Spirit of the Ronin

by Travis Heermann

  Each morning, under the supervision of Sergeant Hiromasa, they formed ranks in the practice yard and drilled with spears, practiced how to march, how to move in formation, learned the meaning of orders given by drum and conch and war fan. They were being trained for the castle garrison, which demanded proficiency with spear and bow, sword and naginata. Captain Yoshimura had declared that if they showed promise, they might be dispersed into units suited to their individual strengths.

  Ken’ishi’s hands grew ever more familiar with the feel of the wooden spear haft, of its weight, reach, and balance. Of course, it was infinitely inferior to Silver Crane, but there were some purposes and circumstances for which a spear might be a superior weapon. Insight into its utility gave him a strong appreciation for it.

  Sergeant Hiromasa told him, “You gain skill quickly.”

  Ken’ishi bowed. “Thank you, Sergeant.”

  “Have you ever used a spear before?”

  “No, Sergeant.”

  Hiromasa gave him a look of thoughtful appraisal. “I think tomorrow I will make you unit leader.”

  Elation washed through him. “Thank you, Sergeant!” He bowed again. “My duty is to serve with all my ability.”

  Hiromasa cracked a faint smile, then moved on.

  But Ken’ishi was not made a unit leader the following day, and he wondered if he had failed somehow to make Hiromasa change his mind. He redoubled his efforts and trained harder.

  And then Hiromasa would approach Ken’ishi and say again, “I think tomorrow I will make you unit leader.” But still no promotion came.

  Day after day, the constant movement helped keep the cold at bay, so that when breakfast came in the form of a fresh egg cracked upon hot rice, the meal became among the most appreciated he had experienced since his days as a starving ronin.

  For Ken’ishi, the drills were easy, if taxing. Working with a spear required a different style of movement and poise, but still required balance and control of one’s body. Perhaps he should not have been astonished at how many of the new retainers lacked the kind of control Kaa had drilled into him since he was five years old. Footwork, balance, and timing were the foundations of martial practice of any discipline, and many of the men lacked these skills in such profundity he wondered how they had managed to survive this long without suffering a tragic accident walking out of their houses. On the other hand, many of them were warriors trained and bred, hard-muscled, flint-eyed, and steady. They knew what it was to kill and to face one’s own death.

  Bred in a samurai family, Michizane exhibited this sort of martial training. He moved with a steadfast stoicism Ken’ishi admired. They sometimes sat together at meals. Michizane once complimented Ken’ishi’s footwork and balance. It was clear, he said, that Ken’ishi had been taught well, and that his skills formed the basis of real strength, no matter what weapon or fighting style he chose. Ken’ishi thanked him, upon which Michizane began to ask about his upbringing and training. Ken’ishi demurred. He knew almost nothing of his heritage, and tales of his upbringing were not something most men would believe.

  During one such conversation, he detected a wistful longing when Michizane asked about Ken’ishi’s family, prompting him to return the question.

  “Ah, my family,” he answered with dreamy delight in his eyes. “My wife Satsuki is as beautiful as wisteria in spring, and kindness drips from her like the petals of those blossoms.”

  Ken’ishi smiled. “Now who is the poetic soul?”

  Michizane said, “And my daughter, Omitsu, is as fragile as a hatchling, but so adventurous, so inquisitive. Everything she sees brings a question.” His face glowed with pride. “Of course, I wish I had a son as well, but perhaps I’ll get to see Satsuki again and we can work on that.”

  Ken’ishi felt a bit of surprise that Michizane’s family could not be with him. “Where are they?”

  “Yame village. About four days’ walk from here. My stipend is modest, for now. Until I can rise in rank, they must live with my parents in Yame, which is fortunate. I cannot put them in the kind of house they deserve.”

  “So you are the eldest son.”

  “Of five brothers. And my father does not have wealth to divide among us. But our home is a happy one. Little Omitsu’s smile is like the sun.” A tear formed at the corner of his eye. “And Satsuki...Satsuki...”

  Kiosé and Little Frog leaped into Ken’ishi’s mind. “You miss them very much.”

  Michizane nodded. “I have not been home since before the invasion. My father told me to seek greater fortunes than can be found in Yame village. I’ve been sending all of my pay home....”

  In contrast to Michizane, Ushihara was a clumsy bull. Stubborn and dim-witted, he had little but vague intuition where grace and poise should have been, but he was also strong and earnest, with a powerful desire to walk the path of a true warrior.

  Michizane snorted that would it be a long journey, and Ushihara would likely die in the attempt. Ushihara spat and called him an over-groomed fop.

  One day, Captain Yoshimura came at the noon meal and pulled Ushihara, along with Takuya, another man of peasant origin, out of the barracks. Lord Tsunetomo’s chamberlain had requested them for a specific duty within the castle keep. Ushihara grumbled at first, but shut his mouth after a stern look from Captain Yoshimura.

  After the midday meal, the recruits were given a short time to rest. Ken’ishi returned to the yard to practice sword drills. Silver Crane moved like fluid metal in his hands, cutting the air with hungry slashes of sound.

  Drills and practice resumed in the afternoon. A couple of hours later, Takuya returned, and some time after that, Ushihara as well.

  Ushihara had never been particularly gregarious or light-hearted, but for the rest of the afternoon his frequent glances toward Ken’ishi were fraught with a kind of dark intent and calculation. As the day went on, whispers of the kami grew louder in Ken’ishi’s awareness.

  That night, after the soldiers’ muscles were wrung out, their hands and feet sporting fresh rounds of blisters, and their bellies full of rice, smoked fish, and pickled plums, the men huddled around the braziers in the barracks. Faces were painted yellow-orange in the pools of glow. Some groups boasted and laughed. Others sang songs. Ken’ishi’s group—Ushihara, Michizane, and seven others—hunched quietly.

  Ken’ishi opened his trunk and pulled out his bamboo flute, given to him when he was just a boy by the first human being he could remember meeting, an itinerant monk, high in the mountains of northern Honshu. Raising it to his lips, he began to play. The notes flowed like mournful birdsong, wavered and trilled and echoed, like a nightingale calling for its mate. The men fell silent. The group around him grew.

  Ushihara sat near him with hooded eyes, scowling. “Damn you, quit that infernal racket. It makes my heart hurt.”

  Ken’ishi had played this song for the girl he fell in love with on a long-ago forest road. The unquenchable yearning for her surged within him, like the scar in his thigh that ached when the weather was about to change, familiar as an old shoe, part of him. He closed his eyes and let it take him, pouring it into the song.

  The flute was snatched out of his hands.

  He opened his eyes.

  Ushihara snapped the flute in two against his knee. “I said stop!”

  The shock boiled up in Ken’ishi like lava from a fire mountain, turning to rage as it spilled over the top. He launched himself at Ushihara.

  Ushihara met him with a fist against his teeth and fingers gouging for his eyes.

  Ken’ishi bowled him over, rage stealing his reason, blood in his mouth. They rolled on the floor, a straining, shouting, punching knot.

  Cries erupted around them. Hands reached for them, trying to pry them apart. Ken’ishi reared back a fist meant to slam Ushihara’s head into the floor, but someone caught it and used it to peel him loose.

  Moments later, Sergeant Hiromasa appeared, roaring, along with armed guards of the night’s watch. Ken’ishi caught a
glimpse of a truncheon moments before it slammed into his head. And then blackness.

  * * *

  Ken’ishi awoke surrounded by night, his outstretched arms aching from being bound, face-first, by coarse ropes to a cross. His head pounded from the truncheon blow. The winter wind sliced through clothing and stole all warmth from him. He gathered his feet under him to stand and relieve the tension on his shoulders, but the ground was too close for him to stand up, too far for him to kneel. He could only hang there from his arms, straining his shoulders.

  The wood was rough and hard and merciless against his face. His breath misted from his mouth and formed a frost on the wood of the cross. The yard was silent, except for the quiet footsteps of the watch passing somewhere behind him.

  His only thought was: How strange to be in a position of torture again so soon.

  Green Tiger’s torturer had subjected him to such eternities of agony that, in the march of the real world’s time, he had no memory or imagination of how long it had lasted. Only an infinitude of hells.

  He was not alone. On a nearby cross hung a dark shape. From the ragged shock of hair, Ken’ishi recognized Ushihara.

  The crescent moon slid across heaven with its entourage of silken stars, silent and aloof, painting two sullen shadows onto the castle wall.

  Eventually the ropes and strain and cold numbed his arms, and he hung in a half-daze, dipping in an out of a black stupor and visions of snarling oni coming to devour him. And with the practice he had learned in Green Tiger’s torturous hell, he let himself descend into the stupor, where things were quiet and dark and the pain only a distant beast clawing at the door.

  Then a sound roused him.

  Weeping.

  Ken’ishi cranked his knotted neck to look at Ushihara, whose cheeks were wet with tears, lips glistening with snot and spittle.

  After a time, Ushihara noticed Ken’ishi’s eyes on him. He sniffed and tried to compose himself, but his eyes still glowed with terror. “They’re gonna kill us!”

  “No,” Ken’ishi said, “we’re to be flogged.”

  “It hurts!”

  “Shut up, coward.” It was only pain.

  Ushihara wept. “It hurts, it hurts....”

  Ken’ishi sighed and shook his head. “You cry like a peasant. You are no better than a gravedigger.”

  At the last word, Ushihara flinched and began to struggle at his bonds, but it was no good.

  From across the yard, a guard’s voice called out, “Shut up, you shit heads!”

  Ushihara settled back against his ropes.

  The shadows crept along the wall and exhaustion crept through Ken’ishi’s body, drawing fingers of blackness through his mind.

  Then he heard Ushihara’s ragged whisper. “He made me!”

  Several moments passed before Ken’ishi absorbed those words. “Who made you?”

  “He said he’ll do to me a hundred times worse than a simple flogging if I tell!”

  “Then why tell me anything at all?”

  Long moments passed. Ushihara sniffled. “I don’t know.” Something in his voice—remorse?—suggested Ushihara spoke the truth.

  Several times, Ken’ishi pressed for a name, and every time he met with fearful refusal.

  The night dug deeper into itself, and Ushihara wept again.

  For some reason he could not explain, Ken’ishi pitied the lout.

  Allowing himself to drift in the currents of pain and cold, his consciousness dimmed until the shadows on the wall diffused into the gray of early dawn. Before long, the morning conch sounded, roused him fully, and brought the men out of the barracks.

  All the recruits of Barrack Six shuffled out onto the practice yard, yawning and rubbing their eyes.

  Sergeant Hiromasa’s voice roared, “Attention!”

  The men leaped into line and stood straight, motionless, and silent.

  Two guards approached the crosses where Ken’ishi and Ushihara hung.

  Sergeant Hiromasa’s voice called out, “Are they alive?”

  One of guards checked them. “Yes.”

  “Then perhaps there’s hope for them,” Hiromasa said. He raised his voice toward the men standing at attention, speaking with gruff emphasis on each word. “I will explain this to you only once. Brawling is forbidden! Your flesh, your bone, your blood, your lives belong to your lord, and only to your lord! You die when he tells you to die! You fight when he tells you to fight! If you fight with another of his retainers, you are fighting with Lord Tsunetomo himself! If you injure or kill one of his retainers, you are doing harm to your lord! You may as well have cut off one of his fingers! He has given you a sword, comrades, a bed, food. Serve him well and he will care for you well. Until that day he deems it your time to die.” He paused, striding slowly before the line, glaring at each man in turn. In his hand, he carried a bamboo cane as thick as two fingers.

  At the sight of the cane, a shiver of memory whispered through Ken’ishi. How many times in his boyhood had Kaa used a cane on him? Memory of its bite raised tingles on his buttocks and thighs.

  “These two men harmed your lord!” Hiromasa shouted. “Should we show them mercy?”

  Cries of “No!” came from the ranks.

  Sergeant Hiromasa approached Ken’ishi and Ushihara. “Do you understand why you are here?”

  Both croaked in affirmative.

  “Now, let us get to the bottom of this. Who started it?”

  “I did, Sergeant,” Ken’ishi said.

  Ushihara gasped and stared at him.

  Ken’ishi continued, “Ushihara offended me greatly, but I should have held my temper. I attacked him. Please give me his strokes.”

  Hiromasa grunted with surprise. “And why would you accept his strokes? Has he not made himself your enemy?”

  “We are brothers in service to Lord Tsunetomo, Sergeant.”

  Ushihara’s mouth worked, but no sound came out.

  “Very well,” Hiromasa said. “But he will not be let off without punishment. When he should have been building comradeship, he rudely, blatantly offended one of his comrades. Ken’ishi will have half of Ushihara’s strokes. Ten strokes for Ushihara. Thirty strokes for Ken’ishi.” He squared himself behind Ushihara. “Strip him.”

  The two guards came forward and tore Ushihara’s clothes from him, leaving him naked but for a loincloth. Ushihara clamped teeth hard onto his bottom lip.

  “You will count,” Hiromasa said. “If you cannot count, I will continue until you can.”

  Terror twisted Ushihara’s face. When the first blow fell, hissing, sharp, and meaty across his back, he clenched his teeth and shouted, “One!” When the second blow fell, a whimper found its way into the word, “Two!” Like the slow beat of a drum, the cane snapped into his back, driving the count from him. He convulsed around each blow like a worm touched with burning twig. The shout of “Ten!” came out with an explosive bleat of relief.

  Two flicks of the tip of Hiromasa’s wakizashi severed Ushihara’s bonds, and he spilled onto the ground, clutching his arms to his chest like nerveless stumps.

  “When you can get up,” Hiromasa said, “breakfast awaits.”

  Trembling, gasping, Ushihara rolled onto his knees. His arms shifted shades of red and blue and purple. Stripes of blood seeping from the crimson weals on his back and buttocks, Ushihara rolled onto his knees.

  Hiromasa turned toward Ken’ishi. “Strip him.”

  The guards tore Ken’ishi’s clothes from him.

  He breathed deeply and steeled himself for the first blow.

  It came, shocking in its depth of pain, as if a strip of flesh had been ripped from him. Perhaps the chill that reached to his bones reduced the pain. He swallowed hard and said, “One.”

  A silvery tendril reached into his mind, threaded between his thoughts, cooled the hot agony of the first blow.

  After this, everything changes, Silver Crane said.

  “Two.”

  In a flash of staggering despair, Ke
n’ishi envisioned himself being cast out in disgrace.

  That is not the man’s destiny.

  “Three.”

  Even such pain as this was bearable. It would pass, as all things bad and good.

  Was his destiny further humiliation? Would he have to cut his belly open to escape it?

  This is not the man’s humiliation. It is the threshold.

  Is it just the wind

  In the bamboo grass,

  Or are you coming?

  At the least sound

  My heart skips a beat.

  I try to suppress my torment

  And get a little sleep,

  But I only become more restless.

  —The Love Poems of Marichiko

  A terrible nothingness stalked Kazuko like a lone wolf stalking a fawn. The nothingness was not a pleasant, floating void, but a vile, diabolical thing that ate at the substance of everything she was. Sometimes it took form and peeled memories from her like stale, sticky noodles, dipped them in her moon’s blood, and ate them with delight.

  One by one, the nothingness flayed her memories away: her childhood, her coming of age, her studies of Chinese classics, her education in the ways of noble ladies and of how to pleasure a husband, and then, the memories of her night with—

  A ragged gasp dragged her upright in bed, chest heaving. Chicken skin sprang up on both arms, across her shoulders, and up her neck.

  Tsunetomo snored quietly beside her, his broad chest rising and falling. He stirred at her movement, then settled himself back into slumber.

  The thought of losing who she was, of having her very self stripped away piece by piece, the sensation of it happening right now, of being replaced by nothingness, unsettled her so profoundly that she rose out of bed and stood above her husband, the grayness of early dawn seeping around the shutters. Frozen by shock, she stood for a long time until she roused herself and did the only thing she knew to drive away the most unpleasant of thoughts: she donned her practice garb, took down her naginata from its rack on the wall, and descended the narrow staircases through the floors of the keep, heading toward the practice yard. Physical exertion would fan the flames she knew to be within her and drive back the darkness of her dreams. She was Otomo no Kazuko, a samurai lady, and no mere visitation from the Land of Dreams would steal that from her.