L5r - scroll 05 - The Crab

by Stan Brown

  Yakamo no Oni seethed with fury. It reached up toward its namesake, tendrils writhing, transforming its hands into claws.

  With a smile, Hida Yakamo raised the Ancestral Sword of the Crab Clan over his head. He held it there as if frozen in time, then brought it crashing down on his own arm with all the strength he could muster.

  Yakamo no Oni flinched and clutched its chest.

  Kuni Yori disappeared from the Wall as quickly and mysteriously as he'd arrived.

  Hida Yakamo howled in triumph.

  The claw fell to the battlement, dripping the last of its black life out onto the cold Rokugani stone.

  Yakamo's arm bled again, his wound reopened by the katana, but it was a good, rich blood—red like the coming dawn.

  "There is no mistake that cannot be redressed. Our karma is what we have made it—it is not beyond correction. I don't know about the rest of you," Yakamo said through clenched teeth, "but I intend to do what's rightl"

  Thousands of voices, loyal Crab voices, raised a mighty "Banzai!"

  Yakamo clutched his father's sword in his one good hand and threw himself off the battlement toward the startled oni.

  LEAP OF FAITH

  Back! Back to the unholy pit that spawned you!"

  Yakamo landed on the oni and swung his ancestor's sword with reckless abandon. Though he had only one arm and fought with a weapon he hadn't wielded in years, the ferocity of his blows forced his foe to the defensive.

  The katana was the traditional sword of the samurai—indeed, it represented his very soul. The young Hida considered the fact that he had kept his katana in its sheath for so many years, occasionally taking it out and polishing it but never actually putting it to use. It was a decoration to him, another piece of ceremonial gear to be strapped onto his armor each day.

  But in this darkest hour, when the fate of the entire clan hung on his action, the Ancestral Sword of the Crab Clan felt like an extension of his arm. Unlike the thrice-damned claw, the katana did not come with any pain or imbalance.

  It simply filled his heart with light and gave him the will to fight on.

  Yakamo no Oni waved its arms wildly. The sword cut them. Finally its fist connected with the human and sent Yakamo tumbling to the ground.

  All around him, other battles raged. Very few soldiers came to the aid of their fellows—it was too difficult to tell who was friend and who was foe. Was your lifelong compatriot supporting Yakamo's cause? Indeed, which Yakamo's cause?

  Yakamo no Oni growled something unintelligible and struck out with its giant fists.

  Hida Yakamo leapt out of the way. He stared at the Shadow-lands leader with unmasked horror. He was looking at himself, looking at exactly what he had become over the past few years. This creature, with its crimson sinews and glowing eyes, was a direct reflection of Yakamo's soul.

  The thought filled the Crab with rage.

  "I take back my name!" he cried. "I take back everything! I deny you, oni! You are not a Hida! You are not a member of this clan! I will drive you and your misbegotten army off the blessed soil of Rokugan, back to the fetid Shadowlands!"

  The oni laughed. "Little Crab," it chuckled, its voice regaining much of the scratchy, strained quality it had when they'd first met. "Was it only this morning that you called me 'Brother'? You do not know your own mind, let alone your heart. Your grief for your father has blinded you to the truth you know deep in your soul—the cause for which we've fought all these months."

  Yakamo launched another round of attacks. The Sword of the Crab bit shallowly into the ropy tendrils of the oni's left hand. A sizzling sound filled the air, along with the smell of burning flesh. Steam escaped the open wound.

  The creature pulled its hand away but did not resume its assault. It seemed reluctant to hurt Yakamo.

  "Stop this senseless battle before I have no choice but to kill you," it implored. "We are family, we are the same. Join me, and I will put you on the throne. Fu Leng has no need for such petty things. You can accomplish everything your father set out to do— you can rule the Emerald Empire!"

  Did the creature really think Yakamo could be tempted?

  The sound of clanking armor made him turn. A dozen zombies converged behind him as quietly as their undead shuffling allowed. He was surrounded.

  "Never!" he yelled. "I do not want to rule! I am a Crab! I want only to fulfill my ancestral promise to keep the empire safe from you—or die trying."

  Yakamo launched himself at the oni, hoping his quickness and ferocity would take the creature by surprise. All he got for his troubles was a mighty backhanded blow from the oni's ropy fist. It rattled his jaw and sent him flying back into the bloody muck. Tumbling head over heals, Yakamo could not hold on to his sword. Skidding face first through the mud, he came to rest at the feet of the first zombie.

  "That, I cannot allow," said the oni with a malicious grin. "My samurai will make sure that your life is safe, but they have no compunction about making it unpleasant—painfully unpleasant."

  The young Hida clawed his way to his hands and knees. Of course the oni wanted him alive. The creature drew power from its connection to him. A name did the oni no good if it belonged to a dead man.

  Several pairs of zombie feet, all clad in Crab armor, surrounded him. Undead hands grabbed Yakamos arms and pinned them back. Helpless, he looked up into familiar, if lifeless, eyes.

  "Hiruma Waka!" Yakamo gasped.

  It was indeed his father's old friend, his own former mentor. In its hands, the Waka zombie held the Ancestral Sword of the Crab. It seemed somehow fitting that the forces of darkness would use that against him. The zombie raised the sacred sword over its head.

  Yakamo did not avert his gaze. He looked Waka right in his unseeing eyes and shed a single, bitter tear of pride.

  The creature that used to be Yakamo's teacher paused. Beneath putrid flesh, decaying muscles twitched, but the sword did not fly.

  270 # Stan! ■«

  Suddenly, the creature that once was Hiruma Waka let loose a sound like all the demons in creation baying at once and launched itself at Yakamo no Oni.

  Taken completely by surprise, the creature raised its hands defensively and took a step back. The Waka zombie landed on its chest anyway. With one swift motion—swifter than any of the zombies had moved before—it slashed the oni's shoulder and breast with the Ancestral Sword of the Crab.

  The oni howled in pain.

  Waka motioned to his fellow undead warriors. Come, fight for honor! he seemed to say. Your lives may be lost, but your souls may yet be redeemed!

  One by one the other zombies heeded the cry—and not just the dozen or so standing by Yakamo. All across the field, zombies who had once been Crab samurai (some dead for hundreds of years) ceased their fight with the living and shambled, ran, leaped, and crawled toward Yakamo no Oni. Soon they covered it entirely, the red tendrils of its body completely obscured by a writhing mass of gray, undead flesh.

  Yakamo watched, dumbfounded by this supernatural display of passion and will. Though the zombies outnumbered the oni hundreds to one, they had no hope of real victory. They owed their reanimation to the creature—and it could remove the spark of unlife just as easily as it had granted it.

  With a deafening roar and one shrug of its mighty shoulders, Yakamo no Oni sent the bodies of the Crab zombies flying. In the same motion it sent all their souls to eternal rest.

  Once-again-lifeless bodies rained all around Yakamo. He smiled proudly as he recognized the one closest to his feet— Hiruma Waka, still gripping the Ancestral Sword of the Crab. The young daimyo bowed deeply to his fallen mentor.

  "Arigato, Waka-san," he said quietly as he retrieved his family's katana.

  Shaking its head dizzily, Yakamo no Oni looked around for its namesake.

  They locked eyes.

  The next pass they made would be the last—both Yakamos knew it. One would die, and the other would hold the fate of Rokugan in his hands.

  They tensed their leg
s and struck identical dueling poses.

  Sound seemed to cease. Neither could hear the ring of steel from any other battle. No shuffling, no scuffling, no cries of triumph or defeat reached their ears. The wind became eerily cool and blew noiselessly by their ears.

  Then the air was split by three long blasts on a war horn.

  Gazing up, both Yakamos saw an army poised atop the ridge from which they themselves had charged earlier that day. Not just one army—three armies. The Unicorn mon flew above the troops to the east, the Crane mon above those to the west, and the troops in the center stood proudly below the mon of the ronin Toturi.

  The allied forces had returned to defend the capital.

  Hida Yakamo nodded to the samurai. They would be sure to restore order to the capital should he himself fail in this last battle.

  He turned to his opponent, ready to let the cataclysmic duel begin.

  But Yakamo no Oni was no longer there.

  Looking around, Yakamo spied the creature atop the ridge directly opposite the one the allied forces now controlled.

  "Another time, my brother," Yakamo no Oni shouted with a grin. "Only a fool fights in a burning house!"

  Before Hida Yakamo could even think of a reply, it was too late. His opponent had already taken four gigantic steps and disappeared beyond the ridge. Goblins, zombies, and other horribly mutated creatures followed in its wake.

  The Shadowlands army was in full retreat.

  Much to Yakamo's dismay, a large number of still-living samurai also followed the creatures of darkness. His clan was sundered.

  Briefly Hida Yakamo considered standing his ground and forcing Toturi to take the plain. But in he knew that the best thing for his soldiers—for his family—was to fall back. If they retreated in a different direction than the fleeing Shadowlands

  troops, it would make it nearly impossible for the newly arrived forces to chase them all down and make sure Otosan Uchi was safe. The capital was more important to Toturi than routing fleeing troops.

  He was about to yell "retreat" to his forces but thought better of it.

  "We are through for the day!" Yakamo finally shouted. "We have undone all the evil we can for now! Gather up the wounded and move out!"

  "But where are we going?" asked a foot soldier wearing the Hida family mon—some distant cousin.

  "Back to the Wall! Back to our home! We must protect the empire! That is what the Crab do!"

  KNOWLEDGE AND KARMA

  It is a good day to die." Hida Yakamo smiled as his tetsubo messily tore a goblin's head from its shoulders.

  He felt alive—more alive than he had in months. Here atop the Wall, his Wall, he truly was master of all he surveyed. He was now daimyo of the Crab Clan. The responsibility for protecting the Emerald Empire from the Shadowlands fell directly on his shoulders. And he would have it no other way.

  "But it is a better day to crush our enemies!" Hida O-Ushi replied. Yakamo's sister held two goblins under a single arm in a vicelike head-lock while she used her dai-tsuchi to parry the attack of a zombie wielding an ono—a great two-headed axe.

  The parapet was awash in combat and blood. In the gray twilight, it was hard to see that the blood was mostly green, but Yakamo could smell the Shadowlands taint in it. He knew his samurai were winning the day.

  Yakamo stepped forward, and his tetsubo crushed the skull the zombie menacing his sister. In the first days after his return to the Wall, Yakamo carried the Ancestral Sword of the Crab Clan with him into battle every day. It was his way of reminding himself that he carried the clan's honor with him always. But remembering the day his father lost his weapon, he soon began to leave the blade in a place of honor in his father's command tent. Though Yakamo was now daimyo, he could not think of that tent as truly belonging to anyone other than Hida Kisada.

  O-Ushi tightened her grip and twisted her hip suddenly. The satisfying sound of goblin necks snapping was her reward.

  "Oy!" yelled a samurai from the other side of the tower. "They're sending up an ogre! Reinforcements! Reinforcements!"

  Yakamo turned without a word and sprinted to the far end of the parapet, with O-Ushi hot on his heels.

  This was his fight.

  "Ai! For a minute I thought you were the Great Bear himself! You look just like your father!"

  The generals and servants around the command tent always made inane statements like that when Yakamo returned from a day on the Wall. The daimyo always waved off the comments. Why this resemblance should be any revelation was beyond him—from the time he was ten years old, people told Yakamo how much he looked like Kisada. Still, deep down, he considered such remarks the highest of compliments.

  He dismounted and strode into his father's command tent.

  "Make sure I am not disturbed," he instructed Hida Tsuru.

  "Hai, Tono!" his uncle responded.

  Inside, the tent remained exactly the way it had been when Kisada was daimyo. The center of the space was still occupied with a tremendous map of the Crab lands, with pins stuck in it to denote troop locations.

  "You did well today. I can smell it on you," said a gravelly voice from the corner.

  "Hai!" Yakamo said, bowing deeply. Then he walked over to the chair in which his father sat. "It was a fine battle. We lost only one to their thirty-five."

  Kisada grunted. "You lost one, you say?" the elder Hida teased. "In my prime not one samurai fell until fifty of the enemy lay cold!"

  "Then I still have room to improve," answered Yakamo, hanging his head in mock shame.

  "The runners arrived an hour ago," Kisada told his son. "The news is good from all stations along the Wall."

  Yakamo grunted. "The Clan is recovering, as are you."

  Kisada's wounds were healing well. After only a few months he was able to walk unaided. His appetite and his dark sense of humor were returning rapidly. But he clearly was not the same man who strode defiandy into the imperial throne room. His once-robust face was now sallow and pale, and he kept his head shaved like a monk's. His shoulders did not seem as broad as they once had been, mainly because he spent so much time sitting. And while his temper was as great as ever, he could not raise his voice for very long without becoming fatigued. The Great Bear seemed to have shrunk to about two-thirds his previous size.

  "Bah!" Kisada spat. "We are stronger than ever before!"

  Yakamo knew his father believed that, and eventually it would be true. But at the moment, the Crab army—much like Kisada himself—was significandy reduced. So many samurai had decided to follow the oni....

  Some had believed in Kisada so fervently that it bordered on religion. They did not question the Great Bear's choices, but only obeyed. When he fell, they followed the path he'd led. The key to saving the empire had to be taking the throne—and if Yakamo was not wise enough to see that, they would follow someone who was. They might have been wooed back by the announcement that the Great Bear yet lived, but Kisada insisted that the empire continue to believe he was dead. Yakamo, like any good son, acquiesced to his father's wishes.

  A few of the samurai had been tainted by their contact with the Shadowlands, as Yakamo so nearly had. Despite their mortal

  forms, they were now creatures of darkness. Their souis were dedicated to the cause of Fu Leng, and they would fight all who opposed their dark master.

  Still others left after the Clan returned to the Wall. They believed Kisada had been insane with power and that Yakamo was even madder. They believed he had not lost his hand in a duel but had cut it off himself in order to wear the claw. Following Yakamo, they believed, would lead only to more dishonor and failure. Most of these samurai had joined Toturi's army.

  "We may be powerful, but so is Yaka— ... the oni," said Yakamo. "He has more troops than ever before."

  Kisada grimaced at the near mention of the creature's proper name. He had given one son's name to the beast, and the other son's life. The Great Bear took full responsibility for both sacrifices. Those burdens weighed down
the old man's shoulders.

  "You must always keep yourself better prepared than that creature. Its fate and yours are still inextricably bound. You will meet it again, and you must be ready!"

  "The beast will not come back here anytime soon," Yakamo responded. "It finally has an army and access to the heart of the empire. It is having too much fun fanning the fires of war. I heard that the Lion and Crane forces are at one another's throats."

  "Do not believe idle gossip," Kisada said. "That could be a rumor spread by the Shadowlands."

  "Hai!"

  "We make the mistake of thinking we understand too much," Kisada mused. "If we cannot even know the truth of what is happening today, how can we possibly know what karma we have earned?"

  Yakamo moved behind his father and placed a strong hand on the old man's slumped shoulders. "No man knows his own destiny. Anyone who claims otherwise is a dangerous fool."

  "Eh?"

  "Something Sukune told me."

  "Your brother was wiser than either of us knew."

  "And stronger."

  Kisada sighed. "Hai. And stronger, too."

  Yakamo straightened his shoulders and looked at something that wasn't there. "I will carry his strength with me all my days."

  "You will need it," said Kisada. "Fu Leng still sits on the Emerald Throne, and the clans can barely stand to be in the same room with one another. This war will get worse before it gets better."

  The daimyo looked to the small wooden shrine that sat in the corner. His brother's katana lay upon it.

  "The empire will not fall," he said, low and strong. "I will not let it fall. The Crab stand on the Wall as we must, as we always have!"

  Yakamo picked up his tetsubo and walked briskly toward the tent flap.

  "Where are you going?" asked Kisada.

  "To make sure no evil comes over the Wall tonight!"