by David Kirk
With one hand he undid the helmet and tossed it to the floor, exposing his face to the nobles. Would they recognize him at this distance? They certainly tried to; there was a commotion beside Ukita, a frantic rearrangement of his bodyguards and attendants as two people pushed to the front. It was the old Lord Nakata and Lord Shinmen. Shinmen peered at him, struck dumb, while Nakata was frantically conversing with his retinue, his head whipping back and forth.
Slowly Bennosuke lowered his sword to point at him, and he froze in the saddle.
“This blade, Lord Ukita, is death to the Nakata,” Bennosuke shouted. “Give me them now, Lord, or I join Tokugawa’s army!”
Ukita did not offer instant dismissal. That alone was shocking. There were a few heavy, hanging moments when Bennosuke believed that he might have actually been considering it—certain, even at a distance, that he could see the lord’s fingers drumming on his saddle’s pommel—but whatever might have been was snatched away by the Eastern army.
Bennosuke had broken the cycle. Instead of facing another challenger from Tokugawa’s men, he had turned his back on them. No one knew if this was an insult or not, because it had never been done before. But regardless, after they slowly realized they were largely being left out of matters of honor the thought of it had rankled, and that was the end of the diplomacy and etiquette of polite personal murder.
Behind him Bennosuke heard the yell as the Tokugawa spearmen began their charge, their feet thundering. He turned like an idiot, staring for a moment as hundreds of spearpoints leveled themselves at him. They were eighty paces away, seventy, and the vast wall of them stretched as far as the boy could see in either direction.
From behind them there was a sudden flickering that vanished upward into the mist. Moments later screams among the Ukita made Bennosuke turn once more. The arrows loosed by the Tokugawa were dropping out of the sky, expertly and sightlessly aimed to fall among the huddled formations, hidden until the very instant before they claimed their oblivious victims.
He gawped stupidly, still caught in the hollow aftermath that followed the adrenaline of his victory. The front ranks of Ukita’s men raising arquebuses at the charging Eastern army and an officer raising his hand were almost meaningless to him, but something primal took charge of Bennosuke. It hurled his body to the ground just before the man slashed his hand down and barked the command to fire and the world exploded.
The bullets scythed through the first ranks of the Eastern spearmen. Men screamed and fell and a broad wave of them stumbled for a few moments, but those behind leapt over the fallen and still they came. The stink of the billowing gunsmoke was foul and acrid, making Bennosuke’s eyes water as he rose to his knees, and when he looked next the arquebusiers were gone and Ukita’s spearmen were charging forward to meet like with like.
There was nothing he could do but be absorbed into their number; they had kept their spears high to allow the arquebusiers to melt away through their ranks, and now he could either be trampled or scramble to his feet to be taken up among them. He did, and he was caught, and they thrust him forward as around him they lowered their weapons and the world became a thing of points and momentum.
Without a polearm, Bennosuke was a terrified passenger, pushed as much as he ran. He saw the coming spears of the Tokugawa and prayed for a gap among them, saw the frenzy written across the faces of the enemy ten paces away. In the next instant speartips were glancing off one another, pushed either skyward or into the ground to be snapped into nothing, and then the boy found himself twisting and sucking in his stomach as though that would somehow make his armor thinner in anticipation of what came next, for that was the impact.
It sounded like a great grunted wheeze, that moment before the screaming; hundreds of men slamming to a halt and finding themselves either impaled or trapped in a crush of blade and shaft and flesh. Bennosuke flinched as he felt a spear thrust rake itself across his stomach, but his armor held and the metal blade slid and stabbed past him, and then someone too close to him was gurgling and hot, wet liquid splattered upon the back of his neck.
There came a brief and uncontrollable flash of joy that he was not skewered, but it was all too easily dashed as he realized his situation; he was pinioned between wooden shafts, twisted like a dancer in the throes of some complex and angular pirouette, his feet barely on the ground and his cheek grinding up against the bowl of another man’s helmet. Trapped, off balance, so close to death.
But he was not alone in this, and what awaited them all was the long, slow grapple. The fight stagnated into sporadic outbreaks of violence, whenever the space to draw a spear back and thrust it forward again could be found.
It was a test of endurance; either one side could break and cede a hole through their lines to the lords and missile troops behind, or they would hold on until their army could produce a maneuver that would turn the battle—flanking with cavalry, or a daring charge at a weakened point, or some improvised stroke of genius that would be remembered for centuries.
What did strategy or centuries mean to those men there, though? Nothing. There was only snarling and spitting and the taste of metal and the sound of curses growled from the very depths of lungs and the feel of the cartilage of noses crushed back and forth until they threatened to disconnect from the skull or rescind up into the brain.
The sword he still clutched in one hand was useless, much too short, and his arm pinned away from his body so that he could only feebly wave it with the power of his wrist alone. With his free hand Bennosuke did what he could and desperately grabbed at the Tokugawa spears closest to him. He tried to haul them away one-handed, wary of the blades splitting his palms open, but he may as well have tried to pull the moon down. The best he could do was cling tenaciously to them and glare hatred at the black eyes of the men opposite him.
A part of him remembered Munisai’s words—about fighting for five minutes after fighting for five minutes. He was so surprised how quickly exhaustion crept through him. He had thought Munisai had meant swinging a sword, but here merely trying to keep his balance and pull or thrust with muscles he seldom used was making him dizzy with the effort.
How long they were there was impossible to gauge, but eventually something changed, some group of men finding inspiration and strength from somewhere. There was a huge push, the crowd twisted, and when it stopped the boy was crushed between men with both of his feet completely off the ground. He gasped for air, entirely helpless now.
Before the panic of suffocation could take him, something crashed down from the sky to strike him on the top of his bare head. He did not know what it was but it was hard and blunt and it knocked the senses from him, his vision turning white for a few moments, while some protected and fading rational part of him wondered if his skull was cracked.
Blood streamed freely down his face, his bared scalp lacerated. As if from far away he heard the incomprehensible sound of his own moaning. It vanished entirely as within his chest he became painfully aware of his heart beating, and to him the thump of it seemed to slow from frantic convulsions, calming, settling into a steady, faithful pulse that was overwhelming, lulling him down into nothingness.
THE SKY was there.
Bennosuke realized he had been looking at it for a long time before he recognized it for what it was once more. The morning fog had cleared; gray clouds were distant above him. He was on his back, earth cold and wet on the back of his skull. It hurt to look, he noticed, hurt to hear. At the back of his throat he tasted bile.
He sat up. One of his arms was beneath his body, and slowly, painfully he uncurled himself from the contortion into which he had fallen. If he had been capable of it he would have felt surprise to find his sword there still in his grip, the fingers wrapped tight around the hilt like prehistoric vines fossilized over rock.
Both his hands were sticky with blood, the flesh that emerged from beneath his gauntlets red. He remembered pain. Gingerly he reached up to his skull half expecting his fingers to feel whatever bra
ins felt like, but he found only a long, painful gash. The boy probed it masochistically for a few moments until he convinced himself that the bone at least did not feel fractured.
He rose unsteadily to his feet, hauling himself up by his sword with its point in the ground. His hair had come loose and was matted with blood and dirt, half of his face caked in it. Over his right eye a filthy crust had formed, and he felt this crackling and breaking like a scab as he forced the lids open fully once more.
Bennosuke looked around; there were corpses at his feet. Men and beasts, hundreds of them twisted around him. Near to him sat the great bulk of a horse. Red, ragged bullet wounds passed through it, and its stomach had burst so that its guts had spilled upon the earth. But it was still mostly whole—and suddenly inviting to him. He was exhausted, the world was pulsing and untrustworthy and his armor as heavy as a glacier, and though he had been on his feet only moments now he felt the need to sit once more.
Like an old man he lowered himself onto the flank of the beast. As he put his weight on it, the horse’s rib cage cracked and popped morbidly. So run through had it been by bullets that it simply gave up any pretense of structure and caved inward. Bennosuke sank into it, and he felt the rush of what was left inside the beast forced outward around his feet, the viscera still warm.
A carrion throne to look out across the battlefield from.
Battle. Soldier. Sekigahara. Only then did the reason for his presence here resurface in his mind, the logic linking sluggishly. Somehow the press of spearmen must have discarded him from their mass, expelling his motionless and filthy form like some queen hornet disgorging a stillborn larva before the fight moved on, driving and grinding the front line away.
That front line now was only a few dozen paces from where he sat, the interlocking spears and lances forming the skeleton of some demonic pagoda rooftop, and yet it seemed so impassably far to his torpid mind. Behind it he saw the full scope of the battle in the same manner, splayed across his vision like a great panoramic painting, all of it distant and unable to harm him.
He saw the banners of all the lords of Japan, the Western on the slopes and the Eastern in the basin, crashing midway like two waves; the only way to tell who was on either side in that press of men was the direction of their standards. Arrows loosed, muskets fired, chevrons of horsemen wheeled and charged.
The idea of tactics and lordly strategy seemed as fanciful from here as it had been in the press of spears. But what Bennosuke could see now was the individual, the minor fates of the other thousands here, and he saw such little, pathetic things.
He saw two men circling each other, weary beyond endurance, the pair of them filthy and glistening with sweat, swinging wild, exhausted swipes and missing, staggering, one with a shattered sword and one grasping an arquebus by its barrel.
He saw the inverted eyes of a man on the ground, his mouth a black and red crescent moon as he mumbled a smiling farewell, seeing something or someone within his mind, remembering anything but this, head lolling in his helmet.
He saw a man sprawled with his armor spread open and his guts too, and a dog as black as coal was pulling on his intestines and backing away, and the man was mewling and pulling them back, and the dog’s tail was wagging, the animal’s eyes delighted at getting to play such a fun game.
Somebody grabbed the collar of his armor from behind, breaking his gaze. Bennosuke flapped numbly at it, his feet scrabbling in the horse guts like a newborn.
“Musashi! Up!” the voice was snarling. “Get up!”
It was Kumagai trying to haul him to his feet. The man’s armor was dirtied, spear abandoned somewhere, and he was frantic with anger. The battlefield seemed to close in on Bennosuke, becoming not some remote theater but a near and tangible thing. There were other men standing there, wounded or dazed by terror or for whatever reason not fighting in the fierce melee of the spearmen. Kumagai was screaming to them, trying to rally them.
“Do you see? Kobayakawa is the traitor! Look!” he snarled and pointed to the slope along their right flank, one hand still wrenching Bennosuke by his scruff.
Like a bridge collapsing from one end, the formations and ranks of Kobayakawa’s men were indeed turning around upon their former allies. That was the entirety of their flank, gone—the sheer number of them, a third of all the Eastern forces, still pristine and fresh and now the enemy. Tokugawa’s men were letting them through their lines, falling in to march shoulder to shoulder with the Kobayakawa like old and trusted allies, and the united lot of them, unbloodied, unexhausted, were heading toward the frenzy in which Ukita and the other loyal lords had been embroiled for hours now.
“All of you, to me! Those dogs must pay!” spat Kumagai.
“What?” breathed one man, bent over double with blood streaming down his brow. “But … look at them!”
“On your feet, Musashi!” said Kumagai, but the boy remained anchored in and among the horse. Kumagai turned to address all the men around him. “We charge them! We must protect the flanks!”
“But—”
“Are you samurai?” said Kumagai, his voice low and cutting.
“That’s—” began the man.
“Are you samurai?” said Kumagai again.
“Yes,” said the man.
“Then why do you hesitate?” said Kumagai, and the man said nothing. He shook his head once, and then pulled himself up straight. Resigned determination came across his face. He knew what Kumagai said was the truth. Those around him, a ragged two score of men, knew so too.
“What about you, Musashi?” said Kumagai, looking down at the only one not yet committed. “Are you samurai?”
The boy said nothing.
“Are you samurai, Musashi?” said Kumagai, and he knocked him on the back of his head.
The boy did not move.
“Are you samurai?” snarled Kumagai now, and he bent low to speak face-to-face. “Or are you just going to sit here? You coward. What are you? You coward. You coward, you fucking coward!”
The boy met his eyes, and the emptiness in them infuriated Kumagai. He rose in one fierce movement, kicking Bennosuke in the chest as he did so, and then he drew his sword. “You fucking coward, Musashi! I always knew you were queer! You stay here, then! All true samurai, to me!”
He leveled his sword at Kobayakawa’s men, and screamed until it became a bitter, choking hiss. Bennosuke watched as Kumagai ran in a stumbling charge, hopping over corpses and slipping in loose mud, and the other men went with him, a shabby sporadic line of men waving swords in desperate and ultimate bravado.
Kobayakawa’s immaculate ranks raised their muskets and fired. The bullets that came from their guns were as big as eyeballs, and they punched Kumagai and his men to pieces in an instant. There was no agony, just eradication. The samurai fell. Only one tried to rise, muscle instinct alone pushing him forward a finger’s length farther, and then he collapsed and was still.
No immortal souls fluttered upward.
An image came to Bennosuke. He saw the Buddhist mandala that hung upon Dorinbo’s wall lit up in the morning sun. Enlightened white figures crawling up Mount Fuji, the condemning demons and devils under the world toying with the fates of men, and between them always that stratum of trapped, twisted corpses.
He saw those corpses now, on the slopes of the Sekigahara valley. But there was no devil here, no path heavenward either. There was just musket smoke and pageantry drifting above a carpet of those damned to nothingness.
Finally he understood.
He thought of Munisai, of the color of his blood soaking into white silk and the long, rattling moan that escaped him as his agony came to naught, and he understood.
He thought of Shuntaro, writhing, forever writhing in that bubbling oil with the men he thought he had saved dancing their ghastly terminal dance alongside him, and he understood.
He thought of Dorinbo, remembered his last words spoken before the burning pyre, and now, finally—finally—after years he understood.
>
Bennosuke picked himself out of the ruins of the horse. The battle still raged but he could not hear it. He had risen a child of Amaterasu and finally he made the choice to raise himself to where he wanted to be.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
When it ends it ends like a butterfly breaking out from a chrysalis, pushing outward from a vital point upon a central seam and the crack grows from there, and then there are two things—the magnificent color of new wings starting to beat, and a scabbed and decrepit husk cast aside and falling downward.
These are otherwise known as victory and defeat.
MARSHAL FUSHIMI STALKED behind the lines of spearmen, howling encouragement and slashing his sword through the air. They would not falter. They were samurai. They would hold. On and on he shouted, his voice growing hoarse.
What he bellowed would be unspoken fact at any other time, but the marshal knew deep inside that large-scale battles such as this removed from the world the laws of rationality and reason. When you got enough men together, fired enough arrows, and charged enough horses, it was as though any barrier of individuality ceased to exist and suddenly raw and thoughtless emotion could course through the whole of them as easily as blood through snow.
This had benefits occasionally, as when a rare band of honest men found sudden courage beyond what they knew they had, but what Fushimi knew as fact, why he had pursued zealous justice his entire life—why he marshaled—was that this world was inherently rotten. There were two villains for every decent man, five cowards for every hero, and so that meant that when enough men were together, such as now, there was a great looming contagion waiting to spread.
This was why Fushimi hated battle, and this was why he knew that he had to play the preemptive healer now; his was the task to remove the disease before it could claim anyone. With the flat of his sword he struck helmets he saw turning, he put a strong hand on the shoulders of men from behind regardless of which corner of the earth they had come from, and tried to speak as a father or brother would.