The Disfavored Hero (19 page)

Tsuki drew little circles before her with a finger, and the search went on.

Night came again, and with it all the fearsome sounds and splashings to left and right, before and behind. But nun and samurai ignored all things impertinent to their quest. They trudged on.

At least they were spared rain; but it made little difference, they were so soaked and muddied face to toe. Moonrise was helpful, lighting their watery path; but also it cast half-shadows in their way, which they felt they must avoid.

The two heroic women moved like wraiths across the wetland. Were others on quests in the same swamp, they might have chanced to see this pair, and fled another way, or else ignored them, having also grown used to ghosts.

Nun and samurai could have searched thus for many days, finding nothing they desired, the marshes were that vast. Pools were linked to pools; they joined with beds of peat and muck, were laced with natural dams of mud and bridges of fallen timber. Nothing was familiar from the night before, or the day before. Nothing gave up clues. But gods walked the islands of Naipon, and would not allow fate to go unmet.

Izanami-the-Old appeared before them with her lantern in one hand and her gnarly cane in the other. She appeared so close at hand, so quickly they could not have expected her. They were blinded by the lamp, so that Tsuki could not see to deflect the crone's blow. The gnarly cane smote her twixt the eyes, and Tsuki Izutsu fell limp across a log, unmoving. Before Tomoe could act in anger, the elderly Izanami said, “It is that way, the lodge. It is beyond the rushes and those trees. You must meet the bakemono alone.”

Tomoe lifted Tsuki's head, saw that she was only sleeping, breathing evenly. Indeed, the blow between her eyes had not been so terrible, but more like a brush or a kiss, and should not have caused unconsciousness.

In that moment, Izanami's lamp was blown out by a cold brief breeze, and Tomoe Gozen could see the goddess no longer.

She came then to the bakemono's lodge, where old Izanami had indicated. From within came crying. Yabushi's sister had finally found her tears, pouring forth in torrents. The young woman's voice wailed like a wind. Tomoe wondered: Is Yabushi already dead?

“O Bakemono-with-no-tail!” called the samurai. “Tomoe Gozen of Heida has come to steal your head!”

The door flung open at once; the bakemono had been waiting. He stepped out without hesitation, looking fierce and certain, swinging his two-pronged sword with violent meaning. It was the source of his bravery, and clearly he expected Tomoe to fall back from the sight. Tomoe made no delay. She leapt onto the slick mud which surrounded the lodge and struck the bakemono's sword with her own.

At contact, the sword rang like a tuning iron, resounding like a bell. Tomoe struck over and over. The harder she hit her opponent's sword, the louder it rang. The marsh filled with the sound of the bakemono's weapon. The sound surrounded Tomoe Gozen like a thick, cold jelly. It made her slow.

Once, the bakemono could have killed her, she moved with such lackadaisical maneuver. But in his eagerness, he slid in the mud and fell upon his tailless rump from clumsiness alone. There, Tomoe might have killed
him
, had she her normal speed. But the knell of the sword held her. She swam through thickened air, while the bakemono scooted away from her with ease, stood up, and came at her again.

Held as she was in the sword's spell, she could not move fast enough to break the bakemono's guard, poor as that guard might be. It was all she could do merely to counter his blows; and even with that much success, she only increased the spell by making the ringing louder.

The bakemono caught her final blow between the two prongs of his sword, and held her to the spot. Tomoe grimaced, then grinned, for she realized that if she let the bakemono hold her long enough, his sword's knell would quieten. Then she would regain her swiftness against the brute.

The vibrations coursed through her bones, a sensation not unlike the time when she survived a stroke of lightning—only this time, it was endured far longer. The vibration blurred her vision, shook her skull, threatened her with unconsciousness. But she held fast, would not let the bakemono withdraw to strike again, until the sound was lessened. Perhaps he realized her ploy, but he was slow and dumb and could think of no way to untangle his double-sword from her daito without further danger to himself.

After long moments of patience, the vibration seemed to be dying down a bit, but not quickly. The bakemono put his full weight behind the magical weapon, intending to press Tomoe, by far the smaller of the two, onto the ground. But she braced her legs carefully, and neither of them moved.

From the corner of her vision, Tomoe Gozen saw a movement, and then another. Two bright blue oni devils, bound to the sound of the sword, had returned to their master. One of them had a blackened stump where its hand had been, and it carried a large rock in its remaining hand. The other bore a long, thick branch, brandishing it with wicked force.

Tomoe could not move at all, for she had become frozen by the too-slowly fading knell. The bakemono's weight at her front, and a pair of oni approaching from the side, Tomoe Gozen was prepared to die.

The strolling nun was not prepared to let her. Tsuki Izutsu plodded through the swamp, one hand to her eyes which smarted in an odd way. She staggered, stumbled, but came on. She fought the Shinto spell with a Buddhist prayer on her lips and came, as had the oni (but with different intent), toward the sound of the ringing sword.

The two oni of brilliant blue turned upon the nun. She raised her bo, its spike protruding, but she was too dazed by the touch of Izanami's gnarly cane. She did not see the rock flung through the air. It struck her in the ear, bringing blood from her head in a large rush. She dropped onto her knees in the dirty water, as the second oni leapt forward. It knocked aside her bo with its log, and thrust the log down upon her over and over again. The sound of splintering bones burst through the sword's knell. Tomoe heard the sound and was helpless.

All the while, Yabushi's sister had been crying inside the lodge. Upon Tsuki's fall, the mournful crying ceased; and Tomoe thought the timing was very inappropriate. The very trees should weep, with Tsuki murdered!

Tomoe's vision blurred from her own tears and the strain. Anger drew aside. Sorrow weakened her. The bakemono's pronged sword had faded in sound the barest amount, while he put every bit of his muscle to the task of forcing her down.

The points of the sword moved toward her, one on each side of her own sword. She had no way to guard. She could not move. Slowly, those points pressed against her forehead, harder, deeper, and blood joined with the tears in her eyes. The vibration stopped, transferred into her brain where it sapped all remaining vitality.

At that moment, the bakemono lurched back, leaving only the two deep cuts on Tomoe's forehead. She fell away, drained by the sword's magic and her own stress. She lay on her back, unable to move or groan. But the bakemono did not deal the final, easy blow.

He stood tall and rigid, terror in his huge, black eyes. He dropped the sword. When he folded forward onto hands and knees, Tomoe barely saw from the angle of her vision that Yabushi'take Issun'kamatoka had launched himself from the doorway of the lodge to thrust his shortsword far into the bakemono's upper spine, finding even the heart.

Little Bushi, pale as death, clung to his own sword, clung to the bakemono's back, and wrenched the blade back and forth.

There was a third oni in the reeds, who had seen its two comrades slay Tsuki Izutsu, the nun who had spared an oni's life. The oni, redder than blood, rushed forward with its spear, and struck first the back of the oni with the log, and next the stomach of the one-handed oni who had thrown the stone. The red oni pulled back with pieces of liver and lengths of intestine on the barb of his yari spear.

The stricken oni scream hideously, ran a little ways into the swamp, then fell to their slow death and swift decomposition.

Tsuki drifted face down in the water, blood spreading away from her body. The oni lifted her with surprising tenderness, and it wailed as had its fellows—for if oni ever loved, how could one help but love Tsuki Izutsu? It bore her away into the night, wailing its awful, wordless lament.

Bakemono died not much easier than oni, though their heads might be taken as trophies, since they did not rot swiftly like oni. Yabushi's sister helped the boy pull his blade from the bakemono's spine, and helped the little samurai stand because he was still weak from the long sickness. The bakemono's curse had dictated only one friend of Tomoe Gozen die within a swamp, and therefore Yabushi had regained a portion of strength at the moment of Tsuki's death. He did not yet realize the connection; when he realized, he would regret her sacrifice, suspecting that Tsuki had let herself be slain for precisely this cause.

The bakemono rolled onto his back, thick fluids widening from the rent he lay upon. His black eyes blinked several times; and by his fear, it was evident that he knew he was dying.

Yabushi and his sister approached the bakemono. Weak as the small samurai felt, he yet handled his sword with purpose.

“Please do not take my head!” begged the bakemono.

“Why should I not?” Yabushi snapped, supported by his tall, slender sister. “Bakemono eat people. You caused one of my friends to die, and injured another. You have been an especially poor husband to my sister whom you stole.”

“But I want to keep my head,” he whined, and started to bawl. “It is true bakemono eat people, but so do human folk eat fish, and snakes eat mice. It is how we live! And had I not allowed my wife to nurse her brother back to health, I might stand this moment a victor. So I am not wholly evil. I beg you reconsider. I have already lost my tail. Let me keep my head! Please!”

Tomoe grunted, trying to regain strength. She turned her face from the mud, peered through a haze of pain and said, “Be merciful, Little Bushi. A poor trophy is a coward's head anyway.”

Yabushi said to the bakemono, “I have more reason than you to be unhappy; and my sister has a greater need for vengeance than you ever did. But you will have your way. I will still cut off your head, but will leave it in your keeping.”

“You are kind,” said the bakemono, sniffling. “Kind enough to grant one more favor?”

“What favor?” asked Yabushi, annoyed by the wheedling coward, and by his own pity for the dying beast.

“I wish to be cremated and buried in an urn with my grave marked, as is done for human folk. Then, perhaps, I will be reborn a man.”

Tomoe heard this, remembering a time when the bakemono said that bakemono were
more
than humankind. She, too, pitied the ogre, who hated himself so well.

“With what name would I mark the grave of a bakemono?” asked Yabushi. “Bakemono have no names.”

“I have a name,” said the bakemono. “I invented one.” His tears fell harder, for much as Tomoe and Yabushi pitied him, he yet pitied himself more. “Kwashiorki is my name. It is good?”

“Kwashiorki,” said Yabushi, trying the sound. It was ugly like a bakemono, but Yabushi said, “It is fine. You will have your grave.”

Trusting the word of a samurai, the bakemono grew calm.

With the aid of his sister who held the bakemono's head up by pendulous ears, Yabushi cut all around the neck. The bakemono did not complain, accepting this painful demise. His executioners twisted the cut neck until the bones broke loose, and Kwashiorki breathed and wept no more. They folded his arms to hold his head. Then the sister of Yabushi went to built a fire for the cremation.

Tomoe Gozen's poor vision faded more, and then there was darkness without sound.

There were obscured recollections of a pyre outside the lodge, made from coals fetched by Yabushi's sister; of weird faces watching in amazement from the nighted marsh as a monster received human rites. The bakemono burned like dry sticks, the fire raging in the darkness, and finally going out. The dank of the ground quickly cooled the ashes. The child samurai and the slender woman gathered the grey ash into a pot which would serve as urn.

As these tasks were performed, an old woman nursed Tomoe, while Tomoe alternately leered mindlessly, fought imagined wraiths, cried out in agony, and wept tears from emotional nightmare. The old woman seemed like someone from Tomoe's childhood: a dimly remembered, nurturant aunty, or Tomoe's gruff, mischief-making grandmother, who was still alive and still a fighter. Later, she seemed not nurse, but the vengeful dame of a bakemono, and Tomoe was afraid. Finally, she was only a strange witch with a gnarly cane whom Tomoe had met twice before.

When the ashes of the bakemono were gathered, and the sun began to rise, Tomoe discovered herself no longer attended by an old and all too mortal hag, but by a beautiful goddess of eternal, heavenly beauty. There was no gnarly cane, but, instead, a shining, handled object quickly tucked into the robe of the goddess before Tomoe could tell what it was.