by VIKING ADULT
and local warlords swarmed like wasps,
Liu Bang was the first among them
to enter the Xianyang Palace;
yet fearing that nevertheless
Xiang Yu might come after him,
he took to himself no man’s wife,
though she be the greatest beauty,
nor seized, to enrich himself,
gold or silver, pearls or jewels
but, empty-handed, mounted guard
over the Han Valley barrier,
by slow degrees subdued each foe,
and took possession of the realm.
If only Kiso in this spirit,
and despite taking the city first,
had listened to Lord Yoritomo,
he might have done equally well.
The Heike had left Yashima, in Sanuki, the winter before;
crossed over to the Naniwa coast in the province of Settsu;
installed themselves at Fukuhara, their old capital;
established a fortress at Ichi-no-tani to the west;
and, to the east, placed the access gate for their main force in Ikuta Wood.
The men garrisoned at Fukuhara, Hygo, Itayado, and Suma
came from the eight San’yd provinces and the six of the Nankaid;
thus fourteen provinces in all had answered the Heike call.
They numbered over one hundred thousand.
Ichi-no-tani:
mountains northward, sea to the south,
narrow of access, spacious beyond,
and cliffs sheer as folding screens.
From the foot of the cliffs to the north
and far out into the southern shallows,
they had heaped a wall of boulders,
felled mighty trees to lay abatis,
and in the deeper water ranged ships
side by side like a wall of shields.
On the towers by the fortress entrance,
Kyushu and Shikoku warriors,
each battle-ready and far-famed
for fierce courage to take on a thousand,
clustered like dense clouds and mists.
Below the towers saddled horses
stood, keen for war, in ready ranks.
Huge drums pounded a martial beat.
Poised before every archer’s breast,
the drawn bow swelled like a half-moon.
Like autumn frost a three-foot sword
gleamed at each waist, and on the crests
red banners streamed, leaping flames
in the spring wind through high heaven.
6. Six Clashes
After the Heike move to Fukuhara,
the Shikoku warriors’ allegiance to them waned.
The Awa and Sanuki provincial officials especially
rejected them and turned their sympathies toward the Genji.
“However,” they acknowledged, “we have followed the Heike almost to this day,
and the Genji will hardly believe us if we suddenly now declare ourselves allies.
No, let us first loose an arrow or two against the Heike
and go over to the Genji on the strength of that gesture.”
Having learned that Taira no Norimori was at Shimotsui in Bizen
with Michimori and Noritsune, his two sons,
they sailed there with ten boatloads of men to carry out their attack.
Noritsune heard they were coming.
“The scoundrels!” he cried. “Why, the other day
they were cutting grass to feed our horses,
and now, just like that, they turn against us!
Very well, then! Go, men, kill them all!”
Aboard a fleet of boats, they struck, howling,
“Get them, get every single one!”
The warriors from Shikoku had meant
to shoot a few arrows merely for show
and then withdraw, but this fierce assault
convinced them, it seems, that they were lost.
They were gone before the foe got near them
and fled up toward the capital.
On the way they came, in Awaji province,
to the harbor of Fukura.
In Awaji there were two Genji men,
both descended from the great Tameyoshi:
Kamo no Kanja Yoshitsugi
and Awaji no Kanja Yoshihisa.
Under the orders of these two,
they built a fortress, and they waited.
All too soon here came Noritsune,
on the attack. The fight lasted out the day.
Yoshitsugi was killed, Yoshihisa wounded
so grievously that he took his own life.
More than one hundred and thirty men
had loosed arrows in the fort’s defense.
Noritsune beheaded them all,
made a complete list of their names,
and forwarded it to Fukuhara.
Lord Norimori then went to Fukuhara in person,
while his sons crossed to Shikoku to attack Kawano no Shir, of Iyo,
who had failed to answer their rallying call.
Michimori, the elder, first reached the fort of Hanazono, in Awa.
The younger, Noritsune, went over to Yashima, in Sanuki.
The news prompted Kawano to cross over to Aki,
to join up with a man of that province: Nuta no Jir, his maternal uncle.
Noritsune started from Yashima in pursuit as soon as he heard.
He landed at Minoshima, in the province of Bingo,
and the next day he closed in on Nuta’s stronghold.
Nuta and Kawano together
were there to mount a sturdy defense.
Noritsune attacked forthwith,
and the fight went on a whole day and night,
until Nuta must have felt all was lost,
for he doffed his helmet and surrendered.
Kawano, however, refused to yield.
He sallied forth with the mere fifty left from his initial five hundred men, only to be surrounded by two hundred under Heihachibye Tamekazu, a retainer of Noritsune’s. These left him just six. Hoping nevertheless to escape, he fled shoreward down a narrow path, pursued by Tamekazu’s son, Yoshinori, a powerful archer. Yoshinori closed within range of his quarry and felled five. Kawano alone remained, with one companion.
Yoshinori moved up beside this man, for whom Kawano was ready to die,
grappled with him until both fell, and was about to take his head
when Kawano turned back, cut off Yoshinori’s,
and tossed it into the deep mud of a rice field.
He then cried in a great voice,
“I am Kawano no Shir,
by birth Ochi no Michinobu,
in the twenty-first year of my life,
and behold! This is how I fight!
Let any man with the heart for it try to stop me!” He slung his companion over his shoulder, galloped off, boarded a boat, and sailed back to Iyo. Noritsune had failed to finish off Kawano, but he took Nuta, his prisoner, with him to Fukuhara.
There was yet another man, Ama no Rokur Tadakage of Awaji,
who lent his support to the Genji.
In two large vessels laden with arms and commandeered rice,
he sailed up toward the capital.
At the news Noritsune set out after him in ten smaller boats.
Off Nishinomiya, Ama no Rokur turned back to engage him.
So fierce was Noritsune’s attack
that Ama must have foreseen disaster,
for he retreated to Fukehi,
a port in the province of Izumi.
Sonobe no Hye Tadayasu,
a man from Kii, was yet another
who dropped the Heike for the Genji.
Learning that Ama no Rokur,
under attack from Noritsune,
had sought refuge at Fukehi,
he galloped there with a hundred men
to join forces with him. Noritsune
fo
llowed and attacked again.
The two men held out a day and a night,
but, confronted by catastrophe,
under cover of their men’s arrows
they fled up toward the capital.
All two hundred of those archers
Noritsune ordered beheaded,
hung their heads in menacing view,
and returned at last to Fukuhara.
Next Kawano no Shir from Iyo, in league with two Bungo warriors,
Usuki no Jir Koretaka and Ogata no Sabur Koreyoshi,
led a force of two thousand men into the province of Bizen,
where they barricaded themselves in the fortress of Imagi.
Noritsune learned of this, too. From Fukuhara
he sent an attack force against them in haste, three thousand strong.
“These scoundrels will make no easy foe,”
Noritsune reported to Fukuhara.
“I need reinforcements!” Word then spread
that tens of thousands were on their way.
The men in Imagi gave it their best,
taking trophies and earning great honor,
but they knew that the Heike were many.
“And,” they said, “there are so few of us!
We cannot possibly win this battle.
No, we had better escape from here
and give ourselves time to catch our breath.”
Usuki and Ogata, by boat,
managed to get all the way to Kyushu,
while Kawano crossed over to Iyo.
There being no enemy left to fight,
Noritsune went back to Fukuhara.
There, Munemori and all the Heike—
senior nobles, privy gentlemen—
with one voice lauded the exploits
of Taira no Noritsune.
7. The Roster of Forces at Mikusa
On the twenty-ninth of the first month,
Noriyori and Yoshitsune called on the cloistered emperor
to report their departure for the west, to destroy the Heike.
His Cloistered Eminence replied,
“Three treasures have come down in our realm since the age of the gods.
They are the mirror, the jewel, and the sword.
See that you return them safe and sound to the capital.”
The two men respectfully undertook to do so. Then they withdrew.
At Fukuhara the fourth of the second month was the anniversary of Lord Kiyomori’s death,
and the memorial rites for him went forward as prescribed.
Constant campaigning had left confused
the passage of the months and days,
but the old year had turned to the new,
bringing a melancholy spring.
Had the world only been theirs,
what stupas217 they might have erected,
what offerings made to the Buddha,
what generous gifts to the holy monks!
But the surviving sons and daughters
could only come together and weep.
The occasion called for the announcement of new appointments,
and clerics and laymen alike received promotions.
When Lord Munemori announced that the counselor Norimori
was to become a grand counselor with the senior second rank,
Norimori said,
Is this really I,
this man, unaccountably
still alive today?
What he sees before him now
is a dream within a dream.
In consideration of this reply,
he was not made a grand counselor.
Morozumi, the son of chief secretary Nakahara Moronao,
was appointed a chief secretary.
Masaakira, an assistant deputy in the Bureau of War,
was appointed concurrently a fifth-rank chamberlain.
People therefore called him the “Chamberlain-Assistant.”
Of old, Taira no Masakado
conquered the eight eastern provinces
and established his capital
in Sma county of Shimsa.
Claiming the title of “Taira Prince,”
he appointed all his officials,
save a doctor of the calendar.218
This case, however, was different.
The Heike had lost the old capital,
but the emperor, who was with them,
possessed the three regalia,
hence full, sovereign authority.
Nothing at all prevented them
from announcing new appointments.
News that the Heike had fought their way up as far as Fukuhara
and soon would be back in the capital
greatly heartened and cheered those who had stayed behind at home.
The prelate Senshin, long resident at the temple of Prince-Abbot Jnin,
corresponded with his old friend, who wrote in one of his replies,
“It is painful to imagine your life under such unfamiliar skies.
There is no peace in the capital either.”
At the end he added this poem:
This fond heart of mine,
where you live in memory
shared by no other,
I now send forth, to be yours,
westward with the sinking moon.
Senshin pressed the letter to his face,
overwhelmed by tears of sorrow.
All this time Lord Koremori
mourned more intensely, day by day,
being torn from the wife and children
he had left behind in the city.
Merchants sometimes brought him letters,
and he suffered so from knowing
what her life in the city was like
that he thought of having her join him,
to have both of them share one fate,
but while bearing up himself,
he hated to inflict all this on her.
He therefore cultivated patience,
day after endlessly trying day,
in a manner that clearly showed
the depth of his feeling for her.
The Genji had meant to attack on the fourth, but they desisted when they learned that it was the anniversary of Kiyomori’s death, so as to let the proper rites take their course. On the fifth the westward direction was blocked, and on the sixth all travel was forbidden. They decided on an initial arrow exchange with the Heike on the seventh, at the hour of the hare, at the east and west access points to Ichi-no-tani.
Nonetheless the almanac had the fourth down as a lucky day,
so it was then that the commanders of the army’s two divisions,
the main and the flanking force, set out from the city.
Noriyori commanded the main force,
supported by the following men:
Takeda no Tar Nobuyoshi,
Kagami no Jir Tmitsu,
Kagami no Kojir Nagakiyo,
Yamana no Jir Noriyoshi,
Yamana no Sabur Yoshiyuki.
And these were his field commanders:
Kajiwara Heiz Kagetoki;
Genda Kagesue, his first son;
his second, Heiji Kagetaka;
his third, Sabur Kageie.
Also Inage no Sabur Shigenari,
Hangae no Shir Shigetomo,
Hangae no Gor Yukishige,
Koyama no Koshir Tomomasa,
Nakanuma no Gor Munemasa,
Yūki no Shichir Tomomitsu,
Sanuki no Shir Hirotsuna,
Onodera no Tar Michitsuna,
Soga no Tar Sukenobu,
Nakamura no Tar Tokitsune,
Edo no Shir Shigeharu,
Tamanoi no Shir Sukekage,
kawazu no Tar Hiroyuki,
Sh no Sabur Tadaie,
Sh no Shir Takaie,
Shdai no Hachir Yukihira,
Kuge no Jir Shigemitsu,
Kawara no Tar Takanao,
Kawara no Jir Morinao,
Fuji
ta no Sabur Yukiyasu.
Under these rode fifty thousand,
who, on the fourth of the second month,
early in the hour of the dragon, [ca. 8 A.M.]
made their way out of the capital
and that same day, during the hours
of the monkey and on to the bird, [ca. 4–6 P.M.]
established their camp at Koyano,
in the province of Settsu.
Yoshitsune commanded the flanking force,
supported by men of his own:
Yasuda no Sabur Yoshisada,
uchi no Tar Koreyoshi,
Murakami Yasukuni,
and Tashiro Nobutsuna.
And these were his field commanders:
Doi no Jir Sanehira;
his son, Yatar Thira;
Miura-no-Suke Yoshizumi;
his son, Heiroku Yoshimura.
Also Hatakeyama no Jir Shigetada,
Nagano no Sabur Shigekiyo,
Sahara no Jūr Yoshitsura,
Wada no Kotar Yoshimori,
Wada no Jir Yoshimochi,
Wada no Sabur Munezane,
Sasaki Shir Takatsuna,
Sasaki no Gor Yoshikiyo,
Kumagai no Jir Naozane,
and his son, Kojir Naoie.
Plus Hirayama Sueshige,
Amano no Jir Naotsune,
Ogawa no Jir Sukeyoshi,
Hara no Sabur Kiyomasu,
Kaneko no Jūr Ietada,
Kaneko no Yoichi Chikanori,
Watariyanagi no Yagor Kiyotada,
Beppu no Kotar Kiyoshige,
Tatara no Gor Yoshiharu,
and his son, Tar Mitsuyoshi.
Lastly Kataoka no Tar Tsuneharu,
Genpachi Hirotsuna,
Ise no Sabur Yoshimori,
Sat no Sabur Tsuginobu,
Sat no Shir Tadanobu,
Eda no Genz,
Kumai Tar, and
Musashib Benkei.
These led a force of ten thousand.
The men left the city that same day,
at the same hour, by the Tanba road
and in a day covered a distance
more commonly covered in two.
They came to the Harima-Tanba border,
and there they stopped at Onobara,
under the eastern slopes of Mount Mikusa.
8. The Battle of Mikusa
The Heike side had stationed over three thousand horse
seven or eight miles from Onobara, below the western slopes of Mikusa.
Taira no Sukemori, Arimori, Tadafusa, and Moromori led them,
with the help of field officers Heinaibye Kiyoie and Emi no Jir Morikata.
That night, at the hour of the dog, Yoshitsune summoned Doi no Jir Sanehira. [ca. 8 P.M.]
