The palace at Western Capital was a small city by itself. Its walls stretched three jou across and twelve in circumference. Palace towers lifted their elaborate clay heads high above the guardian walls, red plums and persimmons ripening on trees growing in their opulent shade. But military service had nothing to do with pretty towers and plum trees.
The warrior’s compound stood on ground north of royal walls, though its perimeter was armed and guarded at least as heavily. The difference lay in the direction of the anticipated threat. Palace guards stood vigilant of assassins; military guards stood wary of deserters.
Within, a broad square of paving stones stretched two blood-smattered jou between the outer walls. To the south of the square, a stone structure rose up like a stern monolith, claiming the good light and fresh breezes from the west running river’s forest. This southern tower housed ranking officers.
North of the square, stood the barracks of the outer yard, vulnerable to the coldest northern drafts by way of a not-distant-enough pig farm. Rough-hewn bunks lined its Spartan interior. Surrounding walls closed darkly around resident inmates—innocent of even a window. The door’s closure-less gap lent a constant, if dim, shaft of light within. The outer barracks housed conscripted soldiers from rival clans. This was my new home.
Occupying the hard berths next to mine were the sons of samurai clansmen from outside of the capital, each, possessor of a high birthright antagonistic to the reigning military government. Many of our ranks had lived their former lives in castles and halls rivaling anyone’s but the shogun’s for luxury, but those things ceased with enlistment. And their former status meant nothing. Only wits and swordsmanship would preserve them.
From their first entry inside the compound walls, enlistee’s hopes centered no more on birthright, but on a rigid system of rank and protocol…and covert alliances. Yes, alliances. Our fathers may have fought and killed each other in the not too distant past, but now, we needed each other here.
* * *
In the chill of predawn, the new order of our lives assembled into a more or less recognizable pattern. Officers from the inner compound organized drills and ran the outer yard recruits with terse, throat-rattling orders that straightened our spines. In early days, we wielded no weapons but our bare arms, trained into katas as we moved strict formations throughout the square. Any deviations brought us brutal attention.
An officer with the face of a child, even if did have a man’s build, bore authority over the newest soldiers. He seemed to take pleasure in shaming us at every opportunity, opportunities we handed him with our raw, untrained hands. He gave us our first wooden weapons and bloodied our heads with them before committing them to our hands, to demonstrate even wood’s effectiveness.
I watched the Captain intervene between paired fighters. I watched him drive them across the square until they were ready to collapse, but I trained my eyes to the ground, and waited for him.
* * *
Exercises began before dawn. Sparring in the sightless darkness of the square did something to the senses. It focused the mind and sharpened the inner eye. But having eight already, hidden though they were, I never particularly felt the need of a ninth.
I fitted a neck guard under my breastplate of tosei gusoku plate armor, steel, leather and bone components cold against my skin. But before I could even acknowledge my opponent, a senior officer drew him away, ordering the boy off with a severe hand gesture the soldier wisely did not question.
The Captain approached, sword raised, his frozen breath billowing through flared nostrils. Neither of us spoke, but I knew this lesson would not be harmless and I lifted my sword.
His attack was quick and I took a defensive posture, blocking with both hands on my sword. I managed to push him back with a force that surprised both of us. Using that surprise, I lunged to the center. A grunt erupted from his nose as he parried, but I had surprised him, and soon he was stepping back again, and again. I swallowed a euphoric gasp.
The Captain’s kata was excellent. He knew every stone within the square and how to challenge my balance on loose pavement. This he did, unsettling and nearly felling me to the ground.
But even with his superior knowledge of technique, I blocked him again and again, countering his rare advance, blunting his force with my arm. Patience and I would have him.
An audience gathered. Our peers wouldn’t have dared, but the higher-ranking men circled and stared. My opponent eyes twitched in recognition of the increased stakes. No casual withdrawal was possible now.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
And then he lunged, swiping my knuckles with the tip of his sword. This attack was desperate, and came at a sacrifice. He’d unbalanced himself and had not wounded me enough. I gripped my sword and countered, bashing his knee wide open and felling him to the ground. I stood above him, blade raised, lungs heaving and breath billowing in the cold morning, but another strike was redundant.
The soldier had fallen upon his own naginata blade. The realization settled over me. Since coming to Western Capital, this was the second death I had seen, and the conviction of my own mortality hit me afresh. I groaned at the sight of the blood pooling around us and wished I could siphon it up and funnel it back inside him.
Shouts for a doctor echoed through the square. Voices called, shaking and ragged. A hand clapped down on my back. I yielded to its command, following a stern-faced superior inside the military compound, through a labyrinth of narrow corridors concluding in a dark cold cell.
There followed no word of explanation, and barely any sound at all, but for the clanging of steel and the retreating of boots.
Hours later, two soldiers returned, opened the cell with a clank of metal and ordered a search. From there, they swiftly disarmed and disrobed me down to my most inner layer of clothing.
I’d seen a boy fall to serious injury in the short weeks since arriving. No one had flinched. With the blink of superior eyes and waive of a hand, men cleared the square. Pools of red blood, steamed up from the stone until cooling and freezing hard on the pavement. A sacrificial stain to honor the Shogun’s military field. Accidents happened here.
I sat with these thoughts for an unknown interval with no notion of time’s passage. Anxiety curbed hunger. But thirst—thirst did come and haggled with my confusion for attention until all I could think of was my desperation for water. Only the sound of heavy footfall in the outer corridor momentarily distracted me from it.
An armed guard called me to attention. I stood, as a soldier learns to do, but fell prostrate when a swift boot swept my knees.
Looking up, I saw no soldier at the gate of the cell, but a minister to the shogun, robed with a bright banner designating his high office. He looked me over, eyes sharp but conductive of something more. I started when I recognized it as grief.
“Soldier. Give me the name of your morning opponent.”
“I don’t know it, sir.”
“That’s a strange answer. All around you knew.”
“I’ve only been here two weeks.”
“Did you intend to kill him?”
“I didn’t kill him. He killed himself with his own naginata…Sir. You can see the wound, yourself.”
“You violated protocols. Witnesses have said so.”
I sucked in a breath. “What protocols?”
No answer came, so I inferred that the problem was a matter of rank.
The minister withdrew with a terse word to the guard. Confinement.
* * *
Confinement was intended as a death sentence. A period of isolation with little food and torturously little water would soon kill a man. Closed in that dark cell, I should have sickened, and eventually starved.
I laughed at them. They couldn’t imprison me. I could change. Find food. Thrive in spider form.
Routines were fixed. Ritual. And within a day I had memorized them. I knew when a guard would appear—when I should be present for a brief inspection. I would take what they left for me, if anything. Piss in the can the cell’s corner. And otherwise play the part of their starving prisoner. Then disappear with the spin of a thread.
I thrived. And after some weeks, I had observably confounded their expectations of my decline. I should have been wasting. I was full fleshed and better fed than I had been in the barracks of the outer yard. My mental faculties were acute. I exceeded the measure of the best of their ranks. I defecated over the can in the corner until they were forced to take it away over-flowing and empty it, shaking their heads and holding their noses in confusion. They could not rationalize what I was eating.
After one more week, a new man appeared next to the guard on his rounds past my cell. Thin framed and pale skinned, I could see he wasn’t military. He carried a case full of instruments, and soon applied them to my physical examination and measurement. My eyes, mouth, chest, genitalia and feet. He examined me thoroughly. Then he cut a tuft of my hair, ordered me to urinate in a sterile container, and collected a sample of my stool. Finally, he nodded to the guard, and disappeared without a word.
This routine repeated for another week. Then the physician reappeared with a more senior colleague. They examined me together. The younger man sliced my finger with a knife and drained a quantity of blood into a glass vial, stopping the vial with a piece of cork. Next, he moved to other fluids, including saliva. They tried by some device to produce ejaculation, but this went too far. I could withhold that much.
When they had collected what they could, the younger man packed up the samples of my fluids and carried them away. The elder of the physicians remained. He removed a fold of rice paper from his robe, made a few notes, and then began to question me.
“What do you eat?”
I thought about my answer, but why lie? “Mostly insects, the occasional earthworm or moth.”
“Your stool is large.” He named a precise volume I won’t repeat. “Where do you find so many insects? There is no earth to dig up. Your cell floor is stone.”
“I suppose they come to me.”
“How do you call them to you? A pipe?” He chuckled.
“I wait and they come.” It was true, though I was silent about the detail of a sticky silken web.
He grunted, dissatisfied. Then removed his spectacles and cleaned them with a fresh cloth. “I believe you. Analysis of your samples is consistent with a protein dominant diet. I’ve even found the pieces of what appear to be moth wings. I’m sure there are some bugs in here. But I’ve no idea where you can be getting the quantities necessary to sustain your weight. If you say they come to you, I’ve no choice but to believe you, or sit in this detestable cell with you continuously to observe the phenomenon.”
I released the breath in my lungs. For a moment, I thought he had decided against his judgment to stay and observe me.