The Banner
11 August 1998
by Jason Postma

All was confusion. The noon sun beat down on the battle relentlessly. The mud of yesterday had turned hard, dried and caked in red layers on the living and the dead. Flies were everywhere. The center of the battle was a twisting, surging mass of steel and men, threatening to swallow the field before the Hare castle.

Jinjiro stood outside of the heaviest fighting. He had been wounded earlier today and was not fighting with the speed and skill he had shown the previous days. The long hours of fighting had taken their toll on him. His armor, once bright with the blue and silver of the Crane, had now faded to a dim purple, shading to red mud at his boots. Its fine workmanship held it together still, but it would never have the bright colors it once had shown. Jinjiro was beginning to think he would never resemble the clean, dignified, civilized courtier he had once appeared. Courtiers are not stained with the blood of others.

A battle was chaos. Jinjiro longed for the simplicity, the quiet, the beauty of a duel. A duel takes a single life, lasts for only a moment, and then the matter is resolved. A battle drags in all within its grasp–bushi, shugenja, and peasants. It rages for days and destroys all that is beautiful where it feeds. A battle is ugly.

Finding anger in the thought, Jinjiro charged once more into the heavier fighting. He cut through a line of Scorpion bushi to come face-to-face with their banner bearer. The bearer had only a moment to see Jinjiro before the steel of the emperor's blade cut him down. Jinjiro suddenly found he held the banner of a minor Scorpion house, and was surrounded by the bushi who had protected the bearer.

There was a small island of calm as the bushi and Jinjiro absorbed what had happened. Jinjiro realized he wouldn't find his way out of this with a duel. Nothing to do but make for the castle.

"Kakita for Usagi!" he yelled, waving the banner in the faces of the bushi closest to him. The distraction served to give Jinjiro some room to cut himself an opening in the ring of bushi; an opening in the direction of the castle. It also served to enrage his opponents.

Jinjiro remembered little of the next two hours of battle. The Hare castle seemed to be running from him, because it never got closer. He changed the banner from hand to hand a dozen times, simply to rest the hand he had been using with the emperor's katana while striking with the other. The first time he had done that trick the Scorpion bushi had pushed forward, thinking they had an advantage, but they quickly learned Jinjiro could fight equally well with either hand, a lesson which cost them dearly.

Blood, heat, flies, and steel were Jinjiro's world, and the need to constantly move onwards. He cut down a bushi that had been particularly difficult, turned, and ran into the wall. He had reached the castle. Hare defenders surged around him, giving him the time needed to climb to the top and plant the banner. The banner guard that had followed him was gone, their last member slain by the Hare bushi on the wall.

Jinjiro took a moment to take a drink and clean some of the dripping blood and fragments from the emperor's katana, then he turned once more to face the battle. He saw how little three hours of fighting had changed the spectacle before him. Just more blood and dead. It was ugly, but honor demanded he return to it. Jinjiro followed his honor.