Free Segaki by David Stacton Page A

screams were terrible. Something wet and squishy fell beside him, and he smelled bonemeal. It was the last thing just then he did smell. He lost consciousness.

4
    He was still unconscious when the man beside him died. When he came to the body had become a corpse. The first thing he saw was that it was day, though because of the smoke, the sky was the colour of celadon. Moreover, from the moist pungency of the smells around him, it must be early in the day. There was first the earthworm smell, faintly foetal, of the mud in the ditch itself. Then there was the leech smell of dried blood. It is odd how the senses sometimes attack our equanimity one by one, now smell, now hearing, and now sight. Of these smell, because the most seldom, is the worst. He sat up, and found himself staring into the face of the corpse, a young man of good family, with a startled, disappointed face. Bushido was a discipline useful only from the front. It made no provision for an arrow from behind. The arrow had gone almost entirely through the body. The point of it soared straight up. Muchaku followed the line of the point, and saw peering soundlessly down at him through the grass fringe of the ditch the frantic face of the dog, with one ear inside out over the side of its cocked head. It looked as though it had been there for a long time. It was sitting down, and its front paws dangled over the edge of the ditch like empty stockings. Muchaku got up painfully and scrambledout of the ditch. A corner of his robe was covered with dried blood from the young man, and for a reason he did not understand he ripped it out and threw it down behind him, as though it did not belong to him any more.
    There was no longer any sign of the army, except for a few suits of armour lying about dead here and there in the fields, but the ricks were now explained. They were peasants with their bundles, who had fled for safety to the very woods in which the danger had lain in ambush all along. They had left behind them only the seeds of the summer planting, in land they did not even own.
    Apart from that, the valley, what he could see of it, was desolate. It was inhabited only by fire in the boles of trees and by the scorched crops. He was thirsty and went in search of a well. The inn seemed the natural place to look. Smoke from the fires lay in attenuated layers here and there in the air and choked him. He entered the grounds of the inn, and saw the ragged old woman who had warned him, lying face down on the ground, her fingers gripping the earth. He felt too much pity to turn her over, but it moved him that she had warned him. No one else had. But perhaps she had only been a crazy old woman with murdered sons, who had had to warn someone before she died. If so perhaps he had made her happy.
    He found the well easily enough, drank, and set down the bucket for the dog. The inn he saw had been a sing - song house, but any valuable geisha there must long ago have been moved to some point of safety. The ruins were still too hot to enter.
    There was no one of whom he might ask directions, but it had not occurred to him to ask the way, since he was so certain of where he was going that he never doubtedthat he would arrive there. He did see fitful shapes in the smoke, but thought it better to avoid them. He did not see that the woman he had taken for dead rose up and shook her fist at him for being still among the living, when she must surely die.
    This new sundered landscape impressed him deeply, as it also seemed to quiet the dog. He knew his brother would have appreciated it, for his brother had a passion for sbumi, that principle whereby one adds a discordant detail to some careful perfection, in order to heighten one’s pleasure by a reminder of how artificial and contrived a thing is any felicity. Usually, in a carefully swept garden, a precise flower arrangement, or a painting, the discordant element was one dead leaf or a misdrawn stroke. But now, he saw, it could also be