by VIKING ADULT
Late at night on the twenty-ninth of that same fifth month, Tada no Yukitsuna presented himself at Nishi-Hachij and announced that he wished to speak to Lord Kiyomori.
“He never normally comes here,” Kiyomori remarked. “What is this about? Go and hear what he has to say.” He sent Morikuni, the heir apparent’s chief equerry, to do so.
Yukitsuna insisted that he must speak to Lord Kiyomori in person, so Kiyomori resigned himself to meeting him in the gallery next to the middle gate. “It is very late, you know,” he said. “Why must you see me now? What is all this about?”
“Too many people would be watching during the day. I preferred to come under cover of darkness,” Yukitsuna replied. “Lately the cloistered emperor’s men have been arming themselves and massing troops. Have you heard about that, my lord?”
Kiyomori seemed unimpressed. “I gather they mean to attack Mount Hiei,” he said.
Yukitsuna moved closer to him and whispered, “No, my lord, that is not so.
My understanding is that their object is the Taira house itself.”
“Does the cloistered emperor know about this?”
“Of course he does.
In fact, Lord Narichika is raising forces on the strength of a decree from him.”
Yukitsuna told Kiyomori the story, even embellishing it somewhat:
what Shunkan was doing, what Yasuyori and Saik were saying, and so on.
Then he excused himself and left.
The astonished Kiyomori bellowed mightily to rouse his guards.
Terrified that his indiscretion might get him called in as a witness,
Yukitsuna hitched up his skirts and fled out the gate—not that anyone was after him—
feeling as though he had just set a great plain ablaze.
Kiyomori summoned Sadayoshi first.
“The capital,” he said, “apparently teems with rebels aiming to overthrow the Heike.
Let all our people know, and muster our men.”
Sadayoshi galloped off to do so.
Right Commander Lord Munemori,
Palace Guards Captain Tomomori,
Secretary Captain Shigehira,
Chief Left Equerry Yukimori,
and the others, clad in armor
and each bearing bow and arrows,
assembled in the greatest haste,
and so, too, a host of warriors
swept in like gathering clouds or mists.
At Nishi-Hachij that night,
there must have been easily
six or seven thousand mounted men.58
Dawn brought the sixth of the month. Before it grew light,
Kiyomori summoned Abe no Sukenari, of the police.
“You will go as fast as you can to the cloistered emperor’s residence,” he said.
“You will call out Nobunari, and you will tell him this:
‘Those in the circle around His Cloistered Eminence
plan to destroy my house and sow chaos throughout the realm.
Each of them is to be arrested, interrogated, and punished.’
Inform His Cloistered Eminence that he is not to interfere.”
Sukenari hastily complied.
He called out Nobunari, the master of the cloistered emperor’s table,
and told him what was afoot. Nobunari paled.
Then he went before the sovereign and relayed all he had heard.
“Oh, no!” the cloistered emperor said to himself in dismay.
“My men’s secret plans are out!” But to Nobunari he only muttered,
“What is he talking about?” He gave no real answer at all.
Sukenari raced back to Kiyomori with his report.
“I knew it!” Kiyomori exclaimed. “Yukitsuna was telling the truth.
Without his warning I would have been in danger.”
He dispatched Kageie, the governor of Hida, and Sadayoshi, the governor of Chikugo,
with orders to seize the rebels. Parties of two or three hundred mounted men
accordingly bore down on the houses in question to do that.
Kiyomori next sent a messenger to the Naka-no-mikado and Karasumaru crossing,
where Narichika lived. “I have a matter to discuss with you,”
the message said. “Please come immediately.”
It never occurred to Narichika that he was in trouble himself.
“Oh, dear!” he thought. “He must have heard about His Cloistered Eminence
planning an attack on Mount Hiei and wants me to stop him.
His Cloistered Eminence is much too angry for that, though.
There isn’t a thing I can do.”
Graceful in a lovely, soft hunting cloak,
he rode in a gaily decked-out carriage,
accompanied by three or four housemen—
all of them, down to servants and groom,
outfitted with exceptional care.
Alas, it dawned on him only later
that this was his last such journey from home.
He noticed as he approached Nishi-Hachij
that a wide area around it swarmed with warriors.
“There are so many!” he exclaimed to himself. “What in the world is going on?”
With a beating heart, he alighted from his carriage and entered the gate,
to find within a dense press of more warriors.
A cluster of especially terrifying ones awaited him at the middle gate.
They seized him by the arms and dragged him off.
“Maybe we’d better tie him up,” they remarked.
Lord Kiyomori peered out from behind his blinds.
“No need for that,” he said, so fourteen or fifteen surrounded him,
hoisted him onto the veranda, and shut him up in a tight little room.
Narichika thought he was dreaming. He had no idea what was happening.
While his men dispersed, swallowed into the crowd,
his servants and groom, deathly pale, abandoned his carriage and fled.
Meanwhile they captured and brought in
the novice Renj; the prelate Shunkan;
Motokane, who governed Yamashiro;
Masatsuna, from Ceremonial;
and the three police lieutenants,
Yasuyori, Nobufusa, Sukeyuki.
The monk Saik heard of all this
and, no doubt eager to save himself,
raced with his whip brandished high
to the cloistered emperor’s residence.
Heike men intercepted him.
“You’re wanted at Nishi-Hachij,”
they announced. “Go there now.”
“But I have a report for His Cloistered Eminence. I am just on my way to him,”
Saik protested. “I will go there straight afterward.”
“You miserable monk!” they retorted. “What report would that be?
Oh, no, no more nonsense from you!”
They pulled him down from his horse, suspended him in midair,
and kept him dangling all the way to Nishi-Hachij.
Since he had been a ringleader from the beginning,
they bound him with special care and dragged him into the small court.
Lord Kiyomori stood above him on the wide veranda.
“This,” he said, “is what happens to anyone who would overthrow me.
Drag the miserable cur over here!”
They moved him to the veranda edge,
and there Kiyomori, fully shod,
furiously trampled Saik’s face.
“Oh, yes,” he raged, “I watched the cloistered emperor pick up the likes of you from among the dregs of men,
appoint you to offices you had no right to hold, and give the lot of you,
fathers and sons, treatment beyond anything you ever deserved.
Then you went and provoked a crisis by banishing the blameless abbot of Mount Hiei.
And now, to top it off, it turns out that you’ve been plotting rebellion
&n
bsp; to destroy my house. So tell me all about it!”
Saik, always a man of exceptional courage, neither blanched nor flinched.
Instead he sat up straight and laughed derisively.
“You have it backward,” he said. “It is you, Lord Kiyomori, who talk bigger than you are. Others may feel different, but as for myself, I will not have you speak to me that way. Being in His Cloistered Eminence’s employ, I was in no position not to subscribe to what the master of his household, Narichika, presented to me as an imperial decree. So I did. But what you say sticks in my craw. Your father was Tadamori, the late head of the Bureau of Justice, but you never even entered court service until your fourteenth or fifteenth year. Then, when you began frequenting the household of the late counselor Fujiwara no Ienari, the youth of the city nicknamed you ‘Stuck-up Heida.’ In the Hen years, on your commander’s orders, you captured thirty pirate chieftains, and for that you were awarded the fourth rank and made a lieutenant of the Watch, but at the time people criticized even that as too good for you. The very idea that a man dismissed as unworthy to enter the privy chamber should rise to hold the office of chancellor—now, that I would call exceeding your station! On the other hand, it is hardly unprecedented for a houseman to become a provincial governor or an officer in the police. In what way, then, have I exceeded mine?”
Kiyomori interrogates Saik.
He addressed Kiyomori so boldly that for a moment Kiyomori was too angry to speak. At last he said, “Don’t just behead this fellow. No, tie him up good and tight.”
Matsura no Tar Shigeyoshi obeyed his lord’s command.
He crushed Saik’s arms and legs and tortured him variously.
Since Saik had never contested the charge, the torture was severe,
and he told everything. They filled four or five sheets of paper with his confession.
Then Kiyomori ordered his jaw split, which they did.
Next he was beheaded at the Goj-Suzaku crossing.
His elder son, Morotaka, formerly governor of Kaga, was in exile to Idota in Owari.
A local official there, Oguma no Koresue, carried out the order to execute him.
Saik’s younger son, Morotsune, was in prison.
They took him out and executed him on the riverbank at Rokuj.
Morohira, his younger brother and a junior officer in the Left Gate Watch,
together with three of his men, was likewise beheaded.
These nobodies got above themselves,
meddled in what never concerned them,
had an innocent abbot banished,
and so, it seems, reaped their reward:
For the godly wrath of great Sann
struck them and instantly laid them low.
So it is that they met their fate.
4. The Lesser Remonstrance
Dripping with sweat, shut up in that tiny room, Narichika said to himself,
“Oh, no! That business we’ve been planning must have leaked out!
But who leaked it? It must be one of His Cloistered Eminence’s guards!”
His mind was turning over every conceivable possibility
when he heard loud footsteps approaching from behind.
“This is it, then,” he thought. “I’m finished. They’re coming for me.”
It was Lord Kiyomori himself, loudly tramping the board floor,
slapping open the sliding door into where Narichika sat.
He wore a short, plain, white silk robe and wide trousers that hid his feet;
the unadorned dagger at his side lolled casually in its scabbard.
Seething with rage, Kiyomori
glared at the figure before him.
“I should have taken care of you
already back in Heiji,” he said,
“but Shigemori offered his life
for yours until I relented.
That is why you still have your head.
What do you have to say about that?
And what do you have against us, then, that you should scheme to destroy our house? They say it takes a man to feel gratitude, since a beast feels none. However, our time is not yet over, no indeed. So here I am, at your service and eager for a full account of your plans.”
“But this is all wrong!” Narichika answered. “Someone must have slandered me. Please inquire further!”
Kiyomori did not even let him finish. Instead he called loudly for an attendant. Sadayoshi appeared. “Give me that Saik’s confession,” he ordered. Sadayoshi brought it to him. Kiyomori took it and read it out to Narichika several times. “Absolutely disgusting!” he exclaimed. “And now what do you have to say for yourself?” He threw the document in Narichika’s face, slammed the sliding door shut again, and stormed off. Still in a rage, he called for Tsunet and Kaneyasu. Seno-ono Tar Kaneyasu and Nanba no Jir Tsunet arrived.
“Take that man and drag him down into the court!” he commanded.
Neither leaped to obey.
“There are Lord Shigemori’s feelings to consider, my lord,” they said.
Kiyomori’s fury only grew.
“I see,” he said. “For you the palace minister’s orders outweigh mine.
You hardly care what I say. So I have no choice.”
The two men must have seen trouble coming.
Both stood up immediately
and forced Narichika to the ground.
Lord Kiyomori brightened up.
“Flatten him! Make him howl!” he said.
Each put his mouth next to an ear.
“You’re going to have to scream, my lord,
somehow or other,” they whispered,
then went ahead and stretched him out.
Narichika screamed several times
as horribly as any sinner
guilty of crimes among the living
and captive now in the afterworld,
when weighed against his own karma,
faced with the Great Mirror of Truth,59
and judged by the gravity of his sins
to suffer commensurate torment
at the hands of the fiends of hell.
Xiao and Fan were thrown into jail,
Han and Peng were killed and pickled,
Chao Cuo ended up executed,
Zhou and Wei were sentenced for crimes.
Xiao He, Fan Kuai, Han Xin, Peng Yue—
all ministers loyal to Han Gaozu—
suffered ignominy and defeat
from the slander of little men.
Was Narichika’s case like theirs?
Caught up now in this painful plight,
Narichika shuddered to think
what might become of Naritsune,
his first son, and the rest of his children.
It was the sixth month and very hot,
but he could not loosen his clothes,
and in the unbearable heat
he felt sure he would suffocate.
Sweat and tears streamed from him.
“But Lord Shigemori—at least he won’t abandon me,” Narichika assured himself. He could not imagine, however, who might take Shigemori his message.
Lord Shigemori arrived only much later, with his eldest son, Koremori, riding in the back of his carriage and accompanied by four or five men from the Palace Guards and two or three attendants. He had not a single warrior with him. So utterly relaxed was his manner that Kiyomori, his father, could hardly believe his eyes; nor could anyone else. Sadayoshi went straight up to him while he alighted. “How can you possibly go without even one armed guard,” he said, “in a crisis like this?”
“Crisis?” Shigemori replied. “A crisis is a calamity that threatens the realm. How could anyone call a private incident like this a crisis?” The armed men present fidgeted nervously.
“And where have you put Grand Counselor Narichika?” Shigemori inquired.
He slid doors open here and there for a look.
One had crossed timbers lashed over it: in there, presumably.
He opened it.
There lay Narichika, facedown, dissolved in tears, and avoiding his visitor’s eyes.
“What have they done to you?” Shigemori asked.
Only then did Narichika look up, poor man, relief written all over his face,
much as a sinner in hell might gaze on the bodhisattva Jiz.60
“How can this possibly have happened to me?” he said.
“Now that you are here, though, I can at least entertain some hope.
I nearly faced execution back in the Heiji years,
and only your kindness kept my head on my shoulders.
I rose to senior second rank and the post of grand counselor,
and already I have passed my fortieth year.
I could never repay what you have done for me, not over countless lives of trying.
And now, just as you did before, you are offering me my worthless life back.
If I survive this, I will renounce the world,
confine myself on retreat on Mount Kya or at Kokawa,
and devote myself to praying for your enlightenment in the life to come.”
“Very well, but there is no question of anyone taking your life,” Shigemori answered.
“And even if there were, here I am, ready to give mine for yours.”
With this he left to go before his father, Kiyomori.
“You should think carefully,” he said, “before you do away with Narichika.
Akisue, his ancestor,
served Retired Emperor Shirakawa.
None in this line, before Narichika,
achieved the senior second rank
or the office of grand counselor.
In the cloistered sovereign’s eyes,
he enjoys favor beyond compare.
I venture to doubt that it would be wise
impulsively to take his head.
Banishment from the capital
surely will do quite well enough.
Sugawara no Michizane,
