Chapter Forty-Seven Sen
CHAPTER FORTY-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.
And missed.
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. He was 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!”
He couldn’t see him. His hand was numb. He looked at it, dazed, bloody to the quick of his nails. His knuckles raw. Something pricking in his leg. A sharp pain, wrenched knee. Lungs burning. He couldn’t see. He heard the thunder of their horses, heard the screams, couldn’t see Saito at all.
“Saito!” Screamed again. Voice rough as rocks.
He fell to one knee, rose, met another Keishi soldier, grappled with him.
Falling to hard earth, eating dirt, hands on his throat, sword shoving at his gut, but Sen twisted away; fingers clawing at him through his mask, iron and cold, into his eyes.
Hand glancing on sharp metal. Grab it, cutting his thumb through the gauntlet.
Short-sword beside him, he shifted, brought it through the man’s throat.
Rolling off the corpse. Revulsion. A groan.
A cry. A voiceless scream. He couldn’t feel his fingers, couldn’t feel at all. Blood everywhere. He fell.
I’m gone, he thought. I’m gone.
“Hoshiakari!”
Saito’s voice came back. The field came back. His vision blurred, cleared again. His heart bloomed; he saw him.
“Saito! Help!”
Saito and Ise Tadanobu thundered along the ridge beside the paddy, pursuing Makoto like hawks on waterfowl. Tadanobu loosed arrow after arrow at Makoto’s retreating back. But now Keishi footmen arrived, and they knew exactly who Sen was.
His feet gave way; he slid to dirt again.
Scrambled, pulled his long-sword from where it fell.
Deflected a blow, jarring him, numbing his arm.
It was luck: the other warrior dropped his weapon – Sen cut at him, off-balance, his blade struck metal at an angle, and it snapped halfway from the hilt.
The force of it sent him sprawling. Bit his tongue, pain everywhere.
He stabbed the man in the neck. He swung. He cut a last man down with the notched blade, killing him, but the twisting motion locked them both together and Sen tripped, sword broken.
He slipped on wet ground, tried to stand, fell.
Nothing worked. His legs buckled. There was no sky.
Everything was dirt. Saito leaped from his horse, hit the earth with the force of a quake, longblade in his arms, swinging in wide arcs to protect him.
Sen drifted. Mind far away. The world tilted under him. He couldn’t keep his balance.
Saito, where are you?
Above him. Hewing down two more mounted warriors before the battle was done, and when Saito screamed in victory, Sen rose again, seething, spitting fury, and he leaped at the first body he saw, mad and raging at the world.
He hacked at the body again and again with his broken sword, trying to cut off the warrior’s head in sloppy chops. Screaming all the while.
A voice behind him. “Sen! He’s already dead!”
“Where’s my horse?” he shouted, horror spiking through his bones. “Where’s my horse?” He tripped; he couldn’t make sense of what was happening. Saito called out. “Sen!”
When it ended, it ended all at once.
Between one breath and the next, it was over.
The Keishi remnants fled. Sen’s ears rang, a high-pitched whine, and everything seemed muffled. There were Keishi flags under his feet. Corpses so fresh they bled and stained the bitter earth.
Beside him, Saito gave a cry. “Is that all they had for us? Is that all they had!”
His men gave a shout. Victory.
“Where are they!” Sen cried. “Where are they!”
Saito held him, trying to calm him down. The broken sword still in his hand. “They’re gone, Sen.”
He staggered. “I just, I need a moment.” Pitched to his knees. Pulled away his faceguard, vomited into the grass. It stung his bleeding tongue. Rib cracked. Hands like shreds.
Saito said, “Let’s get you up.”
“I… I think,” he began, and pitched down again.
“Take it easy, Sen. You’re hurt.”