Segaki (4 page)

He went to his own quarters, slid the panel closed, and composed himself. At noon he had a thin gruel and a little rice. Then he watched the ripples in the pool. An abbot who no longer believes any of it has grave
responsibilities
towards those who are faithful. He owes something, but what, an apology. For though he no longer believes, he still believes, he can feel it, in something, and therefore what he thought he believed in was not what he believed in at all. So it is only when one can no longer give one’s best, that one realizes that one never gave it at all, which left him feeling rather chastened, on the whole.

Oio did not appear until late that afternoon, and when he did, though he was as impassive as ever, his face was pale. “Our protector, the Lord of Noto, is dead,” he said, and then brought out the whole story.

The war had at last reached the province. The petty overlord of the next district had taken advantage of the confusion to seize Noto for himself. The Lord of Noto was relatively peaceable, and had held power for so long he had forgotten to grip it tight. His castle had been taken by treachery and burned, the women raped and killed, the heirs male murdered, the peasants terrorized, and what wealth there was confiscated.

“And this man?”

He was a younger son, away on the coast. When he came back he found the ruins still smouldering. He wandered through them and found only a charred dress. What soldiers there were went over to the winning side. So he was Lord of Noto now, and Lord of nothing. He had been hiding in the woods for three days, with his dog. He was half-starved.

“And what does he want?”

“Lessons in Bushido. The Hagakure.” Oio hesitated. “He cannot read.”

Muchaku’s eyebrows went up. He pursed his lips. “Let him stay here until he is better.”

“He demands to see you.”

Muchaku thought that over and shook his head. “No, I will not see him. But let him stay until the end of the week, until he is better.”

He dismissed Oio and looked at the pool again. Zen was popular with the Samurai, because it provided them with a discipline that made fighting endurable, and a few special psychological skills, how to shoot an arrow, how to engage in hand to hand fighting, with the best chance of success. There was a philosophy behind it, but it was the petty blood-thirsty skill in front of it that was in demand. The Hagakure was a receipt book of such things. It was true, Muchaku had a copy by him. It was a fashionable book among members of his class. But he had put that behind him. He did not want to see it in front of him now.

“When you are at the parting of the ways, do not
hesitate
to choose the way to death. No special reason for this, except that your mind is thus made up and ready to see to the business. We all prefer life to death and our planning and reasoning will be naturally for life … therefore every morning and every evening, have the idea of death vividly impressed in your mind. When your determination to die at any moment is thoroughly
established
your life will be faultless and your duties fully
discharged
.” That was the wisdom hidden under the leaves, the Hagakure, and it was a true and indispensable wisdom. But it was followed by specific recipes for the exact
torsion
of a bow, the precise moment to rise up on one’s toes and bring the scimitar down on the opponent’s head, how to strike when one’s conviction of winning assured a clean stroke. And that he would not teach.

But the soldier stayed. He stayed a week, whimpering and howling. And then it appeared he refused to leave. The other monks were terrified. Through Oio, Muchaku heard all about that. “Tell him he must leave,” he said. “We cannot have a soldier here.” He had heard the man was practising archery in the morning in the orchard. He had even heard the wobbling whine of the arrows, as they zoomed in to hit the target. And he had drawn back, obscurely angry.

The dog, too, had taken to following him with a downcast hungry look. He discouraged it as much as he could. Once he even picked it up and hurled it into the stream, as he had done once with a stupid monk, as a Koan. But the poor animal could not help being grateful to be there. It could not be shocked into submission.

If it was not the dog perpetually pattering after him, with its gaunt, liquid eyes, it was the monks staring at him. They felt, so Oio said, that if the soldier’s being here were known, others would come to capture him, and that would be the end of them.

The scenes at meals and at the pump were not now pleasant. One of the monks in particular, the scruffiest of the lot, a man who was tolerated only as a kitchen helper, had become impossible. He trembled all the time.

The monks had taken to talking among themselves and glancing at Muchaku, ready to fall silent when he came too close to them. And now this beggar stepped forward from among them. Oio would have pulled him
back, but Muchaku motioned him to be still. He wanted to know what was going on.

The soldier, it appeared, wanted to learn the Zen rules of fighting. He would go only in exchange for that
talisman
, that was no talisman at all. He was a coward, too. He wanted to be safe while he inflicted danger on others. That was how his mind ran.

“Teach him, oh teacher,” implored the beggar monk,” and then he will go away and we will be safe again.”

Muchaku refused and got rid of the man. But everything was collapsing if even these men would fall to pieces for a little security to bind up their over-intellectual sheaves. Besides, there was nothing to teach except a discipline that took a lifetime. Did they not realize that? If they could not face death themselves, after years of training, were they here only in the hopes of learning a supposed secret that did not exist, and is that what his fifteen years of carefully tending them had come to?

It was too much. He sent them away. He could not even speak to Oio.

But he did not feel at ease. This little haven he had built was a haven no longer. It had become as irrational as the world. Perhaps it was too high up for most men to reason amiably. Thin air made them giddy. It did not make their giddiness any the less saddening. He lay on his mat, with one feeble lamp burning somewhere like a firefly, listening to the stealthy rustling paper movements of the ferns on the rocks below.

He must have been expecting something of the sort for he was not in the least surprised when it happened.

Suddenly the paper screen that closed the room behind him ran splitting out in all directions, and the soldier
crashed through it, sword in hand. At least it must be the same soldier, but then all soldiers are the same soldier, otherwise they would be generals or else not soldiers at all. He had been weeping. His face was contorted with shame. For a second they looked at each other. Muchaku did not bother to rise.

The soldier held the sword at his throat. The little lamp finally found its metal and glinted off it tentatively, as though this were the first time it had ever reflected metal. It was rather beautiful.

Muchaku found at least that not all discipline had left him. He felt calm, very far away, rather exhilarated, and utterly detached. No doubt this was the event towards which he had been rushed willy-nilly, and he was relieved to find it so trivial.

“I do not want to die. Teach me how to kill, or you will die,” shouted the soldier, and his sword shook and trembled up and down, catching in Muchaku’s cotton robe and pulling the stuff awry.

“We will both die in either case,” said Muchaku. “You would have to study for years.” His eyes narrowed. “You are no real samurai.”

Something pattered into the room behind the soldier. It was the dog. The soldier gave a sob, cast the sword down, so it rattled and slithered over Muchaku, towards the floor, and stamped up and down in rage. “You have nothing to teach,” he screamed. “You are too learned!”

Muchaku winced. He could almost see Oio’s smile, if he had heard that. The soldier collapsed in a heap against a post of the room, and the dog came up to him and whined. At first the soldier did not see it. Then he grabbed it by the neck, whirled it yelping in the air, and
cast it towards Muchaku. “Keep it,” he said. “Let it follow you everywhere, so I will know where to find you.” The dog flew through the air, over Muchaku, and out the window, tried to get its balance, failed, and after a breathless moment, there was a splash.

The soldier looked at the window with disbelief. He must have been very fond of that dog, to throw it away in the midst of a passion. He gulped, turned, and
blundered
out the door, leaving his sword behind him. Muchaku heard him thrashing about and then, endlessly after, a loud exclamation at the gate. After that there was only silence.

He lay there for a moment, and then getting up, he, too, went out through the garden panel and clambered painfully down the rocks towards the pool.

When Oio came to wake the abbot, five hours later, he found him curled up asleep, with the still wet and
shivering
dog clasped tight, and the sword lying fallen on the ground. The ruptured paper panel creaked and rustled. He stood there, looking down, without saying anything.

Muchaku stirred and awoke. He tried to push the dog away but it would not go. It would never go again.

“Has he gone?” asked Muchaku.

“Yes.” Oio looked disapproving. “You should have given him his lessons he wanted so much. He was very disturbed.”

Muchaku did not care for that. “There was nothing to teach.”

Oio shrugged. “Yes, but it would have made him happier for a while. Who knows?” Oio slipped
noiselessly
from the room, but Muchaku knew he had been rebuked, and rightly so. Oio was better than he. He had
always known that. But he had never felt shy about knowing it before.

Two weeks went by.

He was in considerable anguish. He did not fit into himself any more and somehow the world he had made here did not want him any more. He loathed dogs, but he took good care of the dog. He had to humiliate himself somehow, and the dog was so grateful for the attention. But he did not deceive himself. Even in the dog’s eyes he was only second best. He felt shabby. And feeling shabby, he began to search around in memory for some time when he had not. He found himself thinking of his
childhood
, and his youth, and of his brother, whom he had not seen for sixteen years. His brother was older than he. He had never been able to ask him questions, and so he had found the answers here instead. But suddenly he had an enormous desire to see him. He would not dare to ask, he scarcely knew what to ask, the sort of doubt that was troubling him could not be phrased, but he might learn something by the sight of him.

He began to wander around the monastery as though he were a stranger. Its perfection was certainly annoying. It reduced these few left-over monks, somehow, to the status of palace maids, the ones left behind to take care of the silks, when the court is somewhere else.

For the court was somewhere else. As has been said, it was the Angrya season. In the summer the Zen monks take to the fields and wandering, a token that we are all outcasts on the earth, and that, no matter how exalted we may become, still, we must concern ourselves with planting yams and culling out the drowned green hairs of the rice plants.

He had never had a desire to leave before himself, but now he had. The monks were angry that he had sent the soldier away, they who had clamoured for him to do so. They seemed to feel that since he had gone away
unsatisfied
, he would come back for revenge to slay them all. It made them avoid the dog, and the dog could not understand that. It had been hurt enough already. Only Oio was kind to the dog.

They were not meditating now. They were filling in time. Their meditation postures were not relaxed. They looked crouched to run like rabbits from a sudden hunter. They skimped their prayers. And the musical patterns of the moving forest leaves seemed to mock the thuds and droning grunts of their own far from
melodious
voices. They stared after him as though he had betrayed them.

In other words, he knew perfectly well, it was not that he was running away, but that he did not belong here any more. His past had closed up behind him, and left him naked in the present, where he had no right to be.

He told only Oio, and somehow he felt that Oio understood.

The day he departed there was a light pattering rain, the sort of rain that brings the snails out, cast up on the plants like pebbles. Their glistening tracks flowed back and forth under the shrubs.

The dog went with him. That seemed to be understood. Monks in any event were supposed to travel with a dog, but he found its presence a worry, for when you acquire a dog, even the most beguiling of puppies, you are aware that you will also have to be there ten years later to bury it, and this dog was already mature. Yet there was never
any question about the matter. It seemed settled between them.

At the gates of the monastery he hesitated. It was after all a little hard to see all this for the last time. But the monks did not know that. They thought he was going on Angrya, and to their minds that was bad enough, for he had left Oio in charge, and Oio was in some ways sterner than he. They stood around with an unweaned look, ripped from their accustomed breast, and scowled at their new nurse.

Oio seemed sad. The two men talked for a moment, and Muchaku knew that Oio knew why he was leaving. So for an instant they looked at each other wistfully, for it was the very first time they had been friends.

As was customary, the monks asked where the pilgrim was going, and he told them: “I am going to see my brother.” At that their faces lit up, for they thought that it was, as customarily, a Koan, which would give them something to be busy with for a while. He was content that they should think so. But only Oio came forward to touch him, to press a little bundle of curd cakes into his hand, and to say, “I hope you find your brother well”.

The unweaned found that reassuring, for they thought it was another part of the Koan, and that therefore
nothing
was changed, but Muchaku, who sensed what Oio meant not to say, was deeply touched.