by VIKING ADULT
“No man come to the west with me,
all the way from Kamakura,
may decline when I give an order!
Any backchat from anyone and I want the man gone!”
Yoichi must have thought better of refusing a second time. “I may or may not miss, sir,” he said, “but I will try, since you wish it.”
He withdrew from his commander’s presence. Mounting a powerful black horse with a tasseled crupper and a saddle inlaid with a sea-squirt motif in mother-of-pearl, he got a good grip on his bow, drew in the reins, and started toward the edge of the water.
His fellows watched him from a distance. “He’ll do it, I know he will!” they were saying, and Yoshitsune, too, seemed sure that he would.
The fan was so far away that Yoichi rode out thirty or forty feet,
but from there it still looked a good hundred yards off.
It was the eighteenth of the second month,
the hour of the cock—very late in the day—[ca. 6 P.M.]
and a strong north wind was blowing.
High waves were breaking on the beach.
The drifting boat tossed up and down,
the fan kept fluttering on its pole.
The sea was dark with Heike boats
gathered to watch, while on the shore
the Genji gazed out, bridle to bridle.
Both sides seemed in a festive mood.
With one hand Yoichi covered his eyes
and silently prayed the following prayer:
“Hail Hachiman, Great Bodhisattva,
and you, gods of my home province,
Nikk Gongen of Utsunomiya,
Yuzen Daimyjin of Nasu,
I beg of you, guide my arrow
to hit the center of that fan!
For should the arrow miss its mark,
I shall break my bow and die,
nor ever again face any man.
If you wish me to return,
let this arrow of mine strike home!”
Once more he opened his eyes.
The wind had dropped just a little;
the fan looked easier to hit.
He took out his humming arrow,
put it to the string, and let fly.
Small as he was, it was still long—
twelve full handbreadths and three fingers—
Nasu no Yoichi’s arrow hits the fan.
and he drew a strong man’s bow.
The arrow’s song rang out afar.
Unerringly, it struck the fan
an inch above the pivot pin
and flew straight on into the sea.
The fan shot up into the air,
fluttered there a moment or two,
then, buffeted by the spring wind,
dropped to the water with a splash.
The waning sunset’s slanting rays
lit the red fan, with its sun disk,
adrift on the white-foaming waves,
bobbing high and low. The Heike,
out at sea, in admiration
pounded the gunwales of their boats,
while on shore the delighted Genji
beat on their quivers a sharp tattoo.
5. The Dropped Bow
So spectacular was the hit that a man of fifty or so,
no doubt swept away by a wave of enthusiasm,
emerged from amidships in his black leather-laced armor, plain-wood halberd in hand,
to dance about where the fan had stood.
Ise no Sabur Yoshimori rode up behind Yoichi.
“An order from our commander,” he announced. “Shoot him.”
Yoichi took the next arrow from his quiver, put it to the string,
drew, and sent it thudding into the man’s neck.
The fellow toppled headlong to the bottom of the boat.
Dead silence fell on the Heike side.
The Genji again beat their quivers.
“Got him!” cried some, and others,
“Just plain cruel, I’d call it!”
The Heike can hardly have been pleased,
for now three of their warriors emerged on the shore,
one wielding a shield, one bearing a bow, one brandishing a halberd.
The one with the shield planted it on the ground and shouted,
“All right, come and get us!”
“Fine!” said Yoshitsune. “Go, you young roughriders, clear them out!”
Five men—Mionoya no Shir, Tshichi, and Jūr, from Musashi,
Niū no Shir from Kzuke, Kiso no Chūji from Shinano—
charged with fierce cries. From behind the shield,
a lacquered, black-fletched arrow buried itself to the nock
in the chest of Mionoya’s charging horse, on the left side, near the breast collar.
The horse fell like a flattened screen.
The rider swung his right leg over,
so as to alight to his left,
and drew his sword. From behind the shield,
a Heike halberd came at him—
too dangerous, he must have felt,
to try to counter with his short sword,
for he made himself small and fled.
The attacker raced in pursuit.
The halberd looked poised to fell him,
but no—the attacker instead clasped it under his left arm,
stretched out his right hand, and reached for Mionoya’s helmet neckpiece.
Mionoya ran for all he was worth, to keep the hand off it.
Three times the attacker missed, but he got a good grip on the fourth.
The neckpiece held until Mionoya tore it loose from the helmet and got away.
To save their horses, the other four riders just watched.
Mionoya hid behind one to catch his breath.
The pursuer stopped, leaned on his halberd, raised his neckpiece, and shouted,
“You will have heard of me by now,
and here I am, before your eyes:
the one I hear the youth of the city
call Akushichibye Kagekiyo
the hard man from Kazusa!”
Heartened, the Heike cried, “Don’t let them get Akushichibye! Forward, men! Stay with him!”
Two hundred came up on the beach, their shields overlapping like chicken feathers. “All right, you Genji, try us!” they shouted.
“I don’t like this,” Yoshitsune observed. He gave the lead to Gotbye, father and son, and to the Kaneko brothers; posted Sat Shirbye from Mutsu and Ise Yoshimori to his left and right; assigned Tashiro Nobutsuna to his rear; and charged with eighty fiercely yelling men. The enemy were not mounted, most being foot soldiers. They drew back for fear that the horses might trample them and reboarded their vessels.
Yoshitsune’s men scattered the shields far and wide, like counting sticks.
Then, flushed with victory, they rode their horses belly-deep into the water, to fight on.
While Yoshitsune sallied forth deeper still,
men on the surrounding boats reached for his neckpiece with grappling hooks
and caught it several times, but with sword and halberd
his own warriors managed each time to knock the hook away.
Then, somehow, one snagged Yoshitsune’s bow, and he dropped it into the sea.
He bent down and tried several times to retrieve it with his whip.
“Let it go, let it go!” his men cried,
but he got it back in the end and returned, laughing, to the beach.
The older warriors snapped their fingers in disapproval.
“You should not have done that, sir!” they protested.
“How could you possibly trade your life for a bow, whatever its value in coins?”
“It was not the bow I wanted,” Yoshitsune replied.
“If mine, like my uncle Tametomo’s,
took two or three men merely to string it,
I might have dropped it for them on purpose.
But with their hands on this weak little bow,
they would have laughed: ‘Why, just look at that!
This is the bow he draws, Yoshitsune,
the man who commands the Genji force!’
No, I could not allow that to happen.
That is why I risked my life for it.”
His words deeply impressed them all.
Meanwhile the sun had set.
The Heike rode in their boats, offshore,
while the Genji withdrew to camp for the night
on the heights between Mure and Takamatsu.
They had had no rest for the last three days.
Two days past, they had left Watanabe and Fukushima,
only to spend a sleepless night buffeted by rough seas.
The day before, they had fought a skirmish at Katsu-ura,
then spent the night crossing the mountains
toward another whole day of fighting.
Every one of them was exhausted.
Some pillowed their heads on their helmets, others on their armor or quiver,
and there they all lay, dead to the world.
Only two men, Yoshitsune
and Yoshimori, did not sleep.
The first went up to a high place
to keep a lookout for the enemy;
the second went to lurk in a hollow,
to shoot enemy mounts in the belly.
The Heike meanwhile gave Noritsune
a force of five hundred mounted men
to strike the Genji that very night,
but there arose between Moritsugi
and Emi no Jir Morikata
a quarrel over which would lead.
The night went to waste, and dawn came.
Had they managed that night attack,
they would have finished the Genji.
That they did not made it all too clear
that the Heike had had their day.
6. The Clash at Shido
At dawn the Heike boarded their boats and rowed to Shido Bay, also in Sanuki.
From among his three hundred, Yoshitsune chose eighty men and horses to pursue them.
Noting how few they were, the Heike set out to surround and dispatch them.
A thousand men stormed up on the shore and attacked, uttering fierce cries.
Then they saw the two hundred left at Yashima galloping their way.
“Oh, no,” they cried, “they have a whole Genji army right behind them!
There must be tens of thousands of them! We can’t let ourselves be surrounded!”
They boarded their boats once more.
So it was that the Heike fled
at the whim of wind and tide.
They had no idea where to go.
Yoshitsune had driven them
from the whole island of Shikoku,
and Kyushu, too, was closed to them.
They were like souls caught in the bardo.
There, on the shore of Shido Bay,
Yoshitsune got down from his horse
to inspect the heads of the slain.
He summoned Ise Yoshimori.
“Dennaizaemon Noriyoshi,”
he said, “the son of Shigeyoshi,
went after Kawano no Shir
because Kawano ignored his call.
He crossed with three thousand horse into Iyo,
missed Kawano himself, and instead
took one hundred and fifty heads
from his housemen and retainers.
All those heads arrived yesterday
at the palace at Yashima,
and today, or so I am told,
Noriyoshi is on his way here.
So go and meet him on the road,
make up whatever story you please,
and bring him back with you, straight to me.”
Yoshimori promised to do so.
Flying the banner that his lord gave him,
he galloped off with just sixteen men,
every one of them dressed in white.
By and by he met Noriyoshi.
The red banners and the white
stopped some two hundred yards apart.
Yoshimori sent a man to Noriyoshi with this message: “I am Ise no Sabur Yoshimori, a close associate of the Genji commander, Kur Yoshitsune. I have come to meet you because I bear a message. My presence here has nothing to do with battle, and my men and I are therefore unarmed. We have neither bows nor arrows. Please allow us passage though your men.”
The three thousand warriors made way for him.
Yoshimori came up beside Noriyoshi. “As you probably know,” he began, “Kur Yoshitsune, the younger brother of Lord Yoritomo in Kamakura, has received from the cloistered emperor a decree charging him with destroying the Heike, and that mission has brought him to Shikoku. The day before yesterday, he landed at Katsu-ura in Awa, where your uncle, Sakuraba no Suke, was killed. Yesterday he attacked Yashima, burned the emperor’s palace, and captured Lord Munemori and his son. Lord Noritsune killed himself. The other Heike nobles died on the field or drowned themselves in the sea. Your father surrendered and has been placed in my custody. ‘Alas,’ he keeps lamenting. ‘Noriyoshi knows nothing about this, and tomorrow he is certain to die in battle. It is too hard!’ I pitied him enough to come forward to warn you. Whether you now die in the fight or surrender and see your father again, that is entirely up to you.”
Noriyoshi, a renowned warrior, must nonetheless have been out of luck, because he said, “That is just what I have heard.” He removed his helmet, unstrung his bow, and gave them to one of his men to carry. Once their commander had done so, his three thousand riders did the same.
Yoshimori and his mere sixteen men returned with the meek captives.
“What a marvelous ploy!” Yoshitsune exclaimed, lost in admiration.
Noriyoshi was made at once
to give up his arms and armor:
Yoshimori took charge of them.
“But what about all the others?”
Yoshitsune wanted to know.
“Men from such remote provinces,”
Yoshimori replied, “hardly care
what leader’s orders they follow,
as long as he suppresses trouble
and succeeds in imposing peace.”
That sounded so reasonable
that Yoshitsune simply added
the three thousand to his own men.
On the twenty-second of the month, at the hour of the dragon, [ca. 8 A.M.]
the two hundred or so boats that had remained behind at Watanabe
reached the Yashima coast, Kajiwara’s in the lead.
“Kur Yoshitsune has conquered all of Shikoku,” the men already there remarked, chuckling.
“Who needs Kajiwara? He’s as useless as altar flowers picked too late for the rite,
a sweet-flag root the day after the festival, a stave once the quarrel is over.”
After Yoshitsune left the capital,
Nagamori, the chief priest of the Sumiyoshi Shrine,
went to the cloistered emperor’s residence.
There, through Yasutsune, the lord of the Treasury, he reported as follows:
“On the sixteenth just past, at the hour of the boar, the sound of a humming arrow [ca. 10 P.M.]
issued from the shrine’s third sanctuary and sped off westward.”
Deeply impressed, the sovereign offered Sumiyoshi, through Nagamori,
a sword and many other sacred treasures.
When Empress Jingū attacked Silla,
the rough spirits of two deities
came from Ise to spearhead her progress.
They posted themselves at bow and stern,
and Silla fell without difficulty.
On the journey back to Japan,
one of these deities stayed behind
at Sumiyoshi in Settsu province:
This was Sumiyoshi no Daimyjin.
The other preferred to fix his seat
at Suwa in the province of Shinano:
This was Suwa no D
aimyjin.
The sovereign, who had not forgotten
the triumph of this punitive campaign,
felt sure that the deities, even now,
would crush the enemies of the court.
His officials shared his confidence.
7. The Cockfights and the Battle at Dan-no-ura
Kur Yoshitsune pushed straight on from Shido Bay
across the sea to the province of Su,
where he linked forces with Noriyori, his elder brother.
Meanwhile the Heike reached Hikushima in the province of Nagato.
Now, the Genji had landed at Katsu-ura in Awa
and then gone on to defeat the Heike forces at Yashima.
Strangely enough, the Heike had fled to a place with hiku, “retreat,” in its name,
while the Genji stopped at Oitsu, “Chaseport,” in the same province.
Tanz, superintendent of Kumano, owed the Heike a great deal,
but now he forgot all that to dwell on this sudden dilemma:
“Should I join the Heike or would I do better to join the Genji?”
He offered kagura at the Imagumano Shrine in Tanabe and prayed to the god.
The oracle told him to follow the white banners.
Still in doubt, before the shrine he pitted seven white cocks against seven red.
Not a single red cock won. All seven lost.
That decided it: He went over to the Genji.
Mustering all the men of his house,
Tanz gathered two thousand horse.
They sailed aboard two hundred vessels.
At his prow rode Nyakuji,262
present in his sacred substance;
his banner bore the name Kong Dji.
As his boat approached Dan-no-ura,
Genji and Heike both bowed low,
but the Heike could only despair
when his fleet went to join the Genji.
Then Kawano no Shir Michinobu,
the man from Iyo, came rowing up
with one hundred and fifty war craft,
and he, too, swelled the might of the Genji.
Yoshitsune saw things going his way.
The Genji had three thousand vessels
and the Heike a mere one thousand,
a few of them large, in Chinese style.
So the Genji strength only grew,
while that of the Heike dwindled.
Genryaku 2, [1185] third month and twenty-fourth day, the hour of the hare: [ca. 6 A.M.] The Genji and Heike exchanged opening arrows in the strait between Moji-no-seki in Buzen and Akama-no-seki in Nagato. Yoshitsune and Kajiwara Kagetoki had already nearly come to blows.