Abstinence Education

Yeah, I left another too-long interval between posting chapters! But this chapter is so long of itself I've had to break it into two posts for Livejournal, which hasn't happened since I was writing Chasing the Dragon. So I'd call this a couple of months' worth in one... and I'm going to make sure the next chapter is a tad shorter!

From slings to arrows, and outrageous (mis)fortune...

The characters and universe of Blade of the Immortal/Mugen no Junin are copyright by Hiroaki Samura and do not belong to me. Not one sen will come into my hands in consequence of this story.

Warnings for sex in various forms, including quasi-incestuous themes and a sixteen-year-old female paired with an adult male. (Yeah, this also applies to future chapters!) Violence and dismemberment are legally required in any BotI fic... and you get an additional caution for harm to animals.

Abstinence Education
by Madame Manga

Part Forty

“I think they’re catching up with us.”

Rin turned to face forward again when the two horsemen appeared around a curve in the road. In the sodden gray mist of pre-dawn twilight, the riders were mostly outlines, but recognizably the same outlines that had been shadowing Manji’s horse for the last quarter of an hour. Rin gripped the high cantle of Manji’s saddle with one hand and adjusted her sword in the sling of her shoulder bag.

Manji grunted and thumped his heels into the tired horse’s sides. It picked up its feet for a few moments and gradually fell back into its stubborn walk. She couldn’t blame it for laziness; it had been a long night’s ride. Though rain wasn’t falling, damp filmed the dark ground and the long needles of the single pines that lined the road. As the light slowly gained on the lingering night, a fine clouding of mist droplets drifted over Rin’s clothes and settled on the tendrils of her untidy braids like a beading of cold steam. She felt chilly and stiff from hours on the road; the horse’s hindquarters were warm but bony and its monotonous lurching sway forced her to work to keep her seat.

Manji sat the saddle in an off-center slouch, leaning a little away from his slinged and bandaged right arm. She could hear nothing but the lagging thump of their horse’s hooves on the sandy road and occasionally a squawk from crows stirring in the trees. An angular dark shape launched from a branch and winged across the road ahead with slow flaps, as if weighted by the thickness of the mist.

With surreptitious half-glances over her shoulder, Rin kept watch on the horsemen. The gnarled silhouettes of the scrubby pines faded gradually in and out to vanishing as Manji’s horse approached and passed them in the mist, but as the travelers drew closer their persistent outlines gained solidity and detail. Big horses that they sat with confidence, their tack and equipment creaking and jingling with sturdy, well-worn leather and metal. The sheathed head of a spear stood above one man’s shoulder, darker gray against the shifting gray of the sky; Rin couldn’t tell how the other was armed. She could guess that he didn’t lack for weapons.

“They’re closer now, Manji-san...”

Manji groaned, with a sense of slightly irritated acceptance of the inevitable, but said nothing. She had not heard an intelligible word from him for all the hours since they had left Anotsu Kagehisa and Magatsu Taito behind.

“Who do you think they are?” Rin insisted in a whisper. “Bounty hunters? The notices said the reward for bringing O-Hama back to her master was thirty ryo! They don’t think that WE could possibly be...?”

He slowly shook his head.

“But remember that merchant? Who thought we looked like, um, them? Now we’re even riding a horse double, like the notices — ”

“Early mornin’, traveler.” The riders had suddenly trotted within speaking distance. “Where you folks heading?”

The spearman. A thick, false-jovial voice with a rural accent, not from Edo. Rin longed to put her arms around Manji’s waist for reassurance, but settled for scooting up a little closer behind the saddle. At this sluggish pace she couldn’t pretend to hold on for security, and her yojimbo might resent encumbrance, in a number of senses. She lightly brushed her cheek against his shoulder blade and felt a degree of tension across his back, though he breathed evenly and looked straight ahead.

“Been riding all night? That horse looks knackered, mate.” The other man spoke with an even broader dialect, like someone from the southern islands. “There’s a choice little inn back a ways — yeh just passed it, wouldn’t take five minutes to turn around. Not hard on the purse, neither. Be glad t’ point the way.” Still Manji didn’t reply. “Yer woman looks kinda worn out too. Well... not like that, y’know.” The man winked at Rin, who quickly averted her eyes. “She’s a young ‘un, ain’t she?” The two horsemen nearly flanked them now.

Manji’s body a tight wall against her cheek, his ribcage swelling, then he let out a long forcible breath. “Not stopping.” The sound of his voice startled her.

“Suit yehself, mate.” The southerner shrugged and shot a gob of spit to the left side of the road. “Me an’ my friend here, we might be going the same way. Maybe we’ll come along with yeh.”

“Maybe not.” Manji didn’t even look around.

“Unfriendly, hah?”

Manji made a near-silent snort in his throat.

“Those’re some scars you got there, buddy.” The spearman eyed Manji from his separate vantage point to their right. “Straight down the face — shee-it. Can’t see out’ve that eye at all, I’d reckon.”

Manji turned his head and spoke low and venomously. “I can tell when some asshole’s sneaking up on that side, if he cuts off my light. You want a demonstration?”

“Sheesh, easy. Take it easy.” The spearman made a conciliatory gesture and nodded at his companion. “Good mornin’, folks, sorry to bother you.” Both men urged their mounts and loped on ahead. When they had disappeared into the mist, Manji reined back and stopped the horse in the middle of the road. Rin let out a long sigh of relief. Manji snarled, though not directly at her.

“Shitfire.”

“What’s the matter, Manji-san? He saw that we weren’t them.”

Manji slipped his right hand from his sling. “Untie it.”

She blinked at his back, then reached up to pull out the sling’s knot at his nape. Manji felt in his right sleeve with his good hand and drew out a shido. He placed the hilt in his bandaged palm and frowned in concentration; one or two of the fingers twitched, but he could not grasp the weapon. He held out the wounded arm to Rin, the shido’s hilt still crossing his palm. “Lash it there. Good and tight.”

The horse meandered to the side of the road and nosed the grass. Rin used her knees as a support for Manji’s arm while they still sat mounted; she crossed and re-crossed the sling’s long strip of cloth over the hilt and around his wrist and hand, knotting it several times. “Tighter.”

She pulled hard. “That tight?”

“It’s pretty much numb anyhow.” He made a grimace.

Manji could rotate his wrist now, which heartened Rin a little — at least the joint had fused and some of the damage to his tendons and muscles must have healed. Apparently his immortal body was able to rebuild missing flesh and bone from scratch, though she worried at how slowly the healing progressed. He’d lost so much blood, and perhaps spilled with his vital fluid the greater part of the mysterious creatures that swam within. The bloodworms might have to regenerate their own supply along with their host’s body. But even with what he’d regained, the weapon couldn’t function as much more than an extension of his arm. She watched him swing the shido in experimental arcs over the horse’s head. “Uh... Manji-san? Maybe we should just turn around and go back to that inn?”

He scribed sharp figures in the air to right and left, then paused to massage his biceps.

“Will we really find them going this way? Anotsu thought they’d head straight back for the river...” Rin hadn’t dared to ask for explanations during the night while Manji chose his directions in silence. His voice still sounded clumsy. He didn’t dignify any of her questions with an answer; he kicked the horse until it started walking.

They didn’t see the two riders again for so long that Rin wondered if her yojimbo’s instincts had fired prematurely. The mist began to thin when the sun rose, though the light remained weak and watery. Then one rider loomed before them just as they passed into a stretch of road that fell between small steep hills. His spear point drew a long hard line over his shoulder, still in the sheath. The other man walked his mount across the way behind them. Manji stopped the horse and turned it halfway, his armed right hand laid across his lap.

“I’m flattered all to hell,” he said. “Now buzz off.”

The riders paused in the road before and behind, and the spearman replied. “Naw, sorry. We ain’t passing up that big a reward.”

“What about the whore and the hatamoto?” Manji pointed his chin up the road past the spearman. “Isn’t that why a couple of professionals came this way in the first place?”

“We got a tip, yeah, but they’ll keep. The whore ain’t worth half of you, buddy, even if there’s only half o’ you left anyhow.”

Manji glanced down at his arm. “You recollect what they call me, pro?”

“When yeh had two eyes and two hands, that’s what yeh were called. Now it’s just two on one, Hundred-Man-Murderer.” The southerner laughed. “Brand new call, straight from the Castle, and they want you bad.”

“So I hear.” Manji looked from one man to the other. “So what’s the reward on Anotsu Kagehisa?” Rin gasped. Manji twitched a shoulder back as if to shush her, and she slapped a palm over her mouth. “Hey, pros like you know all about that guy.”

“The Itto-ryu? We ain’t looking to get bisected, buddy.”

“Oh, now I’m easy pickings.” Manji snorted. “Fine, then I don’t have to share info.”

“Anotsu? What the hell would you — ”

“Where he slept. Who he’s with, how he’s disguised, and what shape he’s in.” Manji shifted his seat.

“You’re shittin’ us.”

“Try me.”

The spearman leaned forward in his saddle. “Say there, bitty gal. You see Anotsu Kagehisa-san too, or has One-Eye been drinkin’ and swinging at ghosts all night?”

Rin stared at Manji in horror when he glanced at her with a prompting air. “What? Why... I can’t tell them — ”

His eye flicked up the road and back, keeping both men in his line of sight. “You promised to keep his secrets?”

“Um... not exactly, but he — Manji-san, he loaned us the horse, and...” She put her hand back over her mouth.

“Wouldn’t want you to break your solemn word of honor or anything.” Manji raised a brow. “Not just ‘cause someone asked you a simple question, like yes or no.”

“Yes or no, he says? That’s a woman yer talkin’ to, not a pair of dice.” The hunters chuckled. Rin flushed and hid her face, and the southerner put an inquiring leer into his words. “Ridin’ Anotsu’s horse? This is soundin’ a wee bit complicated, mate. What’s the tale on the pair of yeh, anyhow? Thought I heard yer little sister got killed.”

Manji’s right arm stiffened. “Take it or leave it, you clowns.”

“Yeah? Why didn’t you take him yourself, outlaw?”

Manji pointed ahead with a sharp gesture. “Because right now, it’s the bitch I want. And I don’t need anybody tagging along when I find her. You turn around and go back the way you came, pro. This road is mine.”

“Well, I guess you ain’t just haulin’ that story outta yer ass... but a bird in the hand, y’know.” Both men nodded; the spearman reached back and yanked the sheath from his point. “By the way, ya can poke as many holes in him as ya like. I hear he won’t mind it too much.”

“Gotcha, mate.”

Manji shrugged off Rin’s grasp when she clutched him in panic. “Outta my way.” She slid from the horse, stumbled when she hit the ground and scrambled for the side of the road. Manji looped the reins halfway around his neck and laid his left hand on the hilt of his katana.

The spearman hauled out his weapon, tucked the shaft into the crook of his elbow and spurred his mount. Rin found a pine and hugged the trunk, crouching in the roots. Manji seized the reins in his teeth, yanked his head to the side and managed to pivot his horse. The long-bladed spear aimed straight for Manji’s chest. He caught the point in the fork of the shido lashed to his right hand and deflected it up and over his shoulder. At the same moment, Manji’s katana tore a high arc over his horse’s head and plunged downwards.

The wheeling horses blocked Rin’s view, but Manji apparently missed his left-handed stroke. The spearman pulled at his weapon and freed it from the shido’s lock, then slashed it sideways. Manji ducked against the horse’s neck to avoid it; the spear whizzed over his head and clipped a tuft from the horse’s mane.

The frightened animal side-skipped and turned; Manji brought his katana up again and reared back in the saddle, but he was out of position and overextended on his hasty attack. The spearman swung and stopped him, steel to steel; the sword flew from Manji’s hand. The spear head launched at him. Manji twisted and arched his spine; at the apex of the thrust, the point emerged behind his back.

For an awful moment, Rin was sure he had taken the spear square through the ribcage. She bruised her fingers gripping the pine’s rough bark.

Then Manji stood up in his stirrups, and she realized he wasn’t hurt. He’d let the spear slide under his arm and trapped it against his side. His fist clamped down on the shaft, he yanked the spearman sprawling halfway from the saddle. His right shoulder punched forward. The man screamed and jerked his body, then slithered limp from the horse and hit the ground head first.

Manji’s right arm yanked downwards to follow his opponent’s fall, nearly pulling him from his own horse. Leaning far over, he had to grab the horse’s mane for stability. He heaved and grunted, trying to work the stuck shido’s point out of the spearman’s breastbone.

A hard, thrumming twang. Manji yelled; he sounded both pained and affronted, and took his own header from the saddle.

He landed on the spearman’s body, hung up in the reins and still struggling with the blade lashed to his arm. With a couple of hard kicks to the corpse’s face and chest, he yanked it free. The southerner worked a lever on his strange short bow and nocked another bolt, but the two agitated and riderless horses intervened. Manji was dragged a short distance before he could work the reins from under his arm. He rolled to avoid the trampling hooves, got up on one leg with the shido as an aid and staggered to the pine where Rin crouched.

The gnarled tree wasn’t much shelter, especially not for someone Manji’s size. He dropped prone behind Rin, panting, and crawled into a small hollow in the sandy soil. “Oh! Are you wounded?”

He gritted his teeth at her. “Arrow. Pull it out, goddammit.” She leaned away from the tree trunk and gingerly ran her hand across Manji’s shoulders and sides, searching for the shaft. A dark sweat stain spread down his spine and under his arms, but she couldn’t see blood on his clothing. “Not — there. Farther... down.” He jerked his chin and craned over his shoulder. Rin glanced at the small of his back and touched his belt knot. “Keep going!”

The ends of the bloody fletches hit the side of her hand. They protruded a little way through a hole in the cloth over the fleshy part of Manji’s left buttock; the short bolt had buried nearly all of its length in his backside. Rin couldn’t get a very good grip on the stub, so she tried to work it farther out by rocking it side to side. “Fuckfuckfuckit! Ouch!”

“I’m s-sorry, Manji-san — it’s gone really deep...” Rin wiped slippery blood from her fingers and prepared to pull again.

“Freakin’ crossbow. Maybe I’m lucky it didn’t poke all the way through to — YEOWW!” His face glistened with sweat. The southerner sidled down the road with his loaded bow, his horse apparently unwilling to approach the dead body in the middle of the way. He became an outline in the mist again. The spearman’s mount and Anotsu’s horse untangled themselves; both took off up the road with empty saddles. “Shit. There goes our transportation.”

Rin found a coil of fishing line in her bag and got a secure knot tied under the fletches. She looped the line over a low branch, held her breath and threw her weight into the pull. Manji balled his fists and wedged his forehead against the ground, his toes digging into the sand. When Manji’s gasps turned raw with agony and his whole body quivered, Rin desisted. She dabbed sweat and tears from her own eyes with the end of her sleeve. “It must be stuck in the bone... uh, I guess we could try cutting it out somehow?”

“Man, that sounds like fun.” The startling thrum of the crossbow sounded again and the bolt tore a swatch of bark from the pine just above Rin’s head. “Crap!” Rin retreated behind the trunk and Manji groped for a dagger. He heaved up on one knee, his limbs still trembling a little, and scanned for his target. Just as his arm drew back, the crossbow twanged.

The dagger fell and Manji hit the dirt again, hugging his arm to his body. He curled around it, his chest heaving in short constrained grunts. When he opened his mouth for a deeper gulp of air and relaxed his arm, Rin saw a bolt protruding almost all the way through the base of his thumb and out the back of his hand. She hissed in distress. Manji gripped the shaft in his teeth and pulled it the rest of the way through. After a few moments he picked up the bolt and showed her the eight-barbed head with a sardonic smile. “Reloads fast, don’t he?”

Rin made a face at the hideous thing; how were they ever going to extract that arrow? “The point’s drugged, too.” Manji flung the bloody bolt aside. “My whole side is buzzing like a wasp sting. That’ll pass, but you don’t want to get even nicked by one of these. You’d fold up in a little heap and not twitch for hours.”

“Wh-what should we do?”

“I can’t move my leg with this thing planted in my ass. Not yet, anyhow. You’re the one who’s going to have to do something.” Manji rolled halfway over to lie on his side and stabbed the straight blade of the hooked knife into the sand by her knee. “Cut that string off me.”

Rin tied the fishing line around the knife’s handle as he directed her, then left him and her bag and sword and crawled up the slope on her face. There was cover if she kept down in the undergrowth and beneath the lower branches of the scattered pines, but she was glad of the lingering mist. When she had worked her way a little distance back down the road from Manji’s position, Rin stood up, threw the tethered knife high into one of the larger pines and backed up the slope, paying out the line. She crouched by another tree and yanked the line in an irregular rhythm to shake the branches, as if someone were climbing. All Manji needed was a moment without that crossbow trained on him...

Rin glimpsed the horse and rider still sidling along the road. The mist was rapidly thinning and lifting from the ground; the hunter would be able to tell soon that no one was in the tree and that Manji hadn’t moved. The shaft of the hunter’s crossbow changed angle; he pointed it at the tree she was shaking, but didn’t fire. Then he switched his aim again, tracing a line downwards, and bent low to peer through the trees. Rin froze; he had spotted her red furisode. The hunter paused with his bolt targeted straight at her.

Something streaked through the air from up the road. Rin heard a scream: not a man’s. The horse reared and flung its head into a spraying fountain of blood, crying out in a shrill whinny. The hunter swung around and pressed his trigger, but had to leap from the saddle when the horse’s front legs buckled. His bolt ripped into the trees.

Manji lunged into the road, his right arm and shido braced around his extended folding spear like a crutch. His left arm whipped out as he hurled another blade. The southerner’s crossbow skidded away. He attempted to pull Manji’s dagger from his upper arm, hissing in pain, then gave it up and clumsily drew a short sword. Cursing, he charged at the still-crippled Manji. The horse moaned and quivered in its dying throes.

Manji switched his spear to his left hand, took a long swinging stride with the shaft as a pivot and slammed a foot into the oncoming man’s abdomen. The southerner sprawled on his back. Manji lost his balance and went down with him; the struggle kicked up a cloud of sand and dust.

Rin bit her fingernails through a few moments of uncertainty, then Manji wrestled free and rose to his knees. The southerner lay flat, breathing hard with the shido thrust through his upper chest. Manji used the edge of his broad spear point to free his bandaged arm from the lashings and stood up.

“Sorry about that.”

“Sorry?” The wounded man looked bemused. “Fer what?”

“Didn’t mean to kill him.” He leaned painfully on the spear and cast a look at Rin when she slid down the slope and into the road. “My mistake.”

“Aw, that’s decent of yeh — he were a good bloke, my mate there.”

“What are you babbling about, asshole? Your damn friend? My horse ran off, his horse ran off, and then I had to go and cut the throat of the only one left! Smart move.” Manji braced his stance and raised the spear; Rin hid her eyes before he brought it down again.

She huddled by the side of the road after retrieving her bag, trying to avoid taking another look at the hunters’ bloody corpses, and especially at the dead horse. The animal lay with its eyes open and its tongue lolling into a dark pool, its long mane clotted with blood. A bold pair of carrion crows loitered nearby, calling in raucous voices to others who sat attentive in the trees. Manji propped himself on the horse’s broad hip, favoring his left side. “Oh, God, the poor thing... wh-why did you have to kill it?”

“Sheesh, kid, I said I missed my aim.” Manji rummaged the bounty hunter’s saddle bags and tossed a few items to the ground.

“It... it was in pain. It didn’t have any idea what was happening — just that it hurt...” Her eyes filmed with tears.

Manji bent over a little farther to retrieve the other saddle bag and winced, clapping a hand to his backside. “Next time I’ll make sure I’m the only one who gets nailed.”

“Why don’t we just turn around and go home? Before something worse happens?” Rin sniffled and wiped her nose.

“Yeah... everything’s hunky-dory back at the ol’ shack.” Manji didn’t look at her. “We’ll put all this shit behind us and pick up where we left off on weapons training.” He hurled a bundle of dirty clothes all the way across the road.

“Um...”

“Dammit, don’t these assholes eat?” He dug out and inspected a paper packet, then offered it with a grunt.

“Their food? While they’re lying there d-d-dead?”

Manji rolled his eye and dropped the packet on the dead horse’s belly. “Suit yourself.” He munched on dried rice and reached for another handful. His gaze fell on the crossbow; he hooked it with his spear, pulled it closer and methodically stabbed at it like a cook slicing a fish. When he had reduced the bow to a pile of splinters and bent and broken mechanisms, he looked up. “Let’s get on with it.”

“On with it? How?”

Manji struggled to stand. “Take a crazy guess.”

“But you can’t walk!”

“No problem.” He moved up the road with a heavy, lopsided gait. “Sitting a saddle right now wouldn’t be so freakin’ comfy anyhow...”

“Please, let’s find a place where we can take care of that arrow and you can finish healing your arm, and get some sleep!” Rin rose and extended her arms to Manji. “Even if we don’t want to go back to... it’s not like we have a sign from the gods! We don’t have to do this.”

“Yes. We do.”

“Oh, Manji! I know you’re really angry with them — but you can’t catch them now, not without a horse, and even though I guess it’s an honor thing for a man, especially when she threatened to, uhh... but she didn’t end up doing that to you, not exactly, and — ”

“What the hell difference does that make?”

“Please! I’m asking — I’m begging!”

He looked at her from a distance. “Quit, hah? I guess you might recollect how that always seems to pan out.” Rin bit her lips and dropped her head. “I got no other plans today, anyhow.” Manji sneered to himself and turned away.

Rin dragged after her bodyguard, blotting his footprints with her own. When they’d ridden through a sleeping village during the night she had scavenged a pair of old straw sandals to wear, but her feet still ached. She couldn’t understand this grim, dogged vengefulness. It didn’t seem like Manji to hunt an enemy so far. At least, he wouldn’t have tracked someone like an Itto-ryu fighter while still suffering from such wounds, not even Anotsu himself. Even when Manji repeatedly urged Rin not to give up her quest, he also counseled patience and a practical approach. He wasn’t the kind to take personal offense at an adversary, especially not when his body could heal nearly any insult. What made him so eager to punish this one?

This woman. Rin didn’t want to think too far along those lines. But what else could he do, really?

Drop the chase now, and another adversary still waited for them. Like a hunter watching for an ambush, sooner or later to close the trap. In any unguarded moment, any almost-innocent remark or meeting of the eyes. He couldn’t bribe it into retreat or throw it off the trail, because it was part of him. Cut deep or wait for it to work itself through and scar over: only pain awaited. No wonder Manji would rather put off the confrontation as long as possible. She wasn’t in any state to deal with it herself, to be honest.

Rin raised her eyes and watched Manji’s back while he took his awkward gait in the lead. Anotsu’s borrowed kosode was tailored a little too narrow for him, and the close-woven hemp pulled tight across the muscles of his shoulders. Plain dark indigo, giving his well-known body a different surface. “Manji...”

“Hnn?”

“Err... nothing.”

He slanted a brow at her, then gestured at the trampled road. “Looks like the horses might’ve finally slowed down about here.”

“They’re a long way away by now, I guess.” She hoped for any neutral topic, just so he would keep speaking to her.

“If they know what’s good for ‘em.” Manji stepped over a fresh deposit of green droppings. “Spooky goddamn nags...”

“You don’t much like horses, do you?”

“Eh. They’ve got their uses.”

“But tell me why?” Rin gave him a tentative smile, longing for a hint of answering warmth. “I don’t know — I like to hear you complain about that sort of thing...”

“Hnnh...” Manji gave a hard, contemptuous sniff. “I swear, they start plotting their tricks the moment you plant your ass in the saddle. Can’t let your guard down for a frickin’ heartbeat. Or you’ll end up with a colossal whack in the nuts right when you thought you had it all figured out.” He limped up a hill ahead of her.

Rin flushed, but swallowed the ache in her breast. Manji plodded in silence for some time, then halted at the crest of another hill. She saw his head snap up and his shoulders straighten in surprise, but he seemed gratified too. “Well — screw me.”

“What is it?” Rin climbed up beside him and peered down the road into a muddy lowland. At first she saw nothing out of the way, but she followed Manji’s pointing finger up the valley. “Oh!” Reins dangling, the runaways drank side by side from a stream. “Gosh... it could almost be a sign...”

Manji grinned with all his teeth showing.


[Continues in second post]