Читать книгу The Book of Duels - Michael Garriga - Страница 15

Miyamoto Musashi, 28,

Ronin & Future Author of The Book of Five Rings

My katana cut through his kimono and armor and flesh and when he dropped his steel I turned to the boat and motioned for my team to leave—his seconds surely would have killed us all—and we’ve timed it just so, the tide pulling us out as we paddle steady with the waves, the salt in my beard and the wind in my dress, and we rise and fall with the water, we rise and fall, and the sea carries me back to my village where I am a child, the snow falling softly outside, and I sit with my legs beneath the kotatsu, the coals warming me, and I am crying in my mother’s arms—she squats next to me and strokes my back and says, Shhhh, Saru-chan, shhhh, as I try to describe the dream I’ve just had of sitting by a pond whose surface is covered with lotus leaves, in the middle of which is but one lone bloom, orange and pink and far removed, and I reach for it with tiny fingers and I am stretched long and thin and then topple and splash into the water, beneath whose surface all is darkness and dry, and though I know my father was killed in the Battle of Sekigahara, he now stands before me in a doorway, his hand reaches out to me, yet the closer I move, the tinier he becomes and so I stand still as a mountain and stare for a long long time calling to him, Tousan! Tousan! until he fades into an ultimate light and vanishes, yet I cannot find the words to tell her this, like a flower that blooms at night can never wish for a thing as miraculous and needed as the sun.

I wake on the boat, the wind blowing us to our destination, and I remember another dream in which I was a warrior who’d been slain in a duel, though perhaps that was no dream—perhaps I am truly the dead man and this voyage but my final dream.