Chapter 8: Under the blossoming cherry trees – Part 2

The chief bandit's name was Shigemaru (12), though almost no one who'd met him in the last decade had lived long enough to use it twice.

He had served under Akechi Mitsuhide (13) once, in the years before Mitsuhide's name became something whispered rather than spoken. He had killed on battlefields where the killing was sanctioned and found the habit didn't care whether a war was still officially underway. When the old order collapsed and the province fell into the gap between one clan's ruin and whoever might eventually claim it, men like Shigemaru didn't see chaos.

They saw opportunity.

He listened to his six humiliated men describe the swordsman who'd put them in the dirt. No crest, no topknot, common clothes. A fighting style too clean for a farmer, too brutal in its precision for anyone who hadn't killed professionally for years.

When they finished, he laughed.

It was not a kind laugh.

"You were beaten by a ghost," he said, and laughed again at the look on their faces. "Takeda kenjutsu. They were annihilated after Nagashino. Everyone knows it. It's already half a folk tale." He shook his head. "You're describing a ghost, you idiots. Or you're looking for an excuse for losing to a farmer."

The underling who'd taken the cross-shaped scar above his brow and the ruined tendon opened his mouth to protest.

Shigemaru didn't let him finish.

The blade came out fast, almost bored. The crippled bandit went down without much sound, and Shigemaru wiped his sword clean on the man's own sleeve before sheathing it. Five watched. They would remember the lesson.

"Useless," he spat, looking down at the motionless bandit lying with his mouth agape, not yet fully registering his own demise.

The silence that followed had the weight of men recalculating, very quickly, exactly how replaceable they were.

Then a voice from the back, quieter than Shigemaru's, with an edge that made even the chief look up.

"I'll confirm it myself."

Mifune stepped forward into the firelight. Younger than most of the others, leaner, with the stillness of a man who'd survived by being patient rather than loud. He'd been Shigemaru's second since before the province fell, the one man in the room who'd never once needed to be told twice.

"A ghost story isn't worth the trouble," Shigemaru said, though there was curiosity beneath the dismissal.

"Then it costs nothing to prove it's just a story," Mifune said. "And if some Takeda dog really did survive and decided to play hero out here, I'd rather know before he makes a habit of it."

Shigemaru considered him, then waved a hand, already losing interest. "Fine. Take a dozen men. Go finish what these idiots couldn't."

They went back for Minokichi the following evening, a larger group this time, twelve men moving up the mountain path with the confidence of numbers rather than skill, expecting an undefended hut and a woodcutter too frightened to have moved an inch.

They found neither.

Minokichi and Yuki had already gone, vanished into whatever fold of the mountain they kept in reserve for evenings like this one—the kind that comes eventually to anyone whose marriage requires a second identity kept ready. The hut sat dark and empty, the door swinging faintly on its hinges. The bandits stood in the clearing with nothing to take it out on.

"Search the woods," one of them barked. "They can't have gone far."

"They didn't need to," a voice said, from somewhere they hadn't expected, "since you didn't keep your word."

Katsuyori stepped out from the treeline, unhurried. The borrowed woodcutter's clothes had been replaced with something closer to his own. Simple, unmarked, and worn like a man no longer pretending to be anything other than what he was.

"I told your friends to leave this mountain," he said. "Tonight, specifically. That was the agreement."

For one frozen second, nobody moved.

Then the five men who'd faced him before, the ones who still carried the bruises, the dislocated shoulder, and the memory of how quickly the fight had gone wrong the first time, simply turned and ran, melting back into the treeline without even bothering to feel ashamed.

That left seven.

They came at him together this time, surrounding rather than charging in sequence, which was smarter than anything the first group had managed. For half a second Katsuyori felt something light up in his chest that was almost pleasure. The old clarity of combat, where there was no room for grief or memory or the weight of what he'd lost. Only the next several seconds, and their clean architecture.

He went through them the way water goes through fingers trying to close on it.

The first strike came from his left and he was no longer there to receive it, already inside the man's guard with an elbow to the solar plexus that folded him and put him on the ground gasping. The second and third tried to flank him from either side at once, which was the mistake of men who have never fought someone trained for cavalry, where the whole discipline is knowing how to be in the gap between two threats instead of caught between them. He dropped low, swept the legs from the one on his right, and used the fall's momentum to send the second man's blade wide, following through with a strike to the wrist that put the sword in the dirt with a crack that meant the wrist wouldn't grip anything for several weeks.

A fourth got close enough to land a glancing cut along Katsuyori's shoulder, shallow, and Katsuyori answered with a strike so fast it barely registered as motion. The ridge of the blade caught the man across the temple and dropped him, cleanly, into the kind of unconsciousness that leaves nothing behind but a headache and a story he'd be too embarrassed to tell accurately.

The fifth and sixth ran without needing to be convinced twice.

That left the seventh standing frozen at the edge of the clearing, sword still raised, watching six grown men either unconscious or fleeing in the time it had taken him to draw a single full breath.

Katsuyori didn't bother closing the distance. He simply looked at him.

The bandit's sword lowered on its own, his hand deciding before the rest of him caught up.

"When you're ready," Katsuyori said, gesturing.

Then he ran, tail between his legs.

Mifune came out of the treeline without hurry, and without his sword drawn. He'd watched the whole thing from the dark the way another man watches weather. Noting, not fearing.

"You must be their boss," Katsuyori remarked.

"I didn't come to fight you. I came to see whether the rumours were true." He stopped at a careful distance and looked not at Katsuyori's face but at his work. "Seven men, and not one of them touched you twice. You were never where the blade came down. You were already in the seam beside it, every time, as though the space between two cuts were a road you'd walked for a hundred years."

He tilted his head. "There's one school that moves like that. When I was a boy, the old men called it the Wind of Kai. They said the four martial tempers were older than any house that ever claimed one, and that the Takeda took the Wind and never gave it back. Swift as wind. A blade you cannot corner, because wind has no edge to corner."

His eyes went to the man on the ground, the one who'd taken the ridge of the sword across the temple and dropped without a mark on him. "And that one. The cut that arrives before the arm that throws it. Kamaitachi (14). My grandfather swore he saw it at the battle of Mikatagahara, and I called him a liar to his face." A thin smile. "They were annihilated at Nagashino. Every last one. It's a tale you tell to frighten children who won't hold still. And here it is, throwing my men in the dirt."

"I'm nobody," Katsuyori said.

"Nobody doesn't move like the Wind." Mifune came one step closer, to the wrong distance, and held it. "Are you some kind of yokai? A ghost playing hero in a forest that isn't his? Or perhaps…" The smile stayed.

"Perhaps a Takeda dog that refused to die with its pack?"

Katsuyori turned the question over. He didn't know the honest answer, and it didn't frighten him.

"I'm just a bum in the woods," he said finally.

Mifune blinked, clearly having expected something considerably more dramatic.

Author’s note:

12. In “Under the blossoming cherry trees” by Sakaguchi Ango, Shigemaru was a bandit who went insane under the influence of a beautiful, bewitching woman. A classic literary folktale-style story, although it was written in the 20th century and is one of Japan’s most notable contemporary literary works.

13. Akechi Mitsuhide was a Japanese samurai general of the Sengoku period. Mitsuhide was originally a bodyguard to the last Ashikaga shōgun, Ashikaga Yoshiaki, and later one of the trusted generals under daimyō Oda Nobunaga during his campaign of political unification in Japan.

14. Kamaitachi (鎌鼬), literally "sickle-weasel," is a yokai of Japanese folklore. It was the traditional explanation for a wound that opened on the skin with no apparent cause and, often, no immediate pain: an unseen weasel riding the wind, cutting as it passed. The yokai is genuine folklore; the sword technique bearing its name is not. That is Kiyoka Oda’s invention, devised for Katsuyori, and no historical school of Kai ever taught such a form.