were converging on Kyoto. In that
interval, Yoshitsune, failing to muster any considerable force in the
capital or its environs, had decided to turn his back on Kyoto and
proceed westward; he himself to Kyushu, and Yukiiye to Shikoku. They
embarked on November 29th, but scarcely had they put to sea when they
encountered a gale which shattered their squadron. Yoshitsune and
Yukiiye both landed on the Izumi coast, each ignorant of the other's
fate. The latter was captured and beheaded a few months later, but
the former made his way to Yamato and found hiding-places among the
valleys and mountains of Yoshino. The hero of Ichi-no-tani and
Yashima was now a proscribed fugitive. Go-Shirakawa, whose fate was
always to obey circumstances rather than to control them, had issued
a new mandate on the arrival of Yoritomo's forces at Kyoto, and
Kamakura was now authorized to exterminate Yoshitsune with all his
partisans, wherever they could be found.

Almost simultaneously with the capture of Yukiiye, whose fate excites
no pity, the fair girl, Shizuka, was apprehended and brought before
Hojo Tokimasa, who governed Kyoto as Yoritomo's lieutenant. Little
more than a year had elapsed since she first met Yoshitsune after his
return from Dan-no-ura, and her separation from him now had been
insisted on by him as the only means of saving her life. Indifferent
to her own fate, she quickly fell into the hands of Tokimasa's
emissaries and was by them subjected to a fruitless examination,
repeated with equally abortive results on her arrival at Kamakura.
There, in spite of her vehement resistance, she was constrained to
dance before Yoritomo and his wife, Masa, but instead of confining
herself to stereotyped formulae, she utilized the occasion to chant
to the accompaniment of her dance a stanza of sorrow for separation
from her lover. It is related that Yoritomo's wrath would have
involved serious consequences for Shizuka had not the lady Masa
intervened. The beautiful danseuse, being enceinte at the time, was
kept in prison until her confinement. She had the misfortune to give
birth to a son, and the child was killed by Yoritomo's order, the
mother being released. The slaughter of an innocent baby sounds very
shocking in modern ears, but it is just to remember that the Kamakura
chief and his three younger brothers would all have been executed by
Kiyomori had not their escape been contrived by special agencies. The
Confucian doctrine, which