The Long Road from Osaka | short story
After the fall of Osaka, Kanbei has only one goal left: get Sadayuki home to Mino alive. Wounded by a spear and carrying an infection no doctor can stop, Sadayuki grows weaker with every mile north. As roads close, doors are shut against them, and hope slips away, Kanbei never leaves his side. Some promises are kept to the very end.
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Content warnings: major character death, suicide, graphic injury, fever
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They left Osaka with the smoke still standing over the castle, two men among thousands walking north to get away from the city, and Tokugawa troops moved through the ruined town behind them like water filling a broken bowl.
Kanbei found Sadayuki at a burned-out storehouse on the last day of the battle, after he'd already spent an hour certain he was dead. Sadayuki was sitting against the wall with his hand pressed to his side, gray in the face, and he looked up and produced the same crooked grin he had worn since they were seven years old and first became friends.
"You look like you've seen a ghost."
"I thought I had."
"Not yet." He put out his free hand. "Help me up."
Kanbei did, and they walked out of Osaka together. Kanbei didn't look too closely at the hand pressed to that side because Sadayuki said the spear had gone in shallow and come out clean and there was no time at any rate, there was never any time; the road north was full of men in a hurry to stop being samurai of a defeated house.
They had been born a few streets apart in a castle town in Mino, and Kanbei could not remember a time before he had known Sadayuki. He remembered instead all the evenings he had spent not at his own house but at Sadayuk's, the long summers in the garden, because his own home was unsafe whenever his father was drinking, which was most nights, and the sound of breaking cups and his mother's thin voice followed him as he ran out the gate.
Sadayuki's family had never once asked why he came so often or stayed so late. They simply set out another portion for dinner and laid out a spare futon, and Sadayuki's mother mended the tears in his kimono without comment.
So the two boys had grown up more like brothers than friends, and then, when they were grown and had taken their places among their lord's retainers, into something that lasted. Such bonds between young men were common enough and were meant to end when the younger took his adult name. Theirs did not. Eight years on, the men they stood watch with had stopped remarking on it.
---
It was three days before Kanbei made Sadayuki show him the wound.
---
They stopped at midday in a stand of bamboo off the road, and Sadayuki lowered himself down with the particular care of a man who worked out exactly which movements he can afford, and Kanbei watched him do it and said, not unkindly but also not in a way that was a request that could be refused, "Let me see."
"It's nothing."
"Then it costs you nothing to show me."
"Kanbei—"
You've been favoring it since Osaka. You sleep on your right. You went white going up that bank this morning and thought I didn't see." He knelt in front of him. "Sada. Please. Let me see it."
Sadayuki looked at him a long moment. Then, with a sigh that was half a laugh, he began working to take off his kobakama and shitagi. "You were always like this. Do you remember, when I broke my wrist and hid it, and you told my mother."
"You'd have kept using it."
"I would have." His hands slowed. He got the clothes loose and then paused over the poorly wrapped bandage made from strips of cloth that, Kanbei realized, had come from the bottom hem of his undergarment. "It isn't pretty."
"I don't need it to be pretty."
Sadayuki undid the bandages. Below the ribs on the left side was a wound the width of two fingers that had not closed. The edges were pulled apart and dark, the flesh around them swollen and hot-looking, and the whole of it wept a thin fluid onto the cloth. The smell that came off it when the wrappings came away was not the smell of a wound healing.
Kanbei looked at it and did not let his face change.
"Well?" said Sadayuki lightly.
"It wants a doctor." He was already getting to and stripping off his own undergarment, tearing strips from the hem, which was cleaner than what Sadayuki had been using. "That's all. It wants a doctor and it wants to be kept clean, and you've been walking with it for three days and telling me it's nothing."
"There's a doctor in every post town."
"Then we'll easily find one." Kanbeu wrapped it, gently, his hands careful, and drew the cloth snug and no tighter. "Lift your arm." He tucked the end securely. "There."
Sadayuki caught his wrist as he pulled away. He said, "It's not so bad as your face says it is."
"My face says nothing."
"Your face," Sadayuki said, "has never in its life said nothing," and Kanbei bent his head and pressed a kiss to his forehead, briefly, and got up to see about the fire.
---
The first doctor was in a post town on the Ise road, an old man with ink-stained fingertips, and he took one look at the two of them — filthy, carrying swords, their clothing stiff with somebody's blood still — and asked where they had come from.
Kanbei said, "The south."
"How far south?"
"Far enough."
The old man's face did not move at all. "I have a wife," he said. "There are men riding through here twice a week asking after Osaka men, and they've burned two houses in this town already for less than sheltering one." He looked at Sadayuki, at the way he was standing, and something in the look was not unkind. "I'm sorry. But go on quickly, and don't say you stopped here."
The second was two days further, and would not open the door at all.
The third took their money, every last mon they had between them, which was little enough, looked at the wound and pressed at it with his fingers until Sadayuki's winced, and said that the flesh had turned and wanted drawing, and gave them a paper packet of powdered something to make a poultice with, and told them to come back in a week. They could not come back in a week, they'd be a week closer to home by then.
Kanbei made the poultice anyway, every night for six nights, kneeling over Sadayuki in whatever shelter they had found, working the paste warm between his palms first so it would not shock him with the cold.
It did nothing.
On the seventh night, unwrapping him, Kanbei saw that the redness had spread past the width he could measure with his own hand, and that at the lower edge of it the skin had gone a dusky purple, and that there were fine, dark lines running up toward the ribs like the veins in a leaf.
"e sat back on his heels.
"That bad?" Sadayuki said. He was watching Kanbei's face, as he had always been able to read Kanbei's face.
"It's spreading."
"Ah." Sadayuki closed his eyes. After a moment he said, "I'm sorry. I should have told you at Osaka. I thought—" He stopped. Breathed. "I thought if we just kept moving I'd get home, and my mother would—"
His mother, who had set an extra bowl at the table for a frightened boy all those years ago, and laid out a spare futon, and mended his kimono without comment.
"I just wanted to make it home," Sadayuki said.
"I know." Kanbei's voice was steady, which cost him something. "We're not finished yet. Sleep."
They tried the temples after that.
At the first, a young monk gave them rice and let them sleep in the temple hall and said, apologetically, that there was no one there with any healing skill. At the second, an older monk looked at Sadayuki's face and told Kanbei quietly, out of earshot, to think about where he wanted his friend to be when he died. Kanbei told him to keep his mouth shut. Then he begged his pardon and asked him for prayers, and the old monk did, and gave them what rice he could spare, and stood at the gate watching them go.
At the third temple the gate did not open. There was a notice pasted to the post beside it, in a clean official hand, listing what would be done to those who sheltered the servants any men of the fallen house, and Kanbei read it twice and then took Sadayuki's arm and turned him around and led him back down the steps.
He offered his sword to a pawnshop in a village whose name he never learned, and the clerk, who was not a bad man, said, "Where's a ronin going to be without his sword?" and gave him some rice anyway, and told him to keep the blade.
---
By the fifth week Sadayuki could not walk more than half a ri without stopping, and by the end of that week he could not walk at all, so Kanbei carried him.
He carried him on his back, arms hooked under his thighs, Sadayuki's forearms crossed loose at his collarbone and his cheek against the back of Kanbei's shoulder, and Sadayuki's breath went in and out against his neck, and Kanbei counted his own steps and stopped every two hundred to rest, and hated the stopping, because getting Sadayuki up again was worse each time. He weighed almost nothing by then. That was the thing Kanbei could not stop thinking about, the whole of that last week, the terrible lightness of him — this man who had once thrown him into the Nagara river on a dare, who had carried a wounded ashigaru a full ri at Osaka without complaining, folded now onto his back like a child.
"Put me down," Sadayuki said, sometimes, into his neck. "You'll ruin yourself."
"Be quiet."
"Kanbei."
"Be quiet and hold on."
Once, half asleep, he murmured something about the persimmon tree in his mother's garden, and Kanbei answered him as though the question had been sensible, and told him yes, it would be flowering now, cream and pale yellow petals, and they would see it soon.
He kept walking. There was nothing else in the world to do but keep walking.
He found the hollow on the sixth day of carrying Sadayuki, in the rain. He had seen the abandoned farmhouse from the grade above an hour earlier and walked past it, because they did not stop in daylight if they could help it; and then it had begun to rain, a steady drizzle still cold with early spring, and Sadayuki had begun to shiver against his back in a way that would not stop, and Kanbei put a hand back to feel his forehead and found him feverish, and turned around.
He carried him down. The path was mud and he went down twice onto one knee and did not let him fall, and did not put him down, not once, not even to rest, and by the time he ducked through the doorway into the dark of the old house his arms had gone into a kind of numbness, and his knees stung, and his own breath was sobbing in his chest.
The house must have stood empty for years. There was a single main room stepping up from the entrance with its packed earth floor, a sunken irori choked with old ash, and a roof that held over perhaps half the space and let the rain through the rest. Pegs on the wall where tools had hung. A broken loom in a corner. Mouse droppings along the walls. But the ground by the hearth was dry, and it was out of the wind.
Kanbei laid Sadayuki down there as carefully as he had ever done anything, and then knelt over him a moment with his hands on either side of him, getting his breath, water running off his hair onto Sadayuki's face.
Sadayuki opened his eyes. "You're crying," he observed.
"It's raining."
"Mm," said Sadayuki, and closed his eyes again, and Kanbei went to make a fire.
---
Those were the last days.
There was a stream at the bottom of the hollow and that first evening Kanbei settled Sadayuki besides the fire, his own shitagi folded under his head as a pillow, and said he would be gone the length of a hundred breaths. Sadayuki, already sliding under, nodded; and Kanbei went out into the wet blue dusk with the dented pot he'd found in the house and ran the whole way there and the whole way back with his heart going like a hoofbeat, certain that in the little time he had been gone Sadayuki's breathing would have stopped.
It had not. He stood in the doorway and watched the rise and fall of his chest for a moment before he could trust his legs to carry him the rest of the way in.
Kanbei gave him water first. He knelt and got an arm under his shoulders and lifted his head into the crook of it and tipped the pot to his mouth a little at a time — wet the lips first, then let him drink, a swallow, a rest, a swallow — because the throat of a man that weak can drown from a mouthful. Half of it ran into his face. Kanbei wiped his chin with his sleeve between swallows and talked to him the whole time, low, the way you speak to a horse or a frightened child or a man you love. "There. Slowly. There's no hurry, we've all night. Little more. Good."
Kanbei cooked the last of the rice down soft, long past what anyone would call done, into a thin white gruel a man too weak to chew could take, and fed it to Sadayuki off the ends of his fingers because he had nothing else for utensils; and later, when Sadayuki roused enough, let him drink it slowly from the tilted pot the way he had taken the water. Three mouthfuls was a good evening. Kanbei told him it was a good evening and ate what was left himself so none went to waste. Then he went to refill the pot with water and set it by the edge of the fire to warm again for whenever the next waking came.
The wakings came less and less. That was what he watched, in those days — how the clear stretches shortened and the fever lengthened, how Sadayuki would surface and know him and even, once, make some ghost of a joke.
"You've turned into a decent nursemaid."
"I've had practice. You were a sickly child."
"I was not. I was delicate."
And then the fever would pull him back down into the muttering country where he was not always certain where he was or which year.
Kanbei learned the tides of it. He learned when a word would reach him and when nothing would. He kept the fire fed. When the shivering came, teeth going, Sadayuki's whole body shaking hard enough to wrench at the wound, Kanbei lay down alongside him and put his own warmth against him and held him through it with his hand spread flat on his chest to feel it rise, and did not sleep, and did not move.
And still he had to leave. Water did not fetch itself and the fire ate wood faster than he could gather it. He learned the shortest path to the stream and exactly how long an armful of dry-enough wood cost him, and he was never gone a breath longer than he had to be, and all the time he was gone some part of him strained back toward the house, listening for a silence he was afraid to come home to.
Once he came back to find Sadayuki lying twisted in a way that must have hurt, calling — not for him, but for his mother, in a small lost voice that went through Kanbei like cold water. He dropped the wood in the doorway and crossed the room in two strides and gathered him up against his chest.
"I'm here. Sada. I'm here, I only went for wood, I'm here."
"Kanbei?"
"Yes."
"Don't—" His hand moved, found a fistful of Kanbei's kimono, and held it. "Don't go far."
"No," Kanbei said. "No. Nowhere."
He did not go far after that, and he went fast, and he came back faster.
---
The wound went past anything the eye should have to see. The dark of it spread up under the ribs. The smell got into everything, into Kanbei's own hair and clothes, so that he stopped being able to smell it at all and only knew it was worse because each time he opened the dressing the marks had climbed higher.
There was nothing to be done for it. He changed the bandages anyway, gently, warming his hands first; and washed the used cloths in the stream and dried them at the fire and used them again, because there were no others; and he did all of it with his face perfectly still, because Sadayuki could read his face even at the bottom of the fever, and Kanbei was not going to let the last thing he read there be despair.
He talked to him while he did it. About the persimmon tree and the garden. About a festival when they were fifteen and Sadayuki had somehow lost one of his geta in the crowd and walked home barefoot, singing. About the Nagara river. He was not always certain he was heard, but he thought a man might hear such things even so.
On what he thought was the fourth or fifth day — he had stopped being sure — Sadayuki came up clear one last time, clearer than he had been since the road, the way a lamp will flare just before the oil is gone. His eyes found Kanbei and knew him completely, and there was something in them that was almost calm.
"Kanbei."
"I'm here." He came and knelt and took his hand.
"You should go on. Home." His voice was a thread. "Before the passes close. Tell my mother—" He stopped, and something crossed his face, and he let that go, because there was nothing to tell her that would be any use to her. He tried again. "You could still make it."
"I'm not going anywhere."
"I knew you'd say that." A breath of the old grin, the seven-year-old's grin, the one Kanbei had first seen across a garden wall. "I only thought I ought to give you the chance to be sensible. Once. In your life."
"You've never given me a sensible thing in your life," Kanbei said, "and I've never wanted one," and lifted his hand and held it against his own cheek.
Sadayuki's fingers moved a little there. There was almost no strength in them.
"Stay," he said.
Kanbei was never afterward certain whether he had meant stay here, or stay with me, or something older, some request from far back down the long road of the two of them, from a garden in Mino twenty years gone. It did not matter. The answer was the same to all of it.
"I'm not going anywhere," he said. "Do you hear me? Not anywhere."
And Sadayuki, satisfied, let his eyes close.
---
The fever took him back down after that and did not give him up again.
His breathing changed toward the end of that night, going shallow, then labored, each breath dragged in and let out slow, with long frightening pauses between where Kanbei counted his own heartbeats and waited.
He did not let go of him. He held him against his chest with his Sadayuk's head at the hollow of his shoulder, the way they had slept a hundred nights on campaigns, and he talked to him, low and steady, the whole night through — about the persimmon tree, about the festival, about the green hills of Mino and how good it would be to see them again, though he no longer believed either of them would.
The rain had stopped by the time it was over. In the gray before dawn the pauses grew longer, and longer, and then there was one that did not end.
Kanbei went on holding Sadayuki a long while after. He could not be the one to say it was finished.
---
When at last he laid him down, he did it carefully, straightening his limbs, drawing the ruined shitagi over the wound so that it was hidden, closing his eyes as one is meant to.
Sadayuki's face had lost the drawn grayness of the last weeks. In the dim light he looked almost young again, almost the boy from over the garden wall, and Kanbei sat beside him a long time and looked at that face and did not think much of anything at all.
Then he thought about the road.
It was still there. North and east through the hills, and he could take it. He could walk out of this hollow and follow the Nakasendo home to Mino and stand at Sadayuki's gate and tell a woman who had once fed him an mended his kimono that her son had died in an abandoned farmhouse in the mountains, and that he, Kanbei, had lived.
He did not want it because there was no shape to it. A road without Sadayuki at the end of it was not a road, only a distance; and he had spent the whole of his life going toward wherever Sadayuki was — four streets over, an extra bowl, a spare futon, the far side of a bad night — and there was no such place anywhere in the world now, and would not be again.
The fire had burned to nothing. Outside, the first birds had started, and pale light was coming into the hollow, and far off across the wet, green hills a temple bell was ringing the hour.
Kanbei drew his sword and laid it across his knees, sittinh a while in the quiet beside Sadayuki, and was not afraid. It seemed a small thing, and a simple one, next to everything else.
He had never wanted to be anywhere Sadayuki was not.
He did not intend to start now.
They were found by a woodcutter who wandered down into the hollow, and then by the men he brought back from the nearest village: two samurai of the losing side, dead in an abandoned farmhouse far from any road that went anywhere. Nobody knew their names or their domain. The villagers, being kind, buried them together at the edge of the old overgrown field and set a single stone, and in time the brush grew up around it, and the names of the two men who had known each other their whole lives and had wanted only to go home were lost entirely, as such names usually are.
But the village remembered, for a generation or so, that the two had been buried side by side because it had seemed to the woodcutter who found them, that one had lain himself down very deliberately close to the other, as near as he could get, the way a man lies down beside someone he does not intend to leave.
