by Givens John
The young warrior waited uncertainly at the edge of the camp site, acknowledging Hasegawa’s right of priority. Of course I guess we’re both up here for the same reason, he said.
I guess I don’t know what that could be.
The Hell-kite smirked, as if undergoing some obscure hazing ritual. Killing bandits, he said.
Hasegawa watched him but said nothing.
The Hell-kite seemed to detect no rebuke in the samurai’s silence. Of course I haven’t killed many yet. But I’m just getting started. He stood waiting so Hasegawa invited him to bivouac there and share his meagre rations. Unless you prefer to be on your own.
Usually I do, said the Hell-kite. It makes me more deadly.
The lone wolf.
The lone wolf all alone that strikes like sudden lightning!
All right then, said Hasegawa.
But since you’ve already got a fire going…
After they had finished their meal, the Hell-kite of Edo retrieved his elongated pannier. The box was hinged along one side and held closed by a pair of brass hook-and-eye latches on the other. Words written in the language of the butter eaters decorated the lid of this foreign box, and inside was a new-design harquebus, a weapon only just arrived in their country and said to possess a deadly accuracy. The gun had a long barrel with a single-leg shooting support that fitted into a brass socket midway down the length of it. The ramrod rode in a tube on the wooden stock under the barrel. The Hell-kite said there was no object anywhere in the world that he preferred to this wonderful new gun. A row of sealed canisters contained black powder, and a pair of small metal flasks held the fine-grain priming powder. There was a leather case with adjustable straps for carrying lead balls, and a jute sack filled with little squares of silk that were used to hold the ball in the breech. The Hell-kite told him he would not trade this gun for a golden Buddha statue big as a man. The weapon was fitted with its punk cord, and extra cords were coiled up and tucked inside the carrying box along with the tools needed for proper maintenance.
I can kill anything with it I can see, said the Hell-kite. He lifted the matchlock out of its case and cradled it on his lap then held up a lead ball the size of a sparrow’s egg. You can imagine the damage that does.
Hasegawa said nothing. But he could imagine it.
The Hell-kite demonstrated how a brass cover closed down over the touch hole so the priming powder wouldn’t spill out. I am particularly fond of the art of the way of the head-shot, he said. The punk cord was slotted into a serpentine-lever that cocked back against a spring and was held there by the toggle bar of the trigger release mechanism. The bandit’s standing there in the folly of his arrogance. Then, bam! Lightning strikes! And his brains are splattered all over the rocks and trees!
All right.
Or he’s on his knees weeping and pleading for his life but you just –
I said all right. Put it back in its box. And don’t show me again.
SO HOW MANY MEN HAVE you killed?
Hasegawa glanced back at the grinning youth but said nothing.
More than a hundred?
They were keeping to a ridge, seeking terrain that would be easier for the horse to manage. Hasegawa had squared up his load better, but he was still favouring his hind leg.
More than fifty then?
That’s no kind of question.
Seems to me it’s the only one there is.
Hasegawa said nothing.
I haven’t actually killed anybody myself yet.
I thought you said you did?
What I meant was that I might have but couldn’t be sure.
You’d know.
Not with my big banger you don’t!
Hasegawa glanced back at him again.
I needed to get a feel for it. You know how you need to get a feel for a thing like that? It’s all very well shooting at trees. Or dogs. Except of course for how they run around so you have to tie them to something so if you miss the first time you can keep trying. But that’s not the same as shooting at a man. And you want to know you can trust your weapon in battle. So when I got into the hills, there was this gang of ruffians camped on the far side of a deep gorge. Troublemakers of the worst sort probably. So I worked my way around until I found a good spot and let it off on them. What a noise! Echoes in all directions!
And you hit one?
Probably.
You don’t know?
Well, no. I had to duck down so they couldn’t see where the shot came from.
They stayed just under the ridge line throughout the middle part of the day, climbing higher occasionally to avoid steep inclines. The shogunate constabulary had set up an outpost farther along on the road so whenever they reached an opening in the forest they would search for the pale wisp of smoke from the day-fire there and estimate their position by it.
You know, said the Hell-kite, probably we could have just stayed on the road and gone straight through.
Not with that gun.
That’s why it’s in its box. So you don’t know what it is.
What else would be in a box like that?
They came to an exposed slope of loose scree that descended steeply to a stream. The open sky was a hard flat blue with low clouds crowding the horizon, and the mountains and forests stretched out beyond them endlessly in all directions, green and blue-green, paling to grey. A sea eagle hung high in the autumn sky, adjusting itself with casual ease as it slid across sheets of empty air.
The Hell-kite stood watching it with him. What you do is you wait until it lands on its nest then shoot straight up through it.
They went down along the edge of the forest for the better footing that might be found there, then traversed back and forth until they reached the bottom. The stream had eroded its banks, and Hasegawa insisted on unloading the horse and carrying the gear across first. He led the horse down through the raw gully, gauging the angle of the slope; but he was unable to keep the animal from stumbling in a panic as the loose gravel broke up beneath him. The horse crashed into the stream and fell sideways then staggered upright and came up the far bank. Hasegawa got him on solid ground and calmed him. The Hell-kite began piling the gear on again, loading it without any thought or consideration. Hasegawa waited until he was finished then made him take it apart and do it right.
They were too low to see the constabulary men’s smoke now, and they had nothing to guide by other than sunlight filtering through the trees; so they cut straight across, trying to hold to an eastern line until they reached the Dewa Road again, well north of the shogunate outpost.
We should’ve just stayed on this road the whole time. Anybody says anything about my gun, we’ll just cut them down.
I thought your intention was to kill bandits.
I won’t let anybody stop me.
Not even the Tokugawa?
The Hell-kite lifted his helmet off the saddle and put it on, the formality of road travel apparently requiring such a display. I guess they piss the same colour we do.
The neck guards attached around the bottom rim of his old head-bucket bothered him, and he tried to angle the crown forward so the hanging iron strips wouldn’t chafe his shoulders. You can take them off, Hasegawa said, they unhook. But the Hell-kite thought the neck guards gave him a fierce appearance, and that was an advantage he would not willingly forgo.
They bivouacked at the top end of an alpine meadow and ate their meagre rations beside a scrappy bonfire, the evening wind soughing in the tops of the cedars and pushing clouds down across the mountains.
The Hell-kite wanted to talk about technique. He said he had a sense of how to fight with a long sword but wasn’t sure if his style looked right. What he wanted was the method of delivering a killing blow. He got up and showed what he meant, hopping from side to side and waving his naked blade in great sloppy arcs, delighted by the display until Hasegawa told him he looked like a drunk farmer swinging a grain-flail.
So what should I do then? said the Hell-kite. The
y always say how there’s a true way but never say what it is! They always say that the superior man acts without effort but not how he does it. How are you supposed to know?
Hasegawa fed sticks into the fire, watching as it jerked and flared. It’s not chopping, he said. It’s slicing. And it’s not hitting hard, it’s drawing the cutting edge smoothly through the target. He adjusted his fire, configuring loosely piled ricks that would burn better. And it’s not just how quick you are, it’s where you start your stroke from. And not the angle you use, but what your opponent thinks you’re going to use. And where he is when he recognises his error. And what he can do about it.
But so then how do you know how to do all that?
You don’t need to know. No one does.
But what about me? What if I’m attacked? I can get off one shot with my big banger but it takes time to reload. I need to know how to fight with a long sword and a short sword. And a slash knife.
Don’t get attacked.
Easy for you to say.
Hasegawa poked the fire, sending a spray of orange sparks up into the autumn evening.
The Hell-kite told him he knew he made mistakes. But he’d never had any help. How could he follow the true way of the warrior if nobody guided him? He said he’d rather leave his bones on a hillside than spend his life squatting in some miserable hovel tapping on copper kettles or fitting tufts of bristles onto bamboo handles. That’s no life! You think that’s a life? Year after year after year of it. Assembling tray stands and gluing the parts together. Your shoulders hunched and your fingers so crooked you can hardly use them! Dipping flax wicks into bubbling pots of wax. Your eyesight failing. Your whole life just that one thing and then you die? Is that a life for a man? He said he’d rather be cut down with a sword in his hands and the sounds of warfare in his ears. The shouts to advance! The roar of musket fire! The howls of the wounded! The smell of blood, and the beauty of comradeship as you launch a massed charge, every man willing to die for the nobility of the attempt.
What attempt?
What do you mean, what attempt?
Attempting what?
Any attempt! he cried. The goal of it hardly mattered. It was the willingness to die for something worth dying for that the Hell-kite craved. He couldn’t find words strong enough. Just the pure beauty of it, he said.
Of men dying…
Of men dying, yes! The beauty of the pathos of their deaths.
You’ve never seen it.
That’s why I’m here! Why do you think I’m up here? Stuck in these mountains?
The Shogun’s Great Peace meant that for someone like the Hell-kite of Edo, there was no chance for a real war. Fighting bandits was the only opportunity.
Hasegawa stared into the tossing fire, the shape of it blooming and flaring, the flames ripped apart at the instant of their inception. So all you want is to kill somebody.
The Hell-kite sat stubbornly beside him. You haven’t listened to what I said. I want to do it properly. The way the men of the past did. With the correct technique. For the beauty of the strokes and the nobility of the achievement.
It’s just dead people lying on the ground.
Not if you do it right.
Hasegawa found a place to spread his quilts and laid them out with his carry-sack for a pillow. He walked back into the bushes to piss then returned to the edge of the firelight. There’s no right way, he said. How could there be?
THE NEXT DAY, HASEGAWA LEFT the Hell-kite sitting sullenly by the morning fire, an extra robe draped over his head.
You know you’re going to have to be careful with that horse.
His horse was his property and of no concern to another man. It would just have to get used to its load. Or it could lie down and die. And good riddance.
And you can’t show anybody that gun, Hasegawa said, but the Hell-kite was no longer interested in discussing such subjects with a has-been samurai.
The road became narrower and overgrown with brush or blocked by fallen trees, some with long black burn-scars ripped down through their hearts and some rotted-out at the roots and toppled from the weight of their years. Hasegawa climbed then rested then climbed again. Rime whitened the shadows of rocks and tree boles, and his breath plumed out whitely before him. It could snow, it was cold enough.
By midday he had emerged into a high-pass of bare rock and scrub pine, the sky cold and clear in all directions, the intensity of its blueness beautiful beyond praise. He got to a place where he could see the nearest of the three holy mountains of Dewa. His family tomb was at a temple in the valley just beyond it, and he was the only person left to sweep off fallen leaves and clear away weeds. Chant a sutra. Burn incense. Tell them he was sorry he hadn’t come sooner. Say he’d stay for awhile if they wanted.
Hasegawa worked his way up around granite outcroppings darkened where streams of snow-melt flowed in spring, the broad grey sheets of rock scoured by the wind as if preparing it for an encounter with the sky. He stopped to rest in a protected pocket of rock, the granite there crumbled into a dressing of coarse sand. He scraped up a handful then let it trickle through his fingers, flakes of mica glinting like tiny black blades in the windy sunlight. How could you know what to say to the dead if you weren’t good at talking to people still alive? He studied the lichens that encrusted the rock, the way they fitted themselves to its welts and knobs and fissures, mustard yellow or milky grey or the grainy brown of raw burdock, with a beauty equivalent in every way to that of cherry blossoms or red maple leaves, only smaller, drier, less insistent…
Except they weren’t like blossoms, they weren’t like anything.
Why did the facts of the world seem so unfinished?
Why was he still draping the world with words? Still seeing it through them?
Why even when he tried to get past this yearning to describe what he saw did he find himself trying to describe the impossibility of description?
A lichen on a rock in the mountains. Was accepting it so beyond him?
Hasegawa walked until twilight then set his bivouac in a protected gorge. A single rice ball wrapped in dried laver was all that remained of his provisions, and he tried to feel satisfied but his belly wanted another. He would have no food tomorrow and probably none the following day.
It began snowing at twilight, soft and silent; and he pulled his gear back under a low juniper then cut extra branches and inserted them into the canopy of boughs above him. He sat close beside his guttering fire draped in every garment and quilt he possessed, the night’s cold sinking into him; and he awoke to white ash where his fire had been, the whiteness of snow covering the high peaks, and a dawn cold so crushing it drove him numbed and stumbling out onto a rime-covered rock plain where he marched in self-configured circles, his teeth chattering, flapping his arms, trying to get himself warm enough to be able to start another fire.
The bleak sun rose into the coldness, and the wind rose with it, blowing snow dust off exposed peaks in great sweeping bursts of silver that glittered then faded against the whiteness of the sky. He went scrambling for more wood, the cold like shafts of ice that drove him staggering back with what he had scavenged. The fire he managed to construct was a poor affair, much of the wood too green to burn well, and he soon abandoned it, packing up his gear with crimped hands and setting off.
The day warmed as Hasegawa walked but he was never warm. His feet felt like things wrapped in frozen quilts. By the hour of the ram, he had reached an open vantage point. The snowy flanks of the first of the holy mountains loomed beyond the fabric of valleys and hills, smooth expanses of whiteness covering its declivities, the lower slopes mottled with conifers. It was a winter landscape seemingly bereft of people although he knew they would be there.
Hasegawa crossed down onto a high alpine valley. Dead meadow grasses flattened and matted with snow crusts crunched underfoot as he walked. The naked branches of brambles sheathed with frost formed intricate lattices that had to be circumvented, as did pools of runoff
from melting snow, the shallow patches of black water edged with icy filigrees of rime; and Hasegawa was in amidst them when he realized that what he was seeing were human bones scattered across the empty ground, pelvises and femurs and rib cages arrayed like barbaric musical instruments stripped clean by blown grit, the world cleansing itself of death’s bounty. He had never heard of a war fought up here. Broken sword blades eaten with rust looked like plant fronds or flattened wands of petrified mud. He found the remains of what must have been spears, the wooden shafts long since rotted away leaving behind lumps of iron with empty shaft-sockets. Shards of corroded armor sometimes still cupped the bones of its wearer, and when touched, fell apart and blew away as dust. He found an ancient helmet of the type worn during the era when samurai were no better than armed servants. He found sprays of arrowheads rusted together into single clumps configured by the shape of the quivers which had held them, the bamboo shafts, the hawks-feather fletchings, the quivers and bows all long since resorbed back into the sun and the wind and the rain, as had the bowmen themselves, whose arrows had not been shot.
A flat slab of granite held the skulls of the slain piled up neatly in a cairn, as if the orderliness of the arrangement justified the suitability of its occurrence, as if that was all that could be done, with nothing to say about them and nothing to hear said.
THERE WAS A BANDIT JUST OFF THE road, sitting exposed in a grassy dell, his feet sticking straight out before him and the front of his robe splattered with dried vomit. He seemed to be gripping himself like a sick child, groaning or keening or perhaps singing some kind of unpleasant song. A back frame lay abandoned beside the roadway, piled high with bundles of dried tobacco leaves, some of which had spilled off, although it could have been left that way as a decoy.