9
DaKar soared above the assembled might of the Shogunate. His helmet bore the fearsome steel beak of a tarn and he wore the etched armor of his land. His rifle was slung across a shoulder, his longsword across the other. The sun was just rising, turning the early-autumn sky pink and blue, glinting on the metal of the battalions and battalions that shielded Edo. Spies had determined that the armies of five clans planned to march on the city, overthrow the military government, and restore the Emperor, whom the Shogun confined in Kyoto.
DaKar swooped down to a southern hilltop where large panels of indigo cloth bearing the Shogun's cloud were are hung on frames, forming billowing walls around three sides of a tatami platform. From here the Shogun and a dozen advisers observed the movement of men on the plain below. As usual, Sayoko sat behind the Shogun to his right, her falcon on her left shoulder. All the men were in full armor, and even Sayoko wore a breastplate over her dark-blue riding uniform. Before DaKar reined his tarn sharply upward, he saluted the Shogun and saw that Sayoko, for the first time since he arrived in Edo, bore the cloud crest, on her breastplate and sleeves.
The Shogun nodded to Sayoko and she was soon on her tarn, a rifle across her shoulder and a sword at her side. Her falcon circled her. Her crop whistled sharply and the tarn rose and the wind from its wings flattened the long grass below. She flew to DaKar, surveying the ground, burning the details into her mind for her report to the Shogun. Ants, she thought. Steel-fanged poisonous ants.
Soon, she and DaKar were riding side by side. They inspected the medical tents, the benefits of which DaKar had persuaded the Shogun. They honored the proud rifle-bearing warriors, the perfect formations of swordsmen, the straight rows of archers. Some were veterans of the last terrible battles that united the territory. Some, like Sayoko, had only heard or read of war. But the night before, all of them had written what they expected to be their last poems, and their eyes were pure with the expectation of a noble death.
The air rushed against DaKar's face as he guided his mount as close to Sayoko as he dared. Laughing, he pointed to her rifle and shouted: "Do you suppose you will be able to use that?" Her glance was withering. After months of lessons forced upon her by the Shogun, she had, despite herself, become a fair, if reluctant, marksman.
"Askari Hodari!"? she hissed, using a phrase he had taught her in gentler times when he spoke of his land. She snapped the reins and sped away from him, tossing her ponytail. He raced after her, grinning, his blood warmed by the scent of war, which he missed so much since leaving Gor, and by Sayoko's hauteur, which was the iciest he had seen. They circled the city twice, then saw dust rise in the distance. With small mirrors they sent a glitter of signals to the generals and the Shogun's party.
The red, yellow, and black banners of the insurgents emerged from the forests and blossomed across the open plain. Infantries marched and cavalries galloped toward Edo, doomed even before they saw their enemy. Bullets ripped through the vanguard's armor as if through silk. Men and horses trampled the fallen. The survivors of the second devastating volley of bullets now crossed swords with the Shogun's forces.
DaKar flew beyond the reach of enemy archers but he could hear the shrieks of beast and man, the crash of metal on metal. He saw the blood on the ground and the torn faces and broken bodies. Later, on the fields and in the medical tents, he would find that bushido gave way to a more basic emotion: warriors did not die with the name of their lord on their lips but cried out for their mothers.
Sayoko fought for calm, desperately memorizing the cruel images. She watched numbly as the sparkling codes that she and DaKar sent helped fell rows and rows of advancing rebels. But it was the sound of suffering that made her tremble. The ethereal poems that likened the death of a warrior to the falling of a petal had not prepared her for the horror below and she was sickened.
DaKar flew low and slew two enemy swordsmen with bullets to the neck, saving an Edo general from death. Sayoko saw DaKar's face, flushed and virile. Her falcon sped along beside her, screaming with joy. I am not, she thought miserably, made for war.
DaKar was still flying low, and three enemy archers trained their weapons on him, tracking him carefully. Sayoko gripped her mount with her legs, aimed her rifle, and watched, her heart deadened, as one archer after another fell in torment from her bullets. DaKar turned his hard face to her. "Askari Hodari!" His lips formed the words silently. Her throat filled with bitterness, but she saluted him and, knowing he was safe, raced away to complete her grim task.
The hell on earth painted on the screens in the Castle's Map Room had failed to capture the obscenity of what Sayoko saw. Her jaw ached and she rested her forehead on the tarn's neck as her body heaved with disgust.
By mid-afternoon, the rebel forces had withdrawn, leaving the fallen in the dust and crushed grass. Only the Shogun's artillery had saved Edo. Sayoko knew that the Shogun would order the generals to prepare for a more formidable assault. She guided her tarn high enough for it to be mistaken for an eagle. As she suspected, an even more powerful force was mustering beyond the western forests and behind the northern hills. She flew back to the hilltop.
Kneeling before the Shogun and his advisers, she made her dreadful report—the number of dead and dying and wounded, the enemy's movements, and the probable force with which the rebel armies would attack again. The men sat in silence, their faces like glowing stone as the sun set. The breeze no longer carried the sound of swords and pain or the smell of burning and gunpowder, and she was glad that the evening hid her tears.
The Shogun finally dismissed her and she stumbled down the hill to DaKar's tent. Her falcon roosted in a tree. In the dimness of the tent DaKar stood, enormous in his armor, his helmet and weapons resting on racks behind him. She was silenced by the sight. She had seen him smolder with lust in the fragrant rooms of the Tora and the Castle, but now he blazed with the exhilaration of battle. The Shogun, Sayoko thought, was dispassionate about war, for it was merely a means to an end, and the warriors were made fierce by duty. But DaKar's eyes had neither the frost of one driven purely by the will to power nor the serenity of one trained to die. The glint, she realized, came from the sheer delight in battle, as primal as her falcon's bloodthirsty joy.
When he gripped her wrist hard and brought it behind her back, she knew that he was not the same man she entertained with her sensuality and erudition. He unbuckled her breastplate and let it fall to the ground. He ripped off the silk ribbon that tied her hair back and ran his fingers through her hair. His kiss was rough and his armor pressed hard against her.
Here on the battlefield, she was not protected by layers of protocol. Here there was no wine or refined ritual, no candle-lit bath or silk quilt. A man she hardly recognized stripped her, and the cruelty in his touch made her throb. In the floating world of the Tora and even in the unsentimental halls of the Castle, Sayoko had lulled herself into thinking that DaKar was of Edo. But now she knew she was mistaken, for beneath his elegant, laughing surface he was, after all, of Gor, that land about which she knew little except that it was crude and violent.
The blood and steel of the day had warmed him as he had not been since his arrival in Edo. His former self had been reborn in battle, and in his Gorean trance the woman moaning beneath his hands was neither courtesan nor soldier. She was spoils.
He imprisoned her wrists in leather bands and hooked them together behind her back. These were not the finely crafted cuffs of the Tora but restraints for slaves. He strapped her elbows together. He smiled as pain crossed her flushed face. He forced her to her knees on the cotton futon on the wood platform and doubled her over her shins.
He coiled her hair and let it spill forward, baring her back and nape and hiding her face. His war-drugged mind was filled with merging images of slaves—captured after battle, awaiting the slaver's kiss, displayed in the markets, coffled, whipped, thrown to the furs and raped.
She strained against the straps, and her open heat moistened with the excitement of fear. He towered over her and she heard the metal and leather fall to the dirt. Her moans—half protest, half desire—inflamed him. He knelt beside her and drew a warm hand slowly from her curving ass to her slender neck.
His fingers parted the wet lips of her heat, dipping into the tiny, hot mouth and drawing the moisture up to the pucker between the cheeks. His fingers lingered there, passing over the ridges, probing the tightness, then stroked the smooth, swollen clitoris. She felt a violent current flow through her, as if what had transported him to another world had now swept her away, too. The shock was unlike the passion she felt in civilized Edo, so strong that she groaned as if in pain. She was intoxicated, and his captive.
