45
STEEL TO STEEL
Swagger turned and strode out the gate, the Muramasa blade over his shoulder, the folds of his hakama jacket tied back by a figure eight of rope around his shoulder, his obi tight, his creases still sharp. He turned right on the little street, walked fifty yards, then diverted to the left through the open gate of Kiyosumi Gardens in the somber rise of light.
He entered a kind of wonderland. Light snow lay upon everything, as did the utter tranquillity of dawn. Before him he saw the pond, a flat sheet of reflection, its surface broken now and then by the ripple of one of the ceremonial carp the size of trout breaking the surface in a flash of golden torso. In one corner, reeds, still green because their verticality gave snow no purchase, waved ever gently, more on their own internal vibration than by any force of atmosphere. Across the way, a pavilion, ivory with a sequence of tile roofs and the elfin upturn of Asian style over stout mahogany pillars and a sea of paned, opaque windows, supported its own mantle of snow. The trees were variously dressed in white as well, the pines supporting it, the willows less cooperative and, like the reeds, still mostly green. Ducks cruised, the big fish fed, the snow lay crisp as sugar, everything was etched to a woodcut genius’s perfection. No modern buildings could be seen. It was a haiku called “Garden, 5:32 a.m., Break of Dawn.” He might have added, “1702.”
He saw the man standing on an island to the left, still a hundred quiet yards away. Swagger followed the path, skipping over rocks where they transected a cove for a shortcut, ducked under willows, turned again to find a wooden bridge, and crossed to the island.
The circle of earth lay possibly thirty feet across, with a shore of rocks artfully arranged, some glazed white in snow. Its trees were willows, bent with their own load of snow, the white on the green, the whole painted magenta by ribbons of sunlight broken through and captured on the surface of the low, dense clouds. Now and then a bubble popped, as a fat carp came up in search of food or merely to belch.
Kondo stood, one hip cocked, with a warrior’s utter narcissism. Like Swagger, he held the saya over a shoulder, almost like a rifle. A smirk marked the handsome face on the square, symmetrical head. He looked like a jazz musician ready for a riff or a ballplayer in the on-deck circle, his muscularity held taut under a black, formal kimono, his radiant vitality almost a heat vapor off his posture.
“So,” he said as Swagger approached, “did Miwa die well?”
“Not particularly,” said Swagger. “He gave some bullshit speech.”
“Alas, I heard it many times. You, Swagger-san, I know you will die well.”
“I doubt it,” said Swagger. “I plan on screaming like a baby. But since it ain’t happening for thirty more years, it ain’t worth worrying about now.”
The jibe brought a sharper smile to Kondo’s confident face. Then he noticed something.
“Oh, I see my father gave you Muramasa’s blade. He actually still believes in all that crap. It’ll be a pleasure to give it back to him without comment this afternoon. He’ll know what it means. That will be my revenge on him. Oh, what a warm family moment.”
“What he’ll get is a bag with your head in it.”
“If Dad’s been helping, that means he sent you to Doshu. I studied with Doshu too. It’s too bad, you know; you can only get so far with Doshu. You’re limited by Doshu’s imagination. You better have more than eight cuts if you’re going to last a minute against me. And when I take your head, Doshu will hear too. I wish I could see that.”
“You must be nervous. You talk too much. I come to fight, not talk.”
“No, I am not nervous, I am eager. This is a red-letter day for me. I didn’t help Miwa win his dirty movie election, but so what? As I say, he was only a pornographer. But I am about to fight and defeat a really great samurai, as I have dreamed of for years. Then I will have defeated in proxy my father, and as he is the living memory of samurai in Japan, I will have entered legend.”
“You’re talking so much you must think you have all the time in the world.”
“I do. And let me tell you why. I have genius, and genius always triumphs. It’s the law of genetics. I have a thousand years of swordsmen’s blood in my veins. Then I have experience. I’ve fought man on man to the death thirty-two times and won all. I know what happens in a duel. I have strength and stamina. I have foreknowledge: I know Doshu’s style and the eight cuts he taught you, and I can easily counter every one with either hand. I also know your particular style: the cuts are shaky, except for your best, migi kiriage, and your footwork is always suspect,” said Kondo.
Swagger said, “You forgot one thing: I cheat.”
The swords came out fast, like the flickering of a snake’s searching tongue, with doubled rasps of polished steel against wood loud against the silence of the dawn. Kondo was much faster. He was so swift in the unleashing, Swagger knew he’d been smart to keep his distance, so that he couldn’t be chopped down in nukitsuke, the draw, and fall ruptured before the fight had even begun.
The island afforded little enough room: Swagger thought that was to his advantage, because the less he ran, the more strength he’d have. The closer he got, the better chance he’d have. If it became a running, cutting thing, like all the movie fights, he was done when his gas ran low, so why bother with the technicalities just to die tired.
Trusting aggression, his old friend, he moved in, quickly cutting the island in half, bringing his blade on high right to an enemy that awaited on the balls of his feet, bent utterly in concentration, his blade thrust before him.
Bob closed, forgetting the swordsman’s shuffle over the bare wood of a dojo. This was in the real world, over clumps of grass, drifts of feathery snow, the odd stone. He launched forward—“Ai!”—with his right-handed kesagiri, but the mercury-slippery Kondo rotated out of sword’s fall, repaying with a fast sideways cut, very strong, classic yokogiri, but Swagger with a speed he never guessed he had (but knew he wouldn’t have for long) got his blade up in time to turn it away, as the steel on steel hit an almost musical tone. Swagger felt the muscle and precision in the blow, even as he turned it and got himself out of range for a second.
“Yes, that’s good, close in, finish it fast. We both know you can’t stay with me. Each second is a point for me. I don’t need to cut you down quickly to win, merely to last until your arms fade,” the yakuza said, that fucking smirk still on his face.
In that second he made as if to relax and exactly as Bob’s subconscious read the relaxation in his body, he knew it to be a fake, and in the next moment, from the pose of muscular softness, Kondo exploded. His move had no coefficient in nature, it was beyond metaphor. What Swagger was doing still alive after that, he never knew, because something cat-fast in himself took over, as his blade didn’t fight Kondo’s for the space, but vacated pronto, turning with a way-less-than-good cut, which Kondo easily thwarted. But Kondo didn’t press the advantage, instead eased backward.
“Not bad. Slow, imperfect, but you still breathe. Let us try you again.”
Tsuki, a straight thrust driven by lunge and locked elbows, flew at his face, a fast-closing raptor, seeking his eyes or his mouth or his throat, and it was only an ancient dinosaur brain somewhere in Swagger’s pelvis that saved him this time, jacking his upper body back an inch beyond the gleamy tip of the katana. Then, stepping to the right, he tried the sideways cut, yokogiri. He cut something, but it was only cloth.
“Agh!” groaned Kondo, deeply affronted, and his rage transferred itself instantaneously to the wicked diagonal kesagiri, which Bob redirected just enough to miss him. Then came a thud as something hard plunged into Bob’s face. It was the hilt, as the enemy swordsman, with not enough room to reverse and get his blade into play, simply reversed and drove, clubbing him hard in the face with his hilt, knocking spiderwebs and fly wings and gunflashes into his mind, setting him up for the kill.
But Swagger wasn’t ready for death yet and grappled the man. Bob chose the moment to repay fa
vor with favor, unleashing a head butt that caught Kondo flush and would have knocked a lesser man to the ground, but Kondo used the energy to break away and reset.
The two stared at each other, each gulping for air, each taut face leaking blood, each set of eyes bulging in the need for information.
Kondo took a small breath.
“You fight like a peasant,” he said.
“I am a peasant,” Bob replied.
Now it was his turn for the tsuki, the fast thrust, though he aimed lower, meaning merely to puncture heart and center chest and bleed his enemy dry. The thrust seemed to take an hour. He stabbed air, withdrew, took a feint cut to his left, and knew that Kondo wouldn’t feint left then cut right the first time and so was stable and locked when a nanosecond later the withdrawal abruptly ceased and became another launch from the left. He rode the strike, tried to turn it to his advantage by stepping inside, but, although the sword was past him, he had momentarily forgotten that his enemy had two arms and with his other one, the guy roped him around the neck. Swagger drove backward, then yielded with a trickster’s cunning, dropped to one knee, and heaved the man over his shoulder, bracing himself on his own blade to stay upright.
That saved his balance but it meant he was behind the curve in getting the blade back in play, and by the time he was ready to cut, so was the other man, having rolled adroitly through the throw to arrive standing in a cloud of snow sprinkles his fall had raised, his hair a mess. Bob shivered, ordering some small pain to abate for the moment.
“Again, you surprise me. Two minutes of fighting, you have even drawn blood, and you’re still standing and spitting.”
Bob had no words for the man. He yearned to nurse the terrific clout he’d taken under the eye and now battled a new enemy beside the real one, his age, his lack of experience, and his fear: his left eye was swelling. One-eyed, he might as well be blind.
He gathered in some breath, trying not to make it obvious, and ran through homilies that might help him.
The moon in the cold stream like a mirror.
Nah. Nada.
Think of sex.
Bad idea.
Think of the scythe, the smooth sweep of the blade through the clear Idaho air.
But as he was reminding himself to think of the scythe, a scythe came at him, that hard-powered kesagiri, what a magnificent thing it was, maybe the best ever, all power concentrated in four inches of flying yakiba, and if he weren’t again lucky as hell, it would have cleaved him, clavicle to belly button, and left all his secrets to spill out on the nice white snow.
Inside the thrust, he head-butted again, at the same time trying to find enough play to get his own point into flesh, but the butt was a glancing thing, more of an ear slap, and by the time his blade was where Kondo was, Kondo was no longer there.
Bob gulped.
Christ, he felt old and used.
“Feel fear? I see it in your eyes. You have accepted your defeat. Wonderful. I can do it quick. You won’t feel a thing. They just fall, wordlessly, without a sound. I’ve never heard a cry. The eight seconds of oxygen in your brain goes fast. The pain never catches up with it.”
Bob’s answer was yokogiri, left to right, driven by the proper “Ai!” because expelling the air in perfect timing hastened the blade. He sliced the air cleanly in two. A lesser man would have fallen in both directions at once. Kondo pirouetted into a new defensive position, then stepped forward with a high kick and a “Hai!” and drove a superspeed diagonal at Swagger who fortunately had a nervous system still enough in the fight to react and leap ahead. In a blinding flash Kondo unleashed another giant power cut, this time his own version of yokogiri, left to right, much more perfectly formed than Bob’s, much more elegant and worthy of a movie. The wicked point of the blade cut Bob’s hakama sleeve and maybe an inch or so of skin. Swagger smelled blood, his own. That was a serious cut, deep, almost to the bone. It needed stitches or it would bleed him out in an hour or so. But it wasn’t to guts or heart or lungs, it took down no bone structures, it didn’t interrupt the flow of neurons, it just fucking hurt.
He rotated leftward, bumped into something hard, the thin trunk of one of the ceremonial willows, and maybe lost a step. At that moment, from utter repose, Kondo fired another yokogiri at him and he winced, not fast enough to block, too tired to duck.
But instead of opening his throat like a broken gutter, the blade lost possibly a tenth of its speed as it hit the willow trunk, glided through without breaking a sweat, and then halted and withdrew a few inches from his face.
“Pretty cool,” said Kondo. “You haven’t seen that in a movie, have you?”
Indeed, he hadn’t. Suddenly snow on the willow leaves shook itself loose as the top half of the tree tumbled, trailing spirals of snow.
Swagger took a shot at kiriage, the rising cut, left to right, his best option, but it was too slow.
“I’ve seen better,” said Kondo. “Really, I think Doshu would admonish you for that one.”
Bob gulped air.
“No snappy patter? You’re spent. That was your last cut. You have no offense.”
With that Swagger lunged again, tsuki hard, but spent most of his energy in the thrust, which connected with nothing except the void that Kondo had so recently occupied.
Swagger sucked hard for oxygen. God, where was his second wind?
“Swagger, let me finish it. No need to go out on a bad cut, screaming, your guts hanging out. I can put an instant end to your suffering.”
Swagger responded to the offer with a diagonal issued from on high that was so awkward and poorly timed it was almost an insult to Kondo. It missed by what felt like seven yards. He had almost nothing left.
“Just let me end it now, fast and clean, old lion.”
Bob didn’t take the advice, as expressed in shinchokugiri, a vertical downward, but badly out of timing and harmless.
“If you didn’t kill me early, you aren’t killing me at all,” Kondo said. “Okay. I offered. I pay my respects. This has been great. You’re a valiant guy. But the party’s over. Five hard cuts and you’ll only be able to stay with me through four. I know you will die strong, great samurai.”
“Fuck you” was all the blown man’s wretched mind could come up with.
“Hai!” screamed Kondo.
The blows came so fast Swagger’s eyes could not stay with them, only the dying warrior reptile far inside took over his instincts and got soft parries on the first left-hand diagonal, the second left-hand diagonal, somehow got horizontal for a harder, low-blade block on a vertical, lurched to the right to dissuade the fourth, now right-handed diagonal, and dropped to come against the final side cut, the yokogiri.
No time.
No gas.
No speed.
His blade couldn’t catch up with the blur of steel that seemed to pick up acceleration as it vectored hard to his body.
It was perfect yokogiri, with Kondo’s full might and genius behind it, and as he knew it would, it flew true into the shred of opening under Bob’s lagging defense. Kondo had an image, almost of woodcut clarity, of what must happen next.
Yakiba—tempered edge—sheers through hip bone, shattering it, continues downward, shattering the femur ball by the inevitable physics of its own impact reverberation, then shatters the femur itself and with it nips the femoral artery, that torrent of blood. Sundered, the femoral deposits its fluid in midair in a fine and driving rush to turn the snow below to purple slush. The blade itself, far from spent, cleaves through what remains of flesh, breaks free, its amputation complete, and Bob falls as he exsanguinates. Clinical death is possibly not instantaneous but certainly occurs within eight seconds.
Yet even as his brain told Kondo that must happen, it did not happen. Instead odd vibrations of uncertainty came his way, as he felt the cut stop hard and shallow and his own hilt torque wildly, almost out of his hands, though he was fast enough to recover even as an old adage somehow came to mind. Who said it? Where? When? Why was
it so familiar?
Steel cuts flesh, steel cuts bone, steel does not cut steel.
He struggled to regain timing but was not quite fast enough.
It was the migi kiriage, the rising cut, left to right, the scythe cut, Swagger’s best, honed on desert slopes under a hard and ceaseless sun. For his part, bad old Muramasa was with it all the way. His blade hungered for blood, driving up from just above the hip, through hoses and ducts and wet linkages and mechanics, through a whole anatomy lesson of viscera, splitting them wide so they could jet-empty their contents upon the snow. It wasn’t Swagger’s best cut, for it wore out at the halfway point before cutting the spine, much less the lungs. But even Doshu would have counted it adequate.
He withdrew, and seeing that which was far as if close and that which was close as if far, segued rather gracefully from recovery into the next most accessible position, which was kasumi (“mist”), a horizontal, over-the-shoulders construction supported on reversed wrists.
“Feel the fear at last?” Bob asked, and maybe saw a glint of it in the man’s stricken face: I am mortal, I will die, my time is up, why why why?
Bob’s kasumi then transcended miraculously and of its own volition into tsuki, not well aimed but well enough as it punctured and passed through Kondo’s throat, splitting his larynx and jugular, half-severing his spine, and weirdly sustaining him in midfall for a half-second before withdrawal.
Kondo toppled, issuing fiery liquids from his ruptures. His face was blank, his eyes distant, his mouth slack. When he hit, a reddened puff of snow flew up.
Swagger stood back from the carnage and his hand flew to his hip, where the steel inserted courtesy of a Russian sniper in Vietnam decades ago had stopped Kondo’s brilliant cut. It was Swagger’s only card, and he’d been wise enough to play it last. The cut was precise butchery, smooth but shallow, and some black gruel pulsed from it, but it wasn’t geysering spectacularly, meaning no artery had been cut. Bob got a pouch of QuiKlot out, tore the top off with his teeth, and poured the clotting agent into the wound, knowing again that stitches were mandatory within an hour, if he had the strength. Then he poured more on the bloodier cut on his left shoulder.