Heaven's Net Is Wide by Lian Hearn (good books to read for 12 year olds .TXT) 📕

Shigeru felt his heart swell with pride and confidence. He could not conceive that this magnificent army could be defeated. On the contrary, the day had come when the Otori would defeat the Tohan once and for all and drive them back beyond Inuyama.

In the distance, across the plain, a cloud of dust signaled horsemen approaching, and before long, Kiyoshige, Miyoshi Kahei, and most of their men rode up to the stockades. They had already had a taste of battle; the Tohan had taken Chigawa, and though Kiyoshige had retreated immediately as planned, the advance had been so swift and brutal they had had to fight their way through.

“The town is on fire,” Kiyoshige said. “Many of the townspeople were massacred. The Tohan are right behind us.”

His face was somber beneath the dust and blood. “We will win this battle,” he said to Shigeru, “but it will not be easy, or short.”

They clasped hands briefly, then turned their horses toward the East, as the conch shells sounded and the Tohan warriors came pouring across the dusty plain.

It was around the Hour of the Horse, and the sun had broken through the clouds and shone from the southeastern corner of the sky, making it difficult to see the Kitano and Noguchi forces clearly. Since the Tohan were passing in front of their position, Shigeru expected the attack of arrows from moment to moment. From the northwest he could see Irie’s men preparing to loose their arrows on the Tohan horsemen’s right flank.

“Why are they delaying?” he said to Kiyoshige. “They must move now. Ride to Noguchi and tell him to attack at once.”

Kiyoshige urged his gray black-maned horse, Kamome, into a gallop across the plain toward the South. The Tohan horsemen were still beyond bow’s range. The arrow that hit Kamome in the chest could not have come from one of them. It came instead from Noguchi’s archers and was followed by several more. The horse went down. Shigeru saw Kiyoshige leap from its back, landing on one knee and steadying himself before rising immediately, drawn sword in his hand. He did not have the chance to use it. A second burst of arrows came like a wave of the sea, dragging him under; as he struggled to get to his feet, one of Noguchi’s warriors ran forward, severed his head with a single stroke, lifted it up by its topknot and displayed it to the soldiers behind him. An ugly shout rose from their throats, and the Noguchi surged forward, trampling over the headless body and the dying horse, racing not down the slope in the direction of the advancing Tohan force but up the slope, along the side of the plain, outflanking Shigeru’s main force, pushing them up against the northern range, rendering the palisades useless.

Shigeru hardly had time to register anything-not the realization of betrayal, not grief at Kiyoshige’s death-before he found himself fighting for his life against his own clansmen, rendered desperate and vicious by their treachery. Afterward, scenes were engraved on his memory that would never be erased: Kiyoshige’s head separated from his body yet still in some way living, eyes wide in shock; the gut-aching moment when he had to believe his own eyes and realize he had been betrayed; the first man he killed in a pure reflex of self-defense; the Noguchi crest; then the replacement of his own shock by a fury unlike anything he had ever experienced, a blood-lusting rage in which all emotions left him, save the desire to kill the whole traitorous horde himself.

The foot soldiers were in disarray, mown down by the Tohan horsemen in front of them and the Noguchi bowmen to the side. Shigeru led his horsemen time and again against the Tohan, but as they were forced back toward the hills, each time there were fewer to follow him. He was aware of his father and Irie away to his left. The Kitano, whom he expected to reinforce him from the south, seemed to have vanished. Had they retreated already? Scanning the banners in vain for the chestnut leaf, he saw Irie lead an attack on the right flank of the Tohan; as he turned Karasu to urge him back into the fray, he spotted Eijiro with his oldest son, Danjo, alongside him. They rode forward together, cutting a swath into the foot soldiers, forcing them to retreat a little, but then Eijiro was struck from the side by a lance and went down. Danjo gave a howl of rage, killed the man who had killed his father; at almost the same moment a horseman rode at him and split his skull.

Shigeru fought on, possessed by the same blind fury. A fog seemed to have descended on the battlefield, dulling vision and hearing. He was vaguely aware of the screams of men and horses, the sigh and clack that preceded another deadly shower of arrows, the shouts and grunts that accompanied the heavy labor of slaughter, but he himself was dissociated from it, as though he saw himself in a dream. The fray was so intense it was almost impossible to distinguish his own men from the Tohan. Banners fell in the dust; crests on surcoats were obliterated by blood. Shigeru and a small handful of men were forced back up the course of a small stream. He saw his companions fall one by one around him, but each one had taken two Tohan warriors down with him. Shigeru was left facing two enemy soldiers, one on foot, one still mounted. All three of them were exhausted; he parried the hacking blows from the horseman, driving Karasu closer to the other steed and bringing his sword quickly back down as the horse stumbled. He saw his opponent’s blood spurt and knew he had disabled him at least for a moment or two; he turned to counter the foot soldier on his right, killing him just as the