“Your son possesses a great many advantages over the other children in his classes, Toichi-san. He is quick, and bright. He rarely falls for the other’s distractions, and rapidly absorbs all that he is shown.” The two men stood in the doorway of the dojo, watching the lines of young children mimicking the motions of the elder student’s training kata. The man who was speaking wore a very simple black hakama and gi with a thin sheet of translucent red silk hanging over his features from the headband he wore. The other man, dressed in a black and red formal kimono replied from behind a smooth black porcelain mask that covered everything but his eyes. “You do him, and me, much honor by saying so.”
The voices showed the sensei to be markedly older than the father to whom he was speaking. “There are other dojos in our clan. There are places where he might learn things these other children couldn’t. He would make an excellent candidate to find out what it truly is to be Scorpion. Of course, you wouldn’t see him again till he passed his gempukku.” The father ran his hand over the single adornment on his mask, a crystal tear set as though falling from the mask’s open right eye, as he considered the sensei’s words. “If you think he can be of greater benefit to the clan in some other position, than who am I to say otherwise, Taiyou-sama.”
The father watched for the rest of the kata, then turned and walked in to the street. Bayushi Taiyou smiled as he watched the other man walk down the road. If the child continued to show this much promise in his new training, Taiyou knew his lord would reward him for bringing the boy to his attention. Taiyou walked in to the next room, began writing a quick letter to his lord, and called for the boy, “Akio-kun, come here. I have a message for you to run to the castle for me.”
Weeks had passed since the last time he had seen sunlight. It had been days since he had seen any light brighter than the red tinted lanterns that hung at various places in the dojo. Like always, his new sensei spoke in a whisper. His voice matched the slight silken rustle of his hakama as he paced in front of the students, making him even more difficult to hear. Today’s lecture was on the topic of defense. He had been lecturing for most of the morning on the benefits and costs of the various defensive maneuvers they had been practicing, which meant that soon they would run a trial to see how much of it the students had understood. The sensei stopped talking and pacing at the same time, and silence briefly fell across the room. As one, the students who had been kneeling rose to their feet and found their places in the two lines that would form the corridor for whatever trial the sensei had in mind. Assistants moved through the room, passing a bamboo bokken to each of the students.
Using a louder voice than the earlier lecture, his voice easily filled the room, “When Hida train, they say that the ability to endure 20 strikes and still be able to achieve your goal makes you a samurai. Strike Me.” As he finished his sentence he walked through the gauntlet of students. They struck out at him with their bokken, raining blows upon him. He turned at the other end, adjusted his clothing, stretched for a moment to remove the sting from the strikes, and begun speaking again. “I am inclined to agree with them. It is a useful skill to posses. When the Mirumoto train, they say that one should defend one’s self as best as possible, while sacrificing no offense. Strike Me.” As this sentence finished, he jogged through the gauntlet once more, this time turning aside or dodging about half of the strikes that were thrown at him, being struck only when he stopped to strike out barehanded at the students whose swings left them especially vulnerable. “Their method is one to keep in mind, as it has its uses,” he said, turning around to face the gauntlet again. “When your training is done and you can call yourself a Scorpion, you will never be struck. Strike Me.” The room filled with the whistling sound of the bokken passing through the air, but as the sensei moved through the gauntlet the third time it seemed as though his body had joined the shadows, dancing almost impossibly between the blades. When he had reached the end, he reached out and took the bokken from the closest child. “Your turn,” he said, noting as the awe turned to apprehension in the eyes of his students.
“Why does the Scorpion always lie?” It was the fifth time the question had been asked of various students around the room. The sensei’s only response to the previous four answers had been to ask someone else. This time, the question was posed to Akio, who sat for a moment, forming his argument. Akio responded, “Sensei, it is because it wears down their honor, to the point that they are willing and ready to do any number of things for our clan.” There was the slightest hesitation before the sensei continued his pacing. Even the students who didn’t notice the misstep were aware of the displeasure in the sensei’s voice as he repeated the question to another student further down the line. The boy answered immediately, “Because it leads their enemies to make assumptions about them. These assumptions can then be turned in to advantages when needed.”
Several more questions were asked and answered before the sensei arrived in front of Akio again. “What is honor?” “Honor is the measure of one’s adherence to the tenets of Bushido; Gi, Rei, Yu, Meyo, Jin...” Akio’s answer was cut short as the sensei asked the next student for his answer. “Shosuro-sama, honor is serving your superiors by completing the tasks they set before you. In doing so, we ensure that the empire continues to thrive and the Emperor can continue to guide us all.” Akio felt as though for the rest of the day’s lessons the sensei’s eyes drilled in to him. When the lesson was finished the students were dismissed to return to their dormitory, and as they walked back Akio heard their whispers. “I don’t know why everyone seems so surprised, it’s not the first time Akio has said or done silly things,” one girl said before glancing over her shoulder at him. A conversation from behind him took his attention from her, “My father has a guard, Kiyoko, who acts the same way. They all call her junshin when she isn’t around. Father says that she doesn’t have the strength of the Scorpion, the willingness to do what must be done for the empire. They use her for the simple tasks around the barracks.” Akio began to hum a tune to himself to drown out their chatter. It didn’t matter to him what they thought, anyway.
The daimyo’s audience chamber was all but empty. There were only two men standing in the room easily capable of holding a hundred times that many. Bayushi Takayuki, one of the local daimyo of the lands near the Shinomen Forest, stood near Shosuro Saburo. “I do not consider either of those options to be acceptable, Takayuki-sama. If it were any other child, I would probably agree that sending him home would be sufficient. Time would pass and he would forget much of what he has been taught. This boy, however, will not forget. I also do not believe that any amount of teaching will rid him of his incorrect view point of bushido. He is too idealistic; he has romanticized bushido to the point that he would bring shame to many of the Lions in the world.” His inflection implied that he had more to say, but Saburo fell silent and nodded slightly towards the main door to the hall.
A minute passed, and then the door slid open, and Taiyou entered. The older sensei walked across the room, foot steps echoing in the hollow space, and then bowed low before his daimyo before speaking, “You sent for me, Bayushi-sama?” The daimyo simply gestured to Shosuro Saburo with the folded fan in his hand. “You’ve made a very large mistake, Taiyou. You ranted and raved about the prospects for this child you sent Takayuki-sama. You heaped all the praises on him you could think of, short of calling him Bayushi reborn.” Taiyou looked between the other two men, then asked his daimyo, “What is wrong with that? Has the boy done something wrong?”
Takayuki once again gestured to the Shosuro sensei, who continued for him, “You sent us a junshin. The boy is willing to learn to steal, sneak, and kill. But he can not properly grasp the reasons we do those things. He will not cheat when sparing. He openly questioned his trial of theft. I have spent many nights working through matters of philosophy with him, questioning him on hypothetical situations, and still he will not come to our way of thought. Even the disdain the other student’s have for him has not changed his behavior. What good is a well made tool that isn’t easily used to perform the task for which it was created?”
Taiyou responded with a nervous laugh. “He’s just a boy. If he’s really that useless to us, kill him and be done with it.” Bayushi Takayuki responded to his cousin, “He’s your mistake Taiyou-san. If Saburo thinks the boy is too dangerous to us, and cannot be used, then you deal with him Taiyou. You are dismissed. Let me know what becomes of the child when you have settled the matter.” The two sensei bowed to their daimyo, and then all three Scorpion turned and left the hall.
Once they were out of the chamber, Taiyou stopped, expecting to talk to Saburo about the whole thing. The Shosuro sensei had other thoughts however, continuing walking as he delivered his verdict on the child. “You’ll have him in an hour. Kill him, and next time you send me a student think first.”
Akio woke up, wrists bound tightly in thick rope in front of him. The rope was looped over and over, clearly whoever had bound him didn’t want to risk Akio getting loose. He looked around and it took him a while to recognize the dojo in which he had originally started his training. Two voices drifted out of the side room that served as Taiyou’s office but couldn’t quite make out the words. Eventually, the voices stopped, and one of Taiyou’s eldest students walked out into the dojo and up to Akio’s form on the floor. “Look at those ropes. You probably couldn’t even cut through them if I sat here and let you.” The student drug Akio to his feet, and walked him out in to the night.
The two walked for almost an hour in silence before they reached the edge of the Shinomen Forest. Once they reached the first trees, the guard forced Akio to a kneeling position and drew his katana. He raised the blade high over his head and then swung down for the collarbone, just left of the neck of the kneeling boy. Just before the sword struck home Akio fell backwards, raising his bound hands in front of him. The katana struck right between his hands, slowing down as it cut through the heavy bonds and the boy pressed his forearms together further trapping and slowing the blade. The final piece of the rope caught the blade, a strand of fate deciding the boy’s destiny, straining as though it would surely snap and let the blade through. The rope held, however, and Akio twisted his body and arms, tugging the blade out of his surprised guard’s hands.
The motion of the blade broke through the rest of the rope, and with his hands free the young prisoner slashed out at the guard. The strike caught him just below the chin. The guard slowly fell to the ground, his life spraying out of his throat on the ground, and his killer. Akio took off at a jog along the forest’s edge, not even bothering to clean the blood from himself, or to remove the bits of the rope that still hung from his hands. As the sun began to rise, the sleep deprivation, adrenaline, and remnants of the drug that was used to capture him in the first place took hold. The boy collapsed against a tree, sunk to the ground, and slept.
For the second time in as many days, Akio awoke to the sound of voices in an adjacent room. This time the voices were full of concern instead of malice. He looked around at the uneven floor and poorly crafted walls. He sat up and his head swam for a moment, and his stomach churned with hunger. There was a bowl of cold soup next to the mat he was laying on. He was clothed in some peasant child’s sleeping clothes and the only belonging of his in sight was the sword he had taken, laying on a piece of cloth next to him.
After he’d started on the bowl of soup, two peasant women entered from the room the voices had been coming from. They both bowed, and then younger of the two left the room without saying anything. The older woman came and kneeled near the futon. “Are you feeling better, child?” she asked. Akio swallowed the soup he had been drinking, and answered that he was. “It has been a while since your last visit. From the way you came back, I guess life as a samurai did not go as he had told you it would.”
“Hai. The Scorpion took me away from him, and after that they decided I had done something wrong. The next thing I knew, I was being lead out to the forest. Then I ended up here.”
“Does Toichi know that they tried to kill you?”
“I do not know, mother. I would guess that he does not. I do not know what they will do to explain my absence to him. They are Scorpion, I’m sure they have something planned.”
“What will you do now? You are welcome to come back home.”
“I don’t think you will be safe if I stay here. They will likely look for me,
and we’re too close to the city. I
think I will take the sword, and try my luck elsewhere in the empire.”
“Well, I would appreciate if you came to visit once in a while. If you
see Toichi, or can get word to him, make sure you tell him about all of this.
He’ll know what to do about it.”
Akio got to his feet, and walked over to the small rack of clothing in the corner, taking a gi that would probably fit him. Then he picked up the sword from the ground and turned back to look at the woman who had always managed to look after him. “I think it would be best if I started moving again. Thank you for taking care of me, mother. I never intended to cause you so much distress,” Akio said, and then headed out the door. He pretended to not notice the tears that silently slid down her face; she pretended not to notice the ones that fell from his.
Many people believe that Scorpion wear masks to conceal their emotions from their enemies. Some Scorpion masks, however, are designed for the exact opposite effect. Takayuki’s mask was one of the latter and his displeasure was clear on his face. “I am torn,” Takayuki began, “between praising you and Saburo for your training of the boy and handing you a wakizashi for your failures. How fortunate am I that I can have both of those options?”
“If that is what you wish, Takayuki-sama.” Taiyou’s voice betrayed his nervousness at the thought of seppuku. “I would point out that my death will not help to fix this problem, or finish the job of killing the boy.” Takayuki paused for a moment, contemplating the various punishments that he could inflict on the dishonored daimyo. “There are perhaps chances in your future to redeem your honor after this failure, but I cannot allow a samurai who has failed me in such a simple task to retain the name and honor of our clan. You are no longer Bayushi Taiyou. If you wish to regain your name and honor, you will bring me this boy’s head.”