CHAPTER FOUR

The sound of rushing water filled the air as the muddy wave thundered towards them. Kenshin saw, with a painful clench of his heart, that they were only half way across the bridge. Time had run out.

Tomahizo turned his back on Kenshin and Chokichi and began to run to the far side. The heavy pounding of his feet caused the bridge to sway precariously. Kenshin was after him like a shot, afraid that the man's headlong flight would cause him to trip and pitch himself over the side.

The man's self interest acted like a good luck charm. Tomahizo neither faltered nor slowed. Once Kenshin saw that he'd reach the other side safely, he glanced back.

Chokichi was still where they'd left her, bent over double in the middle of the bridge, one hand on the rope rail, the other pulling desperately at the fabric of her skirts. Her feet were tangled in the light colored under-kimono that peeped out between the folds of the azure over-kimono.

There was a crack. A tree upstream tore from its roots on the gorge edge and joined the maelstrom.

Still running, Kenshin shoved the merchant hard between the shoulder blades to send him staggering onto dry land. He was just turning back to help Chokichi when the wooden posts anchoring the bridge to his side gave way, forcing him to jump to safety.

The girl on the bridge shrieked, turned and tried to run as the planks beneath her feet shuddered and fell. She was still trying to climb it like a ladder when the tsunami of mud and water roared past.

Staggering back, all Kenshin could do was stare aghast as a force of nature stronger than anything he'd seen before smashed its way down the gorge. The bridge disappeared.

Shocked, Kenshin looked behind him, ready to offer sympathy to the merchant, but Tomahizo was already on the move. The path from the bridge led uphill to a herdsman's hut before tracing the edge of an escarpment. From the map, Kenshin knew that this was the last peak before the trail began to descend through a mountain pass leading to a town on the other side of the range.

The merchant scuttled quickly up the path without looking back.

The maelstrom's fury drew Kenshin's gaze hypnotically. He stood and waited as the muddy waters crashed at his feet, ready to jump back if more of the gorge edge fell away. A minute passed, two, and then the water receded as the worst of the flood spent itself downstream. The water level dropped dramatically in the space of seconds, leaving debris in its wake. The river at the bottom of the gorge no longer ran clean. The water was a dirt brown color and it flowed over and around logs and boulders that hadn't been there before.

Everything was bathed in a thin coating of brown muck. Everything except a bit of blue clinging to the remains of a rope bridge that had been pressed into the embankment opposite by an uprooted tree.

Kenshin wiped the rain from his eyes, his bangs plastering themselves to his forehead. The bit of blue moved. Chokichi was alive.

She'd wrapped an elbow around a support strut for the rope handrail and by some miracle she'd held onto it when the bridge slammed into the mud. Her lower body was obscured by tree branches, which pinned her to the cliff side. The tree was stuck half in and half out of a cave-like gash under the embankment, carved out by rushing water long ago.

Kenshin immediately looked for a way to get to the girl. Because of his Hiten Mitsurugi Ryu training his sense of balance was better than most, and he was light in weight. The debris at the bottom of the gorge would hold him; keep him from the swirling river water. The hardest part would be finding hand and footholds down to the gorge floor.

"What are you doing? Come here!"

Tomahizo stood at the herder's shack, hands on his hips, an imperious tone in his voice.

"Or haven't you the sense to get out of the rain?" he jeered.

It was raining again, not a downpour, but steady drops hitting the ground as if the heavens themselves were intent on cleaning up the mess left in the gorge. Kenshin hadn't even noticed the new bout of precipitation.

Wordlessly, he pointed to the opposite bank where Chokichi's struggles to get free of the branches were clearly visible.

"Forget her," Tomahizo called roughly. "Your job is to protect me, not her."

Biting back a retort, Kenshin turned his back and moved to the edge of the gorge.

"Wait here," he ordered curtly, and dropped down to a large root protruding out of the mud. As he expected, it bent but held his weight and provided the first of many footholds he'd need.

The merchant cursed, then came the sound of a slamming door. He'd gone into the hut, not bothering to watch to learn the fate of his mistress. By the time Kenshin got to the bottom of the gorge, the smell of smoke wafted through the air. Tomahizo had started a fire in the hearth.

He was probably counting his money too, Kenshin thought sourly. Tomahizo certainly lived up to all the other stereotypes of the parasitical merchant.

Then he was at the gorge floor, with no more time to spare a thought for his charge. The water rushed by fast and dirty. Taking a breath, he jumped and gained the first boulder. He leapt again, downstream this time, to a smaller rock.

It rolled beneath his feet so he had to leap again, and again, his feet kissing the boulders and logs for mere seconds as he used momentum more than anything else to keep himself above the moving water. He gained the other side and began to climb.

The tree helped. It was lodged so tightly into the side of the gorge that it didn't move at all when Kenshin jumped from the mud to the trunk. Taking care to avoid the root system, he scrambled up it and wended his way through the latticework of branches. The tree must have been massive, judging by the length of its trunk, and Kenshin spared a moment of awe that water could have dislodged something so big and strong.

Chokichi was whimpering when he reached her. She gasped in shock when he touched her shoulder, and he cursed himself for not speaking sooner. One side of her face was flat against the dirt, her right arm crooked over the bridge strut lying against the embankment wall, her left crossed under her, hands twined together. She hadn't seen him coming.

"It's alright," he told her soothingly, using the same tone he would to a skittish horse.

"I'm here now. I'm going to get you out."

Straining, Chokichi raised her face away from the dirt and craned her neck to look at him. The side that had been pressed against the wall was brown with mud, while the side that was exposed to the air was clean, washed by the rain that continued to fall down. It would have been comical if not for the circumstances.

"Why?"

"Why what?" Kenshin asked distractedly, looking down from his perch on a tree branch, figuring out how to extract the girl from the branches pressing her into the wall.

"Why did you come back for me?" she whispered.

Kenshin felt his mouth drop open in shock. Did she really think herself so worthless that he wouldn't take the time to save her? Had her time with Tomahizo convinced her of that?

"Don't ask stupid questions," he said gruffly and dropped to a lower branch, removing his wakizashi from his obi. A shorter sword was more appropriate for what he had to do.

Realizing the rudeness of his words, he glanced back at Chokichi to see if she looked insulted or sad. Instead he saw her lips curved into a tiny smile as she leaned her face back against the dirt, content with his answer.

Sighing inwardly, her realized he would never understand women. Cutting, however…

It was difficult, slicing through some branches while holding on precariously to others. A short sword was not meant to be a pruning device. At last he sliced his way down to the final branch pressing her into the soft mud.

"Hold tight," he warned, and cut her free. The rope bridge creaked in her arms, but held.

Kenshin quickly went to her, covering her body with his own and wrapped an arm around her obi-covered waist. Beneath the fabric she was slight, skinny even.

"Let go of the bridge," he urged.

She didn't want to at first, her instincts were telling her to cling. He had to stand on the branch beneath and place his fingers atop hers, gently pulling at each one until they relaxed their deathgrip on each other and untwined so that she could pull her arm out from under the rope.

They ascended slowly, Kenshin finding the hand and footholds needed and urging her to use them once they climbed higher than the tree. At last, they gained the edge. The wooden bridge posts were still there, giving them a final handhold. Chokichi rolled over and sat, pulling her feet back from the edge and staring across the gorge to the hut where a wisp of smoke trailed out, rising up like a grey ghost against the green foliage clinging to the cliff above it.

She turned to Kenshin once he was settled next to her, and opened her mouth to speak.

The ground began to tremble beneath them. Chokichi's eyes went wide.

Instinctively, Kenshin grabbed her and rolled away from the edge, landing with his body over hers protectively as the earth once again roiled in the throes of a quake.

This quake was gentler and shorter than the last one. He'd over reacted.

Raising his head, he blushed as he realized the inappropriateness of his position. The last time he'd been this close to a woman, he'd been with Tomoe. The two situations were nothing alike. His wife had been all softness and curves; Chokichi was rigid with fear, her child-like body holding no allure. The only reaction he'd had to her was a man's instinctive need to protect the weak. He rolled off her, muttering an embarrassed apology.

Chokichi sat up slowly.

"When will it end?" she asked, a hopelessness in her eyes that he didn't know how to answer.

He shrugged slightly. Sometimes the world rocked. No one knew when or why. Then her eyes drifted past him to the hut opposite, and he realized her question wasn't about the earthquakes.

Not sure what to say, he rose to his feet and held out a hand to her. The rain was coming down harder now, pounding the ground at their feet. He helped her up and drew her under the trees by the trail. The Bakufu soldiers would be coming soon. To get back across the gorge he and they would have to travel up or down stream and find a place to cross it now that the bridge was gone. He couldn't get Chokichi across the gorge floor the way he'd come to rescue her. That way was too precarious. Even with his training and sense of balance, he'd almost ended up in the river several times.

Then the point became moot.

They were huddled under the trees, listening to the rain getting softer. One moment the hut with its welcoming smell of smoke was there, and the next it was gone.

With barely a rumble, the cliff above shifted, and came down, tons of rock and earth slipping, subsiding, and covering the hut. It obscured the entire hill, covering it in fresh wet earth and spilling down into the gorge below with a thump that jarred all the way to the embankment opposite.

Kenshin and Chokichi stood frozen for a moment, unable to believe what they'd seen. Then the girl gasped and sank to the ground.

Kenshin remained upright by force of will, staring at the rockslide that had ended his mission. There was no way Tomahizo had survived that. He was broken and smashed like the hut under tons of rubble.

He'd failed.

For the first time since Katsura gave him an assignment, Kenshin had failed.

To Be Continued.