by Ronan Frost
Chapter Eleven
A hand touched my shoulder.
I shrugged it aside, and the hand found me again.
I awoke with a start.
The fire had burnt low, glowing fragments of red among black. I sat up. Yobutomo lay across the other side of the fire, still asleep.
Then who…?
I spun about as the hand touched me again. The boy stood there, cloaked in a heavy wet blanket from head to toe. The light of the dying campfire cast enough light that I saw his feet were bare, mud between his toes.
The figure spun and darted away with a faint childish giggle, as if he had played some pleasing trick. In the light of day, an innocuous, delightful sound; in the depths of this coldness it was ice.
I glanced over at Yobutomo. Impossibly, he still slept.
I heard the slap of the boy’s bare feet as he ran the perimeter of our camp, beyond the firelight.
I found myself on my feet, spinning about trying to catch another glimpse of him. Why hadn’t Yobutomo awoken with those sounds?
I froze at the boy’s words whispering from the reeds close to my right.
“C-c-c-ome o-o-o-n.”
I retreated a step, warding my face with my arms.
A hand seized about my wrist and hauled me forward. The fingers were ice, pressing into my skin, pulling me off balance. I fought against it, but although the boy was of my height, he had a strength far greater. Silhouetted against the stars, the hood of his cloak now thrown back, a chance beam of moonlight revealed his face.
Of course I knew it was him, the ghost that had followed me for so long. I cried out in panic, collapsing to my knees. Scores of dancing orbs of light emerged from the ground, shining as cold as a full moon. They moved around us, looping and arcing through the air.
A shouted question came from the night, Yobutomo’s voice:
“Tonbo? Boy, where are you?”
My chest worked, yet my throat would not form words and all I could manage was a weak wheeze. My free hand flailed at the earth, fingernails digging in the mud, feet bucking and kicking, but I could not stop that terrible inexorable force that dragged upon my captured wrist. I saw Yobutomo had cast something, a piece of cloth, into the glowing fragments of the fire, pressing it deep until it burst afire into yellow flame. He held his makeshift torch aloft upon a stick and ran towards me. My eyes locked upon his advancing form, the flame bouncing with every step, his shadow beneath it, fearing to look upon Takatora now that the bright cold lights danced about us. He seemed to come on so very slowly, my breath held in my lungs, my muscles quivering with weakness, willing Yobutomo on, urging impotently for him to run faster.
The ghost sensed the monk’s approach and he pulled all the harder. I cried out, twisting from side to side, refusing in my terror to look anywhere but at Yobutomo.
Suddenly he was there, his voice close.
“Boy! What are you doing?”
I opened my eyes. The hand about my wrist was gone. I was in the mud, alone, fighting for breath. The cold dancing lights slowly faded. Between gasps, I said: “He… he was here.”
Yobutomo held the stick with the burning cloth higher, the flickering feeble light hardly reaching into the blackness.
“Who was here? Tonbo, look at me! Who was here?”
I blinked, wishing desperately the terror would abate. “Takatora. My brother.”
The flame of the torch made a whooshing noise as he cast it about all points of the compass. A prickling wave flashed over my skin; running the length of my back and arms, every hair standing on end. The lights could only be seen from the corners of vision where sensitivity to faint light was greater: faint hovering balls swirling like ethereal smoke in a breeze I did not feel. I swallowed the hard ball of tightness in my throat. “Do you... Do you see them too?”
“An ancient battle was fought here,” Yobutomo said, glancing upward to the suffuse glow hidden by cloud. “The moon draws the blood soaked into the earth. We should not linger.”
I could not stop shaking. I turned my wrist over and in the flickering orange light of the flame saw the clear imprints of fingers driven into the flesh as clearly as if they had been pushed into soft clay. Instinctively I clasped my other hand to it, pressing hard, as if I could isolate that part of my body and stop that dread cold from clawing up my arm.
“Let me see that,” said Yobutomo.
Shame flooded over me and I held myself close, almost doubling over. My brother’s hand served only to remind me of my guilt and my thoughts roared loud and chaotic in my ears.
“No, it’s nothing,” I managed, but I could not meet Yobutomo’s eye. “Let’s just go, let’s go.”
We collected our few belongings with broad sweeps and in moments were back on the dark of the highway. I glanced back, but nothing followed.
I forced my thoughts to focus on my movement. A cold pre-dawn wind blew in our faces, flapping at our clothes, stinging and cracking my lips. When I sensed Yobutomo was not looking I peeled back my hand and inspected my wrist. The prints had faded.
We moved under a spell of silence and Yobutomo did not speak until the grey light of dawn appeared in the east. His voice, after so long a time of quiet, seemed strangely odd to my ears.
“You saw your brother?”
The highway was devoid of travelers, our breath visible as rising plumes, frozen earth making crunching noise under the soles of our straw sandals. It was some time before I answered: “My brother is dead.”
Yobutomo absorbed these words and said nothing, simply keeping pace at my side.
“We were playing by a river,” I said at last, not sure why I was telling him. “Somehow, it turned into an argument, and we fought, and he slipped and fell. There was an accident, I didn’t mean it...” I shook my head, my swollen tongue filling my mouth, the backlog of tumbled emotion jamming the words in my throat, edged upon the border between distant past and a breath that would bring them to the present.
“Takatora, he was older than me,” I said. “The strong one. It doesn’t make sense, why didn’t he push back? I was only playing.” The memories that came were never deep; bloated and fetid, they were always ready to float to the surface. I blinked, finding my eyes filmed and glassy. I bundled every part of that blackness, all the words and the tangle of feelings, swallowed them up into a ball deep inside, and I felt my mouth tighten into a firm line.
“He drowned?”
“Master Masakage was there, passing through the village. He saved me.”
“From what?”
“My father.”
This seemed to strike a chord in Yobutomo and his stride faltered a moment. “Your feared your father?”
“He was angry,” I said softly. It was the only true memory burned into my mind, the rest that followed were vague pictures drawn by Master Masakage’s telling. I remember clearly the fury in my father’s eyes, for he had seen what I had done to his favorite son. I closed my eyes and I could see the expression on my father’s face shift into betrayed outrage, his brows furrowing deeper as I was hauled up by one arm to Master Masakage’s horse. My father had doubled his pace, breaking into a run, racing towards the horse, but it was too late. I felt the strange smells and roughness imbued in the rough texture of Masakage’s cloak. It was the first time I had been horseback, impossibly high, and through the saddle I felt massive muscles shifting and moving as we galloped away.
“A few days later Master Masakage returned to the village and left word where I could be found if ever they wanted to reclaim me.”
“A moment of anger can undo years of affection, and cause guilt and regret lasting a lifetime...” Yobutomo spoke so softly I hardly caught it. “Do not doubt a father’s love for his child. There is a special kind of keen hurt for a father who has lost a son.”
“Well, he never came,” I replied sullenly. “Nor my mother.”
“Did you seek them out?”
I just shrugged, and looked away. “Master Masakage told
me the village had been raided by the Shingen Clan. None survived.”
I saw Yobutomo’s great bushy brows dip in a concerned frown so deep they seemed to knot together. I could not tell if it was of concern, anger, or something else entirely.