The Disfavored Hero (22 page)

Buddhism provided the sects for richer Naiponese, but the sailors were poor, therefore as disturbed by their cargo as was Tomoe. They paid homage and apology to the Shinto gods of the sea and wind several times a day, and gazed never on the bronze visage of the Buddha. The prayers may have held sway for these three days, but toward evening of the third, billows of angry clouds erased the sunset, waiting ominously in the distance. The sailors began to batten down their supplies, in preparation for ill weather.

That night, there were no stars, for clouds engulfed the sky. The junk's sails were folded tight, making of the craft a sleeping beast. Firebrands burned fore and aft, reflecting orange trails out into the sea. There was no other light. The voyagers watched the sky with terrified anticipation, but there was no wind, no wave, no obvious cause of alarm. Only the atmosphere was noticeably changed, seeming stifling and thick; and the sailors wrought their own atmosphere of dread.

The Buddha's bronze visage was black upon the night. A fire brand reflected in its eyes, nowhere else.

Then, way off over sea, a sound arose, the sound of all voyagers ever taken by the sea, their souls bound to the underwater land of the Dragon Queen and the mythic city of sea-dead, sea-folk, and horrifying gods. The sea-dead rose from slavery on rare occasion, to become the bitter, hateful Divine Wind.

Rain refused to fall. No wind touched the ship. But they heard that terrifying wind growing louder, and the sailors fell in anxious prayer, clapping their hands and chanting: “Protect us! Protect us! Oh Heaven do Protect us!”

Toshima's mother came up from the junk's bowels, lit joss sticks from a firebrand, placed these lengths of incense in the lap of the Buddha. The pungence wafted along the deck, and out upon the sea.

White fire blazed momentarily in the distance, briefly lighting the roof of roiling, tortured clouds. Moments later, there was a deep, throaty growl—as though the Dragon Queen had waked, had breathed the fire.

Still, the rain would not fall. But the wind rose fast and screaming, and sailors screamed back in fear. The calm sea became a hell of angry fists, reaching up higher and higher with each blow upon the complaining hull. One fist reached up in fore, another aft, and doused the brands. The Buddha's eyes continued to glow, not with fire, but with icy blackness darker than the dark. Tomoe wondered if the seated figure would suddenly stand, but it did not, for no Buddha could ever rule the sea. Buddhas captured naught but human minds.

Tomoe held Toshima onto the deck as the junk rocked and twisted about. An invisible sword—the wind—slashed the folded sails, tore the mast from the junk and flung it into the sea. Sailors screamed louder, mourning for themselves.

Toshima's mother stood before the Buddha with her hands held high, shouting a charm or prayer of entreaty at the huge bronze figure who watched her dispassionately. Woe be to the world if the gods should ever war on each other, so the Buddha remained passive. A wave swept over the deck, soaking all in spite of the lack of rain. Madame Shigeno alone had dared to be standing, and only the prematurely old woman was washed away. Toshima struggled to escape Tomoe, to crawl to the edge of the deck where she would have cried out uselessly for her mother. But Tomoe held fast, lest her mistress go over the rail. The Lady kicked in tantrum.

The deck of the junk began to crack, the pressures of the stirring sea pulling the wooden hull in various directions. The wood cried like a man. The Buddha, sitting on its heavy pallet, added to the tensions. It fell through the deck and punctured the bottom of the hold.

Sailors were already trying to launch fishing boats over the side, but the living sea reached out with cruel fingers, snatched the boats, pulled them away and down. Braver sailors flung themselves to their doom. Others clung to the rails and to life and begged the sea to spare them.

The junk was sinking fast, drawn down by the giant Buddha and the sea's grisly insistence. Only the head of the Buddha protruded from the junk's bowels, its shoulders below the broken deck. Something must have pushed at it from below, for the statue began to rise … then fell once more so the junk split near in two. Then the sea enveloped the whole of the junk. The Buddha's head was last to sink from view, gone perhaps to decorate some hall of the Dragon Queen's country, for the folk below could not make their own ornaments and stole even their cities by sinking lived-on islands.

In the raging waters, Tomoe clung to Toshima. The Lady used her fan like a fish's fin, and it was difficult to say who was keeping who afloat. They saved each other, or at least held one another back from swifter death. They gasped each time a wave passed out from under them, filled their lungs with air, then held their breaths until the clinging sea let them up once more.

All was darkness, or nearly. Tomoe's eyes strained to see through salty sea, black as squid's ink. She could not tell up from down when submerged with Toshima, and was not certain if what she was seeing were vagrant stars above, or city lights below. The sky, she knew, was shrouded with clouds—but what fire could burn on the bottom of the sea? There was no logical answer, so Tomoe closed her eyes.

Again, the sea parted from them, and the women choked for air, clutching one another tightly. Tomoe could not see the Lady's face, for all was held in darkness, but she remembered with some irony that she had wished to see Toshima without cosmetics.

Almost as if some chiding deity were granting this request, lightning split the sky with a fiery gulf, and Tomoe saw Toshima's face twisted with fear and agony, frightful as a devil's mask, wet hair clinging like tendrils around a horrifying visage.

Then rain fell at last, so that sea and sky were one, and Tomoe knew they were lost, forever lost, and cursed the awful sea.

It may have been that the sea did not hear Tomoe Gozen's hateful charge, its own racket had been so miraculous. Or the sea may have heard perfectly well, and had set itself about the preparations for a more grueling death for a samurai and her mistress.

Vomiting seawater, Tomoe fought her way upward from a coma deep as the waters. She was entangled with Toshima in lengths of kelp and rope—rope from the winches which had been stored in the junk's belly. They were adrift upon the Buddha's pallet, with no other remnant of the lost voyage in sight.

Toshima lay akimbo amongst the rope, breathing easily and therefore commonly asleep. Tomoe fathomed how it had to have been: the Lady managed to drag both of them onto the pallet, in spite of the tangle of hemp and seaweed which had caught them. Certainly Tomoe had no recollection of herself achieving this temporary salvation or respite. She had been stricken alongside the head by a fragment of the splintered junk. That was her last memory.

The sky was startlingly clear and intensely blue, fading toward light green on the empty horizon, where sky blended with jade waters. The sea was calm. There was no breeze.

Inspecting Toshima, Tomoe saw that the Lady's neck was already blistered from sleeping face-down in the hot sun. Tomoe, hardened by her career, suffered less from the exposure. Carefully, she untangled herself from the ropes, and gently unwrapped Toshima as well, turning her carefully. The Lady stirred, groaned, woke in Tomoe's arms and nearly smiled, but cried out in agony instead.

Her arm was swollen. It was not broken, but badly wrenched. It hurt to move it even a little, but with Tomoe's aid, the injured limb was soon bound between Toshima's breasts, immobilized by the Lady's obi sash which served as bandage and sling.

“Alive at least,” said Toshima, her voice husky from so much saltwater swallowed and coughed up. They were grateful for their lives, but shared doubts about their fortune when looking in all directions to see nothing but blue and green horizon.

“We can fashion a sail,” said Tomoe. “My sword can serve as mast. My jacket can hold the wind.” But when the makeshift sail was fashioned, there was no wind to fill it. Neither did they have a paddle. There was no wrack from the lost junk, aside from their immediate selves, and therefore nothing they might adapt as oar. Eerily, there was not even a natural current to move them on. It was too quickly evident that they could not hope to use the pallet-cum-raft as more than an island of slow, suffering death.

For a long while they sat on the raft, looking at each other, then at their knees, but never at the surrounding sea. They did not speak. They listened to their own breaths, and the tiny waves lapping around the edges of their minimal habitation. In a while, Tomoe began to handle the rope in a diverting manner. Slowly, her eyes grew more and more intense with considerations. Finally, she said,

“We can make a harness of this rope! I will draw the raft with the power of my own limbs.”

It was true Naipon bred strong swimmers, being as it was a land of many rivers, lakes, wetlands, and surrounded by oceans and seas. Martial training had given Tomoe stronger arms and legs than most good swimmers could boast. Her will as much as her training rendered her adept at arduous tasks. All the same, it was a terrible thing to set herself to perform, a thing she would not have proposed were there other choices.

Toshima helped as best she could with but one good arm, and soon the two women had fashioned a harness which Tomoe fit over her head and around her shoulders. The further ends of the rope were attached to one edge of the square pallet, which perforce became the prow. The horror of the night before had left Tomoe less than trustful of the sea, but she entered it, and would long endure it. She swam to the rope's length, took the tension, and pulled. The raft moved slowly at first; but because the sea was calm, it did not battle her strokes. Soon, she was giving Toshima the swiftest ride possible by the power of a single swimmer.

The sun was their only marker. They made way toward the north, where Tomoe expected the greatest concentration of islands.

The first day in the water was tolerably unpleasant; the second educated her more fully in regard to the sea's willful cruelly; and on the third, Tomoe's body began to reveal the horrific effects of extreme fatigue and long-term exposure to the sea. Had Toshima not discovered, by accident, a source of nutrition and unsalted water, certainly the torture could not have gone on so long.

Toshima hung her arm off the back of the raft, inadvertently providing a rudder. She gasped, injured by ongoing exposure, hunger, dehydration. Fish swam slowly beneath the shelter of the raft, and one chanced to brush against Toshima's hand. Fitfully, she snatched at it, captured it, bit into it's living flesh, madly desirous of an end to her famished state. She was surprised to realize she had bitten into a bladder which was neither salt nor urine, but part of the specie's biological system of ballast.

For the second and third day of Tomoe's long swim, Toshima provided food and drink by the determined speed of her reaching arm. On the fourth day, constant exposure to the sea stole Tomoe's ability to swallow, and the fish vanished in any event, learning their danger in Toshima's proximity. Thereafter, both women were expiring with increased rapidity.

Though stronger, Tomoe suffered more. Every muscle shouted for release. Her very bones commanded rest. The sea sapped the warmth from her body despite the relative warmth of the surfacemost layer; her arms, hands, face and feet wrinkled until she looked like a hideously diseased crone. Eventually the cramps were too awful to endure, and she was repeatedly forced to climb onto the raft and lie in exhaustion. Toshima was helpful during these periods. Tomoe would lay belly down while the Lady walked up and down upon the samurai's back, bare feet massaging warmth in, pain out. Tomoe groaned with near-ecstasy, emptied her mind, succumbed to total relaxation and illusion of renewal. But she would not allow these moments to persist. Soon, she slunk over the edge of the raft, returning to her dreadful mission.

The harness abraded her shoulders until they were red and raw. She tried to swim with enough clothing to protect her torso, but wet cloth hampered her, and she was forced to remain naked while in the water, which at least meant dry clothing waited each time she climbed on board.

Once, a strange fish swam beneath the shade of Tomoe, attached itself to her by means of a sucker disc. She was so numb that she did not notice it until, climbing onto the raft for another brief period of rest, the suckerfish let loose and stayed in the water. It had bitten her, and sucked her blood, but the wound was superficial. She watched out for such fish thereafter.

A wind began to rise, and Tomoe's jacket billowed forth—but the gods only teased and toyed. The wind grew still once more. Tomoe slid yet again into the evermore horrendous waters.

She could no longer speak. Her tongue had swollen. Sometimes, she could barely breathe. Although Toshima's sharp eyes kept vigilant watch, as night drew across the fifth day, no isle had betrayed itself in any direction. There seemed no end for Tomoe's labor.

The Lady had been burnt by the sun until every exposed portion of her body was bright red and peeling. Her arm had swelled and darkened. But she did not complain, for looking on Tomoe's misery, she counted her own grief minor. Each time the samurai climbed onto the raft at dusk, she was completely drained, looked to be death's sister.