Prologue
It was deep into the chills of autumn when two great armies clashed for the last time on the fields of Shimegahara. All told, forty-thousand soldiers, divided in near equal measure between two fools, fought a gruesome battle in worship of the petty grudges of their ancestors. They met with blades and bows and stained the mud red. Even when drizzle turned to downpour, neither side would relent. For miles in every direction, villagers retreated to their row houses, listening to the distant thunder of drums.
Well-fortified in the shelter of wooded foothills, Tatsutomi Shigenaga, lord of his clan, awaited news of the battle in the company of three thousand reserves. He sat perched on the edge of his stool, clad in his full, crimson armor, spear in hand. The polish put to his helmet’s gold crest did nothing to hide the scratches and dents earned from decades of war. He was in every appearance a perfect rendition of his samurai title, broad-shouldered and firm-faced, ready to march to the field at the first word from his scouts. One would expect no less from the Red Dragon of Suyama.
What a brave, indomitable sight he should have been for his young son, Kazuchiyo, but Kazuchiyo would not be the hero of this tale if he were lacking in perception, or if he were easily swayed by a guise of confidence. It did not escape his notice how heavily his father’s hand shook around his spear.
“Father,” said Kazuchiyo, “won’t you let me fight beside you?”
His father grunted, adjusting his grip on the spear. Perhaps he had realized that Kazuchiyo could see his struggles. “You are not yet a man,” he said. His lip quirked with good humor. “If you were to take a head, you wouldn’t have a man’s name to claim it with.”
Kazuchiyo was not a boy easily swayed by humor either. “Then we can hold the ceremony now,” he said. “Grant me a name and a sword so I can fight for our family.”
“When you are old enough,” said his father.
“All my elder brothers had their ceremonies by the time they were thirteen, and I’m thirteen now.”
Tomonaga, third of Kazuchiyo’s elder brothers, stood at his father’s other side. He was also clad in full armor bearing the dragon crest, and all the more smug because of it. “Don’t be eager to rush out onto the field, little tadpole,” he teased. “You may have the dragon’s mane, but not its fangs. Not yet.”
Made self-conscious by his brother’s teasing, Kazuchiyo reached back to fuss with the thick, black locks of his hair. The soldiers around them smirked in amusement. “I’ll cut it with Father’s permission,” he retorted. “When it’s time.”
“It will be time soon enough,” said their father, and he cast his gaze again before him, as if he were somehow able to peer through the downpour to his troops. His fist tightened around the spear. “Believe me, you will one day have your fill of war.”
A cry arose from the lookouts, and Kazuchiyo’s father straightened his back, waiting with hard-forged anticipation in his brow as the ranks made way for a messenger. The man came on horseback nearly all the way to the war tent before dismounting. The dragon’s banner hung limply from his back; his helmet was cracked and askew. “My lord!” he cried as he rushed inside and threw himself to the ground. “My lord, news from the front!”
“Let’s have it, then.”
The man raised his head, and it was then that Kazuchiyo realized he was little more than a boy himself, no more than two or three years past his own age. His face was heart-shaped and soft and unbefitting of a soldier. “My lord, Master Yatamoto has turned against us and joined Aritaka,” he said, and his audience went stiff with shock. “He launched an attack against our southern flank and has divided our forces in two. Soon they’ll have cut the vanguard off entirely.”
Shigenaga rose from his stool. The rustle of his armor impressed upon young Kazuchiyo a sensation like coils drawing tight. “And my sons?” he asked as his soldiers gathered themselves in kind. “They still fight?”
“They do you proud at the front,” the boy replied, “but they’re in desperate need of reinforcement.”
“They will have it.” Shigenaga strode forward and called to his generals, ordering them to make their soldiers ready. As all rushed to comply, he turned back to his younger sons. “You will remain here with the final regiment,” he instructed them. “Protect this camp at all costs.”
“Let me go with you to the front,” said Kazuchiyo. “Let me fight to defend my brothers!”
“Your brothers have more than enough fight in them,” his father assured him. “This temple has none of its own.” He set his hand heavily on Kazuchiyo’s shoulder. “If the vanguard falls, there is always retreat.”
Kazuchiyo nodded with resolve and resignation. “But if a rearguard falls, there’s nothing,” he finished the saying obediently. “Good luck, Father.”
Shigenaga nodded in return. It would be sentimental foolishness to pretend either of them knew then what fate awaited them, but he touched his son’s hair and smiled, saying, “When this battle is over, I will have a grand name for you.” And Kazuchiyo smiled, eager for it.
The Lord of the Tatsutomi mounted his horse, and with trusted generals at his side, he rode away from the safety of the temple camp. The thunder of their hoofbeats and war chanting disappeared beneath the hills. In the company of the five hundred remaining men, Shigenaga’s third and fourth sons faced their duty with all due seriousness, commanding scouts to increase the diligence of their patrols.
An hour passed, as the rain intensified, with no news.
“What name do you think Father will pick for me?” Kazuchiyo wondered aloud, tightening his robes and trying to make them feel more like armor.
“Part of his own name, of course,” said Tomonaga. “Kazunaga, probably. Mother was always pleased with your name.”
“Tatsutomi Kazunaga,” he said, rolling the name about in his mouth, imagining the brush strokes. The battle raged on, yet already his boyish mind was cast into the future, to a time when he could be called upon to defend his family and home with more than merely his presence at his father’s side. He longed to bear the twisting curves of his clan’s dragon sigil upon sturdy armor, as his brothers did, and to uphold his father’s justice. His fantasies were cut short by the memory of that very banner torn and crooked, hanging from the back of the soft-faced messenger who had come to warn them of betrayal. He glanced about and could not remember what had become of that boy.
A shout arose from the perimeter, and both sons turned toward the tent entrance, holding their breath. Tomonaga grabbed up his spear, and showing none of his father’s caution, he hurried to the enclosure’s entrance. He was greeted there by an arrow carving into his skull.
You mustn’t blame poor Kazuchiyo for what he did next.
His father had warred with the Aritaka since before he was born, and he had for thirteen years been saturated with tales of samurai valor. He had watched the bodies come back on carts, bloated and bloodied, limbs askew or missing. He was no stranger to death. But upon seeing his closest brother stumble back, a shaft of wood piercing his skull just below his right eye, a panic overcame him. Without thought to who had fired the arrow, he caught Tomonaga in his arms. By the time he had lowered him to the ground, Tomonaga’sbody was limp and the spear was tumbling from his hand.
Out from the unceasing rain came their attackers: soldiers in patchwork armor, with patchwork loyalty. They cut down every Tatsutomi in their path with the ferocity of beasts. A son of the Dragon ought to have stepped over his brother’s body, taken up his spear, and met his death with courage, but Kazuchiyo knelt in the mud, shocked, Tomonaga twitching and gurgling against his chest.
He would tell me later that he fought. He would have liked for me to tell you that now. But it is my reluctant duty to confess that he did not, and that it would haunt him for the rest of his days.
One of the Aritaka struck him across the temple with the butt of his spear. Kazuchiyo should have been prepared after years of his brothers’ training, but the blow sent him crumbling to the ground and robbed him of his sight and sense. In breathless darkness he tried to draw himself upright, his only anchor Tomonaga’s wet hissing. Hands grabbed him from all sides, wrenched his arms behind him to be tied. The spots cleared from his vision just in time to watch a sword cleave through his brother’s neck.
“The head should be mine,” said one soldier. “I shot him.”
“Head goes to the general,” said another. “If you’re lucky, he will reward you for it.”
Kazuchiyo was hauled upright. On his feet, face to face with his brother’s killer, some strength came back to him. Too late he struggled; with arms bound he was an easy target for a fist in his gut. He doubled over, gagging.
“Keep your eye on him,” said the gnarled man, and he took a fistful of Kazuchiyo’s hair as he dragged him from the tent. “Lord Aritaka said to take him alive if we can.”
Kazuchiyo stumbled after. A thousand questions preyed on his tongue, but none would have done him any good to ask. He couldn’t understand how it had happened so quickly, that his father’s most stalwart troops had fallen to lordless mercenaries, who were now shaking his brother’s head to drain it of blood. His stomach crowded against his throat, and he wanted to scream.
They threw him over the back of a horse. The gnarled man mounted behind him and took him again by his hair. As they rode away from the camp, every movement of the animal bore into Kazuchiyo’s stomach and ribs, and he nearly vomited. But it was shame more than pain that burned his eyes as he was carried away from the temple, through the sparse forestry of the foothills and down muddied slopes to the field. Even when he tried to struggle, there was nowhere to go.
What few attempts Kazuchiyo did make at escape ceased when they came to the battlefield. In the waning light Shimegahara was sickly and gray, its grasses matted down by bodies strewn in all directions, an unceasing drone of dying men accompanying the patter of raindrops. Men in dark, indigo armor walked up and down the plains with swords in hand, putting an end to any enemy breath they came upon. The corpses were piled so high that the figures moving among them may as well have been hellish oni overseeing the torture of the damned. So many of his father’s men, slaughtered and rotting. The stench was enough to make him choke.
Above it all there rose a voice—a cry, bellowing and piercing at once, roiling like ocean waves across the weary plain. Someone still fought, more creature than man by the sound of it. Kazuchiyo could not lift his head to see, could not know whose soldier wailed with such agony and hate, if even it were a human being at all. A mad hope overcame him that it was somehow his father, a dragon transformed, made furious with revenge for his fallen army.
The horse stopped, and Kazuchiyo was yanked roughly from the saddle into the grabbing hands of yet more soldiers. They dragged him over bodies and broken banners, and one of his sandals came loose, trapped by a man’s armpit. It was all he could do to stay upright, and still he didn’t fight, until their passage over an embankment brought him to his father.
It was not the Red Dragon of Suyama who still fought. He knelt in the sludge, the tufted shafts of arrows sticking straight out from his chest and back in half a dozen places, his armor hanging off, his helmet shattered nearby. It was not the arrows that had felled him; two Aritaka soldiers stood on either side of him, their spears plunged into his hips keeping him pinned. The earth surrounding him was stained black. Kazuchiyo could only stare, uncomprehending. His father’s silhouette broken among the heaps deadened him, and it wasn’t until he was shoved to the ground himself that he realized the man was staring back at him.
Shigenaga’s eyes were so heavy. He was past the point of feeling pain, and he shivered, half slumped against one of the spears buried in him. When he opened his mouth, only blood came out, no strength in him to voice words. Kazuchiyo tried to push to his feet, to run to him, but the surrounding men swept his legs out from under him. They pushed his chest into the dirt.
“There,” said a deep voice. Kazuchiyo strained to find the source. “He lives, as promised. And he will continue to live, from now until the end of his life, as my son.”
Shigenaga coughed and gagged to follow. As he struggled, Kazuchiyo managed to raise his head, and at last he laid eyes on his enemy: Aritaka Souyuu, the Great Bear of the North. His body was broad and hulking, his dark armor weathered and stained, and atop his head sat the helmet passed to him by his father, crafted from oxen horns. Kazuchiyo had seen him only once before, and at the time found in him no reason to be impressed. Now, he was frozen, and at Aritaka’s mercy.
Lord Aritaka was not alone. In addition to his many surrounding generals and foot soldiers, a figure stood beside him that Kazuchiyo had never seen, nor had he any inkling of their origin. In the dark and rain it was impossible to tell even if it was man or woman or something else, their form being draped in the thick robes of a holy mystic, their long hair swept back from a narrow, sloping face. The stranger was entirely unconcerned with Aritaka’s boasting or Shigenaga’s slow and agonizing death, their attention instead fixed on something in the distance. Perhaps they were listening to the howl that even then continued to ripple across the battlefield.
“You were always a worthy rival,” Lord Aritaka was saying, and Kazuchiyo watched in mounting horror as he motioned two of his generals forward. “And you deserve a worthy death.”
Both unsheathed their swords. The first moved behind the prone Shigenaga, while the second squatted before him, offering up his blade. Kazuchiyo shook, helplessly transfixed, as his father accepted it. But then the two spear-bearers stepped back, wrenching their blades from Shigenaga’s torso, and he lurched. Fresh blood spilled out from beneath his armor, and his already pale face went white. Though he caught himself on his palms, keeping himself partially upright was the most his strength could bear. He couldn’t angle the sword toward his belly as honor dictated.
“Kazu…” he choked out, and he lifted his head, his eyes pleading. Kazuchiyo pulled against his bindings in futility. “Kazuchiyo, you—”
The first general struck. His katana cleaved through Shigenaga’s vertebrae in one clean stroke, severing his head from his body. Kazuchiyo watched, numb, as it rolled a few meters down the slope to rest at Aritaka’s feet. Though the eyes went swiftly dull, they stared back at Kazuchiyo relentlessly, locked in a final image of anguish.
Lord Aritaka sighed. “Put it with the others.”
“Yes, my lord,” said the figure beside him, in a deep and craggy feminine voice. She removed a silk bag from the inside of her kariginu and collected Shigenaga’s head with as much respect as could be shown given the circumstances. “And the boy?”
“Like I said, he comes with us.”
The gnarled man hauled Kazuchiyo to his feet, which could barely hold him. The field smeared into black and gray and the stench of blood, and Kazuchiyo swayed dizzily as his father’s body became one of the thousands. A small cart beyond Aritaka and his entourage carried more silk bags, enough for every one of Shigenaga’s sons and generals. To Kazuchiyo, it was an impossible outcome, and he felt that at any moment he would slip away into some terrible dreamscape.
But then, that scream. Over the rolling field that wrathful cry continued unceasing, and in fact sounded more forceful than ever. Kazuchiyo’s bleary ears clung to it. His throat vibrated around it, as if it spilled from his own lungs. He could not make a sound, but the furious stranger did it for him, and he quaked with emotion.
They marched him north across the field, into the ranks of Aritaka’s foot soldiers. Here the scream grew louder and with time more ragged, interspersed with clashing iron and men cursing. Before long they came upon a circle of Aritaka soldiers, each shifting anxiously even as they shouted orders at the man at its center: the source of that thunderous voice, the howling creature.
To anyone he would have been a ferocious sight, but to Kazuchiyo, torn asunder by an evening of traumas, he was godlike: nearly two meters tall, shoulders broad as a torii gate, legs planted in the earth as sturdy as a centuries-old oaks. Indigo Aritaka armor was fastened haphazardly across his muscular frame as if he had outgrown it in moments, bursting the seams. However, the Tatsutomi spear he brandished suggested that all his armaments had been scavenged from those fallen on the field of battle. His wild crop of brown hair was matted down by blood, and his chest plate was stained with gore. A dozen failed challengers lay at his feet.
As Kazuchiyo watched, one of the surrounding Aritaka men fired an arrow, and it struck deeply in the woven plates of the warrior’s shoulder guard, enough to draw blood. Still he did not slow. He snapped the arrow shaft with his fist and then charged, scattering Aritaka’s bravest. With a vengeful bellow he thrust his spear into the offending archer’s throat. One soldier advanced, hoping to find some opening in the warrior’s defense, only to quickly realize there was none. The spear whipped about with incredible speed, its blunt edge cracking the soldier’s jaw from his face. A second blow felled him onto his back before the blade stabbed clear through his armor to his heart.
The circle widened. The soldiers looked to each other in helpless confusion. For some time a stalemate dragged on as the warrior caught his breath, his dark eyes flashing from one man to the next in challenge.
“What’s taking so long?” said the gnarled man holding Kazuchiyo captive. “Shoot him and be done with it.”
“But you saw—” replied the soldier closest, who flinched in alarm when the warrior turned his eyes on him. He gulped. “There’s gold for you if you can take his head.”
The warrior’s penetrating eyes fell on Kazuchiyo next, but he did not flinch. He stared straight back, more fearful for than of the madman. Already Kazuchiyo had watched invincible men killed by easy strokes. It may have injured his father’s pride to know that watching a stranger felled by Aritaka arrows and spears would be his final, unbearable burden,but to Kazuchiyo this was more than a stranger, this was rage incarnate. This was the fist around his throat, the burning behind his eyes. This was vengeance and fury in human form, a demon, a dragon, a weapon. All the hate he could not raise to his surface was already a force in the world, with dozens of corpses to its credit. If his enemy snuffed even that out, he would have nothing left.
The warrior charged without warning. His face twisted in rage, and he roared, lightning and thunder at once. The gnarled man cast Kazuchiyo down and drew his sword, but his assailant was inescapable. The man’s worn katana snapped like a twig beneath the spear’s crossblades; then his arm snapped, severed at the elbow. All around the soldiers reeled and panicked, those with arrows knocked loosing them on their unstoppable foe. Kazuchiyo shuddered at the sickening thunk of the few that found their mark, but still the warrior fought, gutting and cleaving, while Kazuchiyo watched in awe. He fought until his voice was raw and his mighty knees shook, the Aritaka retreating so far that he couldn’t cross the distance. Even Lord Aritaka himself came to watch the spectacle draw to its inevitable conclusion, the mysterious, robed woman beside him. The vision of a young, fearless warrior driving back the Aritaka soldiers was a fitting beginning for what would one day become his unapproachable legacy.
At last he was spent, collapsing to his knees among his victims. Kazuchiyo was there to catch him. Though neither had arms free or strong enough to bear the other, they leaned chest to chest beneath the cool autumn rain. The warrior trembled, and Kazuchiyo with him. Strangers, then, but only for a while longer.
“Thank you,” whispered Kazuchiyo, thinking that at any moment his champion would crumble at his seams like all the rest. “Thank you—he killed my brother.”
The warrior panted, each hoarse breath stirring the hair against Kazuchiyo’s cheek. “You’re samurai?”
“Yes. My name is Kazuchiyo.”
“Kazuchiyo,” he repeated, blood on his lips. “I’ll kill you, too.”
At the time, he must have meant it. I wondered often, at the end of it all, if he regretted making that promise. But I do know that Kazuchiyo believed him. He always believed in him.
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