Traitorous Monk Enshin Akamatsu.
Heads being this important, there was no question of taking prisoners of war. Surrender in battle ceased to be a soldierly option. The head was taken and the corpse was sometimes used for weapon practice. It was then thrown away, but the head was kept.
While still a common soldier, I had sometimes been assigned to the washing of a head or two. These round objects soon ceased to be human. One caught them by the ears or by the nose to turn them around and scrub away the gore. Occasionally, a dead eye would blink at the indignity and this always brought a laugh.
Naturally, each of us foresaw the possibility that our own heads would be handled in this disrespectful fashion. And when the thought occurred we would be rougher than ever, slapping that pale cheek or scrubbing away at those young lips.
There is nowadays none of this. Indeed the entire quota system that supported all of these decapitations has disappeared. One is judged not by the number of staring heads collected but by more abstract trophies: diligence, perseverence, loyalty.
Perhaps I am again being old fashioned, but there was something reassuring about those melonlike objects bumping about the knees, held by their long hair from the belt or the saddle pommel. At least it was something to see and to smell. It was not, like loyalty, invisible. And there was something satisfying about the scrubbed face staring at one—for all the world like a small son—as the scribe called out, To Officer Kumagai Naozane— one head: name unknown.
* * *
Here in this time of peace I should perhaps say something further about war, specifically about killing. It is not something we often go about these days, and if we do, it is in an impersonal and executive manner. One side in a skirmish is sent against another and in the muddle a number, indeed, are killed. This is the result of administrative considerations. At the same time, however, it divests the slain of a kind of dignity that is his due, and it deprives the slayer of distinction. Let me enlarge.
Back in the time of which I am speaking, he who was killed had been chosen and he had had the opportunity of defending himself. Thus, due to misfortune or ineptitude, he could himself observe the transition from life to death and this conferred upon his position a sort of dignity—one which we demonstrated by the removal of his head.
He who killed was acknowledged as being better at his job, always a welcome compliment, and he was proved so at considerable risk of discomfort, always the sign of a competent craftsman. Hence the satisfaction at a job well done, as signified by all the smiles of those gathered around the piles of heads.
I was to be found there, grinning away with all the rest, for I had just returned from the excitement of battle. I had chosen my man (or been chosen—that sometimes happened as well) and we had chased each other about the field. With my sword held high, two hands gripping its handle as my two thighs gripped the heaving side of my mount, I experienced the full glory of battle.
How can I best describe it to you who have perhaps never felt it? First, perhaps by suggesting that the glory of battle is no empty phrase. What I felt was a kind of resplendence, a kind of bliss or, if you will, perhaps happiness. Racing away, sword in air, I knew I had never been more myself.
I might compare this feeling, in myself, to the loss of temper to which I am prone. When I allow this to occur I am as though filled with a liquor which fleshes me out, defines me. I am gratefully engorged and become a single entity. No longer do I reason and consider, doubt or worry. Rather, I am solid all the way through, as my sword is. I am utterly and only myself.
This feeling is defining, but now imagine it amplified until it eclipses even any consideration of the matter. Solid, now more a part of the mount than the mere rider, more the sword than the simple wielder, I am so entirely consistent that thought is stilled.
That blessed state—when thought is stilled. There are only a few occasions when the miracle can occur. When deep in prayer, when engaged in love, when lost in anger, and when committed to battle. To be filled with faith, with lust, with ire— it is all the same: one is filled.
Without a thought I urge my mount, I must be first in battle, first to burst upon the enemy, first to kill. Racing, my steed leaping over the barricade, I am inside the camp, my sword swirling as I grip my mount and see my adversary as he, as mindless as myself, comes racing to meet me.
We are so much more similar than we are different, but we have designated each other, and we must now fight. I grab at his bridle, he makes a fast pass at my sword arm; I wheel, aim for his neck, that exposed sliver of flesh just under the back rim of his helmet; he whirls and aims at my neck, that small V-shaped wedge of flesh between my cuirass and my collar.
If we miss, we wheel and try again. If one of us does not miss, the other falls slowly from his mount and lies in the dust, still or writhing—awaiting the coming sword and the final separation of spirit from body.
I have known only victory, never defeat (on the battlefield, that is) and so cannot share with you the emotions of the loser, but I wonder if these are so different from mine. I am filled still with my purpose. So is he with his. I have not returned to that dappled person I was. Nor has he gone back to any previous self. We are there, still alike—heroes, if you will, in that we have surmounted our petty persons to become these armored beings still filled with pure purpose.
You may wonder that I, a priest, would continue to so express myself. Yet it is something akin to this feeling I have been describing that I expect to discover in myself as I enter the blessed land—this sense of being whole, this miracle of the sundered parts together assembled.
I remember the forty-eight vows of Amida Buddha and dwell upon the eighteenth, the Namu Amida Butsu, Amida's "Original Vow." It is this I invoke to allow me passage. And it is I who opened this very road to those whom I bested in battle. My ambition to stay behind and guide the dead is perhaps best understood when one remembers that I have already led so many.
* * *
There followed a long era of peace—a full decade. It was, to be sure, an uneasy one, but I wonder if there is any other kind. These years of Taira peace were so filled with dissent and intrigue that I was not surprised the other day to hear one of our ballad-making novices singing away about the bad old times of which I am now writing.
Back then, sang this young voice, men both high and low lived with no peace of mind, lived as though walking always upon the thinnest ice or treading the narrow ledge above a precipice. The world had waxed corrupt and lax, and vice had outstripped virtue.
And so it had. To begin at the very top, there was an unusual discord between the retired emperor and the Emperor Nijō. The younger would not defer to the older, and Go-Shirakawa in turn could not countenance such disrespect in the younger.
The retired emperor would deprive the reigning emperor of several of his most trusted officers. Nijō would retaliate by decimating the attendants of Go-Shirakawa. This intercine and largely bureaucratic warfare made life difficult for those in the imperial service. A lord one day, banished the next, men's fortunes so fluctuated that great houses came tumbling down, whole families were sent weeping into the wilds, and suicides grew common.
With imperial bickering in plain view, political machinations, usually decently hid, slid into sight. The customary intrigues and maneuverings of the court cast off their shrouding layers of ceremony and flaunted themselves. One result was that the imperial house lost an amount of respect. Another was that the court of Kiyomori, himself so carefully circumspect, gained a like amount.
At the same time, though the Taira had supported the now-retired emperor against his elder brother
