Child of Vengeance (39 page)

“Musashi,” called Kumagai, and gestured for him to ride alongside him. The man’s voice was muffled behind his snarling mask, his eyes barely visible. “Don’t do anything stupid, you understand? This is dangerous. Stay with us. You fall and you’ll not be walking away. The last thing I want to do is bear a lad with a mashed head home. That’s … dishonorable.”

“I’ll be fine, sir,” said Bennosuke.

“Stay with us, don’t even think of going for the ball,” said Kumagai. “I’ll look out for you. Don’t get any stupid ideas of glory into your head.”

“I understand,” said Bennosuke.

“Good lad,” said Kumagai, and he laughed. Bennosuke thought he could see the glint of an eye in the dark holes of the face guard. “Rare fun, this.”

They rode on. A familiar shade of blue lay up ahead; Lord Shinmen’s riders stood, finishing their preparations. Bennosuke recognized some of their faces, most of all the young samurai who had struck Munisai’s head from his shoulders. None of them seemed enthused, grimly looking back at Ukita’s men as they passed. Kumagai snapped his head down in a battlefield bow, which was returned without luster.

“Surprised they’ve got the nerve to show their faces,” said one of Kumagai’s men once the blue samurai were behind them. “It’d take more than a wooden ball to get back their honor.”

“The pride of Munisai Shinmen,” said another, and there was cruel laughter.

“Silence!” barked Kumagai, fiercely whipping around to face them in his saddle. “They are allies of our Lord Ukita, I remind you!”

“More’s the cursed pity,” someone muttered. Kumagai pretended not to hear it.

BENNOSUKE LET HIS
horse fall back into the body of the pack and glanced sideways at the men who had spoken. He was not angry with them. What they had said was proof that what he was doing needed to be done. The boy put his right hand to his left wrist, and he felt the hardness of the knife even through his armor.

They rode into a bottleneck of men and horses that waited to be allowed into the arena. Above them, on a platform that had been erected over the main gateway, a man stripped to the waist continued a steady beat upon the large, burnished gong. Bennosuke felt the hairs on his body stand on end, the reverberation scintillating as it counted onward, counted downward.

THERE WAS NO
check for weapons; that would be insulting. Men and horses shuffled flank to flank under the gong and then into the
field proper, which was enclosed by a palisade of burgundy and white material. Bennosuke felt a stab of apprehension as he took took it all in, the arena a lot smaller and the number of riders a lot greater than he had anticipated.

Men called greetings to one another as they sat waiting in their clan groups, the bamboo slats of their banner poles cracking in the gentle wind. Around the outside of the palisade, onlookers had gathered, jostling one another for position while the children they held on their shoulders giggled and waved.

A lordly platform overlooked the field, large and tiered. The lords sat highest upon it, and arrayed below them in descending importance were the lesser nobles, consorts and wives, dignitaries, and guests of the court. To Bennosuke they were nothing but distant balls of seated, colored kimonos, but he could guess who sat highest of all even without the hint of his burgundy attire.

Let me meet Hayato before that platform
, Bennosuke prayed.
Let him have a good view. Let the old man see blood
.

What seemed to be the last of the competitors rode in. Men waited as their steeds nervously hopped from foot to foot. The horses could sense the anticipation in the air. Samurai twisted in their saddles, clutched their reins tighter, looked to one another, and smiled maniacally. It was war without weapons.

A drum roll beg an, a dozen men pounding on the heavy taiko skins from somewhere unseen, and the sudden thunder sent a pulse through both man and beast. A cry of salutation went up from men outside, and then into the arena came Hayato and his bodyguard. Their dozen horses were identical purebred stallions large and black and fierce, their banners adorned with streamers of paper and silk that curled and fluttered like the trail of comets behind them.

Bennosuke saw Hayato Nakata as he passed, he and his men riding the circumference of the arena once to bask in adulation. The young lord had his helmet off, and though he did not seem comfortable he made an effort to smile and look heroic, waving to the crowds with the one hand he had. The stump of his other arm was concealed artfully by his armor, and a man rode close enough on either side of him to keep him steady.

The boy’s mare whinnied slightly as she felt her rider tense.

The Nakata rode to a halt somewhere toward the center, no doubt awaiting the ball to be thrown to them. Bennosuke did not take his eyes off their banners, gaudy and standing above all others. The drums came to a climax, and then there was emptiness until a single man appeared alongside the still gong. He gave a long and wordless yell, and the sheer strength of his voice was impressive. It carried across the ground as well as the drums had, and he held the note until all were looking at him.

“Hail, our esteemed regent Hideyoshi Toyotomi!” he called once he had their attention, raising one fist theatrically in the air.

“Ten thousand years!” yelled the mounted samurai in return, their voices a unified bark.

“Hail his majesty, the sovereign of heaven, our emperor!” called the man.

“Ten thousand years!” screamed the samurai once more.

“And hail our benevolent and noble Lord Nakata!” bellowed the man finally, his voice breaking with the force he put into it.

“Ten thousand years!” came the uncertain reply. That was a prestigious list Nakata had placed himself at the head of, and the samurai were caught between courteousness to their host and sacrilege.

The herald began to explain the rules of the game circuitously, his language honorific and unwieldy even if he had been merely speaking. Screamed as it was, it took some time simply to say they should get the ball out and through the gate upon which he was standing. As he howled, it occurred to Bennosuke then that as they had no weapons, Hayato’s men would not strike him down instantly. They would wrestle him from the horse and bind him, and then images of prolonged torture at the clan’s leisure came to him. He remembered the misery and terror he had felt within the straw helmet. That he did not want to know again. He would have to plunge the dagger into his own throat once Hayato was dead.

It was not seppuku, but good enough. Having made that decision, to be the master of his own fate, he suddenly relished what was to come. What had been welling in him peaked—he was terminally alive, and he locked the far bobbing banners of the Nakata in his sight.

Another man clambered up alongside the herald. He was huge
and bared to the waist, a heavy ceremonial rope hung with paper folded into lightning bolts tied around his belly. In one hand he held a sling, and in the other massive palm he held the ball. The orb was polished, dark wood the size of a human head, tied with red streamers, and the object of everyone’s sudden attention. The herald dropped to his knees and watched as the giant wrapped the ball in the sling and then let it hang by his shins.

The giant waited for expectant silence, and then he began to rotate the ball with the slightest movement of his wrist, the circular motion almost insignificant. But at that gesture the samurai kicked their horses and began to trot around the arena following the direction of the ball’s spinning. Gradually the slinger began to increase the size of the spin and watched as the horsemen spurred their horses faster in time.

“Follow my lead,” said Kumagai, not looking back at his men. “We stay on the outskirts until I say otherwise.”

When the giant could swing it no wider one-handed, his arm out by his side, he began to pass it around his body from one hand to the other. A grin broke over his face as the horses below him started to canter. Hoof fall began to drown out any other sound, and the world became a myriad of colors for Bennosuke as the banners flicked between one another and the horsemen began to press inward. His mare whinnied and kicked as she was buffeted.

“Ukita!” screamed an unseen rider from beyond them, his voice passing quickly. “Ukita! Eat shit!”

“Knock that bastard from his horse, whoever he is,” growled a samurai ahead of Bennosuke, the man taking his eyes away from the ball for but a moment to try to spot who had shouted.

Atop the platform the giant took the sling in both hands and began to spin his body now, around and around. Men stood in their saddles as their horses broke into a run. Tighter they became, Bennosuke’s stirrups meeting the flanks of other horses and the feet of other men. Ukita’s samurai pressed around him, shielding him. A human yelp came from up ahead, brief and stolen quickly downward, and then their horses stumbled for a moment over something beneath them.

The slinger put the force of his huge back into it, hunching his
shoulders. It was an impressive piece of skill for a man of his size to balance on so small a platform as he whirled, the ball almost straight before him. Now the gallop began, and the noise of hooves became that of a pounding, white-foamed river, relentless and overwhelming and driving forward, always forward.

With a yell the slinger committed to the final rotations, ball dipping high to low, and then he released it. It sailed high into the air and flew like some rogue eclipsed sun, a hundred pairs of gauntleted hands reaching up toward it like pagans at prayer. A great roar went with it, from the riders, from the crowd, and from the lordly platforms. It arced and then plunged into the midst of the riders, gone from Bennosuke’s sight, but the boy felt as much as heard a sudden frenzy from somewhere within the press of men.

“Keep riding! Not yet!” yelled Kumagai, standing and straining to see. Bennosuke spared every glance he could to see how close they were to the Nakata. The burgundy men must have been near the center of the melee, for they barely seemed to move. The tips of their banners became as the polestar, a firmament around which the boy could gauge his frantic rotations.

“Ukita! Ukita! Die!” came a sudden fierce cry from ahead. A rider appeared as if from nothing against the flow of men, his horse wide-eyed and frothing in terror and the samurai’s face much the same in rage.

There was a frantic instant of parting for the wild charger, and then he was among them, his arm out trying to hook someone, anyone wearing Ukita colors, from their saddle. Bennosuke’s body froze, and all he could do was watch dumbly as the man struck him across the chest before vanishing into the mass behind them. The boy tumbled backward, the reins knocked from his hands. For a second he hung in a failing, flailing equilibrium, and then he felt his foot come free from the stirrup and his body begin to plunge into the stomping mass of hooves below.

A hand locked around his ankle before it passed entirely over the flank of the horse and he was lost, and then another Ukita samurai leaned down and wrenched the scruff of his armor up. Together the two men managed to right the boy without breaking pace, and gratefully
Bennosuke clasped the reins once more and slung his body close to the horse beneath him like a drowning man holding driftwood.

“You all right?” barked one of the men to him, and all the boy could do was nod.

“Anyone see who that was?” screamed another.

“Just bloody watch for him again, we’ll get him if he comes back!”

Bennosuke ignored them, focusing on his balance. He was panicking, his equilibrium impossible to find once again, and all the while the banner kept catching in the wind, threatening to whip him from his mount. The hours he had spent practicing in the past two weeks seemed for nothing. Bennosuke hung on grimly, until he saw Kumagai suddenly slash his hand across and point toward the center.

“Now! Let’s go! Come on!” he screamed, and wrenched his horse into a turn.

He had spotted an opening through the swirling outer rings of riders to the eye of the whirlpool, and he and his thirty riders plunged into it in a loose arrowhead. The impact that they made as they collided with the central mass of bodies drove the wind from man and beast, a shared exhalation of pain. Kumagai’s horse rose and clambered over another in desperate panic, knocking the rider off, and onward they all scrabbled over a floor that writhed.

There was no galloping in the center, barely any motion at all. They pushed on and forced other men around them, moving at the whim of the tide of crowd. Here, trapped in the crush, there were as many riderless horses as there were those still guided by men, and what samurai were left were in the frenzies of violence, wrenching and punching. It seemed to Bennosuke that this must be a glimpse of a hell of some sort; a press of bodies and flesh so tight, and nothing but animal terror and human hate between them.

“There!” barked Kumagai, his voice breaking with laughter as he pointed. “The ball!”

A young samurai had the darkwood ball clasped to his chest, his knuckles white around it as other men clawed at him. His horse was not moving, held tight by those around it. Behind him, Bennosuke saw burgundy advancing. The Nakata were going for it too.

Achingly slow, fighting for every inch, the Ukita turned their
horses and began to try for the ball. But their collective will was irrelevant; they were a mere part of a mass that heaved and pulsed with desires and plots. They became entangled, their horses buffeted and spun like leaves on a river, and then suddenly another group of men were intersecting with them, pushing through them.

Someone grabbed at Bennosuke from behind, fingers hooking around his shoulder. A samurai was falling, seeking any purchase to try to save himself. He was not Ukita, and his fingers were gouging and tearing at Bennosuke, clutching at his helmet and then his face, his eyes, his mouth. The man was heavy, Bennosuke was off balance, and then the two began to slowly sink together.

The boy was lying almost straight across the back of his horse before he started hitting the man, lashing out with his elbow and the back of his fist again and again. The man could not see where the blows were coming from, and he swore and cursed in confusion and pain, but he held on. Bennosuke bit down on the fingers in his mouth and tasted blood as he desperately tried to wrench himself up, twisting his body and hauling upon the reins.