Jack collapsed onto his hands and knees, breathing hard from the run. He should be safe here – he had run very far – but even if he wasn't, he didn't have the strength to run any farther. His kimono was rent and his skin lacerated by the beast's claws, but the pain of his wounds was nothing compared to the agony in his heart.
The sword was broken.
He took a few minutes to catch his breath, then drew what remained of his katana from its scabbard. The beast had broken the blade halfway along its length. Jack had the part of it that was attached to the hilt, but the rest of it was somewhere far behind him. He didn't know how it could have happened, but the beast had bitten down on the blade and…it had broken. Then Jack had fled, in shock and panic, thinking that he could hear Aku's cruel laughter ringing in his ears.
I should have let the beast kill me. At least then I could have preserved some remnant of my honor. His vision blurred as his eyes filled with tears. He heard sobbing; his own, he realized. It was shameful to cry this way, but he could not stop himself. After all this time, all his traveling and all he had endured…failure. It all came to nothing. A long, low, keening wail of despair escaped his lips.
Jack was beaten. He had lost – and there was only one course to take. Though he had not died in battle, he could still die with honor, like a samurai ought to. The broken sword would serve to slit his stomach, at least. He had no fellow warrior to strike off his head for him, so his death would be slow and painful. But it would at least be an honorable death. It would, in some measure, make up for his failures.
He wiped his tears with his sleeve and got into a kneeling position, setting the sword before him on the bare ground. This jagged, chilly mountainside, with its gray stone and gray mists and gray skies, would be his deathbed and his grave. There would be nobody to burn him on a funeral pyre, nobody to say prayers or to mourn, but he felt he did not even deserve that scant comfort. He prostrated himself on the ground and spoke a prayer to Amida Buddha, then sat up again. He loosened his sash a little and pulled the torn cloth of his robe aside to expose his belly – then he took the sword in his hands, holding it so that the jagged end was a hairsbreadth from his skin, and nerved himself to…
"Whatever it is, lad, it can't be as bad as all that." Startled, Jack spun around to face the source of the voice. Standing on a boulder not far away from him was a tall, broad-shouldered man in rough clothing, his ginger-red hair loose about his shoulders, his bearded face a kindly smile. He was wearing a great broadsword in a scabbard on his back. The stranger (or was he a stranger? He seemed familiar somehow) leaped down from the boulder and approached him, his open hands showing that his intentions were friendly. "And that's a hell of a way to go, in any case."
Pulling his ghi closed again, Jack stood up to face the stranger. "Please, leave me to do this. It is the only honorable course left to me."
The stranger shook his head. "No it's not. It's giving up and that's never honorable, not under any circumstances." He looked Jack over carefully. "Looks like you've had a rather bad day. Come on, I'll give you some food and clean clothes and a place to sleep for the night. And I'll do something about those scratches, they look painful." He held out his hand. "Everything will seem better after some food and a good night's rest. My house isn't too far."
Jack pondered this. The man's interruption had been rude and bordering on sacrilegious, but of course he couldn't know about the tradition of seppuku so he couldn't be blamed for that. And he had offered his hospitality – refusing it would be unthinkable.
So he would accept. There was nothing else to do. "Thank you," he bowed. "I will go with you."
The red-haired man grinned, his teeth shining white. "That's good, lad." His eyes went to Jack's broken katana, which was lying on the ground. "Maybe I can fix that sword of yours. I have some experience in such matters."
Jack went to pick it up. "I mean no offense, but I do not think you could. It is enchanted and the ones who forged it passed on a long time ago." He put it back in its scabbard.
"I can tell. As I said, I have some experience in these matters." He beckoned for Jack to follow him, then went to walk around the boulder he had been standing on before. Jack trailed after, wondering at this strange man. Maybe he wasn't a man at all, but a kami, a wild spirit. Jack felt uneasy at that thought – but even so, he reasoned, the fellow had offered him help, and if he intended to do harm he could do no worse to Jack than he had intended to do to himself.
The man walked down a rough little path, a goat track, whistling a little tune. After a few minutes they came to a place where the path ended, near a great wall of rock. The wall was split, leaving an opening just wide enough for the stranger to pass by turning sideways. Jack went after him.
They emerged into a small valley, and Jack found the green of it startling after the gray rock. The path continued here, a small dirt track, and the red-haired man kept walking along it. They went around a bend, and came to a fair-sized wooden house with a thatch roof.
"Home sweet home," the man proclaimed as he opened the front door. He gestured for his guest to enter the house first.
Jack bowed to him and removed his sandals, as his custom dictated, before entering the house. The room he came to was large, simply but comfortably furnished, with a stone fireplace in which a few embers glowed. The stranger got a few logs and sticks from a nearby bin and tossed them on the embers, then prodded them with a fire iron until the logs caught. He smiled in satisfaction.
"Sit down here and warm up. I imagine that you'll be wanting a bath, so I'll go heat some water for you. And I'll see what's in the larder for a meal." Jack thanked his host and sat down on the rug before the hearth. The man left through another door – Jack caught a glimpse of the kitchen beyond it – still whistling merrily to himself.
Jack sighed and closed his eyes, enjoying the warmth of the fire as it took the chill from his bones. His host had been right. He was starting to feel better already.