WAP chapter 10

CHAPTER 10: the fall

The priestess was distracted lately. Hana glanced up through her lashes to steal another glimpse of her face. It was serene. Her hands were neatly folded on her legs. She still looked- she looked a step above human, with her perfect stillness and flawless skin. Hana didn’t reach out to touch the scars on her face from old sores, but it was a close thing.

‘I want to know where she went yesterday.’

She pushed the wistfulness down. She wasn’t going to get to know. Hana played with a loose string on her sleeve and ran her tongue along her teeth.

“Shinji. What is the reading for this character?”

Hana listed to the side, watching the priestess carve a 10 stroke kanji into the dirt with a finger. Sunlight dappled onto her face from above, casting shadows.

“The first radical is person…” Shinji’s voice trailed off, thinking. He bit his lower lip and furrowed his brow. “Sha? And shaku?”

“And the last reading?” Her voice was like the wind, soft and unhurried.

The moment trailed on. “I don’t remember, Priestess.”

She merely nodded.

Hana shook her head, but Fumiko bent her face down to the kanji with confidence. “It’s kari,” she said. “As in ‘borrow’.”

The Priestess gave her a fond look. “That’s right.” And then her head fell off her body.

Hot blood hit Hana’s face. She blinked and choked in a confused breath, accidentally inhaling- inhaling-

Fumiko screamed, before Hana really even understood what she was looking at. The Priestess’s head rolled. Her body collapsed forward. Her knees were still folded in seiza, so she was neatly packaged up.

She didn’t understand.

“Fuck off.”

A man’s voice, low and unfamiliar, twisted with contempt. Hana stumbled to her feet with difficulty. She kept a hand on her stomach, a comfort mechanism by this point.

‘Shinobi. Like the man last week.’

It wasn’t the same man. That man had been slimmer, handsome and young. He had laughed and smiled and worn clothing that looked local, if rich.

‘Where did he come from?’

He was simply there one moment. Her brain screamed in panic.

“You killed her,” Hana said dumbly. She didn’t understand. “Why?”

The look he gave her filled her with a cold terror. She was drowning in it. She was breathing so fast that she felt dizzy. She nearly stumbled over the Priestess’s body and had to put a hand on that small back in order to balance. She was still warm, through her clothes. A muscle twitched under Hana’s hand even as the neck hemorrhaged blood. The horror of it shook her.

The man shoved her carelessly. The force of it sent Hana flying. She hit the dirt with a cry.

Fumiko rushed over to her and helped her stand with shaking hands. Hana looked up at her cousin’s face to see it bone-white with terror. Fumiko bowed her head in respect that that man didn’t deserve and began dragging Hana backwards out of the clearing where they had been studying. “Let’s go.” Her voice was high and tight.

Shinji was standing stock still, frozen. He was staring at the Priestess’s face. Hana couldn’t see it from this angle. Wildly she wondered what it looked like. Was she still serene? Had it been too fast to hurt?

Fumiko cried his name and Shinji jerked to attention. He nodded and began to run as well, crowding Hana along with Fumiko.

Supported by the two of them, Hana craned her neck back to see the murderer pick the Priestess’s head up by her lovely hair. She cried out in shock but the others wouldn’t let her stop running.

They ran back to the village and stood in the street, trembling. Hana felt her chest hurt- her whole abdomen hurt. She was shaking.

“She’s not dead.”

It took a moment to understand Shinji’s rough whisper. He held her hand in one hand and pressed the other against Fumiko’s back. The blood on Hana’s face felt cold now, thicker. It had stopped running into her eyes.

“I saw,” Shinji said. He swallowed and glanced back in the direction that they had come from. “She mouthed at me. Told me to run. She said.” He let out a gasping sob. “She said it was fine, that she knew who he was and she would come back.”

It should have sounded ridiculous. It should have. But.. the priestess wasn’t human like them. There were whispers that she was a god herself. No human could have done what she did, with the miracles of the shrine and the flowers and their perfect harvest, much less do whatever she’d done to all those samurai.

“Come back?” Fumiko said, voice barely audible.

Hana grimaced. “Hurts,” she managed. Her knees were so weak. “I need to lie down.” They let her down onto the dirt. Fumiko checked the temperature at her forehead and then stroked through her hair. “I believe her,” Hana said, gritting her jaw. What was this? Had the shinobi done something to her when she’d felt afraid? Was it from the shock of seeing the Priestess- not die, but be hurt?

No one was around. At this time of the morning, everyone was working. They milled around in shock. Eventually, Hana felt recovered enough to go back. They clutched at each other for bravery as they went back into the forest. The clearing wasn’t so far from the village. They’d been going there most mornings each week, where there was shadow to shield them from the sun but space to let the air move and cool them.

The man was gone, she noted with relief.

But so was the Priestess’s head.

Fumiko let out a choked cry and broke away from Hana and Shinji to kneel at the Priestess’s poor abused body. The blood was horrible. It seemed impossible that so much blood had ever been in one body. Fumiko ran her hand down the back of Aiko-sama’s shoulders and then down her arm. And she shrieked when the hand moved.

“Fumiko,” Hana said slowly. “You’re the best writer.”

Fumiko looked up at her in confusion.

“She can’t hear us,” Hana explained hurriedly. She knelt to wipe away the kanji ‘borrow’ and then grimaced at all the blood. “Over here.  Take her by the hand and- yes.” Shinji strode over and encouraged the Priestess’s body to stand. The sight of it sent shivers down her neck but Hana grabbed hold of her courage. She beckoned Shinji over. The Priestess wasn’t a large woman, but she looked like a child now, tucked against Shinji without her head. Fumiko wailed again, involuntary pain bleeding out.

The Priestess knelt again, hands patting down at the dirt. Hana held one, interlacing her fingers. This was still her master, she reminded herself.

Unprompted, the story of the creation goddess Izanami no mikoto floated to her mind. The Goddess was the first to die. Izanagi promised that he would rescue her from death, but when he saw her body and understood what death meant, he turned away in revulsion and trapped her in hell.

Never.

Hana felt her lips thin. “Ask her what we should do,” she said.

It took a moment for Fumiko to understand. Her face was red now from tears but she was full of determination as she knelt. It must have been muscle memory for her to gracefully lift one sleeve back, just as Aiko-sama had taught them to do to keep their clothes clean from ink. She wrote the sentence in the dirt and dug it in deep.

Then lovingly, gently, Hana guided the Priestess’s hands on top of the words.

Pressed together as they were, she could feel the moment that the Priestess understood she was feeling words and began to decipher them. After a few scant seconds she used her own hand to wipe away the words and began to write.

I need to go to my head.

The words sat for a full minute before Aiko-sama erased them herself.

I am sorry to ask. I cannot go alone.

“Fucking hells.”

All three of the villagers with heads in the clearing spun to look at the interloper.

“Mayumi-san,” Shinji said tersely. He took a step between them. “I- the Priestess is-”

“I can see her,” the shinobi cut him off. She brushed past him without effort, confusion and wonder warring with horror in her features. Her lips curled in disgust but her eyes were empathetic. “Priestess…” She touched the Priestess on the back, where Hana had.

The Priestess flinched.

Then she relaxed. She tapped the ground where the last sentences were still waiting.

“Go where?” the shinobi woman asked sharply. “What happened here?”

“I don’t know,” Fumiko said. She was shaking her head. “It was so fast. We were- it was as usual, and a man attacked her. I didn’t even see him until after.” Her voice broke.

“He took her head,” Shinji cut in. He sounded fierce, for the first time in his life. “He was a shinobi. Not like you.” Mayumi looked at him sharply but he was undeterred. “You’re dressed like a normal person. He wasn’t. He had a bag- I think he was going to take the- take her head from the start.”

There was a pause while Mayumi-san contemplated this. “A bounty hunter,” she said after a moment. She put a hand to her chest. It looked surprisingly delicate, Hana thought, despite how horrible shinobi could be. “He would take her head to the Daimyo.” Her voice was flat. “This is how he decided to solve his problem.”

“Who is he?” Hana shot to her feet. “You know him?”

The older woman gave her a flat look. “I speak of the Daimyo,” she clarified. “He realized that samurai were not sufficient.” She ran her hand down Aiko-sama’s back in an absent way that seemed maternal. The emotion of seconds before was gone, replaced by cold calculation.

Hana zeroed in on the movement and licked her lips.

This woman cared for the Priestess. She was- she was burakumin, yes, but she understood. And if the Priestess would share sake with her, who was Hana to turn up her nose? “Mayumi-san,” she said. She made audacious eye contact. “Will you help?”

“Let me think,” the woman said, which was not an answer.

Hana began to pace, taking care to avoid stepping on the waiting message. “She doesn’t hear us,” she pointed out. “Can someone write to her again?” Her voice broke. “It must be terrible.”

Mayumi-san’s careful control over her face broke a little, showing a grimace.

“Fumiko?” Hana entreated.

Her cousin nodded and wiped away the words. She hesitated and looked at the shinobi, clearly unsure of what to write. She settled for “Mayumi is here. We ask help.”

She was the only one to see the older woman wince.

“You forgot the particle,” Shinji said automatically. He seemed to have turned off his emotions somehow. Hana envied it.

‘Mayumi can’t bear to leave Aiko-sama with hope and say no,’ Hana felt. She had to believe that Mayumi would help. They could lead her to the Daimyo’s palace if they needed to, but she needed help. That horrible man had hurt her.

“Preposition,” Fumiko corrected with a thick voice. She began to write it in and then shook her head. She led the Priestess’s hand to the new sentence. Even without eyes, the Priestess read it so quickly. She was so clever and good. She absolutely must be healed.

Hana closed her eyes and sunk to her knees. She didn’t care that she was kneeling in Aiko-sama’s blood and the mud it had turned into. She clasped her hands together and leaned forward until her forehead brushed the filth. ‘Izanami-sama, turn your eyes to your loyal servant,’ she prayed. ‘Help her. Give us courage to save her as you should have been saved.’

Mayumi-san made a very strange sound.

Hana didn’t care why. She didn’t look up. She kept praying with all the fervor she could muster. She was a true believer, she really was. Her prayers to the gods had been answered by the Priestess’s arrival and then she had seen miracles, seen power and glory and riches that could have suited no one else she had ever seen in her life.

“She wants clothes?” Fumiko said, uncertain.

Hana stopped praying and looked over. Blood dripped off of her face onto her lap.

The others were looking down at the dirt where Aiko-sama had written something else. The shinobi wiped it away and wrote a quick answer. Fumiko scrunched up her face but clearly wasn’t able to read it before the Priestess read it, wiped it away, and wrote something new.

“We have a plan.” Mayumi-san looked at them like she wasn’t sure how she had arrived in this clearing. Her eyes were a little lost but her fingers were curled around one of the talismans that the Priestess had been praying over and painting. “I’ll need to get something from my clan, for travel. First we will go to the shrine and help her dress.” Her mouth stretched into a smile that looked… too toothy. Hana didn’t pull back but it was a close thing. “One can’t go to the Daimyo’s court in anything but one’s finest, of course.”