Chapter Text
The flames of the bonfire danced across the storyteller’s work-hardened face, catching on the fog in her eyes. Her age had made her almost blind, and almost deaf; still, her hands rose and fell to the tone of her voice, fingers forming into grotesque caricatures of monsters unforgotten.
Iruka stood off to the side and leaned against one of the wooden poles that held up the hunters’ encampment at the village’s edge. Although no longer a child, the stories gripped him tightly like a mother who would rather give up her life than let go of her newborn in the face of cruel death. His arms were crossed in front of his chest as if this alone could ward him off against the intrusive fear that spread across his skin and touted and coaxed, that grabbed at his limbs so firmly it would leave plum-colored bruises.
The storyteller, this old and all-wise woman, let her voice rise and fall in just right places. Iruka’s hair stood on end.
“Once, there was a kingdom,” she murmured. “A kingdom unlike any other. It may have been the very first kingdom to prosper as the king was kind and the queen was wise and they understood that their duty was not to rule over their servants and the poor. The kingdom’s lands were bright and warm and fruitful as the sun shone and water flowed. The king and the queen were in love, which did not happen often as marriage between royals was naturally loveless, but driven by their love for their kingdom they were fair in their judgement of criminals, fair in the housing of the sick and homeless, and fair to the nobles as well. Soon, the people began calling them the golden king and golden queen.”
“The time came that the queen bore a child. A healthy boy with bright hair and a strong will and a heart in the right place. When he was old enough to roam the gardens of the palace on his own, it happened that the prince got bit by a serpent and fell sick with a fever that threatened to pull him into death. The king and queen were gripped by their fear for their son but none of the healers they had summoned could ease either worry or sickness. The poison of the serpent had spread too far. So the king and the queen prayed. One after one, they visited the shrines of their country and prayed to the shrines’ deities of love, the deities of health, the deities of fortune, of wisdom, of hunt, of war. But their prayers went unanswered.”
“Finally, they made an offering at the shrine of a demon who had once been prayed to as a kami but his tongue was too sharp and his smile was too wicked and his eyes were red as blood. He was a youkai of tricks and deception. That night, after their visit to his shrine, the demon came to the king and the queen in their dreams and told them what they had to do to save their child. Do you know what he said?”
Don’t, Iruka thought. Stop here.
“For your son to live, you have to die,” she said.
Iruka averted his eyes from her and watched the flames twist and flicker. The heat on his face had become unpleasant but he wouldn’t back away. How often he had heard the fables and legends and myths about the forgotten gods that had turned vicious and brutal Iruka did not remember. He had heard them enough that they had become familiar to him, and this familiarity stood sharply against the crude images the storyteller would conjure into existence. As a child he would wake from nightmares of stags that wore the faces of the humans they hunted and fed on, or foxes, their coats red as blood, with mutilated tails and a number of endless claws protruding from their limbs.
The smoke curled in on itself, before drifting towards the night sky. The memory of his nightmares went with it.
“Chiyo-sama, it’s too late for the children to listen to a story like this,” Iruka spoke, considerate but firm. The woman was one of the village’s elders and, as such, to be treated with respect, to be protected from the ill-intentioned, and to be honored for the dozens of lifetimes she had lived. Iruka disliked her inevitably.
Upon hearing his voice, the old woman’s mouth lifted into a sly smile. With the years the skin and muscles of her face reached towards the ground, the woman herself shrinking in size, and her back bending, but not even her sagging cheeks were able to hide the upcurve of her thinning lips.
“Ah, Iruka-kun.” She sounded like a hunter who had just set her eyes on promising prey despite her maternally tone. “Have you been listening this whole time? Are you not bored of my old tales yet?”
Iruka shushed the children away and made sure that no one was hiding behind the logs or trees with pointed stares into the half-dark that meant trouble should he find someone not on their way home to their fathers and mothers.
“I don’t want them to grow up in fear of monsters that aren’t there,” he said as he took a seat across from Chiyo. Her smile wavered.
“You have seen nothing of the world, my boy. You are foolish to believe that we are safe from them.”
From them. He bristled. She hadn’t said one word about him but still he knew that she meant for Iruka to feel included in her accusation. Who was he in her eyes – the serpent that had bitten the child, the henchman of the cruel youkai demanding its parents’ lives? Iruka would never know. But he knew that there were other things they should be afraid of.
Who had taken Akahisa-chan’s father from her as the message had arrived from the border of the country just a few nights ago? What was it that had left old Kichirou-san as a ghost, his abused body after years of service unmoving by the shogi board, too taken by terror to make his next move? “I don’t believe anything, Chiyo-sama. I only see what happens in this village.” And he saw what the wars had left of this country even if they were living in peace now. Iruka saw because he couldn’t look away.
“Ah,” the old woman huffed and rested her hands on the carved handle of her walking stick. “And seeing makes you wiser than anyone else, it appears. Our boy from the forest.” With great effort she hefted herself from her seat while Iruka exhaled a deep seething breath as if a dragon had lodged in-between his ribs and stoked an ever-growing fire. “For all it is worth, I hope your truth is our fate as well. But fate is a fickle thing.” She lifted her right hand and Iruka’s fingers moved into a weak hold on her elbow as he steered her along the village’s path and to her dimly lit home. He did not speak a word. Anger was exhausting to carry – a weight that was too stubborn to die.
Over the threshold, Chiyo halted as she lifted her head. “There is something coming,” she said and for a moment, Iruka thought that she was addressing him but then he followed her gaze and met the treetops that loomed over their valley, the green merging into a single darkness after sunset.
Iruka’s mouth set into a grim line. He nodded to her with a slight bow of his head and with the sound of the door closing he set off on his own way.
His feet carried him to the stream at the eastern end of the village, back where the hunters had taken up the barren earth as a place to skin their prey and prepare the meat for the upcoming winter. Now, some figures hunched by the light of their oil lamps, illuminating not only their faces but the bottles of homemade spirits they shared between them while picking at whatever was left of the lunches their wives had packed. They weren’t the battle-bitten men that Iruka had always imagined them to be when he was younger and several heads smaller than them. But the village depended on the hunters to feed its mouths as the last harvests had not been as fruitful as the council had hoped, and the village was a great distance from the next so that proper trading routes had scarcely been established.
Iruka eyed the men and their shining, oily faces, the dirt on their cheeks, their lean bodies. Yes, the village needed them but if someone would ask Iruka’s opinion, the hunters needed the hunt just as much. They didn’t know anything else. So used to leaving with well-wishes and charms thrust into their hands, to protect until they returned with tired features but triumphant smiles. Was Iruka jealous of them? Perhaps. He could admit as much. But he wasn’t jealous of the hunt when it was the way the village welcomed the hunters back in with caring arms and glowing pride that made Iruka’s head throb with memories set aside a long time ago.
One of the men took notice of the figure watching them. He lifted his head and squinted to make out the shape of… who was that? Whatever fine-tuned instincts he called his, he had drowned them in alcohol. A bead of sweat rolled down his neck and as fear wound its way around his throat, he plastered a hand on the shoulder of the companion next to him, and dug his fingers into the tendons of it.
“What?”
The man looked and looked but Iruka was gone already.
His hand slid off his friend’s shoulder. “Nothing, I…” He shook his head and returned to the bottle in his hand. “I thought I had seen something.”
No attempts to cheer him up helped; he remained quiet for the rest of the night, with his thoughts spinning on the storyteller’s words that he hadn’t heard but that he felt, all of them felt, nevertheless: Something was coming.
*
“Can I see?” Iruka asked.
“Why?” Aoi scoffed. “You have already seen the carcasses we had to burn. The ashes are still rising, the coals hot. Go there if you want to see.”
Iruka met Aoi’s gaze and in his eyes he saw his own dislike mirrored. Briefly he wondered whether he could make amends with him, be amicable to be heard and to have his voice and opinion matter in this village, like he always had to. Not once had Iruka truly been welcome here, he thought. Tolerated, maybe. Endured. As long as he played to their rules, maybe. But why take him from the forest to raise him in the village, then? Why not just leave Iruka there when everyone considered him to be a bad mark hanging over the village? Hiding their thumbs in their fists behind their backs to ward off bad luck, like Iruka was a youkai himself.
Iruka took a step forward. “Aoi-san, let me see.”
His tone meant no business and Aoi, who had lowered his gaze already to the map of the lands, including the forest, froze at Iruka’s words.
“Do you think this will solve itself?” Iruka hissed. “Because it won’t. You will go onto your next hunt, and the next, and every time you will turn up with less until the village will starve. You know it as well as I do, but you are too conceited to ask for help.”
His jaw clenched, a vein on the lines of his face, at his temples, protruding but Iruka stood his ground. “Kami, you make it very easy for me to want to punch you in the face,” Aoi gritted out.
“Go ahead. You can drag me through the dirt if it helps you feel better but at the end of the day you will still have to deal with this and it will only get worse.” Iruka leaned forward and tapped a finger onto the map, moving into Aoi’s line of vision. “You think I like being right about this?”
“I think you love being a goddamn nuisance,” Aoi barked and shoved himself away from the low table. The leather of the tent flapped when he roughly pulled it away, fitting himself through the opening and Iruka followed him out. They rounded it, and a few steps away there were more men, some standing, some in a crouch.
“Move,” Aoi yelled as he already shouldered his way past one of the other hunters, his position as their leader allowing him to be an absolute prick to the other’s whenever he didn’t get his way. Iruka trailed after him.
“Here,” he spat out. “Have a look. It’s rotten. All the way through. Make of that what you will. I swear – “
Shut up for once. He was already focusing on the sight below him. A deer, young according to the size, but so thin, so gaunt. In the background, a stifled sound of anger escaped from Aoi’s throat but another hunter stepped up to him and lead him away.
Iruka lowered himself and quickly wrapped a piece of cloth from his bag around his hand before touching the body. It was still warm but where the flesh should have given away under Iruka’s fingers, it was hard, and hot, as if there was an infected wound that simmered with a fever.
Iruka pulled up the dear’s eyelids and revealed sclerae the color of pitch. With his wrapped hands he rolled the body over to get a better look at its sliced throat. Instead of blood, the wound was oozing a substance that was so dark it almost appeared black, and resembled miso paste in its consistence, so clumped that it was almost too thick to drip out of the fatal opening.
“How long has it been?”
The men around him were silent. Iruka turned his head around and glowered at them.
A shuffle, and then a younger hunter was shoved forward. He cleared his throat and avoided Iruka’s eyes when speaking. Weren’t it for their stupidity, Iruka would have felt just about satisfied that they were afraid of him.
“This – this was one of the last we killed. When the sun was about to set,” the boy said. His voice had yet to hit a lower register.
Iruka mulled this over. Too early for the blood to clot.
With a knife drawn from his hakama Iruka cut along the deer’s stomach in a thin line. He motioned to one of the men to help him in holding the animal open, and as soon as its guts were laid bare, Iruka held his sleeve over his nose. The stench was excruciating. Behind him, a sharp inhale and then the sound of gagging. Without lowering his hand from his face, Iruka wrapped the knife in some of the cloth he had used as a barrier between him and… whatever it is that had taken to this deer quicker than the hunt ever could.
Quickly, he stood up. “You went to the forest.” It wasn’t a question.
“Yes,” a deeper voice replied. Iruka met Asuma’s gaze. Not even the smell of tobacco was strong enough to cover the decay.
“The same lands? The same route?”
Asuma shook his head. “No. We went deeper but found not even a bird. Nothing. It was completely dead.”
His pulse drowned out any background noise. He hung onto Asuma’s lips as he continued to speak. There wasn’t anything to lean against so Iruka braced himself against the light-headedness and forced himself to breathe evenly, take a slow lungful of air.
“This one was half a day’s ride from the village.”
Iruka stared at him. “I need to talk to your father.”
Asuma took another drag of his pipe before shaking out the remains. His voice rumbled in his chest as he hummed. “And he needs to talk to you.”
*
“The forest is dying,” Iruka said.
Hiruzen took a sip of his tea. They were seated across each other on the floor, some incense burning of to the side. Iruka’s own tea stood untouched. He eyed the porcelain of the tea pot, the brushstrokes that were burnt into the glass, and suppressed the sudden urge to smash it on the ground.
“You are very sure of it,” the old man and leader of their village replied. Over the years, the liver spots had become abundant on his leathery skin. And over the years, Iruka had relished in the times that he had been invited into the Sarutobi’s home for some tea, a game or two of go, the impression of what it meant to have a family. Nevertheless, every time he left it to go home and lie down on his futon, he wondered, what was it that Hiruzen was trying to do? To pacify some of the anger that Iruka had harbored since he was a child. “And yet you have not set one foot into the lands.”
“I don’t need to see to know it. For weeks the hunters have turned up with less than nothing, and the village will starve if we don’t stop whatever it is that is going on.”
Hiruzen hummed. “Drink some tea with me, Iruka. For old times’ sake.”
Iruka stared at the cup in front of him. When his own frustration threatened to knock him over, Iruka reached for it with shaking hands and willed himself to be calm. As the tea slid down his throat and into his belly, he let his eyes fall shut and chase the taste of the tea plant’s leaves.
“How do you feel?”
Iruka wrapped his hands around the cup until his fingers touched. If he were to guess, the first time the old man had showed him how to brew tea, he had been about nine or ten years of age. Even in summer, he would drink it hot as sweat seeped through his clothes.
“Hiruzen-sama,” he started with his eyes still closed. “There has to be something that we can do.”
When he opened himself up to the world again, Hiruzen’s was looking out of the window and over to the valley’s end where the village ended and the forest began.
“We have made offerings,” Hiruzen spoke with a calm Iruka was sure he had never experienced. “I have sent out messages to the kannushi of the temples east and west but, if they have reached them, there has been no response.”
Iruka stared at the old man. “That’s… that’s all we can do?”
The white robes rustled as Hiruzen gave a sigh. “Iruka-kun, have I ever told you how this country came into being?”
“It was the work of two brothers. They had founded it, together, after war had torn this land apart and almost killed them both. Hashirama-sama wanted peace for the capitol and a strong bond with the other villages, too.”
“I see that at least someone has paid attention to an old man like me.” The way Hiruzen talked about himself made Iruka choke out an affronted sound; the old man however threw his head back and laughed, as jovial as he must have been in his youth. “Oh, don’t look so offended, Iruka-kun. You know it is true. I am not getting younger by any means.” He lit his pipe with steady hands and smiled while drawing a puff.
Although Hiruzen meant to make him laugh, Iruka couldn’t. He refilled both of their cups in silence.
“And you are right, of course,” Hiruzen drawled around his pipe, “but I did not mean the capitol’s founding.”
At this, Iruka looked up. “What then?”
“How this land was created. The mountains, the valleys, the rivers,” Hiruzen said.
“But you aren’t that old.” The old man broke into renewed laughter while Iruka floundered. “No, I meant – of course, you aren’t that old!”
Hiruzen wiped at the moisture in the corner of his eyes and chuckled to himself as he busied his hands with stuffing the pipe. “You are a joy, Iruka-kun.” The way he said it, though, the way the words struggled to leave his tongue – Iruka felt as if he was bidden farewell to.
“No, I am not old enough to have witnessed how these lands came into being. But there is a tale that I would like to share with you, if you were so kind as to fetch some tea leaves and put on the water over the fire.”
Iruka returned with a tablet and carefully lowered it down on the floor, while taking his cross-legged seat opposite of Hiruzen again. He knew the Sarutobi’s house by heart, and where the expensive tea dishes for Hiruzen’s ceremonies were hidden away.
“Now, where were we,” Hiruzen’s low voice mused. It was raspy, like a blazing oil fire that refused to be put out with simple water. “Right. The daidarabou. Have you heard of them?”
Faintly. But whenever he had heard the word, the memory refused to resurface.
Hiruzen nodded. “What you see know are not the lands that have always existed. Once, they were as flat as a pan perhaps, or as smooth as a frozen lake. But a daidarabou, driven by hunger, shaped the same earth we built this village on. Because the daidarabotchi’s feet were as large as hundred-year-old trees, and its body taller than any mountains, its clumsy hands it split the earth left and right as it maneuvered its colossal body on its quest to still its hunger. When it rained, the footprints it left behind filled with water and turned into our lakes. When the daidarabotchi searched for nourishment in the ground, it piled up heaps of dirt that became our mountains. But all this for nothing. Only when humans started to walk this earth did the giant find a source to fill its hunger.”
Iruka’s hands were frozen onto the cup. “Why are you telling me this now?”
“Why now?”
“Because,” Hiruzen started and slowly, raised himself from the floor, “I know you and the way you look down on the people in this village who continue to tell stories that diminish the ayakashi’s world.” His montsuki kimono, the stiff silk of it, crinkled as the old man moved to the window. One would have assumed that his joints would protest after sitting still for so long but contrary to public opinion Hiruzen was in good shape for this current chapter in his life.
Heat rose to Iruka’s cheeks. “I don’t look down on them – “
“You don’t? But you dislike it so strongly when someone speaks of the shadows they believe to have seen at night, and you get angry. That anger will carry you nowhere, boy.” Hiruzen turned half-way around; the evening light dipped the angles of his face in a warm glow.
Iruka felt warm but for completely other reasons.
“This anger carries me to look for a solution before this village will die,” he bit out. “You just told me yourself, the daidarabou created these lands to still his hunger and who am I to judge that? We are the same, if only smaller and equipped with knives and bows, Hiruzen-sama.”
Iruka willed himself to remain polite if only for the benignity he had been shown by the Sarutobi family. He dug his fingers into the fabric of his own hakama that rested over his thighs, with his sit bones grounding him against the hardwood flooring. He didn’t know when this anger had started. Perhaps he had collected it over the years, like the hunters collected their tools, and honed the blades of their spears. Perhaps Iruka had done the same to his anger, honed it, let it grow and take root deep inside of him.
Iruka looked down at his lap and his bloodless knuckles.
After silence had fallen over them like heavy rainfall, turning words into heavier versions than they were supposed to be, Hiruzen walked back over to Iruka. “I don’t expect that I can keep you from leaving. Will you come pray with me a last time?”
And just like that, all the tension seeped out of Iruka. His shoulders sagged down, and his eyebrows knit together like a child that was about to cry. With a heavy heart, Iruka swallowed, nodding. Soon, he was following Hiruzen’s light footsteps out of the back of the house, where there was a place still sheltered by a roof, but otherwise unprotected by nature’s arbitrary will.
They stood still in front of the kamidana. The altar was built into the wall space, slightly above Iruka’s eye level and reaching to Hiruzen’s crown. The shrine encased a seal written in bold letters, proudly showing it off, and for the first time during all his years in this village, Iruka wondered what kami the ofuda was embodying. But with his head still churning over their conversation, how the old man had known exactly where Iruka’s intentions lay, that he could not let the world go its natural way but had to meddle, because this was about the forest and all the beings that called the forest their home, he only bowed, tongue too heavy to speak.
One after another, Hiruzen placed small dishes on the kamidana. There was fragrant rice, two cups of sake, and finally, water and salt. Although the wooden frame of the shelf told Iruka that this shrine had been here for a long time, it looked clean and respectable. The ofuda, he guessed, must have been bought off the nearest Shinto temple when it was still functioning as one, before slowly the priestesses had one after another left the temple for their passage to the next world.
They bowed again, and took a step back.
“I built this kamidana on the day that I inherited the village.”
Iruka looked over to Hiruzen.
“Many have forgotten that thanks have to be given to kami but here, in the privacy of my own home, I have made up for it,” Hiruzen said thoughtfully. But then, he chuckled. “At least I tried.” He met Iruka’s gaze with a smile. “This shrine serves the forest gods, Iruka-kun. And I hope, for your sake as well as mine, that you will venture with certainty and understanding.”
*
Iruka’s first bow had been one of Asuma’s old ones that the man no longer used since switching to blades. He still remembered how the oiled and waxed wood seemed smooth under his hands, maybe the only good and genuine thing he had touched in years. He had been awarded five arrows back then, and one of them had splintered badly on the first day after Iruka used too much force to pry it out of a barrel so that he soon went about carving his own.
The arrows were seldomly straight and even in the beginning. It would have frustrated Iruka greatly if it hadn’t been for his lessons with Chiyo-sama, where she taught him and other children of the village the art of kanji. After those hours and hours spent memorizing and meticulously writing out the seemingly arbitrary characters Iruka considered himself prepared for any future disappointment in the acquisition of new skills.
He carved until his arrows became forward and true, and started experimenting with the weight of them. Heavier versions, Iruka studied, would shoot from his bow in an arc whereas lighter arrows showed a higher chance of missing their target. To obtain suitable material, as freshly harvested bamboo still changed its size and shape for a good three years, Iruka would get permission from Hiruzen to travel to the next village in a region that was warmer, where the bamboo workers were more attuned to the growth and therefore, the bamboo grew faster.
Iruka’s current bow existed as an amalgamation of softwood and bamboo and leather, and presented strongly in its curvature so that Iruka would leave it strung at all times, as if to tame the bow, as if the bow hadn’t tamed him into moments of stillness only interrupted by his quiet breaths.
This was the weight that settled on Iruka’s back as he wrapped up a clean yukata and another change of clothes. He didn’t know how long he would be gone for, and he didn’t know where his journey might guide him.
He gave thanks to the village’s elders as was expected of him, and then caught the group of children Iruka had been teaching off the record and only irregularly but still they insisted on calling him sensei. Iruka wished he could have been their real sensei but village politics were whimsical towards him.
“Iruka-sensei, don’t leave!” Moegi-chan cried as she clung to him and sobbed into his shoulders. Even though most of her face was hidden from him, he could still see her red cheeks, her flush only strengthened by her crying. Konohamaru and Udon stood a small distance away from her, obviously put off by Moegi’s emotional outburst, but when Iruka kneeled down to settle the girl on the ground both of the boys shuffled to her.
Iruka’s heart was tearing. He wiped her face with a cotton tissue and let her blow her nose into it. “Moegi-chan, consider this as a mission. While I’m away you, Konohamaru and Udon will look after the village, okay?” He wondered whether the children heard the tremble in his voice; he couldn’t let them see how much this affected him for they needed to remember Iruka without tears, Iruka without sadness tinging his eyes. They needed to learn that not every farewell meant a turn for the worse.
Udon tugged at Moegi’s sleeve while big fat drops rolled down her cheeks. She sucked in deep breaths, trying to calm herself down; Iruka had noticed the streak of volition and bravery the young girl very early on. While he patted her ginger hair, Konohamaru lifted his head. He worried his bottom lip between his teeth.
“Iruka-sensei, is it true that you’re leaving to fight all the youkai in the forest?”
Iruka was caught off-guard, and the pain in his chest turned dull. “Who told you that?”
Konohamaru’s eyes fluttered to the side. “No one.” So he had probably overheard a conversation he wasn’t supposed to listen in on. “But you’re bringing your bow.”
Iruka put on a smile. “Because I will need to hunt for myself while I’m gone. But I’m not fighting anyone.” At least that’s what he hoped. He didn’t intend to seek out the forest in search for answers just to cause more harm. That was not what lay in his nature.
“Can’t we come with you?” Konohamaru asked. Iruka blinked away his own surprise. Konohamaru was a loud child, a confident one and never showed hesitation, rather the opposite of it, when faced with conflict. But Iruka had expected that the stories of the village had scared him away enough, that all the tales of youkai with teeth larger than their heads, and enchanted words that would seize your will and walk you over a cliff towards your death, weren’t the least bit enticing for a boy who wanted to play the hero.
Iruka shook his head. “I’m sorry, Konohamaru-kun. Imagine what your grandfather would say if I got you in danger. You’re young and have so much growing to do. But I’m easier to spare. And by the way, if you come with me,” he lowered his voice to a stage-whisper so no one would overhear and let mischief seep into his words, “who will annoy Chiyo-sama if not you? She’ll think she’s safe from any pranks!”
Despite himself, a little smile tugged at Konohamaru’s mouth. Iruka looked at the three children in front of him, Udon with his arm around Moegi’s shouldes, and Moegi lifting her chin high despite her watery eyes. And he thought that even though life in the village was hard, and complex, he loved them so dearly for how clever and caring and attentive they were.
When he opened his arms, the three streamed in. The embrace had too many limbs, and Konohamaru accidentally elbowed him in the stomach, while Moegi got more tears on his clothes but Iruka didn’t mind. He didn’t mind at all.
With a stern face he sent them off to see if they could make themselves useful around the village so the goodbye wouldn’t drag out any longer. And without another minute to waste Iruka turned around, turned his back on the village, and left through the rice fields.
And the village watched Iruka become smaller, and smaller, until he was but a faintly dove blue speck in the distance.