Another chapter, la dee da...Hatsumi, by the way, is not high.
Disclaimer: FB ain't mine, or anything else you recognize, for that matter.
Chapter 20
The "sickroom," as it had come to be known, now had a new occupant. Khezuke, bleeding severely from several gashes that mysteriously opened all over his body, had to be carried in by Haku and Hatsuharu. The doctor was now undertaking the time-consuming task of stitching up the numerous angry gashes.
Khezuke's horrendous scream rang in the witnesses' heads for a long time afterwards. Asheno had retreated to his rooms, leaving Rhena and the others to take care of everything.
The two veteran inhabitants of the sickroom, Khosure and Lhurone, held a hushed conference with Haku, Hatsuharu and Hotohori, as the five looked at the curtain that hid the doctor, Khezuke, and Rhena from view. A bloody trail still led from the doorway to behind the curtain.
"Hold that, please, Rhena," the doctor ordered. Mercifully, Khezuke had remained unconscious since the gashes appeared.
"What happened?" Khosure asked, fascinated. "Who was that?"
"Ashu Khezuke from our grade," Hatsuharu replied grimly. "He's a Dzuni, too. Got kicked out of his house by his parents when the letter from Asheno arrived." Obviously it rankled on the bull's mind. "We came into the house, and Asheno was standing in the entry hall. At first Khezuke just stared at Asheno in a funny way, then he collapsed, screamed, and these…cuts magically appeared on his body."
"Is that how his Dzuni spirit responds to Asheno? If so, he's got problems," Lhurone observed.
"I'm pretty sure he's the boar of the Dzuni," Haku murmured, "but I really don't see why he'd get cuts just from seeing Asheno."
"Assuming Asheno was the reason," corrected Hotohori.
"Those gashes looked like the kind you'd get from a really sharp whip," said Lhurone. No one asked him how he knew.
After two hours, the doctor finally emerged. "It'll take a long time for him to recover, but the stitches should start healing in a day or two. Just keep the bandages fresh and use this scar solution," he told Rhena. "Good day, everyone. I'll be back to check on him tomorrow." He bowed to the huddle as he departed.
Rhena turned wearily to them. "500 stitches," she said. "I'm not letting Asheno near this one anymore."
Hatsumi
It was time for a change of scene. Time to get away from Rhenigroth, from my old life. Find a new city, new streets to drift on. Cross the mountains, see the sea of Zi Alda and the venerable capital of Hoth. Lhasa, city of the harithe. Snow instead of rain. I'd saved enough train fare money from the piddling part-time jobs I'd managed to find the last two years, since I escaped from The Den of Sin. About time, too, my current boss was an S.O.B. I'd be working the cashier, or stocking the shelves, when the old drunk would yell, "Rhenuth, bring that bottle over, will you?" Right in the customer's hearing and all. The store being a liquor store only made it more ludicrous.
"Rhenuth" I picked up, being the first name I saw after I'd run away from The Den of Sin. It was on a sign for a brothel. A policeman had stopped me.
"Are you lost, little boy?" Rare enough that a policeman would be in that area of Rhenigroth, rarer still that one with a heart of gold would be there.
"Yes." I couldn't tell him about The Den. If the owners found out who snitched, I'd be dead.
"What's your name?"
"Hatsumi. Rhenuth Hatsumi." I'd sound more believable if I had a last name, too. "My parents left me here then drove off." Child abandonments were fairly commonplace among desperate people in western Hoth.
He plunked me down in one of the more decent local orphanages. I had a clean bed and regular meals. The downside was that the bed was more than a tad broken down, and the food consisted of unidentifiable mush. The managers found a job for me in a hotel kitchen, then as a guard. After I'd earned enough money, I moved into a communal apartment house. We didn't pay rent, but we had to perform maintenance on our apartments in return for staying there. It is fair to say I was the only one who paid his full due. I'd picked up a gig in the liquor store.
I have moved around a lot in Rhenigroth, and I have seen all there is to see in Rhenigroth. I respond not just to wanderlust, but also the need to escape the many eyes of The Den of Sin. Their constant threat has forced me to dye my light brown hair black, and to slouch to hide my height and muscles. So demeaning, to have to shrink and disguise my body.
To fair Lhasa, then, the hub that, for countless centuries, has welcomed refugees and those wishing to hide.
The last few hectic weeks of the school year passed by quickly. The high school placement exams were duly suffered, and survived, by the students. Khezuke and Khosure made theirs up later. Miraculously, all of them, except for Lhurone who didn't take the tests, performed decently despite the upheavals in their lives.
Graduation proceeded mechanically and soullessly; the five dzuni who participated had no relatives, aside from Rhena, to congratulate and hug them. Asheno had told them in a perfunctory exchange last night that they would all attend Karori, and no other school. Lhurone would be home-schooled intensively.
"Karori? Did you say Karori?" Haku had asked incredulously.
"You have excellent, unimpaired ears. Yes, I said Karori," sarcastically responded Asheno. Haku burst out laughing.
"What is so funny?"
"Oh, nothing, Asheno, but Karori of all places…" He continued howling, Asheno steadily glaring at him.
"What is so entertaining about Karori?" Asheno asked through narrowed eyes. "What do you know about it?"
Gathering he'd revealed too much, Haku kept his mouth tightly shut.
Haku
The memories of my last weeks in junior high school are virtually nonexistent. Faran-Zhuku went into overdrive, bombarding both my sleeping and waking moments with visions and voices, as if to make up for lost time. Lately, Rhena keeps asking me if I feel well, because, to quote her, I "look like a sleepwalker, I declare!" Really, I have only been living in a perpetual dream.
A dream of epic proportions, hundreds of monumental and inconsequential episodes in the lives of Lhoru and the Shomas—add some new characters, too—jumping over the fence of my mind, like sheep following one another. But some sheep were more aggressive than others.
While Hatsuharu, Tori, Kho, Lhurone, and Khezuke were resting and gathering their strength, heady events such as Lhoru's first meeting with Asheno, Lhadoman's forced transformation into his true form, and a new woman turning Hathori's life upside down (to name only a very few). New members of the old Dzuni whirled by me, leaving me barely enough time to process them. Yet I still managed to see everything Faran-Zhuku showed me: the fear, the sadness, the grains of joy, the personal preferences, and the pathos that resided within each and every one I encountered in the visions. Faran-Zhuku insists upon my experiencing these in excruciating detail; I have learned to honor his wishes and trust his wisdom, or more accurately, his centuries of accumulated memories. The untouched questions still push and yearn for asking in my mind, but Faran-Zhuku will answer them when he does, and not before. Hopefully before I go insane.
My room, never a bastion of cleanliness to begin with, has succumbed entirely to the outpouring of drawings generated by the visions. Hundreds of drawings and impromptu paintings providing a still image of Shoma family secrets. Secrets that even some of the old Dzuni don't know about each other, but that I, Haku, a fifteen-year-old boy, part of the youngest generation, have been allowed unconditional glimpses of. I spent the night after graduation, listening to Hatsuharu play a bittersweet violin melody, flipping through the hundreds of drawings, remembering each vision. Then, the final vision, the end of the old curse, the beginning of ours.