“In the night, the police questioned Kita. He gave them nothing, but now his people have been warned. Beware the trail, Burke. They will try again for you. You must persevere and reach the top. I will be waiting there. As will Kita.”
“And then?” I said, part of my mind still lulled by the night’s chanting. There was something dreamlike about the whole sequence. It seemed threatening, yet remote.
Yamashita’s hands reached out, his fingers probing for nerve clusters. He worked my hands, my arms, my legs. The pressure was hard and insistent. Painful. But after a moment, he looked closely at me and nodded in satisfaction. “Good. Now you are fully with us.” And I did, in fact, feel more alert. I rocked back and forth from one foot to the other, getting ready. Most of the foggy feeling had dissipated.
“When we get to the top…” I inquired again.
“Kita seems a man who enjoys the dramatic. This ritual…” He held out a strong hand and gestured around us. “I would be surprised if we were alone with Kita at the summit. He may bring some assistants.” My teacher looked at me significantly. “It will be the culmination of the ritual, Professor. I will try to see that others join us as well.”
Then they took our sandals away and sent each of the aspirants out onto the trails. We were enjoined to move as quickly as possible. To race the sun to the different summits in the hills. To prove our worth.
I thought of the knife nestled in my back. Yamashita looked at me, his eyes hard and betraying nothing. “
Gambatte
,” he said, and turned away. Hold out. Endure.
I started out on the final section of tanren, the forging. I thought about the significance of the name. The Japanese say you forge your spirit through martial arts training. The image is one taken from the blacksmith’s creation of a sword blade. The metal is shaped and reshaped in thousands of actions until it is refined and melded into a thing of fearsome purity.
I had seen the end result of such an action and had also glimpsed something of the forging itself. Whatever the beauty of the product, it was created by a brutally refined process.
They pound on the raw material.
I listened, hearing made keen with terror. There was not much wind. Somewhere out of sight, a stream flowed. Birds sounded from faraway perches. And I tried to control the ragged sound of breath. Because being quiet might give me a chance.
The first one had come at me within the first few minutes of the run, before my breathing had a chance to settle into its rhythm. It was a straight, hard
mae-geri
attack and it was all I could do to keep the front kick from smashing into my thigh.
The path they’d marked was narrow. It was studded with rocks, and fallen tree limbs had been crudely cut to mark the way. They looked like victims of bad butchery. The trail was cool to the touch in places where your feet hit the slick earth. Cloud cover had made the night linger, and the air in the woods was dank and still. You looked up toward the sky and thought a storm was coming.
Mostly, you looked down. Running barefoot in the woods is hard. And I didn’t want to break any toes. I’ve snapped any number of them over the years and the nice thing is that you can set them yourself with a quick jerk and a little tape. But I knew I needed to be firing on all cylinders that day. God help me if I wasn’t.
It was stupid of me, of course. They wanted you jogging along, head down. And I was so focused on getting to the end of the ordeal that I forgot that the journey is sometimes as critical as the destination. So when the first attacker came at me, a blur of motion exploding with a hiss of breath, I was caught unawares. It was only reflex action that kept me from going down. I jerked away just enough to rob the strike of its full impact. I turned toward him, expecting more, but he faded back into the underbrush. I backed slowly away and began running again. I kept looking over my shoulder, but he didn’t follow. I went on.
After that, I watched. They waited in the shadows, like wraiths, although their blows were solid enough. At a twist in the trail, a dip or rise—anywhere your line of sight was obstructed—they’d spring at you. They took one shot apiece, giving it all they had, but not following up. A sudden jab, a hard shove, delivered with concentrated venom, but then I was free to go on.
The point, I came to see, was to keep me off balance. To disrupt the rhythm of breathing. Because breath centers us and gives us strength. And, I was sure, they wanted me weak by the end.
The blows were directed at my arms and legs, mostly. They wanted to damage the muscles just enough to slow me down. To make me vulnerable. So as they came at me, I knew what to expect. And after a while, you could predict the timing of attacks.
It was, after all, a ritual. It reminded me of the gauntlet the Iroquois would make captives run: contained cruelty driving victims on to what lay ahead. And that fate was always worse than what went before. But Yamashita was waiting for me somewhere up the hill. I flinched at the blows, but I settled into it. And kept running.
The path dipped and twisted, a living thing whose stony surface bit at your feet and whose branches whipped at you with a malevolence that was a pale echo of the lurking attackers. But the trail always trended upwards. You could feel the strain as you wound up the mountain. It was hard to tell how far I’d come, or where the summit was. The footpath was too narrow, the ground jumbled and choked with trees. But slowly, the sky lightened and the gray dawn began to spread.
I hit a level patch of good, soft earth and raced along. I could see no more attackers. I’d gone down a few times and knew my feet were cut, but I hadn’t taken too much damage. Sweat clung to me in the close air of the woods. I could feel spittle in the corners of my mouth from the effort of breathing. I scanned the way ahead of me, alert for the next attacker, head up.
The path wound along a ledge. To the right, the hill fell away in a rocky shoulder studded here and there with trees. Laurel bushes clustered in places down slope, and you could see how far up the mountain the path had come. There was a glimpse of rushing water down there, all dark glitter and foam amid a rocky bed, and I probably would have heard it, but my ears were filled with the vibration of my running, the thudding of blood in my ears, and the sawing of breath.
I see now that the view of the drop was a distraction. The sensei would nod and talk about a tsuki, a gap in concentration. It’s the point of dangerous vulnerability. I should have been looking up to detect an attack, but my eyes jumped to the slope, partially out of the novelty of the view after the miles of closed forest. So I didn’t even see the final attack coming.
The tripwire he’d strung across the trail was thin, but strong. It sent me sprawling and I landed hard. Small pebbles ground into the palms of my hands. He moved quickly for such a big man, but even so I managed to scramble away on my hands and knees. The sweeping underhand strike from the butt of his yari gave my ribs a glancing blow, but he was strong and it was enough to make me gasp with pain.
I looked at him. It was the same flat face that had stared along a shotgun barrel as it tracked me on a New York street. That night his eyes were dark pools, his face pale in the shadows thrown by streetlamps. In the half-light of the woods you could see him clearly. Han. You got a sense of the force of him and knew why they called him the Mongol. He was dressed in the black uniform of Kita’s disciples with a red belt around his waist that, for all the muted light that morning, was like a crimson splash of blood and heat in the still woods.
He was big and strong. And he knew it. His square face was set in a grim smile and his massive hands gripped the spear and waited for me to stand. I got up, my back to the drop-off, and knew I was in a bad spot. The yari’s protective sheath was removed, and the long steel head was aimed right at me.
“Why?” I asked. Not that I was really interested: I was stalling for time to prepare for what was coming.
“You know too much.” He had an oddly quiet voice. But his eyes were hard.
I kept stalling for time. “Others will know soon, too,” I said, trying to get away from the edge and find some room to maneuver. But the lance’s head tracked me without mercy.
The Mongol shook his head from side to side, jerking like a meaty machine. “Others will not know. It ends here. With you and the old men.”
I had put out a hand in supplication even before I consciously registered the fact that he had begun to move. He drove the spear at me in a savage lunge made deadly by years of practice. His thrust was hard and precise, man and weapon welded together in one deadly urge. I’m sure, in his mind, that the spear had already ripped through me. You could see the glow of anticipation in his eyes.
But the rocks betrayed him. His footing slipped—just a little—and bled some of the accuracy out of his thrust. As quickly as I could, I closed with him, hoping to get inside the spear’s offensive radius. I parried the shaft with my right hand and jabbed at his eyes with the rigid fingers of my left. For someone this big, you can’t bludgeon them. There’s too much muscle and bone. The sheer mass is too great. You have to go for selected targets. The soft tissue.
He swept the strike away with a grunt. He tried to bring the yari around, but it was too cramped—I could hear the shaft clack on wood and stone as he tried to bring it to bear on me. I drove into his solar plexus with my right fist—I would have dug into him and torn his lungs out if I could—but I couldn’t get the angle right. And now he had dropped the spear.
I could sense the fight’s balance tipping. He knew it, too, and saw the knowledge reflected in my eyes, because his savage grimace just got bigger. I knew if he got his arms around me that I was finished. I tried to spin away, out of his killing zone. But he moved in. A massive hand locked around each of my wrists and he held my arms out away from him. He looked at me and his eyes were deep, partially hidden behind the slope of the epicanthic fold, but still lit with a feral sense of triumph.
The Mongol’s head reared back for a moment and I actually thought he was going to howl. Then he brought his forehead smashing down into my face. My head snapped back. I could feel my leg control fading away, but I tried to backpedal to stay upright. He let go of my wrists then. And his kick blew me off the ledge and down the slope like a leaf caught in a storm’s vortex.
I was partially stunned, but Yamashita has worked for years to make my body responsive to events that flash upon you quicker than thought. I felt the first, sickening lunge into nothingness. My arms wheeled and my feet scrabbled for a purchase that had evaporated. What do you feel at a moment like this? Regret? Anger? It really happens too fast, to be frank. Training takes over. As a result, there was only a fleeting idea. And I swear it was in Yamashita’s voice.
Do not hit your head. It would be bad.
The laurel bushes slowed me down some. The undergrowth and rocks on the slope meant you didn’t fall for long in a straight line. It was more a punishing series of rolls: a bounce, some scraping, gravity twists the body and then the series starts all over again.
I stopped with a punishing thud, coming to rest on the limb of a downed tree. I was lucky. One jagged branch tore across my chest and out the front of my gi. I lay, pinned there, waiting for my sight to clear. I sagged, eyes closed, while distant birds shrieked alarm.
I was stunned, and that’s probably what saved me. From the ledge, the Mongol looked down and saw me, inert. From his angle, I’ll bet the tree limb looked like it went right through me. I should have been trying to move around, testing my limbs and probing for injuries. But if I had, he would have seen me moving and come down to finish me off. As it was, the Mongol figured his job was done. When I finally opened my eyes and peered up, he was gone.
I lay there and listened to the still sounds of the woods: birds in the distance, a rustle of dried leaves as something scampered through the underbrush, the whine of the mosquitoes as they found me, drawn by blood. I wanted to lie there for a while. I knew that when I moved, it was going to hurt. And part of me didn’t want to take the inventory of damage.
But the ordeal wasn’t done. I could see that. Yamashita was waiting for me somewhere at the summit. The old men, Han had said. First they’d take Sensei. Then they’d go for Changpa. And I had to get to them because the Mongol was heading there as well. I knew that this wouldn’t be the last time that the Mongol would try to send a victim spinning off into the void.
I moved gingerly downhill. The trail was a trap and I wasn’t about to get caught again. In the ravine, I splashed down into the cold water of the stream. In a flat space, silt swirled around my feet and I collapsed to my knees, then dunked my head to clear it. The water was like ice. I gasped and looked up the streambed, a jumble of mossy rocks, and dark water swirling along. The Chinese philosopher Mencius said that human nature tends toward good the way water runs downhill. I was headed up, against the current.
My feet were a mess. Even covered with mud I could see that. My left elbow felt sprung and my nose was broken. Again. I had been mostly worried that Yamashita’s tanto would have broken through its wooden sheath during the fall and cut me. I hurt so much allover that I held my breath when I felt around in the small of my back: I could have been cut to ribbons and not known it. But the fall must have shaken it loose, and the knife lay buried somewhere along the slope.
My gi top was ripped in a number of places. I tore the lower part up into strips—the material is thinner there. My elbow got wrapped up in a primitive brace. I would like to have done the same for my hands, but I wanted them free for whatever was coming. It was the same with my feet. Some kind of protection would have been nice, but I was afraid that it would make my footing unsteady when the time came. Over the years, I had learned that the wise thing to do is not always the easy thing. I would bleed a little longer.
Gambatte
, Yamashita had told me. Hold out. I started to move up the hill. It hurt, but I kept moving. I would endure.