Musashi - Eiji Yoshikawa [303]
“I was curious as to how you’d talk, and now I know—like an idiot. But your babbling intrigues me. Come down from there, and I’ll open your conceited eyes for you!”
“What’s your weapon? Sword? Wooden sword?”
“Why ask when you don’t have a wooden sword? You came expecting to use a sword, didn’t you?”
“I did, but I thought if you wanted to use a wooden sword, I’d take yours away from you and fight with that.”
“I don’t have one, you fool! Enough big talk. Fight!”
“Ready?”
“No!”
Denshichirō’s heels made a black slanted line about nine feet long as he opened a space for Musashi to land in. Musashi quickly sidestepped twenty or thirty feet along the veranda before jumping down. Then when they had moved, swords sheathed, eyeing each other warily, about two hundred feet from the temple, Denshichirō lost his head. Abruptly he drew and swung. His sword was long, just the right size for his body. Making only a slight whistling sound, it went through the air with amazing lightness, straight to the spot where Musashi had been standing.
Musashi was faster than the sword. Even quicker was the springing of the glittering blade from his own scabbard. It looked as though they were too close together for both of them to emerge unscathed, but after a moment of dancing reflected light from the swords, they backed off.
Several tense minutes passed. The two combatants were silent and motionless, swords stationary in the air, point aimed at point but separated by a distance of about nine feet. The snow piled on Denshichirō’s brow dropped to his eyelashes. To shake it off, he contorted his face until his forehead muscles looked like countless moving bumps. His bulging eyeballs glowed like the windows of a smelting furnace, and the exhalations of his deep, steady breathing were as hot and gusty as those from a bellows.
Desperation had entered his thinking, for he realized how bad his position was. “Why am I holding the sword at eye level when I always hold it above my head for the attack?” he asked himself. He was not thinking in the ordinary sense of the word. His very blood, palpitating audibly through his veins, told him that. But his whole body, down to his toenails, was concentrated in an effort to present an image of ferocity to the enemy.
The knowledge that the eye-level stance was not one in which he excelled nagged him. Any number of times he itched to raise his elbows and get the sword above his head, but it was too risky. Musashi was on the alert for just such an opening, that tiny fraction of a second when his vision would be blocked by his arms.
Musashi held his sword at eye level too, with his elbows relaxed, flexible and capable of movement in any direction. Denshichirō’s arms, held in an unaccustomed stance, were tight and rigid, and his sword unsteady. Musashi’s was absolutely still; snow began to pile up on its thin upper edge.
As he watched hawklike for the slightest slip on his opponent’s part, Musashi counted the number of times he breathed. He not only wanted to win, he had to win. He was acutely conscious of once again standing on the borderline—on one side life, on the other, death. He saw Denshichirō as a gigantic boulder, an overpowering presence. The name of the god of war, Hachiman, passed through his mind.
“His technique is better than mine,” Musashi thought candidly. He had had the same feeling of inferiority at Koyagyū Castle, when he had been encircled by the four leading swordsmen of the Yagyū School. It was always this way when he faced swordsmen of the orthodox schools, for his own technique was without form or reason, nothing more, really, than a do-or-die method. Staring at Denshichirō, he saw that the style Yoshioka Kempō had created and spent his life developing had both simplicity and complexity, was well ordered and systematic, and was not to be overcome by brute strength