The Disfavored Hero (26 page)

“All true!” She moved about the cavern tensely, looking pensive, looking sad. “All mad!” Tomoe wished the woman would stop pacing; the nervousness was catching. “Once, I was a queen! (Or perhaps a princess, I forget.) You believe that? It is so! I gave up my country for the filthy man—saving only this one island, which I kept for him and me, a paradise it seemed, though soon to be my hell.

“All that I retained of my country can be seen from this mountain peak; and I could have asked no more beyond the arms of my lover. But he went away. For all I know, he wanders the paths to this day.” She stood taut and all the more nervous, though less flighty, looked across the chamber and out into the rainy night to the far glow of the smaller mountain.

“I was glad, in the end, to be rid of his flabby laziness,” she said. “I have more peace than loneliness. My one fear is that he will return, and claim me his wife again. I would not like that. I would not like it because I would welcome it! Do you understand me, Tada, my only friend?” The one sharp eye focused on the samurai, expecting and receiving no reply. “I would melt into his flabby arms as I always did,” she said, and stooped in front of Tomoe as she had before. “I would gaze into his still-young face, as I gaze into your eyes; and once more he would only cast me aside and say, ‘Keiko, you are too old for me!' And that is why I hate the farmhouse, Tada. It has cruel memories as well as the hellish magic which stole the years of happiness I planned.”

Keiko held her crouch and began to rock on the balls of her feet. Tears rolled down her face like the torrent outside, dripping from the ends of her downy, long mustache. Tomoe said,

“I thought you happy, old woman. I came to learn happiness from you, to learn madness. But you are more wretched than I, lamenting a husband who was fat and useless and who you are better left without. Whereas I have lost good friends, and a good master, all because of sorcery; and therefore I have grown so afraid of magic that I shrink from the magic of life itself!

“I pitied myself, but you are more pitiful, Keiko, dreaming you were once immortal, because you grew too old to keep a lover; dreaming that a dead city was your nation, because you have nothing; dreaming the same city populous, because you are alone. I came here to seek your help, but what help have you for me?”

The madwoman stood abruptly, eyes dry, looking happy once again; for she was after all a madwoman, whose emotions ran extremes. She pushed on Tomoe's head with minor mischief, and unbalanced her from the crouch. Tomoe sat on her bottom, somewhat perturbed, looking up at the old woman who said, “You offered me help once. It proved your foolishness, but you meant well, so I will help you. You seek forgetfulness? I have plenty! I have used it on myself! You may join the citizens of my capital. Go down into the city. Ask for the man named Ya Hanada. He will give you saké, and grant you a single wish.”

Tomoe crossed her legs, remained upon the floor. She covered her face to hide despair, and replied, “There is no one living in the city, old Keiko, crazy Keiko.”

“Go down and see, samurai!” She scurried to the mouth of the cave, peered down through sheets of hard-driven rain. “The city is lit! Come see!”

Tomoe would not move. She sat before the fire, her back to Keiko, stubbornly silent, refusing to share the madwoman's vision.

“If you want an end to worldly strife, my friend Tada, you will find oblivion in the city. If you wish badly enough to find the people of my country, you will.”

Still Tomoe sat rigidly. She had given up the idea that the madwoman could be of help. She put aside the notion that there was genius in madness. She heard Keiko behind her, rummaging around for something or another, but did not look back to see. Keiko said, “You want me to help you find the way, Tada? Very well. I will do it!”

Tomoe looked halfway around, in time to see the rock coming down upon her head, held between Keiko's bony, wrinkled hands. The samurai made an averting motion to no avail, for Keiko was swift, and Tomoe was struck unconscious.

The madwoman had killed her; she knew it. Tomoe's head throbbed. She was fevered. Perhaps, she feared, her skull had been broken—(had it been necessary for Keiko to strike so hard?); at least, her brain was so rattled she might never think better or see more clearly than now.
The woe of all! Once I was so wise, and now my brain's destroyed
!

Her own ruminations made her feel as though she ought to laugh, for not only was she in immeasurable agony, she was also immeasurably silly. Death was, quite possibly, more whimsical than anyone had ever guessed.

For a long while she did not move, for it hurt to try. She tried instead to remember how she came to the stone-cobbled street. Had Keiko dressed her, carried her down the mountain? The madwoman was strong, certainly, but this was too much to assume. Either someone had helped her, or else Tomoe had stumbled down off the mountain even with her head bashed in, and come here on her own. There
was
a dream-like memory of staggering through the gates of the city, tripping over the legs of dirty beggars who ought not have existed, slipping in the vomit of drunkards, passing stone buildings from which wafted the perfumes of “entertainers,” the angry shouts of offended gamblers, the stink of sake; and once she had rested, an arm against a wall, and heard beyond a doorway the pretensions of a would-be philosopher qualifying the nature of reality to who-knows-who. It was indeed a decadent city, and in the dream (for dream she thought it until this very moment, and even presently was uncertain) Tomoe had wondered how she had not seen it all before.

Eventually she tottered and swooned, and lay, face-up, in a puddle wherein some man had previously pissed. When she awakened, it still seemed she might be imagining all this, for the lump had changed her reason.

“Dead!” a far-away voice declared, and Tomoe agreed, yes, dead.

“Dead!” another voice confirmed, as high and sweet as the first, so similar to the first, in fact, that it might have been the same voice but it came from another place.

There was further confirmation:

“Dead! Dead!”

Three voices there were, for three voices became hysterical with laughter.

Tomoe groaned. She said vulgar words. Then she wept tears because it hurt to do either. Then she opened her eyes, expecting to see laughing devils, but she saw three happy painted harlots tittering over her. Harlot-angels they were, and one of them bowed close and parted her red lips to place a query:

“Are you dead?”

The samurai turned her head too far to one side, and tasted the foul water in which she was strewn (for strewn she felt, like pieces of armor cast about). She felt the warmth of the women's bodies, radiating so near, and the sweetness of their odor mixed horrendously with the stink of the wet pave. It was daylight, but a haze of cloud diffused the light, giving the atmosphere an underwater approximation, a certain lack of clarity, affording no visible sun. Yet, for all the bluntness of her perceptions, all her senses were operable, and Tomoe made a grave decision with graver uncertainty: “I am alive.”

The harlots tittered more.

“You are a fierce warrior! We can tell,” said one girl, and the other two went hysterical again, covering their faces with small hands. “To have been injured so badly, you must have fought a giant!”

“Two giants,” said Tomoe. Then confessed, “Or one old woman who is insane.”

The girls did not laugh at all when Tomoe said this. They looked to one another as startled animals.

“I cannot move,” said Tomoe. “My head hurts too much. If you would help me, I would be grateful.”

They were delighted to do so, although their combined strength could not offer Tomoe a gentle transport. They raised her awkwardly from the street, from the dampness of the recent rain and other resources, and all of them together went tramping down the misty street. The sound of their passage echoed off grey, grim walls. The young harlots sang a childish song to aid their labor, and Tomoe tried to keep her head from jiggling.

They bore her to a disreputable teahouse and laid her on a straw mat, carefully putting her head on a wooden pillow wrapped in cloth. They fed her soup, which she vomited, and they fed her some more before she went to sleep. She woke periodically, hearing entertainment in other paneled areas: songs, instruments, lovemaking, laughing women and drunken men. After a long while—more than a day, she suspected—she woke more fully. It was no sound which woke her, but rather an unexpected silence.

The teahouse seemed to have held its breath, and all within were still. After so long a continual racket of one kind or another, this sudden change made Tomoe stir. She was alone, but saw the silhouette of a young woman on the other side of a rice-paper wall. There was a second silhouette, of a huge, broad-shouldered man. He was the one who wrought this silence, and he was the one who broke it, his voice guttural and threatening. “It will be you!”

The girl fell before him, weeping, begging. But the big man was unkind. He placed a foot upon the back of the effaced harlot, and drew his sword, prepared to slay.

Defying the agony of her skull, Tomoe rolled off the mat and onto her feet, and thrust her sword through the thin wall, into the heart of the man she knew only by his shadow. The shadow lurched backward, fell, and Tomoe brought her sword out of the wall, stained crimson.

The house erupted with commotion. Tomoe was suddenly surrounded by a dozen prostitutes hysterical with fear and joy, and a few men, half-in or half-out of their clothing. They all bowed to her the slightest bit, in deference and curiosity. One of the girls spoke, and Tomoe felt vaguely that it was the very one whose life she had just saved. “Now you have made enemies!”

Tomoe moved the pierced panel aside, and saw what lay upon the floor. She had murdered a hairy monster in a priest's saffron robes.

“What is he?” said Tomoe.

“His kind serve Smaller Mountain!” said a harlot. In Tomoe's continuingly dazed state, they all looked alike to her, their faces blurs; they sounded the same, their voices as elusive as their gaze. It may have been that only one harlot had ever said a word to her, from the moment she was found in the street; or it may have been that they all took turns. In whichever case, one of them said, “They take a single sacrifice each day, so that the mountain will not overflow.”

Shinto deities accepted no sacrifices, neither human nor beast, but Tomoe had already surmised that crueler gods ruled here. A city of stone would not satisfy kindlier deities. The thought did not give her untoward trepidations, however, for everything still seemed part of a delirium wrought by her concussion. She assumed she would either awake from this daze, or she would not; but meanwhile nothing was quite real enough to bother.

“Well,” said Tomoe blandly, “you need not fear the mountain's eruption today. The hairy priest is this morning's sacrifice.”

“His order will seek vengeance!” the same harlot said, or perhaps another. “You are not safe here anymore. We are not safe with you among us.”

“Then I will leave. Can someone show me the way to the saké house of Ya Hanada? I was told to seek him for a boon.”

“I will take you,” said a blurry, heavy-set figure. It was one of the few men in the room. He finished tying his obi, bowing as he added, “But you must know that Ya Hanada grants only sinister boons.”

Ya Hanada was a plump, kindly-seeming fellow who saw Tomoe and her escort to a private quarter of the saké house. Like all the buildings, it was of stone, and like the teahouse, it was partitioned with walls of paper. Hanada smiled and bowed and scurried about the partitions, seeing to all his visitors' needs. He vanished briefly, having much to attend, but returned with his servants who might have been (for all Tomoe could perceive) the same women she had met at the teahouse. The two men—Hanada, and her recent compatriot—were also difficult to distinguish, except that Hanada was more ingratiating.

The two servants sat on their knees amidst the two men and one woman, and made such pests of themselves with their efforts to please that it was difficult to gain the opportunity to converse with their lingering host.

“How is it that you come to my house?” asked Hanada, holding a little saké cup between the fingers of both hands.

Tomoe sipped the warmed drink, then sipped it again, and one of the geishas was quick to keep it full. The sake burned differently than she thought ordinary, but soothed better, and in fact her head ceased throbbing for the first time in too long. But the world's lack of clarity was not resolved, indeed, was made worse, and Tomoe felt light-headed already.

“Keiko sent me, with a bump upon the head,” answered Tomoe, and for the first time, she found the humor which waited with quiet reticence all this while. She laughed, considering Keiko's blow, and sipped more of the incredibly relaxing liquor; and the others laughed too, even though the mention of the madwoman gave them no comfort.

Hanada replied, “If she sends you, then I must serve you to the best of my capacity. For she is our queen, though she seems to have forgotten, and visits us only to ridicule. How did she say I must serve you?”

It was difficult to discover what was so funny, but something certainly was. Tomoe spat some of the saké on herself, trying to hold in the laughter, but she doubled over nonetheless and forced out the foolish words thus: “One wish!” she said. “I have one wish!” Tears of mirth squeezed from shut eyes, as she pounded the floor from her collapsed position.

Hanada bowed most courteously. “And what wish is that?”

Tomoe's nameless friend, who had shown her the way to Ya Hanada's establishment, was sharing her humor. They struck each others' backs, and laughed uproariously. But Tomoe had the problem the worse and ended up with her arm over her face, lying on her back as though defeated in a terrible battle, chortling ridiculously, barely able to catch a breath.