Child of Vengeance (45 page)

Moments passed as they weighed each other up, and soon Seibei realized Bennosuke’s intention. Grudgingly, he changed his stance, raising his sword to a position to strike rather than to hover defensively by his side.

It became a test of nerves then. They inched slowly toward each other on agile feet shaking with anticipation, prepared to dodge or strike in any direction. Bennosuke heard his breath growing faster in his ears, but gradually he realized he could feel neither the surging of his lungs nor the pumping of his heart.

The more he focused on Seibei’s sword, the more a serene detachment came over him. Closer still he drew, entranced by the blade, the blood upon it, the detail of the hilt’s guard shaped like a dragon chasing its tail, the moment now was all there was and he was alive in that moment, and so death

could

never

find

him

in

this

void

and then Seibei snapped. The Yoshioka samurai lunged forward, swinging his sword down. Bennosuke ghosted to one side, the blade glancing off the armor on his chest, and before the man could raise his sword again Bennosuke grabbed his wrist and barreled into him with a speed free of the burden of thought. His weight and his strength separated man from sword, and Seibei staggered backward.

There was a heartbeat then, when Bennosuke found himself remembering Munisai’s words of the honesty before death. Seibei looked Bennosuke in the eye with a proud dignity, no fear or anger there. Just an instant, though, so quickly gone—Bennosuke brought his longsword up, hands trained for years wielding a weapon refined over centuries, and in one great sweep took his head off.

He was surprised by what a small, sad, easy thing it was to do. Seibei was alive and proud one instant, and then he was two separate things of meat and bone and hair. The man’s head bounced free, and his body crumpled onto the earth. In the silence that followed Bennosuke turned to Tokugawa’s army.

“That’s it?” he said in genuine surprise. “That’s the Yoshioka school?”

As the sensation flowed back into his body, he looked suspiciously
down at Seibei’s remains. He felt almost guilty how easy it had been to beat the man. He had his answer quickly: blood was seeping out from under Seibei’s waist, dark and arterial. The second challenger’s spear thrust. The Yoshioka champion had been too proud to admit the wound, had chosen to face Bennosuke faint and lamed, and now he was dead.

He wanted to feel regret, but the cheers of Ukita’s men reached him then. It warmed him, kindled something within him: the visceral thrill of victory. It surprised him, the magnitude of it, even though he had known this base pride in his swordsmanship had always been humming insidiously away beneath his higher sensibilities.

Sympathy vanished for Seibei, twisting into contempt for the man’s idiocy. Behind his faceplate a skeletal grin broke across his face, his eyes glimmering far worse than Kumagai’s ever had. He looked back across the army as they worshipped him. He was free of their burden now, the knot within him vanished. He was not some faceless part of it; they were they and he was he, an inferior whole and superior individual.

Bennosuke knew right then that he was worthy of everything, every adulation and glory that fate could bestow upon him. His eyes saw the burgundy banners, and he knew that whatever spirit that loved him had planned things out for him.

IN THE YEARS
that would follow, he would think back to what he did next and his stomach would turn with regret, embarrassment, and fear. It was so stupid, and even as he moved to stand before Ukita’s army he could hear the rational part of his mind screaming at him to stop. But his body was in the throes of triumph, and he knew with absolute certainty that at that moment he was invincible.

“Lord Ukita!” he bellowed, holding his sword above his head. The samurai thought Bennosuke’s cry was merely honoring their lord, and so they howled along with him, repeating Ukita’s name over and over.

“Lord Ukita! I have something to ask of you!” Bennosuke shouted over them to where the lord sat upon his horse.

Despite the din Ukita heard. He gave an order for silence, and
then he whispered something to an adjutant. It was this man who called to Bennosuke; obscene for a lord to raise his voice.

“Who are you to make demands of your most noble lord?” the man called.

“My name is Musashi Miyamoto,” he said. “But perhaps I am better known as Bennosuke Shinmen, the son of Munisai Shinmen.”

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 brains 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.