The Disfavored Hero (15 page)

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 were 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.”

“Be generous, my friend,” the kappa begged, and bowed very low. He was careful not to spill the water in his head's indentation.

“I have one dried peach,” said Yabushi, but the kappa immediately declined. “You are too greedy, my kappa friend. Who has ever given you more than seven cucumbers?”

The kappa clenched his hands together in the manner of woe, and spoke with immeasurable self-pity, “But I did not eat even one of them! Seven oni devils attacked me after you left, and took my cucumbers away! Oh, life has been miserable since they ventured into this swamp!”