Musashi - Eiji Yoshikawa [352]
More ghastly still was the sight of the dead and wounded left in his wake. As he continued his tactical retreat up the path, he reached a patch of open land where his pursuers surged forward in a mass attack. In a matter of seconds, four or five men had been cut down. They lay scattered over a wide area, moribund testimony to the speed with which Musashi struck and moved on. He seemed to be everywhere at once.
But for all his agile shifts and dodges, Musashi clung to one basic strategy. He never attacked a group from the front or the side—always obliquely at an exposed corner. Whenever a battery of samurai approached him head on, he somehow contrived to shift like lightning to a corner of their formation, from which he could confront only one or two of them at a time. In this way, he managed to keep them in essentially the same position. But eventually, Musashi was bound to be worn down. Eventually, too, his opponents seemed bound to find a way to thwart his method of attack. To do this, they would need to form themselves into two large forces, before and behind him. Then he would be in even greater danger. It took all Musashi’s resourcefulness to stop that from happening.
At some point, Musashi drew his smaller sword and started to fight with both hands. While the large sword in his right hand was smeared with blood, up to the hilt and the fist that held it, the small sword in his left hand was clean. And though it picked up a bit of flesh the first time it was used, it continued to sparkle, greedy for blood. Musashi himself was not yet fully aware that he had drawn it, even though he was wielding it with the same deftness as the larger sword.
When not actually striking, he held the left sword so that it was pointed directly at his opponent’s eyes. The right sword extended out to the side, forming a broad horizontal arc with his elbow and shoulder, and was largely outside the enemy’s line of vision. If the opponent moved to Musashi’s right, he could bring the right sword into play. If the attacker moved the other way, Musashi could shift the small sword in to his left and trap him between the two swords. By thrusting forward, he could pin the man in one place with the smaller sword and, before there was time to dodge, attack with the large sword. In later years, this method came to be formally named the Two-Sword Technique Against a Large Force, but at this moment he was fighting by pure instinct.
By all accepted standards, Musashi was not a great sword technician. Schools, styles, theories, traditions—none of these meant anything to him. His mode of fighting was completely pragmatic. What he knew was only what he had learned from experience. He wasn’t putting theory into practice; he fought first and theorized later.
The Yoshioka men, from the Ten Swordsmen on down, had all had the theories of the Kyōhachi Style pounded thoroughly into their skulls. Some of them had even gone on to create stylistic variations of their own. Despite being highly trained and highly disciplined fighters, they had no way of gauging a swordsman like Musashi, who had spent his time as an ascetic in the mountains, exposing himself to the dangers presented by nature as often as to those presented by man. To the Yoshioka men, it was incomprehensible that Musashi, with his breathing so erratic, face ashen, eyes bleary with sweat and body covered with gore, was still able to wield two swords and threaten to make short work of anyone who came within range. But he fought on like a god of fire and fury. They themselves were dead tired, and their attempts to pin down this bloody specter were becoming hysterical.
All at once, the tumult increased.
“Run!” cried a thousand voices.
“You, fighting by yourself, run!”
“Run while you can!”
The shouts came from the mountains, the trees, the white clouds above. Spectators on all sides saw the Yoshioka forces actually closing in on Musashi. The impending peril moved them all to try to save