Sword of Honour by David Kirk

Seigan had turned his eyes to him.
    The stern gaze grounded Musashi, focused his thoughts.
    ‘Wise one, hear me fairly, without prejudice,’ he said to the priest, as honestly as he could. ‘I do not want to die, and neither do I want to kill. But these men will not
release me, and I fear before dawn they will attempt to storm the grounds. Do you wish for that to occur?’
    The priest did not respond.
    ‘Do you want to see these fine grounds sullied with blood?’
    The thought did not seem to bother him.
    ‘Innocent blood – I swear to you that I am innocent. My only crime is living, in wanting others to live. This the reason they would flay my skin from me.’
    Silence.
    ‘Do you really want for our ghosts to haunt you through all the years to come?’
    Something passed across the priest’s sombre face. Only a sliver, the slightest twitch of a muscle beneath one of his eyes, but Musashi saw this, saw the opening.
    ‘Please, I beg of you,’ he said, his voice lower now, beseeching. ‘Is there any way out of here you have kept hidden from me?’
    ‘No,’ said Seigan.
    ‘Then surely,’ said Musashi, ‘there must be something else you can think of. Anything. Please.’
    The priest was reluctant, so reluctant, but he weighed the potential scenarios before him against one another and made a decision. He rose to his feet, took a lantern in his hand and went to the
rear side of the shrine. There, with some effort, he pulled a loose plank aside and revealed a space beneath the hollow wooden dais the shrine was set upon.
    ‘In there,’ said Seigan. ‘You can hide. I’ll open the gate, let the samurai in, tell them you knocked me on my head and when I awoke you were gone. That you’ve
probably snuck off away into the night. When they’re truly gone, then you can make good your flight.’
    It occurred to Musashi, when he was nestled down in the darkness and Seigan was lowering the plank over him, that he was placing his faith entirely in this man. The priest
could very well board him up in here and go and rouse the samurai outside and deliver him like that. But he looked up at the man’s shaven head, at his impassive features, and he felt no sense
of threat.
    For a moment, it was not Seigan he saw.
    Seigan in turn saw the way Musashi was looking at him, and he hesitated for a moment before he lowered the plank entirely. He spoke with curt distaste:
    ‘Consider the path you walk.’
    And that was all, and again it was not entirely he alone that spoke. The priest reset the plank and the light was stolen from Musashi, and in the complete blackness, down amidst the rocky earth
and the caresses of cobwebs and the smell of damp sawdust, Musashi lay there listening to the muffled cries from outside, thinking of the holy.
    How it would go, how he had envisioned it countless times over in the years since Sekigahara, is that Dorinbo would be standing at the altar of the shrine of Miyamoto.
Standing beneath the burnished disc of the gong hung on high and the carved gaze of Amaterasu, the wood of it bright and new, and his uncle would turn and he would take in the boy that had left and
the man that was now before him and then he would come to him as though he sought not to disrupt a spectre.
    ‘Bennosuke,’ he would breathe.
    ‘Musashi now, Uncle.’
    ‘Musashi, Musashi!’
    Dorinbo would accept this instantly and laugh then with his eyes quivering and wet. His uncle’s eyes so very visible because they were eye to eye here, perfectly level as men, although
Musashi had not encountered one of equal height to him since his early adolescence. Dorinbo, though, of course, would be so, deserved to be so, then and now continuous. And he would clap Musashi on
the arms, a warm and honest gesture like that, and the monk would say, ‘You live! You live!’
    ‘I do. Through it all I came, Uncle. It is over now. I understand. It is better to live.’
    ‘You have forsaken the Way?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘You understand! You