"Still playing with your pet?" Ni asked, his deep growly tone echoing much more loudly than the scratch of his claws on the stone cave floor. San growled back at him, albeit lighter, and lower.
"He's not a pet" She said. Her response echoed much like his, the same way it had each time he'd asked before.
If the human that lay before her on her bed of furs could hear the banter between her brother and herself, he wouldn't have been able to indicate so. He'd been unconscious for two days now, and though he occasionally reacted to his surroundings with a single twitching eyelid, or a whimper, San was certain that he could not speak in this state.
Her second brother followed soon after the first, though whatever animosity he felt, he kept to himself as he stood at the entrance of the cave. Ni noticed his brother's hesitation and growled as he turned back to his sister.
"He's stinking up the whole place. We live here too, San. You can't keep your smelly, ugly, dangerous playthings in the same room we sleep."
San didn't answer him. Her silence was enough of an indication that she wouldn't bend on the issue. They'd argued so many times already, there was nothing new she could say in the man's defense. But Ni was persistent, and flashed his teeth in one final snarl, lowering his neck toward the unconscious man in what San knew was an empty threat, and mirrored with a threatening stance of her own.
He reeled back slightly, ears still pressed down when he snorted and turned away. Her brothers grudgingly stormed out and down the hill. When they were gone, she felt, before she heard, a strained sigh. San automatically looked down to the source of the sigh, where the human lay sleeping.
She was leaned over him, hands at either side of his arms, her chest inches from, and parallel to his. Odd. She hadn't been aware of her posture until this moment. Why she'd situated herself so, and without her own awareness, she had no idea. She righted herself, sitting upright and folding her legs to kneel at his side.
He muttered some incoherent sound as he turned his head in his sleep. San considered that somehow he was aware of his surroundings despite his state. Or, more likely, he was simply reacting to his pain.
She reached for his right hand and pulled back the sleeve, as clinically as she would've pulled back the skin from a carcass, all without touching the cursed flesh that was there. Merely, she examined its color, its spread, trying to determine whether the mark had made its way any further up his arm, or dug its way any deeper into his tissue.
She hardly heard the whimper that escaped him when she pressed the pad of her thumb against his wrist to feel the weak pulse there. He was still in much the same state he had been when she and his elk carried him up here. If his pain had spiked suddenly, she couldn't tell.
San sighed in defeat, standing up and laying another pelt down on him, in case he was cold. It was all she could think to do before she became aware of the need to quench her thirst. Before she left the den she dug out the preserved stomach of a deer from a small pile of her things against the wall.
It was late, and especially dark within the thick underbrush, but San knew her way to the stream just as well as she knew her way around the seven square meters of cave she'd confined herself to with the human in order to tend to him. She'd hardly left his side since the Forest Spirit spared him, much to her brothers' scorn, and consequently, her own ridicule. Ichi and Ni honored her right to do with him as she pleased, he being her rightful "kill" of sorts. But they certainly did not appreciate her decision to keep him alive, well fed, and warm.
San knelt down at the bed of the running water, upstream from where she usually brought Ashitaka to clean him. When San lowered her mouth to the surface of the water to drink, she realized she'd thought his name when she thought of him. She wiped droplets off her chin as she considered why. Maybe her brothers were right, and she was getting too attached to him.
'Just wait, he'll be just like that bird you took in' Ichi had assured her more than once. Ni mirrored those sentiments, 'Even if he doesn't turn on you later, you're wasting your own time'.
She lowered the dried deer stomach into the water, filling it up and closing the fleshy valve with her thumb to keep it from leaking when she carried it back up to the den. She was stopped in her tracks when she saw Yakul approach her. The elk stopped only a dozen feet from her, and outstretched his thickly furred neck down toward her half the remaining distance. Her arm closed the distance, palm up, for him to smell.
The elk leaned into her palm the same way any of the tame beasts would, though he had every opportunity now to be wild like his fellow cervidae. He never wandered far from where his human, Ashitaka, now slept, undeterred by the wolf gods that also slept there.
He spoke to her when she pulled her hand away, and he did so in a language that was only just less coherent to her than that of the animals which naturally dwelled here.
Master is well? he asked.
"No" she said. "I can't cure what he has. But at the least he won't die tonight."
Master is awake? he asked.
"No."
Yakul snorted in aa dejected show of grief. Every day he saw her he asked about Ashitaka, and every day he was just as upset as before. What was his plan, San wondered, if shitaka never woke up? Of course, she didn't ask him, but she was sure that the elk had not even considered it. Domestic beast like him lived and died at the sides of their human caretakers. He relied too much on his master. Cared too much about Ashitaka to be free.
She'd seen the humans of Tataraba cage and beat their animals. It was easy to imagine all humans committing such evils. San could not understand the impulse of owned beasts to be kept and to serve their humans. She was beyond trying to understand. But in defense of the elk, she did believe she'd seen some measure of genuine affection between the two of them.
A relationship built on mutual trust with a human seemed so impossible to her only days ago. But despite her knowing better, and despite all she'd come to learn out of the need to know it, she had to admit that she was beginning to trust Ashitaka.
She was tempted for a moment once or twice to speculate that her newfound trust in Ashitaka was not unlike Yakul's. A thought which commanded both her curiosity, and fear.
San was no tame beast. And she would certainly not be made into one.
If anything, Ashitaka was the tame beast between them. He was, after all, the one who now relied on her for food, warmth, and rest. He was the one who needed her care. This was an outlook that brought her a strange satisfaction. Not the satisfaction of a predator ruling over its prey, as she might've expected to feel, but that of a caretaker. She felt almost affectionate toward him.
Yakul had been drinking from the stream as she mused. His ears flicked away some imperceptible noise, and his head quickly lifted from the surface of the water. He left briskly, at a speed that was more to avoid discomfort than to escape danger.
San looked in the direction opposite the one the deer had left. The breeze carried the scent of her mother downwind to her, and she quickly rose to her feet.
Moro sauntered out from the other side of the trees with her head low. She walked slowly up the hill, briefly turning her head to look at her daughter without stopping or slowing her gait. San could see the mangled carcass of a doe hanging by its neck from her mother's jaws. She ran up the hill to greet her, keeping pace at her elbow as she walked to the cave.
Moro dropped the doe at the entrance of the cave and, eyeing the figure laying within, she crept through the passageway. San quickly ran ahead of her, standing at Ashitaka's side. Her mother had threatened on a number of occasions to crush his head. These were threats San had dismissed, but she couldn't fight the recently constant and growing need to protect him regardless. Moro pushed roughly against his right arm with her snout, and raised her head judgmentally back at San.
"It's pointless you know."
San didn't answer. Moro repeated herself.
"The deer god himself wouldn't cure him. Even if you ease his suffering, he's going to die, and you'll have wasted your time."
"I don't care."
Moro growled lightly, frustrated but unwilling to prolong the argument. "I brought you meat. You may feed the human some, if you wish." She left without another word of it, moving outside again to her preferred place above the cave.
San stopped her at the precipice that overlooked the lower half of the mountain, before her mother could physically separate herself from her.
"He doesn't change anything. He won't betray us to the gunwoman, and I'm not going to lose sight of what matters" she insisted, "Even if you don't trust him, at least trust me. I know what I'm doing."
Moro sighed and folded her legs under her belly to sit at the edge of the cliff. She kept her eyes up, peering off into the distance, and remained silent. San assumed the conversation had come to an end, and turned to make her leave before her mother spoke, having collected her thoughts.
"It's not a matter of trust. Or a matter of your priorities" she said, her deep throaty voice almost quiet. "He's here. With us, with you. And you care about him."
Moro waited patiently as San took in her words. Twice San opened her mouth to retort before closing it again. She frantically shook her head before finding the words to argue with.
"He's not our tribe. He's not more important to me than our family is!"
"Ashitaka won't die to protect the mountain. But you will, won't you?"
"Of course I will" she answered without pause. San could not find the relief she'd hoped to on her mother's face. She could not understand why.
"You've chosen this fate, San. I would not have wished it upon you, but now you risk losing more than just this life."
Her mother never told her what she meant by it. Moro took her place atop the roof of the cave, and San had nowhere to go but to return to the human.
She carved out a good helping of meat from the haunch of the doe, making sure to do so far enough away from the cave as to not to smell the carcass from her bed as she slept. The meat was still warm from the hour or so ago when it was attached to a living creature. Safe for a human with a weak stomach to digest.
San knelt down beside Ashitaka's head. He was still very much asleep, and San did not anticipate he would wake any time soon. She lifted his head and rested it on her knee to support it as she reached for the deer-stomach pouch she'd had at her side.
Feeding an unconscious man was easiest if his throat was not dry. It was simple enough to coax his mouth open. She'd certainly repeated this process enough now that even unconscious, his body relented to her. A few drops at first, to make sure he had the strength to swallow them before she gradually emptied cold water into his mouth.
"Maybe someday you'll repay me for this" she muttered to herself, knowing Ashitaka could not respond, even if he did have the cognizance to hear her. "You can bring me food, and I'll sleep all day and night" she smirked to herself imagining their roles reversed, but perhaps without the curse or gunshot wound.
The pouch was empty then. She set it aside and reached for the bloody haunch. Humans were averse to raw meat. But luckily, Ashitaka could not protest to raw meat in his state. Besides, the blood would help it go down.
San bit into the muscle, her teeth cutting through as easily as a knife through snow. It didn't take long to reduce it to a viscous red paste in her mouth. Without allowing herself any time to consider the thoughts which always proceeded this part, she lowered her mouth to his.
She had dismissed it as an association of emotions. After all, Moro had fed her much the same way when she was young and unable to feed herself. She had the preconception already that it was a gesture of tenderness. Whatever it was she felt when having her mouth on his was just because of that link in her mind and nothing more.
She pulled herself up from his mouth and was stunned to find that his eyes were open. His eyelids lifted weakly, and his pupils were slow to find her face in the dark, but his gaze was unmistakably upon her. San had not expected him to wake.
His stare confronted her, even in its weakness. It commanded her awareness of that feeling she had no name for.
"Ashitaka?" she asked.
He didn't answer, and before San could speak again his lids fell closed once more. Something of relief washed over her.
Not awake, not awake, she told herself. Just dreaming. But even with this reassurance, she remained still, waiting just to be sure that he had not truly woken. Moments went by. Once she was certain he was sleeping, she was torn between relief and disappointment. When she became aware of this dichotomy, she started to chew up another clump of meat, rather than ponder it.
The task of feeding him could not have ended soon enough. She treated herself to the final mouthfuls of haunch when it was over, and traded the deer hide blanket that covered Ashitaka for a thicker, and much warmer bear pelt.
She kept a distance of four feet or so from him when she laid down to sleep at his side. It would be more convenient to sleep under the pelt with him, to share what little heat there was. She knew that perfectly well.
San feared what would come of her to cross that boundary. Dangerous enough as it was to care for a human as she found herself doing, miles more dangerous would be to share a bed with one. She would not allow herself to grow any more accustomed to him, or any more invested emotionally than she already was.
She found she couldn't sleep when she faced him. Instead, she rolled to her other side to face the wall. Turning her back on him in a manner that was more trusting than it was isolating.
Any day now, he would be well again, and this routine she'd made for herself would be ended. This pleasant distraction of being his caretaker, over. it was not as hopeful a thought as it was when she began.