The Plum Rains and Other Stories (12 page)

The Hell-kite wanted to talk about technique. He said he had a sense of how to fight with a long sword but wasn’t sure if his style looked right. What he wanted was the method of delivering a killing blow. He got up and showed what he meant, hopping from side to side and waving his naked blade in great sloppy arcs, delighted by the display until Hasegawa told him he looked like a drunk farmer swinging a grain-flail.

So what should I do then? said the Hell-kite. They always say how there’s a true way but never say what it is! They always say that the superior man acts without effort but not how he does it. How are you supposed to know?

Hasegawa fed sticks into the fire, watching as it jerked and flared. It’s not chopping, he said. It’s slicing. And it’s not hitting 
hard, it’s drawing the cutting edge smoothly through the target. He adjusted his fire, configuring loosely piled ricks that would burn better. And it’s not just how quick you are, it’s where you start your stroke from. And not the angle you use, but what your opponent thinks you’re going to use. And where he is when he recognises his error. And what he can do about it.

But so then how do you know how to do all that?

You don’t need to know. No one does.

But what about me? What if I’m attacked? I can get off one shot with my big banger but it takes time to reload. I need to know how to fight with a long sword and a short sword. And a slash knife.

Don’t get attacked.

Easy for you to say.

Hasegawa poked the fire, sending a spray of orange sparks up into the autumn evening.

The Hell-kite told him he knew he made mistakes. But he’d never had any help. How could he follow the true way of the warrior if nobody guided him? He said he’d rather leave his bones on a hillside than spend his life squatting in some
miserable
hovel tapping on copper kettles or fitting tufts of bristles onto bamboo handles. That’s no life! You think that’s a life? Year after year after year of it. Assembling tray stands and gluing the parts together. Your shoulders hunched and your fingers so crooked you can hardly use them! Dipping flax wicks into
bubbling
pots of wax. Your eyesight failing. Your whole life just that one thing and then you die? Is that a life for a man? He said he’d rather be cut down with a sword in his hands and the sounds of warfare in his ears. The shouts to advance! The roar of musket fire! The howls of the wounded! The smell of blood, and the beauty of comradeship as you launch a massed charge, every man willing to die for the nobility of the attempt.

What attempt? 

What do you mean, what attempt?

Attempting what?

Any attempt! he cried. The goal of it hardly mattered. It was the willingness to die for something worth dying for that the Hell-kite craved. He couldn’t find words strong enough. Just the pure beauty of it, he said.

Of men dying…

Of men dying, yes! The beauty of the pathos of their deaths.

You’ve never seen it.

That’s why I’m here! Why do you think I’m up here? Stuck in these mountains?

The Shogun’s Great Peace meant that for someone like the Hell-kite of Edo, there was no chance for a real war. Fighting bandits was the only opportunity.

Hasegawa stared into the tossing fire, the shape of it
blooming
and flaring, the flames ripped apart at the instant of their inception. So all you want is to kill somebody.

The Hell-kite sat stubbornly beside him. You haven’t
listened
to what I said. I want to do it properly. The way the men of the past did. With the correct technique. For the beauty of the strokes and the nobility of the achievement.

It’s just dead people lying on the ground.

Not if you do it right.

Hasegawa found a place to spread his quilts and laid them out with his carry-sack for a pillow. He walked back into the bushes to piss then returned to the edge of the firelight. There’s no right way, he said. How could there be?

T
HE NEXT DAY
, H
ASEGAWA LEFT
the Hell-kite sitting sullenly by the morning fire, an extra robe draped over his head.

You know you’re going to have to be careful with that horse. 

His horse was his property and of no concern to another man. It would just have to get used to its load. Or it could lie down and die. And good riddance.

And you can’t show anybody that gun, Hasegawa said, but the Hell-kite was no longer interested in discussing such
subjects
with a has-been samurai.

The road became narrower and overgrown with brush or blocked by fallen trees, some with long black burn-scars ripped down through their hearts and some rotted-out at the roots and toppled from the weight of their years. Hasegawa climbed then rested then climbed again. Rime whitened the shadows of rocks and tree boles, and his breath plumed out whitely before him. It could snow, it was cold enough.

By midday he had emerged into a high-pass of bare rock and scrub pine, the sky cold and clear in all directions, the intensity of its blueness beautiful beyond praise. He got to a place where he could see the nearest of the three holy mountains of Dewa. His family tomb was at a temple in the valley just beyond it, and he was the only person left to sweep off fallen leaves and clear away weeds. Chant a sutra. Burn incense. Tell them he was sorry he hadn’t come sooner. Say he’d stay for awhile if they wanted.

Hasegawa worked his way up around granite outcroppings darkened where streams of snow-melt flowed in spring, the broad grey sheets of rock scoured by the wind as if preparing it for an encounter with the sky. He stopped to rest in a protected pocket of rock, the granite there crumbled into a dressing of coarse sand. He scraped up a handful then let it trickle through his fingers, flakes of mica glinting like tiny black blades in the windy sunlight. How could you know what to say to the dead if you weren’t good at talking to people still alive? He studied the lichens that encrusted the rock, the way they fitted themselves to its welts and knobs and fissures, mustard yellow or milky grey or the grainy brown of raw burdock, with a beauty equivalent in 
every way to that of cherry blossoms or red maple leaves, only smaller, drier, less insistent…

Except they weren’t
like
blossoms, they weren’t like anything.

Why did the facts of the world seem so unfinished?

Why was he still draping the world with words? Still seeing it through them?

Why even when he tried to get past this yearning to
describe
what he saw did he find himself trying to describe the impossibility of description?

A lichen on a rock in the mountains. Was accepting it so beyond him?

Hasegawa walked until twilight then set his bivouac in a protected gorge. A single rice ball wrapped in dried laver was all that remained of his provisions, and he tried to feel satisfied but his belly wanted another. He would have no food tomorrow and probably none the following day.

It began snowing at twilight, soft and silent; and he pulled his gear back under a low juniper then cut extra branches and inserted them into the canopy of boughs above him. He sat close beside his guttering fire draped in every garment and quilt he possessed, the night’s cold sinking into him; and he awoke to white ash where his fire had been, the whiteness of snow covering the high peaks, and a dawn cold so crushing it drove him numbed and stumbling out onto a rime-covered rock plain where he marched in self-configured circles, his teeth
chattering
, flapping his arms, trying to get himself warm enough to be able to start another fire.

The bleak sun rose into the coldness, and the wind rose with it, blowing snow dust off exposed peaks in great sweeping bursts of silver that glittered then faded against the whiteness of the sky. He went scrambling for more wood, the cold like shafts of ice that drove him staggering back with what he had scavenged. The fire he managed to construct was a poor affair, much of the 
wood too green to burn well, and he soon abandoned it, packing up his gear with crimped hands and setting off.

The day warmed as Hasegawa walked but he was never warm. His feet felt like things wrapped in frozen quilts. By the hour of the ram, he had reached an open vantage point. The snowy flanks of the first of the holy mountains loomed beyond the fabric of valleys and hills, smooth expanses of whiteness covering its declivities, the lower slopes mottled with conifers. It was a winter landscape seemingly bereft of people although he knew they would be there.

Hasegawa crossed down onto a high alpine valley. Dead meadow grasses flattened and matted with snow crusts crunched underfoot as he walked. The naked branches of brambles sheathed with frost formed intricate lattices that had to be circumvented, as did pools of runoff from melting snow, the shallow patches of black water edged with icy filigrees of rime; and Hasegawa was in amidst them when he realized that what he was seeing were human bones scattered across the empty ground, pelvises and femurs and rib cages arrayed like barbaric musical instruments stripped clean by blown grit, the world cleansing itself of death’s bounty. He had never heard of a war fought up here. Broken sword blades eaten with rust looked like plant fronds or flattened wands of petrified mud. He found the remains of what must have been spears, the wooden shafts long since rotted away leaving behind lumps of iron with empty shaft-sockets. Shards of corroded armor sometimes still cupped the bones of its wearer, and when touched, fell apart and blew away as dust. He found an ancient helmet of the type worn during the era when samurai were no better than armed servants. He found sprays of arrowheads rusted together into single clumps configured by the shape of the quivers which had held them, the bamboo shafts, the hawks-feather fletchings, the quivers and bows all long since resorbed back into the sun and 
the wind and the rain, as had the bowmen themselves, whose arrows had not been shot.

A flat slab of granite held the skulls of the slain piled up neatly in a cairn, as if the orderliness of the arrangement
justified
the suitability of its occurrence, as if that was all that could be done, with nothing to say about them and nothing to hear said.

T
HERE WAS A BANDIT JUST OFF THE
road, sitting exposed in a grassy dell, his feet sticking straight out before him and the front of his robe splattered with dried vomit. He seemed to be gripping himself like a sick child, groaning or keening or
perhaps
singing some kind of unpleasant song. A back frame lay abandoned beside the roadway, piled high with bundles of dried tobacco leaves, some of which had spilled off, although it could have been left that way as a decoy.

The Hell-kite attached the bullet pouch and priming-power flask to his battle jacket then hooked a pair of black powder canisters onto his sash. He stuffed a handful of charge-patches in one sleeve pouch in imitation of a shogunate gunner he’d seen. He hid a slash knife in the other sleeve except the weight of the stupid thing swinging there bothered him so he took it out again.

He hiked up through the forest, intending to circle around behind the bandit’s position, but what seemed like an easy route would veer off unexpectedly or follow a gentle gradient only to end in the dead-drop of a ravine. He backtracked then tried again with no better luck. The slopes and gullies and
outcroppings
of rock all looked the same, and he soon lost patience and went crashing through masses of prickle-brush and groves of willows and alders, kicking and slashing at entangling branches until he had fought his way out into the open. 

The bandit was just downhill, sitting with his back to him. The Hell-kite dropped to his hands and knees then retreated until he reached an outcropping of rock, his heart pounding. He peeked out over the parapet. The bandit hadn’t moved. The Hell-kite blew on the punk cord until the tip glowed orange then locked the serpentine-lever back at the fully-cocked safety position. He poured in a charge of black powder. He fitted a lead ball on its patch and drove it home deftly. He primed the pan at the touch hole then closed the pan-cover, humming a wavering little war ballad under his breath as he shortened the serpentine to half-cock then rested the long barrel of his
harquebus
against the rock.

The bandit disappeared in the smoke of the discharge, the roar echoing in the autumn hills. The Hell-kite ducked down behind his rock cover. It was too loud. Even distant enemies would have heard that shot and known what it meant. But when he finally looked up again, he saw the bandit was lying on his back with a flap of meat knocked out of his shoulder and his legs kicking and twisting in an odd manner. He’d have time to get off another shot before reinforcements could launch a counterattack.

The Hell-kite opened his bullet pouch and picked out a lead ball, the sounds of battle thudding in his ears, horses charging and men shouting their war cries as the famous queller of
bandits
seated the next ball on its patch of silk cloth, fitted it in the muzzle then drew his ramrod and drove it down smartly into the firing breech, pleased with his skill and his calmness and his panache.

Except he had forgotten to put in the powder charge first.

He squatted back down behind the ramparts of his primary shooting position. Why did everything always have to happen to him? Enemy forces could be preparing an assault, and he had no one to defend him. This was the injustice of solitude. He 
always had to do everything himself, with no help from anyone ever.

The Hell-kite had a tool that could be used to force loose a blockage in the breech but he hadn’t brought it with him. He had everything else he could possibly want except for that one stupid tool. He felt his eyes fill with tears of frustration as he cursed his fate, cursed the mountains and forests, cursed the sun and the moon and the stars in the sky. But the superior man is not defeated by setbacks. Now was an opportunity to profit from a calm appraisal. He tried that. Then he turned his
harquebus
upside down and began slamming and banging the muzzle on the hard surface of granite, battering it harder and harder until the ball was jarred loose and dropped onto the dirt.