by VIKING ADULT
tucked up the skirts of some common robe,
mended some suit of clanking armor,
stuck a few arrows in a quiver—
bamboo, or the kind hunters use—
clapped it on their backs, and raced,
raced to gather around Seno-o.
Over two thousand mounted men
followed him all the way to Bizen,
to Fukuryūji Nawate,
and there, at Sasa-no-semari,
they dug themselves in behind a moat
twenty feet wide and twenty feet deep,
laid abatis, built shooting towers,
put up an unbroken wall of shields,
and, bristling with ready arrows,
awaited the enemy’s assault.
After Seno-o killed Yukiie’s deputy in Bizen,
the deputy’s men fled up toward the capital.
At Funasaka, on the Bizen-Harima border,
they met Kiso and reported what had happened.
“I don’t like this at all,” Kiso said ruefully. “I should have executed him.”
“I warned you!” Imai Kanehira replied. “I could tell he was no ordinary man.
I urged you a thousand times to do it, but no, you had to spare him.”
“I can’t see that it matters much, though. Go on after him and kill him.”
“Then I shall go down there and see what I can do,” Imai replied.
He galloped off with three thousand men.
Fukuryūji Nawate:
a strip of land a bow length wide
and many hundreds of yards long.
To right and left, rice paddies
too deep for a horse’s footing.
The three thousand longed to charge,
but they had to move slowly.
When they pressed in toward the fort,
Seno-o emerged up on a shooting tower and called in a great voice,
“From the fifth month past to this very day, I have owed my foe my life,
and just for him I have prepared this welcome.”
He had assembled several hundred exceptionally powerful archers,
who now loosed a fierce volley of arrows that forestalled any advance.
Imai Kanehira, Tate, Nenoi,
Miyazaki no Sabur, Suwa,
Fujisawa—fiery warriors
such as these bent forward and down
to expose only their neck plates;
tugged and dragged the dead, men and horses,
into the moat; managed to fill it;
and with deafening howls attacked.
Some plunged into the paddy fields
up to their horses’ chests and bellies,
with never a thought for the risk they ran,
to attack in swiftly formed bands;
some, oblivious to the deep trench,
pressed their assault in repeated waves.
The battle lasted all day. By dusk
Seno-o’s hastily mustered force
had gone down to final defeat.
Very few of his men survived;
almost all had died in the fight.
His fortress now fallen, Seno-o
retreated over into Bitchū,
where, beside the Itakura River,
he put up a wall of shields and waited.
Imai all too soon approached.
Bamboo and other makeshift quivers
emptied in spirited defense,
and when the last arrow was gone,
the survivors fled with desperate haste.
Seno-o and just two others reached the bank of the Itakura River and flew from there toward Midoroyama. Narizumi, who had taken Seno-o alive in the north, meanwhile reflected angrily that his younger brother was dead. He decided to capture Seno-o again and left his band to pursue him on his own, some hundred yards behind him.
“Stop, Seno-o!” he shouted. “You are a disgrace, turning away from the enemy! Come back, come back!”
Seno-o was crossing the river westward. He stopped in midstream and waited.
Narizumi galloped up beside him. They grappled hard and fell.
The fight between Narizumi and Seno-o.
Equals in strength, they rolled over again and again, and into a deep pool.
Narizumi could not swim. Seno-o, an expert swimmer,
pinned him to the bottom, lifted the skirts of his armor,
stabbed him so fiercely three times that hilt and fist plunged into the wound,
and took his head.
Seno-o then mounted Narizumi’s horse, his being winded, and continued his flight. His son, Kotar Muneyasu, was fleeing, too, with one of their men, on foot rather than on horseback. Although still a young man in his early twenties, Muneyasu was too fat to run even a hundred yards, and despite having discarded his equipment he made slow progress.
His father left him behind and fled nearly another mile. Then he and his man met. “Normally when I fight an enemy in the thousands,” he said, “the world seems bright around me, but now everything ahead seems dark. Perhaps that is because I abandoned Kotar. Even if I were to live and serve the Heike again, my fellows might well say, ‘That Kaneyasu, he’s over sixty and doesn’t have that many years left—can those years really have meant so much to him that he abandoned his only son, to flee?’ I would be covered with shame.”
“That is exactly why I urged you to meet your fate with him,” his man replied. “Sir, please turn back.”
“Then I will,” said Seno-o, and he did.
He found his son lying there with terribly swollen feet.
“I came back to die fighting with you, since you couldn’t keep up. All right?”
Tears streamed down his son’s cheeks.
“I am so hopeless,” he answered,
“that I should have killed myself.
And now you, too, because of me,
at any moment will face death—
which makes me guilty, it seems to me,
of the foul crime of patricide.
Turn back! Flee! There is no time to lose!”
“No,” said his father, “my mind is made up.” As they waited,
Imai Kanehira bore down on them at the head of fifty howling riders.
Seno-o shot his last arrows,
seven or eight of them, rapidly—
five or six riders fell, stricken,
dead or not, there is no telling—
drew his sword, beheaded his son,
and charged into the enemy,
slashing at every man around him.
They answered with many blows,
until at last they struck him down.
While his man’s valor rivaled his lord’s,
weakened by his grievous wounds,
he failed to kill himself, as he wished,
and instead was taken prisoner.
Only a day later, he died.
They hung the heads of all three men
in Sagi-ga-mori of Bitchū.
Lord Kiso inspected them.
“Ah,” he sighed, “these were true warriors,
each worthy to face a thousand.
What a shame I could not spare them!”
9. Muroyama
Lord Kiso meanwhile gathered his forces at the Manju estate in Bitchū,
so as to prepare an attack on Yashima.
Higuchi no Jir Kanemitsu, left in charge in the capital,
sent a messenger to inform him,
“In your absence, Lord Yukiie is conveying slander about you
to the cloistered emperor, through the sovereign’s trusted advisers.
Please put off your planned western campaign and return in haste.”
Kiso accordingly raced day and night back to the city.
Yukiie apparently preferred to stay out of trouble,
because to avoid him he set off for Harima by the Tanba road.
Kiso returned to the capital through the province of Settsu. The Taira, in turn, were planning an attack on Kiso.
Their commanders were Lords Tomomori and Shigehira, assisted by Etchū no Jirbye Moritsugi, Kazusa no Gorbye Tadamitsu, and Akushichibye Kagekiyo. Twenty thousand mounted men and more crossed to Harima on a thousand ships. They established their camp at Muroyama.
Yukiie may have hoped to regain Kiso’s goodwill by fighting the Heike.
With over five hundred men, he moved against Muroyama.
The Heike camp had five sections.
One, Moritsugi’s two thousand men;
Two, Iga no Ienaga’s two thousand;
Three, Tadamitsu and Kagekiyo
at the head of three thousand men;
Four, Shigehira with three thousand;
Five, Tomomori with ten thousand.
On came now with whoops and yells
Yukiie and his five hundred.
Camp One, under Moritsugi,
went through the motions of responding,
opened, and let them all through.
Camp Two, under Ienaga,
parted also and let them pass.
Camp Three, under Tadamitsu
and Kagekiyo, did the same.
Camp Four, under Shigehira,
let them come in and on through.
Beforehand all five had agreed
that they would surround the attacker
and shout as one their war cry.
Yukiie, with no escape,
recognized that he had been trapped.
He never flinched or feared for his life
but fought, fully expecting to die.
“Engage him! Engage their commander!”
Every man among the Heike
longed to do that, but none dared.
Tomomori’s most trusted men—
Ki Shichizaemon, Ki Hachiemon,
Ki Kur, and others—fell before Yukiie.
So it was that the five hundred
dwindled down to a paltry thirty.
All around Yukiie the foe;
with him very few men indeed.
How he was now to get away,
he had not the slightest idea,
but with the courage of desperation
he cut through the mass around him
and got out, unscathed himself—
although his twenty followers
were, nearly all of them, wounded—
managed to get on board a boat
at Takasago in Harima,
and sailed from there to Izumi.
He crossed next into Kawachi,
where he found refuge at last
at the fortress of Nagano.
For the Heike two victories—
Muroyama and Mizushima—
mightily increased their strength.
10. The Tsuzumi Lieutenant
The whole capital teemed with Genji,
who burst in everywhere and committed a great many thefts.
On land belonging even to Kamo or Hachiman,
they cut green rice plants to feed to their horses.
They broke into storehouses and took what was in them;
they stole from travelers and stripped off their clothes.
“When the Heike held the city,” people said,
“Lord Kiyomori was only a general sort of threat.
No one ever stole all your clothes.
Better the Heike than the Genji.”
The cloistered emperor sent Kiso a message. “Put a stop to this lawlessness,” it said.
The police lieutenant Tomoyasu, a son of Iki governor Tomochika, delivered it. He was so good on the tsuzumi hand drum that people then dubbed him the “Tsuzumi Lieutenant.” Kiso summoned him. Without a word of reply to the message, he asked, “So they call you the Tsuzumi Lieutenant, do they? Is that because you have everyone beating and thumping on you?”
Tomoyasu said nothing and returned to the cloistered emperor. “Yoshinaka is a fool,” he reported. “At any moment he will turn against the court. I urge his suppression immediately.”
His Cloistered Eminence should then have issued suitable orders, but he did not.
No, he had the abbots of Mount Hiei and Miidera mobilize their fighting monks.
The senior nobles and privy gentlemen raised a force
consisting of stone-throwing boys, wastrel youths, and beggar clerics.
At first the warriors of the five inner provinces had sided with Kiso,
but news of the sovereign’s displeasure with him
turned them all into the cloistered emperor’s allies.
Even Murakami no Sabur, the Shinano Genji warrior, shifted allegiance that way.
To Kiso, Imai Kanehira said, “This is extremely serious, you know.
I mean, how can you possibly fight a sovereign endowed with all virtue?
Take off your helmet, unstring your bow, and submit!”
Kiso was furious.
“When I came out of Shinano,”
he said, “I attacked at Omi and Aida;
then up in the north at Mount Tonami,
at Kurozaka, Shiozaka,
and Shinohara; then out in the east
at Fukuryūji Nawate,
at nearby Sasa-no-semari,
and at the fort of Itakura;
and not once, through any of that,
did I show my back to the enemy.
Cloistered emperor he may be,
sovereign in name and in virtue,
but no, I will not, even for him,
doff my helmet, unstring my bow,
and, at a word from him, submit.
Every man guarding the capital has a horse—so he’s not supposed to ride it?
There are paddy fields everywhere.
What business does he have, this cloistered emperor,
censuring them for feeding their horses rice leaves from a few?
After all, my young men have no army granary to supply them.
What’s so terribly wrong with their going off sometimes to help themselves?
It’s not as though they were breaking into the houses of ministers and princes.
That Tsuzumi Lieutenant is out to get me, I just know it.
Go, beat his drum for him—beat it and smash it!
I expect this to be my last battle. Oh, yes, Yoritomo will hear about it!
Now, get out there, all of you, and fight!” And off he went.
The men from the northern provinces had gone home.
He divided the mere six or seven thousand horsemen he had left
into seven corps, this practice having favored him in the past.
The first, two thousand under Higuchi Kanemitsu,
headed for Imagumano, to attack from the rear.
The other six corps set off to the Kamo River, each from its own station.
At an agreed signal, they were to assemble on the Shichij riverbank.
It was the eleventh month, the nineteenth day, in the morning, when the battle began.
Word spread that twenty thousand troops were stationed
in the cloistered emperor’s Hjūji residence compound.
His men wore identifying badges of pine needles.
Surging forward to attack the west gate,
Kiso found the Tsuzumi Lieutenant directing operations,
wearing a red brocade hitatare but, purposely, no armor—
only a helmet bearing an emblem of the Four Celestial Kings.
Tomoyasu climbed up to stand on the wall beside the west gate,
a halberd in one hand and in the other a vajra bell that he shook furiously.
Sometimes he also leaped and danced about.
The young nobles laughed at the sight.
“Disgraceful!” they exclaimed. “He’s got a tengu in him.”
In a great voice Tomoyasu cried,
“In days gone by, when a herald
read out the sovereign’s decree,
dead plants and trees put forth flowers,
fruit promptly ripened on the bough,
and demon powers bowed in assent.
>
That we now live in the latter days makes no excuse
for turning upon the sovereign endowed with all virtue
and drawing the bow against him.
The arrows you shoot will turn back to strike you!
The swords you draw will cut you!”
“Silence him!” Kiso shouted, and his men roared their great war cry.
The flanking force under Kanemitsu
added their voices from Imagumano.
Then they shot burning humming arrows
into the Hjūji residence compound.
At the time a strong wind was blowing.
Fierce flames leaped up and filled the sky.
Tomoyasu, the man in command,
fled the first of anyone there,
but once he was gone, all the others—
His Cloistered Eminence’s twenty thousand—
fled likewise, every man for himself.
Some in the helter-skelter panic
took their bows but forgot their arrows;
some took their arrows but not their bows.
Some bore their halberds upside down
and cut themselves about the legs;
some got a bow tip somehow stuck
and when they could not pry it loose,
simply had to abandon the bow.
The Settsu Genji, who had secured a position at the east end of Shichij, fled westward.
The cloistered emperor had issued an order that anyone caught fleeing be killed,
so the inhabitants of the city, perched behind shields on rooftops
and ready with all the stones that weighted their roofing,
cried at the sight, “Fugitives! Here they come!”
They picked up their stones and rained them down.
“We fought for His Cloistered Eminence!” the Genji shouted.
“Beware of committing a grave offense!”
“Silence them!” the rooftops shouted. “Our sovereign has spoken! Kill them all!”
Some, as the stones came pelting down, abandoned their horses and crawled away;
some were hit and really did die.
The Hiei monks had held the east end of Hachij.
Those of them who feared shame died fighting; the shameless fled.
Wearing green-laced armor under a light green hunting cloak,
Chikanari, the head of the Water Bureau, fled up the Kamo riverbank on a pale roan.
Imai Kanehira chased him and shot a deadly arrow straight through his neck.
Chikanari’s father was Kiyowara no Yorinari, a chief secretary. “A scholar of the classics has no business donning helmet and armor,” people muttered.