***WARNING***
Mention of un-living oneself.
Glossary:
Kemus: Ainu for "covered in blood". Japanese would pronounce it 'Kemushi', which, funnily enough, means "Caterpillar".
-san: Honorific to refer politely to anyone who is not a close friend nor someone above your station.
THE MASTER
The sun was just about to set by the time he reached the village. It casted the sky in shades of stark red and gold, like a vast and intricate brocade cloth covering the whole valley. It seemed to soften the wistful warble of birds as they returned home. It was so quiet… Just a few souls trodded the gravel path along with him, few enough for them all to fall into the same cadence—as if not to disturb each other with the sound of their steps. A rustle of leaves betrayed a cool breeze before it hit, and they all bundled up in unison; all but the man in the bellowing white traveling cape. He just looked up at the sky, at the few clouds rushing above him. A thought weighted on his brow: At that rate, it'd be snowing before the next full moon.
He had asked around for the boy, but while half the villagers didn't seem to know anything, the rest simply ignored him, returning to their fields, homes and hearths without a second thought. It was getting on his nerves. He didn't want to be there either, knocking doors and asking around—he just wanted to know the boy was being taken care of. The man couldn't care less who he was with as long as he had a roof over his head. Just that. Find that out and he'd be out of their lives, well on his way to enjoy the first snow with a warm bottle of sake by his side.
Too bad he had ran out of village to ask…
Just as despair started gnawing at the ends of his cape, a curious pair of beady eyes caught his gaze, peeking out from a hut. The man smirked: If anyone knew anything about the boy, it'd be a nosy old geezer like that one. And yet.
"He's not here?!" the man blurted, startling the otherwise nonchalant old man.
"Uh— Nope," he insisted, scratching the back of his balding head as if to regain his composure before the stranger. It was subtle, but enough for his voice to sound as hoarse and brittle as it did before as he added "No kid, no stray cat, nobody's come this way f'r a week."
That pesky, gnawing despair was now hooked around his neck like a dear old friend.
Taking his leave, the man headed south towards the desecrated glade. His steps were heaver now, a somber thought starting to take form in his head: Could he have…? No, he frowned. The boy's young age made suicide seem unlikely, no matter how dire the situation. However, the fact did little to raise his hopes: the cold would have most certainly taken him during the night anyway. As though in response to the sinking feeling in his chest, the spindly shadows of trees started to creep over the road. He did not resists their winding fingers reaching inside his mind: Even when I wield my sword, I haven't been able to save a soul too many times more than I'd like. I kill. And kill. And kill. And still they are like maggots; evil just springs back from the decomposing corpse of this country. By that point the last traces of gold had faded from the sky, and the forest was now a realm of shadows cut by slivers of eerie blood-red light. There will be more acts like this; all I can do is bury the innocents, he concluded, deep in the dark as he stepped through the veil of trees before the glade.
He gasped.
Under the agonizing light of dusk, grass was now a thorny, field rugged by dozens of mounds—makeshift graves pierced by either a round or a pointy stake rudely crafted from twigs and the carcass of a cart, of which only the wooden wheels remained. And right in the middle, a frail small figure struggled with a rock.
Taking a breath to find his bearings, the man started towards it.
"You buried not just your family, but the bandits too…?" he asked as he reached the tuft of deep-red hair almost lost in the waning light.
The boy turned around, wide-eyed—a glint of fear grew in his glassy eyes as he took the towering man in, and he memories of that night looked fresh in the dried trail of tears on his cheeks. But just as quickly as the fear rose, it faded. The boy turned his back to him again. Rolling the rock in place apparently held more importance to him than acknowledging the giant man with a sword behind him, eh? Even if he was one who had saved his life the night before.
"Slavers."
"Huh?" the man snapped back from his thoughts at that.
"Mom and dad died last year, 'said it was cholera," the boy explained, his voice soft but flat even though he seemed satisfied having placed the rock in its 'rightful spot'. It was the tone with which you spoke of a painful memory many, many years after. It was pure luck the boy was still giving him his back; pity was not something the man was keen on sharing, even if the recipient was a boy not a day over six years old at most who seemed to had lived in a year what many don't live in their whole life.
"And you still made graves for them…?" He insisted.
"… Bandits and slavers look the same when they are dead, so…" The boy shrugged, wiping his nose.
Silence.
A thousand children enduring the same night wouldn't have come up with such logic. But then again, not a single thing about that boy was ordinary: The unruly deep-red hair, the still gaze, the strange garbs that he was wearing—he'd never seen something like it. He'd been wandering around for some time now, but he never crossed path with the winding lines that adorned the boy's collar and hems, let alone someone with hair the color of blood. He was all… foreign.
The boy remained still, seemingly comfortable with the silence of the man's thoughts. Either that or he absorbed by the three small stones carefully placed before him
"What are those?"
"Kasumi-san, Akane-san, Sakura-san," the boy looked at each of them in turn as if presenting them to him. "They were sold to pay some debt. Only knew 'em for a few days but I was the only boy and no parents around, so I had to protect them. But I—" the words got stuck in his small throat. Head tucked in, shoulders up, stiff, and tiny hands now balled-up in white-knuckled fists on his knees, he looked so terribly small. "That's why I wanted to find them good stones, so that no-one forgets. But these were all I could find and—and there were no flowers either…"
The man closed his eyes and slowly, almost affectionately, opened the clay jug he had been carrying around in hopes of enjoying at least one good thing since the start of fall. "Man or woman, to die without knowing the taste of good sake is a crime," he started solemnly, pouring a good half of it over the three stones. The boy looked on. "This offering is the least I can do."
A slight nod: Thank you.
"What is your name, boy?"
"Kemushi."
The man frowned. "That's not a name for a swordsman."
The boy turned, confused. Unfazed, the man studied him: his small frame, the unruly hair, the soft voice, the sharpest eyes waiting for his next words… "From now on, your name will be 'Kenshin,'" he declared, placing a heavy hand on the boy's head. Big eyes gazed at him in awe from below the wild tuff of hair. "I shall teach you… My most precious knowledge." And you will become the greatest swordsman of them all.
This will be the end of the canon-ish chapters for a while. So buckle up: from now on, "here be dragons."
Feedback is more than welcome. This is my first serious attempt at writing, English is *not* my mother tongue, and it's only me, chat gpt and a bottle of wine to proofread this baby. Just be gentle with me, senpai 3
Almost forgot: Why Ainu-Kenshin? It seemed the truest-to-source-material way to actually write a redhead in 1800's Japan. Plus, points for story shenanigans in the near future.
Thank you for reading!
[Dec 14] Made some small adjustments and will be adding glossaries and historical (or in this case contextual) notes to the chapters. I try to limit foreign words, but sometimes there's just no good alternative.
Contextual notes notes:
• Red hair is not something that happened (at least that I could find) among the japanese during the Edo period. Ainu people, however, could actually have red-haired children during that period. People from Korea too, but I didn't want to open yet another can of worms.
• Based on what I could gather, Ainu people don't name their children for the first years of their life; instead, they basically give them a nickname. I tried to find a sweeter one (as Ainu parents love their children as much as anyone else), but I couldn't find something that matched the wordplay that the author intended.
• Unlike the christian crosses from the manga and anime, Kenshin has made some sticks with round & pointy ends. I tried to imagine what a child would understand and be able to do based on Ainu tombs markers, which have pointy ends for men and round ends for women. Tombs have no names nor anything because they are meant to be kind of forgotten (pleaaaase forgive me if I understood incorrectly). For Akane, Kasumi and Sakura however, Kenshin DID want people to remember them, so he used stones.
• As for what Kenshin is wearing, I think it's called Attus (it's the name of the fabric, but also of clothes made with it): It's a robe made of fabric weaved from tree bark. Traditionally, women would decorate them with intricate patterns on each opening (hems & neck) to confuse bad spirits and prevent them from entering the body of the wearer. Please do correct me if I got anything wrong!