The Disfavored Hero (11 page)

A little ways into the swamp, the ground raised to one side, a narrow dry path, and she climbed on this to follow toward the sound, which had grown quite loud. There was splashing and muffled snarling; then, abruptly, there was a watery clearing wherein Tomoe beheld a surprising activity.

There was a ninja all right, who had doubtless come into the swamp silent as a ghost so that Tomoe might never have been aware, except that the ninja had run straight into the snare of some other clever being: a bakemono—a species of ogre.

The ninja was hanging upside down from a strong vine, swinging a wicked barbed weapon at the snuffling ogre who danced around the roped prey, splashing and evading the swinging weapon, feinting with its own sharp claws. The ninja was clad in black shirt, trousers and hood; the ogre wore scales and slime.

Tomoe charged to the very edge of the dry path, stood with sword drawn, and cried out, “Ogre! Flee into your dark habitat lest Tomoe Gozen cut you up the spine!”

The ogre turned about, knee deep in water, and still tall. It had horny growths above its eyes and growing out of its cheeks, and knobby, nailed warts about its chin. Its mouth was too big on one side, stretching nearly to one pendulous ear, a trait rare even in this ugly race. Its arms were very long and thick, and its scaly skin was green and slimy like the algal swamp it lived within. It appeared to be sexless, but might have been male, its organs sheathed. The ogre replied in a harsh, awful voice, “I have caught the ninja fair and square. A rare catch! And I am proud! He is mine to rend and to eat.”

Tomoe regarded the ogre casually, and said, “Still, I am today feeling chivalrous, and would like to save a ninja's life.”

The ogre was upset. It knotted its huge, three-clawed fists, guarded its captive carefully, and spoke gutturally from its sideways mouth, “A curse will be put to you, samurai, if you cheat me of my dinner!”

“I do not fear the curse of a bakemono,” said Tomoe with teasing humor in her tone. “The curses of your race are only good in swamps.”

“All the same,” argued the ogre, “there may come a time, when like today, you have call to enter some swamp or marshy land. I am a wandering ogre, as you are a wandering samurai, and we might chance to meet again in circumstances auspicious for me. Even if we never meet, my curse will hold in any swamp, at any time until fulfilled.”

“Then curse me well, slimy beast, for you go hungry tonight.”

Then Tomoe waded quickly into the mire and cut off the tail of the hastily departing ogre. It grabbed its bloodless behind and wailed at the loss of its bottom's brief extension, then turned around a safe distance away to level its curse:

“As I have been denied a tender feast, so shall you be denied some tender friend—for I know samurai value friends above dinners, as ogres value dinners above friends. In addition, for the loss of my tail, which is all we ogres prize as beautiful about ourselves, I curse you with an equal loss: the fairness of your face will learn a scar.”

Although Tomoe was disconcerted by the curse, and knew she would be forever wary of swamps if she valued her visage or her friends, yet she laughed at the departing beast. She called it a fool and a coward, especially a fool, because curses could be equally cruel to the perpetrator of the malediction. She thought she heard it whisper,
yes, yes I am a fool and a coward
, but its tone inferred that Tomoe was, perhaps, something far worse, for her chivalry and boldness.

Before it was completely gone, it cried out unseen from some dark vantage point, more bitter than angry, “Samurai are snarling dogs! Ninja are monkeys in trees! The Shogun is a demon-boar, and the Mikado unfit for an ogre's pet! Human kind are less than bakemono!”

Its name-calling complete, the beast ran off, splashing.

Tomoe turned to the ninja who still hung in the tree like a big plum. He glared at the samurai, only his eyes visible from the tight-fitting hood. He still held the barbed instrument, with which he reached up to the vine and cut himself down. He went head-first into the foul water, and Tomoe laughed at that, waiting for the ninja to come up for air.

In a moment Tomoe grew wroth, for the clever ninja did not surface, but had fled unseen. She cried out, “It is true, then, ninja have no honor! You owe me your life and thereby fealty! Come out, shadowman! Debase yourself before your new master!”

But there was no answer, and mocking all stupid samurai, Tomoe waded to the dry strip of land to make her way toward the road and better light. On the other side of a ginkgo tree, however, she was halted. The ninja was there, upon his knees, and he said, “In our way, we are an honorable caste. I owe fealty to another, but you may ask me one boon, and if it is in my power to give, I will repay my debt to you.”

“Go and slay your master,” she said.

“I would kill myself first,” he answered, which she knew before she asked.

“Then, say who sends you.”

“Another boon,” he said. “Not that.”

“You deny me twice? It must be this; I ask nothing else. It is no joy to be tracked by persistent ninja, who wait only to slay me in my sleep without ever telling me why they were sent. It is only proper that I know who despises me so greatly that they would wish me a dog's unhonored dying. So tell me who it is, then I shall let you go, or you shall cleverly evade me anyway, and I will wait for you to come again, knowing my true enemy by name.”

“It dishonors me to tell you,” he said. “But it dishonors me not to grant your boon. So you will know the Shogun and no other sends ninja to kill you, and you must know why, for I …”

Suddenly he lurched, and fell forward. As he was falling from knees to stomach, his hands went to his face. His hands bore knives strapped to his fingernails. He tore off his mask, the flesh of his whole face as well, his identity thereby and forever sealed. He lay dead, with a dart in the small of his neck.

Tomoe had leapt to one side the moment she heard the dart in the air, thinking it an arrow or shuriken intended for her. She crouched, and looked into the trees all around. Leaves waved through narrow shafts of sunlight. Many shadows moved. She saw nothing, no one, no other ninja.

Which was more disconcerting, she did not know: that ninja killed each other for the smallest treason, or that the Shogun thought Tomoe Gozen merited the unheralded death of a dog.

Later, on the road, she sensed no presence behind her. Perhaps her destination was so obvious, there being so few towns along this road, that the ninja who had killed his partner thought it a more clever ruse to wait for her ahead rather than follow behind. In any event, even if she saw to the death of one of them, or a great many, there would be no stopping them, and eventually she would not be quick enough, or alert enough, and the ninja would have succeeded in their chore—to the regret of Tomoe Gozen.

In time, Tomoe forgot the curse of the bakemono. How so is hard to say; curses, being the dreadful things they are, are not to be dismissed. But after trampling up from hell, surviving the lick of lightning, fighting amongst demons from the under earth—one bakemono more or less could provide, by contrast, only the most piddling of adventure, hardly worth recall.

It might also be that some vanity, some egocentricity, led Tomoe Gozen to reason how the deities of the upper, middle and lower earth gave less heed to the maledictions of ogres than of human kind. And too, through the many months of travel, Tomoe had beheld many wonders in rapid succession—a merchant's mountainous dromedary which spat acid at highway robbers; a strange, loathsome fish which crawled out of a lake at night and gobbled up the embers of a campfire; a fox which, startled, turned into a red thrush and flew into the sun; a rattling set of bones, anciently enclosed in an amber, translucent tomb; a dragon's scale cast by a magician into a bowl of water, turned into a goldfish for his little girl; and other such—so that she was jaded to the sights and experiences which blended one into the next, none recalled daily, some never jarred to memory at all. With all this, a feeble ogre's swearing was indeed very little.

Then again, throughout the many months, it must be noted that Tomoe—perhaps by coincidence, perhaps by subconscious design—never chanced to tread within a swamp, and made no friend but wandered all alone. It may be, therefore, that some erstwhile corner of her brain pondered and deemed credible the swamp-fiend's epithets. Too, her dreams might have been troubled by things her waking mind forbade to thought; but if so, even those dreadful dreams, themselves unremembered, became fewer and fewer until they bothered her no more.

Finally there was nothing in front or in back of her mind which attributed vitality to the promise of a friend's death or that her face would bear a scar.

Eventually it came to be that Tomoe was untroubled throughout, except by the loneliness of the road, and certain things of government she had learned in passing. And who remains to say, after everything is done, that Tomoe misplaced this memory because some meddling deity was seeing to the curse and wished to make Tomoe unawares.

The ninja, on the other hand, could not be forgotten, for they turned up in least expected moments, which paradoxically made them predictable. She had slain four of them in as many months, and had not been followed for a while, though she knew one of them would pick up her trail eventually. But she had grown blasé even about this, a game to her at last, and one she thought to win.

Deathly winter and bone-dry summer were parted, incongruously as always, by green, erotic spring. Spring gone, Tomoe walked along another dusty road, new and yet familiar; there were many like it. Her straw hat hung to her back, and the sun heated the back of her long, black hair, gathered in a low-fashioned ponytail. She could see a good way down the road, upon which walked but one besides herself.

At first she thought the other samurai was far away. There were only rice paddies, the farmhouses were set far off the road, and there were no trees—so she could not judge distance by perspective. It took a while to realize the individual she walked behind was not off in the distance; rather, he was close but very small.

It was a child so young he could not have been more than two years in military school. The likelihood that he was a runaway seemed, at the moment, remote, for the youngster walked with pride and dignity, as any samurai fully possessed of honor. Had he run off from a dojo, he should skulk in shame. His singular presence on the road, therefore, was a mystery.

As Tomoe closed upon him, by right of her longer stride, she noted that the boy's dress was very similar to her own, though more brightly colored. His hat was thrown back like hers. His hair was done up in a ponytail, sticking up in the manly fashion, and he carried a shortsword or long knife which, contrasted to his size, was not unlike the long daito worn by Tomoe. He was a samurai in every detail of appearance. Indeed, the differences between him and Tomoe were largely of size, at least to a casual observer.

He walked with one fist on his hip, and one arm swinging free, and there was purpose and direction to his gait.

When he placed his hat upon his head, Tomoe was reminded to do the same, lest her brain be cooked by the hot day. Revealed upon Tomoe's back was her family seal, embroidered as the only payment for a recent, brief employment. The round seal consisted of two violent, cresting waves facing each other, a hollow between. It was femininely phallic, as were many family seals.

On the back of the boychild's long shirt was a rooster, wings spread, its feet thrust to each side with claws, its tongue a lick of fire.

As she strode up from behind, she said, “Good day, samurai. My name is Tomoe Gozen of Heida.”

He nodded curtly, hand to shortsword, and kept walking. He picked up his pace a bit so that the bigger samurai would not have to lessen hers so much. He introduced himself. “I am Yabushi'take Issun'-kamatoka of Ogmya village.”

Tomoe was impressed, though she had not heard of the village. “That is a very large name for a very little samurai.”

Yabushi'take Issun'kamatoka turned red with embarrassment, and reluctantly admitted, “Sometimes … I am called Little Bushi.”

“Ah, good.” Tomoe clapped her hands once, showing relief. “Well, Little Bushi, how have you come to this road?”

“I am ‘soldier on the wave',” he said. “I am ronin.”

Tomoe showed appropriate sadness. “Alas, I too am a masterless samurai, although I have found minor employment here and there in the past year. I see by our clothing that we have neither of us fared too badly, or perhaps we have not been masterless so long. I would be pleased to tell you my story.”

Yabushi could not in politeness or in truth claim he did not wish to hear a story. Yet if he listened, it meant he would be bound to telling his own. After brief consideration, he said, “I would be pleased if you would share your tale.”

Tomoe looked woebegone, and confessed, “It has not always been thus with me. Once I served a good master, and then I served one evil, and since them I have served only poor lords for short times and been more often than not upon the road. An important man told me I was the Mikado's own samurai, but I have heard nothing of it since, so I have not gained by the arrangement. Even a great lord could not walk into the Mikado's imperial temple and say, please, I beg instruction. Thus I have come upon hard times.

“Lately I hear rumors that the Shogun sends the most esteemed child of Amaterasu into exile, to an island in the Sea of Naipon, far from his supporters in Kyoto. This has boded ill for me, presumed retainer to the Mikado. I am, alas, hunted like a criminal by the Shogun's ninja agents, though he dares not have me challenged openly for I have not swerved from the Way.”

The small samurai was both aghast and impressed by the story.

“The Shogun is an honorable man!” he half protested.

“We ronin learn all too soon,” said Tomoe, as if they shared a dreadful secret, “that honor, like power, can be bought for gold, and held by intrigue. As ronin, we are lost of many samurai privileges; we are told we have less honor. But are we less proud than before, Little Bushi? Does Amaterasu shine less favorably upon our faces?” She closed her eyes and turned her face to the warmth of the sun.