Shike by Robert J. Shea (the reading list txt) 📕

Jebu started to rush the palanquin, but it was already too late. Six warriors stood along the path between him and Horigawa, their short, horn-reinforced Mongol bows drawn, steel-tipped arrows pointing at Jebu’s chest. Beyond the palanquin more archers stood ready. His armour might be able to absorb most of the arrows, but they would surely stop him before he reached Horigawa, and he would die uselessly. Once again he would have to forgo vengeance. He stood, trembling with frustrated rage, as the palanquin bobbed off down the mountainside. Arghun ordered some of his men to climb down into the ravine to retrieve Torluk. Even if the tumanbashi had survived the fall, he would not fight in this battle.

“I could kill you both now and save the lives of many of my men,” Arghun called to Jebu and Yukio. “But I remain true to our word. Go, get behind your wall. You will die soon enough.”

As Jebu and Yukio, turning their backs on the Mongols, walked through the gate, Yukio said, “Jebusan, I do not want to do any killing today. I do not want to die as I have lived. I have practised the warrior’s trade as best I could. I liberated the Sacred Islands from the Takashi, which, I believe, I was sent into this world to do. It has not been my karma to enjoy ease and honours. Now all that is left to me is to depart this world. I want my leave-taking to be beautiful. I want to be with my good wife and my children for a time, to read to them the Lotus sutra which has always been my favourite. Will you make it possible for me to do that, Jebusan? Will you hold them off long enough for me to die as I want to?”

Hot tears filled Jebu’s eyes. A poem came to him, a final gift from the Self. He spoke it to Yukio.

The lone pine,

The lightning flashes. The mountain top is bare.

Yukio said, “You are the mountain top, Jebusan.” Tears were running down his cheeks. “Men thought me a giant, but I was always standing on your shoulders.” He gripped Jebu’s arm hard for a moment, then turned away, his dark green robe swirling.

Jebu went to the samurai quarters to arm himself. Yukio’s men had already put on their armour and helmets. When Jebu told them Yukio had refused Kublai Khan’s offer of the kingship of the Sacred Islands, they were overcome with admiration. Several of them wept.

“To this day I have regretted that I did not kill myself when my father did, even though I was happy to serve Lord Yukio,” said Shenzo Totomi, wiping his face with the sleeve of his under robe. “Now I am grateful that I can die with his hero-this god.”

“Let no man die until he has sent a hundred of the enemy into oblivion before him,” said Jebu. And Yukio’s last army, twelve warriors strong, went out to meet the Mongols.

Alone, moving unhurriedly, Jebu began to don his suit of black armour. He tied the belt of his broad, short Zinja sword in the world-serpent knot, remembering the chant of the monks when Taitaro presented it to him on his initiation day: “The sword is the Self, cutting through matter and time and penetrating to true insight.” He took down his naginata from the wall, a weapon so big only he could wield it. Who could withstand his naginata? Only one man, and he wasn’t fighting today. As he armed himself he composed his mind, making each action part of his meditation. He repeated the statements of Zinja attitudes he had been taught as a child: I am going into battle now. I am not concerned about the outcome. I am concerned only that I fight with all the mind and strength I possess.

It is strange, though, he thought, interrupting the chain of affirmations. Even though I have entered every battle with the belief that it may be my last, I have never felt so certain that I am going to die as I do this day. He could hear the shouts of battle and the ringing of steel, but he knew there was no hurry. Today, the Mongols would not be able to use their mass tactics. They would have to come at the fort one at a time and engage in single combat, to the delight of the samurai. Let the other men have their moments of glory before I enter the battle. He took the Jewel out of the inner pocket in his robe and revolved it in his fingertips. To his surprise, instead of clearing his mind as it usually did, the heart of the Jewel showed him Taniko. She was looking right at him, with that keen, sparkling gaze that had always de lighted him. The Jewel shows me what I have lost and so resigns me to death, he thought. Taniko blamed me for the deaths of those she loved, and now she is Hideyori’s consort. Yukio will surely die today, and then I have no one to live for. The Zinja bound me to Yukio for so many years that he has come to mean more to me than the Order itself. It is good that I die with him today. He looked once again into the heart of the Jewel and saw there a glowing emptiness, the Void from which all things spring, not a darkness but a blinding light. His mind filled with that light, he tied his headcloth, shouldered his naginata and went out.

As he crossed the small yard to the gateway he heard, above the clangour of battle, the pure, sweet notes of a flute floating from the tile-roofed house where Yukio and his family prepared for death. Yukio had courted Mirusu by playing the flute under her window night after night. Perhaps it was she who had asked him to play now.

At the gate, six men were crowded together. Two more, in the watchtower, stood with their tall samurai bows ready.

“Each time they rush for the fort, one of us goes out to hold them off,” said Kanefusa, a big northern warrior who was a cousin of Yukio’s wife. “Their archers have killed three of our men, but we’ve killed many of theirs.”

“Open the gate and stand aside,” said Jebu, swinging the naginata down from his shoulder. As soon as the gate was open wide enough, Jebu rushed out. There were no Mongols outside. They had taken cover from the samurai arrows behind an outcropping of rock at a bend in the road. Jebu ran down the path and around the rock. A warrior in brown stood before him, mouth fallen open in astonishment. The path was not wide enough to allow Jebu to swing the naginata in a full circle. Instead, he thrust its point into the man’s throat. Shouting, the next Mongol came at Jebu with a sabre. Jebu brought the cutting edge of the naginata down on the man’s shoulder, sending him tumbling over the cliff after his comrade. The attackers set up an outcry as, one after another, Jebu killed them where they stood, or knocked them into the ravine. A mounted warrior charged him. Jebu sliced into the horse’s belly, and animal and rider toppled from the path together. Now the Mongols were crowding one another to get away from the flashing blade at the end of the long pole, away from the figure in black armour bearing down on them. Then Arghun, on horseback, was facing him, standing in the saddle, his bow drawn, an arrow aimed at Jebu’s head. Jebu stood, staring into the empty blue eyes.

“Climb down here, Arghun, and draw your sword,” he called. “Let’s finish it now.”

“Eor you, it is finished,” said Arghun, and he released the arrow. A quick chop of the naginata deflected it, but a line of bowmen fired a cloud of arrows at Jebu. Several arrowheads embedded themselves in the sharkskin and steel strips of his armour, while most rebounded from it. Not one missed altogether; the archers were expert marksmen. Grinding his teeth and chopping down arrows in flight with his naginata, Jebu retreated step by step. By the time he reached the gate his armour was bristling with arrows, and one had pierced his left shoulder. Behind the gate, panting, he let Kanefusa unlace his armoured left sleeve to pull out the arrow and bandage the wound with a strip of paper.

“I do not want you here today, monk Jebu,” Shenzo Totomi said with a grin; “Only your feats will be remembered when the chroniclers write of this battle, and the rest of us will be ignored.”

“You must outdo me,” Jebu answered, shrugging his arms back into the sleeve. “Then we all will be remembered.”

For a time, they lost no more men. The Mongol archers could shoot at the defenders only by exposing themselves to fire from the watchtower. Thus protected, the samurai took turns single-handedly meeting the Mongol charges, striking down the attackers one man at a time. Repeatedly, Jebu charged through the gate when the Mongols attacked and rushed headlong down the path, flailing enemy warriors into the ravine with his naginata. Each of his assaults ended with his being driven back by volleys of arrows, but he was determined to break through to Arghun.

They were fighting in shadow now. The sun had crossed the narrow blue gap between the mountains above them. Jebu looked up to see bright rays stretching from the peaks to splash dazzling light on the snowy mountain opposite. He heard a rumble from above. He had barely time to shout a warning. Huge rocks-grey boulders the size of horses-were tumbling down the steep slope towards them. A picture of Yukio’s charge down the hillside at Ichinotani leaped up in Jebu’s mind. But these were not horses and men thundering down on them. These were insensate masses of stone capable of crushing them all and sweeping the entire fort from the ledge. There was nothing they could do but throw themselves flat. With a roar like the firing of a hundred hua pao, the avalanche was upon them. The crashing and shaking of the earth stunned Jebu, and he squeezed his eyes shut as he waited to be smashed like an ant under a sandal. At last there was a silence, almost as terrifying as the noise that preceded it. They lay still on the ground, and Jebu realized that somehow they were still alive. He rolled to his feet. He saw the worst damage at once. The watchtower was kindling wood, the two samurai archers who had been standing in it gone. Where it had been lay a giant, jagged stone, cracked in several places from the force of its fall. Amazingly, the house that sheltered Yukio and his family was still standing. There were seven defenders left now, and no place from which an archer could provide protective fire for them. The wall itself was down in many places. Yukio had nothing between himself and his enemies but seven human bodies. One of the seven had his arm broken by a huge rock. Looking up, Jebu saw tiny figures peering down at them from a ledge far above. It was Arghun who had unleashed the avalanche.

Jebu sent Shenzo Totomi to make sure Yukio was unhurt and to report to him. Even as Totomi crossed the rock-strewn courtyard, Jebu heard the war shouts of attackers. The injured samurai ran out through the gate with his sword in his left hand and a poem on his lips. He managed to account for three of the enemy before he fell under a volley of arrows. Another samurai leaped to the top of a fallen stone and nocked an arrow with a double-bladed frog-crotch