Samurai Champloo Fan Fiction ❯ Nenju ❯ XXXIV. The temple bell dies away ( Chapter 34 )

[ X - Adult: No readers under 18. Contains Graphic Adult Themes/Extreme violence. ]

Disclaimer: I don’t own Samurai Champloo or any of its affiliated characters, which belong to Manglobe/Shimoigusa Champloos. Neither do I own the haiku of Matsuo Basho (translation by R.H. Blyth, this chapter).

A/N: According to Larousse Gastronomique, most snakes — even the poisonous ones! — are edible; I’ve yet to find Reptile Helper at my local grocery store, though, so I think Mugen’s on his own with this one. Also, as we know, an engawa is the raised wooden walkway outside of buildings.

Many thanks to FarStrider, who’s still worth her weight in French toast. :)

Nenju


The man Jouji had brought to see them was standing at the top of the rope ladder; he took hold of Fuu around the waist and swung her on board as Mugen clambered up after. “Hurry,” he said only, dark circles under his eyes as he looked at the Ryukyuan. “Is this everything?”

One of the sailors came up over the side with their meager belongings, which he dropped at their feet; Mugen nodded, her frustration building as he stood there and did nothing. “Yeah.”

“We have to go back,” she told them, voice rising in panic. “He’s still there, we can’t leave him, we have to go back — “

She took a step toward them, intent on making them see, on making them help, before Mugen grabbed her wrist. “Fuu,” he said, his voice thick.

“Your companion is dead.” The captain looked directly at her. “There is nothing you can do for him. We must leave, now, or they will be on us.” He gestured toward the quay, where some of the shogun’s men were boarding small boats —

“Then go,” Mugen said, as she gripped the front of his scarlet gi.”Do what you got to.” The captain — Jouji had called him Maurits, she remembered; he’d been reeking of sake when they’d met him, but now she couldn’t smell any part of it on him — grunted and strode off, the ship coming to life around them as the sails belled in the wind.

The ship slid through the water, inexorably drawing away from Nagasaki and the mass of people still on the pier as she and Mugen watched. They stood there until after the town had receded into a smear of light on the horizon, the shogun’s men and the quay left far behind them.

“Jin’s not dead,” she told him, in a voice that sounded small and forlorn even to her own ears. “Please — “ There was a pressure building up in her throat, a breath that she could not let escape, salt stinging in her eyes. Her chest hitched once, and again — and she was clinging to the white haori, sobbing, Mugen’s arms holding her as tightly as she held him.

“Yeah.” He rested his head on hers. “I know.”

When it grew light and there was nothing left to see but water, Mugen managed to coax her below deck, where Maurits had rigged a piece of sailcloth to screen off a small area. There was a sack filled with straw behind it; Mugen lowered her onto it, before lying down himself at the foot of the sack, stretched across the entrance. She was tired, so tired — Fuu realized with a start that it had been almost a full day since waking up the morning before — she let her eyes close and listened to the sound of his steady breathing as she fell asleep at last.

She slept for the better part of two days, fighting her way back down into dreams when the noise of the ship threatened to wake her. Maurits gave the order for quiet, and the ship’s company complied; the woman they’d picked up in Nagasaki made them uneasy — the cook swore up and down he’d seen her weeping in her sleep without making a sound, seconds before the vicious bastard she was with had him pinned to a locker, telling him he’d slit him open if he so much as looked at her again — and there was none of the usual skylarking that marked the first few days out.

It was, as was generally agreed among the crew, best to leave the captain’s business to the captain.

She woke from a dream, on the second day; they were in the mountains, and she was fifteen again, watching Mugen inexpertly seduce a pair of girls. Jin walked ahead, her hand caught in his sleeve. She could hear his soles crunching over the road, and smell the forest around them — Jin was walking too quickly and she frowned, pulling on his sleeve to slow him down: but the cloth pulled through her fingers as he steadily drew away from her —

Fuu opened her eyes, the sense of loss like a knife in her side, and it took a moment to recognize the sharp familiar pain in her belly as distinct from that. She pushed herself upright on the sack of straw, drawing Mugen’s worried eyes. “Have to pee,” she told him shortly. He nodded and went back to dozing.

The ship’s wooden deck creaked and moved under her feet as she made her way forward. Maurits saw her and nodded, not pausing in his conversation with another sailor; she found her way to the tiny room — the second crewman she’d asked had known a little Japanese, and hadn’t bolted at the sight of her as the first had done — at the ship’s narrow front and closed the door behind her before looking. There was the thin line of blood she knew would be there, trickling down the inside of her thigh.

Fuu tore a long strip from the bottom of her juban, for want of anything better, improvising until she was reasonably sure it would stay in place. She’d always been irregular, but for it to arrive now — there was nothing of him left to her any more, she thought dully.

She relieved herself before leaving the little room, almost bumping into Maurits when she emerged. She could see Mugen over his shoulder, sitting at the long low table the crew used for meals, his eyes on her. “We’ll be in Ryukyu soon,” Maurits said. “A day’s time, two at most. Will you join us?”

She nodded, and sat next to Mugen. “How much — “ she started, then fell silent. If Mugen had already paid for their passage, it would be pointless at best to ask again, and at worst, it might encourage a greedy man to think they carried more money on them than he knew about.

“You want to pay me?” the captain asked, amused. “Keep your money. The chief factor asked me to do this, and while he’s a sodomite, he’s a good man; it’s my pleasure to take you wherever you want to go.”

“Thank you.”

The ship’s captain smiled and pulled a wide scroll from his pocket, unrolling it on the table as Mugen leaned forward. “These are the Ryukyu islands here,” Maurits said, indicating shapes outlined in black on the paper, before tapping the tip of his finger at a spot on the paper close to them. “We’re here, I believe. I don’t know if you’ve decided where you would have me land you — ?”

“Further south, the better. I don’t want to take her anywhere near the northern islands,” Mugen told him.

Maurits looked at her enquiringly; she nodded. “Mm. Then I would suggest this place.” He put his fingertip just below an arm of the biggest island. “We put in here when we need water. Very few people, and those that are there keep to themselves; there’s even a fair amount of forest left. Good harbor.”

“There any Satsuma-han?” The Ryukyuan crossed his arms over his chest.

The European shook his head. “I’ve never seen them there. Just aren’t enough people for the han to have an interest, and it’s too far south — to cover that part of the island, they’d need to take men from other places they want more. It’s the best place I can think of; if you need to leave, there are enough Company ships that water there that we could get you out,” he said, and smiled. “Of course, this is also the only place I can think of where you’d be as likely to survive as to die.”

Mugen frowned. “How hard is it to get in and out of the harbor?”

“Not hard, once you know where the reef is.”

The Ryukyuan grunted, scratching his ear thoughtfully. “Can’t be too far from a village. We’ll need supplies, and building a house means time.”

Maurits nodded, a slow smile beginning on his face as she watched. “Tell me,” he said. “What do you require in a house?”

Mugen eyed him suspiciously.


Maurits had insisted on giving them some of his supplies; they found themselves gifted with an ax, some gardening tools — Fuu almost inadvertently decapitating one of the rowers while carrying the hoe, before Mugen took it quietly from her — and an extra bucket to carry them in, before he wished them luck and landed them on the beach. She watched the small boat as it pulled away from shore, half wanting to run into the warm water after them and ask to be taken back onto the ship, now that they were here.

The island was beautiful, lush and green — greener than anything she’d ever seen, as green as the wet paint Moronobu had used — mountains climbing toward the sun; the water around it was clear, a bright blue-green as if color was seeping off the mountains into the ocean, tinting it brilliantly before the water turned a deep blue once more. It was amazing and breathtaking and now that she was here, she just wanted to go home.

“Right. Come on,” he said, starting up the narrow path.

It was only a foothill, and a small one at that, but she found herself breathing as heavily as if she’d been running a race when they reached the top; he looked completely unfazed by the climb and was peering at some stone steps when she got there.

“Foundation’s solid enough,” he told her as she puffed to a stop. “Roof’s all right for now, but unless it gets fixed in the next couple of years, whole damn thing’s going to fall in during a monsoon.” He set the tools Maurits had given them against the wall, as Fuu took a long look

The house was — the place where the house had been built was pretty, she decided; there was a stone wall, with tall trees and a small courtyard, and an opening in the wall through which she could just make out steps leading up to a clearing. There was even a mango tree, which cheered her a little.

The house itself was a disaster, however. She wasn’t sure what she had been expecting, but . . . the shoji were disintegrating, the wooden frames rotting in place; she stood on tiptoe to touch the roof, pulling away her fingers as one of the roof tiles fell off. “It’s all right for now?”
He nodded. “Needs work, but yeah,” he told her. He stepped up on the narrow engawa, and Fuu followed. It wasn’t terribly different from what she was used to, she decided, and maybe it could be changed a little, and then maybe the feeling of being a six-year-old watching her father leaving forever would go away —

There was a sudden motion and Mugen jumped back, his eyes on something in the crumbling firebox. “Don’t move,” he said.

She craned her neck to see, then wished she hadn’t, as a smooth triangular head appeared over the edge with the long mottled body gliding after; the snake slithered onto the plank floor and she stopped breathing.

The longsword was a bright streak in the dim light, then he was wiping it on the edge of his gi, the snake lying in pieces on the floor. “Habu,” Mugen said conversationally. “Poisonous. Tasty, though.” She looked at him in horror. He shrugged, picking them up and taking them outside.

There was a dry, powdery smell inside, sharper than the general dust and neglect that she’d noticed first. The smell was stronger further in — she took a tentative step forward, looking at the white spatters on the floor while remaining alert for anything slithering in the building. The blotches were centered there: she frowned. Why would — she looked up toward the beams that supported the roof, hearing a faint cooing; there were pigeons up there, which meant that that was —

“Shit,” Mugen said, standing at her elbow and looking at the floor. “Damn birds.”

Okay. Fuu turned to him, suppressing the sudden crazy urge to laugh: this was so — they hadn’t been off the ship for half a day, and already their house had turned out to be infested with poisonous snakes, covered in bird crap, and threatening to fall down around their ears. “There was supposed to be a village near here, wasn’t there?” she asked, cutting off the tears that were threatening. “Let’s go find that.”

She felt better once they discovered that the nearest village was close enough for her to be able to walk there and back in a morning, and she felt much better on discovering that there was something eminently familiar in the village — a gambling hall, as like to any she’d known in Edo or Kyoto, that this one could have been dropped inside Osaka without anyone being the wiser.

And, of course, the gambling hall was full of what Fuu had known well since before she was old enough to need to bind her chest: foolish men who were there to lose their money.

“Please, one more. My luck’s going to turn, I know it is,” the man said to Fuu, his calloused palms held open in entreaty.

“I already have all of your money,” she told him, not unkindly, as she got ready to leave. “You don’t have anything else.” She looked over at Mugen. If nothing else, they’d be able to buy what they needed, and they wouldn’t have to break into their savings to do it.

“My boat.”

Fuu turned back toward the voice.

The man set his shoulders. “I have a boat,” he repeated. “A good one.”

She rolled the dice in her palm. They were good dice, she knew — from their weight, it was evident that they hadn’t been tampered with — and the shape of them in her hand was comfortingly familiar. She knew them; the dice just were. There was nothing about them that was indefinite, no chance of false hope.

Fuu let them tap softly together in her hand before handing the dice back to the roller, and nodded at the man. “All right,” she agreed. “All or nothing. My money, your boat.”

He swallowed convulsively. Mugen muttered something dire under his breath that she ignored, kneeling at the head of the mat alongside him.

She yawned. She was so tired, and he’d be hungry sometime — for her part, she would have slept on the sand, and it felt like she’d never want food again — but Mugen deserved better than that.

“I’ll get the money, you just get the hell out of here — “

”Place your bets!”

Fuu shoved the tiny mountain of ryu forward, as Mugen groaned beside her. The dice roller liked to put a little more of his back into it than she would’ve done, she thought: the man snapped the dice out from under his fingers, the white cubes tumbling as he caught them in the cup. “Odd,” she said.

“Even,” the man with the boat responded.

The roller plucked the cup away from the dice —

“Three-two, odd. The woman in pink wins.”

Fuu scooped the ryu into her sleeve, the man’s eyes on the gold as it disappeared. Somewhere, she felt a little pity for him; he had the same faraway look on his face that Mugen had had when Sara the goze had come so near to killing him, that same expression of a man who had just felt the ground give way under his feet as something he had known all his life had suddenly been proved wrong. Any other time, she might have been tempted to tell him to go home, and not to gamble away his boat.

But not today.

She watched the man get up and walk toward the door unsteadily, before standing up herself. “You coming? You should probably look at it to see if you’re getting cheated.” Fuu looked over at Mugen.

“What?” He frowned.

“Well, what am I going to do with a boat?” she asked. “I don’t want to even look at another one as long as I live.”


As the months went by, the house on the foothill began to turn from an abandoned building into a place where people lived.


That made thirty, by her count.

Fuu balled her hands into fists before putting them into the small of her back and stretching. It was no wonder all the farmers she’d seen looked like they did; this was an incredible amount of work, she thought. And she’d been lucky that Mugen had found this place, which hadn’t been reclaimed by the forest yet — the area around the house was thick with weeds, but those were easier to clear than trees. All she’d needed to do was to clear the weeds, and turn the soil, and find the seeds, and plant them . . . it would be worth it when there were vegetables to eat, and if even half of these did well, there would be more than they needed. The sweet potatoes looked healthy enough, with the edges of the leaves traced round in a delicate purple. She wondered how sweet they were: if they had any luck at all, she’d be able to fatten them up a little. Mugen was so thin, and even Jin —

Jin.

She dropped her trowel and slid to her knees between the rows of green kabocha plants, dirt grinding into the side of her face as she toppled over. Small curling tendrils were emerging from the leaves, she saw, and he was gone; the knowledge crept up, sly and insinuating through the pit of her belly. He was gone, and he’d never see how the dirt never came out from under her fingernails, and the shape of how he was gone seemed large enough to eat her alive —

She crawled to the side of the vegetable garden and retched, emptying herself of the sour stinging bile until her arms were shaking and gummy spittle hanging in strings from her mouth was all that was left.

“Fuu?” Mugen’s voice carried back to her.

“Back here,” she called out to him, wincing at how hoarse her voice was. She brought a handful of the water that she’d been using on the plants to her mouth, rinsing the sourness out. She spat carefully to the side of the plants, before using more of the water to wash off her face as he came around the side of the house. He held a string of fish in his hands.

“What’re you doing?” He looked at her curiously, and she wondered how terrible she looked to him.

“Just weeding.” Thinking about how I’m going to get through the rest of my life, she added mentally. Any ideas? “Help me clean those?” she asked instead.

He frowned, and she could see he wasn’t entirely convinced but that he wasn’t going to push the matter. “Yeah.”


They fell into a routine in the evenings.

As soon as the sun went down, she would build up the fire and wait for Mugen to appear, and he would show up with something for her always in his hand. Usually, it was something for her to cook — though sometimes it was something completely unexpected like a packet of tea or a polished silver mirror; he’d even brought her a pair of chickens, once, their legs trussed together and carried clucking to her on a pole that he held over his shoulder. He never said where any of it came from, and she never asked. They’d eat something, watch the fire for a while she asked him questions she’d thought of during the day, and then he’d fall asleep while she washed out their bowls and banked the fire. In the morning, he was always gone by the time she woke.

Mugen had assumed the role of an oracle in her eyes, with the sheer volume of knowledge he had of what was necessary to survive in Ryukyu. When she’d said as much to him, he’d been surprised, as if it was a matter of course that he would know; and his aptitude for making things surprised her as well. The day after he had brought the chickens to her, he’d stayed on land and put together a tiny house of sorts for them from wood they’d scavenged from the house. It would keep the chickens safe at night and there would be eggs, eventually, he said; she’d just liked the idea of company during the day when he was out on the water, and named them Tatsu and Kazu for their tendency to squabble over particularly fat bugs in the garden.
Fuu turned the cup in her hands, watching the fluted rim curl in on itself. The cup was undecorated clay, but still more elegant than her hands, these days; her nails were short and ragged, the skin round the edges peeling and rough with scrubbing. They looked like old woman’s hands, she thought dispassionately. Once it would have — she pushed that thought away and took a resolute swallow of her tea. It didn’t matter here how ugly her hands were.

On the other side of the fire, Mugen looked up from the flames to her. “Got something for you,” he said.

She put the cup down. “You do?”

He gave her a crooked grin. “Not here. I’ll bring it tomorrow.”

“Thanks.”

They were silent a long moment, as she thought about him. He’d never said anything to let her know what he was thinking, not since the moment they’d seen Jin fall in Nagasaki, but she knew it was there and that it was eating him from the inside out. It would be an act of compassion, to comfort him, and the idea that she could forget, even if it was only for a short time —

It would be easy, she knew, to tell him yes some night, when what she would mean was that her need had overwhelmed her better judgment.

Maybe it would be a good idea, she decided, to start keeping sake or that local stuff in the house to knock herself out, for nights when that yes would come easier.

“What are you going to do?” he asked.

Fuu shrugged. “I don’t know. I’d like some edamame, if I can figure out how to grow it.”

“Not what I meant,” he said. “I meant — “

”I know what you meant.” She reached behind her for the thin quilt she’d bartered some of Tatsu’s eggs to have. “Are you going to be warm enough? There’s an extra one if you want it.”

Mugen shook his head. “He’s gone.”

“No. He isn’t,” she said. “He can’t be.”

“Bastard stuck him in the gut. You know how lucky he was to have lived through that once?” he asked. “Even if he didn’t die right away, chances’re good the wound went bad. And if it didn’t, he killed a governor, Fuu. We were gonna be executed for less than that, remember?”

Her mouth set in a stubborn line. “You wouldn’t give up that easy, and neither would Jin,” she pointed out. “And I wouldn’t let either of you go without at least saying goodbye.”


He exhaled. “Sometimes — “

”What?”

Mugen’s eyes flicked up to her. “Nothing. Get some sleep, willya?”

It was the next day that she realized she was learning what was necessary to survive in Ryukyu.

Fuu caught the movement out of the corner of her eye, as she bent to pick up the melon that had fallen from her hands as she came down the steps from the garden.

She inhaled sharply, a current of fear shivering through her as she fought the sudden impulse to run, willing her heart to slow to its normal pace.

It lay next to the fire, a long liquid thread with cold yellow eyes; it raised its head and hissed, warning her away from the comfortable warmth.

Her eyes fell on the dying fire. It would go out if left as it was, and there would be the difficulty of building a new one with the green wood —

— and inside her she felt a spark of anger. This was her home; the snake had had to slither over the path she’d raked, over the floor she’d scrubbed, up to the fire she’d worked on so long to get it to burn —

“I’m not afraid of you,” Fuu said out loud.

She took a step forward, the hoe comforting and solid in her hand. The snake hissed again, beginning to coil as her courage wobbled dangerously. It would be so, so easy to wait outside for Mugen to come back — he wouldn’t think twice about it, he was used to saving her when she was too weak and useless to do it herself —

She clenched her teeth and severed the snake neatly in two, the blade of the hoe slicing through directly behind the head.

Fuu watched it for a moment, not daring to come closer, as the halves lay inert on the floor. She’d cut it in two, but it seemed so much less dead than the one Mugen had killed — she prodded it gingerly with the hoe, half expecting the snake to curl into angry life once more; the body rolled a little, but otherwise stayed still.

Emboldened, she slid the hoe blade under the head and picked it up: there was no way she was going to touch it herself — she carried it to the door and threw it off the edge of the path, the long body following after. It stayed still in the underbrush, and finally, she went inside, satisfied that the birds would do the rest of the cleaning up for her.

Mugen came in as she had built the fire back up, handing her a string of fish as he squinted at her. “You look different,” he commented.

She smiled. “I had a good day.”