บท 271: Training

And so commenced the first day of training. Five thousand men gathered in the palace courtyard. Where there had once been rows of beautiful flowers and carefully trimmed trees, there was nothing but the cold hard stone and the flat earth. It was a brutal sight on the senses.

Each man had a metre between himself and the next, and they were all arranged in orderly rows and columns, fully armoured with live steel sheathed at their hips. They were ready to go to battle from the look of them. Red armour, blue armour, yellow armour and in places, black. Where peasants had once fielded a lone and measly dou over a ragged kimono, they had been equipped with full brown leather armour and twin swords to go with it, as befitted men who had endured what they had.