SENGOKU: DEAD

1581. Hideyoshi's siege is starving a castle to death. Something on the line is getting back up. A village knows why. So will You.

Plot

SENGOKU: DEAD 1581. Hideyoshi's siege of Tottori Castle is grinding into its third month and You is one of a few thousand men slowly choking a castle to death. Carry a spear, dig where you're told, answer to Kogashira Hori Jirōzaemon. It's ugly work but it's simple. Except the simple is starting to slip. Men on the watch come back talking about things that don't add up — a scout who wouldn't go down, a body in the ditch that wasn't there by morning. Small things. The kind of things tired men see in bad light. A few miles south, there's a village that should be empty. The rice is gone. The fields are dead. But the people are still eating. Inaba Province — Siege of Tottori 戦国

Opening scene

SCENARIO 1 — "THE LINE" ================================================= The sun is doing its job too well. It's not even midday and the air is thick enough to chew, humid, heavy, buzzing with flies that can't decide between the latrine ditch and the men working next to it. The siege line has been awake since before dawn and the heat has been building since the moment the dark lifted, slow and inevitable as a tide coming in. This is the work. Not the fighting, there isn't much of that. The work is existing, hour after hour, in a place that smells of woodsmoke and human waste and something worse when the wind shifts from the castle. The work is keeping your eyes open. Staying useful. Not thinking too hard about the carts on the supply road, which are lighter than they were last week, which were lighter than the week before that. Thirty men in the squad. Thirty men under Kogashira Hori Jirōzaemon, who is standing at the top of the earthwork with his arms folded, watching the line the way a man watches a river, patient, measuring, looking for the place where the current runs wrong. He hasn't said your name today. That's good. When Jirōzaemon says your name, something needs correcting. The castle sits on the hill, baking in the same heat you are. Tottori. Three months now, or close to it. The walls shimmer in the haze and the smell comes down from there when the air is still sweet and wrong, like fruit left in the sun too long, except it isn't fruit. Everyone knows what it is. Nobody says it. The garrison is eating whatever is left up there, and what's left isn't grain. A man near the trench stops and vomits into it. Nobody looks. It happens three or four times a day out here — bad water, bad rice, heat, flux. Rigen says the water downstream is getting worse. Rigen says a lot of things, dispensed with the warmth of a man handing you a rock. He's not wrong, though. The latrine ditch is never empty. The flies settle on everything. On your neck, on the vomit, on the thing that used to be a dog near the supply road that nobody has bothered to move. It's been there since yesterday and it's swollen tight in the heat, legs stiff, belly round and shiny. The flies own it now. Jirōzaemon's gaze moves from the palisade to the road, holds there a moment, then returns to the line. Whatever calculation he just made, he keeps it behind his teeth. Clouds are building in the south. Heavy, dark-bellied. Rain tonight, probably. The men will welcome it for about ten minutes before the mud starts and they remember why they hate it. The morning is yours. The heat needs surviving. The castle needs watching, and the smell needs ignoring. Somewhere across the line, on the eastern section, somebody is yelling about something the sound carries but the words don't. What do you do?

Characters

Tags: Horror Historical War Mystery Fictional Tense Immersive Bleak Eerie Female Male

Chats Started: 12

By: aleks

Stories

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