The Disfavored Hero (The Tomoe Gozen Saga Book 1)

by Jessica Amanda Salmonson

  Yabushi was appeased.

  Hereafter, it was difficult to be rid of the nun, whose name she gave unasked: Tsuki Izutsu. She followed after Tomoe and Yabushi, asking pointed questions about faith, thereby discovering that Yabushi’s instructor taught both Shintoism and Buddhism and kept a reliquary for both within the dojo. This struck the nun as adequate if not perfect. Tomoe, however, was averse to Buddhism, and Tsuki Izutsu seemed to put it in her mind as her duty to straighten Tomoe’s path.

  “Zen is popular among the more influential samurai,” said Tsuki, sounding like some tempting devil.

  “So is rich food,” said Tomoe. “It makes them fat and slow.”

  Tsuki enjoyed Tomoe’s response immeasurably, but added pointedly, “The Mikado himself is a student of Buddhism.”

  “And in exile,” said Tomoe, then caught herself lest she sound blasphemous for judging Amaterasu’s descendant. She said, “The Mikado demonstrates ryobu-shinto, the Two Ways of the Gods. It has nothing to do with Zen.”

  Tomoe wished Tsuki would simply go away, so that the two samurai would be left to speak in private. Tomoe wanted to know how Yabushi had come to be in this village, when Ikiki was where his sister had been sold; it was not a topic for uninvited ears. Tsuki, unfortunately, could not be rebuked by subtle methods, and her strides were too vast to be outpaced.

  “What do you know of Zen?” asked Tsuki.

  Tomoe stopped—Yabushi too. The bigger samurai looked at the strolling nun harshly, and replied, “Not much and enough! Buddhists preach of a hierarchy of souls, with human next to the top. Shintoism means that all things bear an equal soul, every tree and rock and fish and fox and farmer and samurai and god. Material wealth, strength, power—these may fluctuate; but souls are absolute, and every soul has the same worth.”

  “There is only one soul,” said Tsuki, eyes glinting as by some private joke. “And that One is ubiquitous.”

  Tomoe had not asked to argue theology. She said, “Not all Buddhists say that.”

  “Not all Buddhism is Zen.”

  “I will tell you this:” Tomoe began, in a tone as lecturing as Tsuki’s, “Shinto is a religion not of tracts, but awe. Everything has importance. We do not bow down. We dance.”

  “When have you danced?”

  “Mine is the dance of the warrior.”

  Tsuki liked this answer, too. Tomoe continued, “Buddhists say it is wrong to kill. How can a samurai believe that? Are we the greatest sinners?”

  “We are all wretched in the world,” said Tsuki, looking for a brief moment less than happy. “To tread the very grass kills insects, to have eaten a piece of fish—and who is to say a grain of rice has less feeling than some animal, than you or I. We cannot help but sin! The air we breathe has life which we soil. But Buddha has shown a way to flee the endless cycle of painful lives and deaths, to gain union with the Whole.”

  “Shinto is less cynical,” countered Tomoe. “Life and death are inspiring gifts, not sufferings to escape.”

  Yabushi stood beside these women, half ignored, watching and hearing their exchange with a bemused expression too mature for his years. Maybe he was thinking ironically: They fight like children.

  “Zen, too, is against scripture, is not a faith of tracts,” Tsuki explained. “Knowledge exists naturally, not in a Buddhist text, or in any other. When you lose yourself in your sword, when you are one with your bushido—that is Zen.” Tsuki thought this brilliant. “Zen is; it cannot be taught.”

  “Then teach me nothing,” said Tomoe as she took Yabushi’s hand, intending to leave the woman standing.

  But the pest endured, walked beside them, asked, “You are perhaps both hungry?” She beamed annoying pleasantness, while stern-faced Tomoe looked forward and refused reply. For one thing, Tomoe did not wish to be beholden to the nun for a meal, and thereby saddled with her longer. For another, she did not wish to be cornered in a discussion of the religious significance of digestion.

  Yabushi, however, was done with anger, and had warmed to the gentle nature and humor of the strolling nun. Also, he was extremely hungry, having saved his two-hundred ryo exclusively to redeem his sister, spending none of it on food or other personal requirements.

  “If you have food to share,” said Little Bushi, “we would be honored and grateful to accept.”

  Tomoe made no contradiction.

  Tsuki had no food, but she did have means.

  The festival was beginning to gather pace. The strolling nun, in her long strides, approached a rich-appearing booth by herself, and said to the man selling cakes, “Most beneficent food-vendor! I can see by your necklace that you love Buddha. Can it be that you are generous to Buddha’s poorest questers?”

  The man was fat, probably from his own cooking. He might be less rich than he had made himself appear for the festival, yet it could not be entirely that he was less than well-to-do. What success he had achieved was very likely due in part to his refusal to feed beggars, who otherwise and gladly would eat him poor. But the nun was very beautiful, and to the fat man this made a difference. He bowed to her and returned to her her winning grin, while handing her a cake.

  Tsuki turned around and motioned to Yabushi, who ran forward to take the morsel away. Tsuki smiled at the vendor once more. “Jizosama, protector of little children, will reward you for your kindness to my friend,” said Tsuki. “There are many blessings on your house, but only an anger-sprite in my tummy.”

  The vendor smiled less hugely, and did not bow so low. Still, he gave the nun a second cake, and when she turned around, Tomoe was there to take it. Tomoe imitated Tsuki’s grin, and Tsuki liked that very much, though it might have been a mocking insult.

  Tsuki said to the vendor, “Not every servant of Buddha, as austere as I have become, has a famous retainer like Tomoe Gozen. I must feed her lest she grow mean like a hungry dog. I am Buddha’s most fortunate strolling nun, albeit a starving one.”

  Without any smile at all, without the slightest nod, the vendor proffered the third cake, and looked around and about for some other vagrant in the nun’s charge. But there were none additional, and Tsuki scurried off with her staff and her final prize, blessing all upon the street.

  Nun and samurai sat down together in a miniature park. In the park were small, carved stone houses. There was a bridge too minuscule to use, not that it was needed to cross a brook no wider than a step. Brilliant flowers blazed in the shade of maple trees.

  There in the shade, three lovely beggars feasted, the women and the child; and there, the cheerful, prying ways of Tsuki Izutsu uncovered the plight of Yabushi’take Issun’kamatoka, who had warmed completely to the nun, and told her all.

  “In Ikiki they told me, ‘We recall your sister. She was always saying: I am a samurai’s daughter! and would not mind the wishes of our guests.’ It seems the geisha house in Ikiki transferred claim on my sister to the geisha house of this village—but they told me when I arrived this dawn that she is not here, never arrived, vanished on the road from Ikiki. I am myself witness to the treacherous nature of that road.” He sighed heavily. “I do not know where any road will lead me now.”

  Little Bushi’s lips quivered as he said these things, and directly two silver tears fell from the same eye and streaked his cheek. “Brave warrior,” said Tsuki, who touched away the streak. “I have a certain power, and can divine for you the whereabouts of your sister. To do this, I need something which belonged to her. I am afraid to ask if you possess one such item, since you say you have not seen her in more than two years, and scarcely remember more than the memory of her. Yet I cannot help you after all, unless you have upon you a thing that once was hers.”

  Yabushi reached into his kimono and withdrew the bundle of gold ryo. He untied the scarf, and spilled the content in his lap. The coins shone like pieces of the sun. The scarf he handed to Tsuki. “This was hers,” he said. “She gave it to me a month before I left for the dojo, before she was taken to Ikiki and never seen again.”

>   Tsuki fondled and wadded the silk, closed her eyes, rubbed the scarf on her eyelids. That was all she did. She handed the cloth back to Yabushi, who methodically restacked his ryo and wrapped them up again. Reluctantly, he asked, “You saw nothing?”

  “I saw it all,” she said quickly. Her usually happy features were drawn up in a sad way.

  “She is dead?” Yabushi asked, his eyes round.

  “She was kidnapped by an ogre,” said the nun, “and lives as his wife in a swamp.”

  Tomoe started. She tried to recollect something she could not, something of dreadful importance. But it had been erased, like a slate, whatever it had been. There were only vague images of what had been written—written in chalk, deathly white. Written in snow, which melted, and fell once more, with no message.

  “We must go save her!” exclaimed Yabushi.

  “We must! Yes, we must!” agreed Tsuki.

  Yabushi leapt to his feet; Tsuki climbed her staff. They brushed crumbs from their kimonos. Tomoe still sat on the ground, staring at nothing, thinking: We must not.

  There had been others who left the festival early, those with small journeys or larger, those desirous of homes before dark. But only three trod the marshland road, for it was hardly ever used anymore, unless by folk in a desperate hurry (and the greater the hurry the better, people said). Yabushi had been in precisely such a hurry when coming from Ikiki, anxious as he was to find his sister at the road’s other end; so he came through the marshland despite warnings of mysterious disappearances throughout the past year, and of a vampirish kappa who was not very large but magically ferocious.

  “I did have trouble on this road,” Yabushi confessed to Tomoe Gozen and Tsuki Izutsu. Tsuki did not wear her prayer-tabard, which was rolled up and tied to her back; so she was clad in a simple but colorful kimono, as were Tomoe and Yabushi. Yabushi continued, “But I had been told in advance about the kappa lurking in the black waters along the way, so I made preparations. Before entering the marshland, I sought cucumbers, which is the only thing kappa love more than human blood. I found seven. When the kappa came for me, I gave the cucumbers to him as a gift. He was so pleased he promised not to suck the blood through my anus, but instead would guard my path so that oni devils and their bakemono captain would not get me.”

  “Did you see oni or bakemono?” asked Tsuki, shivering.

  “No. I do not know if the kappa helped me, for he never showed himself again. But I must say that the only other trouble I had was a fear of awful noises of many sorts.”

  Tsuki laughed at that, but it was a more nervous laughter than her usual, for she felt much the same about their current path.

  “Even in broad of day,” said Tomoe, “this place smacks of ghosts and danger. Perhaps the kappa did protect you.”

  Tsuki bowed close to Yabushi’s ear and said, barely loud enough for Tomoe to hear (and that was on purpose), “Buddha protected you.”

  As Tomoe had remarked, even with the sun angling on the marshland and its road, it was an awful place. It was more than a common haunting, too. The road seemed to carve through an entirely different world, as unlike the village as rivers are from sand. The shadows were green and wavering, like some underwater habitation. The sky was pale jade instead of blue. Anything could happen in such a place as this, and take one—or three—unawares.

  The road was half overgrown from a year of minimal use, and it was sodden in many places where swamp waters encroached. There had been no repairs.

  The very vines reached out to grasp passers, vines alive with vine-slender snakes whose heads wobbled and whose breaths stank. In the water, things that looked less like frogs than they ought bobbed up and down as though watching the small procession’s every move. And those bulbous eyes were made for just such observation. Perhaps they were the spies, the ninja, of this ghastly land, merely disguised as frogs.

  Tomoe Gozen knew she was not alone with one fearful consideration: How much worse will this road be come dark!

  Dusk was some ways off when the two samurai and nun turned to the sound of a wagon creaking and harnesses rattling. People were coming.

  Most who used this road traveled in haste. But the five men on horses and wagon moved lethargically, as though they were in dread of arriving home.

  The five men were samurai. Four were those who had begrudgingly allowed Tomoe a space to sleep one night. The fifth, evidently their leader, was the self-same man who had expected Tomoe to die and offered her occupation when she did not.

  “Trouble?” asked Tsuki softly, guarding Yabushi, which he allowed because he liked her.

  “I think not,” said Tomoe. “I know them.”

  Tomoe, Tsuki and Yabushi stood off the side of the road, pressed into the foliage, and let the slow wagon and riders pass. The wagon contained tent gear beneath assorted paraphernalia for Noh plays: wooden masks, gaudy costumes, and set-pieces. Tomoe was surprised to consider samurai as actors, for these four men must have been the ones who performed the Noh play with the strange theme. The fifth was perhaps their director. She wondered all the more about what lord these men must serve, so odd they were with their double-edged swords sheathed on their backs and their second occupation in theater, so much stranger must their master be.

  They looked less magnificent in the green shadows of the marshland forest, and the shadow of their own gloom. They were tired and sad, it was certain, as though the festival had meant as much to them, or more, than it had to common peasants.

  “A downtrodden lot, eh, Yabushi?” said Tsuki, good-humored even in the eerie land. The leader may have overheard.

  When the wagon and riders passed, the leader hung back. He looked down at Tomoe with the same expression he had given her before, that is, pleasant, but sad or empty. Only his voice was different from before. It shook with the weight of secret sadness, and that made Tomoe wonder more.

  “Be glad you did not join me after all,” he said, “for I had somehow forgotten, or refused to recall, that the festival was for two days only. But I offered you my friendship as well, and that at least you might have taken, though in the end it is perhaps as well you did not.”

  Tomoe flushed. “What right have you, who would have watched me die, to sound bitter about me?”

  “I have no call whatsoever,” he confessed, his voice louder. “All the same, I wish you had at minimum attended our exhibition today. I would like to have impressed you as once you impressed me.”

  Yabushi and Tsuki exchanged glances, puzzled by these exchanges. Tomoe said, “What master do you serve, who enriches the lives of peasants with warriors who are actors or actors who are warriors, but makes those very men unhappy to return home?”

  “I cannot tell,” he replied, a warning to his tone. “He is only, The Great Lord.”

  Tsuki boldly interrupted, “Only Buddha is the great lord!”

  The mounted warrior glared at her, and she silenced. He said, “There are many Buddhas,” and Tsuki could not deny it. Returning his attention to Tomoe, the sad warrior said, “Please, before I am away, I would beg to know your name, although I cannot properly tell you mine.”

  “You mock me?” asked Tomoe, who knew herself famous whether for better or worse. “Your men hosted me one night, and refused to talk to me, as have many other samurai in recent months. You will already know that I am Tomoe Gozen, survivor of the Battle of Shigeno Valley.”

  “My pardon, honorable Tomoe. I plead innocence for myself and my men. We are poor in knowledge about the world. If they were not friendly to you, it is because we are always reticent in matters regarding samurai.”

  “But you yourselves are samurai.”

  “No. We are not.”

  “You are Noh players then?” Tomoe was incredulous.

  “Not that either. We are …” he seemed to search his mind for an appropriate introduction. Unhappily, he decided, “You might say, we are of the haniwa clan.”

  For a samurai to call himself haniwa was hugely demeaning, for haniwa w
ere hollow, clay warriors found in lords’ tombs of an earlier era. She was not certain if he detested himself so much that he considered himself hollow and of clay, or if he reckoned her a fool to be made fun.

  Tomoe begged to differ, “Haniwa is no clan. Haniwa are things.”

  “Then we are things,” said the sorrowful samurai, or non-samurai if he preferred. He turned his mount and hurried away, spurring the steed to catch his men, retaking his place among them and their wagon.

  Tsuki Izutsu touched Tomoe Gozen’s hand, which had grown inexplicably cold, and she said, “That was a strange conversation.”

  “They are strange warriors,” replied Tomoe, and they went upon their way. They followed in the track of the five men and their wagon’s wheels. Soon, those men were out of sight and beyond the range of hearing. Even their tracks disappeared after a while, as if they had never been.

  “There it is!” exclaimed Yabushi, pointing. Being the only one familiar with the road, Yabushi had taken the lead. Down the road a ways was an abandoned boat, which the small samurai had wondered at on his earlier passage here. The boat lay upside down, half in the marsh waters, half on the road, overgrown with weeds but largely intact. Doubtlessly, it had belonged to some unfortunate victim of the marshland’s trouble.

  As samurai, nun, and samurai neared this vessel, a kappa vampire stepped out from behind it, trailing vile green algae from his feet.

  “We meet again, friend Yabushi!”

  The monster was no taller than the small samurai. It bore no clothing except a belt to which was strapped a shortsword. It was obviously male. Tomoe half drew her long daito; Tsuki readied her stick; but Yabushi said, “Let me. I handled him before,” and the two women held back.

  The kappa asked, “What have you brought me today?”

  Yabushi looked his dubious friend up and down. The slender kappa was not entirely unhandsome, having many qualities of a normal child, though he might well be older than many a grandfather. Only his greenish tinge and the depression on his hairless pate betrayed his non-human condition. The depression on his head was filled with water from the swamp in which he lived, for if he was without water altogether, he would lose his magic and become weak and helpless. If left dry a long while, he would die. Yabushi answered the kappa, “I paid you seven cucumbers before. I have nothing more today.”