Free Child of Vengeance by David Kirk Page A

didn’t know what else he was expecting.
    The samurai walked into what would have been the courtyard of a house. The paving stones, now cracked and mossy, still marked a path around a tree that was long dead. He remembered it in bloom, the pleasant smell of the cherry blossom, and the vivid pink of the petals against the soft blue skies. He remembered the tree catching alight, the blossom igniting and falling from the branches like a shower of fiery rain, taken upon the wind as they turned to ash.
    Eight years ago, here.
    Perhaps if he confronted this he would find the words to say to the boy. The boy, with his body and face so unlike Munisai’s, but Yoshiko’s dark eyes looking out at him as if she had never left this world. That he remembered most of all—the last time he looked into his wife’s eyes, her on her knees before him.
    Munisai sighed, the tightness in his chest growing with every beat of his heart. He bowed reverently to the ruin of the cherry tree, and settled into a meditative pose. Then he went within himself, and began to think.

    B ennosuke watched from the ridgeline as his father became perfectly still, his blue kimono the one blot of vivid color among the ruins. It was jarring to the view he knew so well.
    Munisai had not noticed he was being followed. The strain of forcing himself here must have been too great. When Bennosuke had woken, he had meant to go tell the man what he had overheard in the dojo last night. He had walked swiftly, but as he had approached the house his legs had slowly frozen as something dawned upon him.
    He realized his father would ask why Bennosuke had not confronted the men as a samurai should, and to that Bennosuke had no answer.
    Fearing that shameful interrogation, he had begun to skulk away when Munisai had emerged. When the boy realized where Munisai was headed he had followed at a distance, intrigued. The man had not stopped, heading down into the valley seemingly without the fear of trespassing on such a solemn stretch of ground.
    The charred stumps around Munisai seemed to grow larger. Bennosuke found himself thinking of the peasants last night. Drunk though they had been—Bennosuke had only a vague idea of what that meant—they had revealed a kind of honesty that was seldom shown. They had spoken the words from their hearts, and they had been hateful and vehement and directed at Munisai.
    Why?
    He knew he should join his father, to ask this question. But though he sat for some time he could not bring himself to move.
    Tomorrow, he eventually promised himself. The man needed time, and so did he; the dead today, the living tomorrow. Tomorrow they would say and do the things that they needed to, though he did not know what they were.
    Tomorrow.

    H ayato Nakata stalked the hallways with purposeless resentment, looking bitterly at the exquisite art around him. The paper walls were painted in black ink, a motif of reeds around ponds and cranes taking flight. Above them carved into the wood were curling, symmetrical designs of leaves and flowers.
    None of it mattered, because none of it was his.
    There was no purpose to art, other than to enshrine. It was testament to a man’s wealth and nothing more, to say that he could afford to pay someone to do something that had no meaning. To admire another man’s painting, then, was to acquiesce to the statement the owner was making: “This exists at my behest, and your wonder at it proves me greater.”
    This was his father’s castle, his father’s art, and he would not grant the old man that.
    He thought of putting his fist through the paper, smashing one of the cranes in two, but that would be pointless. It would be remarked upon, and then his father would summon him and he would be made to confess he did it like a child. That was all he was seen as now: a child.
    A child who dwelled in a nice, comfortable city. He heard the voices and the sniggers of those palanquin bearers once more. He heard them often now.
    The old