CHAPTERFORTY-SEVEN
Sen
Mud-splattered eyelids, thick with broken bones and mixed with blood.It’s not over yet. Raging, Sen nocked another arrow to his bow. Drew back. Let fly. Felled one of Akiyo’s guards. His horse, Kaminari, thundering beneath him. Another. Draw, let fly. His fingers stinging from the bow, its wire like a knife. Shafts whistling into flesh. Chinks in armor. Hooves trampling skulls. He nocked another.Ride.“Ame’in!” Someone called to him; he shouted back. He rode with Hori Yataro and Saito beside him, and their kin, and met death.
The battle had reached a fever pitch – Sen’s hunters wove back and forth, meeting the opponents and wheeling away, a moving river of arrows and mounted soldiers.
“Break!” he shouted. “Break!”
They split into a rain of smaller units, groups of three and four. Warriors on the hunt. Overwhelming. He could only target one opponent at once, but any number of enemies could come at him from all sides while he did. Saito and Yataro charged at his side, his blood-guard, his protectors. The battle went on. Exhausted, he strung arrow after arrow to his bow. “Ame’in!” Yataro’s voice hit like rocks cracking asunder: “That’s Akiyo!”
The Musha’in rode toward them. Followed by a rain of three, and a man in black and yellow – sleek, trim-eyed Kaga Makoto – at her left.
“Get her!” Sen shouted. “Now! Go!”
He nocked an arrow.Breathe, he thought.Breathe.He let fly. The arrow darted at his enemy.
Andmissed.
Before he could draw again, Akiyo drew her own, and in a flash, hit Sen in the left shoulder, piercing his armor and upper arm. He wheeled away as Yataro loosed one, then another arrow to cover his retreat. But there was no turning back. Keishi pouring over the hillocks. Akiyo readied a second arrow and rode after him.
No, he thought, eyes tearing from the pain. The anger burned, enflaming him.Not like this.He plunged off the road, leading Kaminari into the deep and empty paddies.
Too late.
Makoto rode parallel, swept his longblade low to the ground, cut Sen’s horse’s legs out under him. He went flying.
Sen screamed. Hit the ice-hard dirt with force that knocked the breath from him and left his skull rattled. He tasted blood. Spit red to frozen dirt.
His bow was gone. He spun around, sword drawn, cut at anything that neared. Horsemen on the ridge. Kaga Makoto, his hunters, bearing down. Makoto moved fast. Slammed to the low scoop of the dirt. Right into Yataro. Instant violence. Bashing at each other with fists and blades, too close in the press of everything. Feet, hands, stomping, spitting, clawing at each other. Blood-pulp in the air. Akiyo attacked him too, on the sod earth above the barley fields. Yataro rode his dappled horse as hard as he could: when he saw her, he cried Akiyo’s name and drew an arrow to his bow.
Sen turned. “Yataro, wait!”
The black-and-yellow warrior, Makoto, lanced out with his longblade. Yataro pulled away, his shot wild. He drew another arrow, turning; Makoto hacked his head off and the body fell to the hard dirt below.
Sen leaped at Makoto. Cutting wildly. Smashed his knuckles on armored plates. Crack of bone. The warhorse shrieked, a terrible sound. Hit him, rammed him again. Fell back. Blows. Kicks raining on him from behind and above. A soldier on the dirt behind him, screaming. Makoto came at him again. Sen tumbled down the slope. Hit bottom. Slammed his head on frozen mud. Ears ringing. Stars. Desperate, he found a rock, flung it at Makoto. Useless against the armor. “You want me?” he screamed. “You want me?” He rammed against him, pulled him from his horse, sending them both back onto the dirt, dazed and tumbling, trying to right themselves, and Sen stepped and tripped and fell on slick dirt as Makoto scrambled back.
Surrounded. Grit in his mouth, Sen shoved against another Keishi footman. Another. Another. Crying as he cut them down.They keep coming.He had no time to think. No time to breathe. His lungs ablaze, arms leaden, feet caught in upturned sod. Someone landed a blow to his abdomen; he pitched to his knees, twisted and pulled the man to the dirt beside him. Longblade clattering away. He leaped. His dagger, sharp as a needle, opened the man’s throat. When Sen fell, he thought he’d been cut too, but it was just the bruise of impact, a cracked rib, and the relentless crush of five hundred shouting kijin-tai.
Sen lay on his back, wheezing, as the man bled out beside him. The blood on his lips was not his own. His sweat ran cold; he shivered, muscles trembling as he tried to stand.
Attack. Attack. Striking at the closest body he could reach. Makoto, with his pretty eyes, had vanished. Fled. A cry of pain, cut short: he stomped on someone’s throat. Attacked the next. Drew both his swords, the short-sword held to the left and forward, long-sword to the right, above his head:
“Come on, you cowards, come and get me!”
He led with the short-sword, deflecting blows, striking with the long-sword strong enough to split someone’s head. Then the next.
Swinging, stumbling around, a whirlwind of steel.Someone’s screaming.Hewas screaming, a wordless, wild beast. Cutting anything that neared.
There are too many.
He lanced into the throat of the next man, catching him in the smallest opening beneath his chin-guard, and the blade went deep. Turned, striking, turned again. The world was chaos and blood on the hard earth. He couldn’t see the sky. He heard nothing but the sounds of death, his own raw breath, hoarse and rattling, wet.
A rain of arrows fell. Some of them hit home. His arms, his armor, studded, pricked with ragged shreds of wood and broken barbs.
“Hoshiakari!”
Saito’s voice in the pound of hoofbeat thunder. He couldn’t find his own. His throat on fire. “Saito!” he gasped. “Saito!”
