The Floating World

by Elijah Stephens

  The next noble dug his toes in and charged. Shinji kicked sand in his face with a wet slap before dropping low and separating his leg at the knee. After the third samurai drove him back with wild swings careening off his weapon, he pulled the sai from his belt and threw it into the man’s foot. While pinning him to the loose sediment, Onozawa rammed his blade through the warrior’s thick leather armor and he spit blood.

  He cracked his next opponent across the skull with the flat side of his katana and his body fell limp in the blood-red water. As the blinded noble recovered from the sting of the chili powder, Shinji rolled around him in the surf, poking his sword into the samurai’s back so deep that the point stuck through his chest. Among the army of thousands crashing below the mountain range, Hideyoshi’s cavalry rode horses riddled with arrows as they divided Yoshimizu’s mercenaries.

  With their preoccupation, they were blind to how their inexperienced infantry was struggling to defend themselves against the enemy riders. Onozawa followed the outskirts of battle and focused on a warrior with a silver crescent on his helmet. The samurai was attacking Hideyoshi’s foot-soldiers by circling their ranks and chopping into them mercilessly from horseback. Shinji grabbed a spear from the piles of the dead and stuck it in the ground with the sharp point aimed carefully. When the rider passed by, it caught him under the chin and dug in, lifting him off his horse.

  Onozawa jumped onto the abandoned equine and headed towards the major clotting of battle. He leaned from the saddle and grabbed a handful of arrows sticking from the soil. With a tight grip, he caught up to a high-ranking General and stabbed him in the neck. After Shinji was tackled by a samurai and rolled through the grass, he lodged a dagger between the man’s ribs and was drenched in boiling blood from his pierced heart. He crippled a rider by throwing the knife into his back, then the conscripts bludgeoned the warrior with farming implements.

  Onozawa climbed onto the horse and picked his next target through the chaos, a skilled archer who circled the perimeter and picked off Hideyoshi’s infantry from a cowardly distance. As dirt whipped past his face, the bowman’s arrow grazed his cheek with a sharp bite. He caught up to the soldier and yanked hard on his helmet, breaking his neck. Once Hideyoshi’s cavalry had scattered the mercenaries into retreat, they turned to aid the others.

  After forming a cohesive line against the enemy with makeshift weapons, they watched the last of Yoshimizu’s nobles leave the battlefield in disgrace. While being uplifted by yells of their victory, Shinji sat on his warhorse with the pain of his injuries subsiding into numbness.

  Katsushiro rode to him. “You fight well face-to-face after all, for a ninja at least.”

  “It was your strategy that won the war.”

  “The Generals and I merely modified a battleplan created by the Daimyo, so be sure to thank him when we return.”

  Shinji caught his breath and looked over the bloody grasslands, to the clusters of bodies and dismembered limbs. All the death he had witnessed in his lifetime couldn’t compete with the aftermath of that plunder. Yoshimizu would be stunned to see only a fraction of his cavalry report back, leaving his population completely bereft of protection.

  “If I were a vicious man, I would ride west and finish this,” said Katsushiro. “Now would be the best time to invade Yoshimizu’s province and destroy the remnants of his tyranny. His funds for buying mercenaries should have bankrupted his viable crops. Even if he doesn’t get overrun by the mercenaries he hired to fight us, his province will stagnate in disrepair.”

  “Hideyoshi will want to know of this victory. Awaiting your fate where all you can do is imagine the result must be unbearable.”

  “You should ride home and proclaim the honor of this day while I retrieve the wounded. There are plenty of weapons left behind by the enemy, perhaps we can melt what we cannot use and sell the rest.” The General nodded with respect. “And you are certainly invited into my home any time you wish.”

  * * * * *

  Shinji rode east as the pain of the day melted with the hope of seeing what he had sacrificed so much for. The blood of the dead was poisoning the landscape and the dark red reflected the glaring sunlight from what remained of the battle, making him grateful to enter the forest and return to the family he fought to protect. The road turned from soft gravel to large cobblestones, and the homes at the edge of the province were silent as women held their children tight. They awaited news from the battlefront and he wanted to report their victory, but it was not his place.

  His horse’s hooves pounded like his heartbeat on the walkway near the Daimyo’s compound. When Onozawa jumped off and entered the central courtyard, the guards who usually stood at the gate were nowhere to be seen. Once inside, there was evidence of a fierce struggle and the men who protected the Daimyo had been massacred. Apparently they made a last stand against invaders and failed.

  At the Governor’s quarters, he walked through the ripped paper doorway and saw a sword stuck in the middle of the room. Upon it was propped the severed head of Hideyoshi Murai, his expression frozen upon the moment of his death. Behind him, the jade key was missing. Shinji ran through the adjoining courtyard, where a dozen royal bodyguards had been slaughtered. At Yukio’s bedroom, the covers were peeled back and she was gone, along with the birdcage that sat in the corner.

  He left the room and grabbed onto the support beam to launch himself onto the roof. He jumped across the sloped tiles until reaching the walkway outside Rumiko’s domicile. The door was open and she was curled up on the floor, gripping her training sword in a puddle of blood. He crouched next to her, and she moaned from the pain of her stomach wound. He pulled back her kimono to see where they had opened her belly.

  As he picked her up and left the compound, she passed in and out of consciousness with every step aggravating her injury. “Who did this?” he pleaded while walking through the forest towards a Shinto shaman. She had no strength left to whisper. He heard the rumbling of a waterfall and turned north along the bank of the river. At a small hut, he mimicked the birdcall of a hayabusa falcon and a tiny man with white hair and a pug nose stuck his head out.

  “I’ve not had visitors for some time.”

  “Takeda, I need your spirit for this woman.” Onozawa stepped into the wooden hut and put Rumiko on a bed of leaves. He pulled back the cloth to show the healer what happened and the shaman’s eyes reflected the complexity of the tragedy brought to the Princess.

  “She is a dove and I will mend her wings. Do you have the blade that did this to her? The cause of the damage is often the cure. If I could speak to the voice of the weapon, it might prefer to take back what it did to her.”

  “A blade didn’t do this to her, a man did.”

  “A blade has as much freedom as a man.” Takeda looked to the ninja’s katana as if it were alive. “You should know this from the spirit your father infused within your own. Do you plan to kill the demons who did this to her?”

  “I’ll kill them all.”

  The healer clicked his tongue. “If the house of Hideyoshi is in turmoil, the province will falter, but it is no man that disrupts an Empire. These are forces of nature you contend with, no less than the bringers of destruction.”

  “But they acted upon the orders of the man who hired them.”

  “Yes, the way a falconer sends his birds out to fly and then brings them home to confinement. Do you know the source of their power?”

  Shinji thought about Yoshimizu. “I have a good idea.”

  “His power is his hatred, but no hate lives higher than the trees. You cannot kill this man.”

  He ran his fingers through Rumiko’s hair. “We’ll see about that.”

  “The panther will find his prey. You must find the seven forces of nature,” said the small man as he readied a pot of herbal tea on the fire. “They are chaos incarnate, but they are not the reason this province is in turmoil. The Earth wants revenge for
tragedies wrought against her children. Be her hand in this world and your father’s spirit will scream from his sword. Take your revenge upon the ronin, the seven demons who will not be contained by their creation.” Takeda watched the ninja’s reaction. “She will live. I can hear her fortune in the birds. Listen and they will speak to you as well.” Shinji heard the chirping sparrows in the trees but ignored anything they had to say. The healer pushed him from the hut with a warning, “The eagle hides his claws.”

  Onozawa stood alone by the river, shaking in his repression of the anger over the day’s events. When the shell he covered himself with was broken, his past came flooding back into his torment. Tears welled up and fell down his cheeks, burning his skin with needles of disillusion for his helplessness to stop his family from being ravaged once again.

  * * * * *

  He walked like the risen dead with his arms at his sides. In his failure, he passed into oblivion. If anyone had seen him, they would have thought he was an apparition. Movement shook the trees and he saw the eyes of the panther buried in the foliage. A deafening sound blasted through the leaves, but the giant cat was only curious. As it stared at him with odd respect, it was then that he realized that it wasn’t the cat who roared.

  Letting the events float around in his head, he knew that if he had been there, no pain would have come to the Daimyo or his family. The jade key was missing and he knew who ordered the assassination. Though Yoshimizu had desired it enough to send ronin into his brother’s home while their armies were at war, the line he wouldn’t cross was with his niece.

  The men who beheaded Hideyoshi also allowed Yukio to cling to the birdcage that gave her comfort, and they would only have treated her in such a way if they were under orders. As his mind dwelled upon hopelessness and sad memories intruded, he stopped in his tracks. The healer had said that the soul of his katana was ingrained by the man who made it, but he didn’t feel his father’s spirit in the blade, he felt his mother’s.

  He had gone unseen as a child, it was the skill he always had. While hiding one time above their thatch-roof, he remembered his mother’s reaction to the news of the assassination of their Shogun. Discounting his swords as inferior metalwork, her silent obedience over the years collapsed and she lost herself in the knowledge that everything was gone. She blamed her husband for the downfall of their province as she grabbed a sword from one of the racks lining the room.

  Despite his muffled yell, she fell upon it to end her shame. Shinji recalled when his father gave it to him as he withered away, a young man dying of an old heart. It was his final gift to his son, to remember his mother and how there could be no place for pride except in those who didn’t know how free they were without it.

  * * * * *

  He entered the Governor’s compound and saw the Generals in shock after returning from their victory at war. They came home to see their good fortune in peril and paced back and forth, screaming words of hate to those who were responsible, wherever they might be. Katsushiro stood in the room where the Daimyo had been killed, as still as a statue and staring into the open eyes of the severed skull.

  “Yoshimizu did this,” he said. “He had the key taken when he could not take it for himself.”

  “Rumiko is injured but she’s alive. I took her to a healer.”

  “Will she survive?”

  He looked away. “I don’t know.”

  “What about his other daughter?”

  “I believe she was kidnapped.”

  “Treacherous dog!” Katsushiro cursed, with fire scorching his tongue as he thought about what kind of a man would murder his own family.

  A samurai with split armor came in while holding a sheet of paper. “We found Hideyoshi’s astronomers in the library. One of them must have had enough time to write a final word.” He handed it to Katsushiro, who gave the message to the ninja with a look of disgust.

  “I can’t read,” Shinji told him. “What does it say?”

  He said simply, “Ronin.”

  * * * * *

  After the dead bodies were collected in the garden and the Generals set up guards at the bronze gates to ward off visitors, Shinji left Yukio’s room with a plan of action and found Katsushiro Satsuma deliberating over the corpse of their former Shogun. “What do we tell the people?” he asked the ninja. “This province will crumble.”

  “I know. It happened when I was a child and the Shimura Clan disintegrated with the assassination of the Daimyo. After word spread quickly that our province in the southern region was unprotected, thieves flocked to our land and everything was plundered. Do you want this to happen here?”

  “Of course not, but a Shogun is seen as the connection between Heaven and Earth. It is his life that brings harmony with his rule.”

  “Then do not let him die,” Shinji proposed, and Satsuma led him into the courtyard where they would not be heard. “Let no one know about his death,” he continued quietly. “Send out messengers to other regions proclaiming our victory in war and tell them that the western province is controlled by the lordship of Hideyoshi Murai.”

  “The mercenaries who left the battlefield will filter back into the countryside,” Katsushiro agreed. “They will confirm that declaration.”

  “Exactly, but send with those messengers a few farmers selling crops. Have them spread word about Hideyoshi’s claim, that those who fought and won the battle gained ownership of the land they work.”

  “But that will cause a revolution. The Shogun is the guardian of a province, the nobles protect the land they are entrusted with, and peasants till the soil.”

  “Though with his death, Hideyoshi’s claim is now true. You all fought and won your land, so now the idea of power maintains order through the warriors of each noble household. If you spread the word about territory coming under the personal ownership of the landlords, it’ll keep this province from being overrun. It will also preoccupy the ruling classes in other regions with internal dissension provoked in the masses. Let the enemy ride to us in groups and not as armies.”

  “And what of Yoshimizu?” Satsuma wondered.

  “We finish him off immediately with our cavalry and end this feud. The lesser nobles and lower classes here believe that victory has granted them peace under Hideyoshi. They assume that he’s still alive, so leave enough samurai to protect the Daimyo and maintain that appearance.”

  The General nodded. “They might believe this, since they do not see him often, but Yoshimizu kept his elite nobles beside him. Despite the war and his desire for our land, he first wanted to protect himself.”

  “That will be our challenge,” said Shinji. “We must defeat Yoshimizu and his Generals to grant freedom to his people.”

  “The peasants?”

  “Since we agree that Yoshimizu must have drained his province to pay for mercenaries, they will unite under our rule and be thankful for the end of tyranny. This will make other Shoguns believe that both provinces of the Yamato Plains are ruled by the house of Hideyoshi Murai. We can take what the enemy left on the battlefield to sell in distant marketplaces. With that money, we can support the restructuring of both east and west.”

  “But who will rule the west?” asked Katsushiro. “They’ll be unguarded.”

  “We can tell the peasants here that Hideyoshi has gone to rule them and secure his father’s wishes of a unified kingdom. You can rule this province yourself.”

  Satsuma began to understand the idea, and only for his people did he consider impersonating the Daimyo.

  “Hideyoshi was once a General in his father’s army, but now you must lead in his place,” said Onozawa. “In the west, we can place our strongest nobles to govern the people back to a powerful agrarian society. They can tax the sale of their crops to send here to their families.”

  “But our numbers were thinned by this war,” worried the General. “You suggest that we spread our samurai across twice as much la
nd?”

  “We’ll keep our fastest messengers on daily travels between the provinces to alert us. I can also traverse the ranks of other guilds to find ninja like myself to guard the surrounding forests, paying them generously from taxes we place on our nobles here.”

  “This is a good plan.”

  “If we can keep other provinces from thinking that we are weak enough to overthrow, we should be safe. The people in this province will believe that Hideyoshi is stationed in the west, solidifying his father’s land and title. The peasants there will assume that the nobles are acting under the rule of the Daimyo here in the east. In time, the people’s freedom will spread and Hideyoshi Murai will outlast his death through politics.”

  Katsushiro considered all the angles. “This could work, assuming that we rush the western province now.”

  “After I find the ronin who did this,” said Shinji. “I will kill Yoshimizu myself. Gather your trustworthy nobles and tell them how we intend to offset this tragedy.”

  Satsuma accepted the notion. “They will prefer to maintain the order of life here, even as a lie, in place of becoming ronin themselves. When are you planning to make your run?”

  “Immediately,” said Onozawa. “Since the war blocked a direct route over the grasslands, the ronin will be traveling north of the mountains. They have a child with them and will be moving slowly. I’m not certain what Yoshimizu plans for Yukio, but I don’t intend to wait to find out. When the tyrant is finally dead, the stage will be set for revolution.”

  * * * * *

  As the day drifted into late afternoon, a storm collected on the horizon, dampening the sunlight. Shinji gathered a satchel of food and left on the main road, where the farmers seemed happier than he had ever witnessed in his lifetime. They believed that they had won the war and were granted peace. They knew nothing about the decimation of the ruling house or the fragility of the tide of battle, and soon their nobles would be charging west to assure their hard-earned victory.