Stephen Hunter - The 47th samurai

He stepped into darkness.

“Hey,” he said, “anybody home? Goddamn, the door wasn’t locked, you must be open.”

He heard shuffling from behind a curtain, some whispers.

He bulled his way back with a lurch, stepped through the curtain, spilling awkwardly into the larger rear room, and there beheld a strange spectacle. A small old man with hippie hair and spaceman goggles sat on a platform with the blade, which Bob recognized instantly by shape and length, though now it gleamed like some rare piece of jewelry.

Six extremely husky young men, all in black suits, three in sunglasses, all holding sheathed wakizashi, stood across from him. He almost laughed: they looked like the Notre Dame interior line doing an en masse imitation of the Blues Brothers.

Suddenly the Japanese began to jabber, an excited, stunned blast of men talking over other men, until finally one yelled loudly and seemed to take command. He leaned forward and sniffed.

“You drunk. You go home. Go now, go fast.”

“Just want to get this here sword shined up so it’s like that thing there. Damn, that’s a pretty one. Sir, can you make this one like that one?” He held the sheathed wakizashi and waved it about theatrically.

The leader spoke harshly and two of the linemen came at Bob, bulking up as they came, their muscles bunching as they tensed, their right hands forming fists.

“Whoa, whoa,” he said, “no rough stuff, fellas, please, please!”

The bruisers halted.

Then he looked at the old man, who looked back. He winked. The old man winked.

A frozen moment transpired as everybody took stock. Eyes flashed this way and that, hands tightened on hilts, breathing became harsh. Bob was suddenly quiet, wary, eating them up. It was a moment that seemed to last an eternity. One could compose a haiku during its exquisite extenuation.

Bob looked at the fat leader.

“The one he’s polishing? The one you killed the Yanos to get? I want it back. And I want you knocking at the door to hell.”

Then it was over, as if no concept of quietude or peace existed anywhere on earth. It was time to cut.

The two closest yaks went for their swords to cut down the American, but they were not fast enough. Iai-Jutsu. The art of drawing and cutting. It was called nukitsuke. With his off-the-charts hand speed Swagger got the blade out-it clacked dryly as the transaction between blade and saya occurred-and into a horizontal cut called “crosswind” by Yagyu, one-handed, the cut landing with his front foot, the body weight behind it for power, so full of adrenaline he drove through both of them. Hidari yokogiri, his old friend, cutting horizontally from left to right. He thought he’d missed, for he only felt the slightest resistance, and for a nanosecond had an image of disaster. But the disaster was theirs. The blade slashed deeply in a straight line, gut to gut, through suit, shirt, undershirt, skin, fat, entrails, viscera, spleen, liver, whatever, and just kept on going in a mad driving arc, leaving in its wake nothing, and then everything. The blood pushed out with a good deal of power. It didn’t explode, as in too many movies, and spritz as though a sprinkler had projected it, it just sloshed out heavily, along with two breakfasts. And it kept on coming, seemingly gallons of it, in a red dump that literally sounded tidelike as it splashed against the floor. One stricken man went down like a sack of potatoes fallen off a truck; the other just stood there, stupefied, stepped back, trying to hold his guts in, and then sat down to die.

Without thinking, Bob’s blade rode the energy high and came up into issuing from above, better known in the country of its origin as kami-hasso, and he watched as another man, sword high in jodan, came galloping at him. Under such circumstances, most men would panic: a huge, angry, bulged-eye man of immense strength charging full bore, the sword raised in his hands as he gathered strength to unleash a sundering blow, he was every mad psycho in every bad horror movie ever made. He screamed dramatically. But with eyes that saw far as though it were close and close as though it were a distant mountain, Bob waited until the clumsy drive of the blade announced itself and then with a quick small movement slipped to the left and shimmied into safety exactly as, trailing blade, he cut the big one’s belly open deeply, and the sword never fell. This one instead kept going by him, turned, eyes now spent of rage and filling instead with horror at the immense damage that had been done to him, went to one knee, dropped the sword, then toppled clumsily forward.

Bob saw none of this. He turned and watched as the three remaining split up, two going one way, the third the other as they came around the old man on the platform, who watched the craziness largely indifferent. Bob’s lizard brain understood without actual thought that fighting one was better than fighting two, so he rotated to the left, coming around to meet the lone man on the left side of the inert polisher on his platform. His enemy was a slight but older fellow, not given to panic or stupidity. His long face intent, the sword before him, he approached steadily, just watching, waiting for Bob to give him an opening, which Bob of course didn’t, so he attempted to make one. His sword flashed laterally, the classic kesagiri, shoulder to navel, left to right, on the diagonal, but from somewhere at a speed that has no place in time, Bob read the cues-“The eyes are the key to reading the actions of the mind: the light or gleam in an opponent’s eyes is as revealing as the movements of the rest of his body”-and rose to take the cut on his own blade, rode the blade down, and then reversed. It was uke-nagashi, the flowing block, and he absorbed the energy from his opponent, seized it, then unleashed it, snapping through with his wrist and extending one-handed in as small a space as possible. Throat. At the end of the arc, the point was traveling at stunning speed, generating amazing foot-pounds of energy, taking all of Swagger’s strength and distilling it to one small cutting edge.

Results looked unpleasant, even shocking, but worse than that was the sudden noise the man made, a hideous wailing, as air and blood were forced from his split larynx and the realization of his own inevitable doom overcame him, causing his lungs to expel their atmospheres forcefully. But he did not fall. By one of the eccentricities of a dying body’s last spurts of energy, his knees locked and he stood still, arms fallen, sword lost, spewing blood from the cut throat-though in a kind of gurgly fountain style, not the patented Toho spray-as his eyes looked at nothing. Then, finally, like a tree, he fell, hitting the puddled blood so hard he kicked up splatters, some of which suddenly danced across Bob’s face, the old man’s face, and the ceiling.

The other two came around the old man’s platform and confronted Bob, separating slightly; they dropped into classic tachi, relaxed standing, the sword before them, as they slid through the blood steadily on small, floating steps, eyes steady, faces intent, not angry or frightened. Bob found himself-who the hell told him this was best?-in kamehasso, sword higher, almost a batting stance but relaxed, trying and finding it within himself to stay calm as they rotated around the front of the platform and came at him smoothly. He looked for his opening, they looked for theirs and had the advantage because they could spread out on the sound idea that he could not-being no Musashi-fight in two hemispheres at once, and whichever he chose to defend, the fellow assaulting from the other would deliver the death cut.

He knew without thinking it, he had to be the aggressor. He didn’t come to a conclusion, it was just there before him, as certain solutions to certain vexing problems had come to him in his last fight, against the little girl.