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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.