PART IV: THE FINAL SCROLL

 

Hear those baby mice

Huddled in their nest...peeping

To the sparrowlets

—Basho

Ken’ishi sat, bathed in sunlight filtering through the emerald forest, surrounded by vibrant green lichen clinging to stones that whispered their antiquity. The sound of running water pattering atop his head soothed the fresh aches of his soul. He had grown weary of examining his soul, but he knew its boundaries now—and its darkest corners—better than ever before. The kami nibbled at his awareness like minnows, passing around him and through him.

The running water had cleansed his skin of most of the dozens of characters and arcane sigils covering his naked flesh from crown to heel. Its raw energy invigorated him in ways that went beyond the flesh, much like the way he had tried to use the mountain waterfall, clumsily, intuitively, to cleanse himself after his first encounter with Hatsumi.

How many hours he had spent meditating here today, he did not know. How many days since he had climbed Kiyomizu Mountain, he could not fathom. The days from that beginning to now ran together like blood from a terrible wound mixed with water. Finally, the blood stops, and only water flows, but the wound is still open.

He had not set foot upon the plain below since Lord Abe brought him to this shrine, built three-fourths of the way up the western slope. The local peasants brought offerings here, and the priest was honored to have such a dignified grandee as Lord Abe no Genmei in his presence.

Lord Abe had warned him the process would be difficult, but he found it difficult in ways he could not have imagined.

The first days had been spent in meditation. Looking back on them, he thought those days were among the darkest he had ever spent, as dark as the weeks he had spent in Green Tiger’s torture chamber. It was as if he were trapped at the bottom of a dark chasm, hemmed in by black, squirming, biting things. He could imagine the stars high above, just a narrow ribbon visible, where happiness might be found, but the biting things only lay quiescent until he moved. Whenever he reached for the finger holds that might let him climb free, the black things swarmed him, hissing and squealing. He could not fight them, could not vanquish them; they were a part of him. He could only accept them, one by one, and in that acceptance, they dissolved like smoke, and he was able to climb a little higher each time.

The biting things were his innumerable failures, the desires he could not relinquish, the wrongs unrighted, the injuries that had never healed, the cruelties he had committed through purpose or indifference, the blood he had spilled.

In these endless meditations, he was forced to gaze deep into the bowels of his own soul and scrape out the corruption that festered there.

The blood of enemies still stained him. Nishimuta no Takenaga, the arrogant constable. Green Tiger’s thugs and henchmen. Even the Mongols he had slain were sons and husbands and brothers. They had more family than he himself. He entreated their spirits to forgive him.

Lord Abe brought him many scrolls to read. Treatises on Confucian ideas by the Chinese ancients, Taoist wisdom, stories of the life of the Buddha. He read and chanted special sutras, performed esoteric mantras at hours deemed most efficacious according to the cosmic shifting of stars, moon, and planets.

When Ken’ishi was not meditating or studying, Lord Abe put him through daily rites of purification. When the stars and planets were favorably aligned, he subjected Ken’ishi to exorcism ceremonies. Lord Abe wrote arcane spells upon sheets of pristine white paper, emblazoned with pentagrams, and pasted those papers to Ken’ishi’s forehead, where they rested as he painted Ken’ishi’s body, front to back, top to bottom, with hundreds of characters in black and red, all the while chanting in deep concentration. The process took hours, after which, even in winter, Ken’ishi would meditate under what Lord Abe called “the purest stream in the world.” The waterfall would slowly erase the characters and wash away the evil they drew out.

He was allowed to drink only from the waterfall. He was allowed to eat only one day out of three, and then only rice, plus the fruit and vegetables the local peasants occasionally brought him. Their gifts of food were a hardship to them in these times, he knew, but he could not insult them by refusing. To them, he was simply the Man Living On The Mountain. They did not ask why he was there, but Kiyomizu was a sacred place where one might cross into other realms, so they thought his presence was probably important. The kindness and compassion Lord Abe admonished him to show, especially early on, when the stain of evil still ran deepest, when he was still prone to fits of unreasoning anger, ingratiated him with the peasants. The eel in his belly protested such kindnesses, chewed at him for it, especially in the first year after he came.

Ken’ishi had wanted to maintain his practice with Silver Crane, but Lord Abe had forbidden it. He was allowed to practice with only bokken. Silver Crane’s power was a corrupting influence. Sometimes, in the depths of his meditations, he sensed the silver threads of the sword’s influence passing through him, tugging at him. In the beginning, he had demanded that Silver Crane remain with him at all times. It was his.

But Lord Abe placed Silver Crane into a box of fresh pinewood, nestled it in silk, and placed one ofuda atop the sword, another atop the box. These paper talismans were written with complex spells and charged with magic. The box was then wrapped in ropes of rice straw and draped with shide, white paper cut into zigzag strips, signifying the boundary between the sacred and profane. He would not touch Silver Crane again until he was purified of the evil that had taken root in him.

Swathed in the ancient forest, he reverted to his old ways under Kaa’s tutelage, practicing his woodcraft in the ancient forest. By now, he knew even the smallest patch of the mountain, and he still found it a place of wonders.

Near the summit on the south slope, he had discovered an old path choked by bamboo. At the top of it, an ancient, stone tomb, just over waist high, had been carved into a rock outcropping. Two sharp-eyed fox statues, as tall as his thigh, guarded the entrance. The suggestion of red paint remained on the entrance seal. Above the entrance, a bronze plaque read: Third Empress of Kyushu, followed by a series of characters Ken’ishi did not know, presumably the woman’s name.

Many times he sat before the tomb entrance, pondering the relentless sweep of history and wondering how many hundreds of years had passed since this empress had reigned, since she had laughed and loved. Where had her palace been? What had her domain been like? What would be remembered of her in a thousand years? Would the barbarian hordes slaughter every samurai and impose their domain here, as they had across China and all the way to lands beyond the sunset?

He communed with the pheasants and rabbits, the tanuki and foxes, the sparrows and finches. None of the tanuki he met were as personable—or as powerful—as Hage. He wondered what the old rascal was doing with himself these days. These tanuki preferred to keep to themselves, likewise with the foxes. After two dangerous encounters with foxes, he favored giving them a wide berth anyway. Lord Abe forbade him to eat any of the game animals, with the reproach that any further deaths burdening his soul would disrupt the purification.

Ken’ishi allowed Storm to roam free on the mountaintop. With more fresh grass than the stallion could hope to eat in a thousand lifetimes, he was content to await the day when Ken’ishi might need to ride him into battle. Ken’ishi exercised him often, lest he grow fat with all that grass and nothing to do.

Lord Abe often left Ken’ishi alone on the mountain and returned with news of the outside world. He possessed webs of information gathering, both prosaic and supernatural. So much had happened since Ken’ishi had climbed Kiyomizu Mountain five winters ago.

The fortification had been completed. A stone wall half-again the height of a man now encircled the entirety of Hakata Bay, from beyond Shiga spit all the way to Imazu, some ten ri, cutting through Hakozaki and Hakata. A man could climb it, but a Mongol pony could not, and only fifty or so paces lay between the water’s edge and the wall. The invaders would not be able to mass large formations of troops. The backside of the wall had an earthen embankment sloping to the top. Men and horses could run right up to the front edge and rain arrows down upon the enemy below.

In the winter of the year Ken’ishi had come to Kiyomizu, the bakufu had concocted a scheme to counterattack the shipyards in Pusan and other ports on the Koryo peninsula and wrest them away from the enemy. Thousands of samurai, tired of waiting on their laurels for the next attack, heeded the call for volunteers. Hakata and Hakozaki were turned from trade ports into shipyards, but the number of large ships required proved too costly. The project was abandoned after a few months. Instead of large ships capable of carrying an invading army, a smaller, more agile kind of vessel became the favorite. These vessels were designed to attack the incoming fleet pirate-style. Scores of them had been constructed.

A series of signal beacons had been erected across northern Kyushu, and they were constantly manned. When the barbarians came again, the news would spread with the speed of flame.

And come the barbarians would. It was only a matter of when. Three years ago, the Mongols had finally conquered the recalcitrant Sung empire after an effort of twenty years. This war had been Khubilai Khan’s focus, a thorn in his side, a major diversion of resources, and a distraction from the “small country” that had defied him across the sea. But with the submission of the Sung, the Mongols now had command of the largest trading fleet in the known world.

Another embassy arrived from the Khan, went before the shogun, and were promptly beheaded as spies.

Two years ago, the Khan ordered his son-in-law, king of the Koryo, to build him a thousand ships. The shogun’s spies reported that fifty thousand Mongols had moved into the Koryo peninsula, along with untold thousands of Chinese and Koryo troops, awaiting completion of the invasion fleet.

Talk in the capital was of war. Talk in Kamakura was of war. Talk across Kyushu was of war. Of course, Kyushu had been living under imminent threat for six years. It was in the air now, in the water, in the crops—that is, what crops remained.

With all the peasants working on fortifications, ships, and others defenses, fields languished. Moreover, two years of drought, followed by two years of blighted crops, had left much of Kyushu starving. Immense quantities of grain had been shipped from the north, but it was only a bandage on a half-severed limb. The peasants were suffering, simmering with growing unrest.

Lord Tsunetomo’s domain was hard hit. An entire corner of his domain had rebelled over tax collection the year before. Dozens of half-starved farmers and a handful of bumpkin samurai had to be executed before the rebellion was cowed.

Now, with the fortifications completed, in the burgeoning of summer with rice seedlings growing, people were looking ahead, hopeful for good crops, but fearful the barbarians would burn the crops around them. The farmers could only do their planting and, if the barbarians came, hope their fields were not ravaged.

It had not happened immediately, but perhaps six months into the purifications and exorcisms, the crimson mark on Ken’ishi’s chest began to shrink. With that discovery, hope bloomed within him. He might return someday to service, if Lord Tsunetomo would have him. Month by month, year by year, the mark shrank to a few small tendrils around the scar. Kazuko was no longer a specter of aching desire, but a warm, treasured memory that resurfaced only occasionally.

Lord Abe had refused to answer any questions about her for more than three years, and only then after a special divination ritual where he determined if the spike of longing in Ken’ishi’s heart was gone.

Diminished, perhaps, but never gone.

According to Lord Abe, Tsunetomo had not divorced her as many had speculated he would do when an heir was not forthcoming. Instead, she had risen to the stature of Captain Tsunemori and was recruiting women of samurai birth for a special unit under her command.

Some thirty women had answered her call, a mix of warriors’ wives and women who eschewed the company of men. She had created quite a sensation—although some called it scandal. She trained her followers in the naginata, and Tsunetomo’s horsemaster, Ishii no Soun, trained them in horsemanship and yabusame. Ken’ishi smiled with pride at the thought of her leading such women.

On a night in the sixth month, Ken’ishi sat on a west-facing ledge near the summit of Kiyomizu, looking out across the verdant plain toward the Ariake Sea, across the glimmering patchwork of flooded rice fields where the stars shone. The lights of Setaka village flickered like fireflies. He had fashioned himself a new bamboo flute and played it now. It soothed him, as it always had. The songs of sadness and longing no longer felt right to him, so he played happier tunes, smiling occasionally at his own inventiveness.

Then the corner of his eye caught a flare of yellow-orange light in the distance, a sudden blossom. The flames hung high above the plain, from a hilltop south of Yame village.

He stood and squinted into the hazy, star-studded distance. Farther to the north, another long beacon burned, and farther still, yet another.

A door seemed to shut in his mind.

His days of healing and renewal were over.

* * *

Lord Abe was not here tonight. He had been staying as guest of the Nishimuta lord who oversaw Setaka village, Lord Jiro’s cousin.

Ken’ishi could waste no time looking for him, either. The lighting of the signal beacons carried only one meaning. The barbarians were coming.

His purification was not complete, but he must assist in the defense. And if he ended up in one of the Nine Hells for his efforts, he would fight his way back out again.

It is time where many threads converge, rang Silver Crane’s voice in his mind. The man’s destiny is at hand.

“Indeed, I suspect it is,” he said. “Will you serve me?”

I am here, in this time, in this place. I will serve. Will the man?

Ken’ishi wondered about the cryptic last question, but asking for clarity would bring no response. The sword had always revealed its secrets in its own time.

He approached the sealed box. Five years of exposure had weathered it. Lord Abe replaced the shide often, so the boundary papers looked fresh.

Ken’ishi was about reintroduce a dangerous relic back into the mortal world.

That was when the admonishment of the sword polisher Tametsugu came back to him: At the moment you most desire to use Silver Crane, when deepest peril and greatest triumph are suspended in balance, you must put the sword away.

Was this that moment? But how could he leave such a powerful weapon here, unused, when the fate of the entire country, thousands of souls, was at stake?

Look to your soul, samurai, Tametsugu had said.

Was one man’s soul worth more than those of thousands?

Ken’ishi sensed the sword’s amusement at his hesitation, and its thirst after being locked away for so long. Its anticipation of battle tingled over Ken’ishi’s flesh.

What would happen to him if he unleashed Silver Crane’s full power? How many deaths could he withstand, without losing himself, before he was no longer human? How many deaths would slake the sword’s thirst? It had the power to drive him into the thickest fighting before he knew what had happened. It could reshape fortune and circumstance to deliver the thickest bloodletting unto itself, and Ken’ishi would become its pawn.

He untied the rope around the box and lifted the lid.

There it lay, just as it ever had. An unassuming, antique sword.

He picked it up and tied it to his obi.

To battle! its voice rang.

“To battle.”

“The knowledge of a general is an understanding of human affections. If a general does not have sincerity, righteousness, and human-heartedness, it will be impossible for him to be in harmony with human affections. It has been clearly understood both in ancient and modern times that when a man does not acknowledge human affections, his strategies will turn into disasters.”

—Issai Chozanshi, The Demon’s Sermon on the Martial Arts

Kazuko sat beside her husband on a campaign stool, never having sat upon a man’s chair before. Her armor creaked as she settled herself beside her husband in the half-circle of officers. The armored plates on her arms, legs, and shoulders felt as natural and comfortable as her robes. She had had her do-maru modified to fit her feminine contours rather than trying to squash her into a man’s shape.

Opposite her sat Tsunemori, grim and tight-lipped, and around the circle, Tsunetomo’s other officers, Yoshimura, Soun, Hiromasa.

One was still missing, and there had been no word of him for too many years. She dared not inquire, or else threaten the fragile trust that had regrown between her and Tsunetomo.

The six of them had already prayed together at the temple, entreating the gods for victory, and now they sat encircled by Tsunetomo’s maku, broad curtains woven with the Otomo clan mon of two apricot flowers, the headquarters of a warrior lord on campaign. The maku snapped and fluttered in the morning breeze, erected in the castle’s central courtyard. Before them in neat rows sat the unit commanders, armored and prepared for battle.

And now, the ceremonial meal that would send them off to battle, designed by the yin-yang masters to grant the greatest fortune. Servants brought the three courses with great solemnity, presented first to Tsunetomo, then to each of the other officers.

First came dried chestnuts; their name, kachi-guri, sounded like ‘victory.’ Kazuko accepted the tiny dish bearing three chestnuts and ate each of them with focused attention and reverence. Next came konbu, the seaweed so common in many meals. She ate each of the three leaves individually, chewing each, savoring the taste of the sea. Third came three awabi, raw abalone served in their shells. She chewed the slimy, gristly mass of each only once before letting it slide down her throat. And finally came saké served in three nested, porcelain cups. The profusion of threes represented Heaven, Earth, and Man, a sacred, lucky number. She downed the saké as a man would, in one gulp.

With the ceremonial meal completed, Tsunetomo raised his voice. “Fortune will be with us now in the coming battles, but there is one thing more.” He snapped his fingers and a squire emerged from behind the maku carrying a scarlet-laced kabuto.

“There are many who say women should not go to war,” he said. “They would bring ill fortune, they lack the strength of men, the bravery of men, and a litany of hidebound nonsense.” Some of his officers shifted uncomfortably at this. “Lady Kazuko has proven them wrong. I have watched her train with her women, watched them develop as warriors, and watched how she commands them. They will be a powerful force on the battlefield. To honor this moment, I present her with a kabuto. And on the menpo is the visage of one of legend’s most powerful creatures, a symbol of purity and goodness, wisdom and justice—the kirin.”

The squire bowed and presented the helmet to her.

It bore two deer-like antlers as a crest, and the face on the menpo was indeed that of a kirin, a flaming visage akin to both horse and deer, painted scarlet and traced with gold filigree.

Her breast filled with emotion, and tears smeared her vision. In the moment, the beauty of the kabuto was second only to the beauty of Tsunetomo’s words.

Tsunetomo said, “This kirin will bring good fortune. Wear it well, my lady.”

She bowed deeply and accepted the kabuto. “Thank you, my lord. My heart is full. I will endeavor to be worthy of such a gift.” Tears streaked her cheeks.

Then, the ceremony continued. Each of the captains stood, in turn, while their squires tied their swords and fixed their quivers.

Kazuko had no sword, so her squire, a woman named Yuko, presented her sheathed naginata.

After accepting their weapons, the captains mounted their horses, donned their helmets, and formed a procession before the maku. Kazuko’s helmet fit her perfectly. As she closed the kirin’s face over hers, a tingle shot through her from head to toe.

Tsunetomo was last, and Kazuko could only watch her husband with pride as he ceremonially girded himself for battle.

These preparations would grant good fortune in the coming days. The previous invasion had been so sudden there had been no time for proper ceremony, resulting in ill omens, and the Kyushu men had suffered for it.

In the fourth month, a disorganized force of Mongols and Koryo had attacked Tsushima, one of the two major islands between Kyushu and Koryo peninsula. Far better organized this time, the warriors there had beaten back the ill-prepared attack. Ever since, the Wolves of Kyushu had waited with weapons close at hand.

Now, two months later, a massive fleet had been seen approaching Ikishima, Tsushima’s sister island. From Ikishima, messengers had rushed across the sea to warn the Western Defense Region. When the messengers landed in Imazu and gave their tale, the alarm had spread by flaming beacon.

Tsunetomo’s horse was brought forth, and he mounted with the aid of a wooden step, as o-yoroi-style armor made it difficult. His squire handed him his kabuto, which he placed upon his head and tied under his chin.

Like the previous invasion, a small force of handpicked defenders would remain with the castle; but this time, Kazuko was riding forth to battle. Her warrior-women awaited her. They were as fervent, fierce, and loyal to her as her husband’s troops were to him. She had shrugged off the rampant skepticism, bombarding her from all directions, that women could not fight. Tomoe Gozen had long ago disproven such skepticism. Kazuko had won the women’s admiration and loyalty. She and Master Higuchi had made them masters of the naginata. Captain Ishii had made them into horse archers. Someone had taken to calling them Kazuko’s Scarlet Dragons. The name stuck.

All that remained now was to prove themselves in battle.

* * *

When Ken’ishi arrived in Hita town after two days’ ride, he heard from the townsfolk that Tsunetomo’s army was long gone. He visited his old house and found it had been granted to a visiting warrior from Kamakura, who had departed with Tsunetomo’s army.

After five years, riding through Hita town gave him a sense of wonder. The people he remembered had gotten older, as no doubt he had. But they looked beleaguered and hungry as well, any mirth long since gone from their faces. The buildings looked in need of repair, weathered and ill-kept.

He visited the Roasted Acorn for a quick meal and news. Except for the castle garrison, every samurai in the province had packed up and set forth with Tsunetomo’s army. Scores of peasant spearmen had marched with them as well.

In the castle, he found only a scant forty men. They were puzzled to see his return. Most of them thought Captain Ken’ishi was dead.

Even Yasutoki had gone with the army, traveling in the baggage train to help with planning and logistics.

As Ken’ishi rode down from the castle through the crowded marketplace, he spied a woman whose striking beauty was immediately familiar. She was talking to a vegetable farmer perhaps fifty paces from Ken’ishi. His gaze met hers, and in the instant before she looked away, he saw recognition there. Then she lowered the brim of her straw hat.

Yuri.

The ‘lily’ who had set Ishitaka’s heart afire.

He urged Storm through the crowd, but by the time he reached the vegetable farmer’s cart, she had disappeared. The farmer drew back from the mounted warrior looming over him.

Ken’ishi scanned the crowd. “That woman you were just speaking to, where did she go?”

The farmer raised both hands. “I’m sorry, my lord, I don’t know.”

“Have you seen her before?”

“A couple of times, perhaps. She’s new in town, she says, staying with her father, a merchant.”

Anger flared up in him. What was she doing back here, telling the same lies she told Ishitaka? And they were lies. Ishitaka had died for her. Ken’ishi had assumed her dead somewhere as well, perhaps far away in Kamakura. What could she be up to? A spy? For whom?

“She’s quite a looker, isn’t she, my lord?” the farmer said with a weathered half-grin.

Ken’ishi sighed. “She is indeed.”

Alas, he did not have time to search for her or to get to the bottom of it.

* * *

Dazaifu was another two days’ ride. In several places, the roads were clogged with troops moving north, many of them Otomo, but other lords from the southern clans as well.

Storm welcomed being pushed so hard. “We have had life too easy these last few years, and I am getting old!” the stallion said. “I do not live as long as you. Let us feel the wind and strike the ground with our hooves!”

Ken’ishi laughed and leaned lower over the horse’s mane as Storm kicked up more speed.

When he arrived in Dazaifu, he found the city surrounded by encampments and headquarters, tents clustered around the city like mushrooms around the base of a tree. He searched high and low for Lord Tsunetomo’s encampment, asking for news as he went.

The island of Ikishima had fallen once again. All the men had been put to the sword. He did not like to think about what happened to the women. Last time, the women had been lashed together with ropes passed through holes sliced through their palms and bound to the gunwales of the invading ships to protect the invaders from incoming arrows. Ken’ishi’s thoughts went back to the Taira warrior who had insulted him in Dazaifu. He said a brief prayer to the gods and buddhas on the warrior’s behalf.

This invasion fleet dwarfed the first, they said. Ken’ishi could hardly envision how that were possible. He had never imagined so many ships existed in all the world. The estimates regarding the size of the invasion fleet were scarcely believable. How could the Wolves of Kyushu hope to stand against so many, even with years of preparation?

Where the barbarians would strike next no one knew, but they now possessed a foothold within striking distance of Kyushu and a link for their supply chain back to Pusan.

Ken’ishi found the Otomo clan enclave on the north side of Dazaifu. Lord Tsunetomo and the other Otomo lords had clustered together again, sharing resources.

When he saw Lord Tsunetomo’s tent, he reined up and surveyed the area. His heart pounded.

Would Tsunetomo welcome him back? Had Lord Abe kept Tsunetomo apprised of his progress? Who would he encounter?

Yasutoki must also be about. Would he cut Yasutoki down at first sight and finally cleanse his evil from the world? No, not yet. That could wait until all the battles were fought.

He approached the two guards at the entrance to Tsunetomo’s tent. He recognized them, but did not know their names.

They also recognized him, shock writ large on their faces. “Captain Ken’ishi!”

Ken’ishi bowed to them. “If our lord is present, would you please announce me?”

One of them bowed and went inside.

The other said, “We thought you were dead, Captain!”

Ken’ishi smiled. “I was, for a while. I’m alive again.”

The first guard returned. “Please, come inside, Captain.”

Ken’ishi followed him, leaving his sword in a rack near the entrance.

Inside he found Lord Tsunetomo and Captain Tsunemori standing near a makeshift table, poring over a map. Ken’ishi recognized the coastline near Aoka village and north toward Shiga Island, which was connected to the coastline by a sandbar. The two men stared at him as if he had just stepped out of the Land of Dreams.

Ken’ishi knelt and bowed to them. “Lords, I hope you’ll forgive the intrusion.”

They returned his gesture. The world had passed five years without him, and the two brothers were no exception. Tsunetomo’s hair was now mostly gray, the lines in his face deeper. He had lost some of his blockish muscularity, but he moved with the same deliberate grace as ever.

Tsunemori cracked a half-grin. “So, again you come to me as if from nowhere on the eve of battle.” He now wore a long beard and mustache. The sparkle in his eyes, absent after Ishitaka’s death, had returned.

Ken’ishi smiled. “I hope to be of use again this time, Captain.”

“No doubt we’ll be able to find some barbarians for you to kill,” Tsunemori said.

Ken’ishi felt Tsunetomo’s gaze upon him, and he wished the lord would speak.

“I have come to request to join the defense forces,” Ken’ishi said. “I am aware that much has likely changed in my prolonged absence. I thank you for the opportunity to do what I have done. I am happy to serve in whatever stead you see fit.”

“Have you kept up your swordsmanship?” Tsunemori said. “I don’t imagine Lord Abe is much of a sparring partner.”

“Two thousand strokes a day with a bokken. I have slain many practice posts.”

The two brothers laughed.

The look of penetrating wonder on Lord Tsunetomo’s face made Ken’ishi squirm. Finally, Tsunetomo said, “Lord Abe informed us of the progress of your efforts, but he would never say when they might be complete. Are you whole again?”

“More whole than in a very long time, Lord.”

“You look better than the last time I saw you.”

“Thank you, Lord.”

“You still carry your father’s sword.” There was a tone in Tsunetomo’s voice Ken’ishi could not identify.

Ken’ishi glanced at Silver Crane’s hilt. “I...left everything behind. I regret the necessity. This sword and a horse are all I have now.”

Tsunetomo nodded. He went to the back of the tent, where some baggage was stacked. After some rummaging, he hefted out an armor case.

Ken’ishi recognized it, and his mouth fell open.

Tsunetomo’s gaze glimmered with hope. He placed the armor case on the ground between them—the same armor case Ken’ishi had received from him so long ago.

“Find Sergeant Michizane, six tents up the path. He will tell you about our plans.” Tsunetomo said. “We depart for Hakozaki in the morning.”

The sickly orchid

That I tended so...at last

Thanks me with a bud

—Taigi

“And where would you have us go? Back to Aoka village? We must stay where the mouths are!” Norikage snapped.

Hana scowled at him.

“Besides, my dear, the barbarians are not even here yet. With the wall in place, we shall escape ahead of them.”

Hana crossed her arms.

He softened his voice. “When the barbarians come, we’ll be first on the road out of Hakata. In the meantime, all these samurai have hungry stomachs and plenty of money.”

She sighed. She knew he was right.

Steam boiled around them from the cauldrons of broth and boiling water, exacerbating the heat of the summer day here in their corner shop, even with both counter windows propped open. His sweat-drenched sleeves were pulled up to his armpits. He mopped his brow with a damp cloth.

The small noodle shop he and Hana managed here near the Hakata docks had been an enjoyable, if some sometimes troublesome, decision after their hair’s breadth escape from Aoka. He found he enjoyed cooking, and Hana was the best woman he had ever known; kind, motherly, and unafraid of hard work, a fear that often plagued him. This life was a far cry, however, from his days growing up in the imperial court. What would his father say if he knew Norikage was selling ramen to sailors, samurai, and conscripted laborers? It amused Norikage to think his father would hang himself from shame. Or fall on a dagger. Or drink poison. Or—

A woman’s voice said, “May I have a bowl, please? And two rice balls?”

Norikage mouthed the word customer to Hana. He turned toward the counter—and blinked twice at the begrimed vision before him.

Dressed in threadbare peasant rags, hair unkempt under a straw hat, was a young woman whose beauty he had not seen equaled since he was exiled from court. Travel dust had caked around her eyes and mouth. She was perhaps twenty, but her eyes were blank slates of the sort possessed mainly by jaded old whores and people who had given up on the world. But she did not look like a whore. Something in her posture and careful movements bespoke a spirit that was hidden, not broken.

He sputtered, unable to find words.

Hana stepped forward. “A bowl and two rice balls, eh? Can you pay?”

The woman laid a coin on the counter.

Hana scooped it up, gave Norikage a cautionary glance, and went about preparing the noodles.

A small head, just visible with a tiny upright topknot, stepped up to the counter beside the woman. “We eat now, mama?”

The woman nodded.

Norikage produced two rice balls from a basket and handed them across.

She accepted them and handed one to the boy. He snatched it and took a ravenous bite. His cheeks puffed like a squirrel’s as he chewed.

Norikage could not help but stare. He had never seen such a beautiful peasant woman. Her skin was porcelain besmirched with dust and sweat. An air of mystery clung to her as well. She removed her hat, but did not smooth her hair as most women did. She left it unkempt, half-obscuring her features.

“Your son looks like a fine boy,” he said. “How old is he?”

Her face blossomed into friendly smile. “Five.”

“Oh, what an amusing age. Hana and I have a daughter that age. And a son who’s three.”

The woman smiled wider, but there was an emptiness in it.

Then a gruff voice called through the other window. “Hey, Norikage, you skinny fart. It’s time.”

A burly, bald-headed man leaned into the other window, palms on the counter. He wore a sword with a battered, old scabbard thrust into his obi. Behind him stood another man, taller, thick-muscled, and low-browed.

“Is it already time, Master Shokichi?” Norikage chuckled nervously, his innards clenched like a fist.

Hana turned away, white-lipped with suppressed contempt.

Where the hell was Ken’ishi when Norikage needed him? He could dispose of these ruffians without a second thought. He often wondered where the ronin was nowadays, regretting their falling out. Meanwhile he counted out coins, placed them in a bowl, and handed the bowl to Shokichi.

Shokichi grabbed the bowl with a clinking rattle, glanced at the contents, and handed it back. “You’re short.”

Norikage laughed nervously again. “No, I’m sure I counted thirty.”

“Sixty.” Shokichi smiled, revealing a mouth fill of blackened, splintered teeth. His breath smelled like rancid fish.

The fist in Norikage’s innards twisted tighter. “Sixty! But—”

“Perhaps you didn’t hear the news. Barbarians are coming. How do you expect us to protect you from them for thirty?”

These scoundrels would use their mothers as shields when the Mongols came. “Please, Master Shokichi, if I give you sixty, I won’t have enough to buy ingredients. I’ll be out of business.”

“Shut up, before I double it again,” Shokichi growled, thrusting his hilt forward.

Norikage’s fingers trembled as he counted thirty more coins into the bowl. How would he buy fish and rice tomorrow?

Shokichi scooped out the coins, dumped them into a black-and-white striped drawstring pouch, and tossed the bowl back onto the counter. “You’re safe and sound for now, Noodle Man.”

The two thugs laughed and sauntered off.

Hana threw herself into Norikage’s arms, whispering, “What are we going to do?”

Norikage just petted her hair gently.

The woman at the counter said, “Who were those men?”

Norikage cleared his throat of a lump. “Just some local characters.”

A spark appeared in the woman’s eyes. “Who do they work for?”

“I had best not say. It’s not wise to—”

“Tell me.”

The force in her voice drew the whispered answer out of him. “Green Tiger.”

The corner of her mouth twitched once. “You said you have children. Where are they?”

“Playing in the back,” Norikage said, suddenly fearful without knowing why.

“My son has not played with other children in too long. Would you...allow this, while I perform an errand? I will be back before my noodles are cold.”

“What are you going to do?”

She smiled again, a vision so sparkling that it disarmed him. “I won’t be long.”

He swallowed hard. “Very well.”

The woman ushered the boy to the side door, whispered something to him as she handed him over to Hana, then she put on her hat. He noticed that she carried a straight wooden staff in the fashion of a pilgrim. Hana took the boy’s hand and led him into the back of the house where their children were playing. She gave Norikage a puzzled expression, but he could only shrug. The woman was already gone.

Norikage finished preparing a bowl of noodles for the woman and placed it on the counter. He leaned out and searched for her up and down both streets.

Suddenly she was sliding back onto the bench before her bowl of noodles. She took up her chopsticks and began to eat. Even when she ate, her movements were meticulous, immensely graceful, as if every mouthful were a choreographed dance.

Norikage wanted to ask her where she had gone, but he could not peel his gaze away from the single spot of blood on her cheek, a ruby on porcelain.

When she was finished, she said, “I hope Ishimaru behaved himself. We should be moving along now.”

Norikage called for Hana to bring out the boy.

The woman bowed and pressed her son’s head into a bow as well. “Thank you for the delicious meal. It was a feast,” she said.

The boy said, “It was a feast.”

Then she placed her hat upon her head, took her staff in one hand and her son’s hand in the other, and led him away.

It was not until she had disappeared that he noticed a drawstring pouch beside her empty bowl. He picked up the pouch and thought to call after her until he recognized the striped pattern. It was much heavier than sixty coins.

He tucked the pouch away and scratched his head.

“Fundamentally, a man’s mind is not without good. It is simply that from the moment he has life, he is always being brought up with perversity. Thus, having no idea that he has gotten used to being soaked in it, he harms his self-nature and falls into evil. Human desire is the root of this perversity.”

—Issai Chozanshi, The Demon’s Sermon on the Martial Arts

Lord Tsunetomo was true to his word. At dawn, his army marched for Hakozaki. Ken’ishi took command of his former unit.

Michizane’s first glance at Ken’ishi when he arrived at the tent had been a strange mix of surprise and consternation. Michizane had assumed command on Ken’ishi’s departure, and now he would be expected to relinquish it and serve as a second. Because Ken’ishi had not been formally demoted, he still outranked Michizane.

In the light of the campfire before Michizane’s tent, Ken’ishi bowed.

After several moments of shock passed, Michizane recovered enough to speak. “You recovered your smile, it seems.”

The men gathered around.

Michizane said, “I can see it in your eyes. Are you here to take command?”

The men stared in amazement.

“I am,” Ken’ishi said.

Michizane slumped a bit at that.

“But I will need the help of a wise and seasoned warrior gentleman to reacquaint me,” Ken’ishi said. “For five years, I have been practically a monk.”

In truth, being thrust back into command frightened him. He had imagined himself just wading into the enemy without regard to tactics or strategy. It was clear this time, however, that the Wolves of Kyushu had prepared extensively for the barbarians’ return.

Michizane nodded and scratched his chin, took a deep breath, let it out. “Don’t worry, Captain. We’ll let Ushihara be your warrior gentleman.” He turned to where Ushihara hung back among the men.

Ushihara blinked and farted with surprise. “Me?”

The men laughed.

Michizane stepped closer. “Welcome back, Captain.”

They spent the rest of the evening together, with Michizane relating the state of affairs. The enemy had taken Ikishima, but any further movements were unknown. Spies had been dispatched to observe the enemy fleet, but none of those ships had returned.

Now, on the march, Ken’ishi glimpsed in the distant vanguard of Tsunetomo’s army a unit of naginata cavalry that could only be Kazuko’s. He could not discern her, which was just as well. Seeing her would complicate things again. It had been five years, but would his feelings be any less immediate? He hoped so, considering how much time he had spent facing those demons in his soul.

As the army took up its position near Hakozaki, everyone was nervous that the enemy would arrive before the defenders were assembled. But two days later, Tsunetomo’s army had erected their encampment and taken up their positions, and still no barbarians. Atop the wall, wooden shields were propped up to protect the defenders from incoming arrows. Defenders could shoot from behind them, and horsemen could shoot over them. Great barrels of arrows and spears were placed at intervals along the wall.

Like the barrels, the beach was dotted by boats as far as the eye could see. These were open-decked and single-masted, almost large rowboats, with room enough for fourteen men rowing shoulder to shoulder and one man on the rudder. Michizane had told him these boats’ purpose, and Ken’ishi remembered Lord Abe telling him of their construction. The paint on all of them was fresh.

The defenders took shifts through all hours of the night and day. The barbarians would probably not attack at night, as ships were too difficult to maneuver in the dark and were incapable of stealth, but the unexpected horrors of the last invasion created an aura of fear and reverence that reason would not penetrate.

Ken’ishi thought Kazuko would hear of his return and seek him out, but he did not see her. Perhaps she felt as he did. Better to leave the past buried.

Early on the morning of the second day, a signal beacon blazed to life north of Imazu, and the signal spread. Horns and drums echoed up and down the lines and across the water.

The first ships appeared on the horizon. The hazy distance obscured their numbers, but the sails just kept appearing.

Ken’ishi jumped up and shouted, “To me!”

Michizane next to him waved his naginata. “Go, go, go!”

Ken’ishi and his fourteen men jumped off the wall and pelted across the beach toward their boat.

They were taking the fight to the invaders.

* * *

Alarm bells rang in a spreading wave across the city of Hakata. Inside his noodle shop, Norikage’s innards clenched. Was today to be the day the barbarians finally came?

Stepping out into the street, he looked out over the bay. A flaming beacon flared to life around the bay toward Imazu, then another one on Shiga spit.

He staggered a little. It was happening again. Memories of Aoka village flooded back. The riders. The smoke. The blood. Little Frog’s terrible death. And Kiosé’s. The wild, terrified flight into the forest with Hana.

He hurried back into the shop and gathered up his family to flee south. They gathered up whatever possessions they could carry on their backs.

Hana kept calmer than he did. His voice kept rising sharp and shrill, with endless second-guessing about what they should take versus what they could carry for long.

The children cried.

Townspeople crowded the streets, but he did not hear any panic. They had known for years this day would come.

When they finally had filled their carrying racks with food and clothing and a handful of valuables, Norikage and Hana herded the children outside.

Standing outside their door was a boy, the one with the strange woman from a few days earlier.

The boy stood there silent, lips pouched, cheeks streaked with tears. He clutched a note in both hands, and held it up to Norikage.

“Where’s your mother?” Norikage asked. He saw no sign of her in the crowded streets, only a river of flight, channeling south.

The boy stepped forward, thrusting forward the note.

“Your name is Ishimaru, yes?” Norikage said.

The boy grunted insistently, sniffling, thrusting the note higher.

Norikage took it, already suspecting what it said, a feeling of dread building in his belly.

You have a good family. Please do me this favor. There is something I must do. If I still live, I will find you and come for him. Ishimaru is a good boy. Better than his mother.

The note was written in woman’s script, and near the end, the hand trembled in the characters.

Norikage folded up the note, tucked it into his robe, and looked at the boy. Grimy face, shaved head, and little topknot. The boy’s eyes bore the mark of hardship, and of fearlessness, defiance, and quiet intelligence.

Ishimaru was slightly older than Little Frog had been when the barbarians came.

Norikage offered his hand. Ishimaru took it.

“When facing a situation where you might die ... you should be the first to volunteer and never retreat a single step. There are situations when it’s right to die, though, and situations where you shouldn’t die. To die where you should die is praised as a righteous death. To die where you shouldn’t die is disparaged as a dog’s death.”

—Izawa Nagahide

The waters of Hakata Bay were calm, the morning breeze cool as Ken’ishi’s men rowed for all they were worth. A slight breeze in the sail boosted their speed, but it was the beat of the drum that propelled them.

“One! Two! One! Two!” the men chanted as they rowed.

Ken’ishi held the rudder, studying the faces of the men who were now following him into battle, most of whom he had not met until two days ago.

All of them were armored, which meant that if they went into the water, the interlaced steel plates of their do-maru would drag them down like stones and drown them before they could remove it. Best not to go into the water, then. They carried a smattering of weapons—swords, spears, naginata, even a few with bows whose job would be to pick off the enemy from below.

Their boat ran alongside four others. A flotilla of five boats would board a single incoming ship, slaughter everyone aboard, and then flee before any other enemy ships could close. Hakata Bay swarmed with these small boats.

Ken’ishi’s boat was third in the flotilla under the command of Shoni no Kagetora. Kagetora was a gruff veteran who looked more at home on the sea than on land, several years older than Ken’ishi. When Kagetora had introduced himself, he thumbed his chest and announced he was the great-grandson of one of the revered sea captains who fought with Minamoto no Yoshitsune, brother of Yoritomo, against the treasonous Taira at Dan-no-Ura.

Ken’ishi’s boat was just one among hundreds. The boats that had launched from Imazu and Shiga had already engaged the nearest enemy ships. The clamor of butchery drifted across the water, screams and the clash of arms. Smoke and flame bloomed from an incoming ship, then another, as the successful samurai set them afire.

The further out to sea they went, the higher the waves became. Their course pointed them into the gap between Shiga Island and Genkai Island, the entrance to Hakata Bay, a breadth of about two ri. Invading ships filled that breadth and stretched beyond to the northern horizon. Hundreds of them. He clenched down the memories of that wild, awful, wracking day almost seven years before, when a similar fleet came ashore and disgorged thousands of bloodthirsty Mongol horsemen. The day Kiosé and Little Frog had died.

The drums beat, and the men chanted, and the enemy ships neared. His flotilla was more than two ri from Hakozaki now, crossing a line between Shiga and the end of the wall north of Imazu, about to cross into open sea.

The enemy ships were easily four times the size of his small craft, with gunwales above the water half-again the height of a man.

In the boat ahead, Shoni no Kagetora shouted, “Strike the sail!”

Several of his men leaped to obey, folding up the bamboo-ribbed sail and removing it from the mast altogether, while the others kept rowing.

Ken’ishi repeated the order to his own craft.

The approaching ships loomed large, two-masted, with broad ribbed sails, gunwales that swooped to a high forecastle, and even higher terraced poop decks. On those high decks, archers waited for range. Red and gold pennons proclaiming ship designations fluttered high above the sterns.

Their flotilla passed several vessels already engaged or burning. The sides of the boarded ships ran crimson with gore. They also passed the sinking wreckage of a few defense boats, or boats drifting where all the men lay dead, bristled with arrows. Scents of blood and smoke and sweat drifted on the sea breeze. And horses.

The men jumped at a sudden peal of thunder across the water. The corner of Ken’ishi’s eye had caught a sudden burst of flame and smoke near a flotilla ahead. The boat nearest the occurrence foundered, the gunwale splintered as if by a tremendous fist, dead men slipping over the side. A puff of smoke and crash of thunder exploded near another defense boat, but too far away to cause damage.

These must be the Mongols’ “thunder-crash bombs.” They had rained fire and terror onto the defenders at Imazu with these devices during the prior attack, blowing men, horses, and structures to bits.

Catapults rested upon the upper decks of many of the oncoming ships. Men in fur-trimmed armor and pointed helmets swarmed around them. A catapult jumped, and a little black ball arced toward a defending boat, trailing smoke. Just before it reached the water, the ball exploded, spraying splinters and pieces of men across the water.

Dense flocks of arrows flew from the invading ships, stretching to impossible ranges.

“Our bows can’t do that!” said a young man.

Michizane said, “We like to look glory a little closer in the face!”

The men laughed and rowed harder.

Their flotilla passed through the first ranks of engaged ships, into a new wave. Kagetora’s lead boat angled toward the nearest oncoming ship.

“Prepare mast pins!” Ken’ishi shouted. Two men situated themselves with hammers on either side of the mast.

The approaching ship drew nearer. All around them, flotillas of five swarmed other ships. Thunder-crash bombs arced and burst. Flaming arrows arced. A great machine on the high aft deck cast flaming spears at the incoming boats. One of those spears pinned two men together against the gunwale of their boat. Another punched a hole through the bottom of a boat, which foundered quickly.

Two other craft of their flotilla swung around to angle for the opposite side, and the last aimed for the bow. Ken’ishi guided his craft next to Kagetora’s. Kagetora had ordered Ken’ishi to stick close until he “got his sea legs.”

The deck above swarmed with men. Arrows blasted toward them from the upper decks, splashing in the water, piercing wood or flesh or lodging in armor. The drum beat faster. Ken’ishi whipped out Silver Crane to deflect incoming arrows, one hand still on the rudder. The men rowed for all they were worth. Kagetora’s craft took the brunt of the arrows but kept going until it slammed against the side of the ship.

“Strike the mast!” Kagetora roared. An instant later, the mast toppled against the gunwale of the ship like a felled tree, and the samurai swarmed up it. War cries and clashing blades rang out.

Ken’ishi shouted orders to ship the oars and prepare weapons. Momentum carried his craft into the side of the ship with a thud. “Strike the mast!”

The two men hammered pins out of the mast mount and toppled the mast onto the gunwale above. Ken’ishi charged up the wooden bridge, Silver Crane high. Behind him came his men in a roaring fury.

The bowmen would stay behind to secure the boat to the ship with grappling hooks and then take up their bows.

The men aboard this ship were not Mongols. Their faces most closely resembled the White Lotus Gang he had faced in Hakata. Their swords were straight and two-edged. Their bronze, bell-shaped helmets were topped by red silken plumes. All of them wore coats, reaching to their ankles, of small steel plates that interlocked like the scales of a lizard. Similar curtains of interlocking plates draped their necks.

Silver Crane rang in his mind. Kill them. Oh, yes.

Ken’ishi leaped off the tip of the mast and used his downward momentum to add force to his first blow, snapping an upraised sword and cleaving half through a bronze helmet. The man’s eyes crossed as he toppled.

Silver Crane sang its joy into the threads of time and fortune.

The face of the first man Ken’ishi had killed in seven years, after five years of ragged effort to expunge the residue of death and evil from his essence, fell away from the edge of his sword with a wet slither.

His men crowded around him, past him, smashed into the Sung like a savage whirlwind. Men fell on both sides.

He stared at the pool spreading around the man’s unfamiliar helmet. Was the mark on his chest tingling again, or was it just his fear-fueled imagination?

Naginata spun and slashed and sheared through the lamellar armor like paper. Severed limbs flew. Blood slicked the deck. Chinese swords darted and thrust. The Sung fought with wide-eyed ferocity, but when the other boats of Ken’ishi’s flotilla disgorged their boarders up the far side, catching the Sung in the rear, their will evaporated. They died to the last man.

Ken’ishi blinked in the sudden silence, rousing himself from his strange stupor.

His men raised their bloody weapons and cheered.

“Quickly!” Kagetora said. He cut the head off the ship’s captain and tossed it over the side, into his boat.

Sixty-odd Chinese heads left their necks. A few of the men wrangled over ownership of the trophies, but Ken’ishi and Kagetora roared reminders that enemy ships were bearing down upon them.

Ken’ishi assessed casualties. Two of his men dead, three lightly wounded. Freshly blooded, their will to fight burned hot in their eyes and clenched teeth.

Then a thunderous explosion, a hundred times greater than any previous, ripped across the water. An enemy ship, perhaps two hundred paces distant, erupted in a boiling cloud of smoke and flame, sending shattered planks and bodies arcing through the air for fifty paces in every direction. A cascade of smaller explosions followed. With five attack boats secured to the sides of the sinking ship, no one was left alive.

“What could do that?” Ken’ishi said.

“Perhaps that’s what happens when their stores of thunder-crash bombs explode all at once,” Kagetora said.

The men stared in awe for several heartbeats until Ken’ishi roused them. They emptied barrels of pitch across the deck and then retreated to their boats. Ken’ishi waited with a lit torch for the last man to go over the side. Then he tossed the torch onto the pitch and jumped down the mast, barely escaping the blast of blistering heat as flames whooshed across the deck.

* * *

Kazuko waited with her bow resting across her thighs. Her naginata was sheathed and slung behind her.

Her Scarlet Dragons lined up around her atop the fortifications near Hakozaki.

She gazed over the heads of the defenders and the wooden shields, across the water toward the oncoming ships. She stopped counting at eighty ships that had charged past the picket lines of defense boats. These ships were fanning out toward landing points around Hakata Bay. The strategists estimated that each ship carried sixty to eighty foot troops, or thirty to forty Mongol horsemen and their ponies. Would it be eight thousand Chinese infantry hitting the beach, or four thousand Mongol horsemen? The numbers made her head spin. The gates of the afterworld would swing wide today.

Her chestnut mare waited patiently for her command, unlike the fiery stallions that men demanded as warhorses. Choosing mares instead of stallions for her Scarlet Dragons had sparked yet another round of scoffing and skepticism. Mares lacked the bravery of stallions, the men said, the strength of stallions, the aggressiveness of stallions.

To all of that, Kazuko had said, “Nonsense. Not all men are brave, or strong, or fierce. The men who are, become warriors. As did these women who are brave, strong, and fierce. And so are the mares we choose to carry us.”

Today would be their first battle.

Some of the ships paused between a hundred fifty and two hundred paces from the beach and turned broadsides. The others maintained their course toward the sand. From the paused ships, strange contraptions flung metal balls toward the shore in high, smoke-trailing arcs.

Then the balls exploded with deafening thunder, blowing shields, wall, and men to bits.

The Dragons’ horses squealed and reared, but the women held in the saddle. With firm grip on the reins and some soothing words, Kazuko comforted her mount.

Captain Ishii no Soun, her husband’s master of horse and archery, rode up. “My lady, we must withdraw for now until the enemy has spent their infernal devices.”

Up and down the line, mounted warriors were struggling with their mounts. The hail of explosions kept coming.

“Understood, Captain,” she said and withdrew across a road that paralleled the shore.

Storms of arrows shot back and forth, most of the defenders’ arrows falling short of the Mongols’ superior range.

The bombardment continued. At first the noise and explosions drove the ashigaru defenders, trained peasants, back from the wall, but when the ships opened their holds to disgorge their assault forces, the samurai commanders shouted courage back into the frightened peasants. The explosions began to evoke less fear.

Kazuko looked around at her Dragons. Their faces were fierce and determined. The scarlet ribbons around their light helmets fluttered in the breeze. Their desire to get into the fight, to prove themselves, simmered around her, but she knew enough of strategy and tactics to hold here.

Then the ships hit the beach. The enemy poured out onto the sand and charged the wall. The defenders sleeted them with arrows, and still they came. More arrows arced from the ships over the heads of the assault troops, driving the defenders behind their wooden shields. Bodies littered the beach like seaweed washed ashore. The defenders sent hissing clouds of flaming arrows into the ships. Crews scurried to extinguish the flames.

War cries and the screams of the dying echoed from all directions, along with the smell of blood and the acrid stench of the brimstone smoke on the sea breeze. Wave after wave of the enemy spewed onto the blood-drenched sand, crossing over their fallen comrades. Defense reinforcements came from the rear to fill holes in the lines. A few brazen samurai, hungry for battle and glory, shouted challenges from atop the wall toward enemy commanders or taunted the enemy troops. She even saw one leap down onto the beach to meet the charging enemy head on. She never saw him again.

How much time passed while she held her Scarlet Dragons in check, she could not remember. But then a hue and cry sounded, a horn from the east.

Something told her it was finally time to act.

She raised her signal fan and called out to her troops. Four abreast, they galloped toward the noise and, in the chaos, spotted a mass of Mongol horsemen on the road, their swords bloodied. They had broken through one of the gates to the beach.

Reinforcements were coming, but the defenders needed time to seal the gap, and a force of Mongol horsemen on the road would disrupt the reinforcements sufficiently to grant the enemy a foothold on the beach.

Kazuko had never seen the barbarians before. Their ponies were small and shaggy, much like the men on their backs. They wore pointed iron helmets fringed with studded leather. Their armor comprised a coat of studded steel plates sewn together and trimmed in fur, reaching just above the knee. Each of them looked like a knot of hardwood, wrapped in hair and steel and leather.

But an arrow through the eye socket would kill them. And she had defeated the two most fearsome oni that Kyushu had ever seen.

Her Scarlet Dragons, however, had not. It was time to see how ready they were.

She shouted, “Shoot!”

The Scarlet Dragons formed around her and loosed arrows into the throng of Mongols. Horses screamed and two men fell. Spotting the new threat, the Mongols spun and gathered themselves to charge, at least thirty in number.

“We will lead a fox chase!” she shouted to her troops. “Break when I command!”

The annals of ancient Chinese generals had taught her that cavalry was most effective when it charged, not when it was the target of a charge. She would try to maneuver the enemy into the path of oncoming reinforcements. Already units of ashigaru spearmen were gathering to stem the tide of the Mongol breakthrough.

The Mongols charged.

Kazuko ordered, “Shoot!” one last time before wheeling her horse and spurring it away.

The Mongol ponies were nimble, but more heavy-laden, and lacked the stride of the Dragons’ taller horses. Kazuko and the Dragons were able to pull away. Passing an intersection, Kazuko spotted Captain Soun leading his unit of heavy lancers, a new type of unit developed and practiced over the last couple of years. They had been waiting in the rear, just like the Scarlet Dragons, for a purpose such as this.

Speeding past the intersection, she raised her war fan to him, and he raised his to her.

Captain Soun’s heavy cavalry timed their charge perfectly. The lancers plowed into the Mongol flank amidst the screams of horses and men. The Mongols held firm, however, facing the new threat with blades and war cries and dogged resilience.

With her pursuers tied up, Kazuko reined and spun her mount again, shouting, “Naginata!”

The Scarlet Dragons slung their bows, drew their polearms from special holsters along the saddle, unsheathed the blades, and lined up to charge.

They had drilled this dozens of times. The weapons switch went smoothly, and they lined up like veterans. This naginata had a longer haft and a longer blade than the one she had first practiced with, the better to fight with from horseback, but she had learned its advantages and disadvantages as well.

Kazuko raised her war fan. “Forward!”

The horses jumped forward into a trot, then a canter, then a barreling gallop. Kazuko couched her naginata with both hands, clutching the reins in her teeth, pounding toward the enemy.

A few of the Mongol horsemen saw them coming, but there was nothing they could do except curse in their coarse barbarian tongue.

The massive impact almost drove her out of the saddle, numbed her hands and arms, knocked the breath out of her. Her mare slammed a Mongol pony onto its side. She lost her grip on her weapon, but was able to snatch it again as it hung impaled through the torso of an enemy horseman. She gasped for breath and let the falling body pull free of the weapon.

The Scarlet Dragons shrieked their kiai. They were the hammer, and Soun’s heavy lancers became the anvil, and the Mongol horsemen were ground into bloody meat between them.

Kazuko brought her weapon down on the neck of a pony with all her might. With the added leverage of height and the length of the haft, her blow severed the pony’s head in a frightening gout of blood. Its rider tumbled off, and one of her sisters impaled him against the ground.

He was the last.

In this first experience with a mass melee, the sight of so much blood—great awful deluges of it—the stench of punctured guts and loosed bowels, the screams of dying ponies, twisted her belly into a watery knot. Tears hazed her vision. She would not throw up before her sisters. She would not show weakness. She was a warrior, just as they were.

The women’s voices rose into a cheer, and then came the men’s howl of victory.

Kazuko and Captain Soun nodded to each other.

Captain Soun spun his unit and galloped back toward the gate where the Mongols had broken through. A block of quick-legged spearmen seemed to have plugged the breach.

There was no time to congratulate themselves any further, however, as the ships that paused to launch their thunder-crash bombs now rowed toward shore with contingents of fresh warriors lined up on the decks.

“It’s hard to hold back and not move. That is why the ability to hold back is important. You shouldn’t act impulsively. If you make moves at random without perceiving an advantage, you’re likely to lose. A noble man controls the frivolity with gravity, awaits action in the state of calm. It is important for the spirit to be whole, the mood steady, and the mind unmoving.”

—Kaibara Ekken

With the bombardment abated, Kazuko led the Scarlet Dragons back to the wall. They rode back and forth behind the defenders, launching volley after volley of arrows into the relentless hordes of the enemy. When their quivers were empty, they refilled them from the barrels and then returned to the front.

The Scarlet Dragons never paused to shoot. They had trained in yabusame, just as the men had. They galloped pass after pass, raining arrows into the crowds of stymied foot soldiers on the beach, and their aim was true. The fighting at the lip of the wall was ferocious and bloody. Someday perhaps she might forget what swords and spears and naginata did to human flesh. The peasant spearmen, armored only with breastplates and thigh guards, fought as bravely as born warriors. Their homes and families were at stake, too, and they knew it.

By late afternoon, the wall’s height had been effectively reduced by mounds of corpses at its base. The invaders charged over the bodies of their brethren, only to join them. At least, thus far.

Kazuko lost count of the number of times she had emptied her quiver, but she kept telling herself, “One more run, just one.”

And then horns and gongs blared from the decks of the ships. The men on the beach pulled back toward their ships. The defenders chased them with arrows. The gangplanks retracted, oars extended, and the landing ships clawed back toward deeper water.

Cries of weary triumph echoed up and down the lines.

Kazuko sobbed once with relief. Tears flowed. She started to wipe them away, until she saw the blood caked thick around her fingers. Fortunately none of it was hers, although she had pulled two arrows from her shoulder guards and one from her saddle over the course of the day. The gods had seen fit for her to live one more day.

Her lathered mare, gasping for breath, trembled with exhaustion.

One of her Dragons had fallen from an arrow, Kyoko, a beautiful woman of twenty-two whose warrior husband had died of a fever after stepping on a sea urchin. She had sworn to uphold the family name. Three others had been wounded and would be out of action for a while. That left the Scarlet Dragons with twenty-seven, including her.

Kazuko wanted to fall out of the saddle from exhaustion and sleep where she lay. Never had she imagined such weariness was possible—weariness of limb, weariness of mind, weariness of the heart.

So much death. How many men had she alone killed today? War turned men into monsters, ground down their spirits until naught was left but a hollow shell that must either be unfeeling or tortured.

Captain Soun rode up beside her, looking just as weary, spattered with blood. “You fought well today, but we are not finished.”

The sun sank toward the distant mountains beyond Hakata. The ships had withdrawn to perhaps three hundred paces from the shore and dropped anchor. The ashigaru and camp servants were hauling carts full of corpses to a mass grave dug behind the lines.

Captain Soun pointed toward Shiga Island. Smoke rose from dozens of fires across the island and the sandbar leading to the mainland. Ships were landing there even now.

Shiga Island was small, less than one ri north-to-south, slightly narrower east-to-west. The sandbar formed the perfect beachhead for the invaders to unload their troops. With little room to maneuver or build deep ranks, the spit was too narrow to mount an effective defense. The wall did not reach all the way to the sandbar. The Mongol horsemen would simply be able to ride around behind it and strike deep into Kyushu.

“I see you understand,” Captain Soun said. “We are to take positions and block the Shiga spit. There are some Shoni men holding the spit for now, but if they’re flanked or broken tomorrow, we will lose the northern end of the wall, and the enemy will have roads south.”

“Understood, Captain,” she said.

“Follow us. We’re leaving now.”

As he rode away, she petted her mare’s neck. “Just a bit farther tonight, my stout-hearted friend.”

* * *

Drunk with victory, Ken’ishi and the rest of his flotilla charged yet another ship. This time, he let his worries disappear under the waves. He plunged himself to the neck into bloody battle, and with Silver Crane’s power, spun a cyclone of blood and entrails.

Michizane’s naginata lay a fearsome swath of death about him.

The Chinese armor was thick, however, perhaps more effective than that of the samurai. Two of his men had broken their swords against the thick steel lamellar. When this melee finally ended, one of Ken’ishi’s shoulder guards had been hacked away by a double-bitted axe with a haft as long as a naginata’s.

Four more of his men lay dead.

They had stormed up the mast-bridge ahead of him this time and met a hissing storm of lethal darts fired from strange, horizontal bows. The darts were shorter than arrows, but the bow mechanisms were made of spring steel. The darts pierced the samurai breastplates as if they were paper. The strange bows took longer to prepare and fire, however, and the samurai soon overwhelmed them. Nevertheless, yet another unfamiliar weapon gave them pause.

While the men collected more heads, Ken’ishi climbed the ship’s tallest mast and surveyed the progress of the battle.

Dozens of enemy ships burned. Dozens more drifted uncontrolled, tied up by little boats that attacked like swarms of ants around an invading wasp.

Scores more invading ships, however, perhaps more than a hundred, had pushed past the picket of defense boats into the bay and reached the shore. Fire and smoke bespoke hard fighting up and down the wall around Hakata and Hakozaki.

The barbarian fleet just kept coming. Out here, on the verge of the open sea, Ken’ishi could see as if to the edge of the world itself. Shielding his eyes against the glare of the hot afternoon sun, he clung to the mast and rigging with one arm and both legs. Still more ships filled the waves between him and the horizon, trailing white foam, their decks thronged with men and war machines.

They had changed course.

Battles between the defense boats and the first lines of ships dotted much of the entrance to Hakata Bay. The ships still coming in from the open sea had turned east.

At that moment, a thick weariness washed over him, and he swayed for a moment. His mouth was parched, dry earth. No more ships were approaching.

He shimmied down the rigging and ordered a brief rest. The men pulled out rations of dried fish and drank from the ship’s stores of fresh water. Standing amid the ubiquitous, headless dead, they rested, bandaged their wounds, caught their breath.

Ken’ishi climbed the rigging again.

The rest of the fleet continued toward the east, but now he saw their destination. They had landed on Shiga Island and on the north side of the sandbar connecting Shiga to land. Black clusters of men and horses swarmed over the narrow spit like angry ants, coalescing into massed units. More ships were heading east, up the coast toward Munakata.

There was no wall protecting Munakata. The Shoni clan was prepared with troops there, but they would have to fight the invaders without the advantage of fortifications.

He tried to discern how the defenders were faring around Hakozaki, but could see nothing except that the ships were still close to shore.

And then he spotted a contingent of some thirty ships that had withdrawn from the shore and were heading this way.

“We must get out of here!” Ken’ishi called down to the deck.

“Why?” Kagetora said. “We’re winning!”

“Because they’re coming back.” He pointed at the oncoming vessels.

Kagetora shielded his eyes and followed Ken’ishi’s gesture.

As Ken’ishi climbed back down, he said, “That could only mean they have failed to breach the wall. Our defenses are holding, but by the time those ships reach us, they’ll be ready for revenge.”

“Then we’ll fight!” said another man.

Ken’ishi said, “We’ve fought well today. But we succeeded only because we were able to isolate individual ships and bring them down, like wolves on a lone stag. We cannot stand against a full assault.”

“You fear to die?” the man said, frowning.

“I’ll not die a dog’s death,” Ken’ishi said. “Best to take our trophies back to our lords and fight again tomorrow.” Then he added with a smirk, “Besides, if we take any more heads, our boats will sink beneath us.”

The men laughed.

Kagetora agreed with Ken’ishi’s assessment.

They set fire to their most recent conquest and oared themselves out of the path of the oncoming ships. Five of the ships tried to pursue, but they were like lumbering oxen trying to catch a fox.

It was sunset when Ken’ishi’s flotilla reached shore, a day of blood and victory behind them, but the battle was far from over.

* * *

Kazuko and the Scarlet Dragons reached the defenders’ camp on Shiga spit an hour after sundown, where they found several hundred samurai and ashigaru, bloodied and weary, but steadfast. The land leading toward Shiga spit shifted from forested hills to scrub and sand dunes. The defenders camped among the dunes, bathed in the light of their cookfires.

All along the spit were anchored the invading ships, and their campfires formed an open, blazing path all the way to the island, where more fires burned. Both armies camped in full view of the other, with nothing between them but a few hundred paces of open sand.

The ships themselves were of at least a dozen different types and sizes, two- and three-masted Sung traders alongside smaller but more nimble Koryo vessels. Out on the water, the deep-drafted behemoths waited quiescent, lanterns glittering like fireflies across the expanse of sea.

Inside Kazuko’s armor, her clothes felt like sodden rags, bunched up in uncomfortable places; but thoughts of comfort must be put aside. They would all be sleeping in their armor tonight.

With the horses picketed and munching on sacks of millet, Kazuko could rest for a little while. Eventually, the Scarlet Dragons’ baggage train caught up with them, and the servants were able to prepare a meal of fresh rice for the exhausted fighters.

The women kept their campsite away from the men. Lord Tsunetomo and his other officers had thought it most prudent. Men did dangerous things in war, bestial things. All knew but no one spoke of what would happen to the women if captured by the enemy. Moreover, there were still many who believed that bringing women to war would bring ill fortune, especially if any of them had their moon’s blood. Keeping the women separate would reduce the chances of unpleasant encounters. If moon’s blood had come for any of her women, they did not tell Kazuko, and she did not ask.

In war, there was blood enough for all.

After she and her sisters had eaten, after their mounts had been cared for, she crossed the hundred paces of starlight and sand between her camp and Soun’s heavy lancers. She wanted to talk to him about the day’s events. Yamazaki-sensei often said that after-battle reflection was as important as the planning.

As she approached the campfires, the men gossiped about the days various victories and near defeats. For the first day, their defenses had held. They had turned aside every attack except at Shiga Island and Genkai Island, which both lay now in enemy hands.

And then she heard a name she had not in almost five years.

She approached the man who said it.

He started as she stepped out of the dark. “Lady Otomo!”

He and all the men around him knelt and bowed.

“Did you say ‘Captain Ken’ishi?’” she said.

“Yes, Lady,” the man said. “He has returned. He commanded one of the boats today.”

Her heart flipped over, and she chided herself for it. “That is good news. His strength is much needed. How did the boats fare?”

“We lost some, but won more. They were not expecting us to fight ship to ship. If not for them, we’d have had it much harder on the wall today.”

“And what of Captain Ken’ishi?”

Another man said, “I heard he took more than a dozen Chinese heads today, all by himself.”

So many in one day was all but unheard of. He had not let his martial prowess slip while he was away.

“Don’t worry, fellows,” said the first man. “We’ll have all the heads we can carry tomorrow.”

Another man said, “I heard that the Takezaki men captured a general on one of the ships and brought him back for interrogation.”

She nodded in appreciation of all these exploits, but there was still a lump in her throat she could not swallow. “The gods and fortunes have smiled on us today. Now, where is Captain Soun?”

“Among five kinds of warfare, war for justice and war for defense are used by noble men. War out of anger, war out of pride, and war out of greed are not used by noble men; they are used by small men.”

—Kaibara Ekken

Yasutoki dragged the watchman’s dying body behind a stack of barrels and wiped the blood from his dagger on the man’s robe. The man lay limp in the dark, gasping like a gaffed fish, clutching weakly at Yasutoki’s clothes, a second mouth squirting a dark stain onto the storehouse’s earthen floor.

Another guard paced back and forth at the opposite end of the storehouse, clinging to the puddles of lantern light.

Yasutoki, on the other hand, moved through the shadows between the stacks of bagged rice and millet, barrels of salt fish, bales of seaweed, and baskets of early-season vegetables.

One of the advantages of being Tsunetomo’s advisor was that he knew the location of all the defense force storehouses. He knew their guard schedules and their contents. He also knew the locations of the guard posts around Hakozaki. The guards at three of those posts now lay dead, in no particular order or strategic location. His attacks had to appear random.

Yasutoki was pleased with how his skills were re-emerging after many years of stagnation. And oh, his dagger was sharp. The last guard had died without a whimper.

His first attack earlier tonight had nearly gone awry. The poisoned shuriken had missed. If the target had not been more confused than alarmed, he might have cried out before Yasutoki hit him with another. Fortunately, the guard’s companion had been pissing behind a house, and returned just time to have his throat cut from behind.

When the defenders of Kyushu discovered that “spies” had murdered guards all over Hakozaki in the dead of night, a new level of fear would sweep through them.

Yasutoki would not be able to make contact with the Khan’s generals or offer any sort of intelligence, but he was still the Great Khan’s loyal saboteur.

He would only be able to get away with such deeds easily on this one night, however. After as much mayhem as he intended, he would have to lie low for a while. After tonight, guards would be tripled or quadrupled. No one would sleep. Vigilance would be at its height.

Until it flagged, as it always did. People could not remain so vigilant for long. Complacency was inevitable. And in that complacency, he would re-emerge to strike again.

No one could predict what would break an army’s will. The pressures and hardships were so numerous that any smallest thing, piled high upon so many other difficulties, could destroy an army’s morale.

Now, four days into the fighting, the defense had been so fierce the onslaught had drawn to a stalemate. Tsunetomo’s forces, including Kazuko and her horse women, had stymied the Mongols at Shiga spit. Ken’ishi and his boatmen had taken to nighttime raids against anchored ships.

Another Mongol force had sailed north and attacked Munakata, but the defense forces there had driven them back yet again. There were rumors that Koryo ships had been spotted near Moji and Dan-no-Ura, but one could not believe everything.

Yasutoki made his way like smoke and shadow toward the lit portion of the storehouse.

Between target locations, he replenished the poison on each of his shuriken.

At the Hour of the Ox, in the darkest depths of night, his associates would finish the job he had started at two other storehouses. But he had to act before the guard shifts changed.

In the seven years since the destruction of his underworld empire, Green Tiger had managed to reclaim a few pieces of his old territory, enlist a few choice henchmen, and now had a comfortable stream of coin finding its way into his hidden coffers. But he was ready to give it all up again to see Mongol rule. The Golden Horde was brutal and merciless to its enemies, but those who submitted could find ways to excel within the new order of things.

This watchman looked like a simple-minded peasant. Yasutoki had of course approved the use of peasants as guards, instead of warriors. Their lack of education and discipline made them easy targets.

A quick flick of his wrist, and two shuriken pierced the guard’s throat and face. The guard stiffened and then fell limp, allowing Yasutoki to dart forward and slash his throat.

It was almost the Hour of the Ox.

He untied a jar of oil from his black obi and poured it over a stack of rice piled against a wall, taking care to splash some onto the wall as well.

Then he took down the lantern, set the oil aflame, waited to make sure the flame caught, and then faded into the dark city. He paused a safe distance away to watch the storehouse burn. Before long, flames and smoke bloomed from the roof.

He found an area on a low hill that afforded an excellent view of the town, climbed to the crest of a house roof, and lay down to watch.

The firewatch appeared with a cacophony of clappers and gongs to raise the alarm. Fire was a worse enemy to any city than a barbarian horde. Especially when few townspeople remained in Hakozaki to fight the fire. The women and children had fled south in great, weeping caravans. The men and older boys remained, most of whom had been impressed into defense units and labor gangs. After a day of hard fighting, many of them had collapsed with exhaustion near their posts on the wall.

The response to the fire would be slow.

And then a flickering glow appeared across town. Another fire.

Yasutoki tingled with satisfaction.

All that remained was...

The third storehouse erupting into flame.

For almost an hour, Yasutoki watched all three conflagrations, watched the fire crews scurry helplessly, watched samurai on horseback shouting ineffectually, watched great quantities of food disappear in columns of smoke.

The Mongols out on the sea must be watching this and smiling with wonder.

Pleasures like this allowed Yasutoki to forget the painful coal in his belly, for a while.

It was a good night.

Finally, with dawn drawing nigh, he made his way back to Lord Tsunetomo’s encampment and to his tent.

He had slipped out a hidden flap in the rear of the tent, out of sight of his two bodyguards. But on his approach to the tent now, he saw that both of them were gone. Abandoning one’s post at a time like this warranted execution.

He circled to the back of the tent, keeping to the shadows, and slipped inside. In the gloom, two dark lumps lay across each other in the center of his tent. He froze at the thick scent of blood.

He whipped out his dagger with one hand, shuriken with the other, dropped low and slid around the tent in a circle, searching the shadows.

No attack came.

Gray dawn lightened the walls of the tent, filtering inside.

Yasutoki put away his weapons and lit a lamp.

His two bodyguards lay arranged like cordwood. He tipped one’s chin back and found the throat had been slashed almost to the spine. The other had taken a blade through the eye socket. The center of his tent was a great pool of purpled, half-congealed blood. These killings had taken place at least an hour ago.

His brain reeled. How could he explain these two dead men in his tent when he was supposed to have been here with them?

Then he noticed that one of the reed mats, similar to tatami, in the corner beside the tent flap lay in slight disarray. The blanket looked twisted, as if by footprints. Leaning over the blanket, he saw something else that turned his blood to ice.

A single kernel of rice.

The assassin had waited here for him to return. Long enough to grow hungry and eat a rice ball, only to be driven away by the approach of dawn.

The camp would come to life soon. Before it did, and before the day’s next attack came, he had to construct an explanation for these deaths. He could not move them far, and he could not hide the massive bloodstain where they lay.

“When on the battlefield, if you try not to let others take the lead and have the sole intention of breaking into the enemy lines, then you will not fall behind others, your mind will become fierce, and you will manifest martial valor.... Furthermore, if you are slain in battle, you should be resolved to have your corpse facing the enemy.”

—Hagakure, Book of the Samurai

“We hold the bay,” Lord Tsunetomo said, “but they hold the sea.”

Captain Tsunemori said, “Captain Ken’ishi, your boats have kept many wolves from our door.”

Ken’ishi bowed. “Mine is but one of many.” He could not help but think about how many of his men had died on their forays, how many replacements as well, and the thousands who had perished in scores of boats.

At this moment, he had no idea how he was keeping the weariness at bay. Four days of fighting. Four days of blood. His entire being felt chafed raw and squeezed empty.

The cloth walls of the maku hung slack in the pre-dawn stillness.

Captain Tsunemori laughed. “You are the most modest samurai I have ever encountered.”

“It was not always so,” Ken’ishi said. “My time with Lord Abe has...changed me.”

“At least it has not slackened your sword arm. You’ve brought back enough heads to populate a village.”

Ken’ishi could not find a way to be joyful about that, even though it was the Warrior’s Way to present one’s lord with the trophies of his prowess. But Lord Abe had called each person a universe. Ken’ishi had destroyed a great many universes. “We have lost many boats as well. The barbarians’ are skilled with their thunder-crash bombs. Success often depends on what kind of troops our target is carrying, Mongols, Koryo, Jin, or Sung.”

“And your assessment of the reason?” Lord Tsunetomo said. His voice sounded as if he already knew the reason.

Ken’ishi had been present for all of the strategic planning since he rejoined Tsunetomo’s forces. He had striven to absorb as much as he could, as well as recall Yamazaki-sensei’s wisdom. “The Mongols are the toughest. They are steppe-bred barbarians, fanatically loyal to their Khan. The Sung are well-equipped. Their armor is thick, and they are seasoned and hardy after twenty years of fighting the Mongols. But they still live in the shadow of their defeat. After they surrendered, the Khan offered them amnesty if they would fight for him, but they still bear the stain on their honor, the defeat in their hearts. The Jin and the Koryo have long been subjugated. They are here because they were ordered to fight, like the Sung. The Mongols are here because they wish to be.”

The Jin were the people of northern China, subjugated by Khubilai Khan’s uncle, Ogedei, and grandfather, Genghis. The King of the Koryo could hardly refuse his father-in-law Khubilai Khan’s demand for troops and ships.

Tsunetomo nodded in agreement.

The kami had been a dull, unceasing roar in Ken’ishi’s mind since the first ships appeared, like the constant, crashing waves of winter, such that the sudden blare of intensity staggered him.

A guard slipped into the enclosure. “My lords, Lord Yasutoki is here.”

Ken’ishi’s jaw clenched.

Yasutoki entered the enclosure, eyes flicking around its occupants, brushing over Ken’ishi as if he were not present.

“My lord,” Yasutoki said, “something terrible has happened. The two yojimbo stationed outside my tent have been murdered!”

Lord Tsunetomo jumped to his feet. “Murdered! Were you attacked?”

“No, my lord. Thank the fortunes, but I was out of my tent.”

“Where were you?”

Yasutoki looked embarrassed. “Forgive me for my rudeness, my lord, but my innards have not been well these last few months. I visited the latrine late last night, and I was away from my tent for a little while. When I returned, my guards were dead.”

“Show me,” Tsunetomo said.

* * *

Ken’ishi’s presence annoyed Yasutoki, and this amused him.

At the entrance of Yasutoki’s tent lay two bodies, dragged just out of view. At this hour, no one would have been around to see. These men had been among Tsunetomo’s most trusted guards. Yojimbo duty was reserved for warriors of special merit.

One glance told Ken’ishi these men were expertly killed. But why would Yasutoki kill his bodyguards? Some nefarious scheme relating to his efforts as Green Tiger, most likely.

“Could this be related to the fires?” Tsunetomo said. “Or the murders of the other guards?” As soon as word had spread of the storehouse fires and the murders scattered all over town, guards had been quadrupled at all the posts. Fire crews were still working to contain the blazes. One had gotten away and threatened an entire district.

“I do not see how,” Yasutoki said. “The storehouses are a far from here.... Unless...” He hurried inside the tent. Tsunetomo, Tsunemori, and Ken’ishi followed him.

Yasutoki opened a lacquered document case with trembling fingers, to reveal dozens of small pigeon holes...that all lay empty. His eyes bulged. “My lord, I have been pilfered!”

“Spies,” Tsunetomo said.

The kami buzzed, restless. Undoubtedly Yasutoki was not only capable of murdering the guards last night, but setting the storehouse fires. This was the kind of machination at which Green Tiger excelled. But why would he harm the defense forces? Was he not in just as much danger as everyone else? Had something changed in the five years of Ken’ishi’s absence? How much gold would buy Green Tiger’s service as a saboteur?

Ken’ishi wanted to leap forward, lay the edge of his blade against Yasutoki’s neck, and force him to confess everything to Lord Tsunetomo—and take his head at the first lie. But Yasutoki still held a higher station. Ken’ishi could not publicly accuse him. And there was still the matter between Ken’ishi and Kazuko, of which Yasutoki knew far too much. If time had mended some of the rents in the fabric of Kazuko’s life, Ken’ishi could not readily put her in jeopardy.

The scar on his chest itched. His fingers ached to squeeze Silver Crane’s hilt and strike.

The implications of Yasutoki’s story rang false.

The yojimbo were not fresh kills.

The storehouse fires had been set between midnight and the Hour of the Ox. The guardposts around town had been attacked at roughly the same time. The new guards arriving for their shifts had discovered the murders.

Yasutoki was suggesting someone had killed his bodyguards and stolen all of his documents, including the guardpost and storehouse locations, and then had time to go wreak havoc, all while Yasutoki was in the privy.

Not even a pile of shit like Yasutoki could remain in the privy that long.

“Spies in our midst,” Tsunetomo said, scratching his beard. “Saboteurs.” He spat. “I must inform the other lords. Yasutoki, your first task is to have the remaining storehouses moved. Distribute the food and supplies to other locations. We cannot afford another such loss.”

Ken’ishi bit his tongue and tasted blood. How could a man as wise and stalwart and honorable as Tsunetomo be so blind to the evil right beside him? Ken’ishi swore that Yasutoki would not survive this. The stain of Green Tiger’s existence would soon be cleansed from the world, but only after the barbarians had been cast back into the sea.

* * *

At sunrise the assault recommenced, but this time the focus moved to Shiga. Fifty ships moved into position northeast of the bulk of the defending army. The enemy was trying to open a pathway for its forces; the sandbar was a perfect site to offload troops in great numbers. The Hakata defenses were too strong, but if they could break through the defense lines east of Shiga, outside of Hakata Bay, they would have open paths south and east, just as they had seven years before. Signals came via flag and fan and drum, passed along the shoreline toward Hakata and beyond to Imazu.

Ken’ishi was given command of a hundred peasant spearmen and twenty-five mounted samurai. The thunder of the Mongol bombs echoed across the distance, and he chafed to be in the battle. But it was Silver Crane’s impatience, not his. The foot troops marched with the speed of cold tar. The sword’s hunger, pulsing and thrumming through him, drove him to wish he could simply spur his horse forward and throw himself into the teeth of the enemy. But his troops were mostly frightened fishermen and farmers, like the men he had known in Aoka village, a unit knitted together by desperation and leadership. Bravery would inspire them—as long as it was visible. Michizane was a fine leader, but they did not look to him like they did to Ken’ishi.

Stories of his successful assaults on the ships were spreading. No matter what he did, people found it worthy of rumors. At fifty heads, he had stopped counting.

The march distracted him from what evils Green Tiger might be hatching in their very camp.

Aoka village was alive again—with encampments. It had become the rear echelon where supplies and weapons were stored. Exhausted and wounded men, pulled off the front lines for rest, watched with wan faces and empty eyes as Ken’ishi’s men marched past.

With less than a ri before they reached the beaches under assault, the crackling explosions of the bombs grew louder.

Captain Tsunemori pelted into Aoka from a northern road through the forest. A splintered arrow protruded from his bloodstained thigh, and his eyes blazed with urgency.

“Go, go, go!” he screamed, waving his war fan to follow him. “Otherwise we will fall!”

* * *

When Ken’ishi’s troops emerged from the forest onto the scrub and sand dunes stretching toward Shiga, a spike of desperate fear shot through his belly.

Fifteen enemy ships had reached the shore. Even now, men and horses were pouring forth behind a stubborn line of Sung infantry. The attack had pried a hole in the defenders’ formation and opened a space for the enemy to gain a larger toehold. Cavalry rode back and forth behind the lines, firing arrows into the Sung ranks, but without visible effect.

Ken’ishi’s men were puffing with exertion, but he must get them into battle. His samurai disdained the peasant spearmen, anxious to join the fray, but he could not leave these peasants alone. Their sergeants would not know how best to engage the enemy. Ushihara led a company of fifty. He was brave and strong, like an old, scarred bullock, but not a tactician.

The desperation on Tsunemori’s face to rejoin the battle burned in his eyes. “Slow, yes, but steady. Do not spend your troops before they reach the battle.”

Behind the defenders’ lines among the cavalry units, a unit of warriors wearing brilliant crimson armor harried the attackers with bow fire.

Lines of spears and naginata rose up behind rows of spiked bamboo barricades just high enough to impale any horse that pressed close. The fences provided little cover from arrows but prevented the Mongol horsemen from charging full into the defenders’ ranks. Bodies littered the sand on both sides. Storms of arrows flew back and forth.

For half a ri eastward, ships tried to land, tried to disgorge their cargo onto the beach, but the defenders were there, spear points glimmering in the morning sun and driving them back to the water.

The scale of the slaughter gave Ken’ishi pause. After five years of meditating on the nature of life, taking it had become a weightier matter than ever. Hundreds, thousands of universes dying before his eyes, some of them foolish, some wise, the strong and the weak, brave and cowardly, all dying together.

Strike now, or you will die! chimed Silver Crane.

But after four days of grueling, blood-soaked battle, it grew easier to watch men die again.

Tsunemori pointed. “There! If those horsemen flank those Shimazu men, the southwest flank will crumble!”

Ken’ishi could see, beyond the chaos of melee, a mass of Mongol horsemen, fresh from newly-landed ships, forming up to swing wide and flank attack a block of Shimazu naginata troops. The Shimazu were fending off a unit of Sung spearmen. There was just enough space on the beach to allow the Mongols’ maneuver. That hole must be plugged.

“Spearmen!” Captain Tsunemori shouted. “Follow behind us and fill that opening! Horsemen, with me!” With a great cry, they barreled across the sand. If they could swing around the southwest tip of the infantry lines quickly enough, they could strike while the Mongols were still in disarray.

Tip the cup, and I will drink. Silver Crane’s voice rasped across Ken’ishi’s bones and teeth.

He whipped it out. “Then give me power,” he muttered so no one else could hear, and spurred his horse.

Clouds of grit flew from pounding hooves.

They reached the gap just in time to meet the enemy horsemen’s maneuver. The Mongol commander’s face twisted into a sneer at being denied his crushing blow.

In the previous invasion, the Mongol horsemen had moved like flocks of birds, in perfect unison. Their favorite tactic had been to swoop in close, loose great clouds of arrows, draw the samurai forces into attack, and then retreat. The samurai, in their zeal to engage, would invariably give chase, and find themselves overextended. Then the horsemen would sweep in and crush them into bloody paste.

The narrow confines of the sand and dunes, funneled between beaches and sea, were too constricted to allow this maneuver. They were surrounded on three sides—by the sea, by their own troops, and by the defenders’ barricades. Ken’ishi saw the Mongol commander’s recognition of his situation, then his roar of command to meet Tsunemori and Ken’ishi’s charge.

The Mongol unit outnumbered Ken’ishi’s by four to one, but the constricted space would negate the enemy’s superior numbers.

The cavalry units slammed together, a horrific carnage of horses and men. Screams of rage and pain filled Ken’ishi’s ears as he slashed left and right. Horses stomped and bit and screamed, crushing each other and any men who fell into the sand.

Storm roared his challenges to the Mongol ponies, taunting them for their stunted ugliness.

Silver Crane shattered blades and sundered armor, cleaved helmets and split flesh. As the blood flowed, strength surged into Ken’ishi’s limbs. The sky and the air filled with silver veins that pulsed and flowed like the blood of destiny itself, entwining men, horses, stones, and sky.

Mongol blades licked at him, touched him, but he felt no pain.

He hacked and hewed, and his fury drove the Mongols back. His men surged forward, sensing their advantage. Slashing naginata laid open swaths of meat, man and horse. The sand turned to crimson mud. The horses fought for footing.

The Mongol commander traded blows with Tsunemori, katana to saber. With a savage snarl, the Mongol launched himself off his horse, grabbed Tsunemori, and dragged him to the earth. In his heavy o-yoroi, injured, Tsunemori slammed into the ground like a bag of grain. The Mongol pulled a dagger, stabbed at him. Tsunemori caught his wrist.

Ken’ishi spun Storm and spurred toward them, but the surge of battle crossed his path. He hacked his way through two more Mongols, but lost sight of Tsunemori on the ground.

When the crush parted, the Mongol commander jerked his dagger out of Tsunemori’s throat, raised it, brought it down again two-handed into Tsunemori’s face. Tsunemori’s arms fell limp to the bloody sand.

Rage exploded white-hot in Ken’ishi’s breast. He leaped out of the saddle and plowed into the Mongol commander, bearing him off Tsunemori’s body. Grabbing the Mongol was like trying to wrestle with an oak bough, but the power surging through Ken’ishi was mightier than any tree.

One hand hooked into the neck of the Mongol’s armor, the other clutching his belt, he lifted the writhing knot of fury into the air above his head.

And then he brought the Mongol down across his knee.

The wet crunch sounded even above the clamor of battle.

The Mongol’s legs went limp as sackcloth. Ken’ishi let him slip to the sand, but instead of fury, the barbarian’s face blazed with terror. Even so, he clutched for a weapon that he might take Ken’ishi’s life with his last breath.

With a single stomp, Ken’ishi burst his head like a melon.

Power surged away from him in waves, like a boulder dropped into water, driving the space around him wider. Friend and foe alike fell back.

In a single bound, Ken’ishi was back in the saddle.

With the loss of their commander, the Mongols broke and fled.

Ken’ishi spurred after them, heedless that this was exactly the tactic they had used years before.

He roared after them, Silver Crane trailing blood as it pierced the sky.

He caught one fleeing horsemen and severed his head.

The rest fled through the ranks of their foot troops, putting the infantry in momentary disarray. However, the Koryo spearmen closed ranks again behind the Mongols, and formed a bristling wall of spear points. Ken’ishi hauled Storm to a halt just out of range of the spears. The Koryo spearmen, pouring sweat in their heavy armor coats, similar to those of the Sung, lunged forward, thinking to spear this lone warrior’s horse, but Storm drew back.

Ken’ishi leaped from the saddle and lunged into them, feeling the invisible silver threads entwining his body, the spears, the limbs and heads of his foes. He swept their spears aside, plowing through their ranks like a charging boar, slashing right and left.

For a split second, he wondered that he had not sought the Void. He no longer needed it. Its realm of endless possibility was superfluous. He needed only slaughter.

Behind him, somehow, he felt his comrades sense the enemy’s surprise.

A lone warrior charging a fully armed and armored unit?

The dance of Ken’ishi’s sword and body placed him without fail between every enemy spear thrust. Every step was perfectly timed to move him out of harm’s way and into range for another lethal attack of his own. His feet moved with the precision of a dancer. Men fell around him like scythed grain.

Hooves pounded across the sand from behind him.

Encircled now by ten hostile spear points, he whirled and slashed, severing spear hafts and limbs and necks.

Fresh screams filled his ears again as his troops crashed into the Koryo spearmen.

This hammer blow shattered the enemy’s courage. A dozen died under the furious cavalry onslaught, and the rest broke and ran.

The momentum shift filled the air like an oncoming storm.

The enemy infantry across the spit, seeing their flank collapse, started to fall back, to contract and protect both flanks again with the sea. The defenders pressed their advantage and charged past their barricades.

In an endless cascade of moments, the enemy fell back with increasing speed, like an avalanche gathering momentum.

The collapsing lines retreated into the narrowing spit, and all became chaos. Bottlenecked, the infantry units fouled each other, panicking the crowded Mongol ponies.

Seizing the moment with a roar of triumph, Ken’ishi and the defending commanders led a devastating charge into the rear of the retreating enemy.

It was there the gods flung open the gates of every Hell to catch the deluge of blood.

Ken’ishi waded through the deepest of it.

The defenders tore through the invaders, leaving hundreds of dead in their wake. The retreat continued westward across the sandbar. Ships that had been safely behind friendly lines now lay exposed on the beach. The defenders stormed them before they could retreat from shore. They butchered the crews and burned the ships.

The enemy commanders struggled mightily to rally their troops and managed to stem the retreat only a few hundred paces from Shiga Island, where the spit narrowed to only fifty paces.

When the advancing defenders encountered this solid block of spears, Sung halberds, and fresh arrow fire, they withdrew out of range.

By midafternoon the engagement had settled once again into a stalemate, but the invaders had lost nearly all of the spit. Fourteen ships burned along the sand. The defenders still held the shore east.

Ken’ishi collapsed at the head of the defenders’ lines, drenched in blood from crown to toe.

Four men carried him to the rear. He was only vaguely aware of the shock of his bearers as they talked about someone’s wound. His flesh was raw and painful, as if the blood burned him, but he had no strength left to wash it off.

Then he saw the hole the size of a spear point in the side of his do-maru.

I will not forget

This lonely savor of my life’s

One little dewdrop

—Basho

Kazuko saw them carry Ken’ishi away from the front lines. Other wounded men were carried back, but he was the only one who looked as if he had bathed in blood. It dripped from his wild mane like rainwater. His half-lidded eyes told her he still lived.

After so long, seeing him like this unleashed a tumult of emotions she would need time to sort.

She swallowed the tear-fueled lump in her throat and assessed her own losses. Attrition had reduced the Scarlet Dragons to just over half of their previous number. They were only eighteen now. All of them hard, bloody veterans after almost two weeks of fighting. Six of her women lay wounded back in the village behind the lines.

They had acquitted themselves well today.

An uneasy stalemate descended over the beach, the spit, and the sea. The enemy had formed what looked like an impenetrable block of spears and stubborn fury near Shiga Island, daring the defenders to try to push them back again. The defenders had likewise formed a similar formation.

Ships hovered offshore, withholding further bombardment. Hundreds of their thunder-crash bombs had rained down upon the defenders. How many of them could the enemy have brought in ships’ stores?

As Kazuko rode through the ranks of spearmen, she heard men speaking.

“Did you see what that Otomo man did?”

“I can’t believe it!”

“He gave us the day.”

“What a glorious death!”

“Was he wounded?”

“Looked dead to me.”

Kazuko bid her Dragons to remain on the beach and take whatever rest they could, then spurred her horse toward the column of wounded being withdrawn to the deserted village. She forgot her own weariness in concern over Ken’ishi’s welfare.

She followed at a distance until they carried him into an old inn, where she dismounted and followed him inside.

The stench of blood and waste filled the inn like the dregs of a battlefield and a privy.

His bearers settled him onto a bloodstained futon. His blood-caked eyelids were closed.

His right hand still clutched his sword.

She shed no tears for him, not yet, not until she knew. In truth, she hardly recognized him. Something in his face had changed. It looked thicker now, more brutish. Or perhaps it was just the blood.

She wanted to wash him clean, to bind his wounds, or if necessary, to wash him for burial, but she did not dare.

Finally the men removed his breastplate—she saw the rent in the side, just below the ribs—and then she saw the wound. Ragged lips drooled crimson. A spear thrust. Where it was not painted with the blood of the slain, his skin was pale, almost gray.

His sword fell from his fingers and bobbled on the guard away from him.

A moment later, the fingers twitched as if reaching for it, then subsided again.

The healer, across what had been the inn’s common room, marked by his drawn face, bloodstained robes, and rolled-up sleeves, was tending another wounded man.

Kazuko called to him. “Save this man.”

The healer looked up. “Eh? I have many men to save, my lady.”

“This man is the hero of the day. Save him, and it will go well with you. Let him die at your peril.” Then she spun and departed. It was a cruel thing to say to a healer, but she did not care.

* * *

Ken’ishi thought he remembered Kazuko’s voice, like the sound of music, but when he awoke, all that surrounded him was suffering and death. His side throbbed with a deep ache that made the multitude of other pains as candles to the sun. Bloodstained bandages wrapped his torso.

Silver Crane lay beside him, sheathed. Fresh chips in the lacquer and bloodstains on the mother-of-pearl cranes made the scabbard looked rougher than ever. He managed to grasp the scabbard, pull it close, and clutch it to his chest.

* * *

He dreamed of silver elixir pulsing through his veins, knitting a rib, suffusing his flesh with vitality.

His eyes drifted open and closed.

He dreamed of thirst that could not be slaked, hunger that could not be sated.

Food came, and went uneaten. He had all the sustenance he needed.

He dreamed of storm clouds crackling with silver lightning, of silver threads fluttering like spider silk on a nascent wind, of ripples in the sea coalescing and building upon each other until waves the size of mountains brushed the sky with silver foam.

Summer rains pattered on the inn’s veranda. The veranda used to overlook the bay; now it looked at the earthen embankment behind the wall. The rain trickled over the thatched roof that used to be redolent with the scents of saké and cooking, but now trapped the stench of death within, hot and thick.

He dreamed of a great whirlpool, larger than Shiga Island, and in the bottom of it lay an open cave mouth, and he gripped the rudder of a defense boat, alone. The sight of the cave mouth, waiting as if to devour him, filled him with terror. The mouth was dark, sucking, suppurating.

Hands held him down.

Liquid that was salty but not seawater—coppery—splashed into his mouth.

The mouth below him. Swallowing the sea. Thousands of men swirling with him in the maelstrom, bobbing on the spinning surface, reaching, helpless, spinning, spinning, spinning toward oblivion.

* * *

Ken’ishi’s periods of wakefulness grew longer. He did not know how many days he had lain here, but the defenders still held the coastline. They had not been forced to retreat south.

He awoke to find a bowl of rice and a cup of water beside his futon. His mouth desert-dry, he reached for the water, but the kami wailed in his mind at such stridency that he dropped it as if it were scalding. The warning of the kami subsided. He tried to work his mouth enough to moisten his parched tongue, but found nothing there. He would eat the rice after he had found a drink.

Then he noticed the white paper ofuda pinned to the front of his robe, a spell that bore Lord Abe’s stamp.

For the first time since he came here, he thought he might walk. He rolled onto his side, lifted onto his hands and knees, levered himself upright, stood up, each movement painstakingly slow. The thudding ache in his side grew warm.

The healer rushed toward him. “Let me help you, Captain.” The healer was a small man, wizened and leathery, but he possessed the strength to lift Ken’ishi upright. “Be careful now. You mustn’t re-open your wound. It has been a difficult week for you.”

“A week?”

“Eight days have you lain here. Fever, delirium, strange ravings, like evil nightmares. An onmyouji came!” The healer spoke of the onmyouji with fear and reverence.

“Lord Abe,” Ken’ishi said.

“He looked very worried about you. Do you know him?”

“He has been my teacher for a long time. All of this is no doubt...very disappointing to him.”

“Of course. War is a terrible thing.”

Ken’ishi let the healer think that was his meaning as they tottered toward a bucket of fresh water near the kitchen. Ken’ishi took up the dipper, and the kami did not rebel this time. What about his water cup had set them off?

The water was so cool and sweet he almost laughed with the pleasure of it.

Back at his futon, he picked up the cup again. Its contents had long since soaked into the deteriorating tatami. He sniffed the cup. The kami cried out again. It smelled wrong somehow, at once flowery and acrid.

“Has anyone been near me today?” Ken’ishi said.

“No, Captain.”

“Who brought me this food and water?”

“I did, Captain.” Puzzlement grew in the healer’s tone.

“Who hired you to poison me?”

The healer’s eyes bulged, and he stepped backward, waving his palms in protest. “What? No!”

The other wounded men watched this exchange with growing interest.

The healer said, “I’ve been taking care of you, Captain!”

Ken’ishi handed him the poisoned cup.

The healer sniffed the cup, and his naked eyebrows rose in alarm. “Someone tried to poison you!”

With a groan of pain, Ken’ishi scooped up the bowl of cold rice and sniffed it, too. It carried the same strange scent. “Shall I kill you now, or wait until you tell me who hired you?” He expected only one name.

Suddenly Silver Crane was in his hand. How had it gotten there? His hand clutched the hilt to draw.

The healer nearly collapsed with fear. “Please, Captain! I don’t know!”

“Tell me about this cup and bowl.” His voice did not sound right. Deeper.

“I brought it to you, uh, just after noon, when you looked like you might awaken.”

“And no one else has been here.”

A man across the room spoke up. “There was someone here, Lord. A woman.” The speaker wore a rough, homespun robe. “She went over to your blankets and fussed with them a bit while you were sleeping.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know, Lord. I never saw her before. Short and ugly. Looked like a servant.”

Green Tiger was wont to have others do his dark deeds for him. Had he hired or forced a peasant woman to poison Ken’ishi? Did anyone else want Ken’ishi dead? Tsunetomo could certainly rest easier if Ken’ishi were killed in battle.

No. Such thoughts were the pinnacle of disloyalty and dishonor.

Tsunetomo had no officers to spare.

The images of Tsunemori’s last moments flooded his mind, and all he could do was sigh. The lords of Otomo falling, one by one, to the arrows of fortune.

This poisonous mystery pushed him to the limit of his strength. Grief stole the rest of it.

The healer rushed forward. “Lord, are you—?” He hesitated before getting too close.

Ken’ishi still held Silver Crane. “Weary and sick with grief. Tell me of the battle.”

The healer cleared his throat. “Our forces drove the barbarians all the way back to Shiga Island. And then, a few days ago, the enemy withdrew from Shiga and Genkai. All of their troops and ships have retreated to Ikishima.”

Ken’ishi sighed again at the good news, easing himself back down. A certainty niggled at his mind. “They will come back.”

“I don’t know what the lords and generals say, but I think the barbarians are waiting for something. So many rumors...”

“Tell me of the rumors.”

The healer rubbed his neck. “I hardly know where to begin. Rumors of barbarians coming ashore from here to Satsuma. Their forces still outnumber ours, but Hakata has proven a tough nut to crack. Why wouldn’t they look for other landing sites?”

Horses needed a beach to land. Hakata was the best location, but it was hardly the only one on Kyushu.

The healer continued, “Anyway, there are reports of enemy ships all up and down the western coastline.”

“Scouts,” Ken’ishi said.

The healer shrugged. “No doubt you’re right about this not being over.”

“Not until we’ve destroyed them all.” When the words came out, Ken’ishi experienced a peculiar mix of anticipation and dread.

“It will take until the end of time to kill them all,” the healer said. “I will bring you fresh rice and water.”

Ken’ishi leaned against the wall behind his futon. Feeling warm wetness at his side, he looked down.

Fresh blood leaked through his bandage.

Deep, still silence

Seeping into the rocks

Cicada voices

—Basho

The thrumming buzz of the cicadas lulled Kazuko into the land between waking and dreams, rising and falling like the breath of the forest in the hot afternoon. Thousands of cicadas, entire cities of them, hid in the trees around Aoka village. That they sang now in the midst of this enormous strife made her think about how wide the gulf was between the natural world and humanity’s desires and efforts.

The defense forces had withdrawn from the open beaches when the enemy fleet withdrew.

Somewhere, out on the sea, a deadly dance continued between the defenders’ scout ships and the enemy ships sent to drive them away. The scout ships usually returned, and when they did, they reported hundreds of enemy ships—it was impossible to determine exactly how many—were gathered around Ikishima. No doubt the island had been pillaged by now, all the men slaughtered, the women enslaved and mutilated. From there, the barbarians had been plotting their next assault for over a month.

In the meantime, Kazuko was grateful for the respite. It gave her Scarlet Dragons the opportunity to recuperate. The next time they fought, they would be at full strength.

The pause granted time for Ken’ishi to recover as well. She had seen him the day before, teaching sword techniques to a group of young men. He still moved with some stiffness, but his wound had apparently healed.

Enemy ships roved the western coastline, searching no doubt for possible landing sites and causing a local panic at every appearance, but none had yet tried to land. The defense forces were too few to protect every sliver of beach on Kyushu. As long as the enemy fleet remained at Ikishima, the defense forces would protect the north.

In spite of the weeks of rest, tension among the defense forces remained high. She saw it on faces all around her. The inescapable summer heat and humidity of the eighth month drove her into the breezy shade, where she had erected her own maku, a cloth enclosure where her women could withdraw from the eyes of men on the fringe of what had been Aoka village.

The army’s idleness was not always a boon. One night two Shimazu warriors had tried to sneak into one of the women’s tents. The warrior women promptly subdued them. The following day, the men had been allowed to cut open their bellies.

The sound of an approaching horse emerged from the cicadas’ drone.

Tsunetomo’s voice rose above the tents and enclosure walls. “My lady wife!” The urgency in his voice roused her instantly.

She hurried outside to meet him. “What news, Husband?”

Astride his horse, he was fully armored, his face dark and grim. “A second barbarian fleet! They attack Takashima!”

The island of Takashima lay in Imari Bay, some fifteen ri west of Hakata Bay. Imari Bay’s shoreline was less hospitable to a mass landing than Hakata, but Takashima would be an even closer toehold than Ikishima from which to strike. Helplessness splashed through her. How could they hope to drive off an enemy of such magnitude?

She moved to Tsunetomo’s stirrup and clutched his thigh, gazing up into his handsome face. Tsunemori’s death had carved the lines in his face even deeper. She hardly saw her husband nowadays. The imminence of battle and death filled their thoughts and pulled them away toward their respective duties. They had not lain together as husband and wife since leaving home.

He reached down and stroked her cheek with his callused fingers. His eyes softened for just a moment. Then he said, “It is two days’ ride to Imari Bay, four days on foot. The cavalry will march ahead. We leave within the hour.”

* * *

Yasutoki watched the Otomo cavalry ride west, joining columns of other clans hurrying to reinforce the defense forces at Takashima. The ashigaru spearmen of several lords would choke the roads behind the cavalry, minus several thousand men left to defend Hakata Bay and Shiga.

He had no intention of obeying Tsunetomo’s orders to remain here and continue to organize the defense supplies. This battle might decide the war, and Yasutoki intended to help decide it. He did not dare reveal himself to Tsunetomo, however. Such insubordination at a time like this would likely warrant execution, or banishment at the very least.

Would he have to kill Tsunetomo at an opportune moment? Would such a move sufficiently disarray the Otomo forces?

A second invasion fleet was a stroke of genius on the part of the Great Khan and his generals. However, why it had not struck simultaneously with the first fleet, Yasutoki could not imagine. The defense forces could not have withstood two concurrent attacks.

He would leave his servants behind, don peasant’s clothes, and travel with the cavalry baggage train. The servants of the baggage train would not question his presence riding with them.

With so many men killed, finding an unattended horse was easy. He would have to move quickly, however, or be stuck behind endless columns of peasant spearmen.

* * *

On the road to Takashima, Ken’ishi was back in full armor for the first time since the battle on the spit. The rent in his do-maru had been repaired.

Far ahead in the vanguard rode Tsunetomo and Kazuko with her Scarlet Dragons. Ken’ishi found himself with excuses to ride near the rear of the column. His feelings were too mercurial lately to trust himself for long in her presence, and she seemed content to keep him at a distance. Except that every night when he lay down to sleep, she was back in his thoughts. Some days those thoughts were pleasant.

The men around him had not stopped staring since his wound had healed. If they whispered about him, it was not within his hearing.

Once, however, he did hear a man say, “Maybe so, but he’s on our side.”

Even Michizane and Ushihara, while cordial toward him, kept their distance now.

He understood. It was natural. Even he felt it. He was different from them now. On many days since the battle on Shiga spit, his heart ached for what he had lost since coming down from Kiyomizu. The tendrils around his scar were spreading again. How long before he lost himself completely, he did not know, but it was inevitable unless the barbarians gave up their invasion soon. Some days, he did not care. On those days, he simply wanted the gods to place the entire barbarian horde before him so that Silver Crane could scythe them down like a rice harvest and soak the earth with their blood.

He remembered little of the battle of the spit except the rapture of it, not unlike the time he had sampled Shirohige’s lotus. The warmth showering him in a waterfall of blood, and the scent of raw meat filling his nostrils.

When he caught himself thinking such thoughts, he took a deep breath and meditated. He had learned to do it even on horseback, allowing Storm to keep up with the rest of the column on his own.

A voice riding alongside roused him from such a meditation. “Sleeping already, old sot?”

Ken’ishi jerked awake.

The man riding beside him was thick-bodied, beady-eyed, jowled, but clad in a full suit of antique-looking o-yoroi.

“Hage?” Ken’ishi asked.

The man winked at him, a younger version of the old fellow Ken’ishi had first met in the forest near Aoka village.

“What are you doing here?” Ken’ishi said.

“Same thing you’re doing here. Protecting my home.”

“But—”

“But-but, tut-tut. I am a creature of surprises.”

Ken’ishi glanced at the men around them. The column trotted two abreast down the road toward Imari Bay. None of the men before or behind appeared to be listening.

“Don’t worry, old sot. They think we’re talking about the weather. A few other tanuki are mixed in here. Even some foxes. We’re not utterly without care about what happens in the human world. Especially when our entire way of life might change. Have you seen the furs those barbarians wear? The last thing I want is to become a hat. Try to get over your surprise so we can have a two-way conversation.”

Ken’ishi finally smiled. “I’m happy you’re here, Hage.” How long had it been since he smiled?

“I’m not. I’ve a feeling this is going to make the slaughter at Dan-no-Ura look like children at play.”

“You were at Dan-no-Ura?”

“I’ve been many places. Now listen, old sot. You’re starting to worry me. I’m happy you’re not dead from your wound. But...you smell bad.”

“I haven’t bathed in weeks.” Aside from a quick dip in the sea.

“That’s not what I meant. You don’t smell like unwashed human. You smell like unwashed...something else.”

Ken’ishi took a deep breath. “I know.”

Hage’s gaze held upon Ken’ishi for a long time.

“I am still myself,” Ken’ishi said.

“I’m unsure that’s desirable. You would be much better off if you were someone else.”

The double-edge of Hage’s words rattled around in Ken’ishi’s thoughts for a moment, until he caught the twinkle in Hage’s eye. Then he laughed.

They rode together in companionable silence for a while. Then Ken’ishi realized what a comfort Hage’s presence was. Then he realized that his only true friend in the world was a tanuki. Then he laughed again. It felt good to laugh.

* * *

Ken’ishi heard the battle before he saw it. It was late afternoon when the distant crackle of the enemy thunder-crash bombs echoed over forests and hills. Tsunetomo’s cavalry was still a ri distant.

When they finally rounded the skirt of a forested hill, they came upon a pitched battle raging across a patchwork of rice fields, the only flat places available in a valley between forested mountains. The valley stretched down toward the rocky coastline of Imari Bay. Hundreds of ships choked the bay, but not floating separately. The entire fleet had been lashed together, hull to hull, in lines and blocks forming great floating walls. Beyond these walls, the dark hulk of the island of Takashima lay like a smoking wreck. Dozens of plumes of black smoke rose from the island, smudging the clear, blue sky.

From this elevated vantage point, Ken’ishi could see the wreckage of small boats littering the sea between the lashed ships and the shore—the remains of hundreds of defense boats. No enemy ships burned, but instead pounded the shore with thunder-crash bombs.

The tactic that had saved Hakata Bay did not work when the enemy ships were bound together to create an immense floating platform, where the high bows and sterns were the only point of attack and men could move freely from ship to ship to repulse boarders. One look at the profusion of wreckage made Ken’ishi doubt that many of the defense boats remained in Imari Bay.

On the distant beach, ships disgorged wave after wave of troops.

Orders rippled down Tsunetomo’s column to form ranks. Drums thundered and conch horns blared.

Between the cavalry reinforcements and the shore, lines of spearmen and archers faced close-packed lines of Sung infantry. Beyond those, masses of Mongol horsebowmen poured swarms of arrows into the defenders. Bodies littered the battlefield in all directions.

Tsunetomo marshaled all of his cavalry, some two hundred warriors on horseback, holding his iron war fan high. Upon it, the writhing red dragon of his house encompassed the apricot blossoms of the Otomo clan.

The column deployed from the road, several clans’ worth of cavalry fanning out into large units, and together they marched closer to the battle. The muddy rice fields sucked at their horses’ hooves, an entire valley’s crop trampled.

Hage rode alongside Ken’ishi. “Let’s stick together, eh, old sot? We’ve made a fine team before.”

Ken’ishi smiled and nodded, his breast filling with joy and anticipation of battle. Silver Crane thrummed at his hip.

“But if you ever grab my tail again,” Hage said, “I’ll turn you into a toad.”

“I saved your life then.”

“It was undignified!”

“Vow never to turn me into a woman again, and we shall be even.”

Hage laughed, eyes sparkling. In his antique-style armor, wearing a tachi of even older style than Silver Crane, he looked like a warrior from a long-ago century.

Crossing the valley toward the battle took longer than Ken’ishi expected. The horses sank to their knees in the soft mud. The terrain would hamper any full-out charge. Only two narrow roads afforded easy approach to the battle, too narrow for the cavalry to make an effective mounted assault.

The rear defending units spotted the newcomers’ arrival, and a cry of jubilation echoed through the valley. Drums pounded and horns blasted out with renewed vigor.

The too-familiar stench of battle and death wafted toward Ken’ishi, even two hundred paces from the fighting.

Silver Crane’s thirst crawled into Ken’ishi’s belly and coiled there. His breast tingled with pleasure, like warm, sensuous fingers stroking him, trailing down to his groin.

The force of Mongol horsemen crashed into the left flank of spearmen. Even slowed by the mud, they plowed into the ashigaru like an axe, splitting them, pummeling them under the muck. In moments, that flank would crumble.

“There!” Tsunetomo roared, pointing with his fan. The Otomo cavalry surged toward the collapsing flank.

The Scarlet Dragons swung wide. Ken’ishi knew this maneuver. They would use the Mongols’ own tactics against them, harrying the corners of the enemy unit with arrows, then charging in with naginata if the opportunity presented. The Mongols would not dare swing to attack the Dragons with a mass of heavier cavalry bearing down on them.

The mud made keeping ranks difficult. Their front grew ragged as they approached the rear of the collapsing block of ashigaru.

At Ken’ishi’s side, Silver Crane began to sing with joy, the music of clashing blades, the rhythm of a thousand heartbeats pounding as one. This rhythm seeped into him, drawing his own heart into this cadence.

Now was the time for arrows, and he joined his comrades in emptying his quiver at the Mongol horsemen, even as the spearmen were ground to bits under hooves and swords.

But the appearance of Tsunetomo’s cavalry was too little too late. The courage drained from the nearby ashigaru, and they began to fall back.

Faces ablaze with bloodlust and victory, the Mongols crushed the last of the spearmen into the mud and charged toward Ken’ishi and Tsunetomo’s cavalry. Ken’ishi hurriedly slung his bow, drew Silver Crane, and aligned Storm to meet them. The rest of the men dressed their ranks and moved toward the enemy horsemen.

Then with a roar from Tsunetomo, they charged forward.

Ken’ishi’s vision became a narrow tunnel, and at the end of it, a single enemy warrior snarled at him. His sword arm tingled with Silver Crane’s thirst and with power. Storm’s hooves slurped through the mud, and he huffed with the effort, lurching with each step.

The two units crashed together with far less force than if the field had been dry, more like a slow melding of lines and combatants. Screams and war cries filled the air like thousands of battles before and after. Ken’ishi’s first adversary was driven backward off the saddle by Silver Crane’s powerful, one-armed thrust.

As Silver Crane began to bite and sting, to sever and hew, its voice rose in his mind. I am the Way to power, unto the end of the world! Its voice seemed to drown the screams of the dying or swallow them like elixir.

The silver threads of destiny coalesced in his vision, glimmering into the expanse of future and distance in an infinitely complex weave, through the men struggling for their own futures, through the earth, into the sky, through wisps of cloud. The intricate pattern of it all formed in Ken’ishi’s mind.

And then, he saw it all.

The defenders would lose this battle.

The Mongols would gain a foothold on Kyushu, here on the shore of Imari Bay, and their sheer numbers would sweep the defenders before them. From here, they would crush Hakata and overrun Dazaifu.

The barbarians would subjugate Kyushu, and from there launch attacks on Honshu, working their way east, ri by ri, until the capital, and finally the bakufu in Kamakura, knelt at the Great Khan’s throne.

The throne of skulls Ken’ishi had seen once in a vision.

Tsunetomo would die, spitted on a Sung halberd.

Ken’ishi would die, pierced by a hundred arrows.

Kazuko would die, raped to death by a thousand leering barbarians.

No.

With a fist, he seized a handful of threads, invisible to everyone else, and tore them asunder.

A thunderclap echoed across the battlefield that was not from a bomb.

The man takes his destiny in his fist and shakes it at the gods.

Every muscle in his body trembled with power, filled to bursting with the excess of it.

The Mongols fell before him like dogs before an enraged boar, spilling blood and entrails in every direction.

All around him, Tsunetomo and his comrades fought and struggled, hand-to-hand, face-to-face, shoulder-to-shoulder with tanuki and foxes they thought were men. The tanuki fought with tenacious strength, and the foxes with deceptive dexterity. In the clouds of silver filaments, Ken’ishi knew them all.

Silver Crane drank and drank and drank.

And its power grew and grew and grew.

Ken’ishi seized another fistful of threads, twisted and wrenched, and the world tore open in a deafening fusillade of thunder and blinding light.

The sky darkened. The cottony wisps of cloud turned to smoke-like smudges, thickening, coalescing.

But no matter how many Mongols and Sung he laid low around him, more surged up from the rear.

A cry of alarm vaguely registered in his mind.

He shook an enemy from the tip of his blade and pulled his awareness back from the abyss of slaughter. Across the field, another mass of perhaps fifty Mongol horsemen swung toward the Scarlet Dragons, driving a wedge between the Dragons and the rest of Tsunetomo’s forces, a wedge that spilled out wider until there was no path for the women to reconnect with their comrades. Several women already lay motionless in the mud, bristling with arrows.

Kazuko’s naginata flashed in the graying light, pointing toward a hill.

At the base of the hill, a red-painted torii arch stood among ancient trees, beyond which stone steps climbed into the foliage out of sight. A shrine lay at the top of the hill.

Even from this distance, Ken’ishi could see that Kazuko knew she was cut off. Her only options were to retreat or be annihilated. But if she retreated, her unit would be pincushioned with arrows before they reached the shelter of the forested shrine hill.

With the hundreds of enemy troops between Ken’ishi and her, he would only be able to watch it happen.

“The dragon is a creature with the ultimate positive energy, so much so that it can fly in the sky without wings. Yet it usually remains curled up in supremely still waters. This is how a man with a heart of true martial courage constantly cultivates himself.”

—Kumazawa Banzan

Barely in time, Kazuko saw the second mass of Mongol horsemen pounding across the fields toward her, loosing storms of arrows as they came. Two of her women went down, then two more. The power of the short, recurved Mongol bows could punch an arrow through a do-maru.

The second unit of enemy horsemen filled the gap between the Scarlet Dragons and Tsunetomo’s heavy cavalry, expanding like a wedge, pushing the Dragons farther away from their comrades, threatening to envelop and destroy them. The only direction to go was away.

The arrows kept coming. She saw Mongol bowmen clutching three arrows in their drawing hands, firing in quick succession with only a heartbeat between each shot.

She had to get her women under cover. They would be cut to pieces. To die now would be a dog’s death.

With her naginata waving high, she pointed toward a shrine hill perhaps four hundred paces away. “Fall back!”

The women obeyed her without question, turned, and spurred away. Only twenty of her Dragons remained. But first she had to move faster. She guided her mare up onto a dike between rice fields, where the ground was solid. The horses were mud from hoof to hock, but the moment they climbed onto the dike’s footpath, they leaped to greater speed. She spurred her horse toward the hill. Arrows disappeared into the mud around her. The mare’s eyes shone wide, and Kazuko leaped her over irrigation canals and gates. They quickly left their pursuers behind, except for a few who followed onto the dikes. Without their overwhelming numbers, individual Mongol riders, savage as they were, posed far less threat than a massed onslaught.

A Scarlet Dragon’s horse screamed in pain and tumbled off the dike into the mud with several arrows in its back and rider.

Kazuko spurred her mount to greater speed. The others had formed a single-file line behind her.

The pursuers fanned out along several other dikes to prevent her from circling back toward Tsunetomo’s heavy cavalry. Arrows sliced toward the Dragons from several directions now.

Two more women went down, each loss a stab in Kazuko’s heart. She had to get them out of range. Three more. They were down to fifteen.

And still the enemy came, harrying them with arrows.

In the distance, the first mass of barbarian horsemen still held Tsunetomo’s heavy cavalry engaged.

The Dragons were on their own.

They were twelve when they finally emerged from the maze of rice field paths and galloped toward the bright-red torii arch at the base of the hill. She hoped the kami would forgive her for bringing death to their doorstep.

From the torii, stone steps made a path straight up the hillside. In the distance, the shadowed red of another torii sat at the summit of the steps.

The pursuers paused fifty paces away and loosed another swarm of deadly shafts. Their aim was lethal. Five more of her Dragons or their horses went down. Some were only wounded, but the pursuers would make quick work of them. Yuko shoved herself from under her fallen horse, snatched up her naginata, and braced herself to face the enemy.

“Get under the trees!” Kazuko called.

But Yuko twirled her weapon in defiance of the enemy. “Up the hill, my lady!”

Within heartbeats, the Mongols fell upon her. She took one out of the saddle with a perfectly timed swipe that split his chest like a melon, then another.

Kazuko’s quiver was empty.

Ten paces away from Yuko, a Mongol drew his bow and took aim.

Yuko saw it coming, with only a moment’s resignation on her face before the arrow shot through her skull.

The remaining handful of Dragons spurred their mounts up the steps. Two more women screamed and fell at the foot of the steps. The clatter of hooves echoed in the tunnel of lush greenery that smelled moist and alive. The canopy shielded them from further arrows.

Five horsemen came into view in the mouth of the torii. Two of the women who still had arrows fired downward, taking one of the enemy out of the saddle.

The horsemen leaped the bodies lying in the torii and charged up the steps, two abreast, eyes gleaming with savage anticipation.

Kazuko’s horse stumbled, almost lurching her out of the saddle.

It was then she saw the arrow protruding from its hindquarters.

With a nicker of pain and exhaustion, the mare’s rear leg buckled. Kazuko leaped off before the horse could fall and crush her. The mare stumbled into the greenery and fell. Kazuko spun her naginata and faced the oncoming foes.

Firing arrows uphill under the low-hanging canopy was difficult, but the barbarians’ marksmanship sent another of her women crashing onto steps with an arrow through the eye. The riderless horse plunged off the steps into the woods, crashing through the underbrush as it went.

Up and up Kazuko and her last two mounted women climbed; up and up the four Mongols pursued.

“To the top!” Kazuko shouted. They would fight from the level ground above. The advantages of a higher position and the length of their polearms might be enough. She plunged up the steps.

Reiko, a stocky, square-shouldered woman of nineteen, and Yukie, a twenty-eight-year-old widow of the previous invasion, spurred up after her, then spun atop the steps to face the oncoming enemies under another torii.

The Mongol ponies whinnied and kept coming.

Reiko said, “It has been an honor, Lady.”

The two mounted women traded glances, squared their mounts, and plunged back down toward the enemy.

Their charge sent two Mongol ponies and riders sprawling. Naginata flashed and slashed. One of the mounted men tumbled away, missing half his face.

The last man hopped up to plant both feet in his saddle and then launched himself at Reiko. His powerful swing caught her in the shoulder guard and knocked her sideways out of the saddle. He plowed into the horse, and the horse tripped over Reiko, and all three went down in a grinding tangle of panicked mare.

One of the unhorsed men leaped out of the bushes and stabbed Yukie through the side of her do-maru. She grunted in pain, but reined back, pulling herself off his sword point, then splitting his skull with the last of her ebbing strength.

The horse knocked over by the Mongol’s leap thrashed back onto his feet, cut and bloodied. Both the Mongol and Reiko lay broken and twitching against the steps.

Clutching her side, Yukie turned her horse back up the steps and gave Kazuko a wan smile.

Then the last Mongol staggered out of bushes to Yukie’s left and plunged his sword into her thigh. The startled horse leaped aside, throwing off Yukie’s feeble return stroke.

Kazuko ran back down, only twenty steps from them. The Mongol sword split the head of Yukie’s horse, and it flopped onto its side. The side of Yukie’s head slammed against the edge of a step and her face went slack, eyes staring.

Kazuko stopped five steps away.

The Mongol yanked his sword out of the horse’s head, then spun on her, his face a vicious sneer. He looked her up and down and licked his lips, said something that sounded like a taunt in his own tongue. In his eyes, she saw all the things he would do to her, all the things he would cheer his fellows to do.

She leaped forward with a shrill kiai, dredging all the power she could muster. He raised his sword to block her blow. The naginata blade severed his wrist and, through armor and all, cleft him diagonally from shoulder to hip.

Gasping for breath in the sudden silence, she blinked and steadied herself, then assessed her plight.

All the horses were dead, fled, or injured beyond help. Yukie and Reiko were dead. The rest of her Dragons lay scattered between here and the ongoing battle below. The forest muffled the din of battle. Doubtless the rest of these Mongols waited at the bottom of the hill.

Alone, she had no way to reach friendly lines. She could not see whether Tsunetomo’s army held the field or lay crushed and broken under the enemy’s relentless onslaught. And night was falling.

“The courage of bloodlust makes no distinction between reason and force, justice and injustice. It is nothing but ferocity, overcoming others, and not being afraid of anything. Like the ferocity of tigers and wolves, therefore, it can perversely impede the human path. Being brave and having no fear resemble the courage of humanity and justice, but having no discrimination between reason and force, justice and injustice, merely inclined to bloodlust, the behavior of tigers and wolves is very lowly. The ones with status start rebellions, the poor ones become bandits.”

—Nakae Toju

Ken’ishi gulped dipper after dipper from the bucket of water. He thanked the woman with the bucket and marveled for a moment at the bravery of the women in the supply train. If the defenders fell, the women would get the worse of it in barbarian hands.

With the fall of darkness, the armies had withdrawn.

The infantry reinforcements were two days behind, and after two days of riding and a day of battle, the horses were spent. The enemy controlled the valley. The defense forces had been pushed back into the hills but controlled the roads out of the valley. Fortunately, enough fresh troops had occupied the area that the defenders had not been routed.

On a tree-covered hilltop, Ken’ishi and Tsunetomo gazed across the valley toward the shrine hill. Between their position and the shrine lay hundreds of enemy cookfires, clustered on the dikes between rice fields. Clouds gathered against the stars, thickening. A steady breeze ruffled the branches and leaves.

“We cannot reach her,” Tsunetomo said.

Ken’ishi had seen the handful of Scarlet Dragons disappear up the shrine hill. He had seen the enemy horsemen pursue.

He had not seen the horsemen come back down. But in the chaos of battle, he could not be sure of the outcome.

“I’ll go, Lord,” Ken’ishi said. “I shall find her and bring her back to you.” Both of them knew Tsunetomo could not go after her. Tsunetomo dared not leave his troops. His death would cut the heart out of them, and it was the Otomo troops who had prevented disaster today.

Tsunetomo turned to him. “She is a warrior. She may well be dead already. Am I to lose you, too?”

“I am only one man.”

“One man who fights like a thousand.”

“Then no one will be able to stand against me in the dark. Alive or dead, I will bring her back. If she’s alive, she will boost our men’s courage.”

For several long moments, Tsunetomo gazed out over the sea of enemies. In the silence, Ken’ishi watched the emotions—too many to sort—crossing Tsunetomo’s face.

Hands clasped behind his back, Tsunetomo said, “Very well, Captain.”

Ken’ishi bowed and left him there.

He spotted Hage sitting with several other disguised tanuki around a campfire.

The group of them watched him approach, some with amusement, some with wonder, some with fear.

He pointed at Hage. “You, come with me.”

Hage raised an eyebrow. “Now, won’t this be interesting.”

* * *

Yasutoki walked into the Mongol encampment with his hands in the air. Behind him walked the perimeter guard with a spear pointed at Yasutoki’s back. The Mongols chewed their meat and drank their fermented mare’s milk and watched him with a mix of suspicion and interest.

The guard brought Yasutoki before a tall, barrel-chested man, enormous for one of his breed, swathed in iron and leather, with long drooping mustaches and flint-hard eyes.

The guard said in the Mongolian tongue, “This man approached me in the dark. He spoke in Chinese. He says he is a servant of the Great Khan. He says he wants to speak to a commander.”

It was strange for Yasutoki, after all these years, to hear so much of the barbarian tongue. He spoke it as best he could recall after so long. “Forgive, Great Leader. Skill with Chinese better.”

The commander spoke in Jin Chinese. “Then in Chinese you will tell me why I should not kill you as a spy.”

Yasutoki bowed and told the story of how he had visited the lands of the Golden Horde as a boy with his father, how his father had met Khubilai Khan soon after he claimed the title of Khan of Khans after his uncle Ogedei. Yasutoki had been so impressed by the strength and majesty of the Great Khan that he applied himself to learning the Mongol tongue, as well as Jin Chinese. He told of how he had been the Khan’s agent during the previous invasion and how he wished to offer his services now.

After so long, he could not be sure that his Chinese would be well understood.

The commander’s face was implacable, shrewd, and ruthless. “I am Batu, zuun of this hundred.”

Yasutoki bowed. “You may call me Green Tiger.”

Batu laughed. “A tiger is sick?”

The men around him laughed.

Yasutoki maintained his composure. “Today there was a great warrior. He killed many of your men. He fought with only a sword.”

Batu’s face darkened. “I know this man. Killing him will be a great victory. And a great pity that such a warrior must be cut down.”

“I have come to give him to you.”

Batu’s eyes narrowed.

“Today, there was a group of women warriors,” Yasutoki said. “Some of your men chased them up that hill across the valley.”

Batu grunted to continue.

“The leader of that group is the wife of one of the lords who face you. Her husband is among the most powerful lords. Kill his wife, and his spirit will be weakened. The great warrior is going alone to bring her back.”

“We searched that hill. No one up there still lives.”

“Nevertheless, the great warrior is going alone, and on foot. He will be an easy target. And if the lord’s wife still lives, you will have her as well. She is renowned for her beauty.” Kazuko and whatever remained of her silly women warriors could have evaded a search. “But you must hurry, or they will escape you.”

Batu wet his lips. “Very well. But you are coming along. If you lie, you will be the first to die.”

Yasutoki bowed low. “Of course, Zuun Batu. I am at your service.”

* * *

“You won’t have to hold on to me this time to maintain the shape,” Hage said, in tanuki form, balanced atop two enormous, furry melons. “I have been storing up my power. My jewel sack is full to bursting, and the kami here are thick as lice on a boar. They seem to be gathering.”

“I have felt them,” Ken’ishi said.

Ken’ishi and Hage had paused in the shadows away from camp, where he told Hage his plan.

Hage said, “With this much power in the air, I will be able to change her, too, and we’ll all three scamper back here without a scratch.”

“Let’s waste no more time,” Ken’ishi said.

With a disquieting familiarity, Ken’ishi shrank into the shape of a tanuki. The world around him was suddenly much larger.

In the shape of tanuki, they crossed the valley toward the shrine hill, giving the enemy encampment the widest possible berth. The night darkened as they slunk along the dikes, concealed among the trampled rice stalks.

Hage paused to sniff the air. “This valley is filled with the stench of humans and horses.”

With such short legs, the distance to the shrine hill looked so much farther. Nevertheless, their small size and natural stealth allowed them great speed.

At about midnight they paused in the grass near the final dike. Between them and the torii lay open ground, which was littered with dead horses and dead women. The barbarians had taken their dead comrades away.

The breeze ruffled the fur on Ken’ishi’s back, thick with the smell of blood and mud from behind them. The kami roared in chorus, but there were so many he could not discern if they were warning him of danger. The nearest enemy encampment lay some four hundred paces distant.

But Kazuko was alive and atop that hill.

“Come!” Ken’ishi said.

The two tanuki slunk out of the grass and darted for the shadows of the underbrush at the foot of the hill. In his zeal, Ken’ishi surged ahead.

“Wait, Ken’ishi!” Hage called. “Something is wrong!”

An arrow shot out of the darkness, hissed past Ken’ishi’s ear so close the fletching brushed him.

The arrow speared Hage and sent him tumbling like an ill-formed ball. The tanuki emitted a bloodcurdling, hissing-squeal.

“Hage!” Ken’ishi’s voice was high and childlike.

Ahead, he heard a quiet snickering of congratulation from the bushes in a tongue he did not know. They were shooting at the tanuki for sport, or perhaps for food. They were, after all, an army on campaign, and food could be hard to find.

More arrows shot toward him, as fat as bamboo stalks to his tanuki eyes.

He charged across the open ground, still on all fours, zig-zagging around more arrows, rage boiling up in him, turning the night crimson in his vision, boiling away the magic that Hage had imbued in him. By the time he reached the base of the hill, he wore the shape of a man again, and Silver Crane was in his hand.

The entire forest at the base of the hill began to move. Storms of arrows poured toward him. Silver Crane wove an intricate dance of glimmering steel that sliced and deflected the swarm of arrows as they came. Then he leaped upon the nearest foe to come out of the bushes and cleaved him from crown to crotch with a single blow. His roar of fury echoed like the call of a beast against the hillside.

Look to your soul, samurai, echoed behind the wrath in his mind, but Silver Crane reveled in its thirst.

In a trice, they surrounded him, and just as quickly he descended once again into the blood-hazed fugue of the afternoon. His entire being became steel, with a puppet of muscle and bone to wield it. His edge sliced lives away in great frothing buckets of gore.

He seized fistfuls of destiny threads again and wrenched them for all he was worth.

The clouds in the sky coalesced. The stars disappeared.

The tenacity of his foes kept them coming. Their swords licked and hacked. All of them wanted to be the man to bring down this invincible enemy. Such a man could become a tumen, one who commanded ten thousand. Ken’ishi could smell their anticipation of the kill. Surely one man could not stand against a hundred battle-hardened warriors and prevail. Every one of them believed it.

Ken’ishi did not see the kills anymore. All was a crimson haze. He did not feel his wounds. But instead of blood, starlight glow seeped from the wounds until they closed up again.

He did not tire.

He did not stop.

Kill them all.

“Kill them all,” he said, over and over.

Black clouds boiled in the sky.

A slash of lightning sundered the night.

Wind rose, stiff and wet and insistent.

The story in the threads of destiny said that he could not have stood against this many men, no matter what his prowess. These men were to have lived through this day, some of them to have fathered children. Except that their threads had now been severed. Silver Crane’s tiny manipulations had given way to an outright re-weaving of the fabric of fate.

He smote them and they flew back into their own throng, each taste of blood feeding the sword’s power.

And then there was only one man left, tall and thick-muscled, with thicker armor than the other men, with long, drooping mustaches.

A sudden tumult of wind howled across the field, making both men stumble for a moment to regain their balance. Fat droplets of rain pattered against the earth.

Ken’ishi and the Mongol rushed at each other, traded tremendous blows, drew near and gazed into each other’s eyes, blades crossed between them.

Ken’ishi kicked him in the knee and felt it snap under his heel. The Mongol commander grunted with pain as his leg collapsed. A swipe of Silver Crane sent the Mongol’s sword hand spinning away.

He did not need the quiet purity of the Void anymore. He had all the power he could imagine. The world itself lay at his feet.

He took the commander’s head in a single blow.

The burgeoning rain pattered into the lakes of blood around him, began to wash away the blood covering him. The earth would drink it all.

The forest hissed in the howling wind.

In the distance, the enemy army roused itself, but it was not coming toward him. The sudden storm threw them into an uproar.

Then he could hear his heartbeat again, feel his breathing, feel the rain on his face. His mouth was full of death.

“Hage!” he called.

The skies opened up and poured rain.

He leaped over dozens of bodies on his way to where he thought Hage had fallen, but found no sign of the tanuki anywhere. He called again and again, but the only reply was the wind.

Then he looked toward the top of the hill, silhouetted against spatters of lightning.

I scream as you bite

My nipples, and orgasm

Drains my body, as if I

Had been cut in two.

—The Love Poems of Marichiko

The massive camphor tree in which Kazuko sat in a high crook swayed with the growing breath of the wind. Warm rain lashed her face, almost like the spray of blood. The ancient tree stood sentinel over the shrine below. The torii atop the steps opened into a flat clearing before a rock face, which had been pried open by the unstoppable growth of the great tree, the wood almost flowing around the stone. A thick rope of rice straw encircled the base of the tree, and she had prayed to the kami of this mountain to protect her.

Earlier, a scout party of Mongols had searched the hilltop. The closeness of the rock face had allowed her to scurry up the tree and hide among the thick boughs. Fortunately, the scouts had not thought to search the canopy. She still clutched her naginata across her knees.

Across the stony glade, the shrine itself sat with its shide papers, disintegrating in the rain, and its bright red bell rope. She considered climbing down to take shelter under the eaves, but the wind would drive the rain underneath to keep soaking her. And the Mongols might return. She had just heard a frightful clamor of battle and slaughter below.

A figure appeared under the torii. A man in armor, calling her name.

In an instant she recognized him. “Ken’ishi!”

His gaze swung upward, and a thrill of joy shot through her.

“Kazuko, is it you?” he called.

She called his name again and shimmied down the tree as fast as she could. He put his sword away and ran toward the tree.

They reached its base together, and he threw his arms around her so tight she could not breathe. The armor between them was stiff and sodden.

But she did not care.

He was here, and she would live.

Giddy with joy, she laughed and drew back from him. In the lightning, she could see the streaks on his face that must have been blood.

Seeing him like that, ensanguined, his eyes glimmering with heat, touched her in a way she was not ready to name.

Her menpo was long gone, and she had no veil.

His finger traced the scar, and his touch sent fire through the numbness of her cheek, deep into her veins where it throbbed with a life of its own.

Her breath caught.

Their eyes met.

The only way she could think to tear her gaze away was to hug him close again and bury her face in his neck.

Instantly she remembered the smell of him. It was still there, masked by the stench of blood and battle and death, but still there. She noticed her hands trying to squeeze him against her, but the armor stymied her.

She pulled away.

His hands fell to his sides, clenched.

She said, “What of the enemy?”

“They were waiting below, like they knew I was coming.” He gazed up into the roiling clouds. “The storm...” His voice trailed off, as if he sensed something she could not. “They won’t come again.”

He sank to his knees, as if all his strength had drained way.

“Ken’ishi! What is it? Are you wounded?”

“I...was. Not now.” He looked up into her eyes, and they were both young again, and no one existed in the world but them. “I’m so tired.”

“Let me help you.” She knelt before him and reached to unlace his armor.

“No, the enemy—”

“If they find us here, let them kill us. There will be no more armor here, in this place.”

He seemed to relax more with each piece she removed: his shoulder guards, his do-maru, his thigh guards, his forearm and shin plates, until all he wore were a soaked, bloodstained robe and trousers.

His shoulders shuddered with his breath. His chin fell to his chest. His hands fell palm up against his thighs.

The continuing flickers of lightning illuminated his arms and face. When had he gotten so many scars? They all looked healed, but she could not conceive how he had gotten so many.

Still so much blood on him.

Rainwater sluiced down the rock face, gushing outward in a cascade not far away, splashing into a natural channel in the rock.

She took his hands and helped him to his feet. He roused from some inner torpor then, as if remembering she was there.

He began untying her armor as well, and she helped him. Her heart swelled with each piece that clattered to the earth. Soon she was left in only a robe and trousers as well.

She took his hand and led him toward the small waterfall. They shed their sandals as they walked.

She guided him under the water. Beneath the waterfall was a natural depression in the stone, forming an ankle-deep pool. The waterfall was warm, and even with the thundering of her heart, she felt the kami pouring over him. Blood ran from his hair in dark streaks, darkening the pool around him. Untying his obi, she let his robe fall open, baring his hard-muscled chest and the livid scar on his left breast, surrounded by what looked like a birthmark she did not remember. And so many more scars. She wanted to kiss each one of them.

His voice was a croak. “All for you.”

He let her peel off his torn, stained robe. The dried blood of untold foes was caked thick under his clothes. With her gentlest touch, she washed it from him while he stood weaving as if about to collapse at any moment, running her fingers through his hair, over his hard shoulders, across his back, across his breast. He trembled under her touch. The front of his trousers stood out before him. She untied his obi, and his trousers fell around his ankles, leaving only a strained loincloth to cover him. She gently lifted each of his feet from the trousers, then she washed the blood from his thighs, from his calves, feeling the heat building under his skin.

The heat bloomed within her as well. Each droplet of rain across her breasts was a shock, her nipples exquisitely erect, her thighs hot and sensitive.

She could not see his downcast face.

His voice was ragged. “We...we...”

She touched the deep scar on his breast, over his heart. Streaks of stubborn crimson surrounded it, and would not be washed away.

He seized both of her wrists.

She gasped at his strength, but his grip relaxed before hurting her.

His palms went to her shoulders, slid down her arms. Then his hands dropped to her obi and untied it.

She shrugged out of her robe, then her under-robe, until she stood naked to the waist, her breaths short and quick.

Standing there under his gaze, shrouded in shadow, she had no wish for comforts, no futon, no fire, no shelter. Her heart thundered in time with the sky, with a primal need.

His hands fell to her waist, and a brief tug let her trousers slide down over her hips.

They were no longer the man and the woman they had been when last they faced each other this way. Scars crisscrossed their bodies and souls. But suddenly she felt like the virgin of that first night, unsure what would happen next, but knowing without question that it must.

She hooked her fingers into his loincloth and pulled it down, then stood and faced him.

He took her face in infinitely gentle hands, hands full of carefully restrained power, and stroked her cheek; and then he kissed her.

A rush of molten fire blazed through her from crown to toenails. Her knees weakened, but he caught her.

The next ripple of lightning revealed a bed of spongy, green moss not far away.

They took each other’s hands.

More naked than at any time she could remember, she gently pressed him down onto his back and settled herself atop him, guiding him inside. He convulsed with a gasp beneath her, driving himself deeper. The intensity of his gaze sent heat gushing through her.

She moved on him, fell upon him, kissing him, tumbling into a shrinking point of ecstasy, that place she had not experienced but one night before.

A serenity filled Ken’ishi’s face, wonder, joy, as if what they were doing was what they had waited their whole lives for.

When he cried out and bucked and she felt the hot flood inside her, her own pulsing ecstasy exploded as well, shattering her into pieces only the gods could reassemble.

Light stroked the black sky like fingers, and he did not stop. He seized her and rolled on top of her. The mossy earth cushioned her against his driving thrusts, each one sending spasms of pleasure through her. The rain fell into her face, mixing with tears of joy.

But then a strange tension crept through his body. His face turned away from her.

With each thrust he whispered, “No no no no...” in a haunted voice.

* * *

Ken’ishi closed his eyes against the appalling images flooding his mind, images the pleasure only blurred. Beneath him, this porcelain goddess, more beautiful to him now than ever, clutched at him and gasped and cried out in waves of pleasure. It was as if he were one with Amaterasu, the Sun Goddess herself, shining in heaven, and only her light kept him from drowning in shadow.

Terrible thoughts, slaughter and drowning and trackless rivers of blood, chewed and writhed at the edges of his awareness until the only way to escape them was to lose himself in the bliss of Kazuko’s body.

She clutched at him with her deepest core, seized his hips with both hands, and pulled him deeper.

When he could not bear to gaze upon her beauty, she took his face in her hands and forced him to look, as if she knew his anguish, for the anguish had been hers as well. She understood his pain, as no one ever had. And she forgave him for all of it.

She pulled him down close to her, clawing at his back until he could bury his face in her hair, in the scent of her neck, and her warm lips kissed his face with tenderness he had never known existed.

Her cries drove him harder, until a tsunami of ecstasy exploded out of him again.

And in the aftermath, as he subsided and rolled off her onto the wet, spongy moss, she pulled him close again in the rain and stroked his hair, whispering soothing things he would not remember.

When the afterglow faded into the tumult of the storm, they found a rock outcropping that kept off most of the rain and wind, and piled their clothes there for comfort, and huddled together for warmth. They made love again, this time for the sheer, exuberant pleasure of it.

Neither of them spoke. Neither knew what to say.

In the early morning, they made love again, this time languorously, savoring every moment, but with a looming sense of the inevitable, that with the coming of morning, this night of dreams and nightmares would be over.

Then Ken’ishi dressed and armored himself while Kazuko huddled under the rocks with her robes covering her nakedness.

He drank from the cascade of rainwater, relishing the surging caress of the kami filling him with their power and wisdom.

And then hearing their warning.

He spun in time to see a figure across the glade, a pale smudge against the foliage. A face painted with shock. A face he knew.

“Yasutoki,” he growled with a voice deeper than any man’s.

The smudge of face disappeared.

“Stay here!” he said to Kazuko.

* * *

With Silver Crane naked in his hand, he charged the foliage where Yasutoki had stood. The criminal would not survive to see the dawn, and his death would save the lives of ten thousand, and perhaps erase a bit of the debt upon Ken’ishi’s soul.

Kazuko called after him, but her words were lost in the deluge.

At the edge of the foliage, no sign of Yasutoki remained.

Ken’ishi pelted through the torii and down the steps. Something sharp stung his arm. He stopped to pluck out a small blade, a shuriken, and tossed it aside. Dizziness washed over him. His limbs turned to lead and sackcloth.

The wound in his arm released a silver glimmer before it sealed like a pair of lips.

In the silver weave of fate, Ken’ishi saw the truth. Yasutoki had brought the Mongols to kill him. Yasutoki had been a traitor all along, in more ways than his double identity as Green Tiger. Even now, he would return to Tsunetomo and tell of the tryst between Ken’ishi and Kazuko, for no other reason than to destroy Tsunetomo’s spirit once and for all. Without the spirit of their leader, the Otomo troops would collapse and be swept away like chaff before the Horde.

Down the pitch-black tunnel of slippery stone steps he pounded and stumbled, but he kept his feet, Silver Crane aglimmer with lightning.

He burst through the bottom torii.

No sign of Yasutoki.

Nothing moved between Ken’ishi and the rain-hazed distance. The cookfires of friend and foe were extinguished, and the dark mounds of the surrounding hills kept their secrets.

Clustered around the torii, however, were the bodies and pieces of the Mongols he had slain.

Suddenly the walls of denial crumbled, and death deluged his mind. The storm—no, a typhoon bigger than the last one—had seized the enemy fleet in its pitiless swells and was even now grinding it to bloody splinters, pounding it with rain and wind. The threads of destiny yanked taut in his imagination, and he saw the entirety of the enemy fleet, more thousands of ships and men than he could count, numbers so large they lost their meaning.

Yet another enemy force had already landed farther west and had been moving east to rendezvous with the army at Takashima, crushing all resistance in its path. Eventually, the defense forces would meet them and the fighting would continue for a while, but without their supply lines, the enemy armies would wither like a tree with its roots severed.

These images blasted through his mind, through the silver weave of his own making.

The ships that had brought them bobbed and struggled against towering waves, only to be crushed under them. The ships lashed together for defense in Imari Bay were being torn apart and pounded into splinters by the very defenses that had preserved them. Hundreds at a time, smashing themselves to flotsam. Thousands of souls—helpless in those ships’ holds—cast into the waves, only to drown as they sank to the bottom of the sea where sharks would feast and crabs would gorge upon dead men’s eyes and soft, fleshy morsels.

The carnage that had choked Hakata Bay in the aftermath of the last storm would be nothing compared to this. Thousands of dead men would wash ashore for weeks to come across the entire north coast of Kyushu.

The defense forces would scour northern Kyushu and the other coastal islands, catching tens of thousands of stranded invaders in their sweeps. Bereft of supply lines and reinforcements, those men would never see China again.

All these things he had blocked from his awareness by driving himself into this woman he worshiped, losing himself in the softness of her.

Kill them all, Silver Crane had said.

And Ken’ishi had killed them all.

The sword was an endless loop, a bottomless well of destruction and power, gorging itself upon death and feeding its infinite power to its wielder, a circle ever building and tightening until the wielder was ultimately destroyed, like a man trying to grasp at lightning.

All of these men were dying at his wish.

All of this knowledge flooded over him at once.

He could not breathe.

But he was going to lose Yasutoki to the darkness.

Until another thread, one scarred by cruelty and tragedy, appeared from a weave as complex as Ken’ishi’s. And just ahead, it intersected Yasutoki’s.

The night grew darker and darker until the blackness overtook him.

There goes a beggar

Naked, except for his robes

Of Heaven and Earth

—Kikaku

Yasutoki fled through the lashing rain, glancing over his shoulder as he tried to follow the dikes in the dark, stumbling often into the muck of the rice paddies. The world was incomprehensible shadows amid sheets of rain. The downpour drenched his clothes, slowing him down. Mud sucked one of his zori free, and he ran on with only one sandal.

The time for intrigue was over. He would find Tsunetomo. Ken’ishi must be destroyed. The two of them could no longer both exist in the same realm. Yasutoki had never flinched from killing a man, had never believed that killing any particular man was beyond his power. Yet when he saw the blazing fury and strength in Ken’ishi’s eyes, his bowels had turned to water, and all he could do was flee.

He had never fled in the face of peril before.

It angered him.

Nevertheless, the force of Ken’ishi’s pursuit would not allow Yasutoki to turn and face his enemy. This rain had doubtless weakened the poison from his shuriken, and his only other weapon was a tanto. And in this darkness, he would not be able to see his pursuer, nor could his pursuer see him.

A flash of lightning split the sky wide open, revealing a figure before him, standing on the dike as if waiting for him.

He gasped and skidded to a halt. The after-flicker of the lightning revealed a figure, but it was not Ken’ishi. The build was too slight and the figure wore a conical straw hat.

All he saw in the flash was two piercing eyes peering from under the brim of the hat.

The figure’s drenched robe and peasant’s trousers clung to womanly curves.

What was a woman doing here? In this weather?

A woman with a wooden staff.

He could hardly hear his own voice through the roar of the rain. “You’re looking for me.”

The woman remained still.

He flung two shuriken at her face, but she remained on the path.

Had she dodged or had he missed? The darkness made him unsure.

She gripped her staff with both hands.

“What do you want?” he shouted.

Between flickers of lightning, she moved.

Suddenly she was upon him.

He fended off a blow to his skull with his left wrist and felt something crack.

Then the staff came apart in her grip, and steel flashed from within. He caught the hidden blade on the guard of his dagger. The rasp of steel on steel. He tried to reach for another shuriken in his sleeve, but his fingers would not grasp.

The staff swept against his ankle, but he moved with the blow, shifting his weight out of the path of the sweep in a technique he had learned decades before. A moment of astonishment grabbed him that his body still remembered the training of his youth, even as he realized the technique now used against him was just as familiar, and may well have been taught in the same training hall.

A whisper-thin touch across his breast, and the pain an instant later as the blade’s edge stroked him like a lover. The front of his robe fell open and blood flowed.

He regained his stance and slashed at her face.

She dodged—barely—and his up-sweeping hand knocked off her straw hat. He tried to glimpse her face, but the darkness and rain obscured her.

“Bah!” he snarled. It did not matter who she was. Someone had sent her to kill him—a rival gang lord, perhaps, and the dancer-like precision of her movements bespoke a long, thorough training.

He kicked at her, but she danced away.

In the distance between them, he managed to fling a shuriken at her. He had only one left. The throw had felt good, but the darkness denied his eyes.

His skills were too rusty. He prepared for another flash of lightning; in that moment he would strike—

Agonizing pain exploded deep in his knee. A shuriken—his own shuriken—protruded from his kneecap. The leg crumpled under him.

And then the lightning flashed, and he saw her face.

He did not need to say her name.

He raised his dagger in defense, a weak, desperate gesture.

Steel licked through the rain, and his severed arm jumped free halfway from his elbow. It splashed into a puddle beside him. He snatched for the dagger with his left hand.

Another whish of steel, another jolt of hot, gushing pain. His other arm spun away through the night.

Her fist twisted into his robes and dragged him up to his knees. The shuriken ground deeper into his knee joint with pain that stole his breath. His strength gushed from the stumps of his arms.

He stared up into Tiger Lily’s face. It had once been so beautiful. But now it was nothing more than a soulless, porcelain mask. Only her eyes lived now, and their sustenance was hatred. In them, he saw every cruelty he had ever enacted upon her, every “correction,” every “night of play.”

He had indeed trained her too well.

She raised her straight-bladed sword, point down, glimmering with runnels of bloody rain water, and jammed it between his lips, splintering his front teeth, filling his mouth with blood and metal and agony, splitting his tongue, prying his face toward the sky.

And as he screamed around the cold steel, she pressed the point deeper, where it slithered into his throat and went all the way down.

* * *

Kazuko dressed herself, waiting for Ken’ishi to return. She donned her armor and took up her naginata.

The last few moments she saw him kept repeating in her mind.

Unmistakably, he had said, “Yasutoki.”

But the voice had been like that of Hakamadare.

“Stay here!” he had said.

Had his eye glinted like a red coal as he looked over his shoulder at her?

She thought she had seen someone at the edge of the forest, but she could not be sure it was Yasutoki. His presence here made no sense. Vast, unknown truths lurked beneath all of this, of which she knew none.

She waited for Ken’ishi to come back as the blackness of night faded to dismal gray.

He did not.

The storm lashed the hilltop. Somewhere nearby, a tree branch cracked and fell.

Ken’ishi might need help. She hurried down the hillside, trusting the forest to conceal her from any enemies. From her concealment, she tried to fathom the breathtaking carnage littering the earth at the foot of the hill. Surging sheets of rain drowned visibility beyond a hundred paces. The valley had become a sea of muddy rainwater, broken only by the lines of raised dikes and the bodies of the dead.

She picked her way among the corpses at the foot the hill, looking for him, but they were all barbarians and the scant handful of her Dragons. She wept for her brave women.

How far had Ken’ishi pursued his prey?

Safety must lie to the southeast, where the defense forces were gathered before the storm started. She dared not stay here. But she might become lost without sight of any landmarks.

Even atop the dikes, the mud was deep and the going slow. At times, she felt like she must be walking across the surface of the sea itself. The wind slapped at her like the hand of the gods, driving the rain against her flesh like pellets.

Bodies littered her path. More of her Dragons, a handful of dead Mongols and their ponies.

And then a familiar face.

Yasutoki’s dead visage stared up at the sky, rain filling his gaping mouth.

Ken’ishi had caught him. A sliver of justice in a world of suffering.

But where had Ken’ishi gone from there?

She already knew the answer.

She wept again, this time for him, but kept moving.

After what seemed like hours of slogging through the mud and storm, the dark hulks of the southern hills came into view, and she turned toward them.

She wandered like a ghost through abandoned encampments, exhaustion sucking at her limbs. Finally she found the road they had traveled from Hakata. For a ri she followed it until she found a village, and there were tents erected in the shelter of trees.

When they took her to Tsunetomo, the astonished joy on his face lit fire to hers, and she embraced him with the most bittersweet happiness.

* * *

Something cool and wet touched Ken’ishi’s cheek, at once familiar, but so long gone it could only be a dream.

It pressed into him, insistent, nudging him.

A warm, wet tongue licked his cheek, his eye, his forehead, his nose. The scent of a dog’s breath came into his nose.

He pried one eye open.

A rust-red snout and little black nose nudged him again. “Get up, fool,” said a voice Ken’ishi had not heard in far too long.

He rolled onto his back. His armor felt made of anvils, constricting his breath, pinning him to the earth.

Warm rain sluiced out of the gray sky, wind like the breath of the gods driving the rain against his skin.

The dog licked his face again.

He reached up and ran his fingers through Akao’s warm, rain-soaked ruff. Akao climbed onto Ken’ishi’s chest and plastered his face with more warm, soft tongue. The smell of wet dog, rich and earthy, came even through the rain. Tears stung his eyes, washed away in the rain. Laughter bubbled out of him, quickly stifled for fear this might not be real.

Akao bit into the laces of Ken’ishi’s breastplate, trying to tug him into a sitting position.

“How can it be you?” Ken’ishi said, his voice cracking and thick with joy, his heart so full it could not be contained. He was sixteen years old again, and his truest friend was with him.

Akao grinned, tongue lolling. “In this time, in this place, anything is possible.”

Silver Crane lay half-buried in bloody mud beside Ken’ishi. He did not want to touch it.

“You should get out of the rain,” Akao said.

Ken’ishi rolled onto his hands and knees, levered himself upright. He staggered to his feet.

“Do you have any food?” Akao said. “I feel like I haven’t eaten in a lifetime.” His sharp eyes darted around the field of the dead.

Ken’ishi half-smiled and half-sobbed. “I’m sorry, old friend, but no.”

The dog’s nose dropped to the ground, and he snuffled among the dead, moving away from Ken’ishi. “With all this water, I can’t smell anything,” Akao said with disgust.

The rain poured down, thick with fresh-smelling kami, thick with both life and death. The wind howled like a ravenous thing. Muffled thunder rumbled in the distance, and it was not barbarian bombs.

Akao stopped and his dark, earnest eyes looked deep into Ken’ishi’s. “Are you coming?”

Staggering after Akao, Ken’ishi longed to curl up in a warm place and dry off.

Silver Crane lay quiescent for now, sated and spent. But only for now.

His voice was thick. “Not yet. There’s something I must do first.”

Akao grinned at him. “Very well. Do what you must.”

Then the dog turned away and picked his way through the bodies. Ken’ishi watched him go until he had faded into the rain.

“Wait, don’t go,” he said, and sadness filled him.

He did not know how long he stood there, smelling Akao in his nose, feeling his thick fur in his fingers.

Another crack of lightning roused him to action. He picked up Silver Crane, wiped off the mud, and sheathed it.

Suddenly his belly clenched, doubling him over. A torrent of black, wriggling things spewed from his mouth and nose, tasting of death itself, like ten thousand tarry, bitter, leeches, seething, squirming out his nose and plopping into the mud. He heaved and heaved, spewing a shiny mound before his knees, more than any man could hold.

In the rain, the blind, squirming things began to dissolve like blood clots.

He spat again and again, wiped his mouth and tried to breathe, trembling and weak, spent in ways only his spirit understood.

Finally, he knew what he had to do.

He would not go back for Kazuko. She would find her own way home. The certainty, the finality of it struck him like a hammer.

In this sprawling field of storm-drenched dead men, it was not difficult to find a peasant spearman of roughly Ken’ishi’s size and build. He traded clothes and armor with the dead man, the simple breastplate of ashigaru. Everyone in Lord Tsunetomo’s army knew Captain Ken’ishi’s armor. Then he cut off the dead man’s head and carried it with him for some distance, thanking the man’s spirit for fighting well and for the use of his head.

He would regret not saying farewell to Storm. The stallion had been as fine a mount as any warrior could desire.

When he reached a populated village, he would buy a jar of saké and drink to Hage.

More than ten years ago, he had passed Mount Kurama. It lay to the northwest of the capital. It was said to be a home of the tengu. Perhaps they would know what to do with a thing like Silver Crane. Its power did not belong in the hands of human beings. Perhaps they would help him finish what Ken’ishi and Lord Abe had begun. Besides, Mount Kurama was near the capital. Perhaps Lord Abe would be willing to help him reclaim his humanity once and for all.

He hoped Kaa was not still angry about their duel.

Without even a last look at the carnage he had wreaked, he carried Silver Crane into the lonely rain.

 

 

 

EPILOGUE

Live in simple faith...

Just as this trusting cherry

Flowers, fades, and falls.

—Issa

“Why this the Ronin Shrine, Mama?” the little boy asked.

Lady Otomo no Kazuko squeezed her three-year-old son’s hand.

The sakura blossoms fell around them like velvety pink and white snowflakes, blanketing the earth. The castle loomed above, silhouetted against the sunset sky. Captain Michizane, her chief yojimbo, hung back a respectful but watchful distance.

They stood before the shrine she had had erected in the sakura orchard. Incense sticks lent bittersweet aroma to the air. She checked the saké cup before the battered, rusted do-maru with the fading laces, and found it empty. The rice ball from two days ago was also missing. Good that she had brought another.

She spotted a tanuki footprint embedded in a nearby patch of moist earth.

“Why, mama? Ronin dangerous, Father say.”

Wiping a tear, Kazuko knelt and stroked his plump cheek. “Sometimes ronin are wild, desperate men, Tsunemaru. Sometimes they are heroes.” She kissed her son on the head, her son in whose face she saw the one she loved, her son who had become the love of her life. “The waves of life can toss people in many directions, some easy, some difficult. The kami of this shrine watch over them….”

Ken’ishi’s armor had been found, but not Silver Crane. And she had a piece of him still, right here with her. His eyes looked at her with adoration every day.

“...Wherever they are.”

 

 

SO ENDS THE FINAL SCROLL