Indiana Jones and the Army of the Dead (11 page)

Batiste looked at the sky, which was clear. “We’ll get a rain shower later today, probably not much of one.”

“Well, we aren’t getting any younger,” Indy said.

And so they set off.

True to what Batiste said, the first couple of hours were easy going. The path through the forest was wide enough for three people to walk side by side, the dirt well trodden, and only the occasional spider’s web or creeper reaching from the woods on either side to impede their progress. Easier to walk around those than to bother cutting them.

He didn’t see a single snake, for which he was grateful and somewhat surprised.

Before noon, they had made what Indy would consider substantial progress. Of course, according to Batiste, they would walk eight or ten times the distance that it would take a bird to fly, so a four- or five-mile flight could easily become a thirty- or forty-mile hike, maybe longer; it would depend on what had to be crossed or circumvented.

Indy knew about jungle travel, and the shortest distance between two points might be a straight line in theory, but in practice that was seldom how you got to do it.

Just once, he’d like to arrive at the site of an archaeological trove, drive up on a nice paved road, collect what he’d come for off a shelf without even having to bend down for it, and go back to his vehicle and drive away. No spiders, scorpions, crazed Nazis, ancient knights, curses, or walking dead. No snakes. Just once . . .

The way his adventures had gone, he wouldn’t be at all surprised to look up one day and see a spaceship full of little green men from Mars dogging his heels . . .

He smiled at that image.

As they moved farther from the village, the route narrowed and grew more twisty. The damp-earth and pollen smell of the rain forest intensified. From other, more pungent scents, Indy knew their path had been an animal trail at some point—and that you needed to watch your step. The largest animals here, Marie had told them, were wild pigs, going to a couple hundred pounds and nasty in a pack, but apt to run rather than fight. It was easier to follow the crooked path they created on their meanderings and step carefully than to cut a straight new path. Much easier. He had bought a new pair of leather gloves at the store, to help prevent blisters once they had to start swinging sharp blades to clear their way, but even so, that was hard and sweaty work, and he wasn’t looking forward to it.

Still, so far it wasn’t so bad, all things considered.

A moment later it was as if they were standing in some god’s shower stall. A tropical frog-drowner, so heavy you could barely see ten feet, and accompanied by lightning, thunder, and wind.

If Batiste thought this wasn’t much of a rain, Indy didn’t want to see what he thought was a hard one.

Batiste came over. He had to yell to be heard over the spatters against the forest’s greenery. “We should stop, put up a tarp!”

“Little late to worry about staying dry!” Indy yelled back. But he had a point. Walking in the dark or during a downpour like this was risky. Easy to step into a hole or trip on a root when you couldn’t see it.

Dry socks was the other thing they didn’t tell you about in school. Indy always tried to bring two or three pairs, stuffed into a waterproof pouch for just such situations as this. Always room for socks . . .

Blisters on your hands were one thing; on your feet, they were ever so much worse. It was sometimes the little things that made a hard trip bearable.

Yamada worked out, alone in the rain.

They were in a small clearing next to a trail, and he was completely soaked, so moving around under the cloudburst didn’t make him any wetter.

Their quarry was perhaps half a kilometer away, but they could be a hundred meters and not know it. The rain assaulted the ears, the eyes, the skin . . .

He raised his wooden practice sword, the bokken, into a basic two-handed guard, shifting his weight forward, his right foot leading.

Ready . . .

Kendo was, technically, the way of the sword, though that art was done mostly with bamboo or wooden blades. Iaijutsu was with the live blade and designed for combat, not to strengthen one’s spirit, as a
do
usually was. Yes, it was true that an archer who trained diligently in kyudo could hit a target with his arrows, but cultivating one’s Zen mind was not the same as skewering one’s enemies. Yamada would rather have an angry and excitable archer who could hit his target every time guarding his back than a Zen master who was unruffled, but couldn’t shoot straight.

Here, in this tropical hole with the rain pounding the verdant jungle and blurring everything into a torrential gray, Yamada, alone outside the hastily erected tents, did his practice with a wooden sword. No need to expose his precious real blade to such elements unless it was necessary.

He faced an imaginary opponent and lifted his wooden blade high for the cut to the head.

He brought the sword down, hard, drawing back a bit, wrists locked, one hand behind the tsuba, the other at the end for leverage.

“Hah!” The sound was guttural and harsh, not particularly loud against the backdrop of the rain rattling the trees and fat-leaved bushes. It wasn’t volume that mattered in the kiai, in any event, but focus. A strong enough kiai had been known to stun an attacker into immobility long enough that he could be cut down.

Had a real attacker been there and this wooden sword been sharp steel, Yamada would have bisected the head to the chin. Even with the bokken, such a blow would have cracked a skull and knocked a man senseless.

In kendo, there were restrictions on where a cut or stab could be offered. The proper targets were the top and sides of the head, the right wrist—but only if upraised, so as to allow blood from it to flow into the eyes—the ribs, and the thrust to the throat. Seven targets, no more. Very stylized. Wearing armor, using bamboo blades—shinai—one might get a bruise now and then, but there was no real danger.

In real combat, there were no limits—you could cut a man off at the ankles or stab him in the groin if you could manage it. Victory was more important than form—though form must be considered. It was possible to do both.

Now Japanese soldiers fought with guns in combat, like other modern armies, and had for a long time. The sword was still carried onto the field of battle, however, and used now and again to dispatch one’s enemies.

Wrapped in protective oilcloth in his tent, Yamada had his family katana, wearing the army’s cheap furniture and looking like one of the machine-made blades issued to the troops. Many officers did as he did—re-dressed a revered family sword in the handle and guard and sheath of the issue weapon, and tossed the cheap steel blade away. Yamada’s katana was four hundred years old, gleamed like a mirror, and had been hammered and folded by a master smith in a time when such a weapon was worth a year’s pay. You could see the layers in the polished steel. The hamon—the temper line that gave a hard edge backed by a flexible body—was called cranes-in-flight.

His sword was as beautiful as it was deadly. The sword was the soul of the samurai.

Only a man ready to die would charge a machine gun with nothing save a sword. After the machine gun was blown up by a grenade and the wounded enemies taken prisoner?

A wounded and soon-to-be-dead-anyway captive could be used to practice one’s stroke. Any idiot with a strong arm and a sharp blade could lop off a man’s head; an expert could slice through the bone and muscle but leave a small bit of skin at the throat, so that the head stayed connected to the body. When someone had elected—or been ordered—to commit seppuku, once the belly was slit, it was appropriate to allow a friend or relative acting as a second to finish the job by taking the head. But—for the second to allow his stroke to completely decapitate the suicide? Well, that was bad form. And practice on living tissue was, in these modern times, harder to manage. At the height of the samurai period, a man allowed to wear the two swords could pick anyone of low status he wished and kill him for any number of reasons, and because he felt like it and needed the practice was enough. No one would blink at such a thing. When a man was hungry and sheep were there, who would speak for the sheep?

Since the wearing of swords had been banned sixty-seven years ago by the Meiji emperor Mutsuhito—a black day, that—the samurai class had been effectively destroyed. Yamada’s grandfather had been the last in his family to wear both wakizashi and katana, and Yamada remembered the old man’s stories of how many samurai had taken their own lives on the day the order banning swords as public wear had gone into effect.

“Mutsuhito was possessed of an
akumi,”
the old man had told a wide-eyed Yamada when he’d been a boy of but six or eight. “He was not the real emperor, though none dared say so aloud. A powerful evil spirit infested him and bade him destroy the samurai class, and this he did.”

The old man would always spit on the ground at this point, and such an action inside the house irritated Yamada’s mother no end, but there was nothing she could say about that, either. Her husband’s father was not to be berated for such things by a woman.

“Never forget, little Hajime, that you are a samurai, no matter what anyone says. You must learn the code of
Bushido
and live by it.”

Yamada had nodded, and he had made some effort to keep to the code. He had learned the arts, martial and intellectual. He could compose poetry, draw with ink and brush; he had even helped cast his own tsuba, the brass guard for his sword, a blade that had belonged to his grandfather, and his grandfather’s grandfather before that.

And yes, he had, a few times, availed himself of captives, or even condemned Japanese criminals, to practice his cutting. His sword was a three-body blade, which meant it could slice through three men stacked one upon another. Inscribed into the tang of the blade, hidden under the handle, along with the name of the smith and the season the sword had been made, were the date and name of the man who had performed the body test. Three men had been used. Sometimes it was done with corpses, but in this case the tang recorded that the men used in the test had been alive.

There was a story his grandfather used to tell, about a certain condemned samurai who knew he would be used for cutting practice thus. Denied the right to commit suicide, the night before, the man had gone into the sand garden outside his home for a final meal. He was not kept in prison, of course, Hajime’s grandfather had told him, for although he had been forbidden to take his own life, his honor had been sufficient to assure that he would turn up on the appointed morning scheduled for his death. But for his last meal, he had sat down and slowly and carefully eaten several pounds of smooth stones. Enough to fill his belly from top to bottom.

“Stones, Grandfather? Why would he do that?”

The old man had smiled. “Because,” he’d said, “he knew that the enemy who had caused his downfall planned to stack him atop other condemned men to blood his new sword. And that the traditional strike is to the belly, below the ribs and above the hips. A well-forged blade would easily cut through human flesh and a living spine, but a cut powerful enough to bisect two, three, or even four men stacked up on one another? That would take a most sharp blade and a strong arm. And if such a hard cut was swung at a pile of rocks? It would break the steel . . .”

The old man’s laugh stayed with Yamada for a long time. “How clever was that?” he had asked. “The perfect samurai revenge. How clear his mind was, to think of that.”

“Did it?” the young Hajime had asked. “Did the sword break?”

“Oh, indeed! I myself was a witness to the execution. The owner of the blade was an arrogant bastard—rumored to have had family come out of the merchant class—and his katana was a thing of great beauty, forged for him by one of the premier smiths of the day at great cost. It was his pride, and he meant to demonstrate it to the world.

“Shattered as if it were made of glass when it hit. The condemned samurai died slowly, bleeding from the cut that did get halfway through his belly, but he died with a smile on his lips. Later, when it was found out what he had done, condemned men used for sword testing had to be specifically forbidden from swallowing rocks . . .”

Yamada shook his head at the memory. Yes, while some men would be nervously composing their death-poems, the unnamed samurai had been methodically preparing his revenge. What calmness of mind and spirit that had shown.

His own sword was a powerful blade, Yamada’s, and he had used it to release half a dozen souls from their flesh. He was a doctor, and he could heal, but he was also a samurai, and he could kill. Whatever was needed.

He turned, the rain pouring over him like a waterfall, to face another imaginary enemy—

—and saw in the trees a face that was not the least bit imaginary. Watching him.

Without a second thought, Yamada raised his wooden blade and charged at the watcher—

Gruber would have pressed on once the rain began, but he was quick to realize that the American, Englishman, and Japanese wouldn’t be doing so; and since he had to stay behind them and far enough back to avoid detection, then stop they must.

He was eager, but he did not wish to behave rashly.

He was drenched, his clothes soaked, and the tarp that had been quickly stretched and angled with ropes among several trees sagged under the weight of water that sluiced over the lower edge in a continuous sheet, like a waterfall on a river. The men laughed and joked, but it rained big here, and the lightning and thunder came close together—flash . . . boom!—so you knew the strikes were nearby, and when such happened, the laughter stopped before it nervously began again. The captain had forbidden smoking, and just as well—the gusty wind drove rain under the tarp, and cigarettes not kept in a tightly capped tin would have been too wet to light. But it was warm enough, the rain, the only good point connected to it.

Gruber sipped from a flask of schnapps and watched as the water runoff from the tarp dug a trench in the muddy ground. This would certainly make walking more like slogging until it dried up.