Kaguta - Or, Ankūro - The Warrior, The Thief and The Killer

8

The rat and the snake.
One kills and eats the other.
Though, which of them dies?
- Rūka.

Despite himself, Saiban slept. Age had begun to creep up on him and he didn't like that. He awoke to find Nesukē, with her eyes closed, beside him. As he moved, joints cracking, those eyes flashed open, her hand moving behind her back. He grimaced, knowing that, if she wanted, he'd already have died from that hidden knife.

Straight away, Nesukē looked over towards the group of five that had settled by the fire, then towards Shubō, attaching his saddle to the horse. Only one of the five by the fire sat awake. The one that had challenged Saiban the day before. Jitoji, Nesukē had said they called him. Saiban caught the man's eyes and then yawned, stretching his arms above his head and then lowering them, a hand resting upon his great sword.

Jitoji noticed that and spat into the fire. At some point, he and the other four newcomers would try to kill Saiban, this much Saiban had worked out during the night. Why, Saiban had not figured out. Yet. He only knew the man's intentions. Whether those intentions stretched to Nesukē and Shubō, he didn't know, but the way the woman had reached for that knife told him that she had fears of treachery, also.

They ate cold food, as they had the night before, and then prepared for the day's travel. As far as Saiban could tell, they should catch up to the merchant caravan before nightfall. Later than planned, but still a good distance from the border of Junawa region, to the south. Even with such pitiful, underfed mounts, they should move faster than oxen-drawn carts. Should.

Once again, Saiban searched around and collected more dried grass for his horse, watching the poor creature devour the food that would do little to assuage its previous poor treatment. Only Shubō and Nesukē followed his example. The other five not seeming to care about the well-being of the beasts they had tasked to carry them.

"Another hot day, I fear." Once upon the horses, they set out, Shubō squinting into the cloudless sky. "I wonder if the rains will ever come again?"

"They'll come. Eventually." He had thought the same thing for months. Yet, even the hardy rice plants of the island had started to die, their paddy fields becoming nothing but dried mud. "The island has had droughts before. The war makes it seem worse than it is."

Indeed, had the war not come, the entire island would have come together to stave of the deprivations of the drought. Sharing food, creating new wells and irrigation projects. One of the few things that Saiban liked about his homeland's culture was the conformity under hardship. The idea of regions and petty conflicts would float away like cherry blossoms on the wind. The war had changed all that. It could not have erupted at a worse time.

Now they passed across vast, open plains, where once the fields would have trembled and waved with barley, wheat and millet stalks. He could only see dead things in those fields, now. To the east, the mountains rose up in the distance, their snow-covered tops and tree covered sides had not managed to avoid the drought. He saw more browns in those mountainside forests. The snow caps not reaching as far down as they once had.

They passed few people on the journey. Refugees, dragging carts and families to some fantasy of safety and rich piles of food. Farmers, fighting to keep their livelihoods from vanishing beneath their calloused fingers. Villages, passed in the distance, looked empty and silent. Kaguta was dying and those waging war could not care less, lost in their dreams of power.

Once, Saiban had a home. A place where he had a community that worked for the benefit of all. He forced himself to push those memories aside. That place, that time had gone. It helped no-one to mope and wail at the wrongs of the past. He had to look out for himself and his future now.