Summer Wind

Chapter 34: Lying Low

In which Kenshin suffers nightmares, memories, and future shock.

The berries of the wild maple raspberry ripen from late May through June. The white, five-petaled flowers face downward, and give way to bright berries the color of coals in a dying fire. They are tucked well under the leaves, and an unobservant hiker can stroll right by a full bush without even noticing the feast at his fingertips. He is not an unobservant hiker, and he knows how well these berries complement a freshly-killed hare singed on a spit over an open flame.

He hunts and gathers. He sleeps. He rambles. And he tries to think.

This is the bad time, some of the worst days he's known. He needs to remember who he is, what his life is about, to rid himself of the creeping entanglement he feels when he's with her. He tries to recall the life he will return to, the ghost waiting for him to re-inhabit it. He remembers, with torturous specificity, each and every one of the men whose lives he'd stolen, their faces in their last moments, their voices as he stilled them, even the clothes they were wearing, the exact way his sword had sliced and shredded them. One in particular haunted him.

He'd had to wait a long time for this one. The temperature was well below freezing, and he could feel numbness creeping into his fingers and toes. His joints felt stiff. He began to wonder if his targets were going to party till dawn. Katsura had told him to return before it began to get light. He'd also warned him—again!—to stop giving guards and servants the choice to flee before he started his attack. "Even from the shadows, more has been seen of you than I like. There is no reason to offer mercy to those who have chosen to serve the oppressor."

At last he heard the party start to break up. He rose in his shadowed corner and began to stretch and loosen his body. Shigekura Jūbei would have two bodyguards with him tonight: Ishiji, as usual, and a man new to them, so new that he was listed on the black note as simply "Second Guard." The sounds of leave-taking grew louder as the three of them moved from the interior of the pleasure house to its entrance, and the assassin took up a position that would allow him to trail them for a block or two, sizing them up.

The three men chatted among themselves as they walked. He could tell Jūbei and Ishiji were quite drunk. He didn't like that. Loss of control, both in sword and spirit, made an opponent unpredictable, the intentions easier to read, but the actions wilder. Jūbei was rumored to have some ability, although he'd grown fat and slow. He knew Ishiji, knew that he was skilled and in good condition. "Second Guard" was young, and walked as though he'd been trained but not tested. Kenshin would start with Ishiji, getting the real threat out of the way. He had just stepped out from the shadows behind the group, and had drawn breath to voice his challenge when he heard something that stopped him.

"So, young Kiyosato-kun," Jūbei said jovially, clapping the young man on the shoulder. "You are to be married in the spring, is it?"

Kiyosato grinned and blushed, while the other two men laughed. "I am just here to serve as your bodyguard, sir. Please don't concern yourself with my personal affairs."

"Nonsense, my boy! Don't hide your happiness. Among all this bloodshed, it is a bright spot for the rest of us. Revel in it! And let us rejoice with you."

Affianced, was he? And new to the job. Kenshin would offer him his life; surely Katsura would understand. He closed the distance between himself and the little group, stepped back into black shadow, and said, in a voice pitched to carry just far enough, "If you want to live, run."

As a man they whirled, Ishiji nearest him, the one Jūbei had called Kiyosato behind him and to his left, and Jūbei between them in the rear. Both bodyguards struck solid defensive stances, but Kiyosato had turned as pale as the moonlight reflecting off his blade. Ishiji was the one who answered. "Vile assassin! Show yourself and die!"

Kenshin stepped out into the moonlight, forearms still crossed in his sleeves, and saw suspicion in Ishiji's eyes. The experienced guard had already calculated exactly who their attacker was. Jūbei shielded himself behind Ishiji, who had already begun his rush even before Kenshin's hands were clear of his sleeves. There were two sharp clangs as Kenshin drove Ishiji back against the wall, and then a crunching thud as he thrust the point of his sword through Ishiji's throat into the wall behind him, cutting side up. The dying man dropped his sword and clawed at Kenshin with his right hand. Kenshin grabbed that arm and used it to push his sword's blade up through Ishiji's head.

Jūbei had already shoved Kiyosato aside, and came at his attacker with his sword raised for an overhead strike on Kenshin's head, but Kenshin dropped down, and pushed his sword's tip up through the bottom of his target's lower jaw until it pierced the top of his skull. With a quick levering movement, he pulled his sword straight forward, splitting open the man's face.

Kenshin stood and turned toward Kiyosato. It was clear this was the young man's first real fight. During the eight seconds since the scuffle began, he had remained frozen in place except for staggering a bit as Jūbei rushed past him. Kenshin was tempted to spare him, but he remembered his commander's words. In the split-second this took, Kiyosato roused himself, and rushed Kenshin with a roar. Kenshin let him come on to his sword, and then ended his life with a single swipe through his chest.

He'd already started to reach his hand into the front of his kimono to retrieve the paper with "tenchuu" written on it when, to his astonishment, the man's prone body began to rise. The assassin watched in amazement as Kiyosato struggled to his feet. Staggering, and screaming, "No! I can't die now!", he came at Kenshin once more, this time with his sword held straight out in front of him. Kenshin rushed at him in counterattack, aiming for the man's throat, but the combination of drink and approaching death made the bodyguard stumble just as they met, and they rushed past each other with no effect. Kiyosato continued to lurch forward until he finally stumbled and sprawled face-down in the drainage ditch at the edge of the street.

Kenshin was having no more of this, and he strode over to the still-twitching body. Just as he raised his sword to drive it into his opponent's back and through the heart, he heard, "Please. I can't die. I must live!" It was weak and whispery, and so piteous that Kenshin was struck to his heart. But he'd already begun his downward strike, and he was in no mood to allow it to be deflected.

It wasn't until he'd watched the last life spasms quiver and still that he noticed the warm trickle on his face. He put his fingers up to his cheek and felt— What? He brought his hand out in front of his face. His fingertips were black. That didn't make sense. He stepped out into the moonlight. Blood. The stinging in his cheek told him it was his own.

Once, during the night, he woke from a dream, a bad one, but even as he tried to remember it, it slipped through his fingers. Sitting up, he rubbed one hand over his face. It came away from his cheek wet. In the moonlight, he recognized that particular shade of black. He'd almost forgotten.

In spite of everything, he is sidetracked by sudden moments of strange, dizzying elation, his head feeling like the night sky of a festival, flaring and flashing, bursting with fireworks and rockets. The mere flicker across his mind of a memory: her fingers as they wield her needle, the curve of her back as she leans to stir the rice, or the soft swish of her comb through her hair behind the big screen in the evenings, making a rhythm that he picks up as he polishes his sword. Even the particular and precise strength of the tea she makes for him, its color, its aroma. How she'd learned to adjust its temperature to his liking. "You drink your tea hotter than is quite respectable," she'd said.

He can't keep a solid train of thought going for the life of him. Maybe he will just check on her.

He begins a pattern of returning each day, often at night, stopping at the edge of the forest. He would squat there, motionless for hours on end, watching her shadow moving around inside, knowing exactly what she's touching, where she's sitting. Exactly how her skin reflects the fire and how the quilt settles over her body.

His personal and survival habits begin to slip. On his third day out he forgets to bathe, and then does so no more. He stops trapping and fishing, instead scrubbing for berries and roots, edible ferns and flowers.

Nights, he dreams. In the past couple of months, the nightmares had begun to abate. Now they return, and he is no longer used to them. He wakes in sweats again. The horrifying images take many minutes to fade after he wakes, and creep into his mind even as he guards against them. He begins to bed down under the sun instead of the stars, trying to push the night out of his sleep.

But his dream's terrors do not fade when he wakes. He relives, for the first time in a long time, his first kill: A boy, untried, and eager to prove himself, makes his solitary way out to the chosen location, a quiet, deserted shrine deep in the bamboo forest. How peaceful he feels, waiting for his first target, how confident. This first assignment had been arranged for early morning, and the boy didn't guess that this will be the last time he works in sunlight. The spring of tension when he hears the first footfall on the leaf-softened path. The sudden silver flash of his blade as he unsheathes it, how alive it feels in his hands. The confused look on his victim's face, and how it turns first to disbelief, and then to sick terror. The descent of his strike—he can see it even now in slow-motion—the exquisitely detailed sensations as his sword reaches in and slices out the man's life. A sharp cry, then instantly nothing—bamboo does not echo—nothing but peace and the stirring of cool air in a silent forest. If he doesn't look down at his feet, nothing has changed, not so much as a leaf has fallen. The blood blossoms out across the ground in front of the shrine, soaking in, blackening the earth. He is fine, in spite of the warnings, and he'd been fine until two nights later. He can't now quite recall what he'd done about that, how he had moved from that night of shakes and sick sweats to the coolly efficient assassin he is now.

These memories are not new ones. In fact, they had harried him sorely just weeks ago, during that rainy night he'd spent out after she had made him see himself for what he was. But now they vibrate with emotion. Like live things, they gnaw at his mind, they travel like fire along his nerves. Her words had cut him, there was no denying it, but something else has changed within him. His spirit is flayed and open, vulnerable, defenseless against a human empathy taking root in an embryonic part of his heart.

A scrap of a question floats up to the top of his mind. What if I left—? He can't even finish the thought. It's slippery, and it makes him queasy. Between the nightmares and the headiness, the stalking and the ragged sleep, and the rough, inadequate eating, he feels even more muddled than he had at the cabin.

Maybe he will go home now.