Chapter Five

At the reedy banks of the river the homeless and abandoned children gathered as he knew they would. As they said they would. Again the youngsters played at catching: once fish, now fireflies. And just like earlier that day, Kohaku helped them. Delighted them.

What a simple thing to do, what a simple act –

There was that one boy, a very ragged and quiet child, who was not as boisterous as the others. It was he who Kohaku had seen that last night and had watched that last day. When the other younglings retreated into the village – as the day, too, retreated into the night – it was he who remained along with the stranger.

"Why do you look so sad?" the asked orphan, whose name faded out of memory.

The stranger smiled: "I – I'm sad for a lot of reasons, kid. I lost my seal."

For the first time the boy-child laughed: "People don't look that sad 'cause they lost their seals, you know."

"You're a wise, young man," he continued. "But without my seal I'll never find my sister."

"Your sister's lost?" Kohaku nodded in reply to the boy's question. "My brother's lost, too. They say he's gone now, he'll never come back."

As the moments passed he learned the truth of what he suspected. The boy did not have a home; in fact he kept to himself, shunning away from the company of children and adults. And the village, for its own part, had more-or-less given up on the child.

"I've been alone for a long time," Kohaku said. He snatched a firefly out of the air and gave it to the boy. "But I'm not alone any more, am I?"

The child let the firefly flash within his palms and crawl about his fingers; he squirmed a little here and there as he felt its legs pry into the gaps between his knuckles.

"Would you help me?" Kohaku asked with a voice that was not a child's not an adult's any longer but a new and unheard-of mixture. "Help me get my seal back?"

The youngling nodded and at once followed the stranger into the stream.

"I know the seal was with me when I started my swim," he said, playfully recalling what happened last night.

"You're lucky, you know, I'm good at swimming."

"Really?" He chuckled. "I think I am lucky. And there's still daylight, too. Here," he lured, "let's go in, let's go in, deeper – and even if we don't find anything it'll be fun."

Kohaku took off his overcoat and lay it atop a rock. The boy, who was wearing very little as it was, took off his kimono and, stark naked, wadded into the river.

The operation was cold in precision but not heartless in emotion. Such as it was, once he had been called a ninja – and he wondered if in his former, forgotten, life he had not been so for he was more than a little adept at the art – yet he was not a machine. There was a soul and a mind there; it was love and it was not wrong. Though to an outsider unfamiliar with the practice the task would have resembled evil.

Always there were methods. Tools, habits like those of predators and he grew to be intimately familiar with them. Adults with jobs would be missed. Children, divorced from society at a time of war and poverty, unwanted and orphaned, who would notice? Who would care?

Men would be too logical to be played. Women might be lured by sentimentality but they could be uncomfortable venturing far from their village. But children, with their intrinsic youth and vitality, lonely children, shown even a sliver of compassion, whose aim, really, was to please and be loved, they were the ideal targets.

It would be like a game.

Thusly, the boy swam wherever Kohaku said he thought he saw the seal's metal box beneath the stream's silvery surface. Across the current, back and forth, past its reedy banks. Further up stream. Past boulders lining curving paths. Again, further up stream, closer and closer to the mountainside. The orphan, as if leashed by words alone, followed him without question, obediently. He had so much energy and so much desire to be helpful that he became reckless enough not to fathom the danger of being led so far from the village and the relative safety it afforded.

The youngster proved to be as good a swimmer as he boasted – but Kohaku was better.

From behind, though, the boy could not see that but it did not matter for the playful, gentle prodding kept him busy working against the river as the two, together, swam further and further toward the cavern's entrance.

And then, when Kohaku felt they were far enough away from mortal eyes –

The child resurfaced by Kohaku. Kohaku stared at the child.

The stranger treaded over the deepest, darkest parts of the water and reached into his kimono. He unsheathed his thin, long dagger and aimed it at the boy's throat. Right then and there, he sank the weapon into the flesh. With a move as fast as lightning, he flung it through the neck all but severing the head and silencing the cry the youngling uttered, singular and poignant.

Kohaku submerged the body and cleaned it. Then he emerged, going from the river to the dry, arid forest, carrying the sacrifice across his shoulders. He reached the entrance of the cave and paused: it was a hell-like and foreboding passage. But the eyes, those ravenous and hungry eyes, they called and he answered entering into the void, unafraid, proud.

"I took longer than I expected, Naraku. I am sorry," he apologized, bowing his head and presenting his catch – the food – on the ground, by his feet.

An eerie, blue luminance, whose source was not part of this world, cast the interior of the cavern in a glow alien yet familiar to Kohaku. All around, in the nooks and in the alcoves were scattered the bodies of bats, shriveled like dried fruit, dead and bloodless. At the middle of the chamber was a mass of pulsating flesh, a tangle of flailing tentacles and a human-like head and torso sitting amid the throbbing, aching web work like a spider. It was the visage of Naraku, weak and weary after their latest defeat in battle at the hands of their enemies.

The demon was hungry. Very hungry. And as the boy stood before the face, the eyes, those parts of the figure that retained the proportions of a man smiled.

While others would be horrified, there was not a fragment of terror betrayed by Kohaku. He stood awed. Elated. He preferred Naraku's mutated form over his human form: it was the most intimate thing in the universe to be with him at that molting-time and it meant everything in the world for Kohaku that his master trusted him so much.

"I thought I might be able to lure a full-grown man for you, but that was not to be." Again he bowed, knelt. "I failed, Naraku."

"You are a good boy, Kohaku." Naraku reached with his tentacles and brought the body closer to his eyes, to his lips. A long, forked tongue emerged out of his mouth, like a tentacle in and of itself, to taste and probe the sacrifice all over. "So young, so clean," he said at last, drawing his tongue back into his body. "You are a good boy, my Kohaku."

Kohaku beamed, delighted beyond the power of words to describe, for he understood Naraku approved and he loved to please his master!

"You are a strong and brave boy, my Kohaku. Fearless. One day, I know, you will not fail."

The demonic head, with its massive tentacles, ambled yet closer to the body.

The boy unsheathed his blade – again – and this time fully removed the head and the limbs, those parts of the food he knew Naraku thought were too bony. He saved those members, though, he knew, too, that his master liked to chew on them while in human guise.

All the while the demon watched, fascinated, by Kohaku who worked at the meat without fear. Without guilt! As if there was, indeed, nothing wrong with what he was doing. Again he smiled and thought to himself how odd it was that of all his minions, even his 'children', only this boy, this human boy, would be his most loyal servant.

And such a gorgeous, beautiful servant.

Kohaku was unfazed by Naraku's dining habit because he loved him and because it was perfectly, absolutely natural.

"You have a way with food," the spider-like creature said, finishing the meal. "Do you ever long for companionship, Kohaku? Do you ever wonder what it must be like for others of your kind, of your age?"

Facing the visage that was transforming, compacting itself into the body of a man, Kohaku answered: "Whatever I was once, I am not now." His eyes welled and a tentacle – no, a hand, a finger – wiped it away. "That human world. I do not belong to it. It could never, ever, love me, or care for me, or accept me the way you do, Naraku."

"Yet," the demon pressed, sensing the possibilities latent within the tears. "When you were out in that village, did you not taste it? Did you not see what it could have been like?"

"Yes, yes I did," he confessed as if it were sin, ashamed. "But I saw, I knew, it was a dream. A fantasy. That was all. This, alone, is real."

Kohaku smiled and leaned against the naked, cold, human body of Naraku, falling as it were into a sleep. He had tasted what could have been and it haunted him, his thoughts, his dreams.

Kohaku knew humankind judged everything Naraku was and did to be evil. But he could not and he would not. Naraku was his whole, entire world. Forever. Naraku was the shadow that wanted and loved him. The darkness that nurtured and comforted him. It defended him always and watched him like a guardian. Because, at the end, for Naraku too Kohaku was the universe.

And it asked little more than to be worshiped.

To a child, alone, weak and alone, he could not resist that love. A love that transcended good and evil, that saw beyond all wrongs and flaws. It was so strong, so powerful, it could not help but to be blind. Blind love, the sort that only a child understood.

Yet –

My samurai, he thought as Koji's face and his deep, onyx eyes and his soothing, warm voice returned, to prick and sting his heart.

"My only purpose, my only mission, the reason I exist, is to love you, Naraku. You are my world, forever eternally, and I will always be your loyal servant."

END