|
From Chapter 22. Manuscript is in standard format (this excerpt is formatted for DU)
Our characters are less than one day away from invading Nanking. For those unfamiliar with this project, I am writing a novel of historical fiction exploring the Rape of Nanking.
Tears of Amaterasu- excerpt of Chapter 22
...Shima marched the squad almost a full kilometer north of the main encampment where the concentration of soldiers was much less than elsewhere. They marched in silence except for weary footfalls around a small rise towards the shattered remains of a small station beside the Shanghai-Nanking Railway tracks.
Awaiting them were two-dozen Chinese civilians, all male, some children and some very elderly. The prisoners stood, occasionally shuffling from one foot to the other, none made a sound.
Kubo recognized their look; bewildered terror. He’d seen it so many times since embarking on this war that, but like the thunderous guns, it no longer affected him.
Shima brought the squad to a halt, “Takarada’s body was discovered this morning not far from where we last camped. He was stabbed beneath the chin with a long knife. I have no doubt that he fought his attackers with honor.”
Kubo snuck a glance at Jiro, who steadfastly concentrated on the nothingness between the squad and the prisoners.
“We’ve dealt with several hundred Chinese prisoners in the immediate area, thousands at Wuxhi and Suzhou, but in honor of Takarada’s murder, I saved these 24 enemy for you.” Shima turned to the squad, “Yamaguchi, get one of them out and on his knees!”
Yamaguchi rushed forwards and pulled an old monk out of the group; prodded the monk with a bayonet to within a few meters of the Corporal then forced him to his knees.
Kubo noticed then that the all of the men’s hands were bound.
“This blade was forged for my great great grandfather,” Shima said, “it tasted blood in the greatest battles of our glorious history. It served the Emperor during the Great Rebellion, and now it serves the emperor on this glorious campaign.” Shima drew the sword slowly. The dim sun caught the wave pattern hammered into the edge and for a millisecond captured the full spectrum of Amaterasu’s loving touch. Shima brought the blade up and sucked a long breath through his nose. The blade hovered there for a second, then flashed down through the old man’s neck.
The Monk’s head tumbled away above an eruption of blood; the mouth opened and closed silently, twice; eyes rolled madly around their blinking sockets then stopped. The body quivered then sunk motionless.
Shima flicked the blade down beside his knee. A strip of blood splashed across the cold ground. He walked to the squad and boomed, “This is why we are here!”
The squad screamed back, “Banzai!”
Kubo watched the blood pool around the headless body.
“Bring another!” Shima barked and again Yamaguchi prodded another captive from the group; this one a much older man dressed in obvious peasant clothes.
The man knelt silently. The other captives cried out for mercy, “Ci bei! Ci bei!”. The old man turned his head as Shima lifted the sword high and stared directly at Kubo, “Zhu qui zhu,” he said softly, “Zhu qui zhu…”
Shima brought the sword down cleanly through the captive’s neck, and like the monk who first tasted the corporal’s blade, the old man’s head tumbled away. His body thudded across the monk’s lifeless back.
The soldiers cried out again, “Banzai!”
Shima, smiling, cleaned the katana with another quick snap of his wrist, “Another!” he cried.
The captives cried out as another of their number was prodded away from the group and forced to kneel.
Why don’t they try to run? Kubo wondered.
Kubo watched Corporal Shima kill seven more of the captives before, backing away, panting, from the heap of headless bodies. “Make the others dig a pit to bury them.”
The squad advanced on the terrified captives, separated the four fittest of the remaining 14 and untied the others, all either very young or very old. Yamaguchi cut the ropes around their wrists.
The captives seemed to relax some; one threw himself at Yamaguchi’s feet and wept, the others exhaled long held breaths, their shoulders slumped.
“Look at this one,” Yamaguchi laughed, “he thinks he’s a dog! Dig dog, dig!” Yamaguchi scratched at the Earth with his boot tip then pointed at the man’s hands.
The captives seemed to understand. They dropped to their knees and began to scrape away the dirt with their fingers. The four captives still tied shuffled nervously from one foot to another and whispered among themselves. One of the soldiers kept his rifle aimed at them to prevent an escape attempt.
Progress was slow allowing most of the soldiers to sit along the shallow hillside and watch. They took turns guarding the four tied men and prodding the diggers to work faster. After two hours the captives managed to scrape a trench only a half a meter deep, a meter wide, and five meters long. They piled the dirt along the north side of the trench.
Corporal Shima paced along the trench and ordered the captives to their feet. He then separated the four oldest and kicked and pushed them to where the four tied captives waited under Kubo’s guard. “Line the others up,” Shima said and the squad scrambled to shove the remaining seven men into line at the lip of the trench. “Make them kneel,” he barked.
The captives seemed to understand the corporal’s words and knelt with their backs to the trench.
“Yamaguchi, Sachi, Kamakura, Akira, Otani, Kensu, Mishima, load your rifles and line up behind the prisoners,” Shima said.
The soldiers did as they were told.
“Shoot them in the head,” Shima barked.
Seven Arisaka rifles crackled and seven wisps of smoke escaped their seven barrels.
A spray of blood and skull splashed across the ground as the prisoners toppled forward, dead.
One of the prisoners broke away as Kubo’s attention focused on the row of corpses beside the trench and charged towards a clump of bushes only fifty meters east.
“Idiot!” Shima snarled and snatched Kubo’s rifle away. He glared at Kubo for a second, then turned and brought the long rifle to his shoulder. Shima fired once and the running prisoner dropped as the 6.5mm bullet tore through his spine. Shima fired again at the writhing target, then again, and again, and again, until expending the last shell in the magazine.
The prisoner was dead, his legs splayed, arms still tied behind his back, half of his skull shattered. The light gray bone and tufts of hair contrasted starkly against the expanding pool of blood around the corpse.
Shima shoved the rifle back into Kubo’s hands. His eyes offered pure malevolence.
Kubo bowed, “I’m sorry,” he whispered.
“Line the others up,” Shima growled.
The prisoners panicked and struggled against the solders. Some kicked and screamed, other threw themselves against their captives.
Jiro brought a rifle butt across the cheek of one man sending him flailing to the ground, the others wrestled with the captives until it was clear that lining them up was a futile effort. The pell-mell lasted only a few seconds until the staccato of rifle fire ended the fighting and left 13 infantrymen and one officer standing in a small field of twitching bloodied corpses.
Kubo rolled over one of the bodies, a young boy, with the toe of his boot. The boy’s eyes hung half open, mouth closed but crooked, as if he had frozen solid during those few groggy minutes of first waking. As if the fear he’d carried for the last two hours was little more than some wispy tendril of a fading nightmare.
Kubo turned away and retched twice before gaining his composure.
Corporal Shima surveyed the carnage, “Otani, add ten to my record, and don’t forget to sign the log book this time or Corporal Shinigasa will think I am exaggerating… The rest of you get the dead piled and covered.”
Otani pulled a small leather-bound volume from his pocket and began to write.
The infantrymen dragged the bodies and stacked them in and around the shallow trench before kicking the prisoner-excavated dirt over the mound of cooling flesh.
Corporal Shima approached Kubo slowly and said, “Come with me.”
The two walked around the base of the small hill before Shima stopped them, “I don’t know under who you served before being assigned to this squad, but failing to keep ahead of a situation will get one of my men killed; needlessly.”
“Yes sir…”
“I did not tell you to answer!” Shima slapped Kubo across both cheeks.
Kubo’s head did not move although the corporal’s strikes were hard, his face was used to the abuse Sergeant Tsuge meted out and compared to him, Corporal Shima hit like a child.
“You and your friend better adapt immediately to life in my squad.”
“Yes sir,” Kubo answered. He bowed almost to 90 degrees, a gesture showing deep respect for the corporal, though inside Kubo wanted to grab Shima by his ears and twist is head off.
They walked back then to find the bodies only dusted with earth, but it was good enough for Shima. He ordered the squad to line up and slowly walked along the formation of infantrymen. “Private Kubo, you are assigned to guard this pile of dead Chinamen from now until tomorrow morning. You will watch over them as if they were your children; as if they were the Emperor’s family. I will return tomorrow morning and if even one hair on one of those bodies is out of place this whole squad will suffer my wrath.” Shima pressed close, nearly nose-to-nose with Kubo.
“Yes sir!” Kubo barked. His insides simmered. Guard duty meant no food and no sleep for another night. His stomach knotted at the very idea of going unfilled again.
“Hand over your bullets,” Shima said, “it’s obvious you aren’t trained well enough to be carrying around live ammunition.”
Kubo fished his few remaining magazines from their pouch on his belt and handed them to the corporal.
“And your pack, since you won’t be sleeping or eating.”
Kubo stripped off his pack and handed it over.
“And your bayonet.”
Kubo considered plunging the blade into Shima’s eye socket as he wrenched the bayonet and cloth scabbard loose and placed it in Shima’s hand. “Yes sir,” he said, struggling to keep the furious anger from tainting his voice and encouraging Corporal Shima to punish him further, or worse, punish the squad.
Shima said, “Let’s go boys. There’s food and drink for all a little ways back.”
The squad left Kubo alone with his charges. That son of a bitch Shima, he thought, maybe we should have killed him instead of Takarada. The morning brightened quickly revealing low gray clouds on the western horizon. Kubo felt the breeze and knew a rain was coming.
He sat on the small rise and faced the shallow grave with its arms and legs poking through the soil and surrounded by twenty four outward facing heads; all open eyed. The warm spilled blood turned the frozen Earth into a shallow mire of red-tainted mud. The cold already reclaimed some of it, preserving footprints and claw marks as sharp breaks in the otherwise featureless dirt.
Kubo yawned. He’d gone some thirty hours without sleep and even the thunder of the artillery failed to alleviate the heavy sleepiness creeping up his spine and into his brain. Shima wouldn’t come and check for a while, if at all. Kubo knew the corporal was more in love with having power than the effects of utilizing that power. Kubo settled back and blinked slowly as the first clouds of sleep enveloped him.
He remembered closing his eyes, but not much else. Without a good way to judge the time of day Kubo had no idea how long he’d slept and, for a second, panicked at the thought of Corporal Shima looking down from the hilltop. But after a quick check of the surroundings, Kubo fell into a comfortable awareness that he was still very much alone.
Someone whispered, “Hideki.” The voice seemed to drift out of the grave.
“Who’s there?” Kubo raised his empty rifle and scanned the bushes and trees around the clearing.
“Why did you let him kill us Hideki?”
Kubo noticed then that the eyes of every severed head stared up at him from their row beside the shallow grave.
“What did we ever do to you?”
“You aren’t real,” he said.
“We were not your enemy,” more voices added now, as if every single corpse was speaking with a single voice.
Kubo shook his head to clear it but the forty eight dead eyes remained fix on him.
“I was a father, a grandfather, a son, a brother, a husband, a peasant, a farmer…”
Kubo screamed, “Leave me alone!”
“You are an animal. You murder the innocents…”
Kubo dropped the rifle and clapped his hands over his ears. “Stop it! Stop it! Stop it! I didn’t want you to die, but I was powerless to prevent it.”
“Why did you let them kill us Hideki? What did we do to you?”
Kubo turned his back on the row of severed heads but the voices continued.
“We were men Hideki; young men and old. We were not soldiers. You let them slaughter us…”
Kubo squeezed his eyes shut. He felt cold fingers drag across the back of his neck and wrap themselves tightly around his throat. He couldn’t breathe; his limbs refused to move. “I’m sorry,” he whispered.
“Sorry isn’t good enough. Sorry doesn’t atone. Sorry won’t bring us back!”
The phantom hands gripped tighter, they burned and stung. Kubo thrashed but could not break their hold. It was as if the hands of twenty-four corpses held him in place.
Ojisan Kenji’s voice boomed, “I am disappointed Hideki! You’ve become everything I feared. Everything I was. And everything I despised.”
“Ojisan,” Kubo whispered, “Please, help me…” Kubo saw his uncle then flickering into existence atop the hill, the reflection of dull sunlight obscured his face, but the voice was unmistakable.
“You are beyond help now Oi. You are cursed to carry the weight of these events for the rest of your life.” Kenji floated down the hill; his body flickered in and out of view. “You are bachiatari!”
Kubo screamed, “No!” Again his limbs refused to move. His uncle loomed closer until cold breath washed across Kubo’s cheeks and filled his nose with the sickening stench of rotten corpses.
The heads chorused, “Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! Curse him! Curse him with our memory!”
Kubo felt his bladder release and hot piss spread across his trouser legs. “Help me Ojisan! Tell them, tell them I had no choice!”
Kenji raised his hands, white flames licked up each finger, but no heat radiated from them. He placed the palms across Kubo’s cheeks. His voice changed to a low rumble, deep and resonant, as if the very sound could shatter stone and steel, “Bachiatari!”
Kubo thrashed sideways but the ghostly hands would not release. He coughed and spat but breath could neither be inhaled nor exhaled. He knew that death was imminent and could only close his eyes and wait.
Something poked against Kubo’s side. He at first assumed the sensation was death, creeping slowly through his abdomen. The voices faded to silence but the pressure rhythm remained. He opened his eyes to a pair of muddy boots.
“Wake up.”
Kubo craned his neck, tracing the outline of the boots, legs, hips, stomach, arms, and head of Jiro standing beside him. “I am cursed,” he mumbled.
Jiro sat cross-legged beside Kubo and waved a heaping bowl of rice before his face. “Shima and the others are drunk, sleeping I think, if not passed out.”
Kubo accepted the bowl immediately shoveled a handful of the rice into his mouth. He tried to say thanks but his mouth refused to do any work other than chew and swallow.
“The others placed bet you’d be asleep before nightfall.”
“How did you bet?” Kubo managed between chews.
“I didn’t.” Jiro opened his canteen and placed it in the crease between Kubo’s folded legs.
Kubo placed the half-empty rice bowl down and guzzled from the canteen. Wet grains of rice ran down his chin. “Why not?”
“Because to hell with them! That’s why. Any one of them could have been on guard duty when the fracas erupted. It was just bad luck you were the one holding the rifle. It doesn’t seem right to gamble on someone else’s misfortune.
Kubo brought the canteen to his lips again and drank. Jiro was wrong. Everything they did in China, he understood now, gambled on someone else’s misfortune; be they the terrified Chinese army, the peasants who couldn’t escape the advancing columns, the architecture and culture, smashed down, burned, decapitated, shot, and buried in a shallow grave.
Jiro nudged Kubo in the side and asked, “What’s wrong?”
“Just thinking…” Kubo let the words orphan in the cold air.
“Too much thinking is bad. It makes things more confusing I think. It’s better to just do and deal with the consequences later.”
“You can say that because you haven’t been sitting here in front of twenty four dead bodies.” Kubo screwed the cap back on the canteen and handed it to Jiro. He picked up the rice and started to eat again.
“You’re just overtired. We all are. Once we get to the city everything will slow down, we can relax some, get drunk, eat good food, and chase women. We don’t have long to go now.”
Kubo tilted his head and stared at the severed heads, “do you think they felt anything?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you think they knew they were all going to die like that?” Kubo chewed slowly between words. “They only fought back at the end. If they attacked us earlier they might have escaped… Some of them at least.”
“Better them in that grave than us.”
“But doesn’t it bother you? I still see the face of the old woman I was told to shoot outside Shanghai, the eyes of the woman in Suzhou Funakoshi was set to rape, the faces of the prisoners being led off to die. I see them whenever I blink, I hear their voices on the wind when we march. I know it’s wrong, I can feel it, but there isn’t any way to change it.”
Kubo turned away and looked over the frozen bloodied ground that captured the frantic last seconds of twenty-four lives.
Jiro snapped, “Enough of this! What the hell is wrong with you? We’re in the army; the infantry, killing is what we do. We march. We fight. We kill. We die. Let history sort out whether we were right or wrong. Until then, I just do what I am told. Your self-pity makes becoming part of this squad more difficult than it has to be. We are going into battle tomorrow and we cannot afford to face the Chinese, fear for their safety, and pity them for being dishonorable. We have to fight, and fight well.”
“Do you feel that way about what we did to Takarada?”
The words hung in the air like a fog, and for a moment neither boy would speak.
Kubo stared at his friend, watching for any indication of guilt, but Jiro’s resolve never even flickered.
“No. Fuck him. Why are you so upset about this anyway?”
Kubo shrugged. “I don’t know. Part of me knows these are the enemy, but part of me thinks they are victims. I don’t know which part is stronger… I guess I need leave… Or a good drunk.”
“We’ll get both, in abundance, once we take the capital.” Jiro screwed the cap back onto his canteen and slipped it into the cloth sack on his belt.
Kubo stared at the grave for a few minutes. “We aren’t an army, we’re a horde.”
“What’s the difference?” Jiro stood slowly and crept up towards the crest of the hill to see if Corporal Shima was nearby.
“I don’t know anymore,” Kubo answered.
“I have to get back to the others. I don’t want them to think I am abandoning them, and I don’t want Shima to punish you again if he finds me here.”
“Thanks for the rice.”
Jiro started around the base of the hill. He glanced back and said, “You’d do the same for me.”
Kubo pulled his knees up under his chin and wrapped his arms around his shins. “Yeah,” he whispered.
The cold descended as fast as the setting sun and by the first hour of evening Kubo paced back and forth beside the grave. He rubbed his hands together and stomped to keep the blood flowing to his extremities. This was a different kind of cold than he knew from the march, deeper, with a definite suffocating stillness of early winter. The air smelled clean and crisp with only a hint of decaying leaves and pungent wood smoke, like the early morning just before a snowstorm.
The darkness crept over the landscape and transformed the nearby woods, so pleasant during the day, into a dense wall of black shadows. Kubo walked slowly around the grave. The ghosts of laughter and song drifted through the gloom. Kubo knew these were the regular sounds of encampment he’d known since first setting foot in China, but tonight they seemed unearthly, inhuman.
The first dog appeared about thirty minutes later. Kubo immediately recognized the shape silhouetted against darkness; the animal’s lighter fur caught and reflected the ambient moonlight so that the it resembled a photo negative against the impenetrable black woods. The shape wasn’t all that large and stayed at the very periphery of the small clearing but Kubo knew the smell of an easy meal would bring more of the scavengers. He readied his rifle, but with no bullets and no bayonet it was little more than a long and poorly balanced club.
Another shape, larger, loped along the edge of the woods, then another, and they grew bolder with each passing minute; working closer to the grave. Kubo could see their yellow eyes floating in the dark. He moved between them and the grave. The Arisaka rifle hung in one hand. He tightened his grip around the barrel and kept the stock outwards to better balance his swing.
The dogs circled closer, closer, until clouds of their humid breath hung in the darkness and their claws scritch-scratched over the blood-infused and frozen ground.
Kubo stepped back. “Go on! Get out!” he yelled. The dogs backed off but only by a dozen meters or so. He knew they wouldn’t be frightened by his voice alone for very long. At least there wasn’t much cover and he could see which way they loped and adjust his defensive position to match.
One of the dogs leapt forward into full view; a scraggly thing, fattened no doubt on corpses, head fur matted down from burying its snout in the bodies of the dead, one ear torn off. The beat lowered its head and growled softly, sniffing the frozen mud, never taking its eyes off the infantryman.
Kubo inched forward and raised the rifle over his right shoulder.
The dog held fast, growling louder, lifting its head slightly from the muck.
“Go on!” Kubo lunged ahead and closed the distance to less than a meter, but still the dog refused to back away. He swung the rifle across the dog’s field of vision, and still it stayed, growling louder, deeper.
The dog stretched back and prepared to spring; teeth glistening, eyes bright.
Kubo brought the rifle back over his shoulder and inched closer. He wanted the standoff to end. If he clubbed this one hard enough it might drive the others, now lining up a in the darkness behind, off.
“Go on! Get out!”
The dog didn’t flinch.
Kubo’s gripped the barrel so tightly that his fingers elicited a sharp creaking sound.
The dog sprung!
Kubo swung the rifle and connected hard against the beast’s left shoulder. The weight of the swing carried the dog diagonally past Kubo to where it rolled and yelped and scrambled back to its feet. Kubo spun through the swing and faced off again with the first dog. The pack snarled and growled behind him.
The dog bared its teeth and backed away towards the grave.
Kubo knew he’d lost whatever upper hand he’d had. Now positioned between the lead dog, already standing atop the mound of corpses, meant whatever move he mad the dogs would win. They would either attack and kill him and get the corpses or flank him and get the corpses leaving him alone. Kubo moved without any further thought and launched himself at the lead dog. He heard the sharp gallop of the pack behind but ignored it. If he could get to the lead dog first then in the confusion he might be able to kill at least one before the pack brought him down.
The lead dog sidestepped as Kubo lunged over the mound.
Kubo slid across the frozen ground. It was like cement and nearly slammed all the wind from his lungs. He rolled in time to see the pack surging over the mound after him.
One of the dogs landed on his back. Kubo tried to roll but the dog had buried its canines in his collar and tugged violently away from the trench. Kubo swung the rifle awkwardly over his shoulder and connected with the dog’s skull.
The dog released him and backed away, growling.
“Stay down!” the voice seemed to come from everywhere followed by a volley of rifle shot that scattered those of the pack it didn’t kill.
Kubo rolled over, panting, and saw several pairs of boots. Suddenly, hands were upon him, lifting, prodding. He stood, shaking.
“Private Kubo,” Corporal Shima said.
Kubo struggled to focus. His adrenaline faded and with it the last of his strength.
Shima slapped the boy hard across both cheeks, “did they get to the prize?”
Kubo shook off the soldiers holding him up and managed to stand, albeit wobbling, if by nothing else than by the sheer power of his hatred of the corporal. He faced the corporal unaided, “I did my best. I would have died to protect them for you.” The words tumbled from his mouth like vomit.
Shima smiled slightly then spoke to the rest of the squad, “Take him to our bivouac and let him sleep for three hours… Who knows how to butcher a dog? There’s good meat on these…” Shima shoved past Kubo and disappeared into the confusion.
Kubo started up the hill with Jiro at his side. “How did you know?”
“We heard the dogs. Shima didn’t want to intervene, but we insisted.”
“We?” Kubo staggered as they crested the hill and needed Jiro to keep him upright.
“All of us in the squad.”
Kubo smiled for the first time in many days.
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
