The Last Battle

When Hangaku Jō was young, her father put her on top of a horse and handed her a naginata two times as long as she was tall. Her arm trembled with the strain of holding the wicked blade out from her side.

“You will be a great warrior,” he told her as he adjusted her elbow to give her better balance. “And the name of Jō will echo through the centuries.”

He didn’t smile at her. He seldom did. Instead, the corners of his eyes crinkled. His own version of a smile, which was a rare sign of approval from him.

So, “Yes, Father,” she said, and kept her arm steady. He spent the rest of the day with her, leaving only at nighttime to take himself off to his own affairs.

“I shall watch your progress,” he promised before he left.

The next morning, her maid dressed her in a man’s brown tunic and pants instead of her usual lady’s robe. Another day spent with Father. Her heart jumped. The unexpected material of her new clothes swished around her legs as she walked out the door, so she did not at first notice the white-haired man waiting for her in the shadowy hallway. In fact, she probably would have walked right by him unless he hadn’t stepped directly into her path and made his bow.

When the man straightened up again, she saw his face was crisscrossed by scars, a web of white against his dark skin. “The lord has sent me,” he told her. “Your training begins today.”

Hangaku masked her disappointment behind downturned eyes. “Yes, Master,” she said.

His name was Akihiro, and the initial lesson began with the eight disciplines of body and breath. She mastered the first two within a matter of weeks—one was just sitting still for hours in focused meditation. Although she was supposed to be ruminating about war games, she often found her mind wandering far from the new things she was learning about stroke, counterstroke, balance, and breath.

Her father returned after six months had passed. He watched from the side of the training ground as she swung her naginata, meeting each stroke of the Master with the correct counterstroke. She was tempted to glance over, which gave the Master opportunity to send her sprawling onto her back when she missed her parry. She caught her breath and glanced up, but her father was already gone.

The disciplines grew more complex. The winter rains yielded to blossoms and the temperate heat of summer, and then returned to rain. She was outfitted for makeshift armor on her twelfth birthday, and the next year outfitted again when her growing wrists poked out from the old sleeves.

At the seventh discipline, she stalled. No matter what coaching Master Akihiro gave her, she couldn’t move her mind away from her upcoming sixteenth birthday. If her mother had been alive, perhaps Hangaku would have been promised in marriage or even anticipating her first child. Instead, her little sister Miwa had married the son of the neighboring Tachibana clan. The man was a year older than Hangaku, and he had the kindest smile she had ever seen. But he had married her golden sister, who was beloved and beautiful. Two things Hangaku would never be.

Her thoughts about her sister’s husband consumed Hangaku. And rather than paying attention to the road when returning from her sister’s wedding, she fell when her horse shied at a hare leaping across the path. The doctors told her that her ankle was sprained.

Bad timing for her. And a bad omen for the Taira clan, to which the Jō family belonged.

Her father had just returned from a meeting with the assembled clans who were opposed to the Kamakura Shogunate. Troops were already gathering, and under normal circumstances, she would be riding with her father to meet them now that her sister’s wedding was finished.

“My steward will run the estate while I am gone,” he told her severely. Her punishment, since she was her father’s heir and trained to act in his stead. She bowed her head beneath his disapproval. “You, I expect to see recovered when I return.”

Days passed, and news trickled to them that the first meeting had become a tense standoff. Each day, Hangaku waited to hear the news the standoff had broken into either battle or peace. Yet the bonds of her injury were her own fault, and so she could do nothing but gingerly climb to the top of the tower ladder to watch and hope for word.

Two weeks into the standoff, Hangaku spied a boy limping towards the gates. Behind him, a trail of bloody footprints stretched down the road in mute testimony to the urgency of his message. She came down from her tower to meet him, having recognized him as a distant cousin.

“I have ridden day and night,” he told her, eyes downcast, “until my horse collapsed in exhaustion. I left him there, and have run since.”

“Your news, cousin?” she prodded gently when it appeared the boy would fall from exhaustion.

With his voice trembling in his throat, he recounted how he had been on the battlefield and seen the death of her father. An arrow struck the lord from his horse, and he had been trampled in the thick of battle.

Through the shock of hearing the news, she gave the boy her thanks and allowed him to be led away from the meeting in order to rest and heal. She ordered her best physicians to tend him.

Despite her desire to set out at once by herself to avenge her father, she instead took a deep breath and summoned the steward to inform him of the news.

The steward sank to his knees in dramatic grief and began sobbing. It steadied her when she saw the older man’s obvious sorrow, even if she knew her own face was white from shock. But she had not cried a single tear.

“What do we do?” he whispered. From his tone, he was not really asking her.

“You will inform the captains. We march at once for the shogunate.”

“No, there is too much to do. We must send word out to the—”

Her voice cut across his like a knife. “I did not realize you were now lord of this clan. I did not realize you carried the name Jō,” she said bluntly.

He stared up at her. She saw his lashes flicker.

“At once, Lady Hangaku,” he finally said. He didn’t bother to wipe away his tears as he stood up, bowed, and left the room.

By this time, the armies knew her, the odd daughter of the lord who spent her days training by their side. When she limped to face them and spoke about marching with the dawn, she was unsurprised to hear a low wave of muttering. But it still took her by surprise when one of the soldiers shouted at her, “Go back to your nursery, little girl!” A chorus of agreement rang out, but not so much as she had feared.

Hangaku looked to her captains. They looked back.

The decision was hers. She nodded at her senior captain, who approached the heckler. The soldier was held steady, stripped to the skin, and a whip applied until blood ran. When they finally released the man’s arms, he fell to the ground with a thud, having passed out during the punishment.

When she asked loudly if there were any more objections, the other men held still. After that, the armies marched with her in the morning.

She, herself, did not sleep a single hour that night. Every time she closed her eyes, she saw her captain bringing down the bloody whip across the skin of a soldier she had once known and respected. A man who would follow her no longer.

As the troops strung out in loose rows behind her on that first day, the temptation to look back was nearly overwhelming. After the previous day’s incident, she wondered if the faces she saw would be friendly or hostile. Perhaps they would just be neutral. The back of her neck itched, but she continued to bite her lip instead of looking.

On the second day, a shout went up on their left flank. News quickly passed through the troops—riders approaching. Hangaku fumbled with her naginata as she unstrapped it from the side of her saddle, and it felt odd in her hand, suddenly unfamiliar. Although she adjusted her grip, her fingers were still sweaty with nerves and she wondered if now battle was approaching, she would drop the blade without a blow struck.

It wasn’t until she saw the contingent of men in colorful armor riding up that she recognized them. Well, she recognized her sister’s husband instantly, but the others she guessed, based on their position and colors worn. She wondered what they saw when they looked at her, a woman dressed up as a man and awkwardly holding a naginata in threat. She quickly put away her weapon and bowed low in the saddle. They returned the gesture.

Camp was made early, since the group brought news of troop movements. She filled her belly with the plentiful vegetables, umeboshi, and rice cooked over the open fires, but didn’t open her mouth except to eat. The meeting went long into the night, and her naginata gleamed in the virgin light of the lamps, a reminder that the men who argued so fiercely were years her senior. Her spirits sank the longer the meeting went on, until the clan heads finally said their farewells. She returned to her tent for a few hours of snatched sleep before they took to the road again as the sun rose over the hills.

The Kamakura had a new general, a second son who had the hot temper and cool soul of a dragon. They had not anticipated that first battle with him as their enemy—and they had lost. No telling what would happen in the coming war.

After that, the days on the road stretched to weeks. They fought a series of surprise and pitched engagements, and her naginata was no longer unbloodied after the first attack. The confusion and dust of the fight concealed its more gruesome horrors from her, but she never forgot that first battle. Although, as time passed, the series of fights began to blur together with their very sameness. She lost her appetite as the weeks wore on and death marched at their side. When they camped one evening by a lake, Hangaku was surprised at the face that looked back at her from the calm surface of its waters. Her features were drawn with fatigue and her cheeks thin as a boy’s.

The weeks blurred together as the seasons turned and became months and more months, the roads stretching out to infinity. As the years of war passed, Hangaku Jō’s blade dripped with the lifeblood of her enemies. Sometimes she saw in the eyes of the men she commanded that they’d forgotten she’d ever begun life as a woman. Everything her father had predicted had come to pass. Her name echoed on the battlefield, and the echoes were bloody.

At the end of countless fights, some won and some lost, she received a direct missive from her sister’s husband, his bold pen strokes so familiar to her. The Tachibana were trapped at their castle by treachery from within. She must ride at once to rescue them.

She should have known better, but the note had been from him. So, the trap was sprung, and the reinforcements she commanded rode straight into the enemy’s ambush.

Hangaku fought, and the heads of her enemies flew through the air. She could feel the sun overhead pricking at her conscience as her troops held their ground against the larger force, could feel each heartbeat as a second of delay became a minute . . . became an hour. Her blade rose and fell, and the hours fell to the ground with it.

Later, she was told that they had to wrestle her from her horse after they’d disarmed her, an arrow wedged in her thigh even though she felt no pain from the wound. They covered her so deeply in chains that she could only walk with the smallest of steps, and still she fought on.

But while she continued trying to fight for freedom, her sister’s clan was wiped out in the East, every man, woman, and child falling to hostile blades. Her golden and beloved sister was killed—and her sister’s husband too.

Her chains were struck only after she was brought many miles and made to kneel before Shogun Minamoto Yoriiye. Of course, he was the same blood of the clan who’d killed her father. But if she wanted to keep her head, she had no choice.

Or did she? Her pen hesitated when the pact was brought before her to sign.

“You are fearless as a man and beautiful as a flower,” the shogun told her with speculation in his eyes. “I can keep you in chains… or there is another bargain we can make.”

Hangaku felt sick at the appraisal in the shogun’s eyes. He saw her as a woman—something she had not been for years. She was not a woman, housebound and powerless. She was a warrior.

“The final part of the pact,” he told her, stepping to the side. Behind the shogun was someone she’d not laid eyes on before—a short, stout man who looked like he had never held a blade in his life.

Asari Yoshito, she found out his name was. The Shogun’s retainer, and a key ally. She signed the pact—how could she not?—and she was set free. The civil war ended with one stroke of the pen.

But the war had aged her. In five years, she had learned the skills it took to run a clan the size of Jō and a war as big as a nation. She’d learned how to fight and kill a man with no regrets.

But most of all, she’d learned sorrow. When the war ended and she became a prisoner of another sort—a wife—she looked back on the person she’d been before the war. Even as the months became a year and she nursed her new son and whispered to him about how he would one day seek vengeance on the enemies of the Taira clan, she felt as if that girl from so long ago—once so full of ambition and love—had become nothing more than a ghost.