Kaguta - Or, Ankūro - The Warrior, The Thief and The Killer

32

What is this inside,
That we forget and ignore,
Not so our own selves?
- Zōinō.

She was an old woman. Not a Rokoi demon. Not a manifestation of vengeance from The Divine. Not even a warrior, let alone a Sansui. Only an old woman that shivered in the incessant rain that drenched them all. Saiban could see her, now. She had haunted his dreams for so long, casting a shadow that draped over him wherever he had travelled. Always in the back of his mind, taunting him with his failures.

An old, old woman.

They had managed to pry the jacket from her fingers, but, short of breaking those on her other hand, they could not take the remains of the Kinishima short sword from her. She held on to it as though it were part of her body, an extension of her very being. She looked small. Were he to pass her on a street, Saiban would not have given her a second glance, save for the wicked scar across her eye and, of course, that eye itself. Now closed as the woman fought for life, he still felt as though it bored into him.

Dojūru kneeled beside her, tending to so many wounds, Saiban wasn't even certain how she had lived this long. Her jacket removed showed a series of scars that Saiban had never seen the like. Through his now tempered hatred, he could see Ankūro had suffered much. Many of those scars showed healed injuries that would have meant death for anyone else. As though the old woman refused to die. Not from bloody wounds. Not from old age. She had seen it all off with her defiance.

He moved away, back to the fire, and loaded it with more and more sticks and branches. If she had a chance of surviving, she needed that warmth. As he searched the surrounding forest for more wood, he passed Kō, squatting within the trees, far away from the old woman, but in a place where she could see everything that occurred in the clearing. The old woman, the captured Sansui, Dojūru and Nesukē's wrapped body. Saiban hadn't had the opportunity to bury her yet and that felt like an insult to his ally's memory.

"I think ... I think she will live. I think she will force herself to live and the Divines will refuse to welcome her to their embrace until she has finished what she needs to do." The words felt empty. He cared nothing for the Divine Spirits, but, it seemed, this former noble did. "You don't hate her anymore, do you?"

"I don't know if I ever did." Kō leaned against the Kinishima long sword, as though comforting it for the loss of its Companion sword. The woman's eyes blinked far less often than they should. "I think I hated the idea of her. I begged her for help, once. Prostrated myself before her and she refused. 'Not my war', she said. Not my war. Is war anybody's to have?"

Saiban couldn't answer that. He was a thief. Before that, a bandit chief. Before that, a thief. He knew fighting, understood it and revelled in it, but war? War held no interest for him. No fascination. War was the privilege of nobility and the burden of the peasantry. Whether skirmishes between feuding Haūdo, or full, unforgiving civil conflict, the entire nation at odds, Saiban had always had little interest in it. Almost always.

He had thought himself, for a time, a warlord. In his little enclave of bandits and free-folk, up in the mountains of Naika region, but Haūdo Ita's forces had shown him the folly of that fancy. His people were not warriors, not an army, no matter what Saiban had thought at the time. Real soldiers had scoured All-Home from the face of Kaguta as though they were nothing but vermin that needed exterminating.

"No matter. She still lives. If she dies, my hatred dies with her. Should you hold any hate for her still, that will also die." He lifted another piece of damp wood to cradle in his arms, watching as Kō's fingers flexed upon the sword. Opening. Closing. Opening once more. "Do you wish you had brought her low? I've seen her fight, now. I don't think any one person could defeat her. Not anyone."