The Way Of The Sword (25 page)

He wasn’t allowed to.

‘To reach the top, you have to climb a mountain step by step,’ the High Priest had told the six Circle entrants prior to commencing the Body challenge. ‘You will experience pain on this journey, but remember the pain is only a symptom of the effort you’re putting into the task. You must break through this barrier.’

But Jack was finding the pain too great to overcome. He’d been running for over half the night. He was hungry and weak from exhaustion; the energy from the pitiful last meal was already burnt up and he had visited only fourteen of the twenty shrines he had to reach before dawn.

Jack stumbled on.

But the fifteenth shrine was still nowhere in sight. Surely he must have passed it by now. He began to question whether the Two Heavens could be worth such physical punishment and all the momentum from his body ebbed away as his mind took hold, coaxing him to stop.

‘Climb the mountain and
satori
is yours,’ the priest had told them.

Jack no longer cared for enlightenment. All he wanted was a bed and to be warm and dry. He felt his pace almost grinding to a halt.

This challenge was impossible. How was he supposed to find his way along mountain trails, made treacherous by the rain, in complete darkness? Somehow he was meant to cover a distance equivalent to crossing the Channel from England to France, with only a paper lantern to light the way and a tiny book of directions to guide him to each of the twenty shrines.

There was no chance of taking a short cut, since the shrines had to be visited in a set order and his book stamped with an ink woodblock to prove he’d been there. Jack wished he had someone else to follow and encourage him on, but each entrant had been separated by a short period of time measured by the burning of a stick of incense. He was alone in his suffering.

Without food or sleep, he wondered whether
anyone
would get to the temple’s main shrine before the first light of dawn struck the eyes of the wooden Buddha.

Despair had Jack in its grip and it weakened the last threads of his determination. His foot struck something solid and he went tumbling forward.

Jack fell to his knees, defeated.

His lantern, miraculously still burning in the downpour, illuminated an old moss-covered gravestone. The whole trail, Jack had discovered, was littered with such burial sites, each one marking the mortal fate of a monk who had failed in his pilgrimage.

He looked down at the rope round his waist and the knife in his belt. That would not be his fate, however desperate things became.

Jack attempted to stand, but the effort was too great and he slumped to his hands and knees in the mud. His body had given up.

The Circle of Three had broken him at the first hurdle.

Jack had no idea how long he stayed there on all fours in the pouring rain, but deep in the recesses of his mind he heard Sensei Yamada’s voice,
‘Anyone can give up, it’s the easiest thing in the world to do. But to hold it together when everyone else would expect you to fall apart, now that’s true strength.’

Jack hung on to these words like a lifeline. His sensei was right. He must continue. This was his path to becoming a true samurai warrior. His fast track to learning the unbeatable Two Heavens technique.

Jack crawled through the mud.

He willed himself to rise above the pain in his legs and knees.

He had to complete the Body challenge.

He reminded himself that this single night’s task represented only one day of the Thousand Day Pilgrimage the Tendai monks had to complete as part of their spiritual training. The High Priest had told them that over a period of seven years, his disciples would run the equivalent of the circumference of the world. Only forty-six monks had ever completed this extraordinary ritual in the past four centuries, but the old priest was living proof that it could be done. He was the forty-sixth. If that old man could complete one thousand days, then surely Jack could manage one.

He lifted his head, letting the cool rain wash the grime from his face. In the darkness, a glint of light from his lantern reflected off the fifteenth shrine only a little farther up the path.

Don’t try to eat an elephant for lunch.

The phrase popped out of nowhere and Jack laughed at the absurd saying Sensei Yamada had given Yori. But now he understood.

By breaking down the course into smaller sections and tackling it piece by piece, perhaps he could finish the challenge. Jack focused on the fifteenth shrine as his first achievable goal. A trickle of energy seeped into his body and he got back to his feet. He took one unsteady step forward, then another, each step bringing him closer to his goal of the fifteenth shrine.

Reaching the shrine, Jack rejoiced and said a little prayer. The words filled him with optimism. With a renewed determination that masked his aches and pains, he stamped his book and set off down the path to his next goal, the sixteenth shrine.

He was running. He had broken through the pain barrier the High Priest had spoken of. But Jack hadn’t gone twenty paces when he spotted two red eyes glaring at him out of the darkness.

A strangled scream erupted from this devilish apparition and it charged straight at him.

Jack barely had time to avoid the bloody tusks as he dived for cover.

The wild boar thundered towards him, its head down to attack. The tusks slashed upwards, missing Jack’s left leg by a hair’s breadth. The animal careered past before disappearing into the undergrowth.

Jack lay there in the bushes, panting for breath. He listened to the hellish squeal recede until eventually it was drowned out by the storm. In his desperation to evade the wild boar, Jack had dropped his lantern and it now lay crushed and useless in the mud, its flame extinguished.

What was he to do now? It was the middle of the night and the dense forest meant he could barely see more than a few feet in front of him. He would surely get lost on the mountainside if he tried to find his way down in the darkness. And, he reminded himself, he was deep in ninja territory. His chances of finishing the challenge, let alone getting off the mountain alive, were minimal.

Having been the last to start, there was also little point in waiting to be discovered. If he stayed put, there was a danger of dying from the extreme cold.

His predicament couldn’t be much worse. Too tired to cry, he got angry instead. Getting to his feet, Jack stumbled onwards down the path.

He would
not
be defeated by this mountain.

He would survive.

He walked straight into a tree.

Jack cursed, but kept going. He remembered the lesson the Daruma Doll had taught him the previous year in
Taryu-Jiai
. Seven times down, eight times up.

Taking a moment to calm himself, Jack realized he should be using the techniques Sensei Kano had taught him in sensitivity training. With hands outstretched, he cautiously felt and listened his way through the forest.

For the first time ever, Jack began to appreciate what Sensei Kano faced on a daily basis, and his admiration for the blind teacher grew ten thousandfold. For the
bō
master, life was a constant struggle through a pitch-black forest, yet he took it all in his stride.

Having got his own troubles into perspective, Jack battled on.

Rounding a corner and heading down the trail, he noticed a flickering light in the darkness. As he got closer, Jack could hear a low moaning. He quickened his pace. He saw a figure lying in the mud and recognized Yori.

‘What happened? Are you all right?’ asked Jack, stumbling up to him.

‘A boar attacked me,’ Yori groaned, his face pale with shock in the glow of his paper lantern.

Jack redirected the light and inspected his friend for injuries. He discovered Yori had a large gash on his right thigh. It was bleeding badly and Jack knew he would have to get his friend off the mountain as soon as possible, if he was to have any chance of surviving. Jack ripped off the sleeve of his robe and tied it tightly round Yori’s leg to stem the bleeding.

‘Do you think you can stand?’

‘I’ve tried… It’s no use,’ gasped Yori, his eyes screwed up in agony. ‘Go and get help.’

‘I can’t leave you here. You’re already shivering. We have to get you off the mountain now.’

‘But I can’t walk…’

‘Yes, you can,’ said Jack, slipping an arm round Yori’s waist. ‘Put your arm over my shoulder.’

With great effort, Jack got Yori back to his feet.

‘But I’ll slow you down,’ protested Yori, ‘and you won’t complete the challenge.’

‘I can’t see where I’m going anyway. I lost my lantern to that stupid boar. So we need each other. Don’t you see, together we have a chance of finishing,’ persuaded Jack, smiling his encouragement. ‘Look, I’ll support you, if you hold the lantern to light our way.’

They took a few faltering steps and stumbled. Yori cried out in pain as they fell against a tree.

‘This is stupid,’ wheezed Yori. ‘We’ll never make it at this rate.’

‘We’ll make it. We just need to find our rhythm.’

Jack looked away before Yori could see the doubt in his eyes.

The lame leading the blind, thought Jack. What hope did they honestly have?

Jack and Yori were lost.

Having agreed that the safest and quickest way down was to follow the route that had been given to them, they’d been making good progress and had been encouraged by the fact that they’d found the next four shrines with little problem. But the twentieth shrine was proving elusive.

‘The book definitely says turn right at the stone lantern to reach the stream,’ said Jack.

Exhausted and frustrated, he was tempted to throw the guide away. They had reached a junction of four paths in the forest. Yet there was no mention of a crossroads in the directions they had been given.

‘So where’s the stone lantern?’

‘Perhaps we missed it?’ offered Yori weakly.

‘Wait here,’ instructed Jack, lowering Yori on to a nearby rock. ‘I’ll have another look. There were some smaller paths further back.’

Jack retraced their steps and eventually found the stone lantern concealed behind a pile of foliage. The branches were freshly broken so Jack knew it wasn’t an accident of nature that had hidden the marker.

‘Kazuki!’ he spat in disgust. Just the sort of dishonest tactic his rival would play to ensure his own success and Jack’s failure.

Fuelled by anger, Jack ran back to collect Yori.

• • *
    

By the time they reached the stream where the twentieth shrine stood, Jack’s last pair of straw sandals were mush around his feet. With every step he now suffered from a sharp pain in his left foot, but tried to hide the discomfort from Yori.

‘Take mine,’ said Yori, slipping off his own sandals.

‘What about you?’

‘I can’t go on any more, Jack.’

Yori’s face was now a pallid sheen of sweat and Jack could see his friend had lost a lot of blood.

‘Yes, you can,’ replied Jack, shouldering more of Yori’s weight despite his own overwhelming exhaustion. ‘Sensei Yamada once told me “there’s no failure except in no longer trying”. We must keep trying.’

‘But it’s nearly dawn.’

Jack looked at the sky. The rain had petered out and the horizon was beginning to lighten. In the valley below, the grey-white silhouette of the Castle of the White Phoenix was now visible.

‘But I can see the castle. We’ve visited all the shrines and just need to get to the temple. We can make it. It’s not that far.’

Jack felt Yori collapse in his arms, limp as a rag doll.

‘There’s no point in us both failing,’ wheezed Yori, his breathing rapid and shallow. ‘You go on. Complete the Circle.’

In his exhaustion, Jack was almost persuaded by his friend’s fevered logic. The Circle was his path to the Two Heavens. The Circle was the key. He had strived for it the whole year, worked too hard to let it slip through his fingers now. On his own, he could still make it.

Jack studied the pale face of his friend and smiled sadly. With the last of his remaining strength, he lifted Yori on to his shoulders.

‘The Circle can wait.’

Jack collapsed into Akiko’s arms.

A crowd of students rapidly gathered round the temple’s main entrance trying to get a glimpse of Jack, covered in mud and carrying his injured friend upon his back. Two monks hurried over and rushed the unconscious Yori away.

By now, the early morning sun was clipping the temple’s rooftops, but it hadn’t yet entered the courtyard. Jack shivered uncontrollably from the cold.

‘What happened? Where have you been?’ Akiko demanded, worry etched in her face as Jack fell to his knees, too tired to stand on his bruised and bloodied feet. ‘We were back hours ago.’

Jack didn’t answer. Instead he stared at Kazuki, who had come up behind Akiko. His rival had washed and was dressed in a clean robe. He looked fresh and almost unaffected by the night’s exertions. Arms crossed, Kazuki observed Jack’s shattered form with amused curiosity.

Jack’s whole body shook, no longer with cold, but with fury.

‘Your cheating almost killed Yori!’ he managed to gasp.

‘You’re delirious,
gaijin
. I didn’t cheat. I finished first because I was the best,’ Kazuki replied, giving him a contemptuous sneer. ‘It’s you who’s failed. Don’t blame me, you pathetic
gaijin
.’

‘He hasn’t failed yet!’ snapped Akiko, glaring up at Kazuki. ‘The sun’s rays haven’t reached Buddha’s eyes. He still has time. Come on, Jack.’

Akiko, not caring about the mud getting on her fresh robe, began to half carry, half drag Jack towards the steps of the main temple.

‘NO!
LEAVE
HIM!’ came a cry.

Akiko stopped in her tracks. Jack lifted his head to the see the white-robed High Priest standing at the top of the steps, his hand outstretched, ordering them to stop. Behind him through the open
shoji
doors of the shrine, hidden in shadow, Jack glimpsed the wooden Buddha.