Sword of Honour Read Online Free

What he had paid for this sword could have bought a street full of houses, but he knew then that he was the one who had struck a
scandalous bargain. What he held here was a thing for ages, for all the centuries yet to be.
    ‘Come,’ he said to his son. ‘See.’
    Ujinari was set at the head of the Yoshioka men. He pressed his brow to the ground and then advanced on his knees. That autumn he was in his seventeenth year, and had a longer, thinner face than
his father, a slighter, taller build. Ujinari took the blade from Tadanari, spoke the same deferential words, looked at it in the light in an identical manner. His breath, however, escaped him, low
and long and admiring.
    ‘Your opinion?’ asked Tadanari.
    ‘I have held nothing more wonderful,’ said Ujinari.
    ‘It is not I you should be saying such to.’
    Ujinari carefully placed the sword back on the stand and then turned and bowed low to the Forger and the other masters alongside him: ‘Truly you are men of worth. I thank you for letting
me witness all you have shown me this day. I could never hope to make something so beautiful.’
    ‘Everything we do was taught to us, as we teach it in turn,’ said the Forger. ‘All it takes is the willingness to learn.’
    ‘And decades of dedication,’ said Tadanari.
    The Forger bowed benevolently at the compliment.
    Ujinari did not notice. He was staring at the sword wistfully. ‘I believe you shall be the envy of all Kyoto with this at your side, Father.’
    The bald samurai turned his head and pronounced sternly, ‘An old man needs a sword that fine like a hag needs a cradle. The sword is yours.’
    Awe unfurled behind Ujinari’s eyes as he turned to stare at Tadanari, and then he lowered his brow to the floor. He held the bow for a long time before he spoke.
    ‘I cannot begin to thank you,’ he breathed.
    Tadanari’s face did not change in the slightest. He was the gift-giver, and he could neither express joy, for that would imply arrogant pride in his own magnanimity, nor feign some
casualness or whimsy, for that would disparage the gift.
    The boys who worked at the forge rolled up reed mats and stood them on their ends in the dusty yard outside, and Ujinari set to testing the blade. He cut smoothly, his form
long-studied and his arms able, passing the steel on the diagonal through the mats. The other men of the Yoshioka watched on, called encouragement or congratulation, marvelled to one another at the
beauty of the sword.
    Tadanari was sitting on a stool outside of the glare of the noon sun. Free of the solemn ritual of the hall, he was smiling openly as he watched his son’s ability. It was he that had
dictated the mood for them all, and even though he was jovial it did not mean that those beneath him were freed of any protocol. The lesser samurai there merely had to assume the protocols of
joviality, the practised ways of expressing it, all that the collective might reassure itself that it was indeed in a time of ease. They slouched upon stairs, they sat cross-legged in the dust,
they stood with thumbs in belts, but they were not relaxed.
    The samurai standing closest to Tadanari jerked his chin at the sword Ujinari wielded.
    ‘Master,’ the man said, and he shuffled his shoulders and scuffed his feet as he sought some fresh-considered posture of what was accepted as casual, ‘unless I see it wrong,
the engraving there upon the flat of the blade – that is the sword of Saint Fudo, no?’
    The carving he spoke of lay on one side only just above the golden collar and ran half the length of the blade. A sword within a sword, but no samurai weapon this. An ancient sword, a foreign
sword, a single-handed weapon straight and double-edged.
    What he asked was not a genuine question, of course, and Tadanari knew this. There was no real chance of an error in identification, not with an icon as strong as that. It was merely spoken
because it offered the chance for Tadanari to say, ‘Keen eyes as