Musashi: Bushido Code (82 page)

Genzaemon jumped forward, howling as though the blow had struck him, but he was too late. Musashi's sword sliced a two-foot strip of bark off the trunk. It fell to the ground by Genjirō's blood-covered head.

It was the act of a ferocious demon. Musashi, ignoring the others, had made straight for the boy. And it seemed he had had this in mind from the beginning.

The assault was of a savagery beyond conception. Genjirō's death did not reduce the Yoshiokas' fighting capacity in the slightest. What had been nervous excitement rose to the level of murderous frenzy.

"Beast!" screamed Genzaemon, face livid with grief and rage. He rushed headlong at Musashi, wielding a sword somewhat too heavy for a man of his age. Musashi shifted his right heel back a foot or so, leaned aside and struck upward, grazing Genzaemon's elbow and face with the tip of his sword. It was impossible to tell who wailed, for at that moment a man attacking Musashi from the rear with a lance stumbled forward and fell on top of the old man. The next instant, a third swordsman coming from the front was sliced from shoulder to navel. His head sagged and his arms went limp as his legs carried his lifeless body forward a few more steps.

The other men near the tree screamed their lungs out, but the calls for help were lost in the wind and trees. Their comrades were too far away to hear and couldn't have seen what happened even if they'd been looking toward the pine tree instead of watching the roads.

The spreading pine had been standing for hundreds of years. It had witnessed the retreat of the defeated Taira troops from Kyoto to Omi in the wars of the twelfth century. Innumerable were the times it had seen the warrior-priests of Mount Hiei descend on the capital to put pressure on the Imperial Court. Whether out of gratitude for the fresh blood seeping through to its roots or out of anguish over the carnage, its branches stirred in the misty wind and scattered drops of cold dew on the men beneath. The wind gave rise to a medley of sounds, from the branches, from the swaying bamboo, from the mist, from the tall grass.

Musashi took a stance with his back against the tree trunk, whose girth could hardly be spanned by two men with outstretched arms. The tree made an ideal shield for his rear, but he seemed to consider it hazardous to stay there long. As his eye traveled down the top edge of his sword and fastened on his opponents, his brain reviewed the terrain, searched for a better position.

"Go to the spreading pine! The pine tree! The fighting's there!" The shout came from the top of the rise from which Sasaki Kojirō had chosen to view the spectacle.

Then came a deafening report from the musket, and at last the samurai of the House of Yoshioka grasped what was going on. Swarming like bees, they left their hiding places and hurtled toward the crossroads.

Musashi slipped deftly sideways. The bullet lodged in the tree trunk, inches from his head. On guard, the seven men facing him edged around a couple of feet to compensate for his change in position.

Without warning, Musashi darted toward the man at the extreme left, his sword held at eye level. The man—Kobashi Kurando, one of the Yoshioka Ten—was taken completely by surprise. With a low cry of dismay, he whirled on one foot, but he was not quick enough to escape the blow to his side. Musashi, sword still extended, continued running straight ahead.

"Don't let him get away!"

The other six rushed after him. But the attack had again thrown them into perilous disarray, all coordination lost. In a flash, Musashi spun around, striking laterally at the nearest man, Miike Jūrōzaemon. Experienced swordsman that he was, Jūrōzaemon had anticipated this and left some play in his legs, so that he was able to quickly move backward. The tip of Musashi's sword barely grazed his chest.

Musashi's use of his weapon differed from that of the ordinary swordsman of his time. By normal techniques, if the first blow did not connect, the force of the sword was spent in the air. It was necessary to bring the blade back before striking again. This was too slow for Musashi. Whenever he struck laterally, there was a return blow. A slice to the right was followed in essentially the same motion by a return strike to the left. His blade created two streaks of light, the pattern very much like two pine needles joined at one end.

The unexpected return stroke slashed upward through Jūrōzaemon's face, turning his head into a large red tomato.

Not having studied under a teacher, Musashi found himself occasionally at a disadvantage, but there were also times when he had profited from this. One of his strengths was that he had never been pressed into the mold of any particular school. From the orthodox point of view, his style had no discernible form, no rules, no secret techniques. Created by his own imagination and his own needs, it was hard to define or categorize. To an extent, he could be challenged effectively using conventional styles, if his opponent was highly skilled. Jūrōzaemon had not anticipated Musashi's tactic. Anyone adept at the Yoshioka Style, or for that matter at any of the other Kyoto styles, would probably have been taken unawares in similar fashion.

If, following through on his fatal blow to Jūrōzaemon, Musashi had charged the motley group that remained around the tree, he would certainly have slain several more of them in short order. Instead he ran toward the crossroads. But then, just as they thought he was about to flee, he suddenly turned and attacked again. By the time they had regrouped to defend themselves, he was gone again.

"Musashi!"

"Coward!"

"Fight like a man!"

"We're not through with you yet!"

The usual imprecations filled the air, as furious eyes threatened to pop out of their sockets. The men were drunk on the sight and smell of blood, as drunk as if they had swallowed a storehouseful of sake. The sight of blood, which makes a brave man cooler, has the opposite effect on cowards. These men were like goblins surfacing from a lake of gore.

Leaving the shouts behind him, Musashi reached the crossroads and plunged immediately into the narrowest of the three paths of exit, the one leading toward the Shugakuin. Coming helter-skelter from the opposite direction were the men who had been stationed along the path. Before he had gone forty paces, Musashi saw the first man in this contingent. By the ordinary laws of physics, he would soon be trapped between these men and those pursuing him. In fact, when the two forces collided, he was no longer there.

"Musashi! Where are you?"

"He came this way. I saw him!"

"He must have!"

"He's not here!"

Musashi's voice broke through the confused babble. "Here I am!"

He jumped from the shadow of a rock to the middle of the road behind the returning samurai, so that he had them all to one side. Dumbfounded by this lightning change of position, the Yoshioka men moved on him as rapidly as they could, but in the narrow path they could not concentrate their strength. Considering the space needed to swing a sword, it would have been dangerous for even two of them to try to move forward abreast.

The man nearest Musashi stumbled backward, pushing the man behind him back into the oncoming group. For a time, they all floundered about helplessly, legs clumsily entwined. But mobs do not give up easily. Though frightened by Musashi's speed and ferocity, the men soon gained confidence in their collective strength. With a stirring roar, they moved forward, again convinced that no single swordsman was a match for all of them.

Musashi fought like a swimmer battling giant waves. Striking once, then retreating a step or two, he had to give more attention to his defense than to his attack. He even refrained from cutting down men who stumbled into range and were easy prey, both because their loss would only result in meager gains and because, if he missed, he would have been exposed to the thrusts of the enemy's lances. It was possible to judge the range of a sword accurately, but not that of a lance.

As he continued his slow retreat, his attackers pressed on relentlessly. His face was bluish-white; it seemed inconceivable that he was breathing adequately. The Yoshioka men hoped that he would eventually stumble on a tree root or trip on a rock. At the same time, none of them was eager to get too close to a man fighting desperately for his life. The nearest of the swords and lances pressing in on him were always two or three inches short of their target.

The tumult was punctuated by the whinnying of a packhorse; people were up and about in the nearby hamlet. This was the hour when early-rising priests passed by on their way to and from the top of Mount Hiei, clopping along on raised wooden sandals, their shoulders proudly squared. As the battle progressed, woodcutters and farmers joined the priests on the road to witness the spectacle, and then excited cries set up an answering response from every chicken and horse in the village. A crowd of bystanders collected around the shrine where Musashi had prepared for battle. The wind had dropped and the mist descended again like a thick white veil. Then all of a sudden it lifted, giving the spectators a clear view.

During the few minutes of fighting, Musashi's appearance had changed completely. His hair was matted and gory; blood mixed with sweat had dyed his headband pink. He looked like the devil incarnate, charging up from hell. He was breathing with his whole body, his shieldlike chest heaving like a volcano. A rip in his
hakama
exposed a wound on his left knee; the white ligaments visible at the bottom of the gash were like seeds in a split pomegranate. There was also a cut on his forearm, which, though not serious, had spattered blood from his chest to the small sword in his obi. His whole kimono appeared to have been tie-dyed with a crimson design. Onlookers who had a clear view of him covered their eyes in horror.

More ghastly still was the sight of the dead and wounded left in his wake. As he continued his tactical retreat up the path, he reached a patch of open land where his pursuers surged forward in a mass attack. In a matter of seconds, four or five men had been cut down. They lay scattered over a wide area, moribund testimony to the speed with which Musashi struck and moved on. He seemed to be everywhere at once.

But for all his agile shifts and dodges, Musashi clung to one basic strategy. He never attacked a group from the front or the side—always obliquely at an exposed corner. Whenever a battery of samurai approached him head on, he somehow contrived to shift like lightning to a corner of their formation, from which he could confront only one or two of them at a time. In this way, he managed to keep them in essentially the same position. But eventually, Musashi was bound to be worn down. Eventually, too, his opponents seemed bound to find a way to thwart his method of attack. To do this, they would need to form themselves into two large forces, before and behind him. Then he would be in even greater danger. It took all Musashi's resourcefulness to stop that from happening.

At some point, Musashi drew his smaller sword and started to fight with both hands. While the large sword in his right hand was smeared with blood, up to the hilt and the fist that held it, the small sword in his left hand was clean. And though it picked up a bit of flesh the first time it was used, it continued to sparkle, greedy for blood. Musashi himself was not yet fully aware that he had drawn it, even though he was wielding it with the same deftness as the larger sword.

When not actually striking, he held the left sword so that it was pointed directly at his opponent's eyes. The right sword extended out to the side, forming a broad horizontal arc with his elbow and shoulder, and was largely outside the enemy's line of vision. If the opponent moved to Musashi's right, he could bring the right sword into play. If the attacker moved the other way, Musashi could shift the small sword in to his left and trap him between the two swords. By thrusting forward, he could pin the man in one place with the smaller sword and, before there was time to dodge, attack with the large sword. In later years, this method came to be formally named the Two-Sword Technique Against a Large Force, but at this moment he was fighting by pure instinct.

By all accepted standards, Musashi was not a great sword technician. Schools, styles, theories, traditions—none of these meant anything to him. His mode of fighting was completely pragmatic. What he knew was only what he had learned from experience. He wasn't putting theory into practice; he fought first and theorized later.

The Yoshioka men, from the Ten Swordsmen on down, had all had the theories of the Kyōhachi Style pounded thoroughly into their skulls. Some of them had even gone on to create stylistic variations of their own. Despite being highly trained and highly disciplined fighters, they had no way of gauging a swordsman like Musashi, who had spent his time as an ascetic in the mountains, exposing himself to the dangers presented by nature as often as to those presented by man. To the Yoshioka men, it was incomprehensible that Musashi, with his breathing so erratic, face ashen, eyes bleary with sweat and body covered with gore, was still able to wield two swords and threaten to make short work of anyone who came within range. But he fought on like a god of fire and fury. They themselves were dead tired, and their attempts to pin down this bloody specter were becoming hysterical.

All at once, the tumult increased.

"Run!" cried a thousand voices.

"You, fighting by yourself, run!"

"Run while you can!"

The shouts came from the mountains, the trees, the white clouds above. Spectators on all sides saw the Yoshioka forces actually closing in on Musashi. The impending peril moved them all to try to save him, if only with their voices.

But their warnings made no impression. Musashi would not have noticed if the earth had split asunder or the heavens cast down crackling bolts of lightning. The uproar reached a crescendo, shaking the thirty-six peaks like an earthquake. It issued simultaneously from the spectators and the jostling throng of Yoshioka samurai.