Child of Vengeance

by David Kirk

  “Ah, I understand,” he said. “It fell in the Gathering? It snapped its neck in a fall? I see. Well, it’s a hard thing to do, to lose a horse. Love them, don’t you? Like a woman, but a horse won’t complain if you ride it for hours. Or ride another one, eh? Aye. I understand. It’s hard, lad. Hard. I’ve done it myself. But it’s just a horse, Musashi. Not the end of the world. Unless … Was that your father’s horse? Well, that’s … I can’t say anything there. But memories are more than things, you understand? That was his, but it was not him, right? Just remember him, and you’ll learn to live with it. Perhaps. I don’t know.”

  Bennosuke had set the animal free once he had found the strength to stand without feeling the crushing weight of shame. He had ripped the saddle and the reins from it, slapped it on the hind, and watched it gallop off. What right had he to put binds upon another living thing?

  That, and she knew.

  “Hard though it is,” Kumagai said after what he gauged to be a pensive pause, “you can’t let it get the better of you. You have to think. You forgot these, didn’t you?”

  Bennosuke realized the man had been carrying his swords. The samurai slid them along the floor to him. The sight of those, of the longsword that had once been at Munisai’s side, drove a fresh spasm of pain into his heart. The boy did not dare touch them. Kumagai took another egg for himself, this time with his fingers.

  “You’ll need them, lad,” the samurai said, sucking his fingers clean. He looked around the inn suspiciously, though there were no other samurai present, and then leaned in conspiratorially. “The Regent Toyotomi is dead.”

  He sat back as though to let the magnitude of that sink in. Still Bennosuke did not speak. What was that news to him? That was the world of samurai, and he did not belong to it any longer.

  “A week ago.” Kumagai nodded. “We only just heard after the Gathering. Our spies from Kyoto are the best. No one else here knows. You know what that means, right?”

  War. The War.

  “We have to return to Takeyama. Our Lord Ukita no doubt has a plan. We’ve wasted enough bloody time looking for you—we have to leave now. It’s time for us to stop being sportsmen, and to be soldiers.”

  He jerked his head at the door and sat back as if to rise. Bennosuke considered it. A soldier did not have to think. A soldier just did. That might be good. He was not dead, and nor could he die today, and there was food and a bed and warmth. A moth, primal and banging around the flame of simple sensation. That was what he was.

  He nodded, picked up the weapons he was not fit to wield, and rose with Kumagai. The two of them exited the inn into a country that was at war but did not know it. People enjoying a last day of merriment before lines were drawn and chaos came as it had not done for decades.

  “Cheer up, you miserable bugger,” said Kumagai as they passed through the door, and he pushed him playfully on the back of the head. “It was only a bloody horse.”

  A Day of Glory and Rebirth; The Sundered Realm Made Anew

  The Twenty-First Day of the Tenth Month, Fifth Year of the Era of Keicho

  (The Year Four Thousand Two Hundred and Ninety-Six by the Old Chinese Methods, Sixteen Hundred Years Exactly After the Europeans Killed Their God)

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The hawk skated upon a sea of cloud, so close to the surface Bennosuke thought he could see tendrils of mist whip around its claws. It circled, circled, circled in elegant stillness, the silhouette navy on steel blue in the dawn light.

  Fog had rolled in through the night, its thickness and depth such that it obscured the basin of the valley but left the peaks of the ridges where the boy now sat exposed. Bennosuke had not been able to sleep, clad in armor as he was. He had wandered up here in the darkness, as had other men, and together they had huddled, praying or sharpening swords or like him simply waiting and watching the hawk.

  Somewhere, down in the mist below, there were two armies, from here invisible and the noise of them muffled. No one knew quite how many men were there; after a hundred and fifty thousand counting seemed pointless. Beyond that was a summoning of warriors the scale of which had not been seen before. It was everyone, ultimate, climactic.

  A week ago no one had known the name Sekigahara, but it was here in this valley where the fate of Japan would be decided.

  The hawk keened, a piercing sound that made Bennosuke shiver and gave him gooseflesh. Perhaps other men might have called such a cry portentous or auspicious, but to him it just compounded the overwhelming feeling of strangeness. Here he was, present at the end of a war that had meant so little to him but had swallowed the lives of so many other men the country over.

  It had been two years since the Gathering. The seasons had passed by, felt as little more than incremental changes in temperature and length of daylight to him. Work and steady diet had rendered him tall and strong, the body of a man his already though he was barely past sixteen. He had changed, and the truth was that sometimes the flesh felt no more his than the gauntlets or the cuirass he wore now.

  It was not a new sensation. The War had welled and welled over the long months leading here, but Bennosuke had seen none of it. Kumagai and his men had been sent to hold a mountain pass, vital but well away from the fighting, and there they had stayed until they had received a summoning from Ukita a month ago to join this great host that had marched to Sekigahara.

  Back then, before open conflict had erupted across the land, Kumagai had made no real effort to ascertain whether Bennosuke’s story was true. Miyamoto was a common-enough name that a search through the clan records would yield dozens of families, and rather than waste time sifting through them all he had simply permitted the boy to fall in with him and his men.

  The samurai had had other preoccupations in any case. He was a horseman and a leader of cavalry, but in being sent to guard that pass so far away from grazing pastures they had had to surrender their steeds. Bennosuke was relieved to be spared the search for another horse, one less burden for him. For Kumagai, however, the idea of being holed up, of being stationary, seemed to make him uneasy.

  “Our most noble lord is being wise and biding his time, holding what he has. I cannot fault the strategy,” the samurai had said again and again, and every time he did so Bennosuke could see the longing for a saddle in his eyes.

  They had practically burst forth from the fort when the order had come a month ago; down from the hills into the troughs and the plains, and their eighty men had joined there with another eighty, and then they had met a band of five hundred, and then that too had been absorbed into a force of two thousand, and it grew and grew until the land swarmed. The samurai had marched and on either side of them rows of the lower born had knelt with their faces pressed into the dirt.

  Ukita and the other great lords had chosen to meet in this valley simply to rally their individual forces into one colossal host and then plan the great offensive out upon the vast plains to the east. Sekigahara was wooded and they held the high ground, and entrenched within the forested slopes they had believed themselves safe and free to spend however long they liked fawning over maps and proposed strategies.

  It had been no small surprise, then, when yesterday the enemy had been sighted marching on them. Fearlessly they had come, heading straight into the cleared bowl of the valley just before night fell, endless blocks of men marching in formation from over the horizon. They had arranged themselves for battle in the darkness, their lanterns slowly engulfed by the coming of the fog, and the sheer number of those lights had been daunting. Bennosuke had heard uneasy conversations around him in the night, the men trying to convince themselves that it was a deception, that each warrior of the enemy was carrying two.

  The boy had ignored them mostly. He had watched the lightening of the sky as he watched the hawk circling now—still, peaceful, apart. The bird swooped upward above the fog in a flowing arc, hanging at the peak for a single majestic instant. But it was a part of this imperfect world and had to obey its laws eventually;
it turned upon itself and dived downward, vanishing into the mists below.

  The Lord Ieyasu Tokugawa was a known falconer. Perhaps the hawk returned to his hand, somewhere hidden down there.

  Tokugawa,” said the Lord Ukita, his hands steepled before his face, “Tokugawa, Tokugawa, Tokugawa.”

  You’ve played this well, he added ruefully within his head.

  The lord’s palisade was below the mist line, a ring of thick silk open to the sky. The flickering of lanterns was unable to dispel the fog that painted the world the color of a sword. In this gloom Ukita sat on a stool, a hastily drawn map of the area spread before him on the floor, the heavy slashes of black ink glistening in the feeble light.

  The valley was the shape of a stubby dog’s leg, and the map showed Ukita and his allies splayed out in a vague horseshoe on the three surrounding slopes of the “paw.” In the center of them, in the basin of the valley where the village of Sekigahara was—an insignificant mass of farmers’ hovels—the entirety of the enemy was dismissed with a few diminutive characters. Thousands of unknown warriors in unknown formations there summated quite blithely as “Tokugawa.”

  That lack of knowledge worried him deeply; logic could not be applied to the unknown. He chewed the inside of his lip, the motion very carefully hidden by his hands. Ukita did not want to show any sign of anxiety to the other lords and generals gathered there—from eager adolescents to the pensive ancients, all sitting, standing, pacing. He was the great lord, though, and they all waited for his command in silence. The noise of the thousands outside was smothered and distant.

  How had it come to this?

  It was a war for a title no one claimed to want: shogun. Each of the former Council of Elders vowed that their sole intention was to continue to humbly protect the child of the late Regent Toyotomi until he was of age to take power. Each of the former Council knew that the others were lying, of course, and of course each knew that they themselves were lying too. To be shogun was everything, all that their ancestors had planned for, and that the fortune was theirs to be born into a time where they had the opportunity to take it … Oh, it made the heart sing.

  So tantalizingly close. As everyone had expected, it had been Tokugawa who was first ejected from the Council within months of the regent’s death for his “dangerous ambition” and “unusual deception.” As no one had expected, Tokugawa had flourished afterward. The Patient Tiger proved his name, winning allies to what should have been a hopeless cause, whispering in the right ears, promising land and gold that wasn’t his to some while lopping off the heads of others.

  And the strategy had worked. Lords from the East and from the North flocked to his banner, pledging allegiance, his forces swelling until they matched the combined might of the four most powerful men in the country. It had been masterfully done, almost unbelievably so, and part of Ukita longed to join the man and share in such genius. But he had made his choices and sworn his oaths, and here they all were.

  Tokugawa. Those small characters, black on white. Ukita tasted blood.

  Lord Shinmen also had a map within his private palisade—and a message. He twisted the lacquer tube open and snatched the rolled paper from within. He read it, and then raised his eyes to his gathered bodyguard and adjutants.

  “Our dear ally Lord Kobayakawa all but names our most noble Lord Ukita traitor,” he said, “and by extension ourselves also.”

  “If Kobayakawa has communicated such with the other lords …” said one man, momentary concern in his eyes.

  “He will have done so,” said Shinmen, and he waved at the mound of message tubes upon the floor to his side. “As has Ishida about him to me, and Konishi about Kikkawa … I would not be surprised to learn Tokugawa had turned the ground itself to his cause. I expect a quake at any moment.”

  There was a nervous attempt at laughter from them all. It faltered not solely because it was a bad joke, but because all knew that there was the true worry. Why else would Tokugawa have the courage to march into this valley where he would be surrounded—unless he wasn’t surrounded at all? It stank of treachery, and frantic messages and accusations had been flitting back and forth between the lords all night.

  If anyone was false Ukita would be the obvious suspect—he or the Lord Kobayakawa. Of all the lords there the two of them had the largest forces, each approaching twenty thousand men. They duly held the most vital positions in the line of battle too, Ukita the center and Kobayakawa the right, with the minor lords like Shinmen sworn to either of them filling in the gaps between.

  Shinmen sucked air through his teeth, ran his fingers over the map. If Kobayakawa switched his loyalty, he could simply roll the mass of his men around and envelop the rest of the army within minutes. Shinmen looked at the layout of the forces, and he did not know which name worried him the most: Tokugawa or Kobayakawa.

  Or Ukita, the honest part of him added. The lord had neither shared nor shown any intention of betrayal in the preceding week—but you didn’t advertise conspiracy until the knife was in the back, did you?

  He felt a rare powerlessness. Though he could command the life and death of hundreds, he was minor here; this was the fate of millions, of a nation. There was nothing to do but prepare. The lord stood with his legs wide and his arms outstretched and his men came to him with his armor. They bustled around him, cladding him in layers of leather and cloth and wood and iron, working with the speed of strong hands and practiced routine.

  The young lad Kazuteru came to him last, bearing his helmet. The samurai placed it upon his head, and then tied the thick, soft cord across the lord’s chin. Shinmen looked at him, and suddenly he was reminded of what his own definition of loyalty had wrought. The familiar thought came to him that Kazuteru, who had struck the head, was some sort of vessel, and that part of him lingered on within the young man before Shinmen, watching.

  “I’m sorry,” the lord murmured.

  Kazuteru looked confused for an instant, and before he began the instinctive apology etiquette demanded when you did not understand a superior, a messenger clattered into the palisade:

  “Orders from our most noble Lord Ukita, my lord!”

  Advance!” bellowed the Marshal Fushimi. “The order is given, warriors of the West! The day has come! Glory to you all, your ancestors weep at the chance to partake in such a battle! The order to assembly is given! Make your way to your posts!”

  The marshal rode along the ridgetop above the fog, weaving his horse between the clusters of men who for whatever reason had found their way here in the night. In peace he was a giver of law and now in war he was trusted to bring order to this host. What was a marshal to do but marshal?

  He saw the men all around him on the slopes, hunched over like gangs of ravens on branches looking down upon the world. The accents that he heard were a strange and awful corruption of the language he spoke—the central, true tongue. These samurai were men from the farthest parts of Japan, from the western tip of Honshu and from the southern isles of Kyushu and Shikoku; he understood but one word in three, and he wondered if they comprehended any more or less of his speech.

  All the clans drawn here, a countrywide coalition focused on no more than a mile square of land. Fushimi was disgusted; these men were practically Ryukyuan, Korean, Chinese. Oh, that on this day of days he should be alongside men of this caliber.

  He rode on, one hand on the reins, the fingers of the other running over his armor absently. The suit had been worn before him by his father and his grandfather and his grandfather’s grandfather, and through scores of battles had proved itself true. Hidden beneath the decorative thread that lay over the cuirass he found a familiar ridge; a long gouge from a sword strike that had been repaired years ago, filled in with molten metal that had hardened across the bowl of the stomach like a tumescent vein.

  Fushimi’s fingers went back and forth across it, back and forth across the vein, the lifeline, and he wondered which of his ancestors had born this blow, and if the successor had toye
d with it as he did now, and whether they were watching, willing him onward through this as a bastion of propriety among the mongrels and the disloyal and the …

  “We advance!” he yelled again before his thoughts ran too blackly, looking for men he could recognize, the few he trusted. “To your posts, all of you! Advance!”

  Bennosuke watched the man on horseback pass him, screaming his commands, repeating his message to all whom he found. He looked vaguely familiar, but the boy could not remember where from. Perhaps it was just the disgust in the man’s eyes, evoking old memories of Miyamoto. He didn’t care, and neither did he brood for long; he rose and placed his helmet on his head, for he had his orders.

  That was where the two years since his failure had gone, Bennosuke knew—orders. That was what made a soldier’s life a soldier’s, and what had made his life as mindless and numb as he had hoped. As he followed the other men trooping down, he looked across the clouds wistfully before his descent and envelopment by the fog stole the serene view from him. He remembered the graceful curve of the hawk’s flight; curling, curling, upward, equilibrium, and then down and gone.

  And then he too was gone, down into the mists and into war.

  From somewhere distant there was a fog-stifled roar that unfolded like a peal of thunder. A cannon perhaps, or a rank of muskets firing. At what, Bennosuke could not tell, but as he descended the frantic preparation that had been hidden by the fog engulfed him. He walked through narrow paths that wound their way through the trees, but because they were crowded scores of men had abandoned them entirely. Their spectral silhouettes flitted between the upright obelisks the tree trunks had become, fading from black to gray to invisible within a mere twenty paces.

  That consuming fog and the twisting of the paths revealed brief images before stealing them away; men racing past, armor clattering, others shouting fiercely as units came together. Barricades of sharpened bamboo spears laying ready, the ribbed green trunks as long as two men. A fletcher desperately tarring feathers to shafts, any sort of art forgotten in the simple need for arrows, and behind him another man struggling to roll a barrel of gunpowder to waiting arquebusiers. A stony-faced samurai staring into a copper mirror checking that the pate of his head was immaculately shaved, a boy to one side holding his razor. A dog leashed on a chain and black as coal snarling and leaping around and around in maddened circles, drool flecking from its maw.