“I haven’t bathed in weeks.” Aside from a quick dip in the sea.
“That’s not what I meant. You don’t smell like unwashed human. You smell like unwashed...something else.”
Ken’ishi took a deep breath. “I know.”
Hage’s gaze held upon Ken’ishi for a long time.
“I am still myself,” Ken’ishi said.
“I’m unsure that’s desirable. You would be much better off if you were someone else.”
The double-edge of Hage’s words rattled around in Ken’ishi’s thoughts for a moment, until he caught the twinkle in Hage’s eye. Then he laughed.
They rode together in companionable silence for a while. Then Ken’ishi realized what a comfort Hage’s presence was. Then he realized that his only true friend in the world was a tanuki. Then he laughed again. It felt good to laugh.
* * *
Ken’ishi heard the battle before he saw it. It was late afternoon when the distant crackle of the enemy thunder-crash bombs echoed over forests and hills. Tsunetomo’s cavalry was still a ri distant.
When they finally rounded the skirt of a forested hill, they came upon a pitched battle raging across a patchwork of rice fields, the only flat places available in a valley between forested mountains. The valley stretched down toward the rocky coastline of Imari Bay. Hundreds of ships choked the bay, but not floating separately. The entire fleet had been lashed together, hull to hull, in lines and blocks forming great floating walls. Beyond these walls, the dark hulk of the island of Takashima lay like a smoking wreck. Dozens of plumes of black smoke rose from the island, smudging the clear, blue sky.
From this elevated vantage point, Ken’ishi could see the wreckage of small boats littering the sea between the lashed ships and the shore—the remains of hundreds of defense boats. No enemy ships burned, but instead pounded the shore with thunder-crash bombs.
The tactic that had saved Hakata Bay did not work when the enemy ships were bound together to create an immense floating platform, where the high bows and sterns were the only point of attack and men could move freely from ship to ship to repulse boarders. One look at the profusion of wreckage made Ken’ishi doubt that many of the defense boats remained in Imari Bay.
On the distant beach, ships disgorged wave after wave of troops.
Orders rippled down Tsunetomo’s column to form ranks. Drums thundered and conch horns blared.
Between the cavalry reinforcements and the shore, lines of spearmen and archers faced close-packed lines of Sung infantry. Beyond those, masses of Mongol horsebowmen poured swarms of arrows into the defenders. Bodies littered the battlefield in all directions.
Tsunetomo marshaled all of his cavalry, some two hundred warriors on horseback, holding his iron war fan high. Upon it, the writhing red dragon of his house encompassed the apricot blossoms of the Otomo clan.
The column deployed from the road, several clans’ worth of cavalry fanning out into large units, and together they marched closer to the battle. The muddy rice fields sucked at their horses’ hooves, an entire valley’s crop trampled.
Hage rode alongside Ken’ishi. “Let’s stick together, eh, old sot? We’ve made a fine team before.”
Ken’ishi smiled and nodded, his breast filling with joy and anticipation of battle. Silver Crane thrummed at his hip.
“But if you ever grab my tail again,” Hage said, “I’ll turn you into a toad.”
“I saved your life then.”
“It was undignified!”
“Vow never to turn me into a woman again, and we shall be even.”
Hage laughed, eyes sparkling. In his antique-style armor, wearing a tachi of even older style than Silver Crane, he looked like a warrior from a long-ago century.
Crossing the valley toward the battle took longer than Ken’ishi expected. The horses sank to their knees in the soft mud. The terrain would hamper any full-out charge. Only two narrow roads afforded easy approach to the battle, too narrow for the cavalry to make an effective mounted assault.
The rear defending units spotted the newcomers’ arrival, and a cry of jubilation echoed through the valley. Drums pounded and horns blasted out with renewed vigor.
The too-familiar stench of battle and death wafted toward Ken’ishi, even two hundred paces from the fighting.
Silver Crane’s thirst crawled into Ken’ishi’s belly and coiled there. His breast tingled with pleasure, like warm, sensuous fingers stroking him, trailing down to his groin.
The force of Mongol horsemen crashed into the left flank of spearmen. Even slowed by the mud, they plowed into the ashigaru like an axe, splitting them, pummeling them under the muck. In moments, that flank would crumble.
“There!” Tsunetomo roared, pointing with his fan. The Otomo cavalry surged toward the collapsing flank.
The Scarlet Dragons swung wide. Ken’ishi knew this maneuver. They would use the Mongols’ own tactics against them, harrying the corners of the enemy unit with arrows, then charging in with naginata if the opportunity presented. The Mongols would not dare swing to attack the Dragons with a mass of heavier cavalry bearing down on them.
The mud made keeping ranks difficult. Their front grew ragged as they approached the rear of the collapsing block of ashigaru.
At Ken’ishi’s side, Silver Crane began to sing with joy, the music of clashing blades, the rhythm of a thousand heartbeats pounding as one. This rhythm seeped into him, drawing his own heart into this cadence.
Now was the time for arrows, and he joined his comrades in emptying his quiver at the Mongol horsemen, even as the spearmen were ground to bits under hooves and swords.
But the appearance of Tsunetomo’s cavalry was too little too late. The courage drained from the nearby ashigaru, and they began to fall back.
Faces ablaze with bloodlust and victory, the Mongols crushed the last of the spearmen into the mud and charged toward Ken’ishi and Tsunetomo’s cavalry. Ken’ishi hurriedly slung his bow, drew Silver Crane, and aligned Storm to meet them. The rest of the men dressed their ranks and moved toward the enemy horsemen.
Then with a roar from Tsunetomo, they charged forward.
Ken’ishi’s vision became a narrow tunnel, and at the end of it, a single enemy warrior snarled at him. His sword arm tingled with Silver Crane’s thirst and with power. Storm’s hooves slurped through the mud, and he huffed with the effort, lurching with each step.
The two units crashed together with far less force than if the field had been dry, more like a slow melding of lines and combatants. Screams and war cries filled the air like thousands of battles before and after. Ken’ishi’s first adversary was driven backward off the saddle by Silver Crane’s powerful, one-armed thrust.
As Silver Crane began to bite and sting, to sever and hew, its voice rose in his mind. I am the Way to power, unto the end of the world! Its voice seemed to drown the screams of the dying or swallow them like elixir.
The silver threads of destiny coalesced in his vision, glimmering into the expanse of future and distance in an infinitely complex weave, through the men struggling for their own futures, through the earth, into the sky, through wisps of cloud. The intricate pattern of it all formed in Ken’ishi’s mind.
And then, he saw it all.
The defenders would lose this battle.
The Mongols would gain a foothold on Kyushu, here on the shore of Imari Bay, and their sheer numbers would sweep the defenders before them. From here, they would crush Hakata and overrun Dazaifu.
The barbarians would subjugate Kyushu, and from there launch attacks on Honshu, working their way east, ri by ri, until the capital, and finally the bakufu in Kamakura, knelt at the Great Khan’s throne.
The throne of skulls Ken’ishi had seen once in a vision.
Tsunetomo would die, spitted on a Sung halberd.
Ken’ishi would die, pierced by a hundred arrows.
Kazuko would die, raped to death by a thousand leering barbarians.
No.
With a fis
t, he seized a handful of threads, invisible to everyone else, and tore them asunder.
A thunderclap echoed across the battlefield that was not from a bomb.
The man takes his destiny in his fist and shakes it at the gods.
Every muscle in his body trembled with power, filled to bursting with the excess of it.
The Mongols fell before him like dogs before an enraged boar, spilling blood and entrails in every direction.
All around him, Tsunetomo and his comrades fought and struggled, hand-to-hand, face-to-face, shoulder-to-shoulder with tanuki and foxes they thought were men. The tanuki fought with tenacious strength, and the foxes with deceptive dexterity. In the clouds of silver filaments, Ken’ishi knew them all.
Silver Crane drank and drank and drank.
And its power grew and grew and grew.
Ken’ishi seized another fistful of threads, twisted and wrenched, and the world tore open in a deafening fusillade of thunder and blinding light.
The sky darkened. The cottony wisps of cloud turned to smoke-like smudges, thickening, coalescing.
But no matter how many Mongols and Sung he laid low around him, more surged up from the rear.
A cry of alarm vaguely registered in his mind.
He shook an enemy from the tip of his blade and pulled his awareness back from the abyss of slaughter. Across the field, another mass of perhaps fifty Mongol horsemen swung toward the Scarlet Dragons, driving a wedge between the Dragons and the rest of Tsunetomo’s forces, a wedge that spilled out wider until there was no path for the women to reconnect with their comrades. Several women already lay motionless in the mud, bristling with arrows.
Kazuko’s naginata flashed in the graying light, pointing toward a hill.
At the base of the hill, a red-painted torii arch stood among ancient trees, beyond which stone steps climbed into the foliage out of sight. A shrine lay at the top of the hill.
Even from this distance, Ken’ishi could see that Kazuko knew she was cut off. Her only options were to retreat or be annihilated. But if she retreated, her unit would be pincushioned with arrows before they reached the shelter of the forested shrine hill.
With the hundreds of enemy troops between Ken’ishi and her, he would only be able to watch it happen.
“The dragon is a creature with the ultimate positive energy, so much so that it can fly in the sky without wings. Yet it usually remains curled up in supremely still waters. This is how a man with a heart of true martial courage constantly cultivates himself.”
—Kumazawa Banzan
Barely in time, Kazuko saw the second mass of Mongol horsemen pounding across the fields toward her, loosing storms of arrows as they came. Two of her women went down, then two more. The power of the short, recurved Mongol bows could punch an arrow through a do-maru.
The second unit of enemy horsemen filled the gap between the Scarlet Dragons and Tsunetomo’s heavy cavalry, expanding like a wedge, pushing the Dragons farther away from their comrades, threatening to envelop and destroy them. The only direction to go was away.
The arrows kept coming. She saw Mongol bowmen clutching three arrows in their drawing hands, firing in quick succession with only a heartbeat between each shot.
She had to get her women under cover. They would be cut to pieces. To die now would be a dog’s death.
With her naginata waving high, she pointed toward a shrine hill perhaps four hundred paces away. “Fall back!”
The women obeyed her without question, turned, and spurred away. Only twenty of her Dragons remained. But first she had to move faster. She guided her mare up onto a dike between rice fields, where the ground was solid. The horses were mud from hoof to hock, but the moment they climbed onto the dike’s footpath, they leaped to greater speed. She spurred her horse toward the hill. Arrows disappeared into the mud around her. The mare’s eyes shone wide, and Kazuko leaped her over irrigation canals and gates. They quickly left their pursuers behind, except for a few who followed onto the dikes. Without their overwhelming numbers, individual Mongol riders, savage as they were, posed far less threat than a massed onslaught.
A Scarlet Dragon’s horse screamed in pain and tumbled off the dike into the mud with several arrows in its back and rider.
Kazuko spurred her mount to greater speed. The others had formed a single-file line behind her.
The pursuers fanned out along several other dikes to prevent her from circling back toward Tsunetomo’s heavy cavalry. Arrows sliced toward the Dragons from several directions now.
Two more women went down, each loss a stab in Kazuko’s heart. She had to get them out of range. Three more. They were down to fifteen.
And still the enemy came, harrying them with arrows.
In the distance, the first mass of barbarian horsemen still held Tsunetomo’s heavy cavalry engaged.
The Dragons were on their own.
They were twelve when they finally emerged from the maze of rice field paths and galloped toward the bright-red torii arch at the base of the hill. She hoped the kami would forgive her for bringing death to their doorstep.
From the torii, stone steps made a path straight up the hillside. In the distance, the shadowed red of another torii sat at the summit of the steps.
The pursuers paused fifty paces away and loosed another swarm of deadly shafts. Their aim was lethal. Five more of her Dragons or their horses went down. Some were only wounded, but the pursuers would make quick work of them. Yuko shoved herself from under her fallen horse, snatched up her naginata, and braced herself to face the enemy.
“Get under the trees!” Kazuko called.
But Yuko twirled her weapon in defiance of the enemy. “Up the hill, my lady!”
Within heartbeats, the Mongols fell upon her. She took one out of the saddle with a perfectly timed swipe that split his chest like a melon, then another.
Kazuko’s quiver was empty.
Ten paces away from Yuko, a Mongol drew his bow and took aim.
Yuko saw it coming, with only a moment’s resignation on her face before the arrow shot through her skull.
The remaining handful of Dragons spurred their mounts up the steps. Two more women screamed and fell at the foot of the steps. The clatter of hooves echoed in the tunnel of lush greenery that smelled moist and alive. The canopy shielded them from further arrows.
Five horsemen came into view in the mouth of the torii. Two of the women who still had arrows fired downward, taking one of the enemy out of the saddle.
The horsemen leaped the bodies lying in the torii and charged up the steps, two abreast, eyes gleaming with savage anticipation.
Kazuko’s horse stumbled, almost lurching her out of the saddle.
It was then she saw the arrow protruding from its hindquarters.
With a nicker of pain and exhaustion, the mare’s rear leg buckled. Kazuko leaped off before the horse could fall and crush her. The mare stumbled into the greenery and fell. Kazuko spun her naginata and faced the oncoming foes.
Firing arrows uphill under the low-hanging canopy was difficult, but the barbarians’ marksmanship sent another of her women crashing onto steps with an arrow through the eye. The riderless horse plunged off the steps into the woods, crashing through the underbrush as it went.
Up and up Kazuko and her last two mounted women climbed; up and up the four Mongols pursued.
“To the top!” Kazuko shouted. They would fight from the level ground above. The advantages of a higher position and the length of their polearms might be enough. She plunged up the steps.
Reiko, a stocky, square-shouldered woman of nineteen, and Yukie, a twenty-eight-year-old widow of the previous invasion, spurred up after her, then spun atop the steps to face the oncoming enemies under another torii.
The Mongol ponies whinnied and kept coming.
Reiko said, “It has been an honor, Lady.”
The two mounted women traded glances, squared their mounts, and plunged back down toward the enemy.
Thei
r charge sent two Mongol ponies and riders sprawling. Naginata flashed and slashed. One of the mounted men tumbled away, missing half his face.
The last man hopped up to plant both feet in his saddle and then launched himself at Reiko. His powerful swing caught her in the shoulder guard and knocked her sideways out of the saddle. He plowed into the horse, and the horse tripped over Reiko, and all three went down in a grinding tangle of panicked mare.
One of the unhorsed men leaped out of the bushes and stabbed Yukie through the side of her do-maru. She grunted in pain, but reined back, pulling herself off his sword point, then splitting his skull with the last of her ebbing strength.
The horse knocked over by the Mongol’s leap thrashed back onto his feet, cut and bloodied. Both the Mongol and Reiko lay broken and twitching against the steps.
Clutching her side, Yukie turned her horse back up the steps and gave Kazuko a wan smile.
Then the last Mongol staggered out of bushes to Yukie’s left and plunged his sword into her thigh. The startled horse leaped aside, throwing off Yukie’s feeble return stroke.
Kazuko ran back down, only twenty steps from them. The Mongol sword split the head of Yukie’s horse, and it flopped onto its side. The side of Yukie’s head slammed against the edge of a step and her face went slack, eyes staring.
Kazuko stopped five steps away.
The Mongol yanked his sword out of the horse’s head, then spun on her, his face a vicious sneer. He looked her up and down and licked his lips, said something that sounded like a taunt in his own tongue. In his eyes, she saw all the things he would do to her, all the things he would cheer his fellows to do.
She leaped forward with a shrill kiai, dredging all the power she could muster. He raised his sword to block her blow. The naginata blade severed his wrist and, through armor and all, cleft him diagonally from shoulder to hip.
Gasping for breath in the sudden silence, she blinked and steadied herself, then assessed her plight.
All the horses were dead, fled, or injured beyond help. Yukie and Reiko were dead. The rest of her Dragons lay scattered between here and the ongoing battle below. The forest muffled the din of battle. Doubtless the rest of these Mongols waited at the bottom of the hill.
Spirit of the Ronin Page 39