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The Choshu Chronicles: Chapter Ten

by Omasu Oniwabanshi ::: 17.Jan.2005

Kenshin ran lightly down the street after the assassin. The street ended, and as Kenshin rounded the corner he stopped, sensing movement.

Flicking the tsuba of his sword with his thumb, he loosened it from its sheath.

It was just horses. Two of the animals, one a dirty gray and the other dark brown, stamped their feet. Kenshin reversed the gesture, and used his thumb to move the tsuba back against the mouth of the sheath. Horses were no threat.

The animals were tethered to a wooden slat from a sliding window, the flat thin planks half open in front, though the building was dark and silent.

Kenshin walked up to them. The third assassin had escaped on horseback. These must belong to the other two. Kenshin glanced up the narrow street. This was still the warehouse district, and it was quiet now that the daylight was gone. However, at the end of the street he saw light, and heard sound. With a busy street like that, someone was sure to have noticed the assassin riding swiftly away.

The gray horse blew softly through its nostrils and nudged Kenshin's chest. Reflexively, his hand came up to brush the animal's cheek. For an assassin's horse, it was pretty friendly.

Kenshin patted along its neck and found the saddle. He checked the girth. It was tight. The horses were ready to provide a quick escape for riders who would never come.

Walking closely around the gray's backside, he loosened the brown horse's girth a little then undid its bridle and the gray horse's bridle from the window. Leaving the brown steed's reins in his hand, he threw the other set of reins over the gray's neck and pulled himself into the saddle.

He hadn't been on a horse much since he learned how to ride at Takasugi's loyalist training camp, the year he'd left master Hiko's service to join the Ishin Shishi. Luckily, the horse he rode wasn't very spirited.

Pulling the brown along by the reins, he headed for the light and voices at the end of the street.

The failed assassin hadn't been very discreet. He'd torn through the street like a cyclone. Everyone remembered him, and the direction he'd taken.

It was the same story from street to street as Kenshin traced the man's progress through Shimonoseki. On the outskirts of town, it grew harder to find witnesses, but by knocking at farmer's doors, Kenshin found people who heard a horse go by at a gallop.

Eventually it became too dark to continue. Clouds covered the moon. He spent the night among the trees along the side of the road, the horses rubbed down with grass and tethered, after he'd led them to a stream to drink. After that he found a tree to set his back against and slept sitting up, his katana upright against his shoulder.

The next morning he re-saddled the horses and continued, buying rice for breakfast from an obliging farm wife.

It was at the next farmhouse, however, that he caught a bit of luck.

"A man with a mole on his left cheek riding a black horse?" The old farmer's voice whistled through a gap in his teeth. He grinned. "That would be Urashima. He's the closest thing to a samurai we've got near here. Went to the big city a few years ago, but he came back last year when they had that big ruckus. Guess he learned he wasn't too good for farming like his old man after all."

The elderly man cackled and gave Kenshin directions to Urashima's house.

The road climbed, and came out at a relatively high hill overlooking the rice paddies below. Perched on the side of the hill was a medium sized home, larger than a peasant hut, but run down. The steeply pitched thatch roof had been patched in some places, but still needed patching in others. It was set off the ground with a low porch wrapped around it.

As Kenshin rode up, he saw a woman, sitting on her knees on the porch, the door to the main room open behind her. As he came closer, the gray he was riding tossed its neck and whickered.

An answering neigh came from an outbuilding next to the main house. Since the gray seemed to want to head that way, Kenshin let it, sparing a glance over his shoulder at the woman, who didn't move or react.

The outbuilding was a barn. Remembering Takasugi's strictures about the care and feeding of horses, Kenshin unsaddled and unbridled the animals, made sure they had food and water, and left them in the barn.

The woman continued to ignore Kenshin until he walked right in front of her and stopped.

She raised her eyes and looked in his face, but from the faraway expression in her eyes, Kenshin wasn't sure she even saw him.

"I told him not to go." She whispered. "I told him it was foolish, but he wouldn't listen to me."

Kenshin frowned. "Urashima is gone?" he asked.

She shook her head and pointed silently through the open doorway of the house.

Kenshin hopped onto the porch and stood in the doorway, debating whether or not to draw his sword, but the house had a quiet, empty feel to it.

He took a few steps onto the tatami mats inside then stopped.

He smelled blood.

The smell came from an area to his right, where a doorway led to a smaller room. Eyes on the doorway, Kenshin watched as a fly flew past him and through that doorway. Before he arrived, he already guessed what he'd see.

At the far end of the room the man called Urashima lay face down in a pool of blood on the floor. He'd fallen on his right cheek, and visible on the left one exposed to view was a small black mole.

Kenshin squatted by the body. It was him, the man he'd seen in the lantern's light.

Swatting at the fly that had come in just before him, Kenshin reached out and grabbed the man's shoulder, pushing him over, and surveyed the wound. He'd slashed horizontally across his stomach and then up diagonally, the wound terminating at the sternum. Kenshin's eyes narrowed. Urashima had committed sepukku without the benefit of a second to lop his head off after the initial incision.

Knowing that there would be no help to end his suffering, the man had cut upwards to reach his own heart after slitting his belly. It was a very honorable way for a samurai to redeem his family's reputation, but to Kenshin, Urashima was just another dead body. Dead was dead. The type of suicide method used didn't matter to him. It was something only the samurai class appreciated.

The blade Urashima had used lay in the blood pool. Kenshin laid the body back down over it gently. There was a time when corpses were just garbage to him, something that had to be cleaned up after the job was over.

Part of him was still callous that way, but the other part, the side of him that had been re-awakened by Tomoe, saw a man whose life had been cut short.

Kenshin stood and looked around. By the wall facing the front porch was a chest. He opened it and found a blanket. He used it to cover the body.

Walking back outside, he saw that the woman still hadn't moved and continued to stare out at the road leading to her home. He lowered himself to the porch and sat next to her. He wasn't good at this. He hated having to ask, but if he didn't Katsura would just send Choshu officials later, and who knows what sort of men they'd be?

"There were two other men with your husband…" he began.

"Yoshi and Hanagawa." She supplied their names mechanically. "They told him to go. They told him once the conservatives were back in power they'd try to get him his old job back in Shimonoseki. They all used to work in Shimonoseki for the government before Takasugi took control. None of them even had important jobs, but Urashima was so proud when Yoshi got him a job in the city. He thought farming was demeaning for a samurai family. They told him he'd never have to go back to farming again. He'd have a stipend and he'd be a hero."

Tears began to run down her face unchecked. "I don't want a hero. I want my husband back."

Was this how Tomoe had looked when she received news of her fiancée's death in Kyoto? This shocked, incomprehensible grief? Kenshin looked away. What could he say? There were no adequate words. He sat with her in silence until the tears stopped flowing and she went back to staring down the road, as if expecting her husband to ride up.

As he left to go find a farmer's wife to tend to her and the body, he glanced back one last time. The last glimpse he had found her unmoved, chained by her grief to the same spot. Then the road wrapped around a clump of pines, and she was lost to sight.