Spirit of the Ronin

by Travis Heermann

  Battles between the defense boats and the first lines of ships dotted much of the entrance to Hakata Bay. The ships still coming in from the open sea had turned east.

  At that moment, a thick weariness washed over him, and he swayed for a moment. His mouth was parched, dry earth. No more ships were approaching.

  He shimmied down the rigging and ordered a brief rest. The men pulled out rations of dried fish and drank from the ship’s stores of fresh water. Standing amid the ubiquitous, headless dead, they rested, bandaged their wounds, caught their breath.

  Ken’ishi climbed the rigging again.

  The rest of the fleet continued toward the east, but now he saw their destination. They had landed on Shiga Island and on the north side of the sandbar connecting Shiga to land. Black clusters of men and horses swarmed over the narrow spit like angry ants, coalescing into massed units. More ships were heading east, up the coast toward Munakata.

  There was no wall protecting Munakata. The Shoni clan was prepared with troops there, but they would have to fight the invaders without the advantage of fortifications.

  He tried to discern how the defenders were faring around Hakozaki, but could see nothing except that the ships were still close to shore.

  And then he spotted a contingent of some thirty ships that had withdrawn from the shore and were heading this way.

  “We must get out of here!” Ken’ishi called down to the deck.

  “Why?” Kagetora said. “We’re winning!”

  “Because they’re coming back.” He pointed at the oncoming vessels.

  Kagetora shielded his eyes and followed Ken’ishi’s gesture.

  As Ken’ishi climbed back down, he said, “That could only mean they have failed to breach the wall. Our defenses are holding, but by the time those ships reach us, they’ll be ready for revenge.”

  “Then we’ll fight!” said another man.

  Ken’ishi said, “We’ve fought well today. But we succeeded only because we were able to isolate individual ships and bring them down, like wolves on a lone stag. We cannot stand against a full assault.”

  “You fear to die?” the man said, frowning.

  “I’ll not die a dog’s death,” Ken’ishi said. “Best to take our trophies back to our lords and fight again tomorrow.” Then he added with a smirk, “Besides, if we take any more heads, our boats will sink beneath us.”

  The men laughed.

  Kagetora agreed with Ken’ishi’s assessment.

  They set fire to their most recent conquest and oared themselves out of the path of the oncoming ships. Five of the ships tried to pursue, but they were like lumbering oxen trying to catch a fox.

  It was sunset when Ken’ishi’s flotilla reached shore, a day of blood and victory behind them, but the battle was far from over.

  * * *

  Kazuko and the Scarlet Dragons reached the defenders’ camp on Shiga spit an hour after sundown, where they found several hundred samurai and ashigaru, bloodied and weary, but steadfast. The land leading toward Shiga spit shifted from forested hills to scrub and sand dunes. The defenders camped among the dunes, bathed in the light of their cookfires.

  All along the spit were anchored the invading ships, and their campfires formed an open, blazing path all the way to the island, where more fires burned. Both armies camped in full view of the other, with nothing between them but a few hundred paces of open sand.

  The ships themselves were of at least a dozen different types and sizes, two- and three-masted Sung traders alongside smaller but more nimble Koryo vessels. Out on the water, the deep-drafted behemoths waited quiescent, lanterns glittering like fireflies across the expanse of sea.

  Inside Kazuko’s armor, her clothes felt like sodden rags, bunched up in uncomfortable places; but thoughts of comfort must be put aside. They would all be sleeping in their armor tonight.

  With the horses picketed and munching on sacks of millet, Kazuko could rest for a little while. Eventually, the Scarlet Dragons’ baggage train caught up with them, and the servants were able to prepare a meal of fresh rice for the exhausted fighters.

  The women kept their campsite away from the men. Lord Tsunetomo and his other officers had thought it most prudent. Men did dangerous things in war, bestial things. All knew but no one spoke of what would happen to the women if captured by the enemy. Moreover, there were still many who believed that bringing women to war would bring ill fortune, especially if any of them had their moon’s blood. Keeping the women separate would reduce the chances of unpleasant encounters. If moon’s blood had come for any of her women, they did not tell Kazuko, and she did not ask.

  In war, there was blood enough for all.

  After she and her sisters had eaten, after their mounts had been cared for, she crossed the hundred paces of starlight and sand between her camp and Soun’s heavy lancers. She wanted to talk to him about the day’s events. Yamazaki-sensei often said that after-battle reflection was as important as the planning.

  As she approached the campfires, the men gossiped about the days various victories and near defeats. For the first day, their defenses had held. They had turned aside every attack except at Shiga Island and Genkai Island, which both lay now in enemy hands.

  And then she heard a name she had not in almost five years.

  She approached the man who said it.

  He started as she stepped out of the dark. “Lady Otomo!”

  He and all the men around him knelt and bowed.

  “Did you say ‘Captain Ken’ishi?’” she said.

  “Yes, Lady,” the man said. “He has returned. He commanded one of the boats today.”

  Her heart flipped over, and she chided herself for it. “That is good news. His strength is much needed. How did the boats fare?”

  “We lost some, but won more. They were not expecting us to fight ship to ship. If not for them, we’d have had it much harder on the wall today.”

  “And what of Captain Ken’ishi?”

  Another man said, “I heard he took more than a dozen Chinese heads today, all by himself.”

  So many in one day was all but unheard of. He had not let his martial prowess slip while he was away.

  “Don’t worry, fellows,” said the first man. “We’ll have all the heads we can carry tomorrow.”

  Another man said, “I heard that the Takezaki men captured a general on one of the ships and brought him back for interrogation.”

  She nodded in appreciation of all these exploits, but there was still a lump in her throat she could not swallow. “The gods and fortunes have smiled on us today. Now, where is Captain Soun?”

  “Among five kinds of warfare, war for justice and war for defense are used by noble men. War out of anger, war out of pride, and war out of greed are not used by noble men; they are used by small men.”

  —Kaibara Ekken

  Yasutoki dragged the watchman’s dying body behind a stack of barrels and wiped the blood from his dagger on the man’s robe. The man lay limp in the dark, gasping like a gaffed fish, clutching weakly at Yasutoki’s clothes, a second mouth squirting a dark stain onto the storehouse’s earthen floor.

  Another guard paced back and forth at the opposite end of the storehouse, clinging to the puddles of lantern light.

  Yasutoki, on the other hand, moved through the shadows between the stacks of bagged rice and millet, barrels of salt fish, bales of seaweed, and baskets of early-season vegetables.

  One of the advantages of being Tsunetomo’s advisor was that he knew the location of all the defense force storehouses. He knew their guard schedules and their contents. He also knew the locations of the guard posts around Hakozaki. The guards at three of those posts now lay dead, in no particular order or strategic location. His attacks had to appear random.

  Yasutoki was pleased with how his skills were re-emerging after many years of stagnation. And oh, his dagger was sharp. The last guard had died without a whimper.

  His first attack earlier tonight had nearly gone awry.
The poisoned shuriken had missed. If the target had not been more confused than alarmed, he might have cried out before Yasutoki hit him with another. Fortunately, the guard’s companion had been pissing behind a house, and returned just time to have his throat cut from behind.

  When the defenders of Kyushu discovered that “spies” had murdered guards all over Hakozaki in the dead of night, a new level of fear would sweep through them.

  Yasutoki would not be able to make contact with the Khan’s generals or offer any sort of intelligence, but he was still the Great Khan’s loyal saboteur.

  He would only be able to get away with such deeds easily on this one night, however. After as much mayhem as he intended, he would have to lie low for a while. After tonight, guards would be tripled or quadrupled. No one would sleep. Vigilance would be at its height.

  Until it flagged, as it always did. People could not remain so vigilant for long. Complacency was inevitable. And in that complacency, he would re-emerge to strike again.

  No one could predict what would break an army’s will. The pressures and hardships were so numerous that any smallest thing, piled high upon so many other difficulties, could destroy an army’s morale.

  Now, four days into the fighting, the defense had been so fierce the onslaught had drawn to a stalemate. Tsunetomo’s forces, including Kazuko and her horse women, had stymied the Mongols at Shiga spit. Ken’ishi and his boatmen had taken to nighttime raids against anchored ships.

  Another Mongol force had sailed north and attacked Munakata, but the defense forces there had driven them back yet again. There were rumors that Koryo ships had been spotted near Moji and Dan-no-Ura, but one could not believe everything.

  Yasutoki made his way like smoke and shadow toward the lit portion of the storehouse.

  Between target locations, he replenished the poison on each of his shuriken.

  At the Hour of the Ox, in the darkest depths of night, his associates would finish the job he had started at two other storehouses. But he had to act before the guard shifts changed.

  In the seven years since the destruction of his underworld empire, Green Tiger had managed to reclaim a few pieces of his old territory, enlist a few choice henchmen, and now had a comfortable stream of coin finding its way into his hidden coffers. But he was ready to give it all up again to see Mongol rule. The Golden Horde was brutal and merciless to its enemies, but those who submitted could find ways to excel within the new order of things.

  This watchman looked like a simple-minded peasant. Yasutoki had of course approved the use of peasants as guards, instead of warriors. Their lack of education and discipline made them easy targets.

  A quick flick of his wrist, and two shuriken pierced the guard’s throat and face. The guard stiffened and then fell limp, allowing Yasutoki to dart forward and slash his throat.

  It was almost the Hour of the Ox.

  He untied a jar of oil from his black obi and poured it over a stack of rice piled against a wall, taking care to splash some onto the wall as well.

  Then he took down the lantern, set the oil aflame, waited to make sure the flame caught, and then faded into the dark city. He paused a safe distance away to watch the storehouse burn. Before long, flames and smoke bloomed from the roof.

  He found an area on a low hill that afforded an excellent view of the town, climbed to the crest of a house roof, and lay down to watch.

  The firewatch appeared with a cacophony of clappers and gongs to raise the alarm. Fire was a worse enemy to any city than a barbarian horde. Especially when few townspeople remained in Hakozaki to fight the fire. The women and children had fled south in great, weeping caravans. The men and older boys remained, most of whom had been impressed into defense units and labor gangs. After a day of hard fighting, many of them had collapsed with exhaustion near their posts on the wall.

  The response to the fire would be slow.

  And then a flickering glow appeared across town. Another fire.

  Yasutoki tingled with satisfaction.

  All that remained was...

  The third storehouse erupting into flame.

  For almost an hour, Yasutoki watched all three conflagrations, watched the fire crews scurry helplessly, watched samurai on horseback shouting ineffectually, watched great quantities of food disappear in columns of smoke.

  The Mongols out on the sea must be watching this and smiling with wonder.

  Pleasures like this allowed Yasutoki to forget the painful coal in his belly, for a while.

  It was a good night.

  Finally, with dawn drawing nigh, he made his way back to Lord Tsunetomo’s encampment and to his tent.

  He had slipped out a hidden flap in the rear of the tent, out of sight of his two bodyguards. But on his approach to the tent now, he saw that both of them were gone. Abandoning one’s post at a time like this warranted execution.

  He circled to the back of the tent, keeping to the shadows, and slipped inside. In the gloom, two dark lumps lay across each other in the center of his tent. He froze at the thick scent of blood.

  He whipped out his dagger with one hand, shuriken with the other, dropped low and slid around the tent in a circle, searching the shadows.

  No attack came.

  Gray dawn lightened the walls of the tent, filtering inside.

  Yasutoki put away his weapons and lit a lamp.

  His two bodyguards lay arranged like cordwood. He tipped one’s chin back and found the throat had been slashed almost to the spine. The other had taken a blade through the eye socket. The center of his tent was a great pool of purpled, half-congealed blood. These killings had taken place at least an hour ago.

  His brain reeled. How could he explain these two dead men in his tent when he was supposed to have been here with them?

  Then he noticed that one of the reed mats, similar to tatami, in the corner beside the tent flap lay in slight disarray. The blanket looked twisted, as if by footprints. Leaning over the blanket, he saw something else that turned his blood to ice.

  A single kernel of rice.

  The assassin had waited here for him to return. Long enough to grow hungry and eat a rice ball, only to be driven away by the approach of dawn.

  The camp would come to life soon. Before it did, and before the day’s next attack came, he had to construct an explanation for these deaths. He could not move them far, and he could not hide the massive bloodstain where they lay.

  “When on the battlefield, if you try not to let others take the lead and have the sole intention of breaking into the enemy lines, then you will not fall behind others, your mind will become fierce, and you will manifest martial valor.... Furthermore, if you are slain in battle, you should be resolved to have your corpse facing the enemy.”

  —Hagakure, Book of the Samurai

  “We hold the bay,” Lord Tsunetomo said, “but they hold the sea.”

  Captain Tsunemori said, “Captain Ken’ishi, your boats have kept many wolves from our door.”

  Ken’ishi bowed. “Mine is but one of many.” He could not help but think about how many of his men had died on their forays, how many replacements as well, and the thousands who had perished in scores of boats.

  At this moment, he had no idea how he was keeping the weariness at bay. Four days of fighting. Four days of blood. His entire being felt chafed raw and squeezed empty.

  The cloth walls of the maku hung slack in the pre-dawn stillness.

  Captain Tsunemori laughed. “You are the most modest samurai I have ever encountered.”

  “It was not always so,” Ken’ishi said. “My time with Lord Abe has...changed me.”

  “At least it has not slackened your sword arm. You’ve brought back enough heads to populate a village.”

  Ken’ishi could not find a way to be joyful about that, even though it was the Warrior’s Way to present one’s lord with the trophies of his prowess. But Lord Abe had called each person a universe. Ken’ishi had destroyed a great many universes. “We have lost many
boats as well. The barbarians’ are skilled with their thunder-crash bombs. Success often depends on what kind of troops our target is carrying, Mongols, Koryo, Jin, or Sung.”

  “And your assessment of the reason?” Lord Tsunetomo said. His voice sounded as if he already knew the reason.

  Ken’ishi had been present for all of the strategic planning since he rejoined Tsunetomo’s forces. He had striven to absorb as much as he could, as well as recall Yamazaki-sensei’s wisdom. “The Mongols are the toughest. They are steppe-bred barbarians, fanatically loyal to their Khan. The Sung are well-equipped. Their armor is thick, and they are seasoned and hardy after twenty years of fighting the Mongols. But they still live in the shadow of their defeat. After they surrendered, the Khan offered them amnesty if they would fight for him, but they still bear the stain on their honor, the defeat in their hearts. The Jin and the Koryo have long been subjugated. They are here because they were ordered to fight, like the Sung. The Mongols are here because they wish to be.”

  The Jin were the people of northern China, subjugated by Khubilai Khan’s uncle, Ogedei, and grandfather, Genghis. The King of the Koryo could hardly refuse his father-in-law Khubilai Khan’s demand for troops and ships.

  Tsunetomo nodded in agreement.

  The kami had been a dull, unceasing roar in Ken’ishi’s mind since the first ships appeared, like the constant, crashing waves of winter, such that the sudden blare of intensity staggered him.

  A guard slipped into the enclosure. “My lords, Lord Yasutoki is here.”

  Ken’ishi’s jaw clenched.

  Yasutoki entered the enclosure, eyes flicking around its occupants, brushing over Ken’ishi as if he were not present.

  “My lord,” Yasutoki said, “something terrible has happened. The two yojimbo stationed outside my tent have been murdered!”

  Lord Tsunetomo jumped to his feet. “Murdered! Were you attacked?”

  “No, my lord. Thank the fortunes, but I was out of my tent.”

  “Where were you?”

  Yasutoki looked embarrassed. “Forgive me for my rudeness, my lord, but my innards have not been well these last few months. I visited the latrine late last night, and I was away from my tent for a little while. When I returned, my guards were dead.”