Tears and Rain
By Gabi-hime
Chapter 6
Brotherly Love: If Wishes Were Horses
There are few things that are more comforting to a confused heart than comfort foods, and while Kuri had little experience with poultry as a comfort food, having mainly subsisted on rice and vegetables for the majority of her life, she found it was something of a lifesaver now. She couldn't quite remember if it had been her suggestion or Soujiro's which had led them to dine at this particular establishment, but she felt a swelling sort of peaceful satisfaction from the meal, which was the first bit of roast chicken she had ever eaten. Silently, she said a little blessing for the aged fowl who'd given his life to ease her mind and the innkeeper who'd decided that it was his time to go in the first place.
She shifted slightly, unused to sitting still for such an inordinate amount of time and cast a shy glance at Soujiro. She was still unsure exactly how to classify him, especially in relation to her. He had protected her, looked out for her, and been a softly reserved kind of a gentle that she had never experienced before. He had been everything she could have wished him to be: thoughtful, considerate, polite, handsome, and very careful of her . . . and yet . . . He had slain two men without thought and without obvious remorse. Of course, considering the way she was forced to read between the lines for the rest of his emotional state, he might be lost in a bog of self-loathing and she would be none the wiser. Well, that wasn't entirely true. She was slowly learning to read the tics and nuances of his bland wall of emotional pleasantries, but it was slow going and after her experiences some nights ago she had begun to seriously wonder if she wanted to see what he was hiding behind that mask. But then . . . even now she felt for him, felt for the little boy he seemed to be half the time, and felt for the sweetly stoic man he presented himself to be the rest of the time. She wanted to know him, to know him as himself. She . . .
He was a good boy. She knew that. No matter what, no matter if blood rained from the sky or dripped slowly from his sleeves, he was good to her, and she found that in the end, that's all she really cared about. What had she expected in the first place? He did carry a sword. It wasn't for show. It wasn't a taunt at the police. For some reason, it was who he was.
And she could accept that.
She could accept him.
She did accept him.
Even if he didn't want . . .
“I've heard Kyoto is really big,” she interrupted their comfortable silence awkwardly with an observation that was less than intellectually stunning. She didn't care what he thought of it, it filled up the silence and kept her from thinking too much.
“It is,” he answered pleasantly, absently discreetly transferring some of the chicken from his plate onto hers, which she had cleaned fairly quickly. For his part, he enjoyed listening to her talk. Her words filled up the silences of his life and gave him something to distract himself with when his toils began to seem Sisyphean in nature and duration. She had become as steady a comfort for him as the roast chicken was to her. The chicken itself was no real comfort for him. While he hadn't had enough money to indulge recently, he'd had it often enough while playing the prince of Shishio's bitter empire and it had lost any kind of simple pleasure he might have found in it. In some dim part of his mind he could almost catch hold of the ghost memory of the first time he'd eaten chicken. It had been in his first days as Shishio's constant shadow. A man in a lonely farmhouse had furnished that dinner, but not of his own accord. Soujiro didn't like to dwell too closely on those early memories. The early ones were all blood-bloated because at that point he hadn't learned how to filter out the blood; he hadn't learned how to deal with it purely logical terms. It had struck him deeply, even if he had covered it up, hiding tears in the rain until they no longer came.
But he had still eaten the chicken.
“Will there be beautiful ladies there? I've heard that there a beautiful ladies in Kyoto who can play the shamisen. I've head someone play the shamisen one time, this guy stopped at the inn over night once, and he had one, but he wasn't very good at it. Do you think we might hear someone play? It sounds so nice.”
When she spoke to him, he could forget that he'd eaten the chicken, at least for a time. He could taste this chicken without also tasting that other chicken in every bite. Without tasting the blood.
“We might, Kuri-san. I like the shamisen too. If I can, I'll try to make sure we hear someone play.”
She leaned forward a little, obviously excited by the prospect and looked as if she were about to say something when suddenly she pitched forward, thrown almost into her plate by a large man who had stumbled into her. She was quick to react, splaying her fingers wide on the table to brace herself and keep both her clothing and her dinner safe. She whirled immediately, quite threatened and unsure of what was going on.
The man who had so carelessly trod upon her was standing at a strange angle, listing as a ship will do when there is no one at the tiller. He was unshaven and smelled of cheap liquor to such an overpowering degree that it wasn't particularly difficult to guess why he had stumbled into her. As he stood, leaning precariously, he grabbed onto his crotch as if this were a reasonable way to steady himself.
As Kuri whirled, he spat at her and then growled, “Watch where you're going!”
For some years Kuri had been possessed of something that all her elders had referred to as “a mouth.” This mouth seemed remarkably different from those of other girls her age purely due to its tendency to react swiftly and without thought to consequences. It was this mouth that had nearly gotten her killed at the inn less than a month previously, and it was this mouth which fully took over her faculties of speech the moment the huge man had spat at her.
Kuri knew that it was unwise to insult a towering drunk. Her mouth did not care.
“I can't watch where I'm going when I'm not going anywhere! You're the one who stepped on me, you lummox! Why don't you watch where you're going, or are you too busy holding onto that, ” here she gestured quite rudely to the lumpy package under his hand, “because you're afraid it'll fall off?”
Soujiro blinked. Had Kuri just said what he thought she'd said?
The brute understood what she'd said well enough and he moved faster than Kuri would've thought for a man that size who was that inebriated. He seized her by the shoulder and picked her up as if she were nothing, twisting her arm hard behind her back until he forced a desperate squeal out of her.
“You cry like a girl, little man. You cry too fast to talk to me that way,” the man snarled, tightening his grip on her even further and causing her to squeal again, “You apologize or I'll give you a new elbow, you understand?”
Despite its earlier willingness to tell the man exactly what if felt like saying, Kuri's mouth apparently had no desire to offer an apology despite the strained traction she was obviously in.
“I said, do you understand?” he gripped harder, “When I speak to you, you answer me, boy.”
Soujiro was frozen perfectly still, reading the man's movements. He was not as drunk as he appeared and Soujiro could feel that there was a sword strapped to his leg, hidden under his hakama. The rest of the diners were similarly frozen, watching the scene play out, but perhaps they were frozen for different reasons. Soujiro was reading the sword callouses on his left hand. This man was a killer, not formally trained, yet still deadly enough in his own way, and he had Kuri in a vicious sort of embrace. Soujiro felt decidedly . . . strange.
“Let him go, Drunkard-san. I'll make sure he doesn't bother you any more,” he murmured pleasantly, unwilling to let the trump card of Kuri's gender fall lest it drive the man further, push him to snap for the sheer pleasure of it, as Usui had done.
The drunk turned to look at Soujiro levelly, or as least as levelly as he could manage despite the list. He was apparently not very threatened, “I'm not letting him go until he answers me real respectful like. He'll squeal until he talks.”
Soujiro moved gracefully, placing his sheathed masterwork katana on the table in front of him before speaking again, “I don't believe you understand the situation, Drunkard-san,” Soujiro murmured, still the paragon of manners as he flicked a fraction of the blade from its sheath with his left hand, “I don't want to hurt you and I'm sure that you don't want to hurt him enough to take a blade for it. Put him down.”
Kuri caught the glitter of the exposed sliver of blade and suddenly thrashed, biting her lip hard, “No, Soujiro-kun, not here, not now. Please. Please, Drunkard-san, put me down. Please don't make him. Please.”
At this fresh burst of action, the man twisted hard again and Kuri felt something small in her arm give way and she cried out despite herself, a painful whimper. As her eyes teared up she desperately looked for Soujiro, to beg him again, not to, not here, but she couldn't find him. He was suddenly gone as if he'd never been there and she found herself alone under the hands of a man who had just broken her arm.
And then she was loose, tumbling to the floor like a bundle sticks falling every which way. As she landed, curling protectively over her arm, she felt the heavy bulk of the drunkard land close at her left with the weight of a dead tree.
At first she was afraid to look, afraid to see the mess of red, afraid to see it dripping so casually from Soujiro's arm, from his mouth as he spoke, from the man at his feet, but then she felt his hand gently on her shoulder, pulling her close and helping her to her feet again and she knew that she had to look. No matter what was there, she had to look. She owed it to him.
There wasn't any blood, and as she realized this she squeezed his arm despite herself, as if giving him some sort of reward for his intervention not ending in mass slaughter. Soujiro gets a gold star for not killing anyone at all today! He didn't react to the squeeze and she reflected that he probably wasn't interested in how she felt about his methods of problem solving in the first place. She might as well keep her gold stars to herself.
The drunk lay unconscious at her feet, apparently having been knocked so by a carefully placed blow from Soujiro's sheath. As they stood over him, their waitress approached carefully. She took one look at the man lying prone on the floor and Kuri caught a look of relief cross her face before she launched into a flurry of apologies.
“Thank you, sir. I'm terribly sorry he bothered you, sir. He's been hanging around here the past couple of days, claiming that he was looking for work. He didn't seem to be hurting anyone, so we let him stay, hoping he'd find a job soon and leave,” she bit her lip, “If you don't mind, could you help me drag him outside? Then we can lock the doors for the night and perhaps he'll be gone in the morning.”
Soujiro bowed simply and nodded at the waitress, “Thank you, but I'll put him outside myself.”
The he proceeded to easily shoulder the huge man and carry him to the main doors of the establishment without visible effort while Kuri stood wide-eyed and watched, still cradling her arm against herself. After a few moments he returned and nodded at the waitress who took a long key out of her pocket and went to attend to the door. He'd left the drunk by the well in the yard, where he'd at least be able to get water if he needed it in the night, which was certainly more courtesy than the man had intended Kuri.
She didn't shy away from him when he approached again, and this was somehow satisfying. Now he would attend to her. His touch was gentle as he carefully pulled her arm away from chest and then went over it with sensitive fingers, feeling for things that might have been twisted or broken out of place. He clucked his tongue softly. It had seemed much worse than it actually was.
“It's only a light sprain,” he remarked cheerfully, “Nothing's broken. If I bind it up tightly, it should be better in less than a week.”
She let out an exhale of relief and he turned to the waitress who had by this time finished locking the door and requested some bandages. She swiftly complied and he was soon busy with Kuri's wrist steadied between his knees. Years in Shishio's service had made him more than adequate at binding wounds. When one lived at the right hand of a man who was a living fifth-degree burn, one learned how to do such things.
It was just as he was finishing the binding that the gentleman came up quietly behind him.
“Pardon me, might I have a word with you?”
Soujiro turned politely, releasing Kuri's arm back into her own custody. The man was elderly, bent almost double and leaning heavily on a cane, but he was quite clean and well-dressed. Soujiro marked him as one of the other guests who had sat and watched the altercation without a word.
“How may I help you?” he asked amiably, folding his arms into his sleeves.
The elderly man cocked his head to the side for a moment as if considering something before continuing, “You see, I was thinking about hiring that man that you so handily dealt with a few moments ago.”
Interesting.
“I'm very sorry to have inconvenienced you, but he left me very little choice,” Soujiro bowed in deference even as he apologized. It was always good to dot your i's and cross your t's, especially when it wasn't clear what the situation was, exactly.
The elderly man spread his hands wide as if in dismissal, “Oh no, I certainly don't blame you for that. You had ever right to react the way that you did. If I had been a little younger and perhaps a bit more spry I would've done the same thing, but time robs men of their initiative,” he laughed and it was a pleasant sound, simple and honest , “In fact, I think you have done me a great service, not a hindrance.”
“I am happy to have obliged, although I am not sure I understand you,” Soujiro was somewhat perplexed by this gentleman. He seemed to have some interest in them, but what that interest was, Soujiro had absolutely no idea. It just didn't make very good sense for a man to thank someone who'd just KO'ed a possible employee.“From the sword that you carry, might I assume that you're a samurai? I have to say, it's good to see one, especially in this day and age,” the man answered.
Ah, now this was beginning to make sense.
“I'm a ronin,” Soujiro corrected benignly. He had no antiquated hereditary or class claim to the sword he carried, only the sure knowledge of the skill and birthright that made him deadlier than men who called themselves generals and masters.
“Masterless, then?” the old man asked, “Are you on a journey?”
“Yes.” That was plain enough from the worn look of his clothes and the thinness of his zori soles.
“Are you headed to Kyoto, perhaps?”
And the pieces fell into place.
“Yes.”
“Then I have a business proposition for you.”
Of course he did.
“Will you come and sit with me? Humor an old man long enough for him to tell you his dreams and you'll have done your good deed for the day.”
If he bothered to mentally consult his deed chart, Soujiro knew that he would find the 'good' column virtually unmarred by marks. It cost him nothing to humor the old man, who seemed harmless enough, so he went to sit with him at his table. Kuri followed as quiet (although nearly as fidgety) as a mouse and seated herself to his right.
The elderly man settled himself on the ground heavily and then sighed in a relaxed fashion before leaning forward and folding his hands on the table.
“I am a horse merchant by trade and I have been one for over forty years. I was raised on horseback and my mother used to tell me fondly that I was born a-horsed. They're beautiful animals. I love them and they also happen to be how I make my living. I am a lucky man. Most people don't get the chance to live among the things that they love and fewer still ever have the chance of making a difference in the world. I have that chance.
“Recently, I was in Yokohama on business, and while I was there I happened to make the acquaintance of another horse merchant, a Dutchman who is also a textile shipper. He told me that he was trading European horses ashore as breeding stock and then he showed me one of the finest specimens of horseflesh that I have ever seen. It was a big stallion, five hands or more taller than the largest of my finest breeding stock. He was a beautiful deep bay color and strong like an ox, but with slender little legs and delicate feet.
“Naturally, the moment that I saw him, I told the merchant that I'd have the pick of the next shipment. They arrived in port two weeks ago, twenty-two in all, and all fine and healthy as the one he'd shown me on the ship. I've brought my best men to handle them, all sensible lads who've worked for me for years, but I never considered the outside element. These animals are treasures from halfway around the world and they cost a good fortune and I am only halfway home with no one to stand should we encounter any . . . unsavory elements. My men are good men, but they're farmers and beast-handlers, all of them. I need a man who can handle a weapon. I don't expect trouble, but I'd like to be prepared for it should the need arise.
“You seem like a trustworthy individual, moreso than the gentleman I was considering, certainly. I'd be willing to pay you well, furnish you with mounts, and provide for your food and shelter all the way to Kyoto if you'd simply agree to ride with me.”
Soujiro opened his mouth to politely decline and explain that one sword did little against a horde of bandits. This was true in theory, even if it didn't apply in this case. Soujiro could have more than adequately protected the little caravan from all but a questing rurouni, but he had no desire to involve the gentleman and his stable of horses in his affairs. There were very likely more men after him, and he intended to stick to the smaller back roads on his way back to Kyoto, not go parading up the Tokaido road with a circus of horses behind him.
Of course, this is the impression that Soujiro intended to impart. Kuri apparently had different ideas and after minding her manners very well for such a long time, she could restrain herself no longer, especially when she sensed that Soujiro was going to decline an offer from heaven for reasons that she could not understand.
“We'll do it!” she cried enthusiastically, smacking her fist into her palm in a way that she intended to signify that the matter was closed, but that really only ended up hurting her wrist. She concealed it as best she could in an attempt to keep it from ruining the effect she had intended.
The old man smiled politely at her and then his gaze went back to Soujiro. Soujiro did not look convinced and seemed rather startled by her outburst. She elbowed him as discreetly as possible.
“Soujiro-kun, free food, a free place to sleep, and horses! We'll get to Kyoto much faster riding than walking! Don't be an idiot!” she whispered fiercely, elbowing him again for good measure.
Silently, he considered her case (elbowed assertions aside) and then considered a piece of advice that Shishio had once shared: the best place to hide is often in plain sight. If someone were tracking him, then they'd expect him to avoid the main thoroughfare, especially after being attacked once already. They would not expect him to continue to take the Tokaido road and they would not be looking for a guardsman on horseback. They'd be searching for a lone traveler who slept in haystacks and abandoned barns.
“Of course, I'll provide a horse for your brother as well,” added the old gentleman, in an attempt to sweeten a deal that already tasted of confection.
This last addition caused Kuri to halt her aggressive elbowing and she turned to the elder gentleman, mouth slightly slack and looked as if she might say something. Soujiro elbowed her back once, gently, and she kept her mouth shut.
They certainly wouldn't be looking for a mounted guardsman traveling with his younger brother.
“I am honored by your offer,” Soujiro bowed slightly, a simple nod of his head, “We accept.”
“Splendid, then we'll set out for the camp first thing in the morning. It's just a short piece down the road.”
Soujiro nodded and he felt Kuri shift uncomfortably behind him, but he ignored her. Later, when they bedded down for the night, alone in the common room, she finally voiced her silent question.
“Why didn't you tell him?”
His answer was simple.
“Because it's easier this way.”
And it was. It was easier thinking of her that way, neatly labeling her and boxing her, containing her, containing his relationship with her, giving it a corollary he could easily understand, that he could classify, that wouldn't bother him so much late at night.“I understand,” she chirped cheerfully, resolved to help him in any way that she could.
But she did not.
To be continued in Tears and Rain (Revisited) Seven – The Road to Kyoto: Under the Protection of a Demon
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