Sword of the Ronin (The Ronin Trilogy)

by Travis Heermann

  On numerous passing ships, bound with coarse ropes looped around necks and limbs, threading through bloody punctures in pierced hands, bound to the outside of the ships’ gunwales, were scores of women, naked or half-stripped, bleeding, old and young and little girls, their faces contorted with suffering. Tied around one of the women, fluttering in the wind and salt spray, was the slashed, stained standard of the Taira clan governor of Iki Island.

  Hell had come into the world on the decks of Mongol ships. Even a man as cold of heart as Kage was moved by such wholesale cruelty. In war, men fought, but women suffered.

  By now, riders must be galloping southward across Kyushu to spread the word of the invasion. Within two or three days, every samurai on the island would be marching, like rival packs of wolves on a mission to defend their territory, and the gates of all the hells would be flung open to receive the dead. But would the wolves of Kyushu arrive in time, and would they be enough to stem the barbarian onslaught? These would be interesting days indeed.

  He returned to his horse tied below. Best to put as many ri as he could between himself and Hakata Bay, and lay low until the blood stopped flowing.

  Dew evaporates

  And all our world is dew … so dear,

  So fresh, so fleeting.

  — Issa, on the death of his child

  Norikage looked out his window at leaves blowing in the steady morning breeze. The weather this autumn had been strange, both unseasonably warm and cold within a few days of each other. Typhoon season was over, but such strange weather sometimes brought unseasonable storms. High gray clouds gave the morning a dull, colorless hue, and the wind was stiff and moist. Even inside his office, with a smoky brazier of hot coals in the corner, Norikage huddled in his robes. Hanging in the window, the straw effigy of a monstrous octopus, crafted and blessed to ward off kappa, swayed gently in the wind, tentacles waggling.

  Aoka village went about its business, even without a warrior to enforce the peace. Disputes were settled peaceably, if not always amicably. The vicissitudes of friendships in such a small place were Norikage’s only real source of amusement. But like most days, he did miss Ken’ishi’s naïve intelligence and his earnestness. Earnestness and honesty were so difficult to come by in this world.

  Something small and hard struck the straw octopus, bounced and clattered off the shutter. He was reluctant to leave his place by the brazier to go look. Then another one, bouncing off the bulbous straw head with its fierce pebble eyes, through the window onto the floor. An acorn, followed by a hoarse giggle of delight from outside.

  “Little Frog!” Norikage called. “That is not polite!”

  Another scratchy giggle that quickly receded.

  Norikage smiled, reached over and picked up the acorn, turned it around and around in his fingers, squeezing the all but impenetrable shell. Like the hearts of human beings, sometimes. Little Frog would grow up the same kind of outcast as his mother. Poor little thing, to be born so low in the world. Norikage sometimes wondered what sins Little Frog had committed in a previous life to be born under such bad kharma, the bastard son of a common whore. Kiosé could afford to clothe him only in the cheapest, most threadbare rags. His bare legs were usually filthy up to the knees, and his hands were always dirty from playing on the ground, but his eyes were bright, inquisitive, and intelligent, unlike many of the adults in the village. How would his life be different with a father to carry him on his shoulders, as Ken’ishi had done on occasion?

  Norikage’s own father had never carried him on his shoulders. His father was not a physically strong man, nor inclined to any sort of play that would distract from the dark, deadly world of court politics.

  Kiosé’s voice echoed through the window, calling for her son, threaded with concern and exasperation. Another distant, mischievous giggle. Norikage could imagine Little Frog enjoying the game of hiding from his mother, watching her seek him from whatever shadowed niche he had hidden himself, still too young for malice to have ever shadowed his heart.

  The inventory report of the village’s winter food stores looked like so much gibberish amid his distraction. How strange that Kiosé and Little Frog both seemed to have forgotten Ken’ishi’s very existence. The rest of the village remembered, but Norikage had observed many times when Ken’ishi’s name came up—more and more seldom these days—she simply looked puzzled at how everyone seemed to know this man except her. Since Ken’ishi had left, her spirit had closed up again. The sparks of life in her eyes had diminished again under the crush of daily toil and the demands of motherhood. How hard Kiosé’s years had been on her. She was so pale these days. She was not more than twenty, but her features bore the weight of the misery of an old woman. She coughed a lot since the weather had turned colder.

  Since Ken’ishi’s departure, Norikage had neglected his own enjoyment of old Chinese poetry. As frustrating as it had been to teach a man so unschooled, to the point where Norikage had found himself reading the poetry to Ken’ishi, he did miss it. He took down a book and thumbed through it. The ancient words of Meng Jiao and Li Bai—Ri Haku in Japanese—reached out to him. Ken’ishi had been impressed to learn that Norikage knew Classical Chinese. Ken’ishi had likened it to mastering two weapons in a single lifetime, something most people could not do. Norikage appreciated the comparison. Growing up in Kyoto had given him a thorough education in the Chinese classics. Although Chinese culture and education had been out of favor in the imperial court for many years, many schools in Kyoto still taught Chinese literature, philosophy, and language.

  An hour passed as he descended into the pages of Ri Haku and Li Yangbing, until a sound brought him back to the world.

  Horses?

  A distant scream of warning.

  The rhythmic pounding of horses’ hooves, growing louder. Many horses. Then another scream, closer.

  Norikage jumped up and ran to the window.

  Then another scream. Much closer this time. A man’s gurgling death rattle.

  Something whispered through the air, too quick to see. The pounding of horses’ hooves, a rough war cry. Then he jumped as something struck the window frame. An arrow!

  A handful of villagers fled down the street as if pursued by oni. He crept to the back door of his office, then into the back alley. The sounds of violence and chaos moved and shifted, difficult to pinpoint. He peered around the corner of a nearby house, catching a glimpse of a horse’s rear, short and shaggy. Then he spotted two corpses lying in the street, the carpenter Taka and his son Hiroki, lying in puddles of deep-red mud, their bodies pierced by arrows, terror-stricken faces frozen in death.

  A horse skidded to a halt not five paces away, snorting and frothing, so close that he could smell its hot breath. He cowered at the hairy, wild-eyed nightmare on the horse’s back.

  Fear of things is not rare. One is often filled with feelings of dread by the unknown. In large-scale battles, it is not visible things alone that induce fear in the enemy. One can probably frighten him with noise, or by making a small force appear to be a large one, or by attacking suddenly from all sides. These are all ways of inducing fear into one’s opponents. One can win by taking advantage of the enemy’s confusion and loss of rhythm.

  — Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings

  By the time Ken’ishi reached Shirohige’s house, the city of Hakata roiled with chaos. A strange succession of intermittent thunderclaps had sent hundreds of people scurrying in panic through the streets, fighting through masses of samurai warriors and peasant spearmen on their way toward shore, where strange ships were sliding up onto the sand, disgorging their cargo of barbarian warriors and horses. Smoke tinged the air. The din and screams of battle wafted like ghosts from the docks, from the beaches, from the streets.

  Running from Green Tiger’s house, Ken’ishi had glimpsed the massive fleet choking the bay with masts and sails, and stopped to stare for several long moments. He had never imagined that so many ships existed in the world. In spite of the impend
ing danger, he had to see Shirohige and Junko to safety; they had been kind to him. After that, he had to somehow make it back to Aoka village and take Kiosé and Little Frog out of there.

  Hirosuke, the historian and scholar in that dank, briny cell, had told him of the terrible wars of decades ago, when the Minamoto clan seized ascendancy and created the Shogun’s bakufu at Kamakura, how the land and the peasants suffered when armies clashed. Armies fought, but the common people suffered.

  Against a force of invading barbarians, Aoka village and everyone in it would be wiped from existence. He had to get home.

  Home.

  As he and Hage ran through the city—Hage in his human visage—their progress was impeded by throngs of wild-eyed townspeople clogging the streets, struggling to flee the fighting. As mounted samurai struggled to reach the lines of defense, they barked orders and screamed curses at the peasants or ran them down.

  Ken’ishi heard dozens of wild rumors spreading like ripples in a pond, growing more fantastic with each retelling.

  “—a hundred thousand barbarians coming ashore—”

  “—horses snorting fire—”

  “—a thousand samurai already slaughtered—”

  “—ships crewed by oni—”

  “—defense fortifications were useless—”

  “—eating children—”

  “—Hakata’s defense forces driven to rout—”

  “—explosions blowing people to bits—”

  He could make little sense of any of it in that first hour after dawn, except that the noise of battle waxed and waned with the distant clash of blades and the scream of horses.

  With the coming of daylight, Ken’ishi’s staff had reverted to the shape of a bow, and his mere handful of arrows clattered in the quiver on his back. Silver Crane still thrummed with power at his hip. Part of him yearned to charge toward the battle and fight the barbarians, but first he had to see to … his family.

  When he and Hage finally reached Shirohige’s house, they found the front gate locked, the house empty, and Pon-Pon gone, along with Shirohige’s wagon.

  Ken’ishi said, “Apparently they wasted no time.”

  Hage said wryly, “There was the whiff of danger in the air. The old man is not the brave sort.”

  “They could be anywhere now.” Ken’ishi imagined the throngs of people packing tighter by the moment, all fighting to get clear of the invaders, and Shirohige and Junko in the wagon behind Pon-Pon, mired in the mob. “Could you follow them, find which way they went?”

  Hage pursed his lips. “I might be able to discern their general direction, but even the old hag’s scent would soon be lost in the crowds.”

  “Can you find them? Will you protect them?”

  “Are you truly so attached to those sour old villains? They hardly seem worth the effort. Souls as black as charcoal, both of them.”

  “They saved my life, brought me back from the land of the dreaming dead. I owe them a debt. Please do me this favor.”

  “What about you?”

  “I must get to Aoka village.”

  “I thought there is nothing there for you now.”

  “Kiosé has forgotten me, thanks to you—”

  Hage frowned and spat, “Don’t blame me for giving you what you wanted!”

  “I was a fool. But I will still save her. And Little Frog.”

  “I cannot reverse the enchantment. Those memories have left her mind like sand through fingers.”

  “I would not ask you to reverse it now. Perhaps it is better that she not remember all the ways I treated her so callously.”

  Hage scratched his white beard, then sighed. “Very well. I shall try to find the old villain and the old hag.”

  Ken’ishi bowed to him. “Thank you, Hage-sensei.”

  Hage puffed up at the honorific title, then bowed in return. “Farewell, old sot. Perhaps we shall meet again in this life.”

  * * *

  Makeshift barricades choked the thoroughfares, spearmen and archers crammed behind the barricades, awaiting the enemy. No one paid Ken’ishi the slightest attention as he fought through crowds and ran down vacant streets interspersed with patches of determination and desolation. Great veils of gray-black smoke rose up to be torn by the stiffening wind. Fires raged through the harbor and nearby districts. The cacophony of battle rumbled and chafed through the city, echoing nearer and farther.

  He had yet to catch a glimpse of the invaders. Nevertheless, he saw evidence of their passage: earthen streets torn up by hundreds of horses’ hooves, a splatter of blood across the face of a vegetable shop, a scattering of hacked, trampled corpses, bristling with cruel arrows, an armored samurai trampled into wreckage.

  Ken’ishi emerged from a narrow side street onto one of Hakata’s major thoroughfares, Hundred Stone Bridges Street, named for the succession of bridges that crossed Hakata’s many canals, which flowed toward the bay like the spokes of a wheel. At mid-morning, the street lay empty and desolate except for the dead, but a smoky tension still hung in the air, as if the next wave of invaders could come charging into view at any moment.

  This street ultimately merged with the most traveled road to Dazaifu. A hundred paces down the street lay the wreckage of a barricade and the warriors who had defended it. If the invaders had broken through here, their path lay open out of Hakata.

  Investigating the wreckage, he found only blood and death, shattered bodies and shattered weapons. He did find several quivers still filled with arrows, as if the samurai had barely gotten off a shot. In contrast, barbarian arrows bristled over the ground, the nearby buildings, the remnants of the barricade, and the remnants of the defenders, thicker than the spines of a dozen sea urchins.

  He was replenishing his quiver when a step caught his attention.

  A horse wandered from an alley into the street, a muscular chestnut stallion. Its saddle was empty, except for a Mongol arrow embedded in the gilded, black-lacquered wood. The horse’s head hung low, sniffing the ground, then it spotted Ken’ishi and shied away from him.

  “Wait!” Ken’ishi said.

  The horse stopped, confusion showing in the white of its eye. Blood spattered the stallion’s hooves and legs, slicked the saddle.

  Ken’ishi stood. “Are you injured?”

  The horse tossed and shook its head, nostrils flaring. “Who are you?” it asked.

  “My name is Ken’ishi, and I am trying to get home to save my family. Are you injured?”

  Sweat sheened the stallion’s breast. “My master is dead. There was battle. Blood.” Its voice was deep, quavering.

  “Are you hurt?”

  “I … I do not know.” The flesh of its breast shivered.

  “May I see?” Ken’ishi edged forward.

  The stallion tossed his head and stamped a sharp hoof. “If you try to ride me, I will kill you.”

  “I have never ridden a horse before,” Ken’ishi said, but if this beast could carry him back to Aoka village with the speed he knew it possessed, he would take the chance. “You have much blood on you.” He approached cautiously.

  “It belongs to my master. He is dead.”

  “Were you able to kill any of the enemy?” He reached out and touched the stallion’s taut shoulder. It was hot and moist, trembling with restrained power. He had never felt such physical strength before.

  The stallion jerked away. “No, there were too many. My master shouted a challenge, and they shot him like a dog.”

  “How many?”

  “As many as the needles of a pine tree.”

  Ken’ishi’s fingers brushed over the stallion’s coat. The animal eyed him skeptically. He moved alongside. “I’m going to pull out the arrow.” He wrapped his fingers around the shaft and worked the head free, then tossed the arrow aside.

  “Do you have water?” the stallion said, chewing at the bit. “I am thirsty.”

  “No, but I can take you to some. If I take you to water, will you carry me home?”

&nbs
p; “Is it far?”

  “For a powerful, noble beast like you, not far at all. And my family is in danger.”

  “And if we meet the enemy?”

  “We will fight them.”

  The horse tossed its head and snorted again. “Very well. Mine was a good master, kind to me, a fierce warrior. He deserves vengeance.”

  Ken’ishi took the stallion’s reins. “Very well, Sir Stallion. We will find water, and then we will run like the wind.”

  Now in sad autumn

  As I take my darkening path …

  A solitary bird

  — Basho

  With her body wrung out from an extra long training session, Kazuko sat down to eat. The rice was freshly made, the pickled plums were tart, and the apples were sweet. Sweat still dampened and stiffened her hair, but the weariness was pleasant. Today during practice, she had sliced clean through three rolled tatami mats, which Master Higuchi said was equivalent to cutting through an entire human torso. She had never made the cut so cleanly before. The rush of satisfaction at her growing skill and strength buoyed her heart.

  As she savored the texture and flavor of the rice, she became aware of a gathering noise in the castle, like the furor of a crowd. Loud voices echoed in the courtyard below, reaching up to the window with the surprise and alarm still intact.

  “—who is he?”

  “—call Captain Tsunemori!”

  “Hey! Get some help! He’s alive!”

  She leaped to her feet, gathered her robes, and ran down through the house. By the time she reached the courtyard, a large crowd had already gathered around a lathered, trembling horse. The shaft of an arrow protruded from the rear of the saddle, embedded like a strange, feathered spike. Blood ran in an encrusted, rusty-red swath along the horse’s belly and flank.

  As she approached the crowd, she raised her voice, “Move aside!”

  Wide-eyed commoners and taciturn samurai alike suppressed their surprise and allowed her through, bowing low. Tsunemori was already there, kneeling beside a man clad in blood-soaked heavy armor. The bent or broken shafts of three arrows protruded from his body, one from his shoulder, one from his lower back, one from his side.