After an hour of enduring the occasional petulant arrow launched in his direction, a barrage of wood and steel was begun in truth, and that was when Ii Nagaochi knew he was in trouble. “Places men!” he roared as he walked among his men, rousing them from their rest. He swung his sword lazily at the crest of the hill, directing the archers there, while the spearmen would wait just behind them on the south face of the hill.
As he suspected, after the hail of arrows had go e on for some few minutes the Asano infantry launched their first attack aimed at securing the commanding position over the battlefield. Three flights of arrows from Commander Ii’s bowmen, waiting on the southern hill, sliced through them as they crested the northern hill and sent them scattering back to the north. They left several dozen men dead and wounded behind them.
The second wave was similarly repulsed, but the third surged down into the depression between the two hills and nearly made the Tokugawa position, but Ii sent his infantry forward. They ambled up the hill and filed through the bowmen who were whipping arrows into the Asano men ascending the hill and the archers who were their northern counterparts. Presenting nothing but their spearpoints, they held the enemy back and even began pushing them down the hill, outnumbered though they were.
Shigeharu gasped next to Shinshichi, who likewise was leaning on his knees, panting. After a few minutes they had recovered some of their stamina and, grasping their yari firmly, began climbing the hill again. The climb itself was not overly troubling; most of the Tokugawa bowmen were focusing on their Asano complement, yet they had been repulsed in three attacks and forced back down into the depression between the hills twice already. Shigeharu’s armor had several arrows sticking from it at odd angles that under other circumstances might have been comical. But in this instance they were deadly serious, and another few paces’ climb brought the two men within reach of the Tokugawa warriors. They presented an impenetrable wall of spearpoints to the Asano. Shinshichi and Shigeharu strove to press forward, but the could not form a cohesive formation struggling as they were against the incline, stumbling over their fallen comrades and the few Tokugawa men who had fallen as well. As they pressed forward the Tokugawa
bushi jabbed at them with their
yari and the few men where were able to dart past their hungry spearpoints were beaten into submission by the hafts.
Step by step the were driven back, the Tokugawa pressing slowly forward to deny them the chance to regroup. A wordless glance from Shigeharu was all Shinshichi needed to back off of the attack, and other Asano men began backing off the attack as well. In small groups of ten to twenty men they steadily gave ground to the Tokugawa, stabbing out at them halfheartedly. Then they reached the floor of the valley between the two hills. Still they were pushed back.
Then they were halfway up the northern hill, and the disparate clumps of men steadied their withdrawal, normalizing their pace until they too presented a united front against the Tokugawa, and still more men were streaming from the forest to the crest of the hill. As one the Tokugawa bushi halted their advance, suddenly stopping as men who were just waking from a disorienting dream. But their situation was far worse for they were outnumbered, had lost the advantage of the higher ground, and were in danger of being outflanked.
“Now!” roared Shigeharu, an intensity in his voice that Shinshichi would have found familiar only in his elder brother Danjo, not his friend. The Asano
bushi roared and flung themselves into a counterattack, heads tucked down to guard against Tokugawa arrow- and spearheads. The sheer impetus of their charge sent the Tokugawa line reeling back. Soon they were backpedaling as fast as they could.
“Yaaaah!” screamed Shinshichi as he shoulder-charged a Tokugawa samurai. His armoured bulk sent the man stumbling back, and his heel caught on a fallen Asano warrior.
Good for the fight, even in death! Shinchichi thought. His enemy sprawled on his back and Shinshichi dispatched him with a a quick thrust to the neck. To his left, Shigeharu was assaulting a determined group of Tokugawa soldiers. He advanced steadily on them, his obvious confidence inspiring the men around him, and the followed him without question, beating their opponents back. With a flurry of thrusts with his yari Shigeharu forced the man who seemed to be the Tokugawa leader back, back over the grass, now slick with the mingled blood of Asano and Tokugawa alike.
The enemy’s spear scored a desperate, lucky strike on Shigeharu’s face that rocked his face back, but he seemed unfazed as he continued his relentless assault on the Tokugawa man. A wild slash across the Tokugawa man’s forearm disarmed him, and Shigeharu followed up with an elbow to his face and then reversed his spear and rammed the blade into his enemy’s unarmored armpit. He pushed the man off of it and by the time he looked up the rest of the Tokugawa men were fleeing. “After them!” he cried, whipping the spear around his head, and the Asano bushi gave a loud sheer as they followed up the face of the southern hill, hot on the heels of the Tokugawa.
And all the while, the rest of the armies were marching towards each other, twenty thousand warriors all told.