The Disfavored Hero

by Jessica Amanda Salmonson

  Although they came upon her unaware, she turned instantly to face her three attackers. She staggered about from drunkenness, but they knew by now this was deceptive. Tomoe Gozen had wished to Ya Hanada to hold her liquor properly, and thus when danger was nearest, she drew up with all her fighting skill, and despite the greater number, she dispatched one of the three with fair ease. The remaining two withdrew, for they sought but one killing per day, whether hers or one among their own.

  The samurai tried to follow, still curious of their residence; but the yellow-clad man-beasts knew Keiko’s trick of vanishing down alleys.

  Tomoe remembered there were such things as invisible paths, but she remembered also that Keiko did not like them. There must be, therefore, some other way out of the blind alley through which the priests disappeared. For, if she recollected, this was the same cul-de-sac into which Keiko had eluded her on their first meeting.

  This minor mystery revitalized her a little, though she stopped now and then to sip from the bottle, and pursued her quest in a wholly bemused state. She put her ear to the pave, thinking to hear some echo of footsteps in a tunnel’s hollow. There was no sound. And every seam and corner of the cobbled street was incontestably solid.

  For a while, the drunken samurai sat in the corner of the alley and pondered stuporously on this, the first riddle to enthuse her in many a day.

  It would help, she felt, if she could see better. If her vision were clearer, she might spy some subtle indication of a disguised doorway through one of the walls. In her travels, she had met many people who saw poorly, and some far worse than her, so she ought not grumble loudly. She could at least see beyond her nose, as some she had known could not. Yet in some ways, she thought it must be more frustrating to see poorly than to be completely blind; though on reconsideration, a distorted light was better than none at all.

  The thought of light triggered some ache in her, which she could not immediately place. For the briefest moment, there was a woman standing before her in the mist, swaddled in darkness, a hood drawn around most of her features. She drew away this mask, revealing eyes like ice and face like fire, and Tomoe started to rise from her seated posture, a hand reaching forth, the hand which held the unemptiable bottle, and she cried, “Noyimo!”

  But the fluid nature of the atmosphere engulfed the apparition. And Tomoe was uncertain what the name meant, the name of Noyimo; and it did not seem that she ached for a shining face, but for the shining sun, dear Amaterasu, whose light dispersed evenly over the city’s omnipresent roof of white. Amaterasu’s face never smiled upon the city, thus Tomoe Gozen would seek Her out.

  “I will climb above the mists!” said Tomoe to herself, and looked about the walls for some method of climbing to the highest roofs. It was then that she saw the manner of the hairy priests’ disappearance, and of Keiko long before them: minimal hand-holds had been carved into one of the buildings’ walls in a very subtle fashion. Tomoe doffed clogs, placed toes and fingers into these indentations, and went up the wall like a squirrel up a tree.

  At the top, she was ready with her sword, but the hairy priests were gone for another day. As Tomoe had hoped, the area above the city was not misted, and she broke through the mists as a dolphin breaks the surface of the sea, but cannot fly further.

  The bright sun warmed her face, and Tomoe was gripped with such melancholia. She could not contain it without weeping. She gasped like a fish out of water, and held her arms up to a sun which no longer knew her. She sobbed the longest while. She sobbed so hard she could barely speak the words: “Help me, Amaterasu! Forgive my passing cowardice! I will never fear the magic of blessed life again, if you will bring me home!”

  But the sun only hurt her skin, hurt her eyes, and she crawled to the edge of the roof and looked back down into her adopted world, which Keiko said she might never leave again. Below, walking through the streets, she saw Toshima, Toshima like a ghost though it was Tomoe who was the specter. The vision rent Tomoe’s heart. The double scar on her brow drew together with her expression of all-consuming grief.

  “To … mo … ehh!” cried Toshima, her voice from another world. “To … mo … ehh!”

  And Tomoe wept the more, as the Lady walked away.

  Ya Hanada turned her away, for he had given her the single wish, and, claiming Keiko to be the entire fountain of his power, he could provide nothing additional without the madwoman’s direction. “I have given you a magic saké bottle,” he said with a cloying, fraudulent solicitude. “What more could my good friend desire?” He had given her the bottle, she realized at the last, so that he would never need to serve her within his house.

  When Hanada shut her out, she went off and tried to break the bottle, sitting it on one stone and striking it with another. But it was as impervious as it was unemptiable, as indestructible as fate.

  Valiantly she attempted to flee the city, but could go only a little ways before she gasped and choked and ran back through the gates to regain breath.

  Spectral friends abandoned her, for she refused to be their darling, and they did not like her recent melancholy. She had never coupled with them, and finally ceased even to bathe with them (and soon she stank). She would not reinforce their frail promises of deeds and dreams of successes, always on the morrow. She never gambled; never waxed philosophic; would not stumble with them through the streets arm in arm in song and laughter. She would only dry their spirits, and few of them would have it. Those few who persisted in their attempts to cheer her she would kick in the groins and send them hopping. She would rail against them and call them worse names than Keiko ever did, Keiko whose visits became rare, as though the madwoman no longer found reward in what her ghost-observing eye revealed. Tomoe came to understand exactly what the old woman despised; but unlike Keiko, the samurai was part of the despicable package.

  Eventually Tomoe neither smote nor belittled those few who hung about. Rather, she pretended they did not exist, as she suspected was more nearly true, if truth there was at all. She went to sit near the city’s edge amongst the most damaged denizens, her unbreakable bottle held near her breast and at intervals to her lips.

  On one of Keiko’s rare visits, she lingered at the gate to malign Tomoe more than the attending company of derelict ghosts. “You smell like my husband, Tada! Phew! Do you like it in Drunkards’ Town? Is life not grand in Yedo?”

  “Kyoto,” Tomoe corrected, her voice a feeble growl.

  The others begged Keiko for the mercy of oblivion; and when she stamped away in disgust, they crawled in pursuit of her, though she ignored them. There was something changed about Keiko, for not only did she come less often, she took less joy at what she saw—as though she too felt guilty, for her part in Tomoe’s ruin.

  Unlike the others, Tomoe never begged for oblivion. She rarely moved at all, except in moments of peril or to sip from her bottle of solace. Thereby she created a sense of non-existence curiously her own.

  The liquor sustained her somehow, or some other magic, for she drank nothing else and ate not at all, and exercised only when the hairy priests forced her. When they came, she would feel perturbed as she forced herself to stand. And she would do them battle, facing sometimes one, sometimes two, or three. Her sword, her unkempt clothes, her bottle—she owned nothing more, not even her own mind, but these few things she defended with excessive vigor. She would not even share the content of her bottle with ghosts (who owned even less and thought Tomoe wealthy) for she had become selfish despite the endlessness of her supply. And besides, she loathed the miserable beggars, who were like mirrors.

  She seldom blinked her eyes either, for the air was so humid she did not have to; and, too, she fancied if she stared hard and long, eventually she would see more clearly.

  The furred attackers in their yellow garb became monotonous annoyances interrupting her exercitation of smallness, although that is not to say they were predictable. It was no longer possible to foretell their coming, for night and day became as indistinguishabl
e as the faces of her company, and she would forget whether it was this day, or the day before, that they had already come. Moreover, they each fought a different style, as though no two of them learned the sword from the same school. She could never anticipate them. Nonetheless, they were dull, for they looked alike, and their rough voices were alike, and they died similarly. They might have been replicas of one another, or there might only be three in all, for she never saw more than that at one time. And the daily corpse would always vanish, though she never saw how it happened or who took it away. Perhaps they were resurrected, to die again, to entertain and appease Smaller Mountain time and time again.

  But if there were only three, rather than the great number they would have her believe, it would be difficult to explain their continual change of fighting style.

  Careful reason was beyond Tomoe’s recent capacity, yet arduous days of mental straining resolved the riddle of their ever-changing mode of attack. They had no skill of their own (if she could accept their own word on the matter); but, instead, they borrowed talents of great samurai who slept, or who had died. Now and then, a style was so unique and famous that she knew instantly what hero’s skill she was pitted against. She might therefore have become awed or egotistical in regard to her own ability to counter, except there was no awe in her anymore, not for herself or others, and her ego had shriveled into a nutshell.

  In spite of this, the daily assaults were good for honing her considerable skills; indeed, she obtained the best instruction she had known since the days of her formal training.

  And Tomoe Gozen knew she might well be match for Ugo Mohri. Yet they would never duel, unless someday he, too, was cast into fools’ paradise; or, unless, dreaming, his skill came to face her in a monster’s hairy body. Even in the latter case, he would not know that he had been defeated, would know only the dream. By default, her nemesis would prevail, and this wore upon her greatly.

  When she came to this understanding, regarding the uselessness of her talent, she thought never to fight again; for to what avail? How many days, or weeks, or months had already passed, she did not know, had no way of counting, could hardly distinguish one moment from another. But the occasion came when over her stood three familiar, hairy men in saffron robes. Without so much as a glance at them, she remained seated against the inner wall of the city, and said, “You were right. I choose to let you win.”

  They took her sword, the sword made by Okio and blessed by the Mikado, and she did not care; swords were of no value to the dead, she thought, and thought surely she was dead. How could the hairy men kill her, if she were already dead? How had she killed them so often, when they were her kindred spirits?

  They took away her bottle next, and this she minded more.

  Two of them lifted her, one to an arm, and the third one said, “Look into our eyes, Tomoe Gozen! See you madness here? You have slain us each a dozen times! Sanity cannot prevail against a multitude of bloody deaths. We have chosen to defy Smaller Mountain, though it means doom to all. Our choice is not to sacrifice you, or any other, but instead, we will keep you living as many days as we can, dismembering you a piece each day. We will attend to nothing else; you will be our new obsession. First we will take the fingers one by one, eventually a hand; some other day, a foot; and later on, the other hand, or the arm up to the elbow, the leg up to the knee. How long can it go?” He looked at her malevolently, and answered his own query: “As long as we can make it!”

  They dragged her off, and Tomoe Gozen did not struggle, but continued to glower and stare. They bore her to the center of the city, and took her into the huge stone temple where she had searched for them before but not found them. They hauled her upward to a hidden place above the rafters, and bound her arms flat together behind her back, elbow to elbow, and wrist to wrist, until she thought her shoulders would unhinge; then they bound her ankles together and attached her feet to hands. They left her thus, in considerable agony, sitting upon her knees to consider her unimaginably gruesome fate.

  In another room, she heard the sound of sharpening knives.

  Briefly, she struggled, but only to ascertain whether she had allowed herself into a hopeless situation. She had. The furred men had tied her in an excruciating posture, so that any movement whatsoever resulted in worse matters. Despite this, Tomoe smiled grimly. At least she had the consolation of knowing that the hairy priests in their exceeding anger, and possible madness, were destroying themselves as well as her, and the whole of the miserable city and island upon which it stood. Smaller Mountain demanded sacrifice, not torture; and unless the sacrifices of days past had always been made to a myth, the volcano would erupt when refused its due.

  All upon the island would perish, ghosts or not, including mad Keiko, including Tomoe, including … innocent Toshima …

  It had been long since she sipped the sorcerous rice wine. Without it clouding her judgment, Tomoe’s thinking altered. She began to breathe heavily with the dawning of her failure to defend Toshima, as was her samurai’s duty. What really had driven Tomoe from that duty? She had fled in fear of magic, it had seemed, but as Keiko once pointed out, refuge had been taken in magic. Tomoe had escaped nothing of her presumed fear. In the end, she had escaped only Toshima.

  Tomoe was not the first samurai ever seduced by a Lady; but there was a specific awareness that she could never fulfill that which her mistress commanded. Lady Toshima had altered the nature of the relationship: a samurai owed greater fealty to a master than a wife, and Toshima had preferred to be a wife.

  All deserved to perish but Toshima. No one else had proven their lives meritable, and Tomoe least exempted herself. Yet she was forced to struggle to save herself, despite a preference not to do so, for the sake of Toshima. But the bonds were far too tight, too well made, immune to the samurai’s efforts.

  In another room, the sound of knives sharpening had ceased.

  “Keiko!” Tomoe cried out in desperation. “Keiko! Mad mother of wickedness, save me from this!”

  She began to bounce on her knees, irrespective of the pain it communicated through her bound feet, hands, elbows. The sockets of her shoulders would have liked to give up her arms. Falling on her side, she squirmed as best she could, which was not much squirming really. She clenched teeth and grimaced and pulled every muscle near to tearing. She slammed her head on the floor trying to regain her knees. All she gained was reiteration of the knowledge that she was helpless.

  The doorway of the adjoining rafters-room slid aside, and there stood three torturers, armed with knives-cum-scalpels, something worse than murder in their expressions. Tomoe spat in their directions; they did not care. They started forward …

  … but she did not see them enter the room.

  In her ears, a ringing began, which became the chattering of a thousand minuscule creatures. Coldness enveloped her. The loft in which the priests had placed her had disappeared, so that she felt as though she were adrift in chilly limbo.

  “Keiko?” she hazarded, but knew Keiko would never manipulate the invisible paths. Keiko’s mystic husband? “Who?”

  In the distance a figure was walking, slender shadow against shadow. It approached with nonchalance, and Tomoe was not certain if it were wiser to urge the person to hasten and untie her bonds, or to lie silent as a stone under the delusion that she might go unnoticed.

  As the figure neared, she knew it for a magician-ninja, the face mostly covered, the dark robes like midnight darker than the darkness in which Tomoe found herself. The magician-ninja was still far away, and still approaching slowly, as though nothing in the empty universe was urgent. Tomoe cried loudly for assistance, her voice echoing through eternity, but the jono moved no faster.

  “Noyimo!” cried Tomoe. “Noyimo, help me!”

  And then the figure was at her side instantly, and cast off a shadowy disguise to reveal someone not tall and slender but squat and rotund. She recognized the rokubu, the filthy man she had met twice in Naipon, with whom she had exchanged a
mon on each meeting, like beggars sharing alms.

  “I am not jono,” said the rokubu, looking down on her helplessness with sadistic glee. “But I thank you for the name of Noyimo! I dared not fight any jono, without their master’s name, and Noyimo rules them all.”

  “Free me!” she rasped, breathing heavily through teeth still clenched. “Free me and I will kill you!”

  “An unconvincing argument,” he said, and reached into a fold of her obi to withdraw the mon she had kept since their second meeting. “With this, I have followed you. I bound us this while, for I had worked a year of charms upon the coin before returning it to you. Your larger destiny was manipulated through the coin, and through the aid of my unsuspecting wife. She made this ghostly habitat, not I; but I have used it better! I used it as a trap!”

  “You trapped me well,” said Tomoe.

  “Not for you. For jono! You are the bait!”

  “Because they cast you from their order?” Her tone was contemptuous of an obsession borne of trivialities.

  He laughed. “That is what Keiko thought! But I am larger than that! There are other cults than jono. They serve Shinto; my clan has served Buddhism, but that is not why we are less famous. Long ago, when certain ninja spies discovered and guarded methods of controlling various magicks, it could not help but create revolution and many factions among the ninja clans. Over all these, the jono prevailed. My clan was all but destroyed, though some of us linger, and seek vengeance. Once, I infiltrated their very order! When I was found out, they thought to kill me, to drown me in the sea. They could not have guessed the Dragon Queen would take a fancy to me, raise an island beneath me, saving my life. She even made herself mortal for me!”

  “Keiko?” Tomoe’s head spun—from these revelations, from the blood clamped by her bonds.

  “She was the Dragon Queen, but now she is a weak old woman—the price of mortality!” The rokubu preened and puffed himself larger, his ego tickled by the cost of loving him. He said, “I wish that I could claim it was only my suave nature, but it was her curiosity more than anything—her curiosity to know what it was like to love a mortal. She had previously longed to try a man unmurdered by the sea, still warm as it were. I was the lucky villain she came upon, to touch with experimental ardor. A matter of sheer fortune, perhaps, being in a given place at a given time; or a well-deserved destiny, if I may be so vain. I do not know. At the time, I knew only that she had filched me from death for a little while, but would tire of me in a single night, no matter how well I performed. When done with her sport, she would draw the island, and me, back into her country—and I would reside among the slaves of the sea-folk.”