Sword of Honour Read Online Free Page A

always.’
    This compliment in turn allowed another, returned and magnified: ‘As I thought. Houken. The Cutter of Delusions. A wise choice, master, yes, but of course you in your wisdom would choose
well. Provident.’
    Mutually flattered, the two of them took to nodding in satisfaction at different tempos as Ujinari continued to cut.
    ‘The Cutter of Delusions,’ repeated the samurai, because something further needed to be said.
    ‘That which purges the fallible man of the snares of the mortal dimension.’
    ‘A strong meaning.’
    ‘The great Saint judges us all.’
    ‘Of course. Your grandsons will hold that sword and see that mark, and know the same.’
    ‘My great-great-grandsons.’
    They spoke as though in platitudes and smiled and nodded on, and yet inside Tadanari a well-hidden resonance hummed. He allowed himself a momentary fantasy, saw some distant descendent in place
of Ujinari, and, though this conjured man might not know Tadanari as anything more than a name scrawled upon some yellowed sheaf of genealogy, he would be armed, be samurai on Tadanari’s
account, and that was everything.
    This the deeper satisfaction. But he did not allow himself to wallow in the conceit of centuries yet to be. Saint Fudo laughed at those who did so. Instead, Tadanari sat back and watched Ujinari
for who he was, what he was, and this was fine enough.
    They, all of them there. His men. His school. He did not bear the name and was not the dynastic head, but that man Naokata Yoshioka was his finest friend, and he served as the foremost teacher.
Over their kimonos each of the Yoshioka samurai wore a jacket of silk dyed in the same peculiar colour. In the shade of the halls within, the garments had seemed a muted brown, but here outside in
the light the peaks of folds became a vivid green. A unique dual tone, emblematic of the school, which no person could describe better than as the colour of tea.
    It unified them, and yet even so one man wearing this shade sat separate. He kept a practised silence, and simply mimicked the expressions of the others as though he were not apart from them.
The boys of the forge peered at him from around the corners of walls, fascinated at his oddity. The samurai’s skin was in tone somewhere between honey and persimmon wood. His eyes were almost
the colour of moss, the brown frail and tinted. Both were the opposite of what they should have been: pale skin, black gaze.
    ‘The Foreigner, the Foreigner,’ the boys named him in their whispers, and the samurai elected not to hear them.
    Tadanari saw the boys in their furtive gawping, and saw the dark-skinned man ignoring them. It put him in mind of other duties he had to attend to, and his interest in the spectacle of his son
and everything he represented waned. His face grew serious and he adjusted himself upon the stool, assumed a more formal posture, and then he beckoned the dark-skinned man over.
    The samurai heeded the command, bowed, knelt beside his superior’s stool on one knee. ‘Master Kozei.’
    ‘Sir Akiyama,’ said Tadanari, ‘I have duty for you.’
    ‘I await your command.’
    Tadanari did not look at Akiyama whilst he spoke, uttered his words quietly, not wanting to distract attention. ‘Word has come from the east. The turmoil there has been resolved. The
Tokugawa have triumphed.’
    ‘I had heard rumour already.’
    ‘Distant Edo must be rejoicing. The Lord Tokugawa, I suppose, will come here soon to swear fealty to the Son of Heaven. Kyoto will be as it will be, and there is much promise for our
school in the coming years. Yet here and now, in particular we have received a missive from Sir Ando.’
    He was interrupted by a rising murmur of excitement amongst the watching samurai: in swift, graceful movements Ujinari cut one, two, three slivers of a mat away, lessening it by finger lengths
at a time with strikes so clean that the unbraced mat did not move or topple. He passed the blade through a fourth time,