Stephen Hunter - The 47th samurai

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 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 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.