The scrub brush burns

It is 1782, the second year of Tenmei. A young ronin called Bekku is
travelling the long road to Kaga, oiled in sweat. The end of a hot day;
the delirium of her pace and the muggy heat leads her to see
otherworldly objects littered around, blurred like vibrating drumskin,
stretched between the trees.

They can be found here, them saints. They are strewn along the
roadside, shed by travellers who travelled before her. She will add her
own troubles to the heap, discarding them one by one, they're blunt,
clumsy weapons concealed about her person, making her old and baggy -
that eat and eat at the pillars in her legs. She will discard them, she
will make herself lighter - the road is helpful for that.

Weary, wary. A pair of shido swing stiffly at her waist, hidden
alongside her beneath layers of a lady's kimono. Short, curved swords
with a hook, and a ring in the hilt that the finger slips into. For
dealing with other ronin. The road is dangerous for that.

Weary, wary. They swing back and forth.

She has a muse dogging her. She has to listen to the muse, her ears
bordering on compassionate. It says, "And what about me? What about
her? What of him? Perhaps." This is a company that corrodes and
corrodes. The road is lonely for that.

She brushes her face. Fatigue is getting the better of her, but she
always pulls herself up by the bootstraps and marches on she tells
herself. It's not shameful to need false comfort. She'll need every
ounce in the days ahead. She brushes her dirty face. Futile, Bekku.
Futile.

Says the muse, "They said you were wrong."

They said you were wrong.

Says she must ask herself. Does it arc through her body in the dead of
rest? Does it weave through the evening? That she was wrong? No, says
the old pride, because - simply - she was right. The road is a fissure
for the old pride, but some of it sticks with the leaves of dust. It's
all gold dust. She has a Midas grasp.

You could call it adoration, what they once felt for her. You could
call it contempt now, if you liked. The words lose a little something
after melting in the rat mouth for centuries.

Here she is, grubby and tired, slow and aching, nearly teetering on
the pillars in her legs. Her feet are raw, her eyes are red-rimmed, her
hips are grazed from the rough grip of the shido hilts stiffly
swinging. The evening is thick with the rotting heat of the day, the
road is mercilessly weathering her heels. Abandon it, abandon it to
tomorrow, the muse cries. Release us, release us to the free evening,
cry the swords and the troubles. Abandon me to sleep, chokes the road
through its mounds of dust.

Very well then. Abandonment it is. There will be an inn soon enough.
But never go back - nothing is worse than retreat, she says. Nothing is
worth renouncing her resolutions. They'd punish her. They'd kill her.
They'd finish the work the road has begun.

But abandonment is a fine gesture for now, and tomorrow she will reach
Kaga, and venture into chaotic streets awash with stone, into a
Messianic tide of civilisation. Tonight she will abandon.

An hour or so passes before she comes to an inn. In that time the
evening has conceded to a moonless night's assault, charring the air,
and her refuge is a beacon in a humid storm. The establishment and its
immediate surroundings are littered with broken patches of umbra,
misshapen formations between the staggered light of several lanterns. A
single lantern is hung outside, under the slanted overhang of the roof,
and as she approaches she sees that beneath the harshness of its glare
there crouches another lonely traveller, tall, slender and
bundled.
His back is facing her. A pipe sits between two fingers and a thumb.
His hair is fiercely celandine bright, and tied back into a knotted
stump. His kimono is plain viridian, without markings. A highway of
smoke winds through the light, rising and thinning until it is
shattered by the closeness of the atmosphere.

He can't fail to hear her lead-legged approach - her feet hammer on the
earth, but he remains silent and still. This arouses her defences and
needles her limbs, but she won't confront the stranger - she is far too
defeated by tiredness and weakened by fatigue. If she has her pursuers,
they cannot have overtaken her and reached the inn before dark. Even if
they kept up with her pace, they would have passed her on the road. On
this occasion, she can forgive herself for not being cautious - that
is, for not wasting time on suspicion.
The inn has windows filled with ornate iron panels - the architecture
is unusual, somewhat grotesque. Pretending to struggle with the slight
weight of her provisions, she staggers inside. At her last uneasy
glance at the traveller, he scratches his forearm with a rapid, furious
motion. The flesh glows pink in the light, and he hides it from her.
She goes in.

~

The steam blasts and buffets her dust husk as she strips, aching with
a weak musclepulse. The shido, wrapped in cloth, are placed with a
muffled knock on top of the hardwood rim of the bath, the rings of
their hilts visible and within reach. She lowers herself in. The water
climbs and gropes around the scorched shores of her hips, then the
vulnerable yield of her stomach and finally the tops of her breasts.
She shudders, grunts, winces and sighs.

The scrub brush is taken to her neck and calves, where the bonedry mud
of the road, rising to her step, has fixed itself most thickly - she
cleans it off with a sluggish, clumsy grind. Her breathing is vibrato,
and a cloud of autumn jasper billows into the bathwater. She scrubs
until she burns, then her arms, her legs and her brisket, scouring the
soil and turning herself into a shining tulip. When she at last stops,
she drops the scrub brush over the side and simmers.
She wants to have a conversation with herself, but it's too hard to
talk business when you're naked and sore, so she instead lets a nervous
flutter blossom and blinks a wasp sting from her eyes. It winds down
her cheeks. Her shoulders abandon their lean angles and slide beneath
the film of purifying heat. Now she sees her muscles stretched out
before her like endless dunes in a muddied haze. What were languid
golden limbs are now inflamed, ripened and young. This was something
that the enemy could never have: her youthful, unprotected body,
looking fresh from a womb.

Fumbling men with rambling mouths do not get what they want - so he got
the mysterious, wise Bekku. He got the old witch. He shouldn't have
wanted or needed another nursemaid, so she owed him nothing more.
Nothing more! Her betrayal should have been no surprise to him - it
wasn't even a betrayal, but an undressing of the creature they already
knew, nothing more than an awakening. It wasn't even a betrayal, and
yet his surprise had seemed the focal point of all their discontent. It
was a mark of respect, not a betrayal.

She closes her eyes as she strives for concentration, but in that
instant is taken by the strange notion that she is bathing in his
remains. The water is grim with dislodged mud, and the mud is him,
exploring her hollows with his filthy tongue. Don't let your
imagination get the better of you, Bekku, she warns herself - but she's
is up in a trice, throwing the water off her in ribbons and sickles,
scrambling over the side and dripping a crippled canter on the
floorboards. She stands there in damp disarray, her slight form swaying
with indecision.

An explanation springs upon her, petrifies her stance and arches her
bare feet. Maybe she did uncover his smell in that instant when she
closed her eyes, but her senses were so shredded that they transferred
the sensation to her immediate surroundings. He couldn't he have up to
her in so short a time? She tests the air but finds only the smother of
steam and her own sweat. The shido are still within reach - of that she
makes certain.

She reaches for a towel, lets it tumble out of itself with a woomf and
works it into her hair, all the time wary of the moving patterns around
her - the shape of the steam and the light. Hurriedly, she moves the
towel across her swollen body, finishing between her legs and letting
it shrink to the floor. She steps onto it as she claws for a fresh set
of clothes. She slips them on, piece by piece, ready at every stage to
abandon the process in a lash, never trapping herself half-in half-out.
Done, she takes up the shido in their rag blanket and pads toward her
room. Yes, Bekku, your imagination did get -

The doorway.

Her breath hitches, her waist tightens and her hand steals around the
hilt, every nerve set afire.

No I won't die today.

The rag slides. She draws her weapon upward and behind her head, where
it locks with a descending blade. She leans and turns under her arm,
altering the course of the attacking weapon, away from her and into the
doorframe.
The rag withers on the floor.
Her assailant faces her, shrouded against the doorway. They are barely
inches apart and he has the height advantage. It's the blonde-haired
traveller in the green kimono; he still has his pipe in one hand. The
other is wound round a short, broad, heavy sword. It is an Ondeko-bachi
- the devil's drumstick, made for swinging like a club. It grates
against the slim blade of her shido.

She recognises the assassin; he is Kintojo. Her body joined to his by
their nuzzling weapons, he raises his chin and grins amiably, right at
her, from beneath nearly white eyebrows. She remains solid and still as
a tor.

Bekku says, "Thought I smelt Hensto. He's sent you in his place,
huh?"

"No, no," says Kintojo. "This is nothing to do with Hensto. He's called
it quits, or at least so he says."

She doesn't believe it. The letch she smelt not even minutes ago is
here in some spirit. But then, oh Bekku, you're so easily deceived,
(the muse returns to dog her.) Weak in judgement and anarchic in
temperament, silly girl. Silly, deluded girl. You should have stayed
naked in the dirty warmth.
Kintojo is waiting for her, still grinning. The silence is
suffocating.

"Then who sent you?" she asks him.

"Who's to say I didn't send myself?"

"You hardly even knew me."

She angrily forces the shido forward, pushing Kintojo's weapon away and
splitting from it, effectively freeing her from his overpowering stoop.
She wants to retreat out of the shadow of the tall man, putting space
between them, but by her poor, sore feet she swears she will not allow
herself to fall back.

"You're right," Kintojo says, a rueful shake of the head. "I didn't
know you at all. So there's no love lost between us."
The shido - the one in her other hand - slips a little in her damp
palm. Her lips are pursed, her fighting talk lodged at the back of her
throat.

Kintojo puts the pipe between his teeth and scratches his weapon arm,
thoughtful for a little. Now when he speaks, he ravenously slurs his
esses.
"Someone did send me, yes. But Bekku, old girl, you'll have to work out
who it is all by yourself."

He lunges at her, ondeko-bachi whipped above his shoulder, poised to
drop neatly into the side of her neck. She abandons ground fast,
clenching both shido with fury-filled fingers, and is abandonment so
different to surrender? Is it?

Concentrate, Bekku!! You didn't go through it all to get a butchering
at his hands!

She braces against a second dive of her enemy's blade, ensnares it
again with hers, and brings her other arm to bear, driving it toward
his abdomen. He anticipates her, turns side on and gets a hand around
her wrist.

She grunts, making time, "How did you pass me?"

Without easing their grip on her wrist, his fingers creep around her
hilt.

"An army could've stumbled past you on that road and not be seen or
heard you were so deep in dreamytime. One of your eyelids kept
flickering - got a stye?"

Damn him. She unlocks her other weapon and tries to strike with it, but
he blocks with his own. She strikes again and he blocks again, throwing
her arm back. Then thinking he's got a hold on the hilt he lets up on
her hand. She jerks it away.

"Must've been a stray lash. Why not kill me there and then?"

"Wanted to wait for you to get back to your old self, give you a
chance."

He thrusts, throwing his weight behind it. She deflects deftly, steps
alongside the ondeko-bachi, turns and bows, leaving a trickle of light
hanging in the air behind the stroke of her weapon. The end of
Kintojo's pipe is separated from the stalk between his teeth, buoyed on
moist air, whirling like a miniature Catherine wheel. It falls and
bounces. Bekku rises and turns once more to face her opponent. The
flush of completion paints her body with rosy sweat.

Kintojo spits out the stalk, incredulous and full of admiration.

Bekku says, "Your pipe-voice bugged me. Talk properly."

"Yeah," says Kintojo. "I know. You always liked to be the one who did
the bugging."

Again he comes at her, far more deadly and precise - the weed must've
slowed his brain a little. She sees his thirsty vigour - the first cut
barely misses her bosom - and judges she hasn't the strength to
withstand the force of his swings head on. So instead she works with
her feet, keeping space between them, never letting him get too close,
hoping his blows will glance off her defence more easily.

Avoid their hot greedy purpose, Bekku. Do not let him crack you open.
Do not let him say you were wrong.
They lurch and feint and barrel to the walls and back, and not a face
or a figure looks in on them - leave the ronin to sort it out
themselves, they say. Leave them to kill each other. It's quick enough,
anyway. They tire soon, heaving all that iron into each other's
faces.

Kintojo's zest cannot last more than a minute. His lunges become lazy
and slow. Her deflections are vague and weak, but now she can afford to
move on the offensive. At the full arc of his cut, when he must work
hardest to change the direction of the weapon, she takes her chance and
moves in, one shido carving a lane before her, the other withdrawn on
the coil of her biceps, to be driven forward at speed.
His hand, the one that held the pipe, goes to his waist, clawed. She
launches the second shido into him, it severs a lip of cloth clean, but
he moved faster than she gave him credit for and has the heel of his
hand hoofed into the V of her ribs, his blade now advancing and her
shido too loose, one too high, one too far forward.

There is just a moment of penetration before the ondeko-bachi is
ascending at the centre of a fanning blood bow. Bekku plunges forward,
onto her knees, holding her breath as if she were trying to contain a
fireball. He quickly conceals the weapon about him, and steps away
while she curls tighter on the floor. The shido clatter.

"You jerk," she gasps, huskily.

"Hey. I'm just the messenger," says Kintojo.

"You gonna kill me?"

"No. You can die if you want, by all means, but I think you can last
the night."

She stifles the wound with a red palm. His retreating footsteps sound
like wingbeats through the heavy night.

"Who sent you?"

"I told you. You've got to find that out for yourself."

He leaves, taking some of her blood, drying in a seaspittle mark across
his weapon's breadth. She gasps again, haks again, crawls towards the
rags that robed her unstained blades.

Is surrender so different?

So long as its not retreat, Bekku. So long.