by VIKING ADULT
Did he give you no spoken message?”
“This is what he asked me to say,” Takesato replied.
“‘First, Kiyotsune died in the west, then Moromori was killed at Ichi-no-tani,
and now I, too, have met my end.
For you this must be a terrible blow, and that is my only regret.’
He went on to say a good deal about Karakawa, Kogarasu, and so on.”
“I cannot imagine now living on,”
Sukemori said, sleeves to his eyes,
weeping piteously, and no wonder.
He made a very sad sight indeed.
He looked so eerily like his brother
that everyone present wept as well.
His retainers, gathered around him,
could only dissolve in helpless tears.
Lord Munemori and Lady Nii,
who thought that he, like Yorimori,
had cast his lot with Yoritomo,
now understood that this was not so,
and they, too, lamented and mourned.
On the first of the fourth month, Yoritomo, in Kamakura, was awarded the senior fourth rank, lower grade. This represented a five-step leap, since his previous rank had been junior fifth, lower grade. The promotion rewarded his suppression of Kiso Yoshinaka.
On the third, Retired Emperor Sutoku was transferred in spirit to a newly built shrine at the east end of i-no-mikado, where the battle had been fought,252 there to be honored as a god. The initiative came from Cloistered Emperor Go-Shirakawa. The reigning emperor and his court apparently knew nothing about it.
On the fourth of the fifth month, Yorimori started down to the Kanto. He had received in the past, from Yoritomo, repeated letters conveying this assurance: “I continue to hold you in the highest regard. For me your mother lives on in you, and I mean to discharge to your benefit my obligation toward her.” These letters had led him to part ways with his house and stay behind in the capital. “No doubt Yoritomo does feel that way about me,” he reflected anxiously, “but I wonder about the other Genji.” So when the pressing invitation to Kamakura arrived, he went.
There was a retainer of Yorimori’s, a man named Yaheibye Munekiyo.
Although a key adviser, he did not go down to Kamakura with his lord.
“But why?” Yorimori asked.
“I simply prefer not to, my lord. You yourself are doing well,
but it pains me that the other gentlemen of your house should be roaming the waves of the western sea,
and I cannot yet fully reconcile myself to their plight.
I shall follow you when I have achieved a somewhat more settled frame of mind.”
Shaken and embarrassed, Yorimori replied,
“I am far from proud of myself for having abandoned my house and stayed behind in the city,
but I valued my standing and my life too much not to grasp at this straw.
As a result I am in no position not to go.
How can you decline to make this long journey with me?
Why, if you feel that strongly, did you not speak up when I made up my mind to stay?
After all, I discussed every aspect of the matter with you at the time.”
Munekiyo sat up perfectly straight and answered with due respect,
“Anyone, whether high or low,
values his life above all things.
Who gives up the world, they say,
still cannot give up himself.
I do not mean that you were wrong
back then not to flee the city.
The only reason Yoritomo
now enjoys such great good fortune
is that he had his own life saved.
When he was sent into exile,
her ladyship the nun, your mother,
ordered me to escort him
to the Shinohara post station.
I gather he still remembers that,
and I do not doubt that if I were with you,
he would shower me with gifts and feasts. I would find that distressing.
The gentlemen now in the west, or men of theirs, might hear of it,
to my everlasting shame. Please, allow me this time to stay where I am.
You cannot possibly now not go to Kamakura, since you never left the capital,
and of course my concern will follow you down the long road.
If you meant to attack an enemy, I would gladly lead your men,
but this time you can easily do without me.
Please tell Yoritomo, if he asks about me, that I am ill.”
Every man of heart there that day
shed tears upon hearing this speech.
Yorimori, thoroughly abashed, still knew that he had to go. He left immediately and reached Kamakura on the sixteenth. Yoritomo received him at once. “Is Munekiyo with you?” he asked.
“Unfortunately, he is currently unwell and so did not accompany me,” Yorimori replied.
“Unwell? What is wrong with him? He must have his reasons. I will never forget his kindness in the old days, when I was with him, and I counted on his coming down with you. I looked forward to seeing him. It is a great disappointment that he stayed away.” Yoritomo had prepared many land-grant decrees, as well as horses, saddles, and other accoutrements, and the chief men around him had eagerly followed suit. All were disappointed that Munekiyo had failed to appear.
On the ninth of the sixth month, Yorimori hurried back up to the city.
Yoritomo urged him to stay longer,
but he protested that people there would worry about him.
A request to His Cloistered Eminence secured for Yorimori
possession of all estate rights and private land that he had owned before
and reinstatement also in his grand-counselor post.
He took home in addition thirty saddled and thirty unsaddled horses
and thirty long chests filled with feathers, gold, dyed cloth, silk rolls, and so on.
Yoritomo’s consideration for him moved the others around him, great and small,
to commensurate generosity with their gifts.
The horses that he led away numbered in all three hundred.
Yorimori had not only managed to stay alive,
he had also returned to the capital rich.
On the eighteenth, Hirata Sadatsugu,
the Higo governor Sadayoshi’s uncle,
led a force of men from Iga and Ise
out into the province of mi,
where local Genji stalwarts engaged them
and killed or dispersed every one.
For these long-standing Heike retainers,
it was undoubtedly admirable
not to forget their old allegiance,
but the idea was rash presumption.
The “Three-Day Heike,” people called them.
Meanwhile Lord Koremori’s wife
had not had for a very long time
any breath of news from her husband.
“Oh, what can have become of him?”
she wondered, more and more worried.
“He always wrote to me once a month.”
While she waited and waited in vain,
spring slipped by and high summer came.
Then she heard that someone had said,
“Lord Koremori? Oh, no,
he is no longer at Yashima.”
Frantic now with apprehension,
she managed to send a man there.
He seemed in no hurry to return.
Summer faded into autumn.
The seventh month was nearly over
when her messenger came back at last.
“Tell me, tell me! What news do you bring?”
He answered, “Lord Koremori left Yashima on the fifteenth of this third month past and went to Mount Kya, where he shaved his head. Then he went on to Kumano. He threw himself into the sea off Nachi, praying ardently for paradise. I heard this from Takesato, the servant who was with him.”
She cried, “Oh,
I knew there was something wrong!” and collapsed with a robe drawn over her head. Her little son and daughter wept and wailed.
Her son’s nurse said, weeping, “My lady, this should not surprise you.
It is no more than what you expected.
Just think how awful it would have been if Lord Koremori had been taken alive, like Lord Shigehira!
That he should have renounced the world on Mount Kya,
prayed with fervor for that true rebirth, and died with nothing but right thoughts—
these things call for gladness in the midst of sorrow.
So, my lady, set your mind at rest
and resolve that you will bring up your children in whatever wilderness may be your lot.”
With these words she did what she could to comfort a mistress
whose only thoughts now were memories of her husband
and who seemed in no condition to live out the day.
The lady became a nun at once
and gave herself, as best she could,
to pious rites and litanies
and prayers for her husband in the hereafter.
14. Fujito
Yoritomo in Kamakura learned of Koremori’s death.
“If only he had come to see me in person,” he said, “I could have saved his life.
I had the greatest respect for his father, Shigemori,
since it was he who, speaking for Yorimori’s mother,
got my sentence commuted from death to exile.
For that I owe him a great debt of gratitude—
one so unforgettable that I hold his sons, too, in high regard.
Besides, Koremori had renounced the world.
It would have been perfectly easy to save him.”
The Heike heard this news once they were back at Yashima:
“Tens of thousands of fresh warriors have reached the capital from the east,
and they are on their way down here to attack.”
And this: “The Usuki, the Betsugi, and the Matsura leagues
have joined forces against us and are coming over from Kyushu.”
Both alarming reports stirred only terror.
Few of the great Heike nobles
had survived Ichi-no-tani.
More than half their chief lieutenants were gone,
and their house was gravely weakened.
One Shigeyoshi and his brother,
both powerful squires from Awa,
sought to rally the men of Shikoku
and assured them that all would be well.
The Heike looked to them with hope,
as though to high mountains and deep seas,
while their huddled women only wept.
The twenty-fifth of the seventh month came.
“It was a year ago today,”
they reminded one another,
“that we fled the capital together.”
They reviewed with tears and laughter
the frantic horror of it all.
The twenty-eighth brought the new emperor’s enthronement.253
Never before, they say, in all the eighty-two reigns since Emperor Jinmu,
had the event taken place without the mirror, jewel, and sword.
On the sixth of the eighth month, the appointments list was announced.
Noriyori became the new governor of Mikawa
and Kur Yoshitsune an aide in the Left Gate Watch.
An imperial order also made him an officer in the police.
Now came chill winds to bend the reeds
and dews gathering under the hagi fronds.
To the plaintive song of crickets,
rice plants rustled, leaves fluttered down—
a sight to cloud the most carefree heart
under strange skies, as autumn waned.
Imagine, then, what melancholy
weighed on the hearts of all the Heike!
Of old, in the ninefold cloud dwelling,254
they sported among the blossoms of spring;
now, on the shore at Yashima,
they gazed sadly on the autumn moon.
No verse of theirs evoked its brilliance
without thought of that night in the city,
and so they spent their nights and days
relieving their hearts and shedding tears.
Taira no Yukimori wrote, in this vein,
Since our lord is here,
the moon in the sky above
is the palace moon,
yet the yearning heart still longs
for the capital and home.
On the twelfth day of the ninth month,
Noriyori set out for the west
on a mission to suppress the Heike.
These are the men who rode with him:
Ashikaga no Kurando Yoshikane,
Kagami no Kojir Nagakiyo,
Hj no Kojir Yoshitoki,
Saiin no Shikan Chikayoshi.
And these were his field commanders:
Doi no Jir Sanehira
and his son, Yatar Thira.
Also Miura-no-suke Yoshizumi
and his son, Heiroku Yoshimura.
Hatakeyama no Jir Shigetada,
Hatakeyama Nagano no Sabur Shigekiyo,
Inage no Sabur Shigenari,
Hangai no Shir Shigetomo,
Hangai no Gor Yukishige,
Oyama no Koshir Tomomasa,
Oyama Naganuma no Gor Munemasa,
Tsuchi no Sabur Munet,
Sasaki no Sabur Moritsuna,
Hatta no Shir Musha Tomoie,
Anzai no Sabur Akimasu,
go no Sabur Sanehide,
Amano no Tnai Tkage,
Hiki no Tnai Tomomune,
Hiki no Tshir Yoshikazu,
Chūj no Tji Ienaga,
Ipponb Shgen,
Tosab Shshun,
leading thirty thousand mounted men.
Their march took them to Muro in Harima.
Command of the Heike army went to these men:
Captain Taira no Sukemori,
Lieutenant Taira no Arimori,
Adviser Taira no Tadafusa;
and these men were their field commanders:
Hida no Saburzaemon Kagetsune,
Etchū no Jirbye Moritsugi,
Kazusa no Gorbye Tadamitsu,
Akushichibye Kagekiyo.
Aboard a fleet of five hundred vessels, they reached Kojima in Bizen.
The Genji left Muro at this news, to camp likewise in Bizen,
at Nishi-Kawajiri and beside a narrow stretch of sea known as Fujito.255
Five hundred yards of water separated them from the Heike, and the only way across was by boat. Their army spent day after wasted day on the slope across from the foe. Young Heike hotheads would row out, flourishing fans and shouting, “Here! Here’s the place! Come right over!” The Genji were at their wits’ end.
Then, on the night of the twenty-fifth, Sasaki Moritsuna fell to talking with a local fisherman. He won the man over with a white kosode robe, a pair of widemouthed trousers, and a dagger with a silver-wrapped hilt. Then he asked, “Isn’t there anywhere along here where you can just ride across?”
“Yes, there are two places,” the man replied. “Few of the shore people know about them, but I do. They are like river fords. The one to the east is good early in the month and the one to the west later. They are about two-thirds of a mile apart. You can easily ride straight across.”
Sasaki, very pleased, kept this intelligence from his men. He stole off alone with the fisherman, took off his clothes, and tried it. Indeed the water was not very deep. In some places it came up to his knees, his hips, or his shoulders. Sometimes he even got his sidelocks wet. Where it was deep, he swam to new footing.
The fisherman said, “It is much shallower south of here, but enemy arrows await you and you have nothing on. You had better not go any farther.”
“Right you are,” Sasaki answered, and turned back. This thought occurred to him, though: “Who k
nows who this fellow really is or where his loyalty lies? Someone else might get the same information out of him just as easily as I did. No, nobody else must know.” He ran the fisherman through, cut off his head, and tossed it away.
On the twenty-sixth, at the hour of the dragon, [ca. 8 A.M.]
another Heike boat rowed out to taunt the Genji with raised fans
and invitations to “Come right on over!”
Sasaki knew just where to do that.
Wearing a dappled tie-dyed hitatare under black-laced armor and riding a pale gray,
he led seven of his men straight into the sea.
“Stop him!” shouted their commander,
Noriyori. “Stop that man!”
Doi Sanehira, whip and stirrup,
galloped off in hot pursuit.
“What has got into you, Sasaki?”
he cried. “Are you out of your mind?
You are forbidden to go farther!
This is insubordination!”
Sasaki ignored him and went on.
Having failed to turn him back,
Sanehira simply joined him.
The water touched the horses’ bellies
in places, or the chest ropes, or higher.
Sometimes it washed across their saddles,
and where it was deep, the men swam on
until their mounts trod bottom again.
Noriyori saw what this meant.
“Sasaki has put one over on us!
The water is shallow! Go on! Cross!”
At his order the thirty thousand
plunged straight in and headed out.
“Oh, no!” the Heike cried on their side,
and launched a great number of boats,
from where they loosed a rain of arrows.
The undaunted Genji warriors,
heads well down, necks protected,
leaped straight into them from horseback
with fierce cries and fought hand to hand.
Some boats, overloaded in the melee,
sank, and with them many went down;
some overturned, to general panic.
The battle lasted the rest of the day.
That night the Heike put to sea.
The Genji came ashore on Kojima, to rest men and horses.
At dawn the Heike rowed back toward Yashima.
The Genji were eager to pursue them, but they had no boats.
They gave up any further attack.
“Many warriors past and present
have ridden their horses across rivers,
