Child of Vengeance (43 page)

Bennosuke found his body snapping toward Goto’s in a wickedly quick motion, and then the blunt point of his sword lanced up and connected with the base of the other man’s throat. There was a hollow, meaty impact, and for a moment the man looked angry and surprised before his body realized what had happened and he dropped to one knee, wheezing.

It was a moment of shock everyone shared, not least Bennosuke himself, so quick had been the thrust. Something he had thought had perished forever within him had seized control of his body for that instant—pride. It would not let him lose, not even a meaningless thing like this, not even when he wanted to. The boy cursed himself inwardly.

“Throat—valid strike,” said Kumagai, and he took another loud gulp of his water. “Looks like you’re down a pair of gauntlets, Goto.”

Bennosuke tried to keep his face still as the men dispersed.
Kumagai remained, looking at him for a long while. The samurai said nothing, and Bennosuke tried not to look at him, but he could not help but be aware the glimmer in the man’s eyes had grown. Eventually the samurai nodded at the boy, his cheek dimpled slightly, and then he too was gone.

I
t had carried on through the months, bravado and wounded pride and simple boredom driving people to challenge him. Piece by piece he had upgraded his armor until he had cobbled together the suit he wore today—hanging oblongs of shoulder and thigh guards, a proper helmet with a neck and face guard, much finer than those of most men of his age.

The others glowered, of course, stripped of cuirass or greaves, but they could not deny his skill. They resented and admired him. He was their champion stranger, the best among and apart from them.

There in the Sekigahara morning they nodded and he nodded, and that was all the comradeship between them; without a word Bennosuke followed them to where they were starting to congregate around Kumagai. The boy fell in toward the back, letting men sidle past and around him, for he could see well enough over their heads.

Kumagai was oblivious to them for the moment. He was perched on top of a platform, a construction of bamboo and wood that was supposed to function as a guard post, squatting as he held a burning length of match cord to a dark metal tube. A few moments later a single rocket shot upward out of it. It vanished almost instantly, swallowed into the gray void above them, and through the cloud eventually came the sad little pop of the explosion.

“Agh … Do you reckon anyone saw it?” Kumagai asked the man he shared the platform with. The samurai could only shrug in response, and Kumagai rubbed the back of his neck pensively. “This is going to be interesting to organize.”

He rose, turning, and as he did so he seemingly became aware of the men assembling before him. The samurai grinned at them, spread his arms wide.

“Well,” he said, “I trust you’ve heard?”

“They couldn’t have come yesterday, could they?” called someone from the crowd, mirth in his voice. “This bloody fog.”

“We are not in command here,” said Kumagai, playing along. “We can see to the end of our spears—what more do we need to concern ourselves with?”

“Are we really advancing?” came another voice, a little more somber though far from grim. “We’re fortified here—should we not let Tokugawa come to us?”

“That would be sound if we were united, but you know it as well as I—treachery looms,” Kumagai said, quite freely. “I believe our most noble Lord Ukita is trying to force the issue, engage battle before any further deceit can worm its way into the hearts of lesser men.”

“Which lord is false?”

“Who knows? All of them perhaps.” Kumagai shrugged. “In any case, we go forward as an example to others. Even if we are surrounded the light of our courage will shine for generations. Our most noble Lord Ukita has always been a man of logic, has he not?”

The men barked an assent; Bennosuke kept his mouth shut. Something in his stomach was twisting. War, he had thought, was supposed to be as considered as a poem. The general made his commands carefully, knowing the full extent and risk involved. This was how it had been since the days of ancient China. You could not play a game of shogi if you did not know the pieces … or the layout of the board, or even the other players.

From behind the lot of them there came a great cry to make way; a band of cavalrymen scores deep cantered by in single file, riders bent forward so that the banners strapped to their backs did not get entangled in the branches of trees. Kumagai looked at the mass of them wistfully for a moment—there had been no time to retrieve their horses—and then his thin face twisted into a bitter grin as he screamed at their backs.

“Enjoy it!” he howled, and his eyes were glimmering as his voice broke into laughter. “Enjoy it, you lucky bags of shit!”

Bennosuke watched the samurai, this leader of men, as he capered above them all and the knot in his stomach grew further. It had been with him since he had seen the scale of things, and it had grown like
a tumor as he realized how seemingly chaotic this all was and how inconsequential he was in it. It was a strange and arrogant dread, but he could not deny it.

Overcome
, the boy told himself,
ignore it
. That was a human fear, and he had sworn to be a soldier, and soldiers obeyed.

In the wake of the cavalry came another messenger on foot, bereft of any armor and seeming small following the warhorses. He scrambled to a halt before Kumagai’s platform. The man bowed, and then kept his hands on his knees as he snatched words between the heaving of his lungs.

“Apologies, Sir Kumagai,” he gasped. “Orders … No time for written command, no chance for the proper signaling.”

“There is nothing to apologize for—I am already all too aware of that,” said Kumagai, still grinning, and he tapped the tube the rocket had launched from with his foot.

“Our most noble Lord Ukita comes himself, such is his bravery,” said the messenger. “He asks that you lead your men downward and form up in squares at the foot of the slope below the forest. Await further instruction there.”

“We go alone?” asked Kumagai.

“No, no,” said the messenger, and he grinned in savage anticipation. “We all go. A great day beckons, does it not? Our most noble lord and his closest allies, the Akaza, the Uemura, the Shinmen, and the Nakata, side by side. Tokugawa will drown in his own dead.”

Kumagai snarled an affirmative, and then the messenger hurtled off once more to find the next officer. Somewhere drums had started beating, deep blows struck on tanned cow skins splayed as wide as the spread arms of a man, counting out the time to thousands of warriors as the orders filtered through. A host shook itself into life, and the ground itself seemed to shake.

Seemed to shake. Bennosuke could not tell for certain if it was from actual footfalls, or if hearing one name had simply made him feel as though his bones were vibrating.

The Nakata were here.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

They marched downward three abreast, each clutching a spear before him. Bennosuke was alongside Kumagai, as he had been for over a year—the boy had become the man’s foremost bodyguard. Since perhaps even that first duel with Goto in the fort, Kumagai had understood Bennosuke’s ability with the sword, and it was a matter of duty and expectation for the superior to be guarded by the best. A mute protector, a dog with its tongue cut out; Bennosuke played the part well.

Onward, downward, all of them trying to keep time to the drums that pounded. The incessant sound came like a distant heartbeat through the fog, but the ground was churned and slick with dew and men stumbled and slipped and rattled the straight-edged blades of their spears against one another. The boughs of the trees above formed a gray tunnel of sorts, and to battle they went like an eel burrowing into the seabed.

At one point the tunnel revealed to them a samurai hanging from the boughs of a tree like a monkey wrapped in metal and lacquer, and he howled at them as they passed, a crazed look in his eyes and a mad grin across his lips.

“U! Ki! Ta!” he shouted, gesticulating in time with his fist.

“Hwa!”
spat every samurai in response.

“U! Ki! Ta!”

“Hwa!”

“U! Ki! Ta!”

“Hwa!”

Such was the noise that Bennosuke could feel his helmet vibrating on his head. It hummed into his skull and made his skin tingle,
and the sound only grew and grew as more and more men took up the cry all across the slope. Dozens of tunnels, dozens of columns of men and horses grim or terrified or exultant.

One such column appeared to their side for a few moments, samurai trooping forward at an angle to that of Kumagai’s men. The color was murky in the foggy gloom, but their livery and their armor were burgundy. Bennosuke’s heart leapt, and his hands fumbled to put the mask of his helmet up and across his face, as though at that distance the Nakata might suddenly recognize him out of all the men here.

Beside him Kumagai turned at the boy’s sudden motion, and then grinned as he saw the sliver of Bennosuke’s face that was left visible between the brow of the helmet and the dull, curved iron of the faceplate.

“Ought to keep your mask off, Musashi,” he said. “Air will start to stink during the battle, you should enjoy it while it’s fresh.”

The boy barely heard him. He watched the Nakata samurai until their pathways diverged and they were gone, obscured by tree and fog once more.

He didn’t know why he was so shocked. Of course the Nakata would be here. Every lord was here. But that he would see them had not occurred to him until now. That shade of burgundy, as dulled as it was in the mist, awoke things in him. Shame, of course, was paramount, but something else was beneath that; something hard.

On they marched, and soon the trees began to thin before they vanished entirely, leaving a wide and gentle slope before them. Kumagai held his hand up, and his men followed him, fanning outward to march ten abreast. They happened across a line of archers without a shielding unit in front of them, and so they halted there and stood waiting in a loose square, their spears bristling.

It took time for the thousands of others to emerge from the forest and to find their places, but slowly they did and silence began to fall. The air was still, the banners held in hands or born upon backs motionless. Bennosuke realized that the mist was thinning, or perhaps the light was waxing stronger with the rising of the hidden sun, and that gradually the distance he could see was growing.

Ranks and ranks of warriors behind him, faces as gray as the fog, but he was not interested in them. A conch blew high and undulating,
and then what he sought revealed itself: out of the forest came the lords.

There was a gaggle of them and their bodyguards, all on horseback. They were beautiful in a way, befitting of sunlight proper and not the dank vista that awaited them. The armor they wore were things of master craftsmanship that had been marveled at by unknown thousands, adorned and covered by overjackets and capes of finest silk that held patterns within patterns. Above them jostled the right angles of banners bearing clan insignia and prayers written a thousand years ago, these prominent above the crests of their helmets that were shaped like crescent moons or the antlers of stags or hung with brilliant white horsehair.

Ukita was at the head, resplendent in a saddle like a throne, with five banners proclaiming his lineage arrayed behind him like a peacock’s tail. The others formed themselves around him—Lord Akaza, whose livery was black; Lord Uemura, whose livery might have been a dark green but was obscured in the low light; Lord Shinmen, who wore that familiar shade of blue; and there, at the edges, the Nakata.

Bennosuke could see nothing else, and some part of him that had long lain dormant was suddenly rapt and trying to see if Hayato rode among them. But the mass of lords were armored, distant, obscured by fog and bodyguards, and there was no way to tell where one burgundy man began and another ended, let alone if one lacked an arm. The boy peered on as Ukita in turn scanned his forces, and then sent a handful of his adjutants to ride up and down the lines to ensure things were in order, the formation suitable.