by VIKING ADULT
“Here I am, on my way to fight, and I land at Victory Beach!
How is that for a good omen? By the way,
are there any Heike sympathizers around to shoot arrows after us?”
“Yes, sir, there is Sakuraba no Suke Yoshit,
the younger brother of Awa no Minbu Shigeyoshi.”
“Then let’s get him out of the way first.”
Yoshitsune chose thirty riders from Kondroku’s hundred and added them to his men.
Descending on Yoshit’s redoubt,
they found a marsh bordering three sides
and a fosse the fourth. Across the fosse
they therefore attacked with ringing cries.
The warriors within the redoubt
loosed on them a shower of arrows,
which the men of the Genji ignored.
Heads low, protected by neck plates,
they pressed their assault, howling for war.
Yoshit must have seen he was lost.
Under cover of his men’s arrows,
he mounted a chosen sturdy steed
and barely managed to escape.
Yoshitsune decapitated
twenty of the defending archers
and offered their heads to the god of war.
Then he uttered a shout of triumph.
“A good start, that!” he declared.
He summoned Kondroku Chikaie.
“How many do the Heike have at Yashima?” he asked.
“Surely no more than a thousand horse.”
“Why so few?”
“Because they have stationed small garrisons of fifty or a hundred, like ours,
all along the Shikoku coast and on the islands.
Besides which, Dennaizaemon Noriyoshi, Shigeyoshi’s eldest son,
has led three thousand horse over into Iyo,
to attack Kawano no Shir for failing to answer a rallying call.”
“So the timing is perfect. And from here to Yashima, how far?”
“Two days’ march, sir.”
“Then attack before they find out we’re here!”
Now at a gallop, now at a walk, now cantering, now resting,
they spent the night crossing zaka Pass, between Awa and Sanuki.
During the night Yoshitsune found himself on the path beside a letter bearer and struck up a conversation with him. The man never guessed in the dark that he was talking to an enemy. He spoke freely, probably assuming that these warriors were on their way to join the Heike at Yashima.
“And that letter—who is it for?” Yoshitsune asked.
“Lord Munemori at Yashima,” the man replied.
“Who’s it from?”
“A gentlewoman in the capital.”
“What does it say?”
“Nothing much, as far as I can see. She just mentions that the Genji have reached the mouth of the Yodo River and are now launching their boats.”
“No doubt they are. We’re on our way for Yashima, too, but we don’t know exactly how to get there. You must show us.”
“Oh, yes, I go there a lot. I know the way. I’ll accompany you.”
“Take that letter off him!” Yoshitsune commanded. It was done. “Tie him up! Don’t take his head, though. That would be wrong.”
So there in the mountain wilderness, they tied the man to a tree and went on their way. Yoshitsune opened the letter and read it. Yes, it did seem to be from a gentlewoman:
“Kur Yoshitsune is crafty.
He will attack, I know he will,
however high the wind and the waves.
Take care not to disperse your forces!”
Yoshitsune said after he read this,
“Why, this is a blessing from heaven!
I want Yoritomo to see it too!”
He put it away in a safe place.
The next day, the eighteenth, at the hour of the tiger, [ca. 4 A.M.]
they came down to a spot called Hiketa in the province of Sanuki.
There they rested their horses before pressing on,
past Niū-no-ya and Shirotori, toward the fortress of Yashima.
Again Yoshitsune summoned Kondroku.
“Tell me about the Heike quarters at Yashima,” he said.
“Apparently, sir, you do not realize that the sea there is very shallow.
Left panel: Musashib Benkei (upper left) guards Yoshitsune while the letter is read. Right panel: The messenger tied to a tree.
At low tide you can ride out to the island and not even wet your horse’s belly.”258
“Fine!” Yoshitsune exclaimed. “Then attack at once!”
He set fire to the houses of Takamatsu and bore down on the Yashima stronghold.
At Yashima, Dennaizaemon Noriyoshi was back from his foray into Iyo,
with his three thousand horse,
to punish Kawano no Shir for failing to answer the call.
Having missed his man, he had beheaded instead over one hundred and fifty Kawano housemen
and brought the heads back to the emperor’s Yashima palace.
“Rebel heads may not be inspected in the palace.” Such was the decision,
and the inspection therefore took place at the residence of Lord Munemori.
The heads numbered one hundred and fifty-six.
During the inspection a clamor arose: “Takamatsu is burning!”
“This is no accident, not in daytime,” Munemori stated.
“It must be an enemy attack. They fired the houses on purpose.
There must be a lot of them. We cannot allow ourselves to be surrounded.
Hurry! Get out to sea as fast as you can!”
The boats stood moored along the beach before the main gate.
Everyone hastened to board them.
Onto the imperial barge
rushed Kenreimon-in, the regent’s wife,
Lady Nii, and their gentlewomen.
Lord Munemori and his son259
boarded one of the boats together.
The others took whatever they could
and rowed out a good hundred yards
in some cases, in others less.
Meanwhile the Genji warriors—
seventy or eighty, fully armed—
burst onto the beach before the main gate.
The tide at the time was all the way out,
down that gently shelving stretch of shore.
In places the water rose no higher
than a horse’s hocks or belly,
and here and there it was shallower still.
The spray kicked up by the dashing hooves
glittered through the prevailing mist,
from which emerged streaming white banners
that to the Heike meant a great host
had come to finish them off forever.
To make sure that the Heike never guessed
how few men he really had with him,
Yoshitsune had them advance
in small groups: five or six, eight or ten.
3. The Death of Tsuginobu
Kur Yoshitsune wore that day a hitatare of red brocade
under armor with purple lacing, lighter above and darker below.
Gold fittings adorned the sword at his side,
and arrows fletched with mottled feathers rose from the quiver at his back.
Gripping his rattan-wrapped bow, he announced in a great voice,
“You see before you the messenger
sent by His Cloistered Eminence,
police lieutenant of the fifth rank,
Minamoto no Yoshitsune!”
Thus he declared his name.
Those who did so after him included Tashiro no Kanja Nobutsuna, from Izu; Kaneko no Jūr Ietada and Yoichi Chikanori, from Musashi; and Ise no Sabur Yoshimori.
These were the next to announce their names:
Gotbye Sanemoto;
his son, Shinbye Motokiyo;
Sat Saburbye Tsuginobu
and Sat Shirbye Tadanobu,
&n
bsp; both from Mutsu;
Eda no Genz, Kumai Tar;
and Musashib Benkei.
The cry went up from the Heike: “Shoot them!”
Some boats arced arrows in from afar;
some shot them straight from closer range.
The Genji warriors loosed them left
as they charged past or loosed them right,
rested their horses behind beached boats,
and with fierce cries pursued the fight.
Gotbye Sanemoto, a seasoned old fighter, avoided the fray
to burst instead into the palace, where he lit many fires.
The smoke had hardly risen before the building burned to the ground.
Munemori mustered his men.
“How many Genji are there, really?” he asked.
“At present, my lord, only seventy or eighty.”
“How awful! We have more than enough
to deal with this enemy even one hair at a time!
It is a painful thought that instead of surrounding and killing them all,
we fled in panic to our boats and let them burn the emperor’s palace!
Lord Noritsune, are you present? Please take the fight to them on land.”
“Certainly,” Noritsune replied.
He and Etchū no Jirbye Moritsugi boarded a small boat
and landed on the beach by the burned-out main gate.
Yoshitsune and his eighty men kept their distance a bowshot away.
Moritsugi stood in the boat’s open bow and shouted,
“I did hear you announce your names,
but I was a long way out at sea,
too far to catch them properly!
Who today commands this Genji force?”
Ise Yoshimori stepped forward to answer, “Who do you think?
Lord Kur Yoshitsune, of course,
tenth-generation descendant of Emperor Seiwa,
younger brother to Yoritomo, Lord of Kamakura!”
“Oh, yes, I know him!” Moritsugi answered.
“The boy orphaned when his father got killed, back during the Heiji Conflict,
and kept as a temple pet at Kurama.
Then he served a gold peddler—
carried the man’s food and gear for him all the way down to Mutsu.
That’s the young fellow you mean?”
Yoshimori retorted, “How dare you, with that slick tongue of yours, speak so of my lord? Oh, yes, I know who you people are: the ones who barely saved your skins in the battle at Mount Tonami, then fled north and begged your way, crying, back to the capital!”
Moritsugi retorted, “Our lord’s generous bounty could never have reduced us to beggary! Oh, no, you’re the ones who lived off banditry—you, your wives, and your children—in the Suzuka mountains of Ise. That’s what I’ve heard.”
“Gentlemen, this empty war of words leads nowhere,” Kaneko Ietada broke in. “Anyone, on either side, could spout the same nonsense. You saw well enough, last spring at Ichi-no-tani, what the young warriors from Musashi and Sagami can do.”
He was still speaking when his younger brother Yoichi, beside him,
drew an arrow twelve handbreadths and two fingers long,
and let fly with a mighty twang.
It pierced Moritsugi’s breastplate and sank into the flesh beyond.
That put an end to the war of words.
Noritsune wore no hitatare,
preferring, for battle at sea,
to wear a tie-dyed kosode robe
under Chinese damask-laced armor,
with at his side a long, daunting sword.
The twenty-four arrows in his quiver
boasted gray-mottled eagle feathers,
and he bore a rattan-wrapped bow.
He was the capital’s mightiest archer:
No man caught in range of his arrows
escaped having one pierce him through.
The target he aimed to hit this time
was Yoshitsune, but the Genji
knew very well what he was up to.
Sat Tsuginobu and Tadanobu,
Ise Yoshimori, Eda no Genz,
Genpachi Hirotsuna, Kumai Tar,
Musashib Benkei—every one
a man worthy to face a thousand—
raced to ride before their commander,
bridle to bridle, so as to block
any arrow sent flying toward him.
Yoshitsune was beyond reach.
“Out of the way!” Noritsune cried.
“You servant rabble, give me a clear shot!”
He loosed a furious volley of arrows
that unhorsed ten men in full armor—
one, the man stationed farthest forward:
Sat Tsuginobu, from Mutsu.
The arrow struck his left shoulder
and went through to his right side.
He crashed headlong from his mount.
Kiku, Noritsune’s outstandingly strong and brave page, wore green-laced armor and a helmet with a three-plate neckpiece. He unsheathed his halberd, one with a plain shaft, and rushed forward to take Tsuginobu’s head. To save it, the fallen man’s older brother, Tadanobu, loosed a powerful shot that went straight through Kiku and came out where his armor joined in the back. Kiku collapsed.
Noritsune shoots Tsuginobu. (The text has Noritsune on a boat, not a rock.)
The sight brought Noritsune at one bound from his boat, his bow in his left hand.
With his right he lifted Kiku and tossed him aboard,
so that even if Kiku died of his wound, the enemy never got his head.
Kiku had once been a page to Michimori,
but he came to serve Noritsune, the younger brother, after Michimori was killed.
He was in his eighteenth year.
Noritsune gave up the fight, deeply affected by this loss.
Yoshitsune had Tsuginobu carried to the rear of the Genji position.
There he dismounted and took Tsuginobu’s hands.
“How are you feeling?” he asked.
Under his breath Tsuginobu replied, “It is all over for me, my lord.”
“Tell me, have you any regrets?”
“None at all, my lord. Why should I?
But I am sorry that I must die
before you rise high in the world.
Otherwise I have always known,
as do we all who wield the bow,
that every arrow could bring death.
More than anything else, though, for a warrior such as I,
it is the crowning honor of my life that in generations to come,
people should be able to say of one Sat Tsuginobu, from Mutsu,
that he died to save his lord on the shore at Yashima.”
With these words the last of his strength failed.
Yoshitsune shed bitter tears.
“Is there no holy priest nearby?” he asked. They managed to find one.
“A wounded man has just died,” Yoshitsune told him.
“For the comfort of his soul, I want the full Lotus Sutra copied in a day.”260
He gave him a powerful black horse with a gold-trimmed saddle.
When Yoshitsune got the fifth rank,
he had awarded this steed the same
and dubbed him Commissioner Black.
This was the horse he chose to ride
at Ichi-no-tani, in the descent
down the steep Hiyodori Ravine.
The slain man’s brother, Tadanobu,
and every other man present wept.
“Any man would be only too glad
to give up his life for such a lord.”
4. Nasu no Yoichi
While all this was going on, men of Awa and Sanuki,
once Heike allies but now at Genji disposal—
fourteen or fifteen at a time, or as many as twenty—
came drifting in from scattered peaks and hollows
until soon Yoshitsune commanded over three hundred horse.
�
�The sun is low,” he remarked.
“Too little day is left to decide victory or defeat.”
He was just drawing his men back when, from farther out at sea,
a prettily decorated boat came rowing in toward land.
Some hundred yards out, it turned broadside to the shore.
All were wondering what it was up to when a stunning girl, not yet twenty,
wearing a fivefold “willow” layering261 and a red hakama divided skirt,
came to the side and planted there, upright, a red fan bearing a sun disk.
She then beckoned toward the land.
Yoshitsune summoned Gotbye Sanemoto. “What does she want?” he asked.
“She seems to want us to shoot the fan. But I suspect that the idea is really to tempt you, our commander, into range for a better look at her and then have some sturdy fellow bring you down with an arrow. Anyhow, you should probably have someone shoot the fan.”
“And who among us is up to that?”
“We have many fine archers, but the best of them is probably Nasu no Yoichi Munetaka from Shimsa, a son of Nasu no Tar Suketaka. He is short but very good.”
“How do you know?” Yoshitsune asked.
“Whenever they go shooting birds on the wing, he hits two out of three.”
“Very well, bring him here.” Sanemoto did so.
Yoichi, then in his twentieth year,
was wearing a dark blue hitatare
trimmed, collar and sleeves, with red brocade
under green-laced armor. His sword
hung at his side from a silver ring,
and the few arrows that the day’s clashes
had left him lifted their eagle feathers,
black-and-white-banded, over his head,
in company with a humming arrow
fletched from both eagle and hawk,
and tipped with deer horn. Under his arm
he clasped a lacquered, rattan-wrapped bow,
and his helmet hung over his back.
With every mark of deep respect,
he knelt before Yoshitsune.
“Now, Yoichi, I want you to score a bull’s-eye on that fan
and show the Heike a thing or two.”
Yoichi made bold to reply, “But, sir, I am not sure that I can hit it,
and if I miss, the shame will be ours forever.
Please give someone else this task—someone more likely to succeed.”
Yoshitsune retorted in fury,