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.
