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Child of Vengeance (Saga of Musashi Miyamoto) - Softcover

Buch 1 von 2: Saga of Musashi Miyamoto

Kirk, David

 
9780345803009: Child of Vengeance (Saga of Musashi Miyamoto)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0345803000 ISBN 13: 9780345803009
Verlag: Anchor Books, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

Inspired by the true story of sixteenth-century samurai Musashi Miyamoto, David Kirk has crafted a rich, absorbing novel of one young man’s coming of age at a crucial turning point in Japanese history.

Thirteen-year-old Bennosuke is deeply disconnected from the rest of his village. When he was five, his mother died, and his father, a powerful samurai, has been traveling the country in service to his lord ever since. Raised by his uncle, a monk, who has tried to teach his charge to eschew violence and martial glory and embrace knowledge and peace, Bennosuke worships his absent, renowned father, Munisai. Subject to shifting alliances beyond his control, Munisai has become indebted to the odious Nakata clan. This escalating feud forces him to return home to his village—followed by his enemies. Now Bennosuke will be forced to confront harsh truths about his family history and his own place in it—and to choose between the paths of samurai and monk. 
 

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

DAVID KIRK first became interested in Japanese history when his father gave him a copy of James Clavell's Shogun. Years later he would be inspired to write his dissertation on samurai cinema. Kirk now lives in Japan, where he works as an English-language teacher and is at work on a second Musashi Miyamoto novel.

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Chapter One

The battle was over, but still Kazuteru ran. He had duty to fulfill. The young samurai ignored the howling of his lungs and the ache within his muscles and bore forth his sacred burden: a dagger the length of his hand. His lord awaited it on the valley top above him.

It had rained all day yesterday and most of the morning too, an anomaly in the high summer. The sun shone bright now, but too late. Hundreds of feet and hooves had trampled the sodden slope and churned it into a swamp. Kazuteru’s armor and underclothes, which had once been a brilliant blue, were now a mottled gray, and his legs were heavy with plastered clay and turf.

His hands alone were clean, protected as they had been under gauntlets and gloves. Bared, the flesh had remained immaculate enough to hold the dagger. But the humidity and the layers of metal, cloth, and wood he wore had made his entire body slick with sweat. It stung his eyes and he could taste it on his lips, and when the ground gave suddenly beneath him as he ran, he felt it on his hands also. His wet palms fumbled, and the dagger slipped from his grasp.

The blade caught the light as it fell. It winked white once at him, and then plunged into the slimy dirt and vanished with a sad little sound. Kazuteru let a smaller, sadder whimper escape him. His waiting lord had a thousand swords and spears with him already, but they would not suffice. They were not ceremonial and pure. The dagger, which had been, was now sullied.

He fell to his knees and plunged his left hand into the muck. It vanished up to his wrist. He began to grope blindly, hastened by desperation but slowed by fear of the blade’s edge.

Something to his right moaned suddenly, a pained voice so pitiful that it stopped Kazuteru. He saw a man twisted where he had fallen, one leg so shattered and bent that his toes almost touched his hamstring. The samurai had no mind left for words; his eyes pleaded with Kazuteru to kill him, and for a moment he thought to oblige.

But then Kazuteru realized that the man wore the red of the enemy, and for that he left him. The man’s agony was but one voice in dozens.

Hundreds.

His fingers touched blunt metal. He pulled the dagger free, and filth came with it. Kazuteru tried to wipe the blade clean as best he could. Once when he was a child—­too young to know about sacrilege—he and his friends had hidden a small cast-­iron Buddha in an ox’s feed just to see if the beast was too stupid to notice. It had been, and three days later they had found the Buddha again. Looking at the dagger now, he was reminded of that serene, shit-­smeared face.

Water. He needed water.

But there was none here, save for that which had soaked into the ground; this was where the fighting had been. There was no time to return to their distant camp, where he had just run to collect the blade in the first place. The only place he could look was up the slope, toward the valley top they had stormed not one hour ago.

He began to run toward the hilltop once more, skidding and stuttering in the mud, dagger in his filthy left hand with his right hand held high and free of any contamination. Ahead of him, overlooking the entire valley, Lord Kanno’s castle burned. One of the smaller curved roofs groaned loudly, and then collapsed inward. A ragged cheer carried on the distant breeze, and a fresh billow of black smoke erupted into the sky.

There, in the corner of Kazuteru’s eye—­a mangled man lying against a barricade of bamboo stakes, seemingly drunk as he fumbled about himself. His numb hands were trying to put a canteen to his lips. Clear water dribbled from the mouth of the ray-­leather bladder, catching the light.

Kazuteru hesitated, his conscience caught, but it was clear the man was beyond any help that water could possibly bring. He squelched to his knees beside the samurai, and tried to take the canteen. The man held on stubbornly.

“I need that water, friend,” said Kazuteru gently.

“W’tr?” mumbled the man, his eyes distant. Still he tried to remember how to drink, still his hands corpse-­tight upon the canteen.

“Our Lord Shinmen requires it,” said Kazuteru.

“F’r Lord Shinm’n,” the man said. Out of instinct alone, he obeyed that name and released his grip. His eyes closed, something that wasn’t blood or water bubbled out of his mouth, and then he died.

Kazuteru muttered his thanks to the man’s departing soul as he began to slowly pour the water on the dagger. It was not quite enough, one clod of black mud remaining. There was nothing else to do but stick his tongue out and lick it clean, and then he knew the taste of the battlefield. He spat, and then the dagger was as clean as it was going to get. Back it went into his pristine right hand, and then he ran once more.

The ground up on the valley top was not so bad, some solid green turf remaining. Nothing slowed him as he weaved his way through the groups of surviving samurai toward where the lords and generals awaited. A cadre of exhausted foot soldiers, all as dirty as Kazuteru, knelt in a clustered circle around their superiors, facing inward to bear witness to this final act. Lungs were still panting, open wounds being treated.

Kazuteru dropped into a walking crouch as he drew close to the mock court, holding the dagger above his head respectfully. Men parted for him until he came to where his lord, Sokan Shinmen, sat on a small stool. He dropped to one knee and waited.

The lord was sitting in his underarmor of toughened cloth. During the battle an arrow had thumped into the plate of his chest armor almost directly over his heart, and he had removed the heavy cuirass to nurse the bruise it had left. The narrow escape had given the lord a spark of manic joy in his eyes that he was unable to conceal.

Shinmen took the proffered dagger and examined it. Kazuteru held his breath. The lord raised an eyebrow for a moment at the drops of water upon the blade, but he said nothing. He shook it dry and nodded appreciatively at Kazuteru. The samurai bowed low, and then backed away on his knees to melt into the crowd. The taste of mud still in his mouth, relief and pride flooded him; he had done his duty.

“Lord Kanno,” said Shinmen, turning back to the three who awaited in the center of the gathering, “do you know what follows now?”

Lord Kanno was the defeated enemy, and he had nervous tears in his eyes as he knelt. Regaled in a full set of miniature armor, he could have escaped from some comedy theater. He was nine years old.

“I think so,” the boy lord said. “I have to perform seppuku. But . . .” the boy began, then faltered.

“But?” said Shinmen.

“But I don’t know how, Lord,” Kanno said sadly. His small shoulders wilted. “I was never allowed to see. I wanted to, but Father said I was too young.”

An affectionate laugh rippled through the crowd of samurai. Only two men remained silent. One was Kanno’s General Ueno, who knelt beside his lord. He was an old man with thinning gray hair that hung disheveled around him. It was he who had been truly in command of the enemy, and he who had lost the day. His eye was bruised, his nose was bleeding, and he bristled with futile venom.

The other stood behind the kneeling pair, his face emotionless for it would be obscene to show joy in front of defeated enemies, and it was he above all the men there who had defeated the Kanno clan. His armor was plain and practical, without any mark of garish boasting save for perhaps the dents and scrapes that spoke of how much fighting he had seen and yet still stood. He was Munisai...

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Verlag
Anchor Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2013
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0345803000
ISBN 13 
9780345803009
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
321
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Verantwortliche Person
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