Lord Oda's Revenge

by Nick Lake

  Taro hoped they had practised often.

  Coming to the other end of the hall, he flew through the doors and into the courtyard. At the other end was the smaller room where his mother slept. He entered without knocking. His mother sat up on her bed, blinking at him.

  ‘Taro?’ she said.

  ‘You must go,’ he replied. ‘Get out of here. Lord Oda’s samurai are coming.’

  ‘Why?’ she said.

  ‘I killed Lord Oda.’ As he said it, he felt sick, as if the deer’s blood had gone bad inside him, or still retained some essence of the deer’s being, and was sloshing around in there to disorient him, and take its revenge. He had provided the pretext. Years, these monks had been here, perfecting their fighting skills, meditating, and assisting the haunted. Now men were coming. Men with guns.

  And it was all Taro’s fault.

  He was looking down, and was surprised when he felt his mother’s hand on his chin, lifting his face to look at him.

  ‘These monks have waited for this day for many years,’ she said.

  ‘They don’t have guns,’ he replied.

  His mother nodded. ‘That is true. Well, we will hope for rain.’

  He stared. ‘Rain?’

  ‘Guns use fire. The rain puts them out.’

  He still stared. ‘That’s it? You’re just going to hope for rain?’

  His mother sighed. ‘Listen. I didn’t tell you the truth before. If I die, I want you to—’

  ‘No! You’re not going to die. You’re going to leave.’

  The door behind them opened, and the abbot entered. ‘It’s too late for that,’ he said. ‘They have surrounded us.’

  Taro looked from his mother to the abbot, then back at her. She was more beautiful than ever. In the doorway, two more silhouettes appeared, then resolved themselves as Hiro and Hana. They both held their swords in their hands.

  ‘We fight?’ he said to them, and to the abbot.

  All three nodded.

  ‘Side by side,’ said Hiro.

  ‘Always,’ said Hana.

  ‘They have guns,’ said Taro – he felt like he was the only one who understood this, understood what it meant. ‘Hundreds of men with rifles. I saw them marching up the hill at the head of the army.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said the abbot. ‘Like the Ikko-ikki, Lord Oda is obsessed with guns. The Portuguese have convinced him that the modern methods of warfare are more effective. That it is easier to kill people from a distance.’

  Hiro frowned. ‘They’re right, aren’t they?’

  ‘They make it easier to kill, perhaps,’ said the abbot. ‘But not easier to live with it afterwards. Better to look a man in the eyes as you kill him.’

  ‘Are you serious?’ said Hiro. ‘This is going to be a slaughter. Do you have any guns at all up here?’

  ‘No,’ said the abbot.

  ‘So basically we’re going to hold off hundreds of gunmen with nothing more than our swords, and our sense of honour?’ said Hiro.

  ‘Yes,’ said the abbot. ‘But we have years of meditation on our side. Decades in some cases.’

  ‘Oh, gods,’ said Hiro. ‘We’re going to die.’

  The abbot smiled. ‘Do not give up hope just yet. Guns are notoriously difficult to use in battle. They take a long time to reload – that gives us many opportunities to make sorties, to cut and slash into the line. They often misfire, and they don’t work at all in the rain.’

  Taro glanced at the night sky, through the open window. It was completely clear.

  ‘Well,’ said the abbot. ‘We shall attack them when they are reloading.’

  ‘How long have we got?’ Taro asked him.

  ‘Not long. They are already on the lower flanks.’

  Taro went to stand with his friends, and put an arm around Hiro’s shoulder. ‘Are you ready, my old friend?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Hiro. ‘There are samurai with guns coming, but the monks have been meditating, so I feel much better.’ He touched Taro’s blade with his own, and they made a ting together. ‘Still, better to die together, eh?’

  Hana moved to Taro’s other side. She touched his cheek, then looked into his eyes. Quickly she kissed him on the cheek, and Taro smelled jasmine and roses, and felt that he might faint.

  ‘If we die,’ she said, ‘come look for me in our next lives.’

  CHAPTER 18

  KENJI KIRA PRESSED his spurs into his horse’s side, watching the troops advance before him. Excitement and hunger swirled in his stomach. Finally he would take the boy, as Lord Oda had asked so many months before. And then, when Lord Oda was shogun, Kenji would be given a province, a title, a wife befitting his stature. Perhaps even Lord Oda’s daughter.

  He looked up at the peak of Mount Hiei, grey in the moonlight. Yes, Hana would be there, with the boy. He was looking forward to seeing the look on her face when he killed Taro. She had humiliated him, going off like that with the peasant. But Kenji would make her pay. It was all so beautiful. At first, when he found the message from Taro’s mother on that hillside, he had ridden hard to Mount Fuji with his men, aiming to kill her right away, to slaughter her and then send her body bit by bit to her son, to draw Taro towards him.

  And that would have been enjoyable. But then two things had happened. First, he had arrived at Mount Fuji to find that Lord Tokugawa had razed the monastery there, slaughtering all the monks. The place was a wasteland, and worse than that, a wasteland controlled by Tokugawa samurai. Kenji Kira had been forced to turn around long before he reached it, to regain the safety of strong Oda land.

  He had cursed and ground his teeth, knowing that the woman was beyond him now, was probably dead.

  But then Yukiko had come to him. She was just a girl, but she wore the colours of a hatamoto, and she carried a Masamune sword – a priceless sword of violence, made by the master of the bloodthirsty weapon. Oda had given it to her, she said. She was strong and lithe and pretty, and she bore a sealed scroll that announced her as a protected favourite of the lord. Yukiko had wanted to know Kenji Kira’s plans, and he had told her. When he did, a smile spread on her smooth, cherry red lips.

  ‘The message,’ she’d said. ‘Taro awaits it night and day. Why not just send it? Only make it Mount Hiei instead. We have thousands of men, there in the valley below the monastery. They are pointing towards the Ikko-ikki right now, but you could turn them around. Destroy the monks of Mount Hiei and capture Taro. Lord Oda would be grateful for both. So very grateful.’

  Kenji had stared at her. ‘I don’t understand. His mother was at Mount Fuji. She isn’t at Mount Hiei.’

  ‘So?’ said Yukiko. ‘It doesn’t matter if she’s dead. He doesn’t know that. Tell him she’s at Mount Hiei, and he’ll come.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘Oh, yes. He’ll come to his mother, like a good boy. And then all we have to do is wait.’

  Kenji had seen something in her then, a steeliness, a stoniness, and he had recognized it. This girl, like himself, had a heart of rock. She would help him to achieve his destiny – to kill Taro, and to marry Lady Hana. He had instructed one of his men to write the note immediately, and had consulted Lord Oda’s keeper of pigeons, to find a bird that had been captured from the dead body of one of Lord Tokugawa’s pet ninjas. Kenji had hoped that the bird would fly to where Taro had gone – but even he could hardly believe it when Yukiko brought word that she had seen Taro, the fat boy, and Lady Hana in an inn on the pilgrims’ road to Mount Hiei. And just the other day, he had personally watched through a Portuguese spyglass as the three companions climbed the path to the monastery, Lady Hana beautiful even in her rude clothing.

  Just thinking of Lady Hana sent a warm glow through his groin, a feeling accentuated by the raw power before him, the army that awaited his command to begin a historic slaughter.

  Power.

  He turned to where Yukiko sat on a horse beside him. She smiled at him. She was not wearing armour, much as he had recommended it. She simply sa
t bareback on her horse, the precious sword in her hand. Her skin was the colour of snow, as befitted her name, and her lips were the colour of blood. He raised his own sword in a salute to her, this magnificent goddess of death. She held up her own, then touched the blade to her lips.

  The gods have sent me this girl, he thought. She is here to remind me of the value of hardness, to keep me on the right path.

  His stomach curled into a cramp, and he took a small pebble from his hand and slipped it into his mouth. He sucked on it, savouring its cool, hard, mineral roundness. Soon he would swallow it, continue the long process of making himself stone.

  But not quite yet.

  One day, yes, he would turn from corrupt flesh into something more permanent, free of disgusting fluids and waste. The process had already begun in his bladder – the Portuguese doctor to Lord Oda had told Kenji there were stones in there, and had seemed surprised that Kenji was so pleased. Didn’t he understand? This meant Kenji would one day be everything he wanted – he would be rock, and stream, and salt. It was all worth it, his diet that included no meat or flesh of any kind, that allowed him to eat only rice and water and stones.

  No maggots or flies would ever feast on his flesh, as they had on his companions, when he lay injured on that charnel field after the battle against Yoshimoto. Sometimes, in the night, he still woke screaming, remembering how he had been trapped on that battlefield, injured and helpless, as the low creatures fed on his friends, crawling into their eye sockets and out of their mouths, taking away tiny parcels of their beings, spreading those great warriors far and wide, as if they were untouchable eta people, to be buried in mass graves.

  But this would never happen to Kenji Kira. He had seen one possible end – the horror of decomposition and the indignity of invasion by insects and vermin. Yet he would not succumb to it. Ever since the day he was finally rescued, and left that place of rot behind, he had allowed only rice and water to pass his lips, and the occasional pebble. Nothing living and nothing that had lived, nothing corrupt. I will be stone, he told himself. I will not rot like the others. I will grow thinner and thinner until I am just bone.

  Not yet, though. Kenji knew how to draw out his pleasures, and he knew that patient waiting was part of the enjoyment of the hunt. Everything depended on planning and care. If he wanted to destroy the monks of Mount Hiei, he had to command every movement of these troops. He raised his hand – the one that was not clutching Lord Oda’s banner – and waved the gunners forward. When they reached the monastery’s defenders, as they surely would, on the upper slopes of the mountain, then the guns would greet them first.

  No one had used guns in this way before in a battle. They were too unwieldy, too slow to load, too dependent on the weather. But tonight the weather was clear, and Kenji Kira had the benefit of Lord Oda’s vision, for the daimyo had seen how the guns could be employed more effectively, with three lines of gunners ensuring that as the guns were firing, new ones were continually being loaded and primed. The monks would meet an endless wave of fire, the bullets mowing them down like blades of grass before a scythe.

  Already, such was the brilliance of the idea, Kenji was almost starting to think he had discovered it himself. At any rate, it would be a pleasure to see it in action.

  He swept his eyes over the samurai before and around him. Three thousand men, a mixture of hatamoto and arquebusiers, the specialist gunners who had been recruited from among the lower ranks, then trained in secret for months to master Lord Oda’s firing technique.

  Three thousand samurai, against ten thousand warrior monks.

  Ordinarily, it would be a slaughter. And indeed, it still would be. But the guns would ensure that it was the monks, not the samurai, who fell on their precious mountainside and nourished it with their blood.

  Fire flared, higher up the slope, and Kenji’s heart leaped. They have guns too, he thought. But it was only a torch. It was followed by another, and then another, and the ranks of monks began to appear from the gloom, like the ghost of an ancient army – only perhaps half a ri from where Kenji Kira stood. They stood firm, in countless ranks, armed with swords that gleamed in the torchlight. They had the advantage of height.

  Yet Kenji had the advantage of guns. The arquebusiers had lit their fuses, and now there were many hundreds of little red glows ahead of him, bobbing in the air, as if an army of fireflies were leading the attack. Some of Kenji’s bolder, and stupider, samurai were rushing up the hill to meet them, and arrows came hissing from the monastery, felling several, knocking them screaming to the ground. Kira had few archers, but there were some purists who had rejected the guns, preferring to keep their wooden toys – some of these knelt and loosed arrows of their own back at the monastery. A couple of monks went down, not many at all from the thousands and thousands who stood waiting. No matter – all of them would perish before Kenji Kira’s guns. Right now they were swatting at mosquitoes, little realizing that a wolf pack was watching them.

  He tugged on his horse’s reins, bringing it to a halt. ‘Samurai!’ he shouted. ‘Would you like to live in glory?’

  ‘Yes!’ echoed the troops.

  ‘Would you like to die in glory, and be reborn as lords?’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘Then go,’ he said. ‘Fight with honour, and if you must die, do so also with honour. Tonight we destroy Mount Hiei. This battle will live forever in history, and you will learn of it in your future lives, when your teachers speak of great conquests. We cannot be defeated. We are the samurai of Lord Oda Nobunaga! If there is fear in your belly, seize it. Make it the fire that drives you. If your hand trembles on your sword, or your gun, it is only because it thirsts for blood. Let your hand strike – let it kill.’ He lit an incense stick. ‘When this has burned down, we will stand here once again, and we will be heroes.’

  Kenji Kira had orders not to kill the boy, to bring him alive to Oda for questioning, but he knew that it would be useless to ask the men to spare any boys they found. The monastery was a place of learning – it was crawling with boys. Anyway, Yukiko said that Taro would survive nearly any wound, so long as he was not struck in the heart, or decapitated. Either of those wounds, she said, would definitely kill him.

  ‘They would definitely kill anyone,’ Kenji Kira had replied. ‘That’s why I always cut off heads, if I can.’ He’d expected her to laugh – she’d shown herself to be a peculiar, bloodthirsty girl.

  She’d looked at him strangely, though. ‘Really?’ she’d said. ‘I wonder, have you ever decapitated a woman?’

  He’d felt her gaze burning into him, and for some reason felt afraid, though he wasn’t going to show it to a slip of a girl like her, even if she did have Oda’s particular favour. ‘Yes,’ he’d said simply.

  She’d nodded and turned away from him.

  Sitting on his horse, he sighed. He would never understand women. But soon he’d have Lady Hana, the most refined and beautiful woman in the land – once he was the hero of the assault on Mount Hiei, Lord Oda could not possibly refuse him her hand in marriage.

  He dismounted, motioning for the others to do the same. From here, the slope became too steep. He planted the incense stick in the ground, and as it smouldered, it filled the air with a scent of sandalwood and jasmine.

  The girl, Yukiko, clapped softly. ‘Oh, and one more thing,’ she said softly. The samurai turned to look at her. ‘Leave some of them for me.’ She twirled her sword in her hand.

  Some of the men laughed, their courage lifted – and only Kenji suspected the girl was not indulging in idle rhetoric, that she would kill ruthlessly if she got the chance. The men turned once again to the field of battle, standing proud in their armour.

  Kenji Kira beckoned his second-in-command. ‘Send the three lines forward,’ he said. ‘Tell them to wait for the monks to move before they fire.’

  They didn’t have to wait for long – something else that Oda had seen rightly. The monks were aggressive, made bold by hundreds of years of imperviousness.
Without even a cry of battle, or an order, they were suddenly moving down the slope, a deadly wave, impossibly vast. From one end of the slope to the other, all Kenji Kira could see was swords, and shaved heads.

  Kenji waited. He knew the value of patience.

  When he could see the monks’ eyes, read the furious anger in their expressions, he smiled. ‘Now,’ he said, rather quietly. It was not necessary to shout – the order was awaited, and all that was required was for his second-in-command to swing Lord Oda’s banner in an arc above his head.

  The first rank of arquebusiers kneeled – this, alone, was five hundred men. Then they fired as one, the sound deafening, like thunder.

  CHAPTER 19

  TARO DUCKED, NOCKING another arrow in his bow. The Tendai monks did not believe in guns, but when he’d said that he was a good shot, they had put him with some of the other monks, sheltering behind the pillars of the lower monastery buildings, bows in hand. Below them was the main company of monks, waiting the order to engage. Taro and his fellow bowmen were having to fire over them, aiming high, to rain down arrows on the attackers.

  At Taro’s feet were two quivers, both full of arrows. Torches had been lit, but none of them near to where the bowmen stood, so that they could fire from the cover of darkness on the front line of the samurai.

  Thwock. An arrow struck the pillar, burying itself deep in the wood, quivering. Taro whipped round, aimed, drew, and fired – the arrow arced up, graceful, then ended its parabola in the stomach of one of Lord Oda’s archers. The man dropped to his knees, then was knocked forward and trampled by the men running up the hill behind him. Taro turned himself back so that the pillar covered him, nocked, drew, turned again, and fired.

  Nock, draw, fire, over and over again. Once he and the monk to his left aimed for the same man, and Taro saw two flights sprout from the man’s chest. That’s a waste of an arrow, thought Taro momentarily, then he nocked, drew, and fired once more. The first quiver at his feet was nearly empty, and yet the samurai were still coming, some of them now breaking through the sharp shield of arrows and clashing with the monks before Taro, armed with swords in the Tendai tradition. Yet there were not many of these samurai – Taro almost got the impression that they had broken from the main force of the army through exuberance, or an eagerness to die. Either that or the commanders had sent a small detachment of lunatics forward, to probe at the monastery’s defences, to show where the monks were weak.