Musashi - Eiji Yoshikawa [304]
Musashi was cautious about making any unnecessary movements. His primitive tactics refused to come into play. To an extent that surprised him, his arms rebelled against being extended. The best he could do was to maintain a conservative, defensive stance and wait. His eyes grew red searching for an opening, and he prayed to Hachiman for victory.
With swelling excitement, his heart began to race. If he had been an ordinary man, he might have been sucked into a whirlpool of confusion and succumbed. Yet he remained steady, shaking off his sense of inadequacy as if it were no more than snow on his sleeve. His ability to control this new exhilaration was the result of having already survived several brushes with death. His spirit was fully awake now, as though a veil had been removed from before his eyes.
Dead silence. Snow accumulated on Musashi’s hair, on Denshichirō’s shoulders.
Musashi no longer saw a great boulder before hint. He himself no longer existed as a separate person. The will to win had been forgotten. He saw the whiteness of the snow falling between himself and the other man, and the spirit of the snow was as light as his own. The space now seemed an extension of his own body. He had become the universe, or the universe had become him. He was there, yet not there.
Denshichirō’s feet inched forward. At the tip of his sword, his willpower quivered toward the start of a movement.
Two lives expired with two strokes of a single sword. First, Musashi attacked to his rear, and Otaguro Hyōsuke’s head, or a piece of it, sailed past Musashi like a great crimson cherry, as the body staggered lifelessly toward Denshichirō. The second horrendous scream—Denshichirō’s cry of attack—was cut short midway, the broken-off sound thinning out into the space around them. Musashi leapt so high that he appeared to have sprung from the level of his opponent’s chest. Denshichirō’s big frame reeled backward and dropped in a spray of white snow.
Body pitifully bent, face buried in the snow, the dying man cried, “Wait! Wait!”
Musashi was no longer there.
“Hear that?”
“It’s Denshichirō!”
“He’s been hurt!”
The black forms of Genzaemon and the Yoshioka disciples rushed across the courtyard like a wave.
“Look! Hyōsuke’s been killed!”
“Denshichirō!”
“Denshichirō!”
Yet they knew there was no use calling, no use thinking about medical treatment. Hyōsuke’s head had been sliced sideways from the right ear to the middle of the mouth, Denshichirō’s from the top down to the right cheekbone. All in a matter of seconds.
“That’s … that’s why I warned you,” sputtered Genzaemon. “That’s why I told you not to take him lightly. Oh, Denshichirō, Denshichirō!” The old man hugged his nephew’s body, trying in vain to console it.
Genzaemon clung to Denshichirō’s corpse, but it angered him to see the others milling about in the blood-reddened snow. “What happened to Musashi?” he thundered.
Some had already started searching; they saw no sign of Musashi. “He’s not here,” came the answer, timid and obtuse.
“He’s around somewhere,” barked Genzaemon. “He hasn’t got wings. If I don’t get in a blow of revenge, I can never again hold my head up as a member of the Yoshioka family. Find him!”
One man gasped and pointed. The others fell back a pace and stared in the direction indicated.
“It’s Musashi.”
“Musashi?”
As the idea sank in, silence filled the air, not the tranquility of a place of worship, but an ominous, diabolical silence as though ears, eyes and brains had ceased to function.
Whatever the man had seen, it was not Musashi, for Musashi was standing under the eaves of the nearest building. His eyes fixed on the Yoshioka men and his back pressed to the wall, he edged his way along until he reached the southwest corner of the Sanjūsangendō. He climbed onto the veranda and crept, slowly and quietly, to the center.
“Will they attack?” he asked himself. When they made no move in his direction, he continued stealthily on to the north side of the building and, with a bound, disappeared into the darkness.