by Ronan Frost
Chapter Twenty-One
The flames lick hungrily at the buildings of Enryaku-ji, devouring timber and thatch fed by the hands of Nobunaga’s soldiers. My hearing has returned and I can hear the crack and sizzle of the terrible fire and the screams of the refugees within.
Everything is being undone; buildings that took scores of lifetimes to construct are consumed in brilliant flaming beasts of destruction, the last shred of resistance had fled, Nobunaga’s army swarming like ants, slaughtering the wounded and helpless, spreading the fires. It is no longer a battle; it is a massacre.
I do not know where to turn, what to do, how to act. I hear a strong sonorous voice calling out from within the main temple. They are surrounded on all sides by fire that has begun to climb up the walls, tickling at the roof.
“Let us concentrate our attention on the Moon of Perfect Enlightenment,” calls that voice from within, shouted over the roar of the fire. “Chastise our hearts in the water that flows from the hillside of Shimei! Scalding water and charcoal fire are no worse than the cooling breeze!”
At this command a mob of monks, women and children pour forth from the doors of the temple and I watch as they throw themselves into the conflagration. Young and old, screaming as they burn.
I watch, feeling the last of my strength slip, sick to my core, wishing to flee, yet somehow I cannot tear my eyes away from the sight of the figures thrashing in pain within that bright furnace, my arms over my head as much to shield me from the waves of heat as to block out the cries that resound inside my skull, opening a yawning emptiness inside of me.
At last, hunched low, I stumble away in the mud and as I turn something draws my eye; a silky flow of shadow upon shadow. I look, and see it is a man darting from the forest into the buildings, and for a moment his face is illuminated as he passes before a beam of firelight. I blink, wondering if I had seen another ghost.
Masakage.
I shake my head, hardly daring it to be possible, yet knowing it to be true. There is the way of the ninja; while the battle is fought he seeks to infiltrate the temple grounds, sow chaos and spreading mayhem from within the camp. I pass several monks, and grab at the sleeve of the man nearest me, shouting and pointing, but he is reloading his gun and will not be distracted. I give up, and continue my pursuit.
The sky is lightening; a deep blood red full of smoke and ash. Has an entire night passed? The east wind has gained strength, the air turned from something unseen and unfelt into a palpable presence, gusting into me, shoving and plucking at my clothing. It breathes into the fires and they respond with renewed ferocity, turbulent fingers of flame burning all the brighter as they devour the ancient wood and thatch.
I do not understand how I have survived.
I follow Masakage as he moves away from the fires and the swelling numbers of enemy soldiers, heading deeper within the complex where still darkness remains. He moves rapidly and I must focus my attention entirely upon him lest I lose him in the smoke and confusion. Then I do lose sight of him and stagger to a stop, eyes roaming the dark as despair floods over me until I see movement and a flash of light; someone is feeding a flame beneath the supports of a temple. Masakage does not see me and I circle him, edging closer, keeping to the shadows and the swirling smoke.
In the light of the kindled fire I see his face lit from below, dark shadows in the deep sockets of wide spaced eyes. A rush comes over me, a flash of false strength followed immediately by a crippling weakness. I drop lower and move so that a large wooden pillar is between us, my feet in their straw sandals easing into the mud with every step. I can hear him now, the scratching like the workings of a rat. My advance is steady until I am within his reach.
Again, fate has brought our paths together.
Masakage looks up, startled. His eyes widen in surprise as he recognizes me, then narrow. I have slipped into a meditative state; everything seems to have stopped, my mind is clear and calm. I lunge at him with outstretched hands, that special kind of strength given only when the mind has taken complete control, it is strength given without regard for consequence.
I catch Masakage about the chest and despite his bulk throw him backward, his head striking the ground. I throw myself atop of him. He is much larger than me, it is as if I ride a fat sow, my legs astraddle his chest. My right hand has found a heavy rock and I hold it high, fingers splayed over its circumference, muscles tensed, ready to dash it against the side of his skull. From the periphery of my vision I see the rock in my hand has a sharpened edge like that of a crude axe.
“Wait, boy!” That edge of command in Masakage’s voice seems to cut right through my thoughts.
I know it is a mistake, but I hesitate. I hold a snake by its tail and should my attention slip a single instant I will be struck dead. I feel the edge of my alertness blunting; my words feel padded, as if someone else is speaking through my own mouth.
“You have taken Aki,” I say, my voice weakening, shaking my head at my own foolishness.
An expression flashes across Masakage's face that I cannot read.
“She was a fool to warn you, but it was the foolishness of youth. She has always been mine.”
“She is not yours.”
“Oh?”
Something in his eyes makes me pause.
“A clever hawk hides its claws,” Masakage says with a smirk of self-satisfaction. “Blood ties are thick. And I do not doubt the loyalty of my daughter.”
At first I do not understand, but then I feel a shifting of the world. My hand starts to visibly tremble, wavering, the stone somehow ten times heavier. Masakage senses my weakening resolve and laughs.
“To grow strong, we must match the cruelty of this world. Give in to passivity and you will fail, just like these pathetic monks. They will be forgotten by history, deserted by their gods because they are weak!”
I raise my eyes and see the glow of flames is growing brighter, gusting with the east wind. It won’t be long until Nobunaga’s soldiers are upon us. My resolve is all but gone; Masakage’s face has changed, I see in it now Aki reflected there beneath those sharp eyes. The taking of his life will not make right the destruction of this night; there is no hope for the monks of Enryaku-ji. Perhaps all this is how it should be; perhaps these deaths are ordained, a natural conquest that will lead to peace over the entire country.
Too long. I have thought too long.
Masakage twists and is out from beneath me. He is suddenly at my back and the heavy stone tumbles from my hand. His hands close about the tender flesh of my throat, squeezing tight and an incredible pain explodes my vision into bursts of light. He stands behind me, out of reach of my flailing hands as they scramble at his but meet nothing to fasten to, desperate to get a breath of air as my lungs work violently against the tightness.
“You should never have fled,” he says, his face leaning over my shoulder and so close to mine I feel his spittle. His eyes roam my face. “We have unfinished business, long have I sought to find you.”
There is a kind of catharsis to the pain. I see now a huge part of myself has always been taken by Masakage, he has always been my Master. Despite seven years of intense focus at Mount Hiei, I had never truly lost that thread binding my soul to his command. Always there in my mind he is there, like a giant bat, twice as tall as I stand its wings wrapped about me as it sinks its teeth into my neck. The vision of suffocation I have endured as a boy has become a reality and the insurmountable mountain of pain forces me to let go of everything and I am borne along sinking deeper, the edges of the world going black, my ears engulfed with roar of screaming blood and my fingers no longer fight at his. The pain is everything. I am dying. It will not be long.
A strange thought enters my head, some fragment of wisdom lodged in the hull of subconscious: one who cannot master himself is condemned to be mastered by others. Now, finally, I feel my thoughts unravelling as everything begins to slip away.
I am startled by a flicker; a candle flame lying fl
at in the wind, resisting. There is some hidden strength in my mind and I realize it is the drive instilled by the kaihogyo. Keep moving and refuse to be lost in the widening spiral of the future, thoughts that if given free reign lead to hours that blossom into days and then into years until the will to continue is bled thin. I have that intensity of focus, as if I once again the only thing important in the world is the next footfall I am about to make upon the forest floor, and nothing more.
Endure, I think. Endure.
My fingers find something at my belt that now I realize I knew had been there all along, whispering its presence in my head that I only hear now that I am listening. A flare of energy fizzes through my body.
A hidden claw of my own.
The dagger of the kaihogyo is in my hand, the dagger I have carried with me for seven years for the purpose of carving out my own guts should I fail. With the last of my strength I fumble and it is in my hand and I raise my arm, elbow locked, then swing down, my arm like a pendulum. As it strikes I feel the blade speak to me along its length, telling me of fabric and skin and flesh and blood until it is buried up to the hilt and it bucks in my hands and is torn away. Masakage’s hands fall from my throat and for some time I still cannot breathe, my world dark. My throat has collapsed in upon itself and it takes some time before something within is restored and air rushes into my lungs with a ragged tearing. I exhale, then inhale again, my hands splayed upon the earth before me and I retch.
“Damn you boy!” Masakage cries.
I open one eye, vision tunneling. Masakage is upon the ground on his back, his hands pressed about the handle of the knife deep in his upper thigh, teeth bared in pain, his leg straight and quivering.
I reach down and tear my knife from his leg and a fountain of blood covers us both. Masakage shrieks. I hold the knife backhand and I can see only that patch of his chest where I will drive my knife home, deep into his heart. Masakage throws back his head, tendons in his neck standing out like cords of rope in anticipation of the mortal strike.
Then, in that fraction of a moment when I have my knee in his gut, I see suddenly from his perspective what it is means to have duty, to feel freedom of spirit in belonging to something greater than the individual. I do not see my Master, I see only the man. My muscles, driven by berserker strength, quiver as I pause and draw breath.
Chapter Twenty-Two
An eerie orange glow suffuses the vast dome of the sky overhead and the air seems to hang in my ears, dead and heavy with silence. Gentle gusts of wind hold flakes of silent ash aloft, raining softly down as they have done for the past three days, blanketing every visible surface as far as the eye can see with formless grey. The fields, roads and rooftops of Kyoto, and even here, beneath the arc of the bridge where the two rivers meet.
I wonder at the uncountable number of incinerated particles that had once made up flesh of thousands of men women and children who had perished; now so indiscriminately mixed with what had been the thatching and beams and burls of wood of the vast complex of buildings of Enryaku-ji. I wonder if Yobutomo had returned to the conflagration; perhaps some of these flakes that fall upon me now had once been a part of his body. I feel that pang again, and I wish I had seen him one last time.
I bend my head over my task. The water here at the grassy bank of the river is not swift, and a sodden mass of ash chokes the surface and reeds. I clear a window to see the blade of my submerged knife blooming red, swirling slowly away downstream, metal becoming silver under the soft pad of my thumb.
My inner monologue of thought slows, and then stops completely. I am alone and truly free in every bare and terrible sense of the word. In solitude I have come back to the world, seeing it now afresh. Nothing is perfect, nothing is finished, and nothing lasts.
I blink back to reality, and rub harder at the blade, although it is already clean. The cold water feels good for it numbs my fingers. It is dangerous for me to be here in Kyoto; soldiers hunt for any who have escaped the mountain, and despite my nondescript clothing I still have the air of a monk, and it would be wise not to linger, yet I have taken a vow, and I will complete my final one-hundred days of the trials, and visit every one of those blackened and ruined shrines along the trail, and take shelter under the blackened beams every night.
Watching that endless song of flowing water, I am almost taken by overwhelming sadness. The sucking emptiness tears at the lining in my chest, the loss a hollow yawning where my heart once was. I feel as if I am a swimmer afloat, feeling the cold swift current of the lower stratum as I kick. If I let that emotion go it will run and take me, and I will drown. I rock back on my haunches, exhaling, withdrawing my hands from the water and closing my eyes, lost in the circle of cause and effect, blame and guilt.
It is then, in my silence, I feel the warmth on my face as I raise my face to the sun. A fluttering rises in my belly, an odd feeling of surety as I realize that I am not afraid of the emptiness anymore.
I open my eyes, and know the world awaits.
THE END
About the author:
Raised on a diet of Tolkien, Star Wars and everything in between, Ronan was first inspired to put pen to paper in primary school after being awestruck by a classmate’s hand-drawn comic book. He would spend hours after school penning his own comic, complete with lots of red ink for blood on axes and swords. Fast-forward twenty years, and his interest in science and the stranger-than-fiction world of the quantum and relativistic has led him into a career in research. In his spare time Ronan still loves to write fiction.
Thank you for reading this book! Please take a moment to leave a review and rating, it really does mean the world to an author. More information about Ronan’s other work can be found at
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And he can be contact by email
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