by Travis Bughi
A few moments of waiting told Emily he would not attack first as the others had. That task must fall to her, and she felt a brief hesitation at having to charge a foe she’d never fought. A part of her hoped that his greater size would slow him, but she dared not count on it. If there was anything she’d learned from watching samurai, it was that speed was their greatest asset.
She feinted right, and the samurai took the bait, lunging with a shout and a strike from his sword to hack at the space Emily would have occupied. A quick turn of her foot, though, and she was inside the samurai’s reach, wooden knife sweeping in to poke his gut. The fight would have ended there had the samurai not leapt back to keep the distance between them. Emily realized his strike had been a feint, as well, to test her true motives.
This one is clever, she smirked. Good.
The first fight had been trivial at best. When Takeo had demanded the four samurai duel Emily first, they’d fumed and slanted their eyes to show their disdain. One of them had even curled his lips in disgust, but it had only made Emily feel at ease. She found being underestimated to be an unparalleled advantage.
The first one had charged and swung at her almost lazily, as if she were not worthy of his full strength. The shock on his face when Emily dodged had lasted throughout the rest of the short fight when Emily stepped in, swept his feet out from under him, and planted the samurai into the ground face first. He shouted in anger, demanding a second bout, but Takeo had refused.
“Were this a real battle, you’d already be dead,” he’d said. “Who’s next?”
The second and third had argued over who would go next, both eager to show their fallen comrade the error of his ways. While they argued, the fourth had stayed quiet and watched Emily with an intense stare that spoke volumes. He did not say anything, but the way he lightly touched the handle of his katana told Emily he knew the two of them would fight.
Now here they were with the second and third sitting grudgingly next to the first with bruised ankles and horribly scarred egos. They sat quietly, jaws clenched and fingers digging into the dirt, while Emily and the fourth samurai circled each other. Emily’s practice knife hung loosely in her hand while the samurai held his katana out and pointed at Emily. Their eyes searched for the leads their bodies would follow, and their feet traced the dirt for proper footing. Around them, a small crowd had gathered, and the murmur of voices drowned out the surrounding camp as the entire world seemed to focus on this single fight.
Emily could tell the onlookers troubled the samurai. His eyebrows furrowed as his eyes occasionally flicked over Emily’s shoulder to stare at the many soldiers who gathered to see the outcome. Emily looked briefly, too, and saw the look of awe in more than one face. Few bothered to hide their interest, and Emily felt bad for the samurai. It seemed he was not as accustomed to fighting with an audience as she was.
She feinted right again and was rewarded when the samurai repeated his own feinting strike. Into his guard she traveled, and he stepped back just as he had before, only this time Emily followed, and her free hand grabbed the samurai’s wrist to halt a further retreat.
He panicked and made a hasty swing for her side, but the wood whistled through empty air as Emily spun to the samurai’s side. He spun to face her again, but never made the full turn. The moment his weight shifted, Emily was on him, lashing out with her heel to kick his planted foot while her hands drove into his shoulder and chest. The big samurai toppled, and Emily’s foot came down on the katana, trapping both the weapon and the samurai’s hand in the dirt.
Emily grinned. She couldn’t help it. The feeling of superiority was running rampant through her veins, and she felt stronger than she ever had before. There was something else there, something new, a feeling of confidence in her abilities that both elated and freed her of the constant self-doubt that plagued her mind. She’d just defeated four samurai in a duel. Four! She could scarcely believe it, but the evidence was undeniable, and the silent gasps from the crowd told her the feat was not to be scoffed at. She continued to smile as she looked to Takeo, and a warm flush spread to her cheeks as he let her see the pride in his eyes.
“Me next!” Another samurai emerged from the crowd, a huge grin on her face.
“Not a chance!” another replied, this one a man with a thin, wiry figure. “I’ll fight the amazon!”
“She’s an amazon?” some voice called out. “No wonder!”
“Advantage to the amazon! Taking bets! Odds in her favor!”
“I’ll take it!”
“Over here!”
Emily balked and froze. Her body went rigid as the crowd grew more vocal and more challengers came forward. Her hands began to sweat, her mouth fell open, and she felt a mixture of embarrassment and insecurity. The attention she was receiving was fierce, and suddenly she wanted very badly to be back in the tent with Takeo.
As if on cue, Takeo came forward and shouted above the others.
“Enough!” he called out. “Fight amongst yourselves or wait a few days. There will be combat enough for all.”
The crowd’s gathering and Takeo’s command must have attracted more attention than Emily realized because, a moment later, Fudo, eyes ablaze, came storming into the circle surrounding Emily.
“He’s right!” he called out in a voice that wasn’t quite loud and yet silenced everyone else all the same. “Clear out! You’ll all get your chance soon!” He paused, and then shouted, “I said leave! Anyone left standing when I turn around will get latrine duty!”
The man whirled on Takeo, putting his back to the crowd, and Emily watched them all scatter like kobolds.
“You’re quite the distraction, young woman.” Fudo pointed an accusing finger at her. “Those samurai were meant to keep an eye on you, not entertain your day. Now I’ll have to discipline them. It seems they couldn’t resist the call to fight an amazon, and they’ll regret their lack of willpower, trust me. Does it upset you that you’re being watched from afar? Would you rather I had my samurai follow you from a single pace’s distance? Perhaps I should assign you latrine duty. That does the trick for most of our troublemakers.”
“It wasn’t her, sir.” Takeo bowed his head. “I issued the challenge to them, and it was me they sought to fight. I told them I would only fight them if they could defeat Emily. I did not know a crowd would gather.”
“Yet you didn’t stop when it did.” Fudo sighed. “You’re lucky I’m a fair man. I would have thought you, a former samurai, would understand the laws and the need for discipline in an army this size, but perhaps I misjudged you. I always allow a single lapse in judgment due to ignorance, so consider this your warning. There is a scheduled time and place to practice swordsmanship. Were we not on the eve of battle, this might be different, but there are too many tasks these days for random duels to disrupt. We have a war to win, and I expect you two to do your part. Yang!”
Gan Yang came sprinting over from his tent and bowed low before Fudo.
“My lord, sir,” Gan started. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know what to do.”
“Yet you didn’t come to me to find out,” Fudo muttered. “Seems you wanted to see that duel just as much as the others. Get ahold of yourself. Take these two off to join your duties, or you’ll lose more than your tent.”
Gan bowed over and over as he said, “Yes, sir, sorry, sir, won’t happen again, sir.”
Fudo paused a moment more and glanced over his shoulder. No soldiers remained watching, and he turned fully and marched off. Gan stayed bowed until Fudo was completely out of sight and then gave an exasperated sigh. Emily could have sworn she saw him shudder in relief.
“You and Fudo have a past, I take it?” Emily asked, raising one eyebrow.
“Yes.” Gan hung his head. “He’s my uncle.”
Gan continued to hold his defeated look, and Emily and Takeo exchanged awkward glances. Finally, Takeo cleared his throat and pulled Gan’s attention away from self-pity.
“Your uncle spoke of tasks and dut
ies?” he asked.
“Yes.” Gan nodded and looked at his hands.
Tasks and duties, Emily pondered. That must be to help the army! A moment of excitement grasped her as she tried to imagine what they would be doing. Would they be chopping down trees like she had seen? Maybe she’d be tasked with helping a blacksmith. She’d never done those things before, and her sense of curiosity was tickled.
“How many things will we be doing?” she asked, her voice a pitch higher than normal.
Gan sighed. “Just one, I’m afraid.”
Chapter 24
One hundred and eleven . . . one hundred and twelve . . . one hundred and . . . and. . .
“Damn it!” Emily chucked the peeled potato into the bucket of water. “I’ve lost count!”
“You were counting?” Takeo asked, pausing to stretch his fingers.
“What else am I going to do?”
Gan said nothing as he sat beside them, slowly peeling one potato after another. His fingers and knife went round and round their odd shapes, peeling away their skin with a conditioned practice that told Emily he’d done this before, reinforced when he released no sign of emotion when more potatoes were dumped into their pile.
When Emily had first arrived at the kitchens, she’d been given a small knife and was seated before a large mound of unpeeled potatoes. The pile was as large as her, and she groaned at it but otherwise kept her complaints to herself. There were easily a good fifty people in the tent, peeling away, and each had a pile just like hers before them, so she resolved that such was life and went to work. Takeo sat beside her, so she didn’t feel lonely, and Gan took up a seat opposite them. The three set to work on the pile, and in a surprisingly short amount of time, they had halved the pile’s height. Emily dared to think they might finish before lunch, but then her dreams were shattered as two soldiers came over to them and dumped two baskets full of potatoes on the unfinished pile, making it bigger than it had been when they’d first arrived.
“We’re really going to be at this all day, aren’t we?” she muttered.
Gan nodded, and Emily wondered what the boy had done to receive this task. Fudo had said he was a fair man. What crime was worthy of peeling potatoes all day? It must not have been too terrible because they weren’t working on a latrine, but surely it must have been noteworthy. Potato peeling hardly seemed fitting work for the nephew of a man in Fudo’s position.
Then again, perhaps she had it all wrong. Maybe this was a lesson in humility for Gan, or perhaps a certain expected task that most samurai went through. After all, Takeo was here beside them, dutifully peeling away without complaint. For a moment, she thought herself ungrateful and that there was no shame in the job she was doing.
Still, it was rather boring work, and that complaint was coming from a girl who’d worked on a farm for the first sixteen years of her life. In the end, Emily decided not to voice these questions and thoughts. She had the feeling they would only embarrass Gan, and the boy seemed to have a hard enough time mustering the courage to speak at all.
There were other things to preoccupy her mind, thankfully. For one, there were new samurai guards watching them. Four in total, though only two were seen at any one time. One was a man with a handsome face and bright, yellow hair that took Emily a couple of blinks to turn from. His hair was particularly distracting because it was so at odds with the rest of the army. Emily was slow to realize it, but it seemed that every native person from Juatwa had dark hair. Some had hair darker than night, like Takeo, but a few others ranged to the lighter side with strands of dark brown that shined when the light hit them just right. Precious few had anything close to Emily’s light brown, almost auburn hair, except this single samurai who watched them from a distance. With such a vibrant, stark yellow, he might as well have been naked for all the distraction it provided. She wondered if the samurai painted his hair or if he was truly born that way.
Yet Emily exerted great effort and roped her curiosity for the sake of respect. She was a foreigner in a foreign land who seemed to be having enough issues making friends without intentionally antagonizing people.
You are among minotaurs, she told herself. Respect, honor, courtesy.
And patience. With patience, she could save all her questions for Takeo when they got back to their tent. That was, of course, assuming she could get a word out before her heart’s desires shut out her ability to think.
They received a break for lunch, which was welcome but entirely too short. They worked until the sun sat just above the trees, and the light started to dim before a kitchen cook came bursting into view to say that they were freed and dinner was now being served. Emily ate with aching fingers, a sore behind, and a sobering, disillusioned understanding of what being part of an army was like. When she left, following Takeo and Gan back to their tents, she took a handful of rice with her to munch on. It was plain and dry, like the bread she had grown up eating all her life, and brought a sense of nostalgia with it.
Back in the tent, she shared some of it with Takeo, and they talked as they held each other close.
“Be honest with me,” Emily said. “With the size of this battle, how much of a chance do we stand to survive?”
“I don’t know.” Takeo ran his fingers through her wavy hair. “I’ve never fought in a battle this large either.”
His fingers caught on a tangle, and she tried to hide her grimace. He noticed, though, and went slower the next time through.
“Can you give me your best guess?” she asked. “I just want to know how many more nights I have with you.”
She wouldn’t mention running from the fight. That was beyond them for many reasons. Not only was defeating Katsu their entire purpose for coming to Juatwa, but the samurai that watched them made it clear that Lord Jiro did not fully trust them. If they ran from this battle, he might well think they were rushing off to warn Katsu; and then they would have no allies anywhere, and Lucifan’s fate would be out of their hands.
Emily wouldn’t allow that. Her life had been given to her by an angel, and she would not cheat that gift, no matter the odds she faced.
“Honestly, it all depends on where we’re placed,” Takeo said. “The nearer we are to the front lines, the more danger there is. Also, if Katsu does attempt to flank us with his komainu-mounted troops, then the flanks will be equally dangerous. And, worse yet, Fudo has made it clear we are intentionally playing bait, acting as part of the personal guard to Lord Jiro’s son.”
“Wouldn’t that make us safer?” Emily questioned. “To make it seem legitimate, Lord Jiro will have to place us somewhere safe, like the back of his army.”
“You’re probably right,” Takeo said. “If I were Lord Jiro, that’s what I would do, but not for the reasons you think. Our unit will be placed at the army’s back so that Katsu will be tempted to divide his forces and attack us from that end. I have no doubts that Katsu will take the bait, and that means we’ll be front-line fighters, just in the back of the army. It will serve to cut off our retreat, but it will also trap Katsu, and when the Old Woman arrives, she’ll crush whichever man she intends to betray.”
Emily traced a finger down Takeo’s chest to touch his abs once more. She liked them a lot. They were hard and had defined ridges, and the strength he had in his core helped instill a feeling of security in her heart, among other things.
“So, you’re not convinced the Old Woman is on Lord Jiro’s side either?” she said. “Why is Lord Jiro so sure, then?”
“Because he has to be. His arguments were good, I’ll grant him that, but it troubles me that Katsu is as equally convinced of Xuan’s loyalty to himself. I think they are both being played and that the Old Woman intends to join whichever side is winning when she arrives.”
“Well then,” Emily said, “we had better make sure that it’s us.”
When they awoke in the morning, it was to loud voices and the movement of many bodies. Emily’s eyes fluttered open, and her ears rang clear.
�
��What’s going on?” Emily muttered.
“I don’t know,” Takeo grumbled and arose from their cot.
He went to the flap and poked his head out. Emily rubbed her eyes and tried to listen, but Takeo’s conversation with whomever he stopped was unintelligible. A few moments later, he returned to take a seat on the cot and rest his arms on his knees.
“They’re packing up,” Takeo said. “We’re heading out tomorrow morning.”
“To battle?” Emily asked, sitting up. “Tomorrow? They’re packing up now?”
“It’s a large army. It will take us all day to assemble and be given our orders. Katsu will be there before us, so we’ll have to arrive prepared to fight.”
Emily flopped back on the cot and touched her fingers to her forehead.
This is really happening, she thought. I’m honestly going to do this.
And not just her. Along with the rest of the camp, she and Takeo set to dismantling the infrastructure required to house thirty thousand soldiers. Their tent was struck and packed, and their cot folded and tucked in with the luggage caravan. They each received a backpack, the rations for the rest of that day and the next, and a canteen of water, and then they were given their orders from Fudo: to take their place among his men with Gan right beside them.
Perhaps most interesting of all, though, was that Emily finally got to see, up close, a komainu, the fabled beast Takeo had foretold they would face. It was being hitched to a wagon and seemed both content and well trained as it only moved when commanded to do so. Emily paused before tossing her folded-up tent and cot into the wagon, taking more than a few long breaths as she stared at the size of the beast.
Four legs and as tall as a unicorn, the komainu was heavily built. Its legs, paws, and head were massive, and its jaw hung open as it constantly panted with a long tongue that was as wide as Emily’s waist. Drool puddled under its drooping tongue, and it shifted constantly as if it had difficulty remaining still. The huge, shaggy mane that grew from its neck shook and waved with every twist of the komainu’s head. Emily noted that she could easily fit half her body into its mouth, and that its teeth were large, pointed, and interlocking. It was quite a sight to behold.