You are arrogant, samurai. Oh, put the blade away. Your arrogance and hubris has been bred into you, part of the quest for the perfect warrior. But in your search to gain glory for yourself and power for your lord, you forget that all are not as you are.
Listen, then, and hear how it was...
"Fortunes and Winds!" squealed his friend Kyu delightedly. Chiyo noted with a wry smile that Kyu's reaction might well have been far less joyful if not for the fact that he had dropped out at the end of the last round. Hibe and Tsu-tau grumbled, but paid up, while Kibiko, who -- quite appropriately as they would be married next Harvest Festival -- had bet on him to win, collected her winnings smugly. Chiyo hooked a suggestive arm around the waist of his bethrothed, and rattled the dice-cup at his friends with just the faintest hint of a larcenous gleam in his eye.
Hibe groaned and shook his head. "Not today, I think, Chiyo. As it is I have almost no coppers left to buy anything from the peddlers when they come through next week."
Little nine-year-old Tsu-tau opened his mouth -- no doubt to say something very similar -- but clapped it shut again as they all heard the sound.
Hoofbeats.
The five friends in the corner of the village square threw themselves forward instantly. Hoofbeats -- three sets, by the sound of them -- meant the magistrate, and the magistrate meant a whole harvest of trouble if a group of heimin were caught playing Fortunes and Winds, which was after all a samurai game. Samurai were notably touchy about heimin who had enough temerity to even *think* about playing samurai games.
Under cover of the prostrative motion, Chiyo kicked the cup and dice into the irrigation ditch. They could find them later -- if there was a later. What could the magistrate want?
Chiyo heard rather than saw the horses draw to a halt in the centre of the square, and a harshly cadenced voice bark, "Where is your headman?"
The unfortunate bearer of that title crabbed forward on elbows and knees and ground his face into the mud before the magistrate's horse. The samurai eyed him callously for a moment, then barked again, still addressing the village at large. "Your Lord --" the capital letter was unmistakable in his inflection "-- requires you for his armies. A levy of two hundred able-bodied men must be ready to join his march for war, here, in four days' time, clothed and provisioned. Your Lord will provide weapons and livery."
Chiyo swallowed hard. Two hundred men would strip the village of its entire able-bodied population, leaving only old men, women, and children under the age of ten to bring in the harvest. Provisioning those same two hundred would empty the storage barns set aside for lean winters like this one promised to be, and more food would have to be bought at market or elsewhere, since their Lord would hardly exempt the village from its taxes simply because he had commandeered its menfolk.
Suddenly it struck Chiyo. This was his fourteenth year. He would be amongst the men in that two hundred.
As Chiyo watched, he could see all these facts arriving in the consciousness of the village headman also. Hibe, next to Chiyo, stifled a sob/gasp of horror as his father, who had been headman for only a few months since the death of old Kikunu, made the fatal error of attempting to beg for clemency.
"Please, sama," he whimpered. "The village cannot survive if we miss the harvest in so lean a year. Please, sama, may we serve some other way, sama?"
The magistrate's smile was pure, distilled cruelty. "Is that so?" he asked as he slid from his horse's back, his sandals throwing a sheet of mud at Hibe's father, smiling that terrible smile all the while. "Is that so, now?"
He sank into a squat by Hibe's petrified father, a horrible combination of mock-sympathy and sheer arrogance etching itself into his face. Chiyo prayed under his breath to all the Fortunes he could think of: Hotei, Jurojin, Ebisu, Inari, Lady Sun Herself. Beside him, he could hear as Hibe echoed him.
"Is that so?" the samurai repeated. Hibe's father nodded, any other response impossible by the waves of abject terror that wracked him. The magistrate seized him by his neck and dragged him to his feet. His eyes glittered nastily.
"Touch my sword," he commanded.
"S-sama...?" Hibe's father stammered.
"Are you disobeying me, filth?" the magistrate demanded, his smile shining malignantly.
The moment froze, etching itself into Chiyo's memory. Amaterasu shining in her noon brilliance, the cruel-eyed magistrate with a broad smile on his face, his two doshin watching dispassionately from their horses' backs, the villagers all cowering pathetically in the shadows of their paltry dwellings, and the headman, Hibe's father, standing there and quivering, the terror rolling off him in mighty waves, stretching a trembling hand out to the blue-lacquered hilt of the magistrate's sword...
And then there was a flash of Lady Sun's light in the magistrate's hand, and Hibe's father's head lay there staring up at his own body, and the magistrate's hands were full of razor katana and covered in heimin blood.
Hibe's family could not dare to run to their dead patriarch -- to do so would invite further ruin from the magistrate. They could only crouch there, grinding their bellies into the mire, hoping that they would not all be ordered to their deaths for the headman's 'impertinence'.
The magistrate wiped his blade on Hibe's father's body and expertly returned the katana to its saya, then cast that terrible gaze over the cowering village. Selecting one of the frightened men kneeling before him at random, he crooked a finger. "You. Come here." The man -- his name was Iudio, and he was a rice- farmworker from the town's outskirts -- snaked forward on his belly, not even daring to rise to hands and knees for fear of retribution. "You are headman now, offal," the magistrate proclaimed. "See that the levy is ready -- and for your impertinence, you have *two* days." He spun around and swung up onto his horse, lashing it into movement.
None of the villagers dared look up until long after the hoofbeats had faded into silence.
"It goes well, sama," Doji Kyuzomo answered. "Some villages required... encouragement... but no more than that."
Uji nodded, and with a wave of his hand, dismissed the magistrate and returned to his conference.
Not far from Chiyo, another of the peasant levies perched on a hillside, playing on a set of simple bamboo pipes he had brought with him from home. The haunting skein of music wafted into the night sky. Chiyo let himself sink into the melody as he remembered his trek with the army.
Days had passed into weeks and weeks into months, and months had dissolved into a kind of no-time which was measured in a simple cycling of day and night with no discernable changes. Days turned, but did not pass.
Camp scuttlebutt, however, suggested that the Lord -- Chiyo had overheard samurai referring to him as Kuwanan-sama, but any heimin heard using that name would be courting razor-sharp steel death -- had got to where he was going, or found what he was trying to find, or simply decided to give it up and go back home to his court, and his geisha, and his poems, and his games of go. Some even went as far to suggest that some units of the army had fought skirmishes already, but that was ridiculous. Chiyo was sure he would have known. But those same rumors hinted battle was coming in a handful of days, and Chiyo suspected -- hoped -- that was true. After the Lord's army had fought his war, they could go home. He might be in time to help with the harvest.
Idly, Chiyo wondered what his mother and bethrothed were doing as he finished the last of his meal and levered himself up from the ground to go in search of a game of dice.
Feeling futility settle like frost on her aching bones, old before there time with the stresses of field work, Chiyo's mother let herself sink back into the mire, not really caring if she suffocated.
It rained constantly now, and the heimin levies were ill-equipped for such temperatures. Most mornings, one or two died from exposure, and one or two more fell over and did not get up each evening. Chiyo had unashamedly stolen a straw jingasa from one of those dead heimin; the need for survival overrode his instinctive aversion to the act.
As the rain dripped through the imperfectly-woven straw of his hat, Chiyo wondered if the samurai in their fine tents even noticed it rained. He knew the priests preached that suffering in this life was rewarded in the next, but as far as he could discern, that meant every heimin in the army was a future Emperor.
He forced himself to eat the last of the millet -- he might be flogged for food wastage if he tipped it out, as was his inclination -- and, lacking the energy to seek entertainment, lay back on the wet ground and observed what little was visible of the rain-slashed sunset. The harvest must be long in by now, he mused. I wonder what my mother is eating this night?
"Mistress Sezu?" called one of the men who had remained, too old to lift a spear for his lord. "Iko has died."
Chiyo's mother bowed her head in a moment of sadness, remembering. Iko had been a happy, smiling little girl of eight summers, with the joy of Lady Sun always in her eyes. She had been a ray of peace and rest to everyone about her. And now she was dead, wasted away from lack of food, just like Mistress Sezu's own daughter and that daughter's two younger brothers. She envied her eldest, who had been taken by their lord to die quickly on the end of a sword, or spear, or arrowshaft, instead of remaining here to watch everyone and everything you loved -- your whole life -- wither around you.
She blinked away the tears she hadn't realised she was shedding and went to help them carry the child's body to a much-overused funeral pyre, caste distinctions abandoned in the face of the more compelling necessity: lack of manpower.
Then, suddenly, the Lord's tessen flashed as a beam of sunlight stabbed its way through the massed cloudbanks, and Chiyo charged as one with the mass of samurai and heimin all around him.
The battle was a nightmare straight from the dark realms of Chiyo's most sweaty, terror-ridden sleep. He swung and stabbed with his yari, not caring who or if he hit, his only desire to escape alive from the madness.
Suddenly, his eyes focussed with sharp clarity on the man in front of him. He wore different colours and he had another face, but otherwise Chiyo was facing himself -- a frightened farmboy taken from his home and family and told to kill with no comprehension of what cause he fought for; driven by a terrible need to escape from the horror of carnage alive. That necessity was all that controlled Chiyo as he raised his spear and, with a single thrust, slew that other self. Rain made his spearhaft wet and the ground treacherous, but he stumbled on, killing himself again, and again, and again, searching for a way out as the sky sobbed its regret all around him.
Then a spearhaft took him in the back of the head, and he collapsed to the ground as his consciousness flew.
The only thing that moved was the stink of death, rustling among the leaves on the trees.
The sound of pipes stopped very suddenly, never to begin again.
He took a few stumbling steps and then sat down, tears and blood intermingling freely with the rivulets of rain trickling down his face as he silently beseeched the uncaring heavens to share their insight with him; to tell him why this had to happen, where his friends and family went, where his life went.
He never so much as noticed he was sitting on the disembowelled corpse of his friend Hibe.
Kuwanan nodded, then paused as he spotted movement out on the battlefield.
"What is that, Uji?" he asked. Uji squinted, then made a gesture of dismissal.
"Just a heimin, sama."