The Disfavored Hero

by Jessica Amanda Salmonson

  It was possible Tomoe invented these ideas, in her desire to be less than wholly responsible for Shigeno’s death. But it was also possible that neither jono nor the Mikado felt a need for the great warlord’s continued exploits, whereas Tomoe might in some way be of service to the jono cult, to the Mikado, or both.

  Toshima had followed Tomoe’s thoughts, having much the same knowledge to work from, and a little more. She said, “You think yourself important, samurai! I asked the jono priestess to defend you. You think she saw to your safety for some cause of her own, but you are important to none but me!” She rushed to Tomoe and clung to her, but the look in her eyes was as much like hatred as love. “Your vanity exceeds all, samurai! To think your life weighed better than that of my father!”

  The samurai twisted away, ridden by guilt, and crushed beneath the sudden knowledge that Toshima had indeed held Tomoe in some manner responsible for Shojiro Shigeno’s death. But Tomoe could not bear to think of this any longer, and turned back to Toshima with equal anger, affecting a superior knowledge not much different from the Lady’s haughtiness. She said, “Already, once, someone tried to trick me into divulging information about the priestess …” Tomoe said nothing else of the rokubu, who was ultimately responsible for the samurai coming in Toshima’s time of need. “This is not ninja-house we have come to, no farmhouse, certainly not a jono temple. It is something else, and I would have away! Stay if you will; I will not.”

  Livid with the rage she had invented to cover guilt, but which she now embraced as genuine, Tomoe left by the only door she trusted. Toshima ran to the door ostensibly to call the samurai back, but pride bit her tongue as well, and she watched the strong woman march away—both of them hiding tears.

  Depression descended upon the samurai thicker than the night’s sudden, heavy rain. She forced her every step up the mountain side, although in her present mood she would rather sit in the torrent and succumb to pity and exposure.

  In the distance, the smaller of the two peaks glowed with activity, though Tomoe had earlier assumed both peaks equally dead. High against the face of the taller peak was a cavern’s mouth, lit by a fire within. That was Tomoe’s goal: the lair of mad Keiko.

  What drew her to the madwoman, Tomoe was not yet certain. The spry hag was attractive in her pleasantly maniacal fashion; but, too, something of insanity per se appealed to Tomoe. There was a kind of wisdom in madness, and Tomoe had some faint notion that it was the sort of wisdom which might provide resolution to her varying sorrows, guilts, and confusions. Keiko was never confused! What she believed to be true became true for her, and contradictory information could be applied without ruining the original theory. Tomoe remembered a strolling nun named Izutsu, who had affected an evangelizing tone to say that, “All human reality is a vast lie. There is only one great truth, and that embraces even lies.” If this were so, then the reality of mad Keiko was no less valid than any other—and it was a far less painful reality than the one which Tomoe understood.

  “Keiko!” she called, clinging to the slick, wet mountain trail. Pebbly ground gave way beneath her fingers. Streams of water furrowed the earth between her knees and legs. She could not continue further, the unhelpful weather holding her back. “Keiko!”

  A torch blazed suddenly at the mouth of the cave, and the old woman stood with her head cocked left and her good right eye peering down. “Tada!” she cried gleefully. That toothless smile cut through her shriveled features, her silky tufts of white mustache moving with the smile.

  Keiko reached behind herself where Tomoe could not see, then came back around with a coil of rope. She threw the rope out into the rain—the whole rope—and it uncoiled in the air, wrapped one end of itself around a solidly placed stone, landed its further end near Tomoe’s hands. It was not done by magic, or Tomoe might have scurried back down the mount. It was done by rope-throwing skill, and Tomoe was more impressed by Keiko’s mad talents.

  “You are dirty, Tada!” scolded Keiko, and would not let the muddied visitor into her clean, warm cave. Tomoe saw the lit interior, saw that the old woman had piled good-sized stones between her living quarter and the place where Toshima twice and Tomoe once had entered without invitation through an invisible door. “Take off your clothes, Tada! Then you may come in.”

  Tomoe stripped, hung her clothing on sharp rocks outside the cave, where the rain would clean them as it cleaned Tomoe now. Rivulets snaked down the flesh of her back, her buttocks, her legs. Dripping, she entered the cavern, placed her sword against a wall, then squatted near the fire and held her hands out. She felt colder as the heat raised evaporative steam from her naked shoulders and glistening wet hair, gorgeous hair which had been allowed to grow long and thick and unruly.

  “Wear this.” Keiko handed Tomoe a dry, scratchy garment, heavy and warm. “So,” said Keiko. “Why does the dangerous samurai’s feet bring her to my retreat during weather ill as this?”

  A dour reply: “I disliked the farmhouse.”

  The madwoman jerked back at the very mention, but composed herself instantly, smiled more broadly so that Tomoe saw the old woman did indeed have a few teeth left in the back.

  “Wise of you,” said Keiko. “Do you know who built the house?”

  Tomoe shook her head, hunched inside the overlarge garment.

  “I did,” said Keiko.

  Tomoe looked shocked.

  “It is true!” The woman skipped around the fire with delight of her confession, laughing madly, and then stopped suddenly. She stooped down so that her face was a finger’s length away from the nose of Tomoe, and she said, “I had a husband then. Lazy man. Fat! Filthy! But I loved him. Too much I loved him. Do not ask why! Love has no reason. I built the house alone; I built it for him and me. He was too lazy to help, but I did not mind, for we would live together and be happy.

  “But when I was done, he ruined it. Ruined it! Wrecked it!” She looked woebegone, or angry, or both, and stood up again, paced her cavern quarters with nervous agitation. “You found the doors he added? Useless things! Pah! But I lived with him in the place; I lived there anyway, I loved him so much, despite his stench, despite how he had ruined the house I made with these hands.”

  Keiko looked at her hands as though they were not her own. Old, mapped with veins, crooked at the joints of every finger, the thumbs drawn back by some crippling disease. She whispered more to herself than Tomoe, “They were stronger hands in those days, smooth, without a blemish, without a line. I seem to remember … I seem to remember …” Her back was to Tomoe, Tomoe who still crouched near the fire, wrapped in a scratchy robe, listening. There was a long silence, during which Keiko stood motionless seeming to contemplate the nature of her own mortality. Age had crept upon her like a specter; she had not seen it come.

  Then she reeled about, and continued her story as though she had never left off:

  “All the while, my husband investigated the depths of his doors, for he did not understand them entirely himself. I forget who taught him the magic—priests, priestesses—but they discovered some corruption in his soul, and cast him out, his lessons half learned. I think he wandered through the doors in search of those who rejected him, or to converse with monsters who would aid him in his vengeance. And how I understand the hot emotions of one rejected! How I know it now! For, you see, he did not age when he walked those paths, and sometimes walked them years before returning to me, to my bed. I grew older than he, and soon he came to my bed no more. ‘Hag!’ he called me, grabbing my silken mustaches. ‘Hag! I would not sleep with you!’ And I said, ‘Why not? All these years I have slept with someone fat and filthy! You can sleep with someone old!’ But he laughed at me, and went through one of his doors, and never came out again.

  “Was I sad? I was not! I was! Not! Was! At least, I had thought I would be sadder. Something … something I have forgotten … I think … I think … I might never have grown old but for him; I might always have been young. It is mad to blame him for that? I remember a palace,
in which I lived like an immortal goddess, until I met the filthy man, and chose of my own will to shed eternal vigor, to grow old with this man I grossly loved. He took me for his wife, loving me for my beauty—but after all I sacrificed, vengeance yet gripped him more than love, and he let me age without him. My sacrifice was for nothing!”

  “Keiko,” whispered Tomoe. “Keiko. How much of what you say is true? How much of what you say is madness?”

  “All true!” She moved about the cavern tensely, looking pensive, looking sad. “All mad!” Tomoe wished the woman would stop pacing; the nervousness was catching. “Once, I was a queen! (Or perhaps a princess, I forget.) You believe that? It is so! I gave up my country for the filthy man—saving only this one island, which I kept for him and me, a paradise it seemed, though soon to be my hell.

  “All that I retained of my country can be seen from this mountain peak; and I could have asked no more beyond the arms of my lover. But he went away. For all I know, he wanders the paths to this day.” She stood taut and all the more nervous, though less flighty, looked across the chamber and out into the rainy night to the far glow of the smaller mountain.

  “I was glad, in the end, to be rid of his flabby laziness,” she said. “I have more peace than loneliness. My one fear is that he will return, and claim me his wife again. I would not like that. I would not like it because I would welcome it! Do you understand me, Tada, my only friend?” The one sharp eye focused on the samurai, expecting and receiving no reply. “I would melt into his flabby arms as I always did,” she said, and stooped in front of Tomoe as she had before. “I would gaze into his still-young face, as I gaze into your eyes; and once more he would only cast me aside and say, ‘Keiko, you are too old for me!’ And that is why I hate the farmhouse, Tada. It has cruel memories as well as the hellish magic which stole the years of happiness I planned.”

  Keiko held her crouch and began to rock on the balls of her feet. Tears rolled down her face like the torrent outside, dripping from the ends of her downy, long mustache. Tomoe said,

  “I thought you happy, old woman. I came to learn happiness from you, to learn madness. But you are more wretched than I, lamenting a husband who was fat and useless and who you are better left without. Whereas I have lost good friends, and a good master, all because of sorcery; and therefore I have grown so afraid of magic that I shrink from the magic of life itself!

  “I pitied myself, but you are more pitiful, Keiko, dreaming you were once immortal, because you grew too old to keep a lover; dreaming that a dead city was your nation, because you have nothing; dreaming the same city populous, because you are alone. I came here to seek your help, but what help have you for me?”

  The madwoman stood abruptly, eyes dry, looking happy once again; for she was after all a madwoman, whose emotions ran extremes. She pushed on Tomoe’s head with minor mischief, and unbalanced her from the crouch. Tomoe sat on her bottom, somewhat perturbed, looking up at the old woman who said, “You offered me help once. It proved your foolishness, but you meant well, so I will help you. You seek forgetfulness? I have plenty! I have used it on myself! You may join the citizens of my capital. Go down into the city. Ask for the man named Ya Hanada. He will give you saké, and grant you a single wish.”

  Tomoe crossed her legs, remained upon the floor. She covered her face to hide despair, and replied, “There is no one living in the city, old Keiko, crazy Keiko.”

  “Go down and see, samurai!” She scurried to the mouth of the cave, peered down through sheets of hard-driven rain. “The city is lit! Come see!”

  Tomoe would not move. She sat before the fire, her back to Keiko, stubbornly silent, refusing to share the madwoman’s vision.

  “If you want an end to worldly strife, my friend Tada, you will find oblivion in the city. If you wish badly enough to find the people of my country, you will.”

  Still Tomoe sat rigidly. She had given up the idea that the madwoman could be of help. She put aside the notion that there was genius in madness. She heard Keiko behind her, rummaging around for something or another, but did not look back to see. Keiko said, “You want me to help you find the way, Tada? Very well. I will do it!”

  Tomoe looked halfway around, in time to see the rock coming down upon her head, held between Keiko’s bony, wrinkled hands. The samurai made an averting motion to no avail, for Keiko was swift, and Tomoe was struck unconscious.

  The madwoman had killed her; she knew it. Tomoe’s head throbbed. She was fevered. Perhaps, she feared, her skull had been broken—(had it been necessary for Keiko to strike so hard?); at least, her brain was so rattled she might never think better or see more clearly than now. The woe of all! Once I was so wise, and now my brain’s destroyed!

  Her own ruminations made her feel as though she ought to laugh, for not only was she in immeasurable agony, she was also immeasurably silly. Death was, quite possibly, more whimsical than anyone had ever guessed.

  For a long while she did not move, for it hurt to try. She tried instead to remember how she came to the stone-cobbled street. Had Keiko dressed her, carried her down the mountain? The madwoman was strong, certainly, but this was too much to assume. Either someone had helped her, or else Tomoe had stumbled down off the mountain even with her head bashed in, and come here on her own. There was a dream-like memory of staggering through the gates of the city, tripping over the legs of dirty beggars who ought not have existed, slipping in the vomit of drunkards, passing stone buildings from which wafted the perfumes of “entertainers,” the angry shouts of offended gamblers, the stink of sake; and once she had rested, an arm against a wall, and heard beyond a doorway the pretensions of a would-be philosopher qualifying the nature of reality to who-knows-who. It was indeed a decadent city, and in the dream (for dream she thought it until this very moment, and even presently was uncertain) Tomoe had wondered how she had not seen it all before.

  Eventually she tottered and swooned, and lay, face-up, in a puddle wherein some man had previously pissed. When she awakened, it still seemed she might be imagining all this, for the lump had changed her reason.

  “Dead!” a far-away voice declared, and Tomoe agreed, yes, dead.

  “Dead!” another voice confirmed, as high and sweet as the first, so similar to the first, in fact, that it might have been the same voice but it came from another place.

  There was further confirmation:

  “Dead! Dead!”

  Three voices there were, for three voices became hysterical with laughter.

  Tomoe groaned. She said vulgar words. Then she wept tears because it hurt to do either. Then she opened her eyes, expecting to see laughing devils, but she saw three happy painted harlots tittering over her. Harlot-angels they were, and one of them bowed close and parted her red lips to place a query:

  “Are you dead?”

  The samurai turned her head too far to one side, and tasted the foul water in which she was strewn (for strewn she felt, like pieces of armor cast about). She felt the warmth of the women’s bodies, radiating so near, and the sweetness of their odor mixed horrendously with the stink of the wet pave. It was daylight, but a haze of cloud diffused the light, giving the atmosphere an underwater approximation, a certain lack of clarity, affording no visible sun. Yet, for all the bluntness of her perceptions, all her senses were operable, and Tomoe made a grave decision with graver uncertainty: “I am alive.”

  The harlots tittered more.

  “You are a fierce warrior! We can tell,” said one girl, and the other two went hysterical again, covering their faces with small hands. “To have been injured so badly, you must have fought a giant!”

  “Two giants,” said Tomoe. Then confessed, “Or one old woman who is insane.”

  The girls did not laugh at all when Tomoe said this. They looked to one another as startled animals.

  “I cannot move,” said Tomoe. “My head hurts too much. If you would help me, I would be grateful.”

  They were delighted to do so, although their combined s
trength could not offer Tomoe a gentle transport. They raised her awkwardly from the street, from the dampness of the recent rain and other resources, and all of them together went tramping down the misty street. The sound of their passage echoed off grey, grim walls. The young harlots sang a childish song to aid their labor, and Tomoe tried to keep her head from jiggling.

  They bore her to a disreputable teahouse and laid her on a straw mat, carefully putting her head on a wooden pillow wrapped in cloth. They fed her soup, which she vomited, and they fed her some more before she went to sleep. She woke periodically, hearing entertainment in other paneled areas: songs, instruments, lovemaking, laughing women and drunken men. After a long while—more than a day, she suspected—she woke more fully. It was no sound which woke her, but rather an unexpected silence.

  The teahouse seemed to have held its breath, and all within were still. After so long a continual racket of one kind or another, this sudden change made Tomoe stir. She was alone, but saw the silhouette of a young woman on the other side of a rice-paper wall. There was a second silhouette, of a huge, broad-shouldered man. He was the one who wrought this silence, and he was the one who broke it, his voice guttural and threatening. “It will be you!”

  The girl fell before him, weeping, begging. But the big man was unkind. He placed a foot upon the back of the effaced harlot, and drew his sword, prepared to slay.