Nothing lived except the flies.
The little boy gazed around him at the heaps of dead flesh that only this morning had been his neighbors, his friends, his family. Old Granny… Nishiemon the headman… Akira… pretty Akemi and her new baby… his little sister Harumi… Kaachan… Tottchan… everybody…
They’d killed everybody…
A funny smell hung over the bodies, clinging to the ground like an invisible fog. The metallic scent of blood, the stink of excrement, and a faint, almost sweetish odor of rotting meat. The smell of death, attracting swarms of droning flies. He yelled and waved his arms; the insects that covered his mother’s body rose in a dark cloud at the disturbance. His voice sounded loud and unnatural in the silence. He let his arms drop, and the flies settled back to their ghoulish feast.
What am I going to do? I can’t just leave them out here… He wasn’t afraid of hard work, no peasant child was, but digging that many graves in the sun-baked soil would take days, even for grown men – and he was sure the raiders had taken every last scrap of food in the village.
I could burn them…He began dragging the bodies into their own houses, beginning with his mother.
When he got to his father’s body he stopped. The raiders had been particularly vicious here; they had literally hacked his father to pieces. One dismembered hand still held their kama; there was blood on the blade, and nearby lay the body of one of the bandits.
The boy blinked.He killed one of them. Tottchan killed a swordsman… he tried to protect us…
None of the other villagers had fought back. He could tell. Most of them had been running away; they had been cut down from behind – even the headman. Tottchan… The surge of pride he felt sustained him through the grisly chore of carrying the pieces of his father’s body into their house. He arranged them as well as he could, laying out his parents on the floor with his little sister between them, and emptied the jar of oil over the bodies.
There remained the dead bandit. He wasn’t sure what to do with the body; he didn’t want to leave it lying in the road but he didn’t want to burn it with any of the villagers either, not even Old Granny who was mean to everybody. He eventually settled for dragging it into a storage shed behind the headman’s house.
He didn’t know how to read or write so he couldn’t leave any kind of memorial for them, not even a list of their names – but because his father had been brave enough to fight back, he took the bloody kama and stuck it in the dirt in front of the notice board, the way a fallen samurai’s sword was left to mark his grave.
He picked up the bandit’s sword. It was heavier than he thought it would be, and covered with dried blood – maybe even Kaachan’s or Harumi’s. A real weapon, a thing designed to kill, not like the kama that was made to cut rice-stalks. If Tottchan had used this instead of the kama… maybe he could have protected Kaachan and Harumi… maybe he could have protected everybody… maybe I can learn how to use it so I can protect people too…
He needed a way to carry the thing without cutting himself, though. He found the saya where it had fallen out of the bandit’s waistband when he was dragging the body, and with some difficulty got the blade back into it. Then he went back through all the houses, looking for anything the bandits might have left. He didn’t find anything; they’d been short of food even before the bandits came, and nobody in their village ever had any money. As he finished with each house, he lit a torch and set fire to the oil-soaked bodies. They smelled awful, like the time he and his best friend Akira had gone to spy on some eta burning a dead horse. People ought to smell better than dead animals. The dead bandit was no different than the villagers. I guess everybody’s the same when they’re dead.
There ought to be something else… something to say… The priest who had come when the old headman died had said some kind of prayers, but he’d been little then and he didn’t remember. He wasn’t even sure what the priest was supposed to have been praying to. So he gave up and, with nothing but the clothes he was wearing and the dead bandit’s sword, left his burning village behind and trudged away, along the road that led through the forest.
By the end of the first day he was awfully hungry.
He had a country boy’s woodscraft, so he wasn’t completely empty-bellied. The grayish mushrooms he’d found growing on a fallen tree looked like some his mom used to pick, and tasted like them too – they hadn’t made him sick yet, so he guessed they were okay. And in a sheltered hollow he’d found a bunch of fiddleheads, it was late in the year for them but they were probably fooled by the cool dim shade. But fiddleheads and mushrooms didn’t really stick with you, not the way Kaachan’s millet dumplings did. And he was cold. Even though the day had been hot, as the sun set the air took on a damp chill. It was getting too dark to see, but he managed to find what looked like a patch of dry bracken and crawled into it, and slept alone for the first time in his life, and cried.
Being on his own looked even worse the next morning. He was cold and hungry, he felt grubby, he itched where the bugs that lived in the bracken had bitten him. He didn’t remember where the road was; he tried to find it but only managed to get lost worse than ever. Now he was really scared. Once he heard a snuffling that might have been a bear, and he thought he saw a huge snake slither across his path. He remembered a story he’d heard last summer, about a snake-woman who lived in the mountains and devoured young men, until at last she was destroyed by a holy priest who had innocently sought shelter in her house. What if a snake-woman lived in these hills? That got him started thinking about all the scary things in all the stories he’d ever heard, giant spiders and centipedes, rokurokubi lying in wait for unwary travelers, evil kitsune waiting to lure him to his death, oni…
He felt something swoop over his head – a fleeting darkness, a rushing noise like wings, a sudden wind – but there wasn’t anything there!
Right, he told himself scornfully. What’s worse, oni or bandits? I know the bandits are real! He saw some scrubby willows at the foot of the hill. Willows usually meant water, and water would probably go somewhere…
The stream was a lucky find. Not only was its nearly-dry bed a better path than the overgrown hillside, but its banks furnished a few half-dried cattail stalks and an unwary frog that tasted horrible raw but was better than nothing. And after several hours of walking, he seemed to be getting somewhere – it was wetter underfoot, the reeds greener, and he could smell water…
He smelled something else too – the sharp tang of woodsmoke, and mixed with it the delicious odor of… fish! Somebody nearby was cooking fish!
His stomach growled so loudly he froze, afraid the fish-cook would hear it. But he heard no footsteps, no one came crashing through the screening willows, so he drew the bandit’s sword as quietly as he could, and crept closer. Maybe it’s the bandits…
It wasn’t bandits, though. It was an old man whose shaggy gray hair looked like a mop of feathers. A beak of a nose stuck out from his weather-reddened face, and his black robes were worn so shiny they looked almost green. A long staff lay in the grass next to him while he cooked a fish over a small campfire, and a second fish waited its turn on the stick. It’s just a yamabushi… okay, I oughtta be able to beg that other fish offa him…
“Well, come on, boy, what are you waiting for?”
The boy looked around. “Huh? Me?”
“Do you see anybody else around here? And put that sword away before you cut your own hand off; I won’t train you one-handed.”
Train… me?
“Well come on, this fish is done and I need the stick to cook mine! You can’t learn swordsmanship on an empty stomach, you know.”
This isn’t happening. Stuff like this doesn’t happen. I’m either dreaming or dead. Slowly he walked forward and took the proffered fish.
“I’ve been waiting for you all day – thought you’d gotten lost or something, though I don’t see how anybody could get lost following that stream. You’re a lot slower than my last pupil, he came looking for me. Of course he was born samurai and wanted to help his brother avenge his parents… that didn’t turn out too well, that it didn’t. I was a lot younger then, and thought I knew it all. So… tell me. Why do you want to learn how to kill?”
“I don’t!”
In a movement too fast for the eye to follow, the yamabushi drew his own blade. The late-afternoon sunlight reflected in the steel, making it seem to glow red. Like blood. “A sword is a weapon. Swordsmanship is the art of killing people. No matter how you try to pretty it up, that’s the truth.”
“I don’t want to go around killing people like the bandits did. I want to… to protect people. Like Tottchan tried to. He tried to protect me, and Kaachan, and Harumi… even though they had swords and all he had was a kama.”
“To protect people… ordinary people like the ones you grew up with. You’ll do, boy. That’s a lot safer ambition than politics. Don’t ever get mixed up with politics, you’ll only get yourself sold out by your own side, that you will. Now are you going to eat that fish or not?”
“You… are you really going to teach me?”
“I don’t know… are you too stupid to learn? What’s your name, boy?”
“Seijuurou.”
“Hn. Too big a name for a hiko like you. I’ll just call you baka deshi until you grow into it. And you, you call me Shishou, that you do.”
“Hai… Shishou.”
NOTES, EXPLANATIONS ETC.
Hiten Mitsurugi Ryuu arose during the Sengoku period, which most authorities define as starting sometime in the late 15th century. So, sometime around then, there was a swordsman called Seijuurou Hiko. Where did he come from? Where did he get his strange idea of protecting the happiness of ordinary people? Where did he get the nearly supernatural skill he passed down through thirteen generations of successors?
Supernatural, huh? There’s a legend that all the martial arts, and particularly swordsmanship, were first taught to men by the tengu. There’s a tradition, still alive in kabuki, that Minamoto no Yoshitsune, legendary prototype of all bishounen heroes, was taught by a tengu in the guise of a yamabushi. How long does a tengu live anyway? Three hundred years? Yoshitsune was eventually destroyed by his own brother; what would his tengu master have thought of that?
The destruction of Seijuurou’s village was inspired by a confused mix of Fire Tripper and Seven Samurai. Our Hiko’s name is written with kanji for “comparison” and “old,” but a soundalike is an ancient word for boy. And millet dumplings… well, peasants hardly ever ate rice, and the millet dumplings come from the story of Momotaro.
This is the first in what I hope will become a group of stories about the previous masters of Hiten Mitsurugi Ryuu. “Soaring Blade” comes from the GeoFront fansub of Requiem for the Ishin Shishi; I just liked it as an overall title for the series.