Stephen Hunter - The 47th samurai

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 connected with nothing except the void that Kondo had so recently occupied.

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.

No time.

No gas.

No speed.

His blade couldn’t catch up with the blur of steel that seemed to pick up acceleration as it vectored hard to his body.

It was perfect yokogiri, with Kondo’s full might and genius behind it, and as he knew it would, it flew true into the shred of opening under Bob’s lagging defense. Kondo had an image, almost of woodcut clarity, of what must happen next.

Yakiba-tempered edge-sheers through hip bone, shattering it, continues downward, shattering the femur ball by the inevitable physics of its own impact reverberation, then shatters the femur itself and with it nips the femoral artery, that torrent of blood. Sundered, the femoral deposits its fluid in midair in a fine and driving rush to turn the snow below to purple slush. The blade itself, far from spent, cleaves through what remains of flesh, breaks free, its amputation complete, and Bob falls as he exsanguinates. Clinical death is possibly not instantaneous but certainly occurs within eight seconds.

Yet even as his brain told Kondo that must happen, it did not happen. Instead odd vibrations of uncertainty came his way, as he felt the cut stop hard and shallow and his own hilt torque wildly, almost out of his hands, though he was fast enough to recover even as an old adage somehow came to mind. Who said it? Where? When? Why was it so familiar?

Steel cuts flesh, steel cuts bone, steel does not cut steel.

He struggled to regain timing but was not quite fast enough.

It was the migi kiriage, the rising cut, left to right, the scythe cut, Swagger’s best, honed on desert slopes under a hard and ceaseless sun. For his part, bad old Muramasa was with it all the way. His blade hungered for blood, driving up from just above the hip, through hoses and ducts and wet linkages and mechanics, through a whole anatomy lesson of viscera, splitting them wide so they could jet-empty their contents upon the snow. It wasn’t Swagger’s best cut, for it wore out at the halfway point before cutting the spine, much less the lungs. But even Doshu would have counted it adequate.

He withdrew, and seeing that which was far as if close and that which was close as if far, segued rather gracefully from recovery into the next most accessible position, which was kasumi (“mist”), a horizontal, over-the-shoulders construction supported on reversed wrists.

“Feel the fear at last?” Bob asked, and maybe saw a glint of it in the man’s stricken face: I am mortal, I will die, my time is up, why why why?

Bob’s kasumi then transcended miraculously and of its own volition into tsuki, not well aimed but well enough as it punctured and passed through Kondo’s throat, splitting his larynx and jugular, half-severing his spine, and weirdly sustaining him in midfall for a half-second before withdrawal.

Kondo toppled, issuing fiery liquids from his ruptures. His face was blank, his eyes distant, his mouth slack. When he hit, a reddened puff of snow flew up.

Swagger stood back from the carnage and his hand flew to his hip, where the steel inserted courtesy of a Russian sniper in Vietnam decades ago had stopped Kondo’s brilliant cut. It was Swagger’s only card, and he’d been wise enough to play it last. The cut was precise butchery, smooth but shallow, and some black gruel pulsed from it, but it wasn’t geysering spectacularly, meaning no artery had been cut. Bob got a pouch of QuiKlot out, tore the top off with his teeth, and poured the clotting agent into the wound, knowing again that stitches were mandatory within an hour, if he had the strength. Then he poured more on the bloodier cut on his left shoulder.

Christ, it hurt.

He retreated, found his saya, and stood for a second.

Do it right, he thought. Thank the fucking sword.

Feeling foolish and white, he held the weapon horizontally before him and bowed to the little Japanese god inside the steel, and said arigato as best he could. Then since the thing wore a dapple of disfiguration, he snapped it hard to the right, flinging its contents off to splatter an abstraction on the snow-chiburi, in the vernacular, big in all the movies.

Now noto: he sheathed the sword, as ceremony demanded, drawing the dull spine of the blade through his left hand and fingers while clutching the saya’s opening until he reached the tip, then smoothly snared the tip in the opening, then ran the wood casing up to absorb and protect the blade, the whole move ending with a gentle snap as tsuba met wood.

His watch read 5:39 a.m., Tokyo time. He turned and looked at the body of the man he had killed. Kondo lay in a sherbet field of blood and snow, and the spurting had stopped. It was only drainage now. Somewhere a big fat golden carp came to a placid surface and seemed to burp, leaving a widening burst of rings in its passing.

Swagger looked back at the body. He could have taken the head as he’d promised. But really-what was the point?

She arrived at the American embassy promptly at 8:45 because nowadays it took a good fifteen minutes to get through security. She wore a new Burberry pantsuit she’d bought recently at Takashimaya, a smartly tailored pinstripe on gray wool, a white silk blouse and pearls, a pair of Christian Louboutin round-toed platform pumps, her Armani horn-rims. Her hair was pulled back into a severe ponytail, her foundation Lanvin, her blush Revlon, her mascara Shiseido.