The 47th samurai

“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 favor 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 cu

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 co

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.