Musashi - Eiji Yoshikawa [119]
The rōnin had come to watch the carnage, not to participate in it, but their weakness had led Musashi to attack them first. At the very beginning, they held together fairly well, because they thought the priests would soon come to their rescue. But the priests stood silent and motionless as Musashi quickly slaughtered five or six rōnin, throwing the others into confusion. Before long they were slashing wildly in all directions, as often as not injuring one other.
For most of the time, Musashi wasn’t really conscious of what he was doing. He was in a sort of trance, a murderous dream in which body and soul were concentrated in his three-foot sword. Unconsciously, his whole life experience—the knowledge his father had beaten into him, what he had learned at Sekigahara, the theories he had heard at the various schools of swordsmanship, the lessons taught him by the mountains and the trees—everything came into play in the rapid movements of his body. He became a disembodied whirlwind mowing down the herd of rōnin, who by their stunned bewilderment left themselves wide open to his sword.
For the short duration of the battle, one of the priests counted the number of times he inhaled and exhaled. It was all over before he had taken his twentieth breath.
Musashi was drenched with the blood of his victims. The few remaining rōnin were also covered with gore. The earth, the grass, even the air was bloody. One of their number let out a scream, and the surviving rōnin scattered in all directions.
While all this was going on, Jōtarō was absorbed in prayer. His hands folded before him and his eyes lifted skyward, he implored, “Oh, God in heaven, come to his aid! My master, down there on the plain, is hopelessly outnumbered. He’s weak, but he isn’t a bad man. Please help him!”
Despite Musashi’s instructions to go away, he couldn’t leave. The place where he had finally chosen to sit, his hat and his mask beside him, was a knoll from which he could see the scene around the bonfire in the distance.
“Hachiman! Kompira! God of Kasuga Shrine! Look! My master is walking directly into the enemy. Oh, gods of heaven, protect him. He isn’t himself. He’s usually mild and gentle, but he’s been a little bit strange ever since this morning. He must be crazy, or else he wouldn’t take on that many at once! Oh, please, please, help him!”
After calling on the deities a hundred times or more, he noticed no visible results of his efforts and started getting angry. Finally, he was shouting: “Aren’t there any gods in this land? Are you going to let the wicked people win, and the good man be killed? If you do that, then everything they’ve always told me about right and wrong is a lie! You can’t let him be killed! If you do, I’ll spit on you!”
When he saw that Musashi was surrounded, his invocations turned to curses, directed not only at the enemy but at the gods themselves. Then, realizing that the blood being spilled on the plain was not his teacher’s, he abruptly changed his tune. “Look! My master’s not a weakling after all! He’s beating them!”
This was the first time Jōtarō had ever witnessed men fighting like beasts to the death, the first time he had ever seen so much blood. He began to feel that he was down there in the middle of it, himself smeared with gore. His heart turned somersaults, he felt giddy and light-headed.
“Look at him! I told you he could do it! What an attack! And look at those silly priests, lined up like a bunch of cawing crows, afraid to take a step!”
But this last was premature, for as he spoke the priests of the Hōzōin began moving in on Musashi.
“Oh, oh! This looks bad. They’re all attacking him at once. Musashi’s in trouble!” Forgetting everything, out of his senses with anxiety, Jōtarō darted like a fireball toward the scene of impending disaster.
Abbot Inshun gave the command to charge, and in an instant, with a tremendous roar of voices, the lancers flew into action.