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The Choshu Chronicles: Chapter Twenty-Four

by Omasu Oniwabanshi ::: 2005

Nakamura stood frozen in the shadows of the buildings lining the opening of the road he'd doubled back on. The dead end road terminated in the high stone back wall of a temple, and Nakamura's dark figure stood out against the pale stones like an ink drawing on a beige scroll.

Kenshin stood in the center of the crossroads, gripping his sword. He'd nearly dropped it when he realized he'd been chasing Nakamura, but Master Hiko's teachings remained true. Never lose your sword.

The night seemed to quiet around them. Silence stretched on until Kenshin broke it with a question.

"Why?"

Still holding the revolver he'd used in his right hand, Nakamura sneered. "What would you understand? A mere boy, not even a samurai. What would you know of honor?"

"Is it honorable to try to kill a man you've sworn to protect?" From the path Nakamura's bullets had taken, Kenshin knew that Ryoma was the target, not Katsura, but he wanted to hear it.

"Katsura?" Nakamura seemed genuinely astonished that Kenshin would think of such a thing. Astonishment turned to anger. "I would give my life for Katsura. I swore an oath to protect him! It's Ryoma who's deceived Katsura. Ryoma deserves to die."

"Why?"

Kenshin kept one eye on the gun Nakamura held at his side. Nakamura's grip tightened on it, but he didn't raise it. There were also the two swords secured in the obi at his waist to worry about, but Nakamura's right hand was presently occupied with the gun, so the swords weren't the immediate threat.

"It's Ryoma's fault we've allied with those Satsuma dogs. My brother died because of them. Did his death mean nothing? I will never forgive them for that. Katsura should remember his death, and the deaths of the Choshu loyalists who died with him." Nakamura's voice became progressively more ragged with emotion. It was like watching a house shaken to rubble in an earthquake. Kenshin decided to try to reason him back to equilibrium.

"Your brother died in battle, honorably." It was a guess, but judging by Nakamura's highly stringent standards, Kenshin doubted that his older brother was the sort of man who'd run away during a conflict. "What you want is murder for revenge."

It was the wrong choice. Kenshin should have remembered that Nakamura did not react well to being challenged.

The older man's lips twisted in a snarl, and he immediately began to raise his gun. Whether he meant to fire or not became a moot point as Kenshin's instincts, honed by days of battling men with guns, kicked in.

Instead of running for cover, he used his speed to run forward, bringing his sword down in a diagonal cut. He managed to pull the strike zone back a few inches, so the blade missed Nakamura's wrist.

There was a loud ‘clank' as the metal of the katana met the steel of the revolver.

Nakamura cursed as the gun was ripped from his hand. It landed several feet away and went skidding into the shadows of the street leading off to the left. In the darkness Kenshin heard it strike against the side of an empty shop and lay still.

His eyes never left Nakamura, so he saw the man's expression change from rage to calculation. Nakamura leapt back, drawing his sword as he went so that when he landed, it was out at the ready, pointed straight toward Kenshin in a classic defensive stance.

"So, boy, is Ryoma so important to you that you'll fight me to avenge him?" Anticipation gleamed in Nakamura's eyes. He wanted to fight, craved it in fact.

From down the street behind him, Kenshin made out the sound of footsteps, running lightly and quickly, pausing at times as though the runner was stopping and looking for something.

Kenshin took a step back and lowered his sword. "I am Katsura's protector, not Ryoma's. Just do not try to kill Ryoma again."

Nakamura's mouth went slack in shock. This was not the reaction he'd expected from Kenshin.

"Hey!"

Hearing Shunme's voice, Kenshin drew back another step and quickly resheathed his sword.

Shunme ran up and stopped midway between the two, glancing curiously at each of them. "Did you find the assassin?"

"No." answered Kenshin quickly. "We are still looking." As he ended his sentence, he looked at Nakamura, whose sword was now lowered, willing him to take the hint. The man's angular face was full of shadows, but Kenshin thought he saw his eyes widen. Nakamura remained silent, so Kenshin went on. "Go ahead. We'll take the side streets."

It wasn't like Kenshin to give orders. Shunme's face quirked in puzzlement, but he nodded and took the side street leading away from the crossroads. Kenshin took a few steps to his right to watch Shunme begin to jog away.

As he did, he heard a growl of rage coming from behind him. Without having to look, he could sense the path Nakamura's sword was making. At this distance there was no time to disarm, only to strike.

So he did, pivoting on his right foot, drawing his sword up, out of the sheath and above his head, he straightened his arm even as he turned his shoulders to avoid Nakamura's blade, which passed close enough that he felt the wind of it along his chest as he leaned away.

Nakamura, feeling his sword strike air instead of flesh, planted his left foot and immediately began to swing his sword, hassaki (sharp) edge up, toward Kenshin's torso, angling for a gap between his ribs.

Kenshin finished his pivot and brought the sword down two-handed across Nakamura's back as the man tried to eviscerate him.

It was a clean, diagonal strike, severing the spinal cord and vital organs in the torso. Nakamura was dead as he hit the ground.

Kenshin stared down at the body, numb.

He heard Shunme run up behind him.

"I wondered when that would happen." Shunme said expressionlessly. "It was inevitable, you know."

"Why?" Kenshin realized he was asking that question a lot this night. "Why was it inevitable? I would have let him go."

He saw that Shunme was giving him an odd look. He flushed, and continued. "He was aiming for Ryoma, not Katsura. If he promised to leave Ryoma alone, no one would known but me."

Shunme looked back down at the body. "Yes, you're good at keeping secrets, aren't you, Kenshin?" One side of his mouth lifted in a half smile, which faded quickly as he looked back at the young fighter.

"He would have known. He would have known that you knew. A man like Nakamura, eaten up with hatred and jealousy…Some men just can't take pity, especially from someone who's superior to them."

"Superior? I'm no samurai." What did Shunme mean? Nakamura made it clear every time they met who was topmost on the social scale, and few people in Choshu knew that he'd once been Katsura's top assassin.

"I meant superior with a sword." Shunme continued gently. "Kenshin, I'm not the only one who noticed that you practice alone. There are only two reasons for a swordsman to do that. One, he's self-conscious about his lack of ability so he wants to get better in private, and two, he's so advanced that he doesn't want to discourage others, or give away his secret techniques."

Kenshin opened his mouth to protest that the only reason he trained in private in the fields was because that was how Master Hiko trained him. Hiko's house wasn't big enough to practice inside.

Shunme raised his hand to stop him. "People envy you, Kenshin. You're Katsura's top bodyguard. He doesn't need to give you a title, everyone knows it."

Blinking, Kenshin digested this information. He stared at Shunme. He had to know. "Do you envy me?"

Now it was Shunme's turn to be taken aback. He paused, then grinned slowly. "Maybe a little, at first." The grin faded into seriousness. "Until I realized what it cost you."

Kenshin went completely still, reading the knowledge in Shunme's eyes.

"Tomoe."

He said her name out loud. How? Shunme knew, but how?

Only one person in Choshu knew the whole story. That was Katsura.

"You're not just a bodyguard, are you?" he asked the older man, who was gazing at him with more candor than he'd ever had before.

"No." Shunme crossed his arms and explained.

"Takasugi loaned me to Katsura to head up his spy network. I posed as a bodyguard so I could be with him without anyone knowing my real purpose."

He sighed tiredly and went on. "There's a spy in Choshu. It's my job to suspect everyone. When I was assigned to move a group of our loyalists, I saw you coming from the street of the stonecutters in Kyoto. The Shinsengumi found us soon after, and you fought them off singlehandedly as we fled. It seemed like an odd coincidence. I knew you were a good swordsman, but I was supposed to believe you stopped an entire squad by yourself. I was suspicious. I went to Katsura and reported that you might be the bakufu spy we've been looking for. He had to tell me the whole story."

Shunme glanced at the ground, struggling with what to say next, then looked back at Kenshin. "For what it's worth, I'm sorry."

Kenshin was silent. If Shunme knew about Tomoe, then how many other people's secrets did he know? He decided to test his theory. Nakamura was dead now. There was no point in trying to protect him any longer.

"Tamako." He spoke the name softly, as he had Tomoe's name.

Shunme nodded, stealing a glance at the body at his feet. "I knew about her. I questioned the maidservant, Midori, so I knew you knew about his concubine too. Midori was quite impressed with the young stranger who helped her carry her water bucket home." A slight smile wafted across Shunme's face, then faded as it was replaced by a quizzical look. "You knew about Tamako, yet you never used that information against Nakamura. I found that…curious."

"You questioned Midori?" Kenshin heard his voice go sharp. ‘Questioned' was often a euphemism for torture.

Reacting to the sharpness, Shunme raised his hands. "Not like that! I just struck up a conversation with her. Tamako came from a family of known Bakufu sympathizers. I was keeping my eye on her because of that and her connection with Nakamura. I kept baiting him, hoping he'd let something slip about her or the political views she might be feeding him, but he never did. Though I searched, I never found any proof that she was giving him directions from the Bakufu forces, but after tonight…"

Kenshin felt very weary. "Nakamura wasn't after Katsura," he told Shunme. "He tried to kill Ryoma. He blamed him for the Satsuma/Choshu alliance. The alliance is set. It's too late to stop it, so there's no point in the bakufu killing Ryoma now."

Kenshin shook Nakamura's blood off his sword, wiped it, and sheathed it. He lifted his chin and stared into Shunme's face. "Your spy, whoever he is, is still out there."

o-o-o

Shunme and Kenshin took Nakamura's body home to the mansion. Shunme grasped the shoulders and Kenshin the legs. When he'd been the hitokiri battousai, others were assigned to clean up the bodies he'd killed. Back then, he'd considered them garbage, and it had been easy to distance himself from the consequences.

No more. Nakamura's body was all too real and too heavy to ignore. They placed it in a shed at the edge of the merchant's garden.

Shunme left Kenshin to go report to Katsura.

Kenshin washed the blood off his hands and returned to the room assigned to the bodyguards. He dreaded telling Takahata what had happened, but when he entered the room it was empty.

‘Takahata must still be out celebrating the victory' he thought, and sank down on the tatami mat by his bundle of belongings.

Then he realized Takahata's bundle was gone. Kenshin rose up on his knees to check. Nakamura's belongings lay by the side of the wall, but Takahata's were missing.

They weren't in the cupboard where the sleeping futons were stored either.

Takahata.

He was a short, scrawny shadow of a man, constantly at Nakamura's side. He'd been completely over awed by the larger, socially superior samurai from his hometown of Iwakuni. Or had he?

Kenshin remembered the numerous times he'd seen Nakamura and Takahata speaking together. Nakamura holding forth, giving his opinions as if they were ordained by the sun goddess Amaterasu herself, and Takahata listening, agreeing, and nodding sycophantically.

That's what it looked like, but who knew how much Takahata influenced Nakamura's opinions and emotions? When his lover died, Nakamura changed. He'd been inconsolable, quiet, vulnerable, and angry. To take advantage of someone's grief like that, to talk them into doing something dishonorable was unthinkable.

To take advantage of someone in that way was…

It was what the bakufu spymasters had done to Tomoe.

Kenshin realized that his hands were clenched. He was shaking.

With a deliberate effort, he relaxed his fingers, and realized the extent of his hatred toward Takahata.

The rage was so unexpected, so overwhelming, that he didn't know what to do with it. He despised the man with every ounce of his being, and felt the bile of it rise in his throat.

"Kenshin?" Shunme's voice came from the doorway, questioning.

Kenshin turned.

"Where's Takahata?" Shunme asked as he stepped through the doorway.

"Gone."

Shunme stopped short. His eyes widened then narrowed as he assimilated the information and came to the correct conclusion, much faster than Kenshin had.

"How long ago?" He asked crisply. This was Shunme the intelligence expert, eyes sharp, body relaxed yet gathered for action, like a cat ready to pounce at a moment's notice.

Kenshin shrugged, not trusting his voice.

"I'll tell Katsura." The older samurai disappeared through the doorway silently.

Kenshin stared down at the tatami mat, memorizing the woven pattern. The rage churned inside him. Takahata caused Nakamura's downfall, and thus his death. Takahata deserved to die.

In all his assignments, Kenshin never felt rage or hatred toward his victims. He hadn't known or cared what specific reason Katsura had for ordering their deaths. It was his job, and he did it, coldly and without emotion.

He swallowed, forcing the rage away, returning his mind to the calm, dispassionate watchfulness of a killer on assignment. The hitokiri battousai was back.