The Heike Story (13 page)

"I know you are all tired after your seven days' watch. By rights you should be drinking wine at the Palace tonight, but my failure prevents me from setting foot inside its gates. I have resigned my post. Let me try to make amends to you in this way. A day will surely come when, your loyalty will be rewarded. This wine —the best I can offer you—is in token of my gratitude to you, my men. Come, drink all you can. Let us drink all night, and sing to fortify our warrior hearts!"

The candles flickered in the night wind as the retainers sat with bowed heads, silent. They knew that wine flowed copiously to the accompaniment of music at the nightly banquets of the nobles, but occasions when a retainer could taste wine were rare. Tonight their very vitals groaned at the aroma, and their hearts grew full at the thought of Tadamori's regard for them.

And Tadamori said: "How this garden suits our poverty—the wild luxuriance of its autumn flowers! Come, drink, all! Fill up your cups, fill up your cups!"

The men held up their wine-cups. At the Palace, Tadamori had the reputation of being a lusty drinker, and Kiyomori, lifting his vessel, began:

"Father, tonight I shall drink at least half as much as you!"

"Well and good—only keep away from the houses on Sixth Avenue!"

Tadamori's reply drew a loud burst of laughter, in which he joined with unusual heartiness. Kiyomori colored with chagrin. How had such tales reached his father's ear? Who of these men had been making the rounds of the bawdyhouses on Sixth Avenue? It was useless to protest, and to draw attention from himself he called to one of the men:

"Heiroku, Heiroku, give us a song—one of the ballads popular in the capital now!"

"You sing, young master, one of those tunes picked up in the neighborhood of Sixth Avenue!"

"Enough of such jokes!"

A voice from the other end of the room launched into a popular ballad; one by one the men joined in; hands clapped in time; someone beat out the rhythm on a wine-jar. Some rose to dance, others broke into new songs. Wildly they sang as they drank, and as they grew more boisterous, a few began to rail:

"Time and again those courtiers have plotted against our master, and now they try to break the bond between him and his majesty by saying he failed to capture Morito!"

"What? Fool! Haven't they succeeded? Hasn't our master resigned from his post?"

"Why should he be blamed? Why did our master resign so meekly? … This is too much! Those aristocrats—my blood boils when I think of them! What does his majesty think of all this?"

"If he trusts and loves our master, why doesn't he put down the plots and intrigues against him? Can't he see that the jealousy of the courtiers is bringing slow death to our master?"

"Yes, though his majesty rules, he has no power over those courtiers who surround him, and our master refuses to let his majesty be distressed because of him."

"They know that too well, those aristocrats!"

"Doesn't the master himself admit that though he ranks with the courtiers, he is despised for being a warrior?"

"Then why does his majesty allow it? Let me ask the Emperor himself! I will bawl this question until it reaches his ears in the Palace!"

"Madmen! Fools!"

The retainers fell silent, but continued to shake their heads angrily. Pretending not to hear them, Kiyomori watched them, and finally rose to join a group. Throwing out his arms, he embraced the heads on either side of him.

"Here—you warriors—why this moaning and complaining? Have you no more sense than toads or vipers? Our time hasn't come. Have you no patience? Are we not the 'trodden weed' still? The time is not yet here for us to raise our heads. Must you still complain?"

The strong odor of heated bodies and the fumes of the wine filled his nostrils as he held the men close. He felt tears of bitterness fall hot on his knees. As a mother bird draws its young close under her wing, so did Kiyomori, exulting, draw his men to him and, calling for more wine, drained his cup in one draught.

The stalled beast turned loose in the fields to fend for itself reverts in time to its wild state. Man's barbarous nature asserts itself even more swiftly, and this was true of Morito, whose transformation back to savagery seemed to come overnight.

"Should I go on living? Am I better off dead? What am I to do with this self? They still pursue me—give me no time to think. ... I must rest, and yet they keep following. I stop to take breath, and they still—" "I—I—I," he repeated to himself, not realizing that that self with which he identified himself no longer existed.

On that night when he escaped from the house in Iris Lane and mysteriously eluded his pursuers, Morito could not remember which way his feet took him. He slept in the open, hid himself in hollow trees, and ate whatever he could find in his wild flight. His clothes were now in tatters, his bare feet caked with blood and mud, and his eyes gleamed like those of some wild beast.

This was the man of letters, the gifted Morito, for whom there had been such high hopes. Who could find in this shape the scholar, the proud Morito? Who could believe that this was he who looked down on his fellow men with scorn? Yet the shape still breathed, walked, and moved. That which lived merely existed.

His ears were now sharpened to every bird cry, and the sight of rabbits and deer no longer startled him. He felt himself one with the birds and beasts of this wild solitude. But the slightest sound of men approaching made his hair bristle. There they were—coming! Taking a fresh hold on the round object that he carried, Morito would stand frozen for an instant, his bloodshot eyes wild, searching this way and that.

A sleeve of his outer robe was torn off to make a wrapping for the thing he held tight to him. It was the head of Kesa-Gozen. He had not laid it down for even a moment since that night. The blood had seeped through and dried hard until, drenched with dew and stained with earth, it looked like lacquer. More than a fortnight had passed since Morito had fled, and the head now gave out the odor of putrefaction. But he clung to it day and night, and when he drowsed, he seemed to see Kesa-Gozen once more in the flesh.

Nothing about her had changed. He heard the silken rustle of her garments as she drew near and whispered to him. He breathed her fragrance, felt the warmth of her body as she leaned toward him. Though spiders spun webs around his pillow of dead leaves, and pale sunless fungi grew about his head, they seemed less real than the fantasies that visited him in his delirium.

Once more they were boy and girl, hovering like butterflies over the flowerbeds of the Palace gardens. Then he saw himself as the pitiful youth, lovelorn to madness—to death. And in his dreams he moaned: "O Kesa-Gozen, why will you not look on me? There is no one to deliver me from this torment but you, O heartless one! Why did you marry Wataru? Pity me! Give me but one night by your side. Let me once steal this forbidden blossom, then let this offense, more grievous than all the Ten Sins, cast me down to the bottomless, fiery pits of hell, for what agony can exceed this which I now endure?"

And in his fevered dreams he saw her closed eyes and sought her lips with his own. Between the folds of her tumbled robes he glimpsed her pale limbs, the curve of her naked breasts; reaching out for her, he would find her no longer there, and the dream would dissolve, leaving him tortured with thirst for her. Awake once more he would break into an agony of weeping, until all nature at midnight seemed to lament with him.

It was still dark when Morito, worn by tears and a night of haunted dreams, awoke. Rising, he staggered and stumbled on blindly, not knowing where he was, when all his nerves tingled suddenly in response to curious new sensations. An icy current seemed to thunder through his brain and a wild roaring filled his ears, echoing and re-echoing in his head.

The Narutaki Rapids—on the road to Takao with its maples!

Dawn had come, and a pale moon hung in the sky. Morito looked about him, filling his eyes with the crimson of maples all over the hillside. Never had the morning light seemed so crystal clear. He was sane once more. Then the events of that night—the 14th of September—came back to him vividly as though he once more stood at the scene. The thundering of the Narutaki Rapids and the baying of waters suddenly sounded like the terrible lamentations of a despairing mother—Wataru's hoarse cries of hate, the mocking laughter of his fellow Guards, and the angry cries of people.

Facing the rapids, Morito cried out as though in reply: "Let me die! ... I cannot face the world alive!"

Swaying, he clung to a boulder and looked down into the boiling current, and as he gazed he spied a group of stonecutters making their way from the opposite shore, leaping from rock to rock as they approached in his direction. Like a flash Morito turned and took flight, swiftly clambering to the crest of a hill.

Arrived at the top, he placed the bundle he carried on the ground, then fell heavily to his knees, struggling for breath. Sweat poured down his body, and he rubbed his hairy chest, panting.

Die he must, now that he had regained his senses, he thought.

"Forgive me, my beloved," he then cried, lifting his hands in prayer. One by one he whispered the names of those he knew, entreating their pardon, then took the wrapping from the head.

"Now look at Morito, who will atone with his own life," he whispered. "Look once more at the world, for I, too, will soon be dust."

Numbly he stared at what he saw. The hair, matted with blood into lacquerlike strands, clung stiffly to the cheeks and forehead.

"Ah, my beloved, can this be you?"

The head resembled nothing more than a large clump of clay. As the sky filled with light, he saw how the flesh had shrunk under the tangled lattice of hair; the bones jutted out, and the skin was mottled. The ears had shriveled and looked like dried mussels; the eyes seemed carved from blue wax stained white. Nowhere could he discover the features he had once adored.

And he prayed: "Dai-nichi Nyorai, Dai-nichi Nyorai!" ("Great Illuminator!")

From the death mask before him his eyes traveled heavenward. In front of him rose the sun like a ball of fire. The roofs of the capital, the Eastern Hills, and the spired pagodas lay shrouded in mist, and all he could see was the immense, flaming wheel of light. Then he suddenly remembered. . . .

The hermitage—more exactly speaking, a modest villa, where the Abbot Kakuyu frequently stayed—stood in a pocket of the Togano-o Hills, on the road to Takao, just where the Narutaki Rapids flow to join the Kiyotaki Rapids. Although he was Abbot of the Togano-o Temple, he spent much of his time at Toba, and people of the region were accustomed to call him the Abbot of Toba—Toba Sojo. He had once been the Abbot of Enryakuji Temple on Mount Hiei, but in these times when monks carried arms and went about firing and plundering, Toba Sojo was often heard to say that he made a poor figure of a monk, since he had no stomach for fighting.

The Abbot's life, too, was unusual. Instead of having lay monks live with him at the villa, he had a young soldier and three menservants to attend him, and to the curious who inquired with some surprise whether the occupant of the villa was a priest or a layman, the Abbot gravely explained that the servants were not his but those of a person of high rank from Kyoto, who was visiting him.

Now in his seventies, the Abbot was one of the many sons of a brilliant and wayward courtier, renowned in his day as the author of a chronicle. Kakuyu, though he inherited a considerable fortune, entered holy orders when quite young, but soon found the life little to his liking. In time—to the neglect of his ecclesiastical duties—he began indulging his taste for painting. Scroll after scroll appeared from his brush, pungent with wit and full of satirical fun. Never had their like yet been seen, for his eye, turned critically upon the troubled scene about him, saw men in the likeness of animals—apes and hares, racing; badgers in priests' vestments; frogs prancing about in coronets—and his brush pictured the evils of the clergy, the extravagant absurdities of the aristocrats, their fantastic superstitions, the struggle for power in officialdom, and all the follies and evils of humankind.

The Abbot was hard at his painting one day when his servant announced a guest. Putting aside his brush and inkstone, Toba Sojo turned to receive the caller, a youthful Guard from the Cloister Palace, Sato Yoshikiyo.

"I envy you your life, your reverence. Whenever I come to visit you, I am convinced that man's life was meant to be lived close to nature."

"Why envy me?" Toba Sojo replied. "I can't see why you don't choose the life that you most desire."

"More easily said than done, your reverence."

"Is that so? He who lives in the mountains yearns for the city, and the city-dweller would rather live in the mountains," the Abbot chuckled, "and nothing is ever to one's liking. . . ."