Tale of the Warrior Geisha

by Margaret Dilloway

  Yoshinaka strode toward her. She stood her ground. His lips curled into a snarl. He grabbed her by the hair, yanked her head back. Her neck snapped and she let out a cry. So let him hurt her, if it came to that. If he could. Tomoe hit the wrist of the hand holding her hair, clutching his thumb, pulling it toward his forearm. Now it was his turn to cry out as he let her go. She shoved at his chest with her foot. Yoshinaka staggered, nearly fell into the fire, landing in a heap of ash piled next to the stone ring. No one moved to help him.

  Yoshinaka lifted his broken face to Tomoe. “You are nothing but a woman.” His eyes watered. “I only keep you because your cunt has not been stretched by children.”

  Tomoe’s face burned. “My father,” she said, “would be ashamed of you. The only reason I stay is that he told me to watch over you. Let me have Yamabuki. I will take her and my mother and Aoi and leave. A convent would be a welcome change over this hell.”

  “You want Yamabuki?” Yoshinaka spat at the ground. “Have her.” He walked off toward the center of town. Kanehira cast his sister a desperate glance, and then followed his foster brother into the maze of streets.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Yamabuki Gozen

  SHINOWARA TOWN

  KAGA PROVINCE

  HONSHU, JAPAN

  Fall 1183

  That night, Yamabuki lay without sleep, listening to the sounds of her daughter’s and Tomoe’s and Chizuru’s even breaths. If only she, too, could sleep. Her head ached and she was too hot. Fever, Chizuru said. A wet cloth lay next to her, heated up too much by her head. She had the feeling if she went to sleep now, she wouldn’t ever open her eyes again.

  After wanting to die for so long, it was only now that Yamabuki truly wanted to live.

  She had heard Yoshinaka boasting that he’d be the new shōgun. Heard Tomoe telling him he was mad.

  He was. They would all die. It was certain.

  She turned on her side. She tried to compose a poem, but only images of blood and death came to mind. Tomoe bearing her sword to cut off a man’s head, then being run through by an opponent’s sword from behind. Yamabuki using the jigai on her own throat. Yoshinaka’s head being borne away to a rival.

  She shivered. It was best not to think of these things. She wondered how Tomoe could sleep so deeply, without stirring or worry. Yamabuki’s eyes flickered to each corner of the room.

  A small fluttering in the darkness caught her attention, as if a piece of material rippled in a breeze no one could feel.

  Obāchan-obake had returned.

  The ghost moved outside and Yamabuki followed as though it had a rope, pulling her along. Obāchan floated down the street and Yamabuki did, too, not feeling the pebbles under her naked feet or the cold night air on her flesh. She walked among the houses, through the dark, until the ghost stopped at last and swayed close to Yamabuki.

  “Do you have news of little Yoshitaka?” Yamabuki asked.

  A vague image of the little boy, now a sturdy youth of seven years, came into Yamabuki’s mind. It wavered and threatened to disappear, but Yamabuki held it firm. Don’t go! A boy wearing a dark blue kimono and pants, holding a samurai sword made for his size, practicing with a man in a courtier’s cap. The boy’s face was angular, his eyes dark, and the way his mouth drew open across his teeth reminded her of Yoshinaka.

  Yamabuki clutched her skin over her heart. He was well. This, at least, she could hold on to. “Arigato, Obāchan,” she whispered.

  The image of her grandmother smiled, but her eyes turned downward. She put her hand on Yamabuki’s head and Yamabuki swore she could feel the weight of it. You must prepare yourself. Yamabuki put the back of her own hand over her forehead, feeling the perspiration there. Her grandmother must mean that she should prepare herself for the upcoming battle at the capital.

  “Hai, Obāchan.” She opened her eyes. Obāchan-obake was gone. She was alone, smelling rotting fish heads, in a narrow alleyway. It was not yet dawn. She walked slowly back home, her swollen feet bleeding.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Tomoe Gozen

  SHINOWARA TOWN

  KAGA PROVINCE

  HONSHU, JAPAN

  Fall 1183

  Tomoe awoke to soft sobs coming from Yamabuki’s mat. Tomoe crawled over to Yamabuki’s sleeping roll and touched Yamabuki’s leg. “It’s time!” she called to awaken her mother. The baby was a month early, but surely it would be all right.

  In the dim light from the fire, Yamabuki looked greenish red. She lay on her back, her legs apart, already pushing. Tomoe touched where the baby’s head should be and felt a cold foot sticking out. She withdrew her hand. The birth water smelled foul. Infection and breech. They needed to get this baby out.

  Yamabuki gripped Tomoe’s forearm. “I cannot. It hurts too much.”

  Chizuru ran over with rags and began manipulating Yamabuki’s stomach, trying to coax the baby to turn. Tomoe spoke to Yamabuki. “No. It’s not in your nature to give up. Your body remembers what to do. Remember the iris blooming in the frozen ground?” She stroked Yamabuki’s forehead. “You told me that, remember?”

  “True.” Yamabuki shifted and shot Tomoe a bittersweet smile. “Long ago. When I was young.” She shouted as the baby’s foot poked farther out, then retracted. Panting, she gripped Tomoe’s arm. “Don’t leave me.”

  “Never.” Tomoe knelt beside Yamabuki’s head, pulling it into her lap.

  Chizuru’s gaze met Tomoe’s. Her mother shook her head. Yamabuki screamed as though someone was stabbing her in the throat.

  “You must fight,” Tomoe said sharply. “Push him out!” Yamabuki screamed again, but this time it was more of a loud moaning shudder. The baby slid out into Chizuru’s waiting hands, the umbilical cord gleaming like an oyster shell in the light.

  Chizuru’s face fell as she held the bloody infant close to her breast. “A boy,” she said sadly.

  She handed him to Tomoe. He weighed no more than a handful of green beans, his limbs scrawny. She swept her finger through his mouth, sucked the liquid out of his nose with her own mouth, spat. He did not take a breath. Tomoe slapped him on the back. Nothing. She put her lips to the boy’s and blew, feeling his chest move up and down. Again and again. Her fingertip on the boy’s chest waited to feel a pulse. Stillness.

  The baby’s head was round and perfect, but too big for his tiny body. His nose was squashed and slick, the eyes white and unseeing. Tomoe had thought his skin red, but no, that was the reflection of the fire. His skin was the perfectly pearly blue of an early winter sky. She pushed more air into the tiny lungs.

  “What is it?” Yamabuki said. “What has happened? Let me see. Let me see!” Unexpectedly, the woman sat up and clawed at the baby, wresting him from Tomoe’s arms. The umbilical cord was still attached to the placenta, which glided out of Yamabuki’s body, her uterus convulsing, then fell onto the bedclothes. Chizuru quietly cut the cord away from the baby.

  Yamabuki rocked the limp boy. Her mouth moved to make words. She shook her head and sobbed without sound.

  “He will be all right.” Yamabuki rocked the baby harder. “Wake up, little one.” She rubbed his chest furiously. The baby lay, wilted, in her arms.

  “Yamabuki-chan.” Tomoe knelt. She tried to come up with words. But there was nothing to say. She put her arm around her friend. “I am so sorry.”

  Yamabuki stopped moving and held her baby silently, staring at the small face. Her shoulders shook. It looked like a dozen men had died in here, blood running off the bedroll and onto the tatami, leaking through the woven straw. “It is my fault,” Yamabuki said hollowly. “I should have taken better care of myself.”

  “Yamabuki-chan. You don’t mean that.” Tomoe embraced her hard, stopping her shaking. “It is not for us to say.”

  “I did this.” Yamabuki’s mouth twisted. “I did it.” She hit her own face with a closed fist, smackin
g it over and over. Tomoe gasped and tried to catch her arm, but the woman had surprising strength. Yamabuki felt feverish, five times as warm as the night air. “I am bad luck.”

  From behind, Tomoe looped her arms under Yamabuki’s armpits and grasped her hands together behind Yamabuki’s neck. “You did nothing. Stop!” The woman thrashed, but could not move. Chizuru took the baby. Yamabuki collapsed, falling into unconsciousness or sleep; Tomoe could not tell. Still she breathed.

  “Let him spend this one night with his mother,” Tomoe said. Chizuru wrapped the baby in a silken blanket and placed him under Yamabuki’s arm. Cries rose up in Tomoe’s throat, but like Yamabuki, she had no tears. She took the baby from Chizuru and placed him on the mat next to Yamabuki. In the dim light, both were the same color.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Tomoe Gozen

  ON THE WAY TO MIYAKO, THE CAPITAL

  CENTRAL HONSHU, JAPAN

  Fall 1183

  They left for the capital at daybreak, only two weeks after Yamabuki gave birth, on a mid-December morning when the wind blew bitter snow into their faces. The journey would take at least a week in this wintry weather, through the mountains.

  It was her brother Kanehira, to Tomoe’s surprise, who took her aside and asked her to accompany them. “Please. He needs you.”

  “I thought you supported him without question.” Tomoe looked levelly at her younger brother. He had lost a great deal of weight recently, his skin hanging loosely from his frame.

  Kanehira nodded. “I do support him. But I’ve said yes to all his ideas for too long. He won’t believe me anymore. He needs you.”

  Tomoe sighed, looking at Yamabuki. “I need to stay here.”

  Her brother put his hand on her shoulder. “You cannot do anything for her. Mother will take care of them. Don’t you remember your promise to Father?”

  Tomoe’s mouth contorted. She took a deep breath. “I will never forget it.”

  Tomoe forced her mother to stay inside, to not see them off. She kissed Chizuru and three-year-old Aoi, and then knelt next to Yamabuki and picked up her hand. The woman had never fully woken from her twilight sleep. They had managed to get her to drink broths and water, but that was all. “We must wait,” Chizuru said. “But as long as she breathes, she has a chance.”

  Yamabuki’s hand was stiff and cold. Tomoe put it to her lips. All the words that needed saying had been said long ago. There would be no changing anything in the hard days to come.

  Without Yamabuki, Tomoe thought, she would have turned out like Yoshinaka and her brother. Bitter, inflexible, battle-hungry, unable to take pleasure in anything but a fight. It was because of Yamabuki that Tomoe had learned to enjoy the daily humdrum routine of life. To find the poetry hidden in laundry day. To learn how to become a mother. To love somebody better than you loved yourself.

  Tomoe stroked the long fountain of hair under Yamabuki’s head, so white now it might be snow-pale by the new year. Her skin hung like empty kimonos on a clothesline. Tomoe put her ear gently against the woman’s face. She still breathed. “Yamabuki!” she said. “Wake up. Please.”

  I cannot go on without you. My sister of heart.

  —

  The ground was always frozen solid when they made camp, as Tomoe tried to get to sleep. Yoshinaka had ignored her entirely on this trip, punctuated as it was by snowstorms that bogged their progress. Mostly she lay in a state between dreaming and wakefulness, her muscles paralyzed, her mind never quite making the drop into deep sleep. At each daybreak, she awoke more and more groggy.

  On the seventh day, they met up with a small Taira force. The Taira simply gave up and joined them willingly before any fighting occurred, glad to exchange their loyalty for a bit of food. The rest they put down easily. Tomoe felt almost guilty for fighting the Taira, with their skeletal bodies and arms that could barely lift a sword. They did not take care of their soldiers.

  Yoshinaka made sure to send a messenger to Cousin Yoritomo. “Kiso approaches,” he said gleefully. “Watch out, Kiso shōgun moves.”

  As they got closer to Miyako, Tomoe grew more concerned about the plan. Would the people accept Yoshinaka as the shōgun? Yoritomo would not. Yoritomo would send an army for him, no matter what Yoshinaka’s victories had been.

  She hoped for a moment alone with Yoshinaka. A moment to embrace each other, for her to tell him her worries. For him to change his mind. Perhaps that was why he avoided her so strenuously. Each night, long after the last embers of the campfire hissed to black, Yoshinaka stayed awake, drinking and talking about all he would do as shōgun. “No more rice taxes,” he said. “We move to Chinese copper. It makes more sense.”

  “Yes.” Kanehira saluted him. “You are a man of the people.”

  “I am.” Yoshinaka nodded. “That is what the people want.”

  And then he would fall asleep, his head on his saddle blanket, never coming into Tomoe’s tent at all.

  She was truly part of his army. One of the men. She wasn’t sure she liked it.

  The last day of their journey, the fifteenth day, was the coldest of all. The air was frozen and dry, hurting Tomoe’s lungs. But still the sky was a clear window to the heavens. She glanced at Yoshinaka. Sweat beaded and ran down his face.

  If only I could go to sleep and awake when this is over, Tomoe thought.

  He glanced over at her and smiled. “It won’t be long now, Tomoe.”

  “Long until what? Our deaths?” She spurred Cherry Blossom forward. Tomoe was the first to pass through the gates of Miyako.

  THIRTY

  Tomoe Gozen

  MIYAKO, THE CAPITAL

  HONSHU, JAPAN

  January 1184

  Tomoe had dreamed about this city as a girl. It had seemed so glamorous. Sophisticated. Where all the action happened. This was where everything new arrived first, new spices and green tea, treasures from China. This was where Yamabuki was from. Where Wada-san had gone to work.

  She never thought she would see it in person.

  “Do you think we will see Wada-san?” she asked Yoshinaka, who rode silently on his horse, his face unreadable.

  He did not look at her. “No. He fights for my cousin now. In Cousin Yoshitsune’s unit.”

  Tomoe gaped. “What?”

  “The Taira government is falling. Of course Wada wouldn’t stay there. He may be weak, but he’s not dumb.” He spurred Demon to go faster, leaving Tomoe behind.

  The weather was cloudy this afternoon in January, and cold enough that clouds floated in front of their faces each time they exhaled. She shivered. The excitement she felt at entering the city left. She had, she realized, been excited at the prospect of perhaps seeing Wada-chan again.

  Tomoe kept her hands inside her sleeves, holding Cherry Blossom lightly, glad her horse would obey with slight touches of her legs. Her face had felt numb this morning when she pushed it out from the heavy coverings, but now the temperature didn’t affect it.

  They entered a long street of store stalls. She had imagined bustling streets, filled with merchants selling exotic goods. But this city. This city was shuttered today. No one carried litters through the street. No oxen walked through bearing loads. Only a few stands were open, bearing paltry goods. Sellers squinted at them, drawn back into the shadows.

  The bustle she had imagined was more a quiet buzz. A few people walked quickly by, barely noticing the presence of the Minamoto standards, the samurai Kiso imposing on his mighty horse.

  Yoshinaka deflated visibly. Tomoe thought he must be disappointed at the lack of reaction.

  She had expected at least a small phalanx of Taira soldiers waiting to attack, but there was no one. No resistance. Tomoe drew in a breath, raised his hand. “Listen!”

  They drew up their horses, listened.

  Nothing. Not a sound except the breathing of their horses, their nervous hooves o
n the earth.

  “They heard we are coming,” Kanehira said matter-of-factly. “Of course everyone is hiding. Wouldn’t you be?”

  “Shush.” Yoshinaka shot him an angry look, then rode ahead, down to where the road opened into the central square, facing the palace gates. “I am Minamoto no Yoshinaka! I am your new ruler. Your new Asahi Shōgun!” The few people going about their business merely looked up at him with vague surprise. They must be used to armies coming in and out by now. One old man stepped forward with a feeble bow. “The Taira have left the city, Kiso, and taken the child Tennō with them. Only Joukou is here now.” The old man trembled a little as he spoke of the emperors. Tennō was the child emperor Antoku, the little boy younger than Yoshinaka’s son. Joukou was the name of Go-Shirakawa, the “retired” or cloistered emperor, who had no real power.

  The Taira were on the run from the other Minamoto forces, Tomoe realized. Not from Yoshinaka. Cousin Yoritomo had driven them to abandon the city. The Taira had taken Tennō with them as a hostage, trying to use him as a bargaining chip. It would not work. Cousin Yoritomo would win eventually. Yoritomo would be the new shōgun.

  Yoshinaka frowned. “No Antoku, eh? They did hear we were coming,” he said. “Go-Shirakawa will have to do.”

  Kanehira, Tomoe, and the villagers all gasped in unison. No one was allowed to say aloud these sacred names of the emperors. It was forbidden. You were to call them “Tennō” or “Joukou,” never Antoku or Go-Shirakawa. All of them had been brought up knowing that, because emperors descended from gods. Yoshinaka knew this, too; he knew it as he knew his own language.

  Yoshinaka’s mouth curled into a smile at the reaction. He knew he had shocked them all, and these people would whisper about his boldness. His temerity.

  They got off their horses, leading them through the city streets to the palace. Tomoe could see it down the road, its roof higher than any other building in town. She saw a grouping of city dwellers collect as they approached, whispering and pointing at her. “It’s the onnamusha!” said one woman, and they all stared.