Daughter of the Sword by Steve Bein Page B

said, they would be doing the world a favor by committing the Inazuma blade to the flames. In the blazing light of the late-night fire, no one seemed to notice the tsuba on Lord Kanayama’s sword, and no one mentioned the hand guard of the late lord’s weapon at Saito’s hip.
    This is no dishonor, Saito told himself. A samurai is to make himself a living sword. Just as the lord does not lightly commit his loyal samurai to battle, a samurai should not lightly let a masterwork sword be destroyed. No, he thought. No dishonor at all.

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    Lord Ashikaga Owari-no-kami Jinzaemon was as fearsome as he was powerful. His reign over Owari was unquestioned; by now all his intelligent enemies has simply decided it was easier to wait until the old tyrant died, hoping the Ashikaga heir would not be blessed with the same demonic cunning as the father. The Owari territory was coveted land, to be sure, and every neighboring warlord deeply wished to wrest it from Ashikaga’s control. Its long, narrow bay was protected by peninsulas on either side, making it a natural port with geological protection from the all-too-common threat of typhoons. Mountains to the north and west provided further protection against threats of a military nature. The Owari plains were rich rice-yielding bounty, and to make the prize even more tempting, Ashikaga’s armies were far smaller than the forces at his enemies’ command. But with mountains and the sea protecting his flanks, Ashikaga could devote all his limited manpower to the protection of his eastern front, an easily defensible position for such a masterful general.
    Once long ago two rival warlords attacked Owari simultaneously, one with naval power and one by land. Lord Ashikaga routed both of them, devoting only half his forces to each. The first he flanked on both peninsulas as the boats stormed the port, enclosing the enemy in an ever-narrowing V of arrow fire. Flaming arrows did as much damage to ships as steel did to flesh, and the attack wasbroken off before the first sailor reached the shore. The land invaders were allowed to penetrate deep into the plains before the second half of Ashikaga’s troops cut them off from behind and razed their supply lines. The enemy headed south, only to be cut off by archers returning from the sea battle. Turning west, the invaders encountered more archers returning from the opposite peninsula. Surrounded by troops on three sides and mountains on the fourth, the enemy was left to starve for a week in fertile cropland that was unfortunately three months away from the harvest. Both maneuvers were so surprising and so devastatingly fast that the opposing generals had no choice but to believe that Ashikaga’s entire army was deployed on the plains and on the sea coast at the same time, and that any general who could simultaneously deploy the same army on two separate fields of battle should be left to die in his own province unmolested, with the hopes that such inhuman skill would not be inherited by his successor.
    For all his might and cleverness, Ashikaga was an ugly man. His face was like a skull with leather pulled taut across it, cheekbones cutting the sharp lines one might find in a prisoner’s face after two weeks without food. On the left side a razor-straight line ran back from his mouth to a missing earlobe, its path a thick white hairless scar. His topknot and eyebrows were bushy gray, standing in sharp contrast to the ruddy skin permanently bronzed by years of harsh battlefield sun. His body bore the marks of combat as well, but by far the worst of his scars was the sickening twisted knot on his throat. In his youth an archer had put an arrow through Ashikaga’s gullet, and only by the grace of some buddha or demon did he survive. It was said he killed two more men that day before stopping to remove the shaft. Some said he even went back and hunted down the man who shot him. Eventually he recovered from the wound, but the healing had twisted the skin