The Disfavored Hero (16 page)

“Then the oni are your enemy, not I. I am not responsible that they take your wealth.”

“The oni are my enemy, it is true.” The kappa insinuated himself nearer. “But they are very big; I am small. They serve an even bigger bakemono, who I would not happily anger. He has become famous among ogres. He acts like a human lord, keeping samurai and a bride. There is no ogress who will look at him, without a tail, so he has taken a human wife.”

“Oni live in mountains,” said Yabushi. “What is the bakemono's hold on them in the wetlands?”

“I was about to tell you that! A year ago, or nearly, he found a magic sword, none knows where. He came to this swamp with the oni he had captured with the sword's magic. He made them his sworn samurai, for he says, without a tail, he is more human than bakemono and must live as men. He is not glad of it, be sure. Even for a bakemono, he is very much insane. Be that as it may, his oni-samurai brandish swords bigger than mine, which you can see is a very little sword like your own. How can I challenge them to regain my cucumbers? But you will notice that Yabushi is exactly my size, and in any case a worthier opponent.”

The vampire drew his sword, slender like himself, and Yabushi quickly drew his own.

Tomoe Gozen and Tsuki Izutsu started forward, meaning to slay the minuscule monster. But he pointed his sword at them and they froze to the spot, unable to approach. They could only watch.

“No tricks on me,” said Yabushi.

“No tricks,” agreed the kappa. “After all, we are friends.” Then he attacked the child samurai viciously. Yabushi beat him off.

The tussle went back and forth for a fair length of time, with neither gaining advantage. But a kappa is untiring, and Yabushi began to sweat. Luck alone helped him: the kappa slipped in his own slime, spilling a portion of the water in his head-hole. The kappa was weaker when this happened, but it merely evened them again, for Yabushi wearied more.

By skill, he almost poked the kappa, but failed because the kappa lurched aside, in the process spilling more of his water.

“I yield!” said the kappa. He gave in for fear that he would spill the rest of his water, and then might be slain by Yabushi or by his friends who would be able to move freely if the kappa lost his magic. “You have defeated me, Yabushi. I am your slave.”

Saying this, the kappa sniggered.

Yabushi pulled some extra strength together, never letting on that the kappa might have won had he held out a short while longer. The little samurai kept this shortsword pressed to the kappa's throat, and said, “The bakemono's wife is my sister, whom I have come to save. You will take me to her.”

“I will!” agreed the kappa, and he and Yabushi vanished utterly.

Tomoe and Tsuki were free of the spell and stumbled forward, since they had been frozen in mid-rush and retained their momentum. They hurried to the place where the boat was upturned, where the kappa and Yabushi had been fighting. “Where!” exclaimed Tsuki. The ground was soft and much-trampled by the swordfight, but no tracks led away.

“Gone,” replied Tomoe.

Tomoe stood at the prow of the boat, keeping it away from branches and snags, while Tsuki stood in the back using her staff as a pole to push through the shallows. It began to rain, at first lightly, and then quite hard; by the time it relented a little, the boatwomen's kimonos were soaked through and through, giving them each the aspect of miserable, half-drowned survivors of a shipwreck.

The sun was very low; her light hardly filtered into the marsh at all. Reeds hindered passage and ability to see far ahead. It was a hopeless quest, to find the bakemono's house in so vast a place, to find Little Bushi on the doorstep where the kappa must have dumped him far from friends and aid. Salty tears streamed down the faces of samurai and nun, but the cold rain hid the fact, except for eyes which were red from strain and sorrow.

“How can we see in here?” asked Tsuki, her happy nature completely doused.

“We will find him,” said Tomoe absolutely. She loosed the boat from an unexpected loop of root. Tsuki pressed the boat onward.

As spears of silver rain struck the murky waters, a mist was raised upon the surface. The women came out of the reeds, and could at last see a long way, by the dim light of day. The water looked like smoke. A little island rose out of the surface-mist, and on this stood a woman. She did not appear to be wet, despite the rain. She watched the women in the boat and did not move for a while.

“Yabushi's sister?” asked Tsuki, striving to sound hopeful.

Tomoe did not think so. The woman was very far off, but Tomoe could make out some elements of her face, which was more beautiful than any face Tomoe had seen in all her life, with one exception, and that the face of a jono priestess which few were blessed to see.

“Little Bushi never said she was so beautiful!” gasped Tsuki, seeing that visage for herself. “She is like a kami spirit, divine to my eyes.”

It was true there was something more than ordinary about her beauty, something suggestive of divinity. This was disturbing, for gods could be kind or cruel, or both at once; they were unpredictable. Oni, kappa and bakemono were better visions, even all combined, for at least these were earthly apparitions, and mortal, to be understood and battled.

The heavenly lady raised her arm slowly, motioned for the boatwomen to approach. They did this almost without choosing to.

The mist swirled up around the woman, hiding her. When Tomoe and Tsuki reached the island, there was no one on it. They discovered that the island was a floating accumulation of vegetation, not strong enough to hold human weight.

“There she is!” cried Tsuki, pointing in a new direction, then began pushing the boat harder. The elusive beauty had motioned them to follow once again; and once again the mist engulfed her before the boat had reached the rotted, crumbling remnant of a tree which rose up in her stead, shaped vaguely like a woman.

“Now there!” shouted Tsuki, and would make the chase again.

Tomoe grabbed the limb of the broken tree, the limb which was like a woman's arm with broken fingers. The samurai held tight, so that Tsuki could not push the boat toward the wraith-woman anymore. “We must not follow her,” said Tomoe. But the woman beckoned with her thin, pale hand, and Tomoe changed her mind, saying to Tsuki, “All right. We will.”

This time they found a bloated corpse floating in the water. It was a woman's corpse, the clothing rotted off, her anus distended in the manner that told how the kappa sucked blood. She was half decayed and horrible smelling, and in no way resembled the creature whose divine beauty allured.

Twice more they changed their route to follow her. Twice more she vanished, or turned into something else.

Darkness fell with suddenness. The woman, the mirage, made no further appearances. Either she was a diurnal wraith and could not come out at night, or she had intended only to cause the boatwomen to become lost. At this, she had succeeded admirably.

No longer confounded by the sorcery of the mysterious vision, Tsuki Izutsu and Tomoe Gozen regained their wits, realized they were lost, and complained to one another about the terrible assortment of trouble residing in the haunted wetlands.

“Next,” suggested Tsuki, trying to recapture her quelled gaiety, “a black whirlpool will be sucking us into the under earth!”

“Do not say so!” said Tomoe, who preferred the strolling nun to remain somber if this was her finest jest.

They pressed on through the dark. And as Tomoe had promised earlier in their venture, the night was worse than the day.

They searched on for Yabushi, guided by the vaguest vagrant starlight and a pale gibbous moon, which shone sometimes between rain clouds, grey upon black night.

The bedraggled voyagers on the mockery of a sea began to despair of ever finding Yabushi or his sister. They despaired of ever finding their way out of the marsh. Despaired of the noises and the half-formed shapes. Despaired of their very lives.

Patches of fog walked amidst the swamp's grim trees, ghosts for sure. The voices of frogs were more coarse and horrid than any they had ever heard, seeming one moment to croak the name: “Tsuki! Tsuki!” while in another moment others answered, “Tomoe! Tomoe!” Directly the hairs on the women's bodies prickled with dread of the supernatural.

Tsuki squeaked and held her breath when something started thrashing around in the bottom of their boat. She stabbed downward with her stick, poked a hole in the damp, poor vessel.

“Only a frog,” said Tomoe. It had escaped uninjured, while the boat began to fill with water. Directly, samurai and nun were wading waist-deep in foul water, rain falling all around. “Amaterasu's brother keep us!” said Tomoe, referring to the cloud-veiled moon.

“Buddha bless!” countered Tsuki, and drew a circle in the air before her.

The limbs and hanging mosses of swamp trees stretched down to stroke them as they passed. The rain and wind caused the leaves and water to sound like ominous laughter. The rain thickened, and there was no place left in the sky for star or moon to peek through and light their way. Awful things slithered between the women's thighs, obscene and thrilling, then slid away. But samurai and nun contained themselves through all. They did not cry out. They spat in the eye of panic and experienced only the dread of their own stubborn persistence. They dragged on through muck and mire, fear and misery.

Night shades toyed with their senses. Weariness heightened their susceptibility to suggestion. Everywhere in the wet wilderness, monsters were in abundance, but none came forth to fight. Tomoe had lost her clogs and tabi-socks in the clinging mire, so felt the cold silt squish between her toes, as did Tsuki who was ever barefoot anyway.

Ahead of them, a patch of fog luminesced. It began to take on a firmer outline, and Tomoe wondered idly if her sword could cut a wraith. But it was only a ghastly old woman next to a lantern hanging from a tree. She was wrapped in a shawl of misty grey, hunched in ragged clothing and leaning on a gnarly cane. She stood on a raised, dry knoll, watching the two women struggle through mud and water. She said nothing, made no call, beckoned in no way.

Soon Tomoe cried out, “Grandmother! Do you live in here?”

The crone cocked her head to one side and did not reply aloud, but the wind around her hissed like a serpent, “Yesss. Yesss.”

“Let us go away from her,” begged Tsuki, tugging at Tomoe from behind. But Tomoe thought the old woman could be trusted, although she might be ugly and eccentric. The kappa had been handsome in his peculiar way; the beautiful kami spirit had misled them entirely. Things were never as they seemed, not in the whole world, and especially not in these wetlands.

“An ugly crone might be a friend,” suggested samurai to nun. “I would guess she has dry lodging near.”

They waded up, out of the worst of the mud. The old woman looked Tomoe over, deemed her fit, and nodded. Then she looked at Tsuki and scowled. With speed remarkable for any age, she raised her gnarly cane to strike the strolling nun. Tsuki Izutsu's walking stick again became a bo, and she fought the old woman, blocking the blows of the gnarly cane, having her own blows deflected. Tomoe was awed by the old woman's fighting ability, though possibly she would not have fared so well against the nun were not Tsuki, like Tomoe, frazzled by the arduous day.

“Grandmother, please!” begged Tomoe. “Please stop!”

The old woman did so, letting Tsuki off, but said, “Beware, Buddhist! This country is a Shinto haunt!, more so than all of Naipon.” Then, turning to Tomoe, the old woman scolded, “You keep bad company, samurai!” But Tomoe defended her friend.

“The Buddhists mean well, for all the harm they cause, and this one means better than others.”

It was difficult for Tsuki to mind her tongue, but she did. The old woman took the lantern from the tree's twisted limb, and motioned, saying, “Come with me. You too, Buddhist. Follow my trail precisely and you need not get more dirtied.”

They followed the old woman through the rain, keeping their feet on her trail, splashing into mud if they failed. After a while they came to an old, old shrine, half as old as time. Mist clung to it like fungus. The small central temple glowed from within, pulsing. Inside, a lit hibachi was the cause of the glow. On its rack sat a pot filled with steamed rice, gobo root, and some sweet-smelling spice or substance wafting rich and inviting.

“You expected us, Grandmother?” asked Tomoe, appreciative of the odor and the large portions of steaming food.

“You make more noise than the oni devils,” said the old woman, and mimed them with sarcasm: “‘Yabushi! Yabushi! Oh, poor Yabushi!' Splash, slop, splosh.” She stamped her feet.

Tsuki Izutsu did not like the interior of the shrine's temple. By the torii gate she had recognized this place as Shinto. She lowered her face, but brooding eyes looked up evenly. She said, “You have, perhaps, also heard the child?”