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He steadily refused to cancel his veto, and after an abortive sojourn of twenty days at Koshigoe, Yoshitsune returned to Kyoto where his conduct won for him increasing popularity. Three months later, Yoritomo appointed him governor of Iyo. It is possible that had not the situation been complicated by a new factor, the feud between the brothers might have ended there.
The fight began with a fierce onset from the Taira, which drove back their foe. With voice and example Yoshitsuné encouraged his men. For an interval the combat lulled. Then Wada, a noted archer, shot an arrow which struck the junk of a Taira chief. "Shoot it back!" cried the chief. An archer plucked it from the wood, fitted it to his bow, and let it fly at the Minamoto fleet.
Sweeping over the Harima Nada with the storm astern, Yoshitsune and his little band of heroic men landed safely on the Awa coast, and dashed at once to the assault of the Taira, who were taken wholly by surprise, never imagining that any forces could have essayed such an enterprise in such a tempest.
Thus, when the largely augmented Minamoto force began to move westward from Harima in October, 1184, under the command of Noriyori, no part was assigned to Yoshitsune. He remained unemployed in Kyoto. Noriyori pushed westward steadily, but not without difficulty.
The peasants round the open fire in their huts never tire of repeating the achievements of Yoshitsuné and his faithful retainer Benkei, or of the two brave Soga brothers; the dusky urchins listen with gaping mouths until the last stick burns out and the fire dies in its embers, still leaving their hearts aglow with the tale that is told.
He wielded the halberd with extraordinary skill, and such a huge weapon in the hand of a man with seven feet of stalwart stature constituted a menace before which a solitary wayfarer did not hesitate to surrender his sword. One evening, Benkei observed an armed acolyte approaching the Gojo bridge in Kyoto. The acolyte was Yoshitsune, and the time, the eve of his departure for Mutsu.
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.
By wholesale oaths, sworn in the most solemn manner, he had endeavoured to disarm the suspicions of his intended victim, and he so far succeeded that, when the attack was delivered, Yoshitsune had only seven men to hold the mansion against sixty. But these seven were the trusty and stalwart comrades who had accompanied Yoshitsune from Mutsu and had shared all the vicissitudes of his career.
Finally, in the spring of 1187, Yoshitsune and his followers, disguised as mendicant friars, made their way up the west coast, and, after hairbreadth escapes, found asylum in the domain of Fujiwara Hidehira, who had protected Yoshitsune in his youth.
Yoshitsune, pleading illness, declined to receive the envoy, and it was determined at Kamakura that extreme measures must be employed. Volunteers were called for to make away with Yoshitsune, and, in response, a Nara bonze, Tosabo Shoshun, whose physical endowments had brought him into prominence at Kamakura, undertook the task on condition that a substantial reward be given him beforehand.
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