The Golden Naginata (25 page)

They were proud of their work, too, for the rock-pile pagodas were precious to see. It was difficult to make the pagodas stand, because the rocks were round and would not stack easily. So the children struggled for success. Tomoe shook her head, unable to accept the Buddhist way of life and death, unable to understand why, if Buddhas were so merciful, children had to come to Hell, even when their lives in Naipon were too brief for them to have sinned.

Tomoe had yet to see the worst of these poor spirits' torment. Far down the dry river there was a commotion and what looked to be a smoky cloud. In that direction, children were crying and screaming. Tomoe watched in horror as the cloud came up the river. Soon she could see that it was a dusty storm of three-eyed devils not much larger than the children, but much stronger. They beat the children with whips and flails, knocking over the pagodas they strove so hard to build. “This is too much!” said Tomoe. The small bit of usefulness and pride the children were able to create among themselves in this bleak place were scattered and spoiled by the laughing, hideous devils. The innocent were smitten. Those who could run went in every direction to no avail, sometimes trying to carry the infants who could not walk. Those infants left behind in stone-built cradles had their beds kicked apart, and their tiny bodies rolled and dashed upon the rocky ground.

Tomoe Gozen could not hold back. She leapt into the riverbed with her Golden Naginata twirling. The smoky devils could not be cut into pieces, for they were intangible beings; yet the shining metal of Tomoe's supernatural weapon sent them squealing out of the riverbed to hide among the roots. Taro tore among the devils, too, and while his long white teeth could not hold them, they feared his jaws just the same, for he was a Shinto dog and they were Buddhist monsters. They could feel the pain of the dog's dislike.

When the devils were gone, Tomoe shouted, “Do not torment these children for a long time! Or I will come back and fight you!” The children began to dust themselves off, collect their friends, and take their places in order to rebuild their ruined pagodas, as they had done a thousand times before. They began to sing for the safety of their families, and things returned to their previous order. A child's translucent hand passed over Taro's fur, but not a hair was moved by that ghostly stroke, and the child, feeling nothing on his hand, went away looking sober.

There was only one child who had seemed unaffected by the horror, who neither took part in the building of pagodas, nor was sent fleeing by the smoky three-eyed devils. This child was particularly beautiful and richly clad. He sat on a high, smooth boulder near the further bank of the waterless river. In the beautiful boy's hand was a paper ball on which a crane-design was printed, so Tomoe recognized him as Koshi, although his spirit was so unlike his mortal flesh.

Koshi raised his child-perfect face to Tomoe, his round face with dark, slanting eyes, and smiled at her so charmingly that her heart was won. He said, “Mother sent this ball to me, saying it was from a strong samurai. Is that you? I have waited here to guide you, because you do not know your way around the Hollow Land and will get lost many times and have many problems without some help.”

Saying this, Koshi leapt into the air and floated gently to Taro's back. Taro did not mind, for the transparent child was weightless.

“There's a trail beside the riverbed,” said Koshi, pointing to a stack of rocks which made a stair. “We will go that route, in search of Okio's gaki spirit.”

Taro went up the steps first, Koshi riding on his back. As Tomoe followed, she asked, “How do you know about Okio?”

“It's a famous tale in Hell!” said Koshi, sounding impressed with it himself. “His family used to live nearby, in a hut hidden among the roots. But Okio heard you were coming, and so took his family to the lowest part of the Hollow Land, to make it hard for you to reach him. The devil Naruka is down there, and has promised Okio not to let you get near enough to see him.”

“Do you know of Ushii Yakushiji, too?”

“The flesh of him travels all around in Hell!” exclaimed Koshi. “But I am not sure he has a spirit. I haven't seen him in a while, so you don't have to worry.” But Tomoe worried anyway. She had felt a stealthy follower from the first, and sensed who it might be.

Koshi, Taro, and Tomoe went down and down the path. Koshi indicated certain tricky bends, keeping Tomoe from being led a wrong direction. After a long time, there were no more children in the riverbed, and in fact the bed had become swampy and overgrown with pale ginkgo trees. The fan-shaped leaves of the trees swayed and made a wind, but it was not the wind which caused the leaves to sway. “We won't go in there,” said Koshi. “There are too many snakes, bigger than you have probably seen.”

Tomoe thought over this advice and replied, “I would like not to see them now.” She followed Taro and his rider. The swamp gave out after another stretch of time, becoming a creek of crystal water. The creek became wider as they progressed, until it was a genuine river running down from the Land of Roots toward the Land of Gloom. The river bottom was pink and smooth, which made Tomoe wonder, but she said nothing, and only followed.

“The path ends soon,” said Koshi, “and the river runs between two high cliffs. You must not look up the cliffs, or tiny devils will leap through the pupils of your eyes and eat your brains. You may not think it very likely, but please consider my advice useful.”

“I will believe you,” said Tomoe.

“We must walk along the shallows of the river. If you do not slip into the middle, you needn't worry about drowning or being poisoned.”

Where the path ended, they climbed into the shallows and began the long trek between faces of two cliffs. The cliffs may have risen into eternity; Tomoe never looked up to find out. “Step most carefully,” warned Koshi, who still rode on Taro's back as Taro swam alongside Tomoe. “We are walking on
Jishin-uwo
the Earthquake Fish, and if we wake him up, he will thrash around and cause catastrophe on Naipon above.”

Tomoe knew about Jishin-uwo, the unbelievably huge catfish who slept beneath the islands of Naipon. It was worrisome to walk upon him, knowing that one misstep would not merely cause Tomoe to slip into the water to drown or be poisoned, but also annoy Jishin-uwo in such a way that thousands of lives might be lost in the living world when the Earthquake Fish thrashed and the ground above the Hollow Lands cracked and heaved. It was a nervous trip indeed, and all the same, Tomoe began to think it would not be as hard as she had imagined, since she had Koshi as her guide and had so far met no untoward resistance.

As they came to the place where the cliffs ended, Koshi said, “There is only one major obstacle between the Land of Roots and the Land of Gloom, and we must pass it carefully.” The water became too turbulent to walk through, so Koshi led them out of the river and along a new path above the banks. The river broke into a fork, the further fork a raging rapids, the nearer one very still. They followed the quiet one until the sound of the other was left behind. Tomoe was surprised to see the water was tinted red. It was a specific shade which any woman of a given age, let alone a woman of war, could recognize at once.

The tinge became darker and darker until the river spilled into a big lake which was the deepest crimson.

“A lake of blood!” exclaimed Tomoe.

“It is the blood of warriors,” said Koshi, “seeped down from the places where they died. I should have warned you not to make a loud exclamation like that, for now we have to worry.”

The smooth surface of the blood-lake began to bubble near the middle. The bubbles began to move toward the shore. As they came nearer, Tomoe realized they were not bubbles at all, but
kabuto,
or metal war-hats, covered with the lake's thick fluid. The lake became more shallow nearer the shores, so that now she could see the heads of a dozen warriors coming out. Their faces were hidden behind monstrous metal masks, which like the helmets were stained with blood. Then she saw their bloody shoulders and arms, and their stained chests, and their legs. They were knee-deep in the lake of blood, slogging nearer, armed with swords and spears and bows and arrows—and everything about them was bright red.

Tomoe held Inazuma-hime ready, and tried to put herself in front of Taro and Koshi to protect them. But Koshi urged his mount forward as he said, “I can handle them!” When the blood-warriors came out onto the dry ground, leaving red tracks where they trod, Koshi rode Taro straight toward the fierce and frightful monsters. For a weapon, he had only his paper ball, which he held above his head. When he was near enough, he threw the ball amidst those who had risen from the lake.

In their horrific lives beneath the bloody waves, these unnatural warriors never saw anything as pretty as a ball, and so they fell upon one another fighting for possession of the rare thing. Koshi rode Taro back to where Tomoe stood, and Tomoe said, “You have given up your favorite thing.”

“It was necessary,” said Koshi, revealing no sadness. “You will have to save your strength for later.”

They skirted the whole of the bloody lake and went along the red-tinged river on its other side, coming back to the fork once more, and following the clear-though-poisonous rapids to a place where the river became a waterfall larger than Tomoe had ever seen. She looked down into the Land of Gloom, which was a grey featureless plain mottled with moving shadows. It was so far down, and the wall so steep, Tomoe almost despaired of finding a path into that deeper country.

“Look!” said Koshi. “The Vault of Paradise!”

She looked skyward to where the beautiful, transparent child pointed, to the crust of the living world, the ceiling of the Land of Gloom which those of Hell called, incongruously, the Vault of Heaven. Across it in rainbow streaks were many precious metals, and like the Celestial River in Naipon's sky, there sparkled a stream of rare gems. It was as gorgeous a sky as Tomoe could ever have imagined! That all the gold and jade of humankind's desire was found beneath the ground should have been evidence enough that such things originated in Hell, yet Tomoe was startled to realize this, and to understand why these precious stones and metals corrupted the minds of men and women.

“And there!” cried Koshi, swinging his hand elsewhere. There was a cloud beneath the sky-roof and in that cloud were the ever-changing shapes of warriors battling eternally. Koshi named them: “Asuro! They fight for the spoils encrusted above their heads, never understanding that their highest goal is still too low to free them from the Hollow Land. I am told they are mindless killers up there! They are the souls of samurai too greedy and cruel ever to be born again! We are lucky they can never come down from their lofty position.”

A path which Tomoe might never have found on her own was indicated by Koshi, who urged Taro off the cliff and onto the narrow route which zigzagged downward, alongside the magnificent waterfall. Once they had climbed over the rim, sound was suddenly muffled, and even the crashing falls made little noise. Tomoe had to speak, to be sure she had a voice! “The Land of Gloom looks less interesting than the Land of Roots,” she said, relieved to hear herself. “I see nothing but flat ground and moving shades of grey. But there are no trees or objects to cast those shadows, so it is a curious if ordinary sort of land I see.”

“I rarely go into the Land of Gloom myself,” said Koshi, “but not because it is so dull. There is more to it than sanity can bear to notice; you should be grateful that the shadows are the only part you see.”

A few bits of gravel fell from above, rolling past Tomoe's feet and on down toward Taro and Koshi. She looked back up the path to see what creature might have loosened those few rocks, but saw nothing.

As the bold trio went down the long, steep grade, Tomoe was visited by a sense of
déjà vu.
Suddenly certain she had walked this path before, she exclaimed in a loud voice, “I know this road!”

Koshi did not seem surprised that she would say this. He explained, “It is common for human souls to visit here, when the bodies are tired or sleeping, or when one is near to death, or in some kind of trance. You may have come here in your worst nightmares. Generally, if a spirit comes from a body which sleeps and is not dead, then when the spirit stumbles and falls from the heights, it returns quickly to its flesh, and the living body awakens in terror, never quite striking the ground below.”

“I have often awakened with that feeling,” Tomoe remembered.

“But you have come here in your body as well as your spirit on this occasion,” said Koshi. “If you fall, there is no saving you, no waking.”

They went carefully, Taro as sure-footed as Tomoe. Tomoe said, “But if
you
fell, Koshi, that would cause you to awaken at Lost Shrine, where your mother waits.”

“You would push me?” asked Koshi, looking back over his shoulder at Tomoe with his eyes big and worried.

“It is not for me to make that choice for you,” said Tomoe. “You are a beautiful child in this land your soul has found. If you go home to your flesh, you will be the half-monster once again, with only your mother and a few with gifted vision to know how beautiful you are inside. I can understand that the Hollow Land is no more hellish to you than life in Naipon. But you are the child of a samurai family, and no matter how a samurai may suffer, he must never cry out in agony, he must never give up. Think of your mother who loves you! Think of your lives to come, which may be better for you if only you can live this one through with strength and compassion, and with no thought for yourself.”

They continued down the cliffside, Tomoe grasping the wall with one hand to keep her balance. Koshi admitted, “I am guilty of many things, not the least of which is a weakness of filial piety. I sometimes sit on a high rock in the Dry River and listen to the songs the other children sing, and those songs are for their families, not for the salvation of the suffering children themselves. When I see how brave they are, I know that I am the most terrible child of all, that it is true I am half a monster.”