by VIKING ADULT
‘We bear an official command,’ they reply.
Now, bandits, pirates, robbers, and the like often, or so I hear,
claim, ‘Your son will be here in a moment,’ or ‘We bear an official order.’
So I said, ‘Command? What command?’ and lit into them.
Oh, yes, given full armor and a sword of true steel,
I’d not have let one of those men escape unscathed!
Where is His Highness now? I have no idea! And if I did,
interrogation would get you nowhere with a warrior resolved to say nothing.”
The many Heike warriors present murmured among themselves.
“What a man!” they said. “Oh, it would be too bad to behead a man like that!”
“Last year, you know,” someone put in, “when on duty at the cloistered emperor’s,
he went off alone after six robbers that the other guards hadn’t been able to stop,
cut down four, and took two prisoner.
That’s how he got his officer’s post in the Left Watch.
Yes, he’s a man to face a thousand, you can certainly say that.”
They all told one another how sorry they would be to see him executed,
whereupon Lord Kiyomori, for reasons best known to himself,
banished him to Hino in the province of Hki.
When the Genji came into their own, Nobutsura went down to the east,
joined Kajiwara Kagetoki, and reported in full how it had all happened.
Deeply impressed, Lord Yoritomo generously appointed him to govern Noto.
6. Ki
Prince Mochihito headed north up Takakura Street, then east along Konoe,
crossed the Kamo River, and climbed the slopes of Mount Nyoi.
Of old when Tenmu, the Kiyomibara Emperor, was still heir apparent,
he came under attack by bandits and, so the story goes,
fled into the Yoshino mountains disguised as a woman.
The prince on his present journey did the same.
All night long he made his way
up mountain paths unknown to him,
as he had never done before,
and on the sand his bleeding feet
left stains as red as safflower dye.
Dense thickets of summer grass,
dew-drenched, tried his patience sorely.
And so, as dawn touched the sky,
he came at last to Miidera.
“Worthless this life of mine may be,
but I have no wish to give it up.
Therefore, monks, I come before you
to throw myself on your protection.”
So he spoke, and the monks rejoiced.
They decked out Hrin-in to lodge him,
and there served him a simple meal.
Dawn brought the sixteenth day, and word spread like wildfire
that Prince Mochihito had rebelled and was gone. The city was in an uproar.
The talk reached His Cloistered Eminence.
“Ah, yes,” he said, “the good news was my release from the Toba Mansion,
but Yasuchika mentioned bad news as well, and this is it.”
Now, Minamoto no Yorimasa had long kept his peace
and might have done so still, and yet this year he incited rebellion.
Why? Because Lord Munemori, Kiyomori’s second son,
had done what he never should have done.
Yes, it behooves the great in this world to think long and hard
before doing or saying, on impulse, things better left unsaid and undone.
Witness the case of a fine horse, renowned throughout the imperial city,
that belonged to Nakatsuna, Yorimasa’s eldest son.
This bay was incomparable: so easy to ride, so swift, so manageable
that there could be none like him. His name was Konoshita.
Word of the horse reached Munemori, who sent Nakatsuna a message:
“I would gladly see for myself this famous steed of yours.”
Nakatsuna replied, “The horse to which you refer is indeed mine,
but recently I rode him too hard and have sent him to the country to recover.”
“So be it, then.” Munemori said no more.
Alas, he brought the matter up before a gathering of Taira housemen.
“Why,” said one, “that horse was around just the day before yesterday!”
“Yesterday, too,” said another; and a third,
“And this morning there was Nakatsuna, putting that horse through his paces!”
“I see. Nakatsuna refuses to part with him. I cannot accept that.
Go and tell Nakatsuna that I want him.”
Munemori packed the man off at a gallop, and notes demanding the horse continued to fly—
five or six, seven or eight in the space of a single day.
Yorimasa heard what was going on and summoned Nakatsuna.
“The horse might be solid gold,” he declared,
“and still you could not hold out against such pressure to let him go.
Send him to Rokuhara immediately.”
Nakatsuna had no choice. He did so, with this accompanying poem:
If you are that keen,
then come here and look at him.
He is to me, this
bay all you like, my shadow:
Nothing can part me from him.127
Lord Munemori never replied.
“What a horse!” he cried. “Look at that!
Yes indeed, this is quite a horse,
but not so fine his tightfisted owner.
No, I do not like that man at all.
Brand this horse of his with his name.”
So they did. Branded “Nakatsuna,”
the horse went straight to the stables.
“Saddle that confounded Nakatsuna,” Munemori would order
when a visitor turned up, asking to view the famous steed.
“Mount the nag! Give him a taste of the whip!”
And so on. Nakatsuna himself heard about this.
“Here I’d give my life for that horse,” he raged,
“and it’s bad enough having sheer power rob me of him.
Now, because of him, the whole land will be laughing at me!”
The story reached Yorimasa’s ears. He said to Nakatsuna,
“Those Heike seem always to be spouting such nonsense,
and they haughtily assume that they can get away with it.
Very well then, a long life would mean nothing to me.
I shall look out for a chance to act.”
The word later on, though, was that he did nothing on his own
but recruited Prince Mochihito instead.
In this connection people thought back to the ways of Lord Shigemori.
Lord Shigemori was at the palace once when he went to call on the empress. While he was there, an eight-foot snake coiled itself around the left leg of his trousers. He realized that the gentlewomen would panic and frighten Her Majesty if he said anything, so he pinned the snake’s tail with his left hand, caught its head with his right, and slipped the creature into the sleeve of his formal robe. As calm and collected as can be, he then rose to his feet and called for a chamberlain. Nakatsuna, who was still a chamberlain, came forward and identified himself. Shigemori passed him the snake. Nakatsuna took it via the archery pavilion to the small court next to the privy chamber, where he summoned a clerk from the chamberlains’ office. “Take this,” he said, but the clerk shook his head vigorously and fled. In the end he had to call his retainer Ki, from the Palace Guards. Ki took the snake and disposed of it.
The next morning Lord Shigemori saddled a good horse and sent it to Nakatsuna.
“Your comportment yesterday greatly impressed me,” he said.
“This horse is a pleasure to ride. He will serve you well
when you sally forth by night to visit some lovely lady.”
Mindful of whom he was addressing, Nakatsuna replied
,
“With humble gratitude I acknowledge receipt of the horse.
But your comportment yesterday, my lord, was worthy of Genjraku.”128
How, though, when Lord Shigemori
always showed such marvelous tact,
could Munemori be so unlike him,
even to taking a man’s cherished horse
and imperiling the whole realm?
Oh, he was a terrible man.
On the sixteenth of the month, by night,
Minamoto no Yorimasa;
his eldest son, Nakatsuna;
his second son, Kanetsuna;
with the chamberlain Nakaie
and his eldest, Nakamitsu,
leading three hundred mounted men,
each set fire to his own house
and started for Miidera.
Among Yorimasa’s housemen was that man from the Palace Guards, Watanabe Ki.
He had ridden too late to join the others, and they had left him behind.
Lord Munemori summoned him. “Well, well,” he said,
“you did not after all go with Yorimasa but stayed here instead.”
With every mark of respect, Ki replied,
“I had long resolved that should anything happen,
I would race forward and give up my life for my lord.
For reasons best known to himself, however, he kept his plan from me.”
“I see. Then are you still in sympathy with this enemy of the court?
Or do you lean also my way? Do thoughts of future wealth and glory
inspire you to wish to serve the Taira house? Tell me the truth.”
Ki wept as he replied,
“Greatly as I value the bond,
generations old, with my lord,
I cannot act in sympathy
with an enemy of the court.”
So he spoke, and Munemori:
“Very well, then come and serve me.
No doubt Yorimasa was generous,
but you will find me no less so.”
Munemori then left the room.
From that moment on, it was, “Ki—
is he present just now for duty?”
“Yes, my lord!” Or it was, “Ki,
I want you here!” “Coming, my lord!”
He was on call the whole day long.
The sun was low when Lord Munemori came forth.
Ki addressed him with every mark of respect:
“I gather, my lord, that Lord Yorimasa has gone off to Miidera.
No doubt you will wish to send a force to attack him.
You need not fear much of a fight.
You will find there the monks of Miidera and the men of the Watanabe League.
I know them well. I would gladly be able to choose my opponent,
and a horse I once had would have served me perfectly,
but a close friend of mine made off with him.
Would it be possible for you, my lord, to let me have one?”
Lord Munemori saw no reason not to.
He put a fine saddle on a favored steed of his own, a pale gray named Silver.
Ki returned home. “The sun can’t set soon enough,” he said.
“Then I’ll gallop this horse to Miidera, lead Lord Yorimasa’s charge, and die.”
At long last the sun went down.
Ki sent his family off to hide.
The journey that now lay before him
filled his heart with grim foreboding.
Over a hunting cloak that bore
patterns picked out in three colors,
with bold chrysanthemums on the seams,
he donned red-laced, heirloom armor.
Next he secured with a stout cord
a helmet studded with silver stars,
slung at his waist an imposing sword
and, over his back, a quiver
with twenty-four arrows fletched black and white.
To these he added—perhaps he wished
to uphold a Palace Guard custom—
a pair of hawk-fletched target arrows.
Black-lacquered, rattan-wrapped bow in hand,
he mounted Silver and, with a fresh horse
and a shield-bearer groom beside him,
set fire to his house. Once it was burning,
he galloped away toward Miidera.
At Rokuhara news of the fire
started uproar and pandemonium.
Lord Munemori came rushing out.
“Is Ki here?” he demanded to know.
“No, my lord,” they said, “he is gone.”
“Confound it! I was lenient with him,
and now he has gone and done me in!
Get after him, seize him, and kill him!”
Ki, who drew a mighty bow and whose arrows sank deep, also shot one arrow after another with blazing speed. He was a formidable warrior.
“He’d get twenty-four men with those twenty-four arrows of his,” the housemen murmured. “Lie low!” Not one dared face him.
At Miidera, meanwhile, they were talking about Ki. “We should have brought him with us,” the Watanabe men said. “There’s no telling what may have happened to him, caught that way at Rokuhara.”
Yorimasa knew his man, though. He said, “Oh, no, he would never let himself fall into their hands—not without good reason. He is deeply devoted to me. He will be here at any moment.”
He had hardly finished speaking when Ki arrived. “I knew it!” said Yorimasa. Respectfully, Ki addressed Nakatsuna:
“I have brought Silver from Rokuhara, in place of your Konoshita.
Please accept him.”
Nakatsuna was extremely pleased.
Then and there he cut off tail and mane,
branded the animal, and the next night
sent him back to Rokuhara.
In through the gate went Silver, at midnight.
He headed straight to his stable,
where the horses nipped at one another.
All the stable hands were astonished.
“Silver is back, my lord!” they announced.
Munemori rushed out for a look.
“Once,” the brand read, “I was Silver.
Now, a shaven-pate novice,
I am Taira no Munemori.”
“That miserable Ki!” Munemori cried. “I gave him a second chance,
and look what he has done to me! Well, I’ve learned my lesson.
When you attack Miidera, do whatever you must to take the scoundrel alive.
I’ll cut off his head with a saw!”
Munemori was hopping with rage.
Alas, Silver’s mane and tail
never grew back, and the brand stayed.
7. The Appeal to Mount Hiei
At Miidera the monks blew conchs and rang the bell to convene their council.
They adopted unanimously the following position:
“Recent developments invite the conclusion that in our time
the Buddha’s Way is in decline and the Way of the Sovereign suppressed.
If we do not now chastise Kiyomori’s violence, when will we ever do so?
His Highness’s arrival to join us demonstrates beyond doubt
that Hachiman and the great Shinra Deity129 grant us their protection.
Why, then, should not all powers of heaven and earth descend to aid us,
why should not buddhas and gods lend us their might to quell the foe?
Now, the Mountain to our north is the home of Tendai learning,
and Nara offers ordination after the summer retreat.
If we appeal to each, will they not join forces with us?”
With one voice they therefore appealed to Mount Hiei and Nara.
The letter to Mount Hiei read as follows:
FROM: Miidera
TO: Enryakuji Administration
SUBJECT: Assistance to avert destruction of this temple
ARGUMENT: The novice Jkai flouts at will the Way of the Sovereign and seeks to
destroy the Way of the Buddha. To compound the gravity of the situation, on the night of the fifteenth past, the second prince born to the cloistered emperor secretly took refuge at this temple. A so-called retired emperor’s decree then commanded us to surrender him, but it is not possible for us to comply.
We gather that a government force is therefore to be dispatched against us. Our temple faces annihilation. Could monks anywhere not deplore our plight? Of special significance is the fact that Enryakuji and Miidera, although separate institutions, share the same Tendai teaching. They resemble, as it were, the left and right wings of a bird or the two wheels of a cart. Neither can do without the other. Under these circumstances, should Enryakuji join forces with us to save our temple from annihilation, then all enmity between us will be forgotten and we shall see again the days when both bodies of monks inhabited the same mountain.
This appeal sent in conformity with the will of the council of monks.
Jish 4, fifth month, eighteenth day
The monks of Miidera
So read the appeal to the monks of Mount Hiei.
8. The Appeal to Nara
The monks of Mount Hiei read this appeal.
“Who do they think they are?” they exclaimed.
“Why, Miidera is a branch temple of ours,
and they talk about the two wings of a bird or the wheels of a cart?
The very idea!” They did not even reply.
Moreover, Lord Kiyomori commanded Meiun, the Enryakuji abbot,
to see to keeping his monks quiet. Meiun hurried up the Mountain and did so.
Therefore Enryakuji notified the partisans of Prince Mochihito
that it had not yet taken a position on the appeal.
Meanwhile Lord Kiyomori sent off to Mount Hiei
twenty thousand bushels of mi rice and three thousand extra-long bolts of silk from the north.
These gifts went out to monks scattered over the Mountain’s spurs and ravines,
but so suddenly that some got double or more and some got none.
Parties unknown posted this lampoon:
Monks of the Mountain,
clad in your silks from the north,
those robes are too sheer
to conceal what you would hide:
the shame of your secret ways.
And another, apparently by one who never got any at all:
And we, too, alas,
who have never laid our hands
on one scrap of silk,
