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

Honshu to Heian Kyo, where they spent the winter and collected’ reinforcements. Apparently Yukio had gone into winter quarters as well. Then, in the Eifth Month of the Year of the Tiger, the huge Takashi army moved away from the capital and started marching northwards to find Yukio and destroy him.

They had paused for a day to admire Lake Biwa, the largest lake in the Sacred Islands. The entire army had waited while Notaro took a boat to a pine-covered island called Chikubushima, where he sang and played the lute at the shrine of the kami of the island. He even composed a poem in her honour. Later a rumour went around the army that the goddess had appeared to him in the shape of a Red Dragon and had promised him victory over the insurgents.

Yesterday they had started climbing the mountains that formed a rampart between the Home Provinces around the capital and the wild country to the north. At midday Atsue had found himself on a peak from which he could look back and see Lake Biwa, a silvery sheet of water, and look ahead to the rolling sea on the long north-western coastline and rank upon jagged rank of mountains. He felt a pang of longing for Heian Kyo. Any day now Kazuko would be giving birth to their child, conceived after his return from the great victory at Ishibashiyama. As they descended the peak and Lake Biwa disappeared, he felt he was leaving home and safety behind and venturing into unknown and dangerous territory.

Atsue hated to admit it to himself, but he did not like war. The actual fighting was never what he expected. There might be hours of waiting or riding about. Then suddenly someone was at your throat, and just as suddenly it was over. Most of war seemed to consist of looting, raping and massacre. Atsue was particularly upset by the memory of the destruction of the temples around Nara. Even the women and children who lived in the temples had been burned to death or cut down with swords. The great Todaiji, five hundred years old, had been burned to the ground on Notaro’s orders. A huge statue of the Buddha had been melted down to a heap of slag.

Atsue tried not to notice when a group of his men were abusing peasants or torturing captured enemy samurai to death. It was hard to ignore such things, though, when they shocked him so. Some incidents he had witnessed would burn in his mind forever. Only his flute playing took his mind off such horrors.

Now the order came to set up camp on the crest of Tonamiyama hill. “Didn’t we get enough rest the other day at Lake Biwa?” said Isoroku impatiently.

“Would you rather cross the valley and charge uphill at that enemy army?” Atsue asked. “Look at all those Muratomo flags. There could be fifty or a hundred thousand of them over there. That’s why we’re stopping.”

Atsue’s servant got his tent up, and Atsue lent the man to Isoroku to set up Isoroku’s tent beside his.

As night fell, Atsue and Isoroku sat in a circle with the armed retainers who followed Atsue into battle. They enjoyed a dinner of coarse rice and broiled lake trout. Atsue’s men were skilled at finding provisions, which was a blessing, since the army’s food supply had run out shortly after they left the capital. They had been living on the land like locusts ever since, stripping bare every farm in their line of march. It was a shame, because the country through which they passed had always been loyal to the Takashi. Atsue wondered why these things couldn’t be better organized. He liked to think that if his father, great Kiyosi, had been leading the army, enough food would have been provided to get at least as far as the unfriendly northern provinces. Now they were in the mountains, and farms were few and far between. The shortage of supplies was becoming a real hardship.

After they had eaten, Atsue took his flute out of his belt, where he now carried it all the time, and played the melody called “Peach Blossoms.” Those nearby remained respectfully silent for a long time after he had finished.

“You play so well, I think you will bring us good fortune,” said

Isoroku. “The kami will notice us, and they will give us victory.” “Then victory goes to the best musicians?” Atsue said with a smile. “Are not the Takashi more cultured than the Muratomo?” Isoroku asked earnestly. “And have we not always defeated them?”

“We’ve always outnumbered them,” said Atsue. “In my father’s day, we often outsmarted them as well. We do not know what is waiting for us beyond the ridge now.” He gestured to the hill where the Muratomo banners had flown, now invisible in the darkness.

“Would you like to die in battle, Atsue?” Isoroku asked.

Atsue shook his head. “I would like to live. Of course, it would be better to die in battle than be taken prisoner and treated shamefully. But why else would anyone want to die?”

“I sometimes feel that I would rather die when I am young and handsome and strong, doing something brave, then grow old and ugly,” said Isoroku. “One cuts a flower when it is most beautiful, not when it has withered. Your father died a hero’s death, and all remember him that way. If he had lived he would be greatly respected, I’m sure, but he would not be worshipped almost as a kami by the Takashi.”

“I’m old enough to know that I’m very young, Isoroku-san. I know very little of life. I want to know and do much more before I die. I don’t care whether people think of me as a hero or not. As for my father, I would much prefer him to be alive and respected than dead and worshipped. I miss him terribly.”

The humming-bulb arrows, screaming like falcons, began to fall on the Takashi camp just after sunrise. They killed no one. Crouching, a bit nervous, Atsue looked across Kurikara pass to the hill bedecked with white banners. A row of about a hundred archers was standing there, bows aimed high so their whistling arrows would carry across the valley.

“How civilized of them to wake us up,” said Isoroku, laughing. “They might have started with arrows that gave us no warning. This is a gesture worthy of the Takashi.”

“Not really like the Muratomo, is it?” Atsue said uneasily. The enemy was controlling the situation, he thought. Eirst, by displaying their banners on the opposite hill, they had determined the place where the Takashi would stop for the night. Now they had chosen the time and manner of opening the battle. Where were those mysterious barbarian troops everyone talked about? The archers across the valley looked like ordinary samurai.

The Takashi were lining up, pulling their man-high bows, releasing their own whistling arrows. After a few moments they drew first blood. A Muratomo archer fell, to much cheering from Tonamiyama hill. Atsue and Isoroku joined the crowd gathered a short distance behind the bowmen. No one wanted to be too close to the archers-even a humming-bulb arrowhead could kill a man if it hit him in a vulnerable spot-but to stand very far away could look like cowardice.

Two Takashi archers were hit. There was a rumble of anger. Some one suggested switching over to willow-leaf arrows. Someone else said it was too soon for that. Two more men took the place of the fallen, who were only wounded and were dragged out of the line to be cared for by their friends. Atsue saw Notaro and several other officers standing a small distance away, watching. Notaro called out praise when another Muratomo archer fell.

I wonder what plans he has for the battle, Atsue thought. It was odd that they couldn’t see any more of the Muratomo than those few archers. Maybe there weren’t as many of them as the Takashi had thought. He squinted at the line of white banners. Clever of them to start a fight with arrows when the sun was in the east, blinding the Takashi.

Just when the incessant screaming of the humming-bulb arrows was becoming more tiresome than intimidating, the Muratomo switched to willow-leaf and armour-piercing arrows. The Takashi archers did the same, and more samurai joined in the contest.

Some of the bolder warriors mounted horses and charged partway down the eastern slope of Tonamiyama. Immediately the Muratomo made a dash down their hill to match them. Atsue glanced to the top of the Muratomo hill. Would they attack now? The white banners remained in place. Only about two hundred Muratomo archers faced twice that number of Takashi. Soon the two groups of archers had halved the distance between them, and men on both sides were falling in threes and sixes, instead of ones and twos. Now some of the Takashi fell back, and some Muratomo did likewise.

The archery battle continued most of the morning. Once in a while a Muratomo samurai would get off a particularly long, accurate shot and kill or wound a Takashi in the watching crowd. Most of the injuries were confined to the archers themselves.

Both Atsue and Isoroku were devotees of the sword and not particularly proud of their skill with bow and arrow. While many other samurai joined or dropped out of the archery combat as the spirit moved them, the two young men stayed out of it entirely.

Just when the sun was directly overhead, the Muratomo stopped firing. They began to withdraw up their hill. Three horsemen rode down towards the Takashi lines. One of them held aloft a white banner. They stopped in an open meadow at the bottom of the pass. Takashi samurai, some on foot, some on horseback, began to drift down the slope towards the Muratomo riders.

“I am Saito Kiji of Nakatsu,” the samurai carrying the white banner shouted. “I have fought both in China and in the land of the Mongols, and I have won many victories.” Kiji went on to describe the martial careers of his father, grandfather and great-grandfather. He claimed descent from the Brave of Yamato, legendary son of an ancient Emperor, subduer of malignant kami and of barbarians. He called upon the Takashi to send a warrior of suitable pedigree out to meet him.

“Let’s get closer,” Atsue called to Isoroku. “I want to see this.”

A Takashi officer rode down the hillside and exchanged words with the Muratomo challenger. The two men rode a short distance apart, then charged each other with drawn swords. Atsue and Isoroku were part of the crowd cheering for the Takashi fighter. Atsue felt himself trembling with excitement.

It was difficult to strike a killing blow from horseback. The two samurai circled around each other, swords mostly missing or glancing off their armour. Then Kiji, the Muratomo samurai, stood up in the saddle on his short stirrups. With two hands he brought his sword down on the Takashi warrior’s right shoulder. Stunned, the man fell from his horse with a crash.

He scrambled to his feet just as Kiji rode down upon him. Kiji brought his horse to a sudden stop, grabbed the Takashi’s chin from behind, and pulled him against his saddle. With one quick downward swipe of his sword the Muratomo warrior cut the Takashi’s head off.

The head was still strapped into its helmet. Holding it high by one of the helmet’s decorative horns, Kiji rode in a circle around the meadow. Isoroku, Atsue and the other Takashi samurai groaned, while the Muratomo opposite them cheered.

Another Takashi rode out to challenge Kiji. More Takashi rode down the hillside shouting their own lineage to anyone on the Muratomo side who might be a worthy opponent. The scene in the valley was becoming quite confused,