Sensei blocked, absorbing the strike and drawing his elbows into his body, then slid his sword down Diego’s blade, going for the thumb. Diego drew back to cut kesa on the other side.
Sensei drove forward, letting Diego’s strike pass behind him and then turning away from Diego while very close, and bringing his blade around to cut Diego’s exposed side.
The arm, Diego’s snack, stuck down his shirtfront took the brunt of the cut, and, though Sensei sliced all the way through it, his sword only cut an inch or so into Diego’s abdomen.
Diego turned like a snake and cut at Sensei’s back but Sensei had kept going, putting him just out of range. Sensei pivoted and sliced up vertically, the move from the Suburi Happo, designed to cut from groin to chin, and Diego jerked backwards to avoid it.
I tried to get Richard and Lou moving again, and Diego saw or sensed the movement. He leaped back into our path, blocking the way.
“No, Diego!” Richard yelled.
Again, Diego hesitated, looked confused.
Sensei closed in again, and Diego faced him, moving away from us without unblocking our path. Diego struck, lightning fast, shomen, and Sensei slid off the line, guiding the sword away, to cut back shomen. Diego moved sideways, without blocking, and struck again, so fast, that Sensei barely had time to get his head out of the way. The sword bit hard into Sensei’s shoulder but Sensei’s rising block kept it from cutting all the way through the bone.
Sensei fell and Diego raised his sword again, to finish Sensei, but I drew and thrust quickly into Diego’s back.
It didn’t kill or disable but it got his attention.
He turned and cut viciously, kesa, but I’d stepped back. As his sword went by I tried to cut his wrist, but I hesitated and nicked his forearm instead. He came back horizontal and Lou’s sword blocked it. At the same time, tears streaming down his face, Richard thrust into Diego’s stomach.
Diego stepped back and put his hand to the wound, then held it, looking at the blood. He sniffed it and his nose wrinkled. He gripped the sword again, both hands, and I dropped to my knees and said loudly, “Da-TO!” When we bow out of class, the first thing we do is take our sword out of our obi and put it down on the floor before us. I set my bare sword down, not in its scabbard, like we’d normally do, but in the same position, edge toward me, handle to the right.
Diego almost did it, starting to lower the sword and bend his knees in reflex, but then he stopped and raised it again.
Lou lowered her sword and said, “Diego, love, come to me.”
Diego froze, his mouth opening and his face softening, and I snatched up my sword and, left hand flat on the mune, thrust it up through Diego’s jaw and all the way into his brain.
Diego fell to the side, his sword still gripped solidly in his hands.
Lou dropped back to her knees and threw up. Again.
We made Richard limp by himself as we carried Sensei to the gate. We kept him from bleeding to death but it was a close thing. Richard brought back his brother’s sword, and we’re saving it. Boy or girl, his child deserves something of her father’s.
All that throwing up wasn’t just something Lou had eaten.
“Sensei would never have allowed you to come along if he’d known you were pregnant.”
Lou nodded and kept crying.
Danny, the southern guard, was discharged from his post and set to garbage detail. He wasn’t at the gate because he was pilfering in the kitchen gardens. Had a nice business in black market tomatoes.
Sensei’s shoulder was never the same. He still lives at the dojo and he makes comments from the side of the mat, but mostly he leaves it to me, and he never went out of the gates again.
But I did.
The Days of Flaming Motorcycles
By Catherynne M. Valente
Catherynne M. Valente is the critically acclaimed author of The Orphan’s Tales series, which has won the Tiptree Award, the Mythopoeic Award, and was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award. Her novel, Palimpsest—which she describes as “a baroque meeting of science fiction and fantasy”—is a finalist for the 2010 Hugo Awards. Her young adult novel, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, which was originally self-published online and is forthcoming in print from Feiwel and Friends, recently won the Andre Norton Award. A new series, beginning in November with The Habitation of the Blessed, retells the legend of Prester John. Her short fiction has appeared in the magazines Clarkesworld, Electric Velocipede, and Lightspeed, and in the anthology Dark Faith, where this story first appeared.