Lord Oda's Revenge

by Nick Lake

  But if I live, he thought, I’ll tell him about it.

  Then he noticed something curious. Lord Tokugawa’s men were not joining the charge. Instead it looked like. . . yes. . . they were turning away, and departing over the plain, away from the river and from their allies.

  They were abandoning the field of battle.

  Taro turned back to the monks, a surge of joy flowing through him.

  ‘Today,’ he said, and though he was speaking quietly, he had the sense they could all hear him, ‘we destroy Lord Oda.’ It was all he needed to say.

  A great cheer went up from the monks, as they took their positions along the wall, some standing behind to reload, or pass forward fresh weapons, because Taro had learned from that terrible night on Mount Hiei, and though he was still appalled by what Lord Oda’s gunners had achieved, with their organized ranks, he wasn’t so naive as to not adopt the practice for his own troops.

  My troops? he thought. Since when do I think of them as my troops? But then he looked again at the monks, and saw the way they regarded him, reverentially almost, their eyes on the ball in his hand, and he thought, Yes. They are my troops.

  The samurai below were getting closer – he could hear their curses, the jangle of their armour. A bullet whined by overhead, disconcertingly close. The samurai were moving with discipline, as they had on Mount Hiei – the first rank had fired, and now the second rank stepped forward, guns already primed, and let loose their shots. The range was not ideal, though, and the Ikko-ikki were able to shelter. For now. Soon, though, Oda’s army would be upon them – that incomprehensible horde, many times bigger than any group of men Taro had ever seen, even the army that had attacked the monastery, and that had seemed to Taro so bafflingly huge. They will sweep over us, he thought. As if they were a tsunami, and we a seaside hut made of wood and straw.

  ‘It’s time,’ said Hiro.

  ‘Yes,’ said Taro. He looked away from the terrifying hugeness of Oda’s army and took the arrow at his feet, lowered it into the brazier beside him. The oil cloths wrapped around the end of the shaft caught light, and he nocked the arrow, then drew.

  ‘Now!’ he shouted. Other arrows flared beside him, and when he loosed his, a flock of burning birds followed it, arcing towards Oda’s army. The arrows were few, though, and the samurai kept coming.

  And then—

  Boom. Taro’s arrow had found its target, and a flower of flame bloomed in the middle of Oda’s men, flinging bodies and armour into the air. The fireball was enormous, a sun in the darkness, and Taro narrowed his eyes, seeing the devastation it caused through a narrow pane of vision. Two more explosions followed, ripping through the great army of samurai, as the Ikko-ikki too hit the right spots, though several of the fire arrows simply disappeared into the dark mass of the advancing army.

  Yet it was enough – Taro saw panic seize the samurai, as they witnessed the carnage wrought by the landing fire arrows. Bodies littered the ground, the ground itself torn into terrible petalled craters, black soot and earth still raining down where rain itself would soon fall. They had buried the barrels under cover of darkness, a thin layer of torn grass on top to hide them from eyes that would be fixed on the monastery above, not the ground below.

  That was the thing about the Ikko-ikki. They might not be many, but they had plenty of guns. And plenty of gunpowder.

  Taro leaned down and picked up another arrow. He lit it, then nodded to the archers near him, before sending it into the air. It flared as it flew, and some of the samurai scattered, all discipline lost. There were only a couple of barrels left, Taro knew, but Oda’s men had no idea of that – they just saw fire arrows streaking towards them, and the bodies of their comrades beside them, where the earth had surged up in fiery explosion, or worse still the places Taro could see, close to the barrels, where there had been men and now was nothing but mangled armour and scorched earth.

  Boom. Boom.

  Two more barrels went up, and again samurai were hurled through the air, or dismembered where they stood, or simply wiped from the earth as drawings from sand. Taro looked to the Ikko-ikki, and he saw excitement in their eyes now, defiance. Lord Oda’s army was not broken – there were many thousands behind the front ranks, who had suffered the worst of the gunpowder trick, but they were no longer advancing in such confident, perfect formation. Some of those who had turned to run had been impaled on the swords of their companions, and now Taro saw anger and fear in the men attacking this little mountain stronghold.

  And yet, even now, the main bulk of the army continued to advance.

  Boom.

  And despite the hole torn in their ranks by the latest explosion, they continued to come, and now the fusiliers were arranging themselves in a row, lowering their guns to fire, and they were still as numerous as the pebbles on a beach.

  ‘That’s the last,’ said Hiro. ‘Time for the ball. Now, Taro. They’re getting ready to fire. . .’

  ‘I know,’ said Taro. He turned to Hana, took her hand in his. ‘I love you,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘I love you, too.’

  Then he looked down into the ball and the mountainside was no longer important, or even there, in any real sense. He was both on it and above it, floating over the turrets and the walkways and the towers and the courtyards. He reached with his mind into the air before him, pulling water from the sea behind the mountain, massing it into clouds.

  He took a deep breath, and he made it rain.

  CHAPTER 73

  ODA, LIKE KENJI Kira, had arranged his arquebusiers in rows of three, so that they could maintain a constant barrage of fire. As they alternated, they moved up the hill, the men at the back loading their rifles as they walked.

  At least, that was the theory.

  In fact, the men were not loading, they were not firing, and they were not moving, for the most part. Their guns were useless in the heavy rain, the water extinguishing the fuses that made them fire, and the matches that made the fuses burn. First the ground had exploded beneath their feet; now their rifles were useless as sticks in their hands.

  Some had turned to run, only there were samurai with swords behind them, and some ran onto the swords while some were just cut down for their cowardice. Chaos reigned among Oda’s troops. The arquebusiers, panicking, turned from their own samurai and attempted to run up the hill, only to be caught in a terrible squall of bullets, fired by the monks with their waterproof guns. The balls tore through their ranks, dropping them in the mud.

  Rain fell heavily, blanketing the battlefield so that it seemed to Taro he was viewing it through a shoji window, imperfect and shifting. The ground, churned by boots and water, was a sucking bog.

  Taro stumbled down the hillside, Hiro beside him. He had told Hana to stay on the battlements, and though usually she would have objected to being left out, to being treated like a girl, she had only nodded. She understood what he was doing – he was going to try to kill her father, and she might not stop him, but that didn’t mean she would want to watch.

  Ahead of Taro, the main line of the Ikko-ikki stretched across the top of the plain. Like the army below, they had formed into disciplined lines – but unlike the army below, their guns worked. They kept up a relentless pace, reloading and firing so that the volley of bullets was constant and inescapable. Even so, they had not had time to make more than a hundred guns, and the vastness of Oda’s army was such that samurai were breaking through, running screaming up the hill, swords in their hands, cutting down some of the gunmen. Taro saw a wedge of armoured men crash through the line, the Ikko-ikki stumbling and turning in confusion to try to shoot the attackers.

  He flicked his eyes to the ball – he was its master now, could control it with the merest inflections of his thoughts. He drew the energy out of a dark cloud above, massed it into a pulsing orb, then sent it down to the ground as a searing bolt of lightning. It tore into the ground, raising a furrow of splattering mud, flinging the bodies of the samurai up and outw
ard in a geyser of death. Hiro gasped.

  ‘Did you do that?’

  Taro nodded, as he continued to move.

  They were surrounded by a small guard of the Ikko-ikki, armed not with guns but with katanas, for short-range fighting. Formed into the shape of an arrowhead, their aim was to fly into the heart of Oda’s army, to seek out the daimyo in its centre. Taro, like Hiro, wore a horned helmet – it bore no mon, for the Ikko-ikki had no respect for nobility, but it protected his head, while leaving a thin gap through which he could see.

  The Ikko-ikki arquebusiers parted to let them past. Taro glanced at them, saw the concentration on their faces as they aimed their rifles and fired. It was terrifying, really, how easily the new guns loosed their bullets into the air – how the flintlock mechanism whipped round in a tight circle to ignite the spark that fired the ball. Taro had seen the older, matchlock guns in action on Mount Hiei, and he knew how long it took for the fuse to burn down, even when it wasn’t raining. Seeing these new Portuguese models firing again and again, he could almost feel sorry for the dying men of Oda’s army.

  Almost, but not quite.

  He squeezed the ball again, drawing more water from the sea into the clouds above. Somehow he was able to run down the hill while being in the clouds at the same time, a bird with no body, only eyes to see, floating up there in the heavens, a part of every raindrop and a presence in every bolt of lightning, a voice in the choir of thunder. In some sense, he was the weather. He was linked inextricably with the natural world around him; in fact, it was as if he could feel the beat of the men’s feet on the ground, as if he was the mountain, too.

  He was also, though, a young ninja, hurrying towards the most powerful sword saint in the land, praying under his breath that this time he would have the strength to kill Lord Oda, to put an end to the horror that had begun when his foster-father had been killed.

  Ahead, a samurai ran at the foremost of the Ikko-ikki, screaming and holding his sword ahead of him. He wore a tusked helmet, emblazoned with the Oda mon. Two of the Ikko-ikki sprang forward, cut him down.

  ‘Hurry,’ one of them said. Taro looked up – somehow they had already closed the gap of the no-man’s-land between the Ikko-ikki arquebusiers and Oda’s army. Mere paces ahead of them was a phalanx of hatamoto, spears and swords in their hands, formed in an orderly, protective square.

  Lord Oda’s retainers.

  Beside Taro, Hiro roared unintelligibly. Taro found himself roaring too.

  Then, with a ringing crash, the two bodies of men met, and everything became madness. Taro staggered, swinging his sword indiscriminately, still screaming, and he saw a man’s arm severed just in front of him, though he didn’t know if it was his sword that had done it. He had never been in battle like this – on Mount Hiei, he had spent most of the time lying with the bodies, trembling with shock at the devastation wrought by Kenji Kira’s guns. This time, he was in the thick of it.

  He glanced to his right, saw Hiro bludgeon a samurai in the face with the pommel of his sword, then turn the blade to gut the man, ducking as a blow from another samurai behind him nearly took off the top of his head like the crown of an egg. This is madness, thought Taro. The greatest swordsman in the world – even a legend like Lord Oda – could die in a moment in a battle like this, stabbed by an ordinary dagger in the side, or tripping on a body and landing on a blade. There was no logic to it, no skill, no fairness.

  Even as he thought it, he was fighting. The ball in his left hand and the sword in his right, he whirled and spun, always cutting, blocking, feinting. The Ikko-ikki were trying to maintain a cordon around him and Hiro, but it was impossible for men not to get through, and Taro buried his sword in one’s man’s stomach as the enemy samurai brought his blade down, two-handed, trying to split Taro in two.

  The world shrank now – it reduced itself to what he could see, framed by the helmet; an oblong window onto hell, populated by sword-wielding demons and bloody corpses, carpeted with blood, rocks, and soggy earth. He felt something, a caress of air behind him, and turned to see a hatamoto’s sword coming down on his neck. Then, at the last moment, the man slumped forward, following his sword to the ground. The back of his head was a bloody mess, and Taro saw the Ikko-ikki arquebusier, a hundred paces back up the hill, kneeling, reloading.

  That would have killed me, thought Taro. It would have been just a sensation of a breeze, then death.

  He didn’t dwell on it, brought his sword up to block a strike from his left, put all his strength into a counterstrike upward and sideways, saw the man’s head spring into the air and fall. He thought he could hear someone saying his name but it was impossible to tell. The battle was a raucous chorus in his ears, a jangling, discordant music of gunfire, metal on metal, and screaming.

  He backed into something and turned, sword spinning – stopped the blade an inch from Hiro’s face. Hiro nodded, turned again, and Taro did the same – so that they were back to back, swords a blur as they defended, slashed, killed. The Ikko-ikki were pressing the hatamoto back – though Taro saw another band of samurai break off from the assault on the mountain and come running towards them, as fast as their heavy armour would allow. Taro flipped – one moment he was standing in the cold, wet mud, water trickling into his boots and the blood of others slick against his skin – the next he was clouds.

  Drawing himself in, he paused, then expressed himself. Another bolt of lightning flashed down, tore into the samurai, and sent them – in pieces – in the four cardinal directions, a sickly, burning smell lingering after them.

  For an instant the madness paused – it seemed some of the hatamoto had seen him look into the ball, then seen the lightning strike, and had connected the two. They backed away, swords lowering as if it was the blades that were nervous. In that moment of calm, Taro knelt and seized a man who was still alive, a terrible wound opening his belly. Taro whispered a request for forgiveness, then sank his teeth into the man’s neck.

  He closed his eyes and the noise and stink of the battle disappeared – there was only the hot blood on his tongue. He drank deeply, feeling the man’s force enter him, taking on more life than his body should have been able to hold, feeling the man’s spirit fill out his skin.

  He stood, ignoring Hiro’s stare, and looked around, trying to get some sense of the lay of the land. It was impossible – there was only flux, only a storm of swords and bullets. It seemed like there were more dead people on the ground than there were living people standing on it, but he couldn’t tell who was winning.

  Then Hiro let out a cry.

  ‘There!’ he shouted. ‘Lord Oda!’

  Taro turned to follow Hiro’s finger, saw Oda striding forward, dragging samurai in his wake, as if he were a great fish and they the minnows that swam in his slipstream. Oda was enormous, though not tall – it was something hard to explain. He seemed bigger than everyone else on the field, more alive – his armour seemed made to contain him, not to protect him; it was as if he were a monster temporarily encased in metal. A malevolence spread from him, like heat – it was as if he were invisibly on fire. Enormous horns rose from his helmet, spearing the sky.

  Taro took an involuntary step backwards. He had faced the man on the staircase of his own tower, had fought him hand to hand at the bottom of the cliff. But he hadn’t seen Lord Oda in his element, on the battlefield, among his troops. The sight was terrible to behold. He noticed the Ikko-ikki, too, shrinking back; even Lord Oda’s own samurai gave up ground, as if Lord Oda were projecting in front of him some wave of malefic energy that pushed bodies aside like driftwood.

  Taro glanced down and shivered. Lord Oda held a sword in each hand, one long and one short. He’d tried to face two blades before, with Yukiko, and it had been a disaster. Taro flicked his eyes left and right, afraid.

  Lord Oda’s ruined right arm was held unflinching in front of him, a wakizashi clutched in the pale fingers.

  Like Yukiko, he was going to fight with two swords.

  T
aro took a deep breath and willed his feet not to turn him round and run him back up the hill. He faced his enemy, the man who had ordered his foster-father killed, who had ordered his own daughter to commit seppuku, who had sent Kenji Kira to kill his mother.

  None of the Ikko-ikki attacked Lord Oda – they seemed to recognize that this fight was Taro’s. Neither did any of the samurai continue to fight. They put up their swords, and soon there was a circle of men around Taro and the daimyo, a point of calm in the storm of the battle.

  Taro looked up. Beyond, he could see Mount Hiei, and the distant Tendai monastery. The conical shape of the mountain was ringed by mist, haloed – and it shone in sunshine that didn’t reach here, couldn’t reach here, because Taro was making it rain. He glanced behind – the stronghold of the Ikko-ikki loomed grey and massive behind him. A good place to fight. He imagined his mother’s grave, up there on Mount Hiei, and wondered if people would visit it, in time, if he won here.

  Or if he lost.

  He gripped his sword. Lord Oda stepped closer. The daimyo looked at the ball in Taro’s hand, the simple glass ball with its simple globe in it, power housed in humility.

  ‘So small and unimpressive,’ said Lord Oda. From a fold in his clothing he produced the gold ball, the fake one, and threw it down in the mud. ‘Yet I suppose there’s a pleasing irony in that.’ He spread his hands, the twin swords stretched out on either side, like the gleaming wings of some awful insect. ‘Come on, then. Kill me with it. Show me its power.’ He pushed back his helmet, let it fall to the mud. ‘I am not afraid. After spending the night trying to make that golden trinket work, I’d practically welcome death right now, if I at least got to see the true ball in action.’