Child of Vengeance (46 page)

A carrion throne to look out across the battlefield from.

Battle. Soldier. Sekigahara. Only then did the reason for his presence here resurface in his mind, the logic linking sluggishly. Somehow the press of spearmen must have discarded him from their mass, expelling his motionless and filthy form like some queen hornet disgorging a stillborn larva before the fight moved on, driving and grinding the front line away.

That front line now was only a few dozen paces from where he sat, the interlocking spears and lances forming the skeleton of some demonic pagoda rooftop, and yet it seemed so impassably far to his torpid mind. Behind it he saw the full scope of the battle in the same manner, splayed across his vision like a great panoramic painting, all of it distant and unable to harm him.

He saw the banners of all the lords of Japan, the Western on the slopes and the Eastern in the basin, crashing midway like two waves;
the only way to tell who was on either side in that press of men was the direction of their standards. Arrows loosed, muskets fired, chevrons of horsemen wheeled and charged.

The idea of tactics and lordly strategy seemed as fanciful from here as it had been in the press of spears. But what Bennosuke could see now was the individual, the minor fates of the other thousands here, and he saw such little, pathetic things.

He saw two men circling each other, weary beyond endurance, the pair of them filthy and glistening with sweat, swinging wild, exhausted swipes and missing, staggering, one with a shattered sword and one grasping an arquebus by its barrel.

He saw the inverted eyes of a man on the ground, his mouth a black and red crescent moon as he mumbled a smiling farewell, seeing something or someone within his mind, remembering anything but this, head lolling in his helmet.

He saw a man sprawled with his armor spread open and his guts too, and a dog as black as coal was pulling on his intestines and backing away, and the man was mewling and pulling them back, and the dog’s tail was wagging, the animal’s eyes delighted at getting to play such a fun game.

Somebody grabbed the collar of his armor from behind, breaking his gaze. Bennosuke flapped numbly at it, his feet scrabbling in the horse guts like a newborn.

“Musashi! Up!” the voice was snarling. “Get up!”

It was Kumagai trying to haul him to his feet. The man’s armor was dirtied, spear abandoned somewhere, and he was frantic with anger. The battlefield seemed to close in on Bennosuke, becoming not some remote theater but a near and tangible thing. There were other men standing there, wounded or dazed by terror or for whatever reason not fighting in the fierce melee of the spearmen. Kumagai was screaming to them, trying to rally them.

“Do you see? Kobayakawa is the traitor! Look!” he snarled and pointed to the slope along their right flank, one hand still wrenching Bennosuke by his scruff.

Like a bridge collapsing from one end, the formations and ranks of Kobayakawa’s men were indeed turning around upon their former allies. That was the entirety of their flank, gone—the sheer number
of them, a third of all the Eastern forces, still pristine and fresh and now the enemy. Tokugawa’s men were letting them through their lines, falling in to march shoulder to shoulder with the Kobayakawa like old and trusted allies, and the united lot of them, unbloodied, unexhausted, were heading toward the frenzy in which Ukita and the other loyal lords had been embroiled for hours now.

“All of you, to me! Those dogs must pay!” spat Kumagai.

“What?” breathed one man, bent over double with blood streaming down his brow. “But … look at them!”

“On your feet, Musashi!” said Kumagai, but the boy remained anchored in and among the horse. Kumagai turned to address all the men around him. “We charge them! We must protect the flanks!”

“But—”

“Are you samurai?” said Kumagai, his voice low and cutting.

“That’s—” began the man.

“Are you samurai?” said Kumagai again.

“Yes,” said the man.

“Then why do you hesitate?” said Kumagai, and the man said nothing. He shook his head once, and then pulled himself up straight. Resigned determination came across his face. He knew what Kumagai said was the truth. Those around him, a ragged two score of men, knew so too.

“What about you, Musashi?” said Kumagai, looking down at the only one not yet committed. “Are you samurai?”

The boy said nothing.

“Are you samurai, Musashi?” said Kumagai, and he knocked him on the back of his head.

The boy did not move.

“Are you samurai?” snarled Kumagai now, and he bent low to speak face-to-face. “Or are you just going to sit here? You coward. What are you? You coward. You coward, you
fucking coward
!”

The boy met his eyes, and the emptiness in them infuriated Kumagai. He rose in one fierce movement, kicking Bennosuke in the chest as he did so, and then he drew his sword. “You fucking coward, Musashi! I always knew you were queer! You stay here, then! All true samurai, to me!”

He leveled his sword at Kobayakawa’s men, and screamed until it
became a bitter, choking hiss. Bennosuke watched as Kumagai ran in a stumbling charge, hopping over corpses and slipping in loose mud, and the other men went with him, a shabby sporadic line of men waving swords in desperate and ultimate bravado.

Kobayakawa’s immaculate ranks raised their muskets and fired. The bullets that came from their guns were as big as eyeballs, and they punched Kumagai and his men to pieces in an instant. There was no agony, just eradication. The samurai fell. Only one tried to rise, muscle instinct alone pushing him forward a finger’s length farther, and then he collapsed and was still.

No immortal souls fluttered upward.

An image came to Bennosuke. He saw the Buddhist mandala that hung upon Dorinbo’s wall lit up in the morning sun. Enlightened white figures crawling up Mount Fuji, the condemning demons and devils under the world toying with the fates of men, and between them always that stratum of trapped, twisted corpses.

He saw those corpses now, on the slopes of the Sekigahara valley. But there was no devil here, no path heavenward either. There was just musket smoke and pageantry drifting above a carpet of those damned to nothingness.

Finally he understood.

He thought of Munisai, of the color of his blood soaking into white silk and the long, rattling moan that escaped him as his agony came to naught, and he understood.

He thought of Shuntaro, writhing, forever writhing in that bubbling oil with the men he thought he had saved dancing their ghastly terminal dance alongside him, and he understood.

He thought of Dorinbo, remembered his last words spoken before the burning pyre, and now, finally—
finally
—after years he understood.

Bennosuke picked himself out of the ruins of the horse. The battle still raged but he could not hear it. He had risen a child of Amaterasu and finally he made the choice to raise himself to where he wanted to be.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

When it ends it ends like a butterfly breaking out from a chrysalis, pushing outward from a vital point upon a central seam and the crack grows from there, and then there are two things—the magnificent color of new wings starting to beat, and a scabbed and decrepit husk cast aside and falling downward.

These are otherwise known as victory and defeat.

MARSHAL FUSHIMI STALKED
behind the lines of spearmen, howling encouragement and slashing his sword through the air. They would not falter. They were samurai. They would hold. On and on he shouted, his voice growing hoarse.

What he bellowed would be unspoken fact at any other time, but the marshal knew deep inside that large-scale battles such as this removed from the world the laws of rationality and reason. When you got enough men together, fired enough arrows, and charged enough horses, it was as though any barrier of individuality ceased to exist and suddenly raw and thoughtless emotion could course through the whole of them as easily as blood through snow.

This had benefits occasionally, as when a rare band of honest men found sudden courage beyond what they knew they had, but what Fushimi knew as fact, why he had pursued zealous justice his entire life—why he
marshaled
—was that this world was inherently rotten. There were two villains for every decent man, five cowards for every hero, and so that meant that when enough men were together, such as now, there was a great looming contagion waiting to spread.

This was why Fushimi hated battle, and this was why he knew that he had to play the preemptive healer now; his was the task to
remove the disease before it could claim anyone. With the flat of his sword he struck helmets he saw turning, he put a strong hand on the shoulders of men from behind regardless of which corner of the earth they had come from, and tried to speak as a father or brother would.

It had worked; the men of Ukita and the lords sworn to him had held like a cliff of stone, absorbed the fury of the Tokugawa charge stoically, and then they began to show the Easterners the quality of Bizen steel. Numbers had told, their skill had told, and they had begun the slow process of driving the thousands of the enemy back with spear and sword.

But that was half an hour ago; now Fushimi saw the treacherous horde of fresh Kobayakawa spearmen as they came, working their way methodically between and then replacing the tired Tokugawa troops. Ten ranks behind the main clash of spears, he turned to look for commands or reinforcements of their own, but neither the Lord Ukita nor any of his generals were anywhere to be seen.

None of the lords were. They had gone. Departed.

Fled?

The marshal could hear the ferociousness of the unwearied voices of the Kobayakawa as they began to engage, stabbing and slashing, and he felt a shudder of fear pass through even himself. He forced iron into his heart, clutched his sword tighter, and screamed until he thought his throat was tearing itself out.

His eyes caught sight of a spear falling, abandoned, and then someone worming away from the fight. He dashed across like a man seeing the ice crack beneath his feet, pointing at the samurai.

“You!” he barked with as much authority as he could. “Halt!”

The man showed no intention of doing so, and so the marshal stood in his path and put his hand on the man’s chest. The other samurai did not meet Fushimi’s eyes, and the marshal saw that the other’s body was shaking with short little breaths. He tried to wriggle past, but Fushimi grasped his breastplate.

“We do not retreat,” he said slowly and calmly over the din of the fighting. “Stand as one and we will not fall.”

“Let me go,” the man whimpered. “Please.”

“You will go nowhere until ordered,” said Fushimi.

“By who?” said the man. “Who’s going to order us? They’ve gone! They’ve gone and they’ve left us!”

“Our lords are still here!” said Fushimi, but of this he had no proof.

“You lie! Let me go!” said the man, and he tried to squirm past once more.

“By my orders, then,” growled Fushimi, and he moved his hand up to grab the man by the throat, trying to shock some wits back into him. “You will not—”

There was a sharp pain under his armpit, and then the man was pushing him back. Fushimi suddenly found he had no strength to resist, and then the man was withdrawing a bloody dagger from where he had stabbed the marshal beneath the armor of his outstretched arm.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, it’s not my fault,” Fushimi heard him stammer, but he kept on going and did look back once as the marshal fell to the ground, no strength even to cry out.

Fushimi sat in the dirt with his legs splayed out before him, looking at the blood on his hands like a drunk counting out the last of his coins. The marshal felt a great and final hatred of the weakness of the world, and a bitter grin carved itself upon his face as around him the fading battle went on …

THE GREAT LORD
Ukita had lost track of himself.

Oh, he knew exactly where he was, sitting at the edge of the forest stripped of all but the lightest armor on an unburdened and unremarkable horse, watching the battle unfold beneath him. He had no idea, however, where the man everyone else mistakenly presumed to be him had gotten to—the thrust and pull of combat had stolen his decoy from his sight.

When the Tokugawa spearmen had charged following the clash of champions, he and his retinue had slowly and calmly withdrawn to the rear of the fighting. There, among a carefully concealed huddle, the lord had dismounted and given one of his bodyguards his distinctive crested helmet and let the man take his horse. As the decoy had ridden off on the steed adorned so brazenly with the clan’s banners and livery, Ukita had gotten onto this plain mare and then covertly
fallen back to where he was now. His fifty finest cavalrymen waited with him, their horses pawing the earth between the trunks of the great trees.

This was not cowardice. Deception was a valid strategy, a logical one.

The proof of this was looming over the right flank of the battlefield—the coming of the Kobayakawa host proper. The first, most eager troops had reached the battle, yes, but behind them the rest were converging and advancing like the wall of a temple slowly crashing down. They were wheeling and arranging themselves, taking the time to best plot their attack, swords and cannons and horses maneuvering around one another.