Read Online Autumn Bridge by Takashi Matsuoka - Free Book Online Page B

himself no differently from a khan, his domain was hardly big enough to have a name of its own. Even a Mongol — vastly overrated horsemen, in Eroghut’s opinion — could ride from one end to the other in less than a day.
    In the beginning, Eroghut and his new lord spoke in pidgin Chinese.
    “My name Masamuné. I lord Akaoka kingdom. You?”
    “My name Eroghut. I Nürjhen country. Now Nürjhen country no more.”
    “Your name?” Masamuné repeated, a look of confusion on his face.
    “Eroghut.”
    “Eh-ho-go-chu?”
    “E-ro-ghut.”
    “Eh-lo-ku-cho?”
    These Japanese were hopeless. Because their language was so simple, they could hardly form any unfamiliar words, even simple ones.
    “’Ghut,” Eroghut said, shortening it the way an infant would.
    “Ah,” Masamuné said, looking very pleased at last. “Go.”
    “Yes,” Eroghut said, giving up. “My name Go.” And from then on it was.
    Go learned the language of Japan very quickly. It was not difficult to form the words, because there were only a few sounds. The Japanese were like the Mongols in one way. They loved war. As soon as the Mongols were gone from these shores, driven away by a storm, as they had been during their first attempt at conquest, Masamuné began fighting first his eastern neighbor, then his northern one, for reasons Go did not understand. It seemed honor was at stake more than land, slaves, horses, or trade routes. There could be no other reason, since the manner in which the samurai fought — a bizarre form of mass single combat, where every warrior sought an opponent of equal rank — guaranteed that almost no battle could result in clear-cut victory for either side. Their armies were not armies in the highly organized Nürjhen sense, but rather wild, heroic, uncoordinated mobs.
    When the samurai told stories of their battles, they exaggerated not only their courage but the courage of their enemies as well, and wept for the enemy dead as well as their own. In one battle, an enemy lord, a fat pimply youth of perhaps twenty, was killed by his own falling horse as he turned to flee. When the story was later told, that lord had become a youth of almost blinding beauty, his courage enough to fill the breasts of a thousand brave men, his death a tragedy of nearly unbearable sadness. Go watched as Masamuné and his samurai drank rice wine and wept at the loss of the hero. Yet these very men knew the enemy lord well, had fought against him in many previous engagements, and knew he was not beautiful, not even moderately handsome, and his courage… well, how much courage does it take, not to mention the level of skill, or lack thereof, to turn the horse in such a way that it would fall on the rider and break his neck?
    So it was that Go came to live among these overdramatic, though unquestionably brave, barbarians, fighting alongside them in their meaningless, utterly inconclusive battles, drinking with them, singing with them, and eventually reciting the same ridiculous lies of heaven-shaking fortitude, dazzling physical beauty, and fearless and defiant death. They lived for nothing beyond war and drunkenness and the mythology of their own courage.
    Go felt right at home. Before Kublai the Fat’s grandfather, Genghis the Accursed, gathered together all the steppe tribes, forced them to become Mongols, and gave them the mission of world conquest, the Nürjhen had been much like these Japanese. Perhaps his mother had not been so very wrong after all. Perhaps these primitive islanders were the new Nürjhen Ordos. It was amusing to toy with the thought anyway.
    Go’s skill with horses was much appreciated by Lord Masamuné. Under his tutelage, the samurai of Akaoka Domain soon learned to move in rapidly shifting units, rather than as inefficient individuals, the units themselves able to join to form larger units, or split apart to form smaller ones. Signal flags were used to communicate commands over long distances during the day. At night,