The Heart of a Fox

by T. Isilwath

  “Yes, you. You have to convince him not to kill himself.”

  “I can do no such thing,” Suzuka refused, folding her hands in front of her and lifting her chin as she turned her head away.

  “Yes, you can. You’re the only other person Akihiro cares about enough to stay here. You have to tell him how you feel,” she pressed, her desperation making her bold. If she was going to save Akihiro, she had to convince Suzuka to take her place.

  “You ask the impossible,” the young woman snapped back with a gasp.

  “It isn’t. Akihiro’s status has improved. He is being accepted by the villagers. He has a name now. If you two were ever to have a chance to be together,

  this is it,” she said passionately.

  “I am a miko. I cannot abandon my duties and calling,” Suzuka answered, but her voice broke a little.

  “I know full well that Shinto priestesses can marry,” she shot back force-fully. “Your father could give you to a man if the match was advantageous for your family. If the right suitor came along, you’d be married and there would be nothing you could say about it.”

  She opened her hands and reached towards the young priestess, pleading.

  “Now is your chance to take your life and your destiny into your own hands.

  Ask Akihiro to take you away from here. You and he can start a new life together. There is a beach he knows. It’s secret and hidden. You can live there.

  He could build you a house, and you’d want for nothing.” Suzuka cut her off with a sharp gesture, her body trembling and her face a portrait of despair and anger, and she wondered if she’d pushed it too far.

  “I am not you! Do not ask these things of me. I am a dutiful daughter. I will not dishonor my father and my family by running off with an abomination.

  I cannot!” the girl exclaimed, then turned and ran from the room, not even bothering to close the shoji door.

  “Suzuka! Suzuka!” she called, but there was no answer. “Damnit. Damnit.” She bit her lip and clenched her fists as she started to cry.

  “Damnit. What do I do?” she choked, then took a deep breath. “You pull yourself together and do what you have to. Come on Jo-Jo. You can do this.

  You don’t have a choice.”

  She swallowed her tears, and her hopeless grief, and went back to stuffing her things into the pack. When she was done, she took her blood sugar and winced when she saw that it had risen above 300 again. She brewed some of Oshou Seigo’s tea and drank it while she ate some fish and vegetables for her dinner. Then she ripped a page out of her journal and wrote Akihiro a letter.

  She knew she had previously decided not to write a goodbye, but seeing that Suzuka wasn’t about to help her, she thought maybe telling Akihiro the truth might sway him to stay. She knew it would mean breaking her promise to the young miko, but Akihiro’s life was worth more to her than that, and she was out of options.

  She went to bed early, knowing she would need her rest if she was going to have the strength to travel in the morning, but she slept fitfully, her dreams full of disturbing images, and she woke up feeling drained. At dawn, she left the letter for Akihiro near the irori, shouldered her pack and blanket shawl, and headed for the river. She was shocked to find Kaemon waiting for her there, along with a small boat that was beached on the riverbank. It looked like some type of broad-bottomed canoe, and its tether was in his hand.

  “Suzuka told you?” she stated flatly.

  The young man nodded. “She told me everything.”

  “Has she changed her mind?”

  “No. She is as bound as I am, as we all are,” he admitted. “You, Joanna-sama, are the only one of us who is free. Sometimes I envy that. I have prayed many days for the ability to accept my jealousy of your freedom. Still, I am deeply saddened by our parting.”

  “As am I. I’ll miss you, Kaemon-sama.”

  “There is nothing I can do to sway you from this path?” he asked her.

  “No. It’s the best way,” she insisted, shaking her head.

  “Then I give you these final gifts. They are all I can do for you.” He handed her the tether to the boat, then reached into his robes to pull out a small vial of liquid sealed with a wax stopper. This he gave to her as well, and she knew immediately what it was.

  ‘Poison…’

  “It is fast acting and painless. Do not use it until you are certain there is no hope. There is no antidote,” the priest informed her.

  “Thank you, Kaemon-sama,” she said, accepting the vial and bowing.

  “There is a set of rapids about 4 ri downstream. The river is very swift and dangerous there. You must be very careful.”

  ‘4 ri. That’s about ten miles.’ “Thank you for the warning, Kaemon-sama.”

  “I wish you luck, Joanna-sama.”

  “Thank you. I leave all of my things to Akihiro. He’ll know what to do with them. There is also a letter for him in my old room.”

  “I will see that he gets it,” the young priest vowed.

  “Thank you.”

  They stared at each other for an awkward moment, then she bowed once more. He bowed back.

  “I should go.”

  He nodded but said nothing. She put her pack into the boat and stepped into it, steadying herself as Kaemon pushed the bow off the riverbank. She used the single pole to guide the boat into the current, then sat back to let the river take her downstream.

  “Goodbye, Kaemon-sama.”

  “Goodbye, Joanna-sama. Kami go with you on your journey.”

  “Thank you.”

  Kaemon stood on the bank, his hands folded into the sleeves of his robes as she sailed away. His face was neutral, but she recognized the same stony expression that Suzuka adopted in order to conceal her true feelings. Choking back tears, she managed a small wave and watched until he was out of sight.

  ‘Akihiro. Please forgive me.’

  ********

  The river moved slowly and she just let it take her, adjusting her course with the pole only when necessary. She knew she needed to conserve her strength for the rapids ahead, and accepted the fact that she might need to carry the boat onshore if the rapids looked too rough. She didn’t know how far she should go, but she knew that the more distance she could put between her and Akihiro, the better.

  When the current started picking up some two hours later, she did her best to guide the boat through the dangerous rocks. She was doing fine until her pole slipped and got wedged against a boulder. It snapped like a twig from the torque, and she was left with only the small back-up paddle to navigate through the rapids. Being that she had never steered a canoe by herself before (Michael had always been with her), she found herself at a severe disadvantage. She knew enough to sit back in the stern of the boat and try to keep the bow facing downstream, but as the river grew swifter, she found it increasingly harder to keep the wooden vessel under control.

  Steering through the rough whitewater, she headed for what looked like a clear path between two sets of rock, only to realize too late that there was another obstacle just below her line of sight as the river took a sudden pitch downward. She tried to compensate at the last moment, but the boat swung around, turning sideways to the swift current. It rocked dangerously and almost capsized, but she used the paddle and pushed hard against the boulders to reorient the boat. The push sent the boat swinging the other way, however, and this time she wasn’t fast enough to right it before it hit another boulder.

  The boat slammed into the rocks in the middle of the river, knocking her to the wide bottom, then it tipped over as the rushing water pushed it downstream.

  She was plunged headfirst into the rapids, desperately fighting the water to come up for air as she was swept away. She managed to surface, but she was helpless against the strong current, and it was all she could do just to keep her head above the water. Her body was knocked around repeatedly as she scrambled to get a handhold on anything she could use to drag herself out of the water, but to no avail. She
ended up just trying to stay afloat on her back and using her arms to steer through the rapids as she crashed and careened downstream with the raging river, her head getting submerged numerous times and her body spinning like a top in the eddies. She was certain she was going to drown.

  ‘So this is it, is it? Will Akihiro ever find my body?’ she wondered as the water tumbled her over.

  Suddenly her feet struck bottom, and she surfaced to see that she had gotten wedged into the shallow delta of an incoming tributary. She knew she only had a moment before the current dislodged her, so she dug in her heels and pushed off for the shoreline. Amazingly, she made it and managed to reach the slower moving water of the delta, and finally the riverbank.

  Exhausted and vomiting up water, she lay sprawled on the muddy bank, just catching her breath and taking stock of how severely she was injured.

  Miracle of miracles, she had no broken bones, but she was badly bruised and had several lacerations. It was a small consolation when she realized that she had lost everything, including her blanket shawl and the vial of poison Kaemon had given her. Ironically, the one thing she did have was the GPS transceiver that was still around her neck.

  She knew she didn’t have the energy to make her way back to the village, even if she had been inclined to do so, and she recommitted herself to her original decision. She wasn’t as far away as she would have liked, but she was hoping Akihiro would find her belongings washed further downstream and waste time looking for her in the wrong places. She resolved to continue and decided to use the slower moving, smaller stream as a path into the forest and a way to hide her scent.

  Gathering what little strength she had left, she pushed herself back into the water and began to make her way up the tributary, following the only course of action she felt she had left to her. She traveled that way for hours, sometimes crawling in the shallows, other times just sitting until she could find the energy to move. She knew that if she hadn’t been in ketoacidosis before she left the village, she most certainly was now, and she could feel the fatigue steadily turning her limbs into lead.

  It was the force of her own will that kept her going until nightfall threatened to make the forest too dark for her to see clearly, then she came upon a place where the stream pooled at the bottom of a waterfall. The cascade fell several yards over a vertical rock cliff, and it looked like a bridal veil streaming over the rocks. Knowing that sometimes there were caves or hollows behind such falls, she swam through the plunge pool and crawled up on the rocks beside the waterfall. A darker area barely visible through the water caught her attention, and she pushed her way through the cascade to pass to the other side. The cave was little more than a scooped out hollow, but it was dry at the very back, and the entrance was completely obscured by the falling water.

  Dragging herself to the rear of the cave, she stretched out on her side and lay there unmoving. In truth, she didn’t have the strength to go any further, and she knew that the cave would probably be her tomb.

  ‘I suppose it’s as good a place as any to die,’ she decided as her body began to scream at her for all the torture she had put it through.

  Quietly, for she had no energy to do anything but gently pass air over her lips, she began to chant in Tsalagi an ancient and powerful Song of Passing.

  The song was meant to detach the spiritual body from the physical one, and help the singer move into peaceful death. As she sang, the pain she was in began to fade, and she felt wrapped in the love and warmth of her ancestors.

  ‘Mom, Dad, James, Sarah, Grandfather… I’ll be with you soon,’ she thought as her limbs grew heavy and her vision darkened. ‘Michael, I’m sorry. Akihiro, I’m sorry. I love you both, but it’s time for me to go home. I’ll see you next time.’

  As her voice grew fainter and fainter, she wondered how long it would take for her to die, and her last thought as she lost consciousness was the perverse notion that she had lost everything in the river (including the vial of poison) just because Spirit had wanted to buy Akihiro more time to find her.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Akihiro was elated. Not only had his hunt for the precious maitake been successful, but he had managed to reduce the duration of his trip to under three days. Of course that meant that he’d gone without rest and food, but he had suffered worse in his lifetime, and he knew that he would recover with no last-ing effects. Besides, as soon as Joanna had eaten some of the mushroom he could sleep easily, knowing that the maitake would make her better.

  He’d found three mature mushrooms growing in a very hard to reach ravine. In the ravine, he’d come upon a copse of hardwood trees that apparently had been drowned during the rains or had otherwise died, and he’d discovered the mushrooms there, growing at the base of the dead trunks. Two of the mushrooms were rather small, but the third was a giant, easily worth a year’s wages, and he’d had to cut it into smaller pieces in order to get it into his sack. It seemed like a lot, but even with the large mushroom, he was praying he would have enough to keep Joanna supplied until next year.

  ‘If I think she will run out before next harvest season, I will go out again and find more for her. I didn’t search that whole ravine. There may be more growing down there,’ he reasoned, clearing the high wall of the shrine and landing on the paving stones.

  He was very glad to be back. Not only because he was so worried about his vixen, but also because his exhaustion had started to make him slow and clumsy. He knew he needed food and sleep, but only after he had taken care of Joanna.

  Hopping up onto the engawa, he eagerly approached the shoji door and slid it back. His nose had already told him that his vixen wasn’t in the room, but he had expected her to be out. It was just approaching sunset so Joanna was probably with Suzuka doing things for the shrine or helping with the evening meal. When he put down his carry sack, however, he noticed that the residual scent of his vixen was stale and the room had an unoccupied feel. Looking around with his tired eyes, he registered that everything was neat and tidy-too neat and tidy. Almost all of the belongings Joanna had stored there were folded and placed against the wall. Even his vixen’s gitaa, Iris, was there in its case.

  The room had not been used for at least a day, probably more. Joanna was gone.

  It took a moment for the shock to wear off, but once it did, he began to panic. Numerous scenarios raced through his mind of what could have possibly happened to his vixen, and none of them eased his fears at all. The foremost was that he was too late, that he had failed to save his vixen, and she had died while he was gone. The crushing grief that fell upon him nearly knocked him unconscious, and a wailing howl built at the back of his throat, but his suddenly parched lips could barely utter a heartbroken croak.

  As he gasped for breath, his hopes rose a little when he realized that no scent of death lingered in the room, nor did he smell the telltale stink of a cremation pyre. No doubt if his vixen had died, they would have at least prepared the body if not already burned it. Such fires could be smelled for many ri and days, but the air was devoid of the scent.

  The knowledge stopped him short, and he gathered his wits about him. If Joanna was not dead, then where had she gone? Had she been moved? Was she foolish enough to try to go back to the sacred grove? If so, why had she left her belongings, especially her beloved gitaa, behind?

  ‘I was only gone for two nights! Where could she have gone in that time?’

  he worried, searching frantically for where he would find his beloved.

  There amidst her neatly gathered things, he spied a white paper with her English letters on it. It was folded, but he could see that there was writing on the inside, and he reached for it.

  ‘A letter?...’

  Footsteps interrupted him and he whirled around to see Kaemon standing in the open doorway. Relief flooded through him because he was certain that the priest would know where his vixen had gone.

  “Kaemon-sama! What has happened? Where is Joanna-sama?” He saw the young man look at him
with an expression of sadness and compassion, and the look made him very worried.

  “Akihiro, I thought I had felt you return.”

  “Yes. I just got back. I found the maitake, Kaemon-sama. My hunt was successful…” He paused and looked at the empty room before returning his pleading gaze to the young man. “But Joanna-sama isn’t here, and her scent is old…”

  “Akihiro, please come with me,” Kaemon said softly, then walked away.

  Confused, he followed the man out of the shrine and down to the riverbank.

  “Kaemon-sama?” he asked when the man stopped next to the water.

  “I could not stop her,” the priest replied. “She was determined to leave.

  She said it was to spare you the pain of watching her die, and none of our arguments moved her from her decision.”

  “What?” he gasped in disbelief.

  “I could not prevent her from leaving, but I was able to control her method of flight. I gave her a boat and told her to head downriver.” He shook his head, not quite understanding at first. It sounded like Kaemon had just told him that he’d given Joanna a boat.

  “You did what? ” he questioned.

  Kaemon put up his hands. “I gave her a boat and directed her downriver.”

  “You let her leave? ” he demanded as he fought back his sudden rage.

  “Peace! Peace! There was nothing I could do. It is not as if I could have cast a Seal and confined her until you returned. She is human. I could not fight her. I have seen her fight, and I am no match for her,” the man hurriedly explained.

  “You… you…” he sputtered, his fury making his palms tingle.

  “I could not keep her from going. All I could do for you was control which direction she traveled. I gave her a boat because I knew you would go in search of her. Now you know which way to go. I told her about the rapids. She would have had to take the boat out of the water to go around them. That would have slowed her down quite a bit. All the same, you shouldn’t waste any time in going after her,” the young priest urged.

  Akihiro snorted through his nostrils, trying to calm himself down. Kaemon was right. It would do no good to waste time arguing when Joanna was out there by herself. He looked downstream, mentally calculating the distance to the rough water, and trying to figure out about how long it would take for a lone human female to reach that point on the river.