The Moon over the Millet Fields
Content warnings: trauma, chronic pain, psychological distress, suicidal ideation, social isolation, ableism, family estrangement
Autumn went out, and winter came down hard.
It came first as a cold that got into the leg and would not leave it, so that the seam in his thigh ached from waking to sleeping and the limp deepened again in the mornings; then as snow, fine and dry on the high passes, drifting deeper in the valleys, turning the roads to a misery of churned ice and frozen ruts. He went more slowly now.
The fingers, the two that had been broken and splinted in the village hut after the field, seized in the cold without warning, and he dropped things, a coin once at a market stall, the man behind the stall watching him fumble for it; a piece of dried fish into a snowbank that he had to dig for with numb fingers. The headaches came worse in winter, the cold pressing against the scarred side of his skull. He took the bitter pills Mori-sensei had given him in Kumamoto, but his supply ran low.
He found small herbalists in the towns and showed them what he had left, the loose mix folded into its plain paper, and the good ones would unfold it, smell it, touch a moistened fingertip to the powder, taste, and nod.
"Goshuyu-to, or something near it. For headaches? I can mix you the same."
They would go into the back, blend from their stock, fold the new mix into fresh paper, and name a price.
The good ones did this without minding that he could not answer them.
The impatient ones waved him off and pointed at the door before he had the packet open on the counter. He learned within a sentence which kind he was dealing with, and either stayed or moved on.
It was in those weeks of the cold of winter and the headaches that the gun found him.
He was on a wooded road in the late afternoon, the light already going amber and low between the trunks, when a matchlock went off on the slope above him, a single hard crack rolling down through the bare trees. He was on the ground before he knew he had moved, flat in the frozen leaf litter, sword half-drawn, his whole body one rigid scream, the field roaring up around him so completely that for several heartbeats there was no road, no winter, no Hyogonosuke at all, only the smoke and the volley and the bodies coming apart. The ringing behind his eyes swelled until it drowned the world. He could not breathe; he clawed at the dirt; waiting for the second volley with the certainty of a man who had learned that the second volley always came.
What came instead, a long while later, was the sound of a boar crashing downhill and a hunter's whoop of triumph from the slope, some village man, out after meat with an old matchlock, who had no notion at all that he had just sent another man straight into hell.
Hyogonosuke lay in the leaves until the shaking let him up, his face wet, his hands black with frozen earth, and understood that there would be no part of his life in which the crack of a gun did not do this to him.
That is mine to carry now, he thought, hauling himself up on the stick. That, and the moon, and the lane between the paddies. I carried a sword to war and brought home a body that flinches from boar-hunters. The bitterness of it was almost a comfort, having edges he could hold.
The bureaucrat's barrier came a few days later.
He saw it from a long way off and had the pass out of his kimono before he reached it. He had learned that much.
The guardhouse here had a small writing desk set up just inside the door, where a thin-faced man of about forty sat with a register open before him, brush in hand, taking down the names of travelers as they passed. Two spearmen stood at the rope. A third leaned against the wall behind the desk drinking from a small cup.
The bureaucrat took the pass when Hyogonosuke held it out. He scrutinized it. He held it up against the light from the doorway, set it down on the desk, smoothed it flat. He read the name aloud.
The bureaucrat looked up at him. He looked at him a long moment without speaking, watching for something, his eyes narrow led when he did not get it.
"I asked you a question, young master. Are you Yagyu Hyogonosuke?"
Hyogonosuke nodded again.
"You nod. You do not speak. You're at a barrier on the lord's road, young master. There are formalities and there are manners. I'll trouble you to use your voice."
Hyogonosuke opened his mouth. He shaped the word — hai, the smallest of the words, the one a child uses, the one he had tried in empty air at Rokubei's and again on a dozen quiet evenings since. He breathed into it. The breath went into the shape and came out the other side as breath. The bureaucrat watched him work his jaw on nothing for what felt like a long time.
"I see," the bureaucrat said at last, very dry. "Well. You're passed through. But I'll be noting in the register that you were uncooperative. That will be in the record."
He wrote something down with deliberate care. He stamped the entry. He picked up the pass and handed it back without meeting Hyogonosuke's eye.
"Pass on. And learn to answer when asked, young master. You shame your house."
Hyogonosuke bowed and went through.
He walked away from the guardhouse with the bureaucrat's you shame your house settling into him slowly.
The man had been petty and impatient and his demand for the spoken word had been within his rights and his duties. Hyogonosuke had failed to meet the demand. The failure had been entered in the register.
The bureaucrat had said the true thing, in a small unkind voice, and it had been true regardless of the voice.
I shame my house. He carried the sentence with him up the road. He thought, in his lowered way: One day there will be a barrier where I have lost the pass, or where the man does not care to read it, and that will be the end of me. Not the gun, not bandits, but my own shut mouth.
He had been walking perhaps half a ri up the next slope when he heard footsteps catching up behind him. A young samurai of perhaps twenty came up alongside him at a brisk pace, having apparently overtaken him by leaving the guard post not long after he did.
"Pardon me, young master. I beg your pardon. You're going north?"
Hyogonosuke did not slow. He bowed slightly without turning his head, the conventional samurai courtesy for yes, but I am not interested in conversation.
"Forgive me — I heard the man at the station. Yagyu Hyogonosuke, was it? Of the Yagyu Shinkage-ryu?"
The phrasing put Hyogonosuke in a position. He could not, in conscience, deny the family connection. He nodded.
"Then it's a great honor. A very great honor."
The young man was tall, lean, strong, dressed in the rough clothes of a wandering ronin but carrying himself with the easy unhurried physical confidence of someone who had not yet learned that any body could be defeated. He carried a long sword and a short. His hair was tied in the tea-whisk style that was popular, but in a messy way. There was something not quite settled in his eyes.
"I've heard of the school, of course. Everyone has. I've been thinking, in fact, of making my way to Yagyu to seek instruction, to challenge the school, if they would have me. I'm Takezo. Shinmen Takezo. I'm from Mimasaka. I've been on the road two years."
Hyogonosuke walked. He nodded small acknowledgments because not to do so would be rude. He could not manage more.
"You don't say much. That's fine. I talk enough for two, my mother used to say. You're going home, then? To Yagyu?"
A nod. He could not evade this without lying.
"Then we're going the same way, more or less. Would the young master mind some company? It's a hard road. Bandits in the passes. Better in twos, the saying goes."
The young man was eager. Vigorous. He had been alone on the road for months, hungry for sword-talk, and the sudden presence of a Yagyu master walking the same direction was the kind of luck he was not going to let pass. He did not understand at all that Hyogonosuke was not who he thought he was meeting. Hyogonosuke would, on a better day, simply have said I prefer to travel alone, forgive me, and the young man would have bowed and dropped back. He could not say it. He could only nod or not nod. To not nod, after the long sequence of nodding, would have been conspicuous and rude.
So he walked with Takezo. The young man talked. He talked about his recent duels, about his theories of swordsmanship, which were unformed but full of energy and conviction, about his impressions of the Yagyu style as he had heard it described. He asked questions Hyogonosuke could not answer. He filled the answers in himself.
"I imagine the school emphasizes — well, I expect you'd say it's about reading the opponent's center, isn't it? The no-sword principle, I've heard about that. What's it actually mean in practice, young master? I've been wondering."
Hyogonosuke walked beside him saying nothing. Sometimes he nodded. Sometimes he did not. Takezo did not seem to mind the lack of response; he was content to be heard by a Yagyu, and his enthusiasm for the school grew as the day went on.
"And I expect the forms keep their old shape, no? The Edo masters have been making changes, I've heard — Yagyu Munenori in his Edo dojo, working with the shogun's house. But Yagyu valley is the real lineage. The transmission. That's what I want. I want what your grandfather has."
Hyogonosuke nodded. He could not say my grandfather is older now, and my uncle in Edo is the one taking the school in new directions, and our family is divided about which of them carries the true tradition forward. He could not say the man you would actually want to ask is not me. He could not say any of it. He nodded.
Walking beside the young man's torrent, Hyogonosuke noticed, distantly, what he had been once. Takezo's confidence, the unbroken certainty that his arm and his eye and his mind would carry him into the next duel and the duel after that, with the duel he would lose still safely in the unimagined future, was the confidence Hyogonosuke had worn at twenty-one. He had argued with Sekishusai about forms. He had felt himself superior to corrections he was given by men he secretly considered slower than he was. He had walked out into the world at twenty-five believing himself prepared for it.
The young man beside him was that man, two years out from the field that would teach him what teaching there was to be had, if he survived it. Hyogonosuke had nothing to say to him because Hyogonosuke no longer had the part of himself that had once spoken from inside such certainty. The certainty was the field's first casualty. He had not got it back.
By evening they came to a fork in the road. Takezo's road branched off, he was heading further north, Hyogonosuke east. Takezo bowed. .
"It was an honor, young master. A very great honor. Tell them at the school that Shinmen Takezo will be coming to Yagyu when his road allows. Tell them I'll be ready."
Hyogonosuke walked on alone. He had not been able to say a word to the young man through the whole half-day. He had no idea what impression he had left. He suspected, with the lowered version of accuracy that was all he had, that it had not been a good one. The young man had filled the silence with his own version of the Yagyu, and the version he had taken away with him would not be flattering. The Yagyu had lost something today. Hyogonosuke did not know what.
He carried it for many days afterward. The bureaucrat had told him he shamed his house. The young samurai had been the proof of it. He had walked half a day beside the future of the sword and had been unable to be even the smallest representative of his family in front of it.
The bureaucrat's you shame your house was no longer a sentence. It was an event that had happened on the road, with a witness, with consequences he could not measure.
The next difficult barrier came in the depths of winter, in those coldest days before the weather chose to turn toward spring.
He came up on it on a grey morning at the foot of a pass, a guard-post closing the road, a barrier and a small guardhouse, three or four spearmen of some local lord whose business it was to know who passed and why. He had the pass in his hand before he approached.
A guard stepped into the road with his spear held crosswise and asked his name, his domain, his business on the road.
Hyogonosuke held out the pass. The guard took it suspiciously, frowned over it, passed it to an older man who could read better. The older man read it. He looked at Hyogonosuke. The others were drifting in, hands on their spears. They had not yet been given a reason to stand down, and the silent traveler with the dirty clothes and the bad leg was the sort of person these posts existed to be wary of.
The panic climbed in Hyogonosuke. His hand wanted the sword, the wanting of it the most dangerous thing in the world at a barrier full of armed men.
He wrenched his hand deliberately away from it, held both palms out where they could be seen. The older man watched him do it. Something in the older man's face changed.
He read the pass again, slowly, putting things together. He looked at the powder stippling on Hyogonosuke's right cheek. He looked at the long pale line of the graze. He looked at the long uncut hair gathered high at the back of the head and falling to the shoulders. He folded the pass and handed it back.
"Go on home, then," he said, not meeting his eye. "Young master."
Hyogonosuke bowed and went through. Behind him as he started up the pass he caught two of the younger guards whispering to each other.
He was a long way up the pass before the trembling stopped.
The barrier set him thinking about the great battle at Sekigahara. He had wanted to fight then. He had wanted, in the months before, with everything in him. He had been twenty-one, old enough by any measure, and the country was mustering. The boys of his age in the valley who had celebrated their genpuku were going.
He had not had his because his grandfather was intentionally delaying it. Hyogonosuke had been a wakashu still, by his grandfather's choice, with the long forelocks of a youth, ineligible for service and socially still a boy in the eyes of the world.
He had hated his grandfather for it. He had not said it; but he had walked past the dojo without looking in, and he had stopped speaking at meals except when directly addressed, and he had let his unhappiness be visible in the small ways a grandson could let it be visible without speaking of it.
Sekishusai had borne it without remark. The genpuku had not been performed. The battle had been fought. The country had reshaped itself. Hyogonosuke had stayed in the valley, still a boy.
The ceremony had come at last in his twenty-third year. By then the war was three years gone and Hyogonosuke had cooled enough not to argue when his grandfather finally said the words. The forelocks had been grown out and tied back rather than cut, the long hair gathered up high at the back of his head and tied. He had been allowed to keep it long, by his choice. He had not gone to the tea-whisk style everyone now wore. He had kept the plain ponytail, gathered high at the back of his head, falling free to his shoulders. It had been the small choice he was allowed to make for himself after the years of being chosen for. He had worn it that way ever since.
And now had not trimmed it since the morning he set out east at the head of his forty men. It would have been longer by now if his body had not been too depleted to grow it; what was there was the same length, more or less, with the ends thin and dry, the whole of it imperfectly combed.
He understood now, walking up the pass with the older guard's go on home, young master still in his ears, what Sekishusai had been doing in those months before the great battle. He had not been keeping a wakashu in his place. He had been keeping a grandson alive. Kyusaburo had been three years dead at the time. Sekishusai had buried one grandson on the wrong side of the sea. He had watched Hyogonosuke at twenty-one mustering the same wanting what had taken Kyusaburo, and he had simply not performed the ceremony, and had borne the grandson's hatred for it without explanation, because he had no way to explain it that a twenty-one-year-old would have heard.
Hyogonosuke could hear it now. Hearing it now was its own slow horror, because it meant that his grandfather had foreseen, six years ago, the very road Hyogonosuke was walking. He had tried to keep him off it, and had been overruled by his grandson's wanting, and in the end he had relented and allowed him to go to Kato because there was no holding him forever.
Sekishusai had been right. He had been right about the cost of the road, and he had been right that Hyogonosuke would not believe him about it until he paid the cost himself. And here was Hyogonosuke, paying it, walking up a winter pass with the cost of him, every part of him a confirmation of the thing his grandfather had prayed to be wrong about.
The understanding did not help. It only deepened the dread of arriving home, because now he understood that what he was bringing his grandfather was not only his lost voice and his bad leg but the proof that the old man's caution had been right all along, and that Hyogonosuke had been too proud to take the gift of being kept safe.
The cruelest thing the winter taught him was not the gun, or the barrier, or the cold in his leg. It was the knowledge and the loneliness.
He had thought, in the months at the Kumamoto house, that he wanted was to be left alone. That had not been quite right.
What he had wanted was to be among people without flinching, to enter a room without bracing, to sit at someone's hearth and answer them when they spoke to him. The alone-ness had been triage, what he had chosen because the alternative was too exhausting to bear, not what he had wanted. He had been confused about it for months because the wanting and the cost had pointed in opposite directions, and the cost had been louder.
Somewhere in the dead of that winter the cost loosened a little, in the small ways the road teaches a body that no stranger out of the thousand it has passed has yet done it harm. And the wanting, freed from the cost, came up.
He began to want people. He would come, footsore and frozen, to the edge of some hamlet at dusk and stand looking at the lit doorways, at the warm orange seams of light, at the shapes of families moving inside about their hearths, and he would want — with an ache that had nothing to do with the cold — simply to be among them. To sit at one of those fires. To say good evening to the man of the house and thank you for the fire to his wife and hear them say something ordinary back. To be, for one hour, a person among persons, instead of a ghost who haunted the road's edge and frightened old women.
He could not. That was the whole of it. He could walk into the hamlet. The bracing had eased a little by now, in the smaller places, on the better days, and he could buy a thing, or beg shelter at an Inari shrine by signs, but he could not talk to anyone, could not answer when spoken to, could not return a single one of the small spoken kindnesses that are the whole currency of being human among other humans.
Once, in a village that kept a roadside shrine with a fire burning in its forecourt for travelers, an old pilgrim sat down beside him in the cold and began, companionably, to talk, about the weather, the road ahead, his own long-dead wife, asking nothing, only offering the ordinary warmth of one tired traveler to another at a fire. Hyogonosuke had wanted to answer him so badly that his eyes stung with it. He had turned to the old man, opened his mouth, reached with everything he had for even one word to give back and nothing came.
The old pilgrim waited, kindly. Then, when the silence stretched, his face moved through puzzlement to a careful pity, and he patted Hyogonosuke once on the knee.
"Ah. Forgive me. You rest."
He turned back to the fire and let him be. The kindness of that pat was the worst thing Hyogonosuke had felt since the field. He sat by the warm fire beside the warm old man and was as alone as he had been in the center of the moonlit dead. He understood then that a man could be starving in the middle of a feast, that he could be surrounded by every warmth the world had to offer and still be locked outside all of it, behind a door that had no handle on his side.
It was that, in the end, more than anything, more than the fear, more than the dreams, that began very slowly to turn his feet toward home. There was one place in the world where being unable to speak might not matter. Where people had known his face since before he could talk at all, and might, perhaps, still know it without a word.
He thought of home constantly now, which was its own torment, because to think of home was to think of his grandfather's face, and his father's, and the life he would have to make for himself when he arrived.
His grandfather's face: not anger, which would have been simpler, but the look of a man proved right about a thing he had prayed to be wrong about. Recognition, and grief, and the bone-deep weariness of being unsurprised. The look he understood, now, Sekishusai had been holding back for six years against the day it would come.
His father's face came to him more frequently now, but differently, not as a face he was bringing his ruin home to, but as a face he was beginning to understand for the first time. His father in the practice yard at first light, running his practice alone, the step-drag of the bad leg working into and through the cuts, the body that had been damaged at twenty making itself into something that served instead of grieving what it had lost.
Hyogonosuke had watched that a thousand times as a boy without understanding any of it. He understood it better now, hitching along a mountain road on the stick, his own leg sore under him.
His father had been shot at twenty and had simply gone on. He had taught the sword with a dead leg and mastered it with a dead leg, raised sons in the wreck of the family's fortunes, and risen every morning of every year with the step-drag that Hyogonosuke was only now beginning to grasp was the very least of what it had cost him.
I would not call it the same thing, Hyogonosuke thought. I was not paralyzed. I walk on two legs that work. I cannot put my broken voice and my sword-mad hands in front of him and call it comparable, because it is not, and because I was supposed to be different.
And there, where his thinking always came in the end now, was the question of what he would do when he arrived. There was room for him in the school, of course. There was always room in the school for a Yagyu.
His grandfather, who had lost the castle and most of the lands attached to it, ran the school now from a small valley and was teaching better than he had ever taught when the family had been a power; men came to Yagyu from every province because Sekishusai was there, and the school was gaining rather than losing in reputation as Sekishusai's last years went on.
His father, who had been injured for thirty years, taught from inside his limits, and his students came eagerly to learn what his particular injury had let him understand about the sword.
The pattern was visible. Damage improved teaching in the Yagyu line. There was no shortage of precedent for a broken son to come home and find his place in the dojo.
But the precedent broke down when Hyogonosuke tried to look at it too closely. His grandfather taught with his voice. His father taught with his voice. The work of the dojo was the long verbal work of correction laid down beside the body of the student — no, there, the hip drops first, you are leading with the shoulder, feel where the weight is. The body of the master was only the second instrument of the teaching; the first was the voice, the precise running commentary that made the student's body into the form. His grandfather's damage and his father's damage had not affected the voice. The teaching had been built on what survived.
Hyogonosuke's damage was the voice. The thing on which the family pattern relied. He could demonstrate. He could stand a student in the right stance and adjust the stance with his hands. He could not say the words. He could show ten students a form a hundred times and not be able to say to any of them the one sentence that would let them feel the form from inside. The work of language laid down beside the body was the work he could not do.
And underneath that, harder to look at, because it was the deeper truth, there was the other thing. He no longer had in him what teaching required. The teacher's voice was the surface of it; the teacher's resolve was the body of it. A man teaching the sword had to argue with his students daily, push back against their bad habits, correct what was wrong with them in the small hour-by-hour way that built a swordsman. That work needed the part of him that argued. That part had been the field's first casualty. He had stopped arguing in Kumamoto. He had not started again on the road.
The Hyogonosuke who had been the kind of student his grandfather had despaired of would have mended the tear in his hakama the night he caught it on the branch. The Hyogonosuke who had walked a week in the torn pants was not equipped to teach anyone anything. The man who waited for someone else to notice his clothes were torn was not the man who could tell a student his stance was wrong.
There was the deeper trouble too, the one he had spent most of the road keeping at the edge of his thinking. The school's continuation through Toshikatsu's branch had been his since Kyusaburo had not come back from Korea. He had been eighteen then. The role had reshaped itself around him without anyone asking him to take it up; he had no choice in any of it. The boy who had been the second son was now the successor, and a household reorders itself in such circumstances without saying it has done so. Toshikatsu had not pressed him. Sekishusai had not pressed him. The marriage that would come in his middle twenties had not been settled in a hurry. They had given him time. He had taken the time and used it the way a younger man uses time, which was to want to earn the role before he stepped into it.
That was part of what Kato had been for. He had gone south at twenty-four wanting to come back to the valley as a man with achievements of his own attached to his name, so that when he took up what Kyusaburo had left him, he would be stepping in as a Yagyu who had made himself in the world rather than as a substitute filling the shape someone better had left empty. He had wanted to come home meritorious. He had wanted the role to be his because he had earned it, not because it had been left to him by his brother's death. He had wanted, at twenty-four, what every second son in the histories had wanted when he became suddenly the heir, which was to deserve what he had not been raised to inherit.
None of that had happened. None of it was going to.
And there had been, all along, his younger brother. Toshiyasu had been eighteen when Hyogonosuke went to Kato. He would be twenty-one now, the same age Hyogonosuke had been when he had wanted to fight at the great battle and his grandfather had not let him.
Toshiyasu had never been the kind of student Hyogonosuke had been. He had taken correction the first time it was offered. He had not argued with the masters. Sekishusai had been pleased with him for years, in the quiet way Sekishusai showed pleasure with the students who did not require him to repeat himself.
While Hyogonosuke had been serving Kato, Toshiyasu had been in the valley. He had been there for the two years Hyogonosuke had been at Kato's. He had been there for the year Hyogonosuke had been broken in Kumamoto. He had been there for the months Hyogonosuke had been on the road. Two more years of Sekishusai's teaching had gone into Toshiyasu while Hyogonosuke was not there to receive it. Sekishusai's last teaching was the kind that went into a student fast when the student was present to receive it. Toshiyasu would now be where Hyogonosuke had been at twenty-three or twenty-four. Possibly further. Possibly past him.
The school did not depend on Hyogonosuke. It had never depended on him alone. It depended on whoever in the family could carry it, and the family had another son who could. Toshiyasu would marry and have children, and Toshikatsu's branch would continue. The school's transmission would go through Toshiyasu. The role Hyogonosuke had wanted to earn before he held it had been quietly transferring to Toshiyasu through the simple fact of Toshiyasu being there while Hyogonosuke was not.
No letter had come from Yagyu in the nine months he had been broken. None had come to the village hut where the doctor had first treated him; none to the temple hall in Kumamoto; none to the small house at the edge of the samurai quarter where Daiun and Ume had tended him through the long convalescence. Kato's office had presumably written to his grandfather — the lord's formal letter, framing him as meritorious, would have been read in the valley by now. But no return letter had come. No instruction to hurry home. No reminder of the inheritance waiting. No mention of the woman whose arrangement had been a known future since his early twenties.
He understood this as the family having already made the shift. They had read Kato's letter; they had heard, by gossip or by some other channel, what had actually happened on the field, and they had put the two together and arrived at the conclusion he had himself arrived at. There was no need to write to him because there was nothing to write to him about. The school would continue without him, through Toshiyasu, and the family had stopped expecting him to be the carrier of the line because they already had another. The marriage would quietly become Toshiyasu's marriage, or another arrangement entirely, made for Toshiyasu now that Toshiyasu was of the age.
He thought of his cousin in a distant branch of the family, a man who had taken a fever as a young man, the kind that pulled the body into hard shaking and held it there for days. The cousin had not been expected to live. He had lived. But what came out of the fever had not been the same person who went in. His body had mended in time, he could walk, could feed himself, could do the small ordinary things, but something in the mind had not mended with it. He had understood less than before. He spoke in shorter pieces, the way a young boy speaks rather than the way the man he had been before the fever spoke. He could not be left with sharp tools. He liked to sit in the sun and watch the birds. The family had taken him into the household and kept him there for the rest of his life, fed him, dressed him, sat him at the meal in his place, walked him to the privy when he needed walking, and he had lived to forty-some years that way, perfectly content in his family's care, neither of use as a successor, nor a shame to anyone either. The family had had other heirs, other workers, other futures. The cousin had been cared for regardless.
Hyogonosuke would be kept the same way. He would sit in the practice yard watching his father teach. He would eat at the family meal. He would be walked past by students who would learn very quickly which of the family they did not need to bow to. He would watch Toshiyasu, who had been the kind of student Hyogonosuke had not been, become the man Hyogonosuke had been supposed to be. The family would keep him regardless.
But the cousin had been a kindness the family carried. Hyogonosuke would be a debt the family paid. The cousin's condition had been visited on him without his consent. Hyogonosuke's had been given up by his own hands. The lane had been his decision; the forty men had been his to bring back; the orders he had taken from Kumamoto had been the orders he had taken, but the way he had executed them had been his work. His state was the consequence of his own bad judgment under fire. Hyogonosuke would be kept with the shame still on him, eating at a table where he had not earned a place.
And that he was kept like this would be the proof of what he had become. The cousin had not chosen what was put before him. Hyogonosuke had stopped choosing in Kumamoto, when Ume had laid his clothes out and he had worn them, when Daiun had said don't move the leg yet and he had not moved it, when the food had come on a tray and he had eaten whatever was on the tray. He had been compliant in the way a child is compliant.
The Yagyu household would lay things out for him and he would take them up. The inn-keeper had done it with the hakama; the family would do it with everything. He would do as he was told because the part of him that did otherwise had not come back.
That is what is waiting, he thought, walking up the road in his dirty clothes with the bundle on his back. That is the shape of the life I am going home to. The corner of the household. The kept one. The one the family carries because he is family, and the one the school does not need because the school has Toshiyasu. No use. No earning. No work to put my hands to that will make me anything other than the cousin in the sun.
He could not bear to look at it for long. He pushed it away, the way he pushed away the impossible fragments of Suke in the field.
It refused to stay pushed away. It kept coming back. It had begun, in the worst of the winter, to be one of the things he carried instead of one of the things he wondered about, a settled weight, like the moonlight aversion and the gun-flinch and the body that nearly killed old women. A part of him now.
He walked north, then northwest, then in whatever direction the road took, because directions had stopped meaning anything. The weeks became months; the snow came slowly began to rot toward the thaw; he grew thin in the way that a winter of poor eating made a man thin, unwashed, ragged, his battered traveling hat rained and snowed upon so many times it had softened into a shape with only a theoretical relation to its origin. He slept in fragments and woke from the field and spoke to no one.
He had been on the road since the very end of summer, the better part of six months by now, the worst of a hard winter among them, when the rain caught him at the turning of the year.
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