The South Sea Road between Komana and Ueda, Hozumi Province, Nippon
Month of New Growth
***
His consciousness returned with a start, and he almost leapt upright in his haste to reestablish his mind in the world. The sudden movement sent waves of pain and nausea through his broken body. He found himself lying on a tea-stall’s terrace, protected from the sun in the shade of a canvas awning. Somebody had placed a cool wet towel on his head, had loosened his travelling cloak and piled his belongings alongside him. One hand grasped weakly at the untidy heap, emerging with a pair of battered spectacles that he unceremoniously stuffed onto his face.
“You awake?” a gruff voice asked him. Akiyoshi still nursed wounded pride, but his friend’s well-being took priority. Worrying moments passed before Nanashi’s eyes came back into focus behind the square frames, and even then he clutched tightly at his head as if enduring a massive headache.
“… yeah,” he finally managed to gasp, obviously not. The wanderer swung his legs over the side of the bench, digging his toes into the sandy ground as if searching for purchase in reality. He managed to cram a myriad of meanings into his next word. “Sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Akiyoshi replied, in the tone of voice that meant ‘I’ll get you for it later’. “Feel like telling me what that was all about?”
“In short?” In truth, Nanashi only felt like retching, except apparently he had already emptied his stomach of all its contents. The vile aftertaste left behind in his mouth, like acidic fur coating his tongue, only intensified after a few dry heaves. It took another long while before the throbbing in his head receded enough for him to speak clearly again. “I know what that word… Natosatael… means.”
“Oh?” Akiyoshi’s voice had lost all of the playful teasing tone that had tormented Nanashi earlier. He leaned close, his handsome features stern and serious. “Is that something you can tell me?”
“The Night of Nefarious Flame.” Gratefully, Nanashi accepted the cup of pale green tea that the warrior offered. He took a sip, swilled the refreshing beverage around his mouth, then leaned away to spit it out upon a secluded patch of dirt. The second sip went down his throat, somewhat quenching the parched fire that threatened to strangle his voice and throttle his breath. His next words flowed slightly easier from his cracked vocal cords. “The daemon that caused it all.”
“The daemon?” Akiyoshi had only barely seen it in person that night before wisely deciding to flee. “The one that killed Yukimi…?”
Nanashi nodded, involuntarily reliving the vision of the girl’s battered body being torn in two. The tea he had just drunk came travelling back upwards the way it had come, emptying onto the shaded dirt beneath the terrace. He closed his eyes and clenched his jaw against the agony, the acrid stench in the back of his nostrils inviting further painfully dry heaves.
“That daemon,” he acknowledged at length, once his chest had settled again. His head felt as taut as a drum skin and as hot as a forge, his mouth still gritty and vile. His stomach had tied itself in knots that would take days to unravel, and all strength had left his limbs, such that he had to devote great effort to simply sitting upright. His vision wavered somewhere between hazy and fading, as if even the corrective lenses before his eyes could not cope with how weak they had become. Funnily enough, though, he could sense the beauty of the scenery around him as if it lived upon his very skin: the cloudless blue sky of early spring, the fertile verdure and the fresh wind rustling through the forest, the rustle of songbirds in the branches overhead. Somehow the contrast between the tranquillity of the vista and the agony in his spirit didn’t seem quite fair.
He sighed feebly, grateful for Akiyoshi’s silence. It gave him the time he needed to regroup and to formulate his thoughts. A sharp splinter dug into his bony backside, as gradually the feeling faded from his legs because of his poor posture. He paid the discomfort no heed. It kept him awake and focused.
When at last the warrior spoke again, he sounded greatly confused. He scratched his chin, peering in puzzlement at the wanderer.
“I’m not getting this. Why would Kayu be associated to that? Yukimi and Chiaki and then you… she lost every bit as much as the rest of us that night, was lucky to make it out unscathed...”
“I don’t know,” Nanashi replied honestly. “I really don’t know.”
Akiyoshi paused, then gave a rueful smile.
“But you plan to get to the bottom of it nonetheless.”
“That much hasn’t changed,” Nanashi agreed weakly. “I suppose I should thank you for the information. At least it’s something to work with.”
“I hope anything else that I tell you won’t end up with you like this.” Although Nanashi didn’t know it yet, he’d been unconscious for three whole days. Dark shadows gathered like clouds beneath his eyes, and his face had a dusky complexion that spoke of extreme exhaustion and loss of blood. The terrace of the tea stall had been the only place within leagues where he could rest, and the message that Akiyoshi had sent to Ueda by means of a hastily paid peasant runner had yet to bear fruit. The lordling had thought about going himself, but he could not leave Nanashi alone and defenceless. Not with people like Kamanosuke Katagiri still within travelling distance.
The silence lengthened again, and he wondered whether Nanashi had fallen asleep this time. Certainly his breathing sounded shallow and steady, an improvement over the feverish gasps while he had lain on his sickbed, but only just. The wanderer’s eyes remained open, however, staring lost and lonely into the distance.
Akiyoshi cleared his throat to speak, and they returned to focus on him.
“I’m told that it’s not considered fashionable nowadays. To hold a flame for so long, you know. Much less for somebody you haven’t met in ten years. What do you think you are? Pure of heart?” He spoke softly, conscious that the feelings – no matter how false they might be – were likely all that sustained Nanashi through twelve years of solitude and study. Who knew how the wanderer would react if Akiyoshi caused his world to come crashing down around his head once more. The lordling fully appreciated that he had to approach the subject carefully.
But Nanashi simply smiled, that self-effacingly sheepish and small smile of his. Normally Akiyoshi would have found it borderline irritating. Now, he rejoiced that his friend could still manage it.
“Not pure, just stubborn,” the wanderer whispered weakly. “And it’s twelve, not ten.”
Akiyoshi chuckled politely, then regained his grave composure.
“Are you thinking that Kayu might have been spirited away like Subaru from your story? That she might have been coerced or threatened into disappearing? Don’t you think that’s deluded? Do you think you’re going to be able to save her? Just like you did with that little girl? Just like in a fairy tale of old”
Nanashi winced at the barrage of questions, reaching for another sip of the tea. By now it had grown cold, but the wanderer slurped at it thirstily nonetheless, grateful for its soothing fluidity.
“Maybe,” he laughed at length, a soft and lifeless laugh that quickly sent him into a fit of wheezing. Akiyoshi froze; Nanashi had already coughed up half his lungs and a whole lot of blood. Thankfully, however, this time he spluttered back tea and nothing else. “Maybe not.”
A single cherry tree sat opposite the terrace, pink blossoms floating to carpet the ground and rot there in the mud. The wanderer’s thoughts turned to the ephemeral nature of existence, the many moments that would slip from his grasp unless he seized the initiative. He stood at such a moment now, he realised. Unless he stepped forth of his own accord, he would let another facet of his soul fall to the ground to rot, never to be recovered.
Only the cry of a hunting hawk pierced the mid-afternoon silence, soaring as a solitary speck in the endless sky above. It folded its wings and plummeted, keen eyes having picked out prey somewhere in the distance. Soon it disappeared from sight.
“But there’s no harm in finding out, is there?”
The fatalistic undertones to the statement made Akiyoshi instinctively want to reach out and hit the wanderer. But then he realised that honesty guided Nanashi’s tongue, not bravado… and that the man had spent so long alone that he truly did not value his own life any more. The realisation chilled the lordling to his very bones. As somebody who had been respected and esteemed and placed at the centre of attention from his birth, the mere idea of throwing his life away for something so meaningless seemed as alien and foreign to him as Nanashi’s heritage. Even the tenets of bushido spoke nothing of love.
“If she did go of her own will?” he asked through gritted teeth, probing for a flaw in Nanashi’s argument, a weakness in his armour of self-hate and sacrificial martyrdom. “What happens then? If she wants to stay there? Without you?”
The smile on the wanderer’s face made him want to cry. Later he would reminisce on the absurdity of his reaction. Akiyoshi had lived through some of the most gruelling training a man could withstand, had weighed lives on a balance and chosen which to discard, had seen three of his best friends die before his eyes, had been through countless battles and wars and desperate retreats. Throughout it all, he had never once cried. And yet, that one smile, and the words that followed…
“In which case I back off, walk away, and think of her from afar. Maybe I’ll never see her again… but so be it. It’s been twelve years. What’s the difference between twelve and twenty?”
He did not know which he found worse, the knowledge that Nanashi felt willing to sacrifice everything by gambling on something as fickle as a woman’s heart, or that the wanderer fully presumed to be dead by the age of thirty. He searched for something else to say, something that might convince the man to be more circumspect in his folly.
“What would your parents say? A letter came last week. They thanked me for taking you in. For giving you another chance. There’s a letter for you, too.” Akiyoshi knew that Nanashi had not met with his family for more than a few days at a time since his expulsion from the Academy, both from a sense of guilt at the blame he shouldered and from a sense of duty towards the truth he had to uncover. The young boy he had known would never have knowingly done anything to disappoint them.
The young man who sat before him, though, merely produced yet another bleak fake smile. He remembered some of the words his father had spoken at the Tohokan all those years ago. A man must always strive to find his place in the world, but remember, the world is much much larger than you can imagine. If you do not find what you seek here in Nippon, do not despair, for there are enough lands beyond the seas to satisfy any dream.
“They will understand.”
Akiyoshi blinked. He’d thought before that Nanashi had not changed. The way he put up his defensive façades, the way he always strove to help others at the expense of himself, even those remained the same. But maybe, perhaps, something had changed. Not necessarily for the better, not necessarily for the worse… but not the same as before.
For literally the first time in years, he found himself completely at a loss for words.
Time passed, long hours during which both men neither moved nor spoke. Thoughts swirled like ethereal eddies around them, weighing down the air itself with the heaviness of their substance. From time to time a breeze blew past, gently ruffling the pair of kimonos motionless beneath the awning, one a flamboyant fiery red, the other a calm dark blue. But the transient world of men seemed content on ignoring them completely, from the travellers on the road to the owner of the establishment, paying them no attention as together they thought of what had yet to come.
The western sky had turned a shade of dark purple by the time either of them spoke again. The air stung colder now, almost frosty upon their exposed faces, and the travellers on the road had dwindled to a trickle of farmers rushing to get home before dark. Stars speckled the velvet heavens above, peeking at them from behind journeying clouds, whilst a ghostly apparition of a moon hung low above the tree line to the east. Nanashi’s parched voice echoed like the hoot of an owl’s call through the onrushing night.
“Aki… I’m going to need your help in confirming some of what you’ve told me, and other things besides.”
The warrior sighed, his internal struggle long since put aside. If the wanderer wished to throw away his life of his own accord, then it was not his place to deny it. He doubted that anything he could say would dissuade the man in any case. Thus, as an old friend, his duty lay in giving him as much help as possible.
“What are you going to do?”
“I am Sasurai-no-Ijin, Nanashi, remember? A nameless foreign wanderer is a nameless foreign wanderer, no matter where in the world he goes.”
“Where, then?”
Nanashi’s determination manifested in a single word.
“Raiaera.”
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