Author's Note:
"History," Napoleon Bonaparte once said, "is an agreed upon set of lies." I like that quote because it helps me understand some of the prejudices that modern society, in all its wisdom, keeps holding on to, such as the concept that there never were any women warriors, or, at least, if there were then they were isolated instances during extraordinary times. The period of Japanese history this story takes place in is called the "Warring States Period," a ten year long civil war between two powerful men, Hosokawa Katsumoto and Yamana Sozen, which then escalated into a nationwide war over who would be the next shogun. A lot of samurai movies from the 1960s and 1970s are set in this period; local warlords, daimyos, and their armies, all laying siege to each other's castles and the like. Akira Kurosawa's 1985 film "Ran" is set in this period. But that's not what interests me.
Recently the U.S. War Department has contemplated allowing women serve as front-line soldiers, a level of equality in the armed services we've yet to attain. Many conservative groups have tsk-tsked the idea, though most of their objections seem to revolve around being squicked out at the idea of menstrual blood and cooties, in one form or another, and more than one talking-head pundit has made the claim that "the frail sex" simply is not the stuff of warriors. This is, of course, bizarre, since, as long as there have been wars, there have been women who have proved themselves again and again, not just in secondary roles, but as front-line soldiers, as generals and as strategists. In the bloody, feudalistic era of Japan there was a whole upper-class of female warriors called the Onna-bugeisha, trained in bushi (the way of the warrior) and the use of weapons, who fought along side their samurai counterparts. Significant historical figures, such as Empress Jingu and Tomoe Gozen, were, along with other women, all Onna-bugeishas who came to play an important role in Japan's history. Though the term is only used once as a reference here, the point I wish to make is that Amaya (whose name means "night rain") has the option of becoming a front-line soldier if she wished, something that today's female American soldiers don't have.
* * *
Love fills me completely
But after my first climax
Alas, she is gone.
-- Kasannoin (courtesan, written on the eve of the Onin War, 1467--1477)
Snow. There was a moan, running backwards into the falling silence of dark flakes, golden dust motes. All that was simply reflecting upon itself over and over. Dark moments turned into light into dark into -- it was afternoon. Warm winter sun slipped through the bamboo curtains. The young woman sat on her sleeping mat, legs akimbo, robes undone, an edge of black hair, a mouth perpendicular, then fell back, stretched out. A nice little warmth in her belly. When she rubbed, first it was nice, then it was good, then she itched in a way that was both curious and weird and -- she forced herself to breathe, rubbing deeper, squeezing, warm-wetness between her legs, liquified heat in her belly, rising in pulsating waves. She panted and rubbed and something broke, she thought something broke, a release, an abominable gushing -- so much! -- gushed out of her, all greenish heat and bluish light and her legs wobbled and she slid, panting, into puddle on the floor.
The bedroom's sliding door was open. She brought her hand up; peered at it. Something was wet, smeared against her fingers. She could feel her soul pulse, throbbing away out on the tips of her cum-coated fingers.
Yes. The bedroom's door was open. Curious. There was no light in the room, though swirling snow fell outside. Why was the bedroom door open? From far out in the dark a fox barked. For, there, outlined against the bleak light of the winter dawn, a figure stood at the bedroom door. Silhouetted. The young woman on the floor, flustered, attempted to pull her robes around her naked shoulders. But even as she began to move, suddenly, there were hands reaching down to grab hers, a shock of impossibly white hair like what the dead wear when they visit you in your dreams, and the young woman was on her feet, her kimono billowing while the two of them now ran; away from the bedroom and the dark and the light and now the one in the dark robes, holding her hand, had begun to laugh and suddenly the young woman laughed too and they crossed a field of dust and snow, their bare feet leaving not a single track in the drifts and tumbled against a stone wall with frozen aloe plants all in the nooks and crannies and the stranger kissed the young woman, a brush of sharp lips, whiskers, a quick dip of her tongue against a closed lower lip. Her skin was darker than the young woman's, her hair larger, her body thicker, her voice richer. She tasted of roses and cinnamon. Tongues explored, coaxed, exhilarated. Fingers laced with the cruelest of claws running between the young woman's open thighs as she, for the first time, touched the stranger's kinky hedge of pubic hair, then slipped into wet slick flesh.
There was a pounding in her ears. Blood. A war kettle drum. A fist banging upon a wooden door. The ghost of all this desire pounding against the heart.
The wind, naked and flushed and glowing, found them. Snow curled around them, pressed together, grinding, this new hunger that led from hand to hand to fingers to fingers to lips to lips to ...
... Amaya no Sozen sat up in the darkness of her bedroom, roused from her rabid dream by a violent muffled knocking. The house was full of indistinguishable sounds. Her little room was dark, cold. She huddled against the tatami mat again, pulled the coverlet round her shoulders, still listening. She knew that the knocking had been on the outer gate, she could hear horses in the courtyard, the clatter of armed men dismounting.
A quickly-moving glow, a lantern on a pole, flickered across her narrow window. Doors could be heard opening, shutting, footsteps running along the passage.
Unable to endure her curiosity any longer, she sat up again, leaned over her sleeping mat to prod her little brother. They shared the same room, along with their old nurse maid who slept next to her. Chizuru, though, was gone and her brother dreamed on, undisturbed by the sudden clamor which had broken upon her during a long winter night.
"Wake up!" she whispered with impatience. "Wake up! I believe father and elder brother Mori have come home!"
The younger child stirred, sighed.
"Don't you want to go see?" his sister asked.
"But it is only father!" protested the half-awake boy. "If we get up to go on to the stairs he will probably see us and scold us."
"How can you sleep, Ki-yo?" Amaya asked, brushing a lock of black hair out of her eyes. "When you know father has just come home?"
"I am not sleeping." Kiyotaka sat up grumpily, shivered in the February air. "How do you know it is father? It may be Yoshi."
"Yoshihisa has gone to Nagasaki," replied the young woman, in wise, eager excitement, "but our father only went to Kyoto. Nagasaki is a much greater distance away."
Sister and brother listened in dark, fixing their straining eyes on the streaks of light that now showed faintly behind the shoji screens.
"If it is our father, he will want to to see us," remarked the young woman.
"There is a great deal of noise," responded Kiyotaka. "They seem to have forgotten all about us. Where is Baa-chan? I want a light, I hate the dark. You get up, Amaya-chan, see what is is all about."
Eagerly the young woman stood, the sash of her sleeping robes trailing behind her as she fumbled across the cold dark room, then out into the upper gallery, full of flickering lanterns. Flushed with excitement, she stood still and listened. Amaya was just now nineteen, with a small compact face, bright dark hair flowing down below her hips. Seeing no one, not even Chizuru, who usually stood so diligently behind her ward, nor Morioka-sensei, her tutor, who was never generally far away either, she pattered across the dark gallery, looking over the head of the stairs.
She knew what her father wore when he went out: his purple and gold kimono, the emblem of the Shogun, his banner with the design of bamboo leaves and the moon, which, ever since she could remember, had been on the great northern gate of Raikou Castle, where she had been born and lived.
Now there were men in the great hall below, but none of them bore her father's banner, nor the swallowtail butterfly descending upon a sprig of wild ginger, the coat of arms of the Nakahara clan, their allies. Her younger brother came up behind her, shivering.
"Why have you taken so long? What has happened?" he asked, peevishly.
"I do not know," whispered Amaya, "there is a crowd of people down there, but they seem to be strangers. I can't see father, Mori or Yoshi."
The two of them huddled together, alert, curious, somewhat uneasy.
A few months ago their peaceful life at Raikou Castle had been interrupted by a rebellion. They had been taken, as prisoners, to Yakunan Castle, where they had escaped only by their mother's vigilance, back to Edo. Then they, along with their little sister, Akki, had been put into the sanctuary of the head monk, Osaka-gûji, at the ancient Maruyama Shrine.
Their father, though, had defeated the rebels, pacified the district, then brought them here to Koga's estate, the heart of Raikou Castle, on the banks of the river Sumida. The family felt secure once again when their mother had told them that the poor witless Emperor made their father Shogun. But that pleasant security had lasted only a short while before Hosokawa Katsumoto, their uncle, refused to be bound by the divine will of the Emperor. He had raised a new rebellion, shortly before the eve of Shogatsu, the Shinto New Year's Festival, that the Shogun and his two older sons had gone out beyond the city gates to put down. Amaya had wanted to go, too; but her father had laughed, though his son, Yoshihisa, the Daimyo of Qijue, the one who had gone north to put down a rising of the Omura clans in the province of Nagasaki, had said he would like to take Amaya with him, for she was both serious and well-trained, then to teach her how to be an Onna-bugeisha, a female warrior.
"A Sozen lady riding out to do battle?" her father had joked. "You have been spending far too much time with your romantic poetry and fairy tales, my son."
Now the entire household appeared to be gathered in the great hall: Jito, the steward of the castle; several high ranking Shinto priests; the captain of the samurai; even the low-ranking servants from the kitchen. As for Amaya and Kiyotaka, their anxious eyes soon discovered their mother and, with her, Ki-yo's nanny. Both were still in their sleeping gowns, their hair undone. Their mother sat by the great hearth on which a few embers of the day's logs glowed. The old woman, Chizuru, and Amaya thought this odd, was kneeling beside her lady, holding her hand. Standing before the women was the one man that Amaya knew instantly from all the other warriors present: old Nobuhide Oda. He was bareheaded; his white hair was matted together with blood. There was blood, too, on his hands. Amaya saw this with shock, blood on his hands as he moved them -- up, down, up -- fleshing out with simple gestures what he was relating as he spoke in a low, exhausted voice. Amaya noticed, as well, that his battle armor was torn and beaten and that the butterfly and the ginger on his banner had been ripped into shreds.
