because Hyogonosuke had let slip that he liked persimmons. He had been perhaps twenty. The persimmon had been very good.
Hyogonosuke stood over what he had done to him and could not breathe.
The sound came back, in a manner, and could hear them now in the tree line, some nearer some further, over the ringing and the bottom-of-the-well deadness of his right ear. Some of the forty were not yet finished. A voice somewhere up the slope screamed, high and steady, with no words. Another, lower, said something, over and over, that might have been a name or a prayer. Another only made a sound. They were dying up there in the dark the moon did not reach, where he could not have found them through the brush and the fog if he had tried, and he did not try.
He went down away from them, away from the sound, away from the faces, stumbling now on the ruined leg, half-fleeing, the faces flooding up at him out of the moonlit ground faster than he could pass them. Behind him the voices thinned, one going quiet and then another, the screaming dropping out and then the praying, until by the time the trees gave way and he came out onto the open, sloped, bare, millet field at the edge of the forest, there was no sound behind him. The last of the forty had finished while he walked.
He was in the field now, the open ground his men had crossed that morning in the frost with the cranes going up before them, and the field had its dead too, the ones who had dropped on the approach, lying out in the stubble in the moonlight in whatever shapes their deaths had left them. He came in among them, and that was where the weight came down on him.
He understood it dimly as his armor — the weight of the do, the sode, the soaked clothing — but it had become the weight of the whole day pressing him toward the ground, and worse than the weight was what came with it: the certainty that there were hands on him. The dead man from the lane. The woman he had pushed off himself. The shapes that had come at him in the grey curtains and sheeting rain. All of them had hold of him at once, gripping his arms, his shoulders, his legs, bearing him down, and he could not draw breath under them. He tried to tell them to let go. He tried to scream it, to turn and roar at them to get off, leave him be, and what came out of his throat was only sound, hoarse and shapeless, no words in it at all, and his good hand went tearing at the cords of his armor.
He got them loose and dragged the do off over his head and flung it into the mud and pulled at the rest, the sode, the ties, his broken fingers useless, the other hand clumsy with panic, and got most of it off him, and still the hands did not let go. The weight was gone; the grip was not. He could feel them on him exactly where the armor had been, holding him, drawing him down into the field, and there was no fighting it, because it was no longer on the outside of him.
The hoarse sound he was making broke apart and became sobbing, and he went down into the cold wet ground sobbing, with no words for any of it and no one left to hear them if there had been.
He drew his knees to his chest, wrapped both arms around them, pressed his forehead against them, and shut his eyes.
Be small. Be still. Be a stone in the bank, a clod of turned earth, anything that is not a man who has to be here.
He gave himself to the cold ground and let it have him, because the hands were drawing him into it anyway, and it was easier to go than to be pulled.
Something is wrong with me, he understood, from very far off, something past the bleeding leg and the streaming eye and the cold. The thigh had gone deep, he half-knew, a bad wound under the crust forming on it now, and only the day's terror had kept him upright and moving on it. He had not slept in two nights. He had not eaten since the sweet potatoes. His mind would not hold a thought; he reached for one and it slid out of his grip like a wet stone and left him holding nothing, and he could not keep hold even of his own alarm, that too slid away, and he let it, because there was nothing left in him to hold it.
The cold came down with the clear sky. By the deepest part of the night a thin frost had begun to form on the beaten millet, on the dead, on the bare back of his neck, and the wet in his clothes stiffened.
The moon crossed the whole sky.
Hyogonosuke was still folded there when it set, still there when the east began to go grey: the sword somewhere on the hill behind him, the thigh stiff in its crust, two fingers of his right hand bent wrong, the side of his face a black dried track from the eye-corner to the clotted ear, the powder driven dark into the skin of his cheek, the eye still weeping, the ringing a constant tide. He was cold all the way through, so cold his body had stopped shivering some hours before, which he knew, distantly, to be a bad sign, and could do nothing about.
It was beginning to drizzle again, soft on the frost, when Kato's soldiers came.
The trouble in the outlying districts had been gathering for some time: a tax raised three years running, two poor harvests in consecutive years, and the particular resentment that collects, quietly and with enormous patience, in people who had survived thirty years of civil war only to come out the far side still poor, still hungry, and considerably less frightened of armored men than their grandparents had been.
The recent wars had scattered a great many things unevenly across the country, firearms among them. Peasants who had once stood in lines at their lords’ command to form the first precarious line of a battle now understood well what guns were for, how to set a position, and how to use the lay of the land, because all of it had been done to them for a generation and they had been paying close attention.
By the time Kiyomasa sent reinforcements, the administrator charged with putting the revolt down, Ito Mitsukane, had been at it for six weeks and lost forty of his men, in addition to however many wounded. Two of his commanders were also dead. And the revolt was spreading from its original village the way fire spreads through dry grass, finding new fuel in neighboring districts that had been nursing grievances of their own, waiting only for proof that resistance was possible, which Ito had provided in abundance.
The army Kato sent to succeed where Ito had failed was not very large, but it was a good deal larger than anything Ito had been able to muster, and its men moved into the valley with the unhurried confidence of soldiers who had been told the hard part was over.
It was not.
Hyogonosuke understood this only later, and in pieces; at the time, what he saw was a country that had been fought over and a campaign that had stalled, which he took to be two different things rather than the same thing wearing two faces.
The first villages they passed through were empty in the particular way of places that have been emptied rather than abandoned. Huts burnt to the blackened ribs of their frames. A well with a dead body fouling the water, so that the column drew water from the stream instead. The fields had gone to the weeds in the weeks since anyone worked them, the millet that should have been harvested standing brown, bowing overripe under its weight.
Hyogonosuke rode through it and felt the aftermath of violence he did not witness: a kind of solemn appetite, the conviction that the real event had happened just out of frame and that he had barely arrived in time for the next.
They made their camp on the site of one of Ito's, and the ground told a story Hyogonosuke was not yet able to fully read. There was a great deal of damaged gear lying about: armor with its lacing cut, a helmet punched through by a bullet, the splintered shafts of spears stacked for firewood because they were not good for anything else now. More of it than there should have been. Equipment like that came off men, and the men it had come off were not in the camp.
His own missions in the first two weeks amounted to nothing much.
He took his forty up one ridge and down another to look at ground that held no one. He was sent to confirm a ford that was in fact a ford, and to scout a hamlet that was no longer standing. He carried messages. Once, he lay a whole afternoon in cover above a trail on word that the rebels used it frequently and watched only a single old woman walk along with a basket of daikon; he was thanked for the thoroughness of his report in a tone suggesting thoroughness was not what anyone wanted from him.
He was impatient, and honest enough to know it, though not yet honest enough to mistrust himself. He had come almost the length of the country to make his name, and the war kept declining to begin. It frustrated him.
The men under him did not seem to share the feeling. They were farmers, most of them; men who had taken up the spear because it paid better than the field and not because they had any quarrel with the people on the far ridge, who were also farmers. Some of them had been to battle before, when they were much younger men. They cleaned their gear, ate when there was food, and slept when the day allowed it, with the bottomless practical calm of men who had learned that a soldier's life was mostly waiting and that the waiting was the good part.
It was on one of those slow evenings that a man named Genta came back to the fire grinning, with the front of his kimono bundled up into a sling and both hands cradling it, and he tipped a little heap of sweet potatoes out onto the ground by the coals. He’d found them in a farmhouse two fields over, half of it burned and the other half standing, underneath a board pried up in the floor with a straw-lined hollow beneath it.
"Buried under the floor of the back room," he said, pleased with himself, settling down to brush the dirt off them. "Right where I'd have put my own, if I had to run and meant to come back for them." He said it the way a man notes that another man keeps his tools the same way he does and went on cleaning the potatoes.
Hyogonosuke had grown up in a valley full of farmers, raised closer to the soil than the grandson of a lord was meant to be because by his father's time there had been only the village and the valley left with the family. The smell of the potatoes, the dirt still clinging to them, and the particular homely fact of a winter store dug up from the cold ground took hold of something he had not thought about in years. Back home, the farmers had pressed sweet potatoes on him in the autumn, warm out of the ashes, when he was still small enough to be walked back to the mansion by whomever found him still out at dusk; they had called him over to their fires with a wave and a roughness that knew exactly who he was and didn’t stand on ceremony.
"Leave me a couple of those," he said. "I'll do them myself."
Genta looked up, and one of the younger men beside him laughed before he caught himself, and said, half an apology, "The master knows how? Surely there are servants for that at home."
"There are," Hyogonosuke agreed, taking a place at the coals to rake a hollow into them with the side of a stick, the way it was done. "It doesn't mean I forgot how to do it myself."
Tasuke, who had carried the master's most important possessions the length of the country and aired his armor for him that very morning, said nothing, because he had been there for the boyhood the others were only now glimpsing, and knew where making sweet potatoes had been learned, though there was no need to say so. He only moved up to make his own room at the fire, and the matter passed.
They buried the potatoes in the coals and ate them when the skins had gone black and split, passing them hand to hand, hissing at the heat.
For a while the war was nowhere near.
Genta turned out to have a gift for dice and no luck at all to go with it. A heavyset man called Rokuro could not hold even the thin camp sake, growing sentimental on a single cup of it, and showed everyone, twice, the lacquered wooden comb he was bringing home to his wife.
Hyogonosuke sat among them with a black-skinned potato cooling in his hands and was as happy as he had been since leaving home: full and warm, easy among men he had come to like in the proprietary way a young commander likes the first men ever placed in his keeping.
He carried that ease with him when he got up to walk the edge of the camp before sleeping, his belly warm and his mind loose. So he was not braced for anything when he passed a second fire, a small one, where two of Ito's people sat, ones too lightly hurt to send back home and not hurt enough to be useless, who kept to themselves and watched the new arrivals with an expression Hyogonosuke had taken for the resentment of men being relieved of their duties.
They were talking low, in the flat way of men who have learned that speaking at all is a risk, and the warmth in him was the very thing that kept him from hearing it for what it was.
"—up the same road, is what I heard. Same as before."
"Then they're fools."
"They've got the numbers."
"So did we, the first time." A pause, the scrape of a bowl. "Numbers don't help you on that road. They march you up it nice and tight, and then—" The man stopped. He had either felt Hyogonosuke nearby or simply remembered that the walls of a camp are made of nothing. When he spoke again it was about the cold, and the other agreed that it was beginning to get quite cold, especially at night now that they were moving into late fall, and Hyogonosuke walked on, the half a sentence sitting unregarded in his mind. He had gotten to know his forty over the better part of a year, in the dojo, in the town, on the road, and he liked them. He trusted them and knew they were worth trusting. He did not understand that he could trust them with his very life and lead them out of theirs in the same motion, and that the second thing had nothing to do with the first.
The road to Higo took the better part of three weeks, and Hyogonosuke traveled it the way his grandfather had traveled in his own youth: on horseback, with a single servant, the things a man needed, and nothing he didn't.
The servant's name was Tasuke, though Hyogonosuke had called him Suke since before he could remember, having mangled the name as a small boy and never quite let go of the shortened version once he could manage the whole of it. Tasuke had come to the family as a teenager, when Hyogonosuke was still small enough to ride on his shoulders, and had been part of the household so long that the shortened name had become a kind of private fact between them, used when the two of them were alone and set aside by an unspoken courtesy when they were not. He complained about his knees at every river crossing and not once otherwise.
Hyogonosuke made the journey easily. He was twenty-four and in the full strength of a young man who had never been given reason to doubt his body, broad through the shoulders from a lifetime with the sword. In the dojo at home he had been the one the others measured themselves against, an heir of the Yagyu line and the most gifted blade the valley had produced in a generation, and he carried that standing the way the healthy carry their health: not as a thing prized, but as an assumption, the floor beneath everything else.
The connection that opened Kato's gate to Hyogonosuke was an old one and, like most such connections, more a matter of geography than affection. Kato Kiyomasa had been born in Owari, as had the Yagyu before the family settled in Yamato, and the bond between men who could name the same province as their home was a real thing in an age when a man might serve his whole life beside others whose speech he could barely follow.
Sekishusai's letter to Kato had said that the bearer was his grandson, that he had been trained in the Shinkage-ryu from childhood, and that he was competent and licensed to instruct. What it did not say, and did not need to, was that the Yagyu patriarch was sending one of his own out into the world under the roof of a man from home and trusted him to remember it.
There was a second thing the letter also did not say, because Sekishusai had judged it better left for the world to raise or not raise on its own: that Hyogonosuke's elder brother Kyusaburo had gone to Korea seven years before and had not come back because he had died at Ulsan, in the winter siege, under the same banner Hyogonosuke was now riding toward.
What the family had been told about Kyusaburo's death was the fact and almost nothing else: that he was dead, that it had happened at Ulsan, that it had been winter. What the wider world knew, and what the family could not help absorbing in the years that followed, was what Ulsan had been: an army that had gone into the cold provisioned for a campaign, not a siege, sealed inside an unfinished fortress, the country around it stripped bare, the men inside starving and freezing by the thousands, drinking from worse than paddy fields and rotted wells, and eating the paste off the walls before the end. Somewhere among that misery Kyusaburo had died at twenty-one.
Hyogonosuke had been eighteen when word reached the valley, old enough to remember his brother and young enough that what he kept of him now was not his face but the silence that had followed the news through the house.
Hyogonosuke never met Kato Kiyomasa personally, nor had he expected to.
His appointment had been handled by a senior bureaucrat in Kato's employ, a compact and efficient man named Okabe, who had processed the formalities of taking on new retainers for so long that the business had shed any ceremony it may once have possessed. He read the letter, asked Hyogonosuke a short series of questions whose answers he did not write down, and named a stipend and a duty in the same breath: five hundred koku, instruction in the sword, and command of forty ashigaru, who needed someone to command them and might as well have a man who could teach them swordsmanship while he was at it.
Hyogonosuke was settled into a small residence with a small, fenced yard in the lower samurai quarters that ringed the castle, on the same day he met Okabe, which was the day after his arrival.
The house sat at the outer edge of the quarter, where the proper streets began to give way to the workshops and tenements of the men who supplied them, which told him with perfect clarity exactly where a new retainer with no battle record stood in the order.
It did not trouble him much. It was a place to begin, and Tasuke took it over within the day, finding where things were bought and at what price, setting the small household in order, airing the master's armor and seeing to his things, so that Hyogonosuke was left free to do the thing he had come to do, which was to be seen.
Hyogonosuke caught a glimpse of the lord himself a few weeks later in the great dojo inside the castle, when Kato and a few senior retainers came to watch morning practice.
Hyogonosuke, who was training among the rest, knew the lord had arrived at the entrance by the way the quality of attention shifted in the room, rather than by any announcement. But like the others he did not break off: the correct response, apparently, was to train harder and cleaner for the lord to watch, and so Hyogonosuke finished his practice. Only afterward did the men line up formally, and Kato stepped into the dojo and walked the length of them.
The lord was a large man, broad in the shoulders, and he wore a beard in an age when most men of rank went clean-shaven or close to it; a thick, deliberate beard that belonged to an older kind of warrior, grown in field camps rather than kept for court. He was not the figure Hyogonosuke had expected: not a daimyo in fine silks who had spent his life sending other men to do his fighting, but a seasoned commander who had gone to Korea and back twice and looked it, weathered and unhurried, with the hard, level eyes of a man for whom violence had long ago stopped being a question of nerve.
His gaze moved down the row of retainers without lingering, until it reached Hyogonosuke, his newest, and held there.
It held a moment longer than it had on any other man, and something moved behind the lord's face while it did: not quite a question, but the look of a man who has caught a few notes of a tune he can't place and isn't certain he wants to. Four seconds, perhaps, with nothing said. Then the man following at his shoulder leaned in and spoke a few words, low, and Hyogonosuke caught only the shape of his family name in them — Yagyu — and saw the lord's expression settle, the half-recognition resolving into something quieter and more closed. Whatever had surfaced, Kato did not pursue it aloud. He let it go back down. Then the eyes moved on, and the lord said something to the man at his shoulder that Hyogonosuke could not hear, and the inspection was over.
I've been noticed, Hyogonosuke told himself. The rest is only a matter of time.
Yagyu Sekishusai made his case over the course of three separate mornings, which was notable because the patriarch was not in the habit of making any point more than once. He'd lived long enough to decide that anything worth saying was worth saying clearly enough the first time. That he came back the second morning, and then the third, was its own kind of argument, and Hyogonosuke understood this, even as he sat with his hands folded in his lap trying not to fidget, hearing his grandfather say the same words again, only in a different configuration.
They sat in the large room overlooking the side garden, in a house that did not match the name it carried. The Yagyu mansion had been rebuilt after the wars on a smaller scale than the one that came before, plain, simple, raised again on land that was now only a fraction of what the family once held. Sekishusai had been lord of a domain in his day, with holdings, retainers and the obligations that came with both, until the fortunes of war and a single ill-judged allegiance had stripped most of it away and left him an old sword instructor presiding over only a valley and a village.
He had spent the years since trying to knit something back together out of what remained, to recover some thread of the family's former standing, but the longer he worked at it the more it became apparent that what he wanted was simpler and more stubborn than status: he wanted his people near him, he wanted the valley kept whole and untouched by future fighting, and he wanted to lose no one else.
"I've lost enough family," Sekishusai said on the third morning, which was the most direct he'd been in any conversation in Hyogonosuke's memory.
The old man looked out over the square, which had been turned into a practice yard sometime before Hyogonosuke's birth, used for Sekishusai's family and occasionally his most senior students. His back was straight even at seventy-three, and there was something in his face even his grandson couldn't easily place
"Your father's leg was paralyzed in battle when he was younger than you are now. Your brother gave his life in Korea. When your uncle Munenori went to Edo, I asked him whether he understood what it cost me to let him go. He said yes. But he was twenty-three and understood nothing. And I don't think you understand either."
Hyogonosuke didn't claim to.
But the names his grandfather set down so plainly opened into things less plain.
His father's room sat at the end of the hall of the family home, close enough to his own that Hyogonosuke had grown up hearing the uneven rhythm of his steps through the house each morning with the first light, on his way to practice the sword: the step-drag-step-drag of a man shot in the lower spine at twenty and left to spend the next quarter century teaching himself to live in a body that no longer worked the way it once had.
His father had never complained about the leg. In all of Hyogonosuke's childhood it was mentioned perhaps twice.
The first was when Hyogo was very young and had asked outright, in the unabashed manner of a small boy, what’s wrong with your leg, and his father had told him as though recounting something that had happened to another man.
He had been twenty, and he and a distant cousin a few years older had been appointed to head the rear guard, a posting meant to keep two young men out of the worst of the fighting while giving them a command, and they’d not been able to bear it. There was a way around the back of the enemy position, his cousin had known the ground, and it had seemed a clever thing: a narrow, raised lane between the rice paddies, slopes rising wooded on either side. They had taken their men up it in the late afternoon and found the slopes full of gunners ready for them. His cousin had been thrown into the water with a round in his shoulder and lived. Toshikatsu had taken a bullet in the lower spine while dragging him out on the retreat and lived also, after a fashion.
He told the story simply, the way a man tells a thing he has finished being angry about, and what Hyogo took away from it at that age was not the lesson but the picture: the green slopes, the bright paddies, his father young and whole walking up a road. It didn’t frighten him because it was a story that happened long ago, and the proof that it was over was sitting in front of him with his damaged leg, alive.
The second time was years later, and Hyogo didn’t realize then that it was the same telling, because his father had taken the story out of it.
Hyogonosuke was seventeen and had come home from the dojo with broken ribs, having gone looking, in the way of boys who are good at a thing, for the place where being good at it stopped being enough. His father sat beside him while the doctor worked and said, quietly as he did most things, that the body had a way of remembering everything it was ever put through.
Worth knowing, he added, before you go looking for what it can withstand.
Hyogo took this simply for the kind of thing fathers said to caution their reckless sons and let it go. He did not hear the rice paddies in it, nor did he hear that his father had once gone looking too, and was telling him, for the second time in his life and the last, what he had found.
His brother was the other name, and it closed a memory rather than opening it.
Kyusaburo had been twenty-one when he went to Korea, and Hyogonosuke had been eighteen when word came that he would not return, brought on a cold spring morning by a retainer who'd taken the notice from a courier.
What Hyogonosuke remembered was not grief, exactly, but the silence that followed the notice through the house: a kind of exhausted recognition in the faces of his family, as though they had always known this was possible and had sincerely hoped otherwise. His grandfather had gone into his room and shut the door and had not come out until the following morning, his face composed, saying nothing.
Sekishusai had grieved Kyusaburo before his death, Hyogonosuke understood now. He had begun grieving early, anticipating the loss rather than waiting for the fact of it.
And he is doing it again. With me. Out loud, across three mornings.
The knowledge settled in his chest like a swallowed stone.
But he was twenty-four, and his grandfather's sword school in the Yagyu valley was not the world. He knew this the way he knew the shape of every room in his father's house, every path in the village, every floorboard of the Yagyu dojo.
He had trained there since before he could understand the difference between playing and training, had learned every form his grandfather knew and several his father had adapted, and he was good. Better than good. He was, if he was being uncharitable to the rest of Sekishusai's students, the most gifted the old man had ever taught; more gifted than his uncle Munenori, who was sharp and disciplined but lacked the instincts Hyogonosuke shared with his grandfather.
A man has to take that somewhere, Hyogonosuke thought. There is nothing wrong with grandfather's school, but it is not where a man finds out what he is made of.
The fourth day brought no morning summons. Instead Sekishusai sent for him in the evening, and they sat together in the large room while the old man looked at him for a long while before he spoke.
"The sword in the dojo and the sword on the battlefield are the same sword. What changes is the man holding it, and whether he has spent enough hours contemplating himself honestly enough to know what he will find when the field opens him up." He paused. "Most have not. In my experience, most men meet their own character for the first time in battle and are surprised by it. The surprise is rarely a pleasant one."
Hyogonosuke sat with this and said nothing.
"I will write you a letter of introduction," his grandfather said. "Listen to whoever commands you. You have never been very good at listening to people who command you."
Hyogonosuke bowed.
He left the following morning, before the night's frost had melted.
This is a work of fiction. (I'm finally rewriting it.) You can find more information about my tumblr, Tales of Edo, here, and an index for this story’s chapters, anything else I've written, and my art, here.
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Suigetsu (Samon’s Story)
Loosely inspired by Yagyuu Hijouken Samon (manga) / Also on AO3
CW: graphic violence, abusive family, physical & psychological abuse
Chapter 1
It was already well into the hour of the rat and the bright full moon hung large and white in an inky sky, casting deep shadows across the formal garden of the secluded samurai mansion in the valley below. Gathering storm clouds raced across the blackness, pushed by the strong winds that had been gusting since late in the afternoon; winds that tore at the ancient maple at the center of the garden, scattering its crimson late-fall leaves like embers sparking from a fire.
Samon sat cross-legged in the center of the porch facing the garden, far enough from the edge that the overhanging roof shielded him from the thick raindrops that had begun falling just then, the only person still awake at this late hour.
He was dressed in a white kimono and light blue hakama as if readying himself for seppuku, and the brightness of his clothing contrasted with the dark wood of the veranda like a reflection of the moon above. He was watching the trees swaying in the distance, trying (and failing miserably) to calm his unfocused mind.
Early the previous morning, a messenger had arrived with a wrinkled letter sent by an acquaintance in Edo, a servant girl working in his clan’s upper mansion, who had once embarrassed herself by confessing her love to him when he was still a boy.
The letter, difficult to read because of her unpracticed handwriting, had been unsettling: she wrote that Munenori, Samon’s father, had been beside himself with rage after finding out about the stipend His Excellency the Shogun had granted Samon, and that he had dispatched Jubei, Samon’s eldest brother, to the Yagyu valley to “set things straight."
She didn’t know what this meant, said a scrawled addition at the end, but thought that he deserved a warning, considering his father’s and his brother’s tempers.
Samon appreciated her thoughtfulness in sending the letter, but the message had given him cause to anxiously pace around the mansion and its grounds ever since, trying to collect his thoughts and preparing for the worst. He almost wished he’d never received the letter at all, that he had been left in blissful ignorance until Jubei arrived at his doorstep.
He understood, at least on some basic level, why his father was angry: Tokugawa Iemitsu, who had inherited the post of Shogun following the death of his father, was in a precarious position because many of the daimyo opposed his succession and instead favored his younger brother, Tadanaga, whom they considered more suitable. Anything those men could use as fodder to strengthen their case, like the relationship Iemitsu and Samon had failed to keep secret, threatened not only the shogun, but by extension the Yagyu, Samon's family.
It was because of these politics Munenori had sent his son away months ago under the guise of illness, and why Samon was now little more than a prisoner in the old family home in Iga, two weeks’ travel from Edo.
Samon often wondered whether the politics surrounding their situation had occurred to Iemitsu. Certainly, he must have given it some thought before trying to return his lover to Edo with the stroke of a brush, by making him a daimyo in his own right and therefore subjecting him to the Edo posting, which required all daimyo to live in the city every other year; ironically, a measure originally devised to prevent rebellion against the shogunate.
But perhaps Iemitsu hadn’t considered it at all, had worried only about the two of them being kept apart for reasons he didn’t fully understand or care about.
Samon would have liked to think Iemitsu wouldn’t be so shortsighted, but he also knew just how impulsive he could be: once, when Iemitsu was still a teen, he’d stabbed his older lover to death just for looking at another man, though Samon had not seen that side of him as the young future Shogun matured.
He realized, of course, that worrying about Iemitsu’s intent or consideration made no difference now: what was done was done, and the only path left was the one moving forward, regardless of where it might lead. Logically, this made it entirely pointless to worry about the What Ifs of the situation.
However, Samon did worry about his father’s plans for “setting things straight,” as the girl had put it in her letter. He found it difficult to imagine any scenario that didn’t end in his own death, and he’d paced around his rooms and up and down the veranda for hours, apprehensively pondering whether a simple thing like blood ties would stand in the way of his father’s ambitions and desire for power.
Would this even enter his father’s mind, considering Samon was merely his third son, and additionally only the child of a mistress?
Eventually, and perhaps overdramatically, Samon had resigned himself to the idea that he would likely be killed once Jubei reached the Yagyu valley, and he’d dressed accordingly to await his brother’s arrival, which he supposed wouldn’t be too long after the courier’s.
By the time he sat down on the porch that night – and honestly, he couldn’t have slept even if he tried, just like he hadn’t slept the previous night – his thoughts were all over the place still, but somewhere at the back of his mind, he’d at least made peace with the idea of death. After all, if this was the price to pay to keep Iemitsu safe in his position as Shogun, wasn’t it worth such an insignificant life as his own?
How strange, he thought, that both my father and I share the common goal of keeping Iemitsu safe.
…
The initial thick, slow raindrops had turned into sheeting rain by the time Jubei arrived, dressed in black and dark green traveling clothes, climbing over the back wall into the garden like a common thief, rather than a visiting relative. It was a familiar entrance for Jubei, who had come and gone by means of this secret back route as a boy more times than Samon could count.
But this was no childhood escapade. Jubei already had his long sword unsheathed as he stood on the tiled roof of the wall, one foot planted firmly on either side of the center ridge while he surveyed the scene before him, like a large bird of prey perched on a tree branch, looking for a juicy mouse scurrying along the forest floor.
Seeing that his younger brother was waiting for him, he jumped down and walked casually along the stone path winding between landscape features, entirely unbothered by the rain dripping from his face and soaking into his clothes.
A small, satisfied smile curled the corners of his lips upward with contentment because his brother was expecting him, but his eyes were cold and disdainful, just as they had commonly looked at Samon in the past.
“I always hoped we’d get a chance to duel,” Jubei said when he was close enough for Samon to hear him over the rain pattering against the tiled porch roof. “I’m told some people think you’re the stronger swordsman, but we’ve never had a chance to measure our skills against each other in the fencing hall, let alone with real blades.”
This was so like Jubei: the obsession to be the stronger swordsman, the strongest swordsman, had not let up since Samon had replaced him as Iemitsu’s fencing instructor five years prior, and it stood to reason that he had only gained more real-life sword experience in his missions and wanderings since.
Samon had already played out in his mind numerous scenarios of how he might draw and strike with his sword tonight, and in each of them had found himself lacking in the face of his brother’s skill.
Jubei was many things: he was hateful and short-tempered, inconsiderate and self-important, ambitious and ruthless. But still, Samon could not deny the fact that Jubei was also an expert swordsman possessed of a strength and speed that was like a demon’s.
And Samon was scared. Terrified, really.
So, this was it, then.
Samon took a shaky breath and uncrossed his legs to rise, uncomfortably aware of the sweat slicking his palms as he reached for the sword that lay beside him, waiting to be drawn.
He found it unmovable, because someone, some shadowy figure suddenly standing behind him, had planted a foot against the sheath, pinning it in place against the floorboards. As distracted as Samon had been with anxiety, and with his focus solely on his elder brother, he’d never heard this second man approach, never even felt his presence. It served only to remind him in this split second of sheer panic of how inexperienced he still was, despite his years of training.
The thought flashed through his mind that his father would have been disappointed.
Samon tried to draw his blade from this awkward position, but next thing he knew, a coarse rope was slung around his neck. Instinctively, he brought up his hands to protect himself from being strangled, but before he could grab the rope, the man behind him kicked him between the shoulders, causing him to slam face first into the dark wood of the porch.
In the seconds it took Samon to taste the metallic bitterness of his own blood in his mouth and try to push himself upward, the man had knotted the rope at the nape of his neck, looped the two loose ends around his elbows to pin his arms against his sides, and bound his hands tightly in the small of his back. No matter how Samon struggled, he already knew there was no point: he was completely defenseless in front of Jubei.
“Why are you doing this?” he gasped, the rope pressing against his throat as he still pointlessly struggled to get to his feet. The man behind him pulled him backward and Samon came to sit awkwardly as Jubei approached.
“Ah, don’t give me that angry look,” Jubei sneered, sheathing his sword. “Is this any way to greet your big brother?”
“Why would you go to such lengths?” Samon said, trying to keep his voice calm and steady but hearing it waver all the same. He was both seething with anger that his own brother would resort to using one of their clan’s shinobi to trap him like this, and utterly terrified at what Jubei had planned, now that a fair duel seemed out of the question. “I know you don’t believe I’m better with the sword, or that you need to resort to dirty tricks to kill me.”
Jubei shrugged. “I’m not allowed to kill you, so what need is there for a duel?”
Samon couldn’t hide his confusion as he studied his brother’s face for anything that might give away a hint of what would happen next. Of all the scenarios he had considered over the past two days (and there had been many), he hadn’t considered a single one that did not involve his own death, unless he’d somehow be able to best Jubei in a duel.
After all, what easier way was there to solve his father’s dilemma: If the youngest son presented a danger to both the Shogun and the Yagyu, then disposing of the youngest son would fix the issue, since merely sending him away had not. And although understanding the reasoning gave him little comfort, it was at least a thought process Samon could follow and he’d prepared, in his own way, for this worst-case scenario.
But this, whatever this was, loomed dark and foreboding in its uncertainty.
“If you aren’t here to kill me,” Samon asked tentatively, “then why are you here?”
The rain had started to let up by now and Jubei smoothed back some of the soggy strands of hair clinging to his face as he stepped onto the porch, leaving muddy footprints in his wake.
Looking around the yard as if he were studying its features, the large rocks and manicured shrubs, he explained: “Father sent me to ensure you’re no threat to our family due to your …” A sarcastic chuckle interrupted his sentence. “…intimate friendship with our Shogun. But, for reasons that are a mystery to me, he doesn’t want you dead. He wants to keep you around.” A shrug. “Your mother is his favorite mistress, after all, so perhaps he’s feeling some kind of attachment. Perhaps she begged him for your life. Who the fuck knows.”
He turned to face Samon. “At any rate, he doesn’t want you dead. But he does want me to ensure that you won’t be seeing our Shogun again and that the stipend and title, with which he tried to return you to Edo so desperately, are rendered irrelevant.”
Although Jubei’s tone was light and dismissive, Samon could detect the undertone of anger, which he supposed originated in his brother’s disappointment at having to miss out on a long hoped-for duel, and he worried this might spell disaster because Jubei had a terrible temper – always had, even when they were both still children – which showed itself in a sadistic side. Jubei truly was their father’s son in that regard.
“So, here I am.” The elder brother continued, spreading his arms wide to indicate the mansion and gardens around them, irritation plain on his face. “An errand boy sent to do father’s bidding, sneaking around the Yagyu valley like a thief. And why? Because my little brother can’t be entrusted with simply doing his job as fencing instructor. No, you just had to spread your cheeks for the Shogun like a cheap whore, caring nothing about rank or position. You truly are an embarrassment.”
He leaned in close, breath warm against Samon’s face, and, with a smirk that exposed his pointy canine teeth, he produced a small dagger from within his belt.
“It’s not death, sorry, but I promise it will hurt a lot.”
As if on cue, the man behind Samon grabbed him by the shoulders and pushed him flat onto his back, tied arms trapped awkwardly beneath his body so that the boney parts of his wrists and elbows ground painfully into the unforgiving wood of the floorboards.
For a moment, their eyes met and Samon recognized the shinobi as Genjiro’s son, Taro, whom he had known since childhood. He felt betrayed that someone he’d once counted as a friend would do this to him, and at the same time realized what a ridiculous sentiment this was, considering Taro was in service to Munenori, just as his father Genjiro had been before him, and any friendship that might have existed between the two boys as children did not extent to their respective positions in adulthood.
Taro placed his hands on either side of Samon’s face to hold his head steady, and Jubei lowered himself over his brother, knees to either side of his ribcage, and leaned forward to look closely at his face.
Samon lay still and quiet, knowing there was no point in struggling now and having resigned himself despondently to whatever was going to happen next.
He couldn’t think of any other course of action to take; his whole life had been one of doing as he was told, no matter if the orders came from his father, his elder brother, or the Shogun. If His Excellency asked for a duel, Samon would let him win. If his father wanted to use him as a pawn in some political scheme, he would hold his breath and wait for it to be over, regardless of the sacrifices he had to make.
Once, he'd told Iemitsu that he didn’t fear death because he was dead already, though that had been a bit of a lie. He feared death. He just knew that his life had never belonged to himself in the first place.
Jubei studied his younger brother’s face, droplets of water dripping down from his hair and rolling off Samon’s cheeks as he leaned in close.
“Get a good look, little brother,” he said, his pale brown eyes searching Samon’s, which looked at him through long lashes. “I’ll be the last person you’ll ever see.”
He touched the side of his brother’s face gently, calloused fingers against smooth, pale skin, then brought his hand up to force open Samon’s right eye. With a flash of steel caught briefly by the moon’s brightness, he flipped the small knife, holding it as one might hold a writing brush.
Samon took a sharp breath in, reflexively trying to wrench his head from Taro’s grip to no avail.
Jubei paused, clearly savoring his younger brother’s expression of terror, of the pupils widening at the sight of the sharp blade, and then he brought the knife down to carefully, surgically, lift the eye from its socket and cut its attachments, all in one swift motion not entirely unlike shucking an oyster.
Samon bit down on his lip to keep from screaming as he felt the warmth of his own blood spill from his eye socket, but his body stiffened and he couldn’t keep his breath from quickening, coming in harsh gasps no matter how hard he tried to control himself to deny Jubei the satisfaction of hearing him cry out. He felt betrayed by his own body when he realized he couldn’t even keep himself from spilling tears.
Jubei noticed, of course. He switched the knife to his left hand and cupped Samon’s cheek with his right, wearing an expression of satisfaction that made Samon feel utterly nauseous.
“How sweet,” Jubei said, his voice soft. “Actual tears.” He used his thumb to wipe them, then licked it as if savoring the salty taste.
“Do you suppose a person can still cry if they don’t have any eyes,” he wondered aloud, not expecting an answer, as he switched the knife back to his right and turned it on his brother once more.
His sarcastic smile was the last thing Samon saw before his world went dark and blood spilled across the other half of his face. He clenched his teeth so hard he was afraid they would break from the strain, but anything was better than giving Jubei the joy of hearing him scream. Even so, he couldn’t suppress a whimper in his agony, and his body, which he’d tried so hard to control even through the pain, was shaking now, shivering as if with cold, and he could do nothing to stop it.
Jubei sat back on his heels, wiping his hands and the small blade on his black tattsuke bakama before reaching into his sleeve and producing a small square piece of silk, which he spread across his palm, carefully placing the two eyeballs on it.
He studied the now lifeless dark brown irises, pupils gaping black in their centers, and seemed amused by the bits of optical nerve still attached to the back, which flopped limply like dead fish as he turned the globes between his fingers.
He stood up and stepped away, engrossed in playing with his trophies. Distractedly, he ordered Taro to wipe up the bloody mess lest it should stain the floorboards of the family home.
Taro helped Samon sit up and began gently wiping his face with a tenugui, whispering quietly so that Jubei would not overhear: “Please bear with it just a little longer, wakasama. I have prepared something for the pain and will give it to you as soon as your brother leaves.”
After a few minutes, Jubei wrapped the eyes with the cloth and tucked them into a pouch for safekeeping. Then he turned and said, almost as if to himself, “Our dear Shogun has always been so attracted to your dark eyes and those pretty lashes.” Every word was dripping with disdain. “I don’t suppose he would find you as attractive now, were he to lay eyes on you.”
You think him so shallow, Samon thought, but he couldn’t help wondering how Iemitsu would react if he saw him like this. After all, he had so often praised Samon for his appearance, just as Jubei said. He tried to shake the thought from his mind.
“Ah, but don’t worry, little brother,” said Jubei, watching him carefully. “You needn't be concerned that he’ll see you again. After all, these lovely little eyeballs I’ll be taking back to Edo…” He jiggled the pouch in his hand, even though his brother obviously couldn’t see it. “… these will serve as proof that you’ve lost your mind being separated from your lover for such a long time. He’ll want nothing to do with a madman who’s gauged out his own eyes, I suppose.”
So, that was the story father was planning to fabricate.
It was brilliant, in a way. Keeping Samon sequestered in the Yagyu valley had not done the trick. Instead, it had served only to embarrass Munenori, making him the subject of gossip around Edo castle once his son had been awarded that ridiculous stipend.
This, on the other hand, would solve the problem: once rumors that Samon had taken leave of his senses and disfigured himself to such an extent would begin circulating around the city, as assuredly they would with Jubei’s help, Munenori could rest safe in the knowledge that the Shogun would at last heed his advisors’ words and sever all ties with his former lover.
Surely, it would be a bit of an embarrassment to the Yagyu, but since Samon was only a third son and the child of a mistress, the outrage would certainly be brief. And the masses would love it: a story of a former lover driven to despair by their separation. It was the kind of gossip that kept the city going.
“Of course,” Jubei said, turning back from the end of the porch. “Our poor shogun will have to find himself a new wakashu on whom to dote his affections now. Though I doubt that will be much of a problem. The city is literally teeming with capable young samurai and since His Excellency certainly doesn’t hold his lovers to particularly high standards, as we’ve seen with you, perhaps he will find himself a whole harem of pretty, young, disposable boys to suit his fancies now. Don’t you think, brother? He might fill his whole Ooku with young men.”
“You’ve no right to mock Uesama,” Samon said through gritted teeth. “You’ve done what you came here to do. What reason is there for you to stand here and mock him.”
Jubei chuckled. “Oh, but it’s so much fun seeing you all riled up. I suppose the sex must have been quite something for you to become so utterly attached. It’s very sweet.”
He crossed back to Samon in a few swift steps, grabbed his brother by the chin, and slammed him backwards into the floorboards so hard Samon saw stars and, for a minute, thought he was going to pass out.
Jubei pulled him back into a sitting position by the front of his clothing, his younger brother too dazed from the sudden assault to resist. “But here you are still thinking you can talk back to me. You just don’t learn, do you? Your job – your only job – is to shut the fuck up and do as you’re fucking told.”
He grasped Samon’s chin and forced his rough fingers, callused from a lifetime of sword training, into his brother’s mouth, forcing it open.
“Don’t even think about biting me,” he warned as he pinched his tongue between two fingers and pulled it forward. “You’ll want to hold nice and still so I can make a straight cut. If you fight me … well, I might just rip it out instead. Your choice.”
He unsheathed his little knife again and sliced through his brother’s tongue, severing it just forward of its base. Then he pushed Samon back down, gave him a kick for good measure, and cast the severed tongue into the yard.
“We’ll have no more talking back now, will we?” he asked calmly, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened at all.
Turning to Taro, he added, “I think I’ll find a servant to heat the bath for me. Get this cleaned up. Once dawn breaks, have someone fetch the doctor. And don’t even think about untying him.”
“Yes, master Jubei.” Taro shifted nervously, watching Jubei disappear around the corner toward the main part of the house, then looked down at Samon who lay on his side in a puddle of his own blood, his body shaking from pain and blood loss.
“I am so sorry,” Taro said quietly. “Please don’t bear me a grudge, wakasama. These things are out of my control.”
Of course, they are. Just as they are out of my control as well.
Samon pulled his legs up, curling into himself, and pressed his head against the smooth wood of the floorboards. If there was only something he could do to make the pain stop. The coppery taste and smell of his own blood were so overwhelming in his nose and mouth they made him retch and he just wanted this to be over.
He lifted his head and slammed it into the floorboards.
He would never have been truly happy sequestered away in the Yagyu Valley, but only a handful of days ago, before the message of his appointment and stipend had reached him, he’d believed that he could at least be content to carve out a small life of his own here.
He’d considered opening a school to teach commoners’ children to read and write, just as his uncle Toshikatsu, his father’s eldest brother, had done after he was injured in battle and no longer able to fulfill his obligations to his lord. Perhaps he might even have taken up teaching the sword in the family dojo or build a fencing hall of his own and teach anyone interested in learning.
But now, even the hope for a simple life had been taken from him.
He slammed his head into the floorboards a second time. And again. Perhaps he could at least succeed in ending his life on this night. Not to spite Jubei, though he had no doubt that his father would see it that way, but to end the misery he was enduring.
But when he tried to hit his head into the floor again, Taro pulled him upright and wrapped his arms around his body, stopping him from continuing.
“Wakasama, please, calm yourself.”
Almost reflexively, Samon smashed his head backward into Taro’s face, hearing the crunch of his skull against the other’s nose. It was to Taro’s great credit that he didn’t curse out loud, but he brought one of his hands up and held Samon’s head back, restraining him from doing anything else.
“Please, wakasama,” he said again. “Calm down so I can see to your wounds. Your life should not end tonight. Don’t give them that satisfaction.”
Samon supposed “them” meant his brother and father, but he cared little whether they were or were not satisfied. He was tired of being a pawn in their political games, tired of being powerless against the forces that controlled his life. But he knew there was nothing he could do and he was tired, so very tired, of continuing down this path that was being laid out for him.
He felt Taro’s fingers on his mouth, a sudden cool touch against lips slippery with blood, and a small round object was placed in his mouth, the finger gently pushing it to the back of what remained of his tongue.
“Please swallow this,” Taro said. “It will take away the pain.”
Yahei was returning from an errand for the retired abbot when he saw a well-dressed samurai leave Shogen's cottage, followed by a manservant wearing the Uesugi family crest, and he realized at once that this was Shiro's uncle, Saigo Kenzaburo, who held an important post (Yahei couldn't remember what, exactly) in the Uesugi's upper mansion.
Yahei stepped off the foot path, bowing to Shiro's uncle when the man came close enough to pass, and Saigo stopped dead, casting his eyes down on the boy.
For a few awkward seconds neither of them spoke; then the old man cleared his throat.
"You're that boy, the one my nephew calls Yahei, are you not?" he demanded, the words spoken with so much disdain they were more of an accusation than a question.
"I hope you're happy with yourself," he pressed on, giving Yahei no chance to speak. "If you hadn't talked my nephew into that nonsense in Osaka, perhaps I could have placed him as a retainer, but as things are..."
He cleared his throat again, as if needing to swallow an unpleasant taste. "I hope the two of you are proud of yourselves for shaming this family."
He paused, perhaps waiting to see if Yahei would say anything in his defense.
"I should cut you down where you stand," Saigo hissed after Yahei didn't respond, making a movement to draw his sword, but then he stopped himself, his hand relaxing against the silk wrap of the hilt. "You're not even worth it."
He walked away, the servant following in his wake.
Yahei was too stunned to raise his head, hands shaking against the wrapped parcel he was carrying.
What... what did this mean?
He slowly straightened, looking after the old man and his servant in confusion, panic rising from the pit of his stomach.
Did this mean Shiro's uncle had no intention of taking in his nephew after they'd come all this way? After he'd promised he would?
Yahei forced himself to walk to the cottage, legs feeling like lead weights with every step as he made his way inside.
He placed the parcel beside the irori almost mechanically, but then he wavered in front of the room he and Shiro shared, dithering uncertainly, his hand unwilling to reach out and open the doors.
Eventually, he quietly slid the door open, almost afraid to look into the room. It was dark inside, a dusk-gray illuminated only by the light falling over Yahei's shoulder.
Shiro was sitting beside his futon, legs pulled into his chest.
The light caught an object near the door: the glint of a polished gold koban, and as Yahei's eyes adjusted to the gloom, he realized coins were scattered across the floor.
"Take them," Shiro's voice sounded hollow, the corners of his mouth twitching up into a smile that held no joy at all. "That's all I'm worth to my family."
He buried his face in his arms, forcing the words out through gritted teeth.
"My uncle..." He took a breath to keep his voice from cracking, somewhere between anger and despair.
"My uncle sat here and ordered me to take the bandages off my face. Then... he grabbed me by the chin, looking me up and down, as if he were appraising a new horse for his stable. And he..." His voice was shaking now. "He made this face, this... this... expression... of utter disgust..."
He curled into himself, sobbing.
Yahei wrapped himself around Shiro, holding him as tight as he could manage.
