Yukionna

Don’t go through the pass!”

“It’s haunted!”

“The yukionna will get you!”

Kenshin Himura was regretting, now, that he hadn’t taken the villagers’ advice. He had gotten about halfway up the mountain pass when the storm struck. Now he hugged the mountainside because the edge of the path was lost in swirling white. Snow caked his hakama and plastered his kimono to his body. The heavy, wet stuff clung to his feet, making every step that much more difficult.

I wish I could be snow falling toward you.

Tomoe’s caress had been like gently falling snowflakes, as far from this killing blizzard as he could imagine. The villagers’ superstitions reminded him of Jiiya’s tales, from the village where he had been born. “In the high mountain passes, that’s where the Yukionna lives. She loves young men, and comes to them in the snow, and lures them into her embrace. Then she sucks the warmth of life from them and leaves them frozen corpses.” Indeed, the wind in the rocks almost sounded like a woman crying. To an exhausted traveler, the drifts must seem as soft as a bed, as warm and welcoming as a woman’s embrace.

He plodded on, step by step on feet he no longer felt. It was hard going on, against the driving, snow-laden wind. The warmth of his body flowed out through his snow-caked clothing, to be sucked away by the icy air.

He stumbled and fell face-down in the snow. I have to get up. I have to go on. If I lie here I’ll freeze. It was hard, hard as any fight he had ever been in, hard as going on had been after Tomoe’s death. But he pulled himself to his feet and plodded on.

The snow was deeper now, up to his knees. The wind buffeted his slender body. Just remaining upright was taking everything he had, putting one foot in front of the other was nearly beyond him. He couldn’t feel, he didn’t know if he was moving forward or not. He stumbled again, and this time he did not get up.

The futon was soft, and Tomoe’s skin was cool against his. She drew the blanket around them both, and caressed him with cold, slender fingers. It seemed right that she should come to him in the snow, as she had left him in the snow, and it was so sweet to be in her arms again, and he was tired, so very, very tired… he let her press her icy lips to his and draw him into her cool white peace…

Anata…

The voice blew away on the wind, unheard.

Gennou picked up the heavy buckets and turned to walk back to the temple’s living quarters, careful to keep his feet in the shifting, slippery snow. The wind moaned around the corner of the building and set up a vibration in the bell; it almost seemed to cry with a woman’s voice.

“Help us…”

It did sound like a woman. Gennou peered into the darkness. Was a woman’s form dimly visible through the blizzard? Stories from his childhood rose up in his mind, choking faith and reason: the Yukionna, prowling the snowy passes hunting for strong young men… and he was young and very new in religion. Here in the dark and the snow the old malificent spirits seemed stronger than the Buddha’s light. He took a step back. “Namu Amida Butsu,” he murmured.

“Please… my husband…”

“Gennou? What’s keeping you?” The mountainous figure of Kaken loomed next to him. Suddenly everything seemed sane and normal again. There was indeed a woman, a traveler… he could see her faintly through the blinding white, her pale clothing blending into the snow.

“In the snow… my husband…”

“Nani? There’s a woman out here in this mess?” Kaken peered through the gloom.

“The Yukionna…” Gennou protested.

“Would never bother the Buddha’s priests. That’s a real woman, in trouble. Okusama, where is your husband?”

“In the pass…”

Gennou, bringing up the rear behind the huge, sheltering bulk of his master, still wasn’t sure about the woman. For one thing, she wasn’t dressed for the weather. She wore no protective coat or hat of rushes, no padded hanten, and her lavender stole was only loosely draped around her shoulders. For another, she didn’t seem to struggle against the wind as he and his master did. She moved with a graceful, gliding walk, as if she were in a garden in autumn.

At first there seemed to be nothing in the snow-swept pass. But the strange woman unerringly led them to a featureless drift, and they began to dig. The wind seemed to come at them from all sides with battering force. It blew snow into their faces, stinging their eyes until they were blind

“Hurry,” the woman begged, her voice nearly lost in the screaming wind.

They dug, scooping the snow aside with their hands. The wind picked it up and flung it into their eyes with stinging force but they kept going. It seemed to Gennou that there was nothing in the snowdrift, and he was about to say so, when his numb hands struck something firmer than snow, softer than rock or ice.

They dug faster and soon uncovered the body of a man, hardly more than a boy, dressed in worn kimono and hakama, with a single sword at his waist. “He’s still alive, I can feel a heartbeat,” said Kaken. He scooped the unconscious youth up in his arms and started back to the temple.

“Please follow us, Okusama,” Gennou shouted into the wind. But the woman had vanished into the blizzard, just as silently and mysteriously as she had first appeared.

They were amazed at the young man’s scars. He hardly seemed old enough to be a seasoned warrior – barely out of his teens – but he was covered with the evidence of old sword wounds. A long slash across his back, they’d found when they took off his snow-caked kimono, another across his chest, and cuts down both thighs. Both his shoulders were marked as though they had been clawed by an animal. His most striking scars, though, would have been apparent for the world to see. As the water-darkened red hair fell away from his face, they saw on his right cheek, two slashes, deep and old, at nearly right angles to each other.

Red hair… and crossed scars…

“Oshou, this man is…”

“A traveler, lost in the snow,” Kaken replied, with his ever-present smile.

“But Oshou…”

“Buddha’s mercy is for everyone. Now build the fire up a little, and help me. Let this medicine steep till the incense has burned halfway down, then give him as much as you can get him to take.”

Hours passed. The storm blew itself out and the world returned to crystalline silence. Gennou and Kaken chanted their sutras, cooked their simple meals, and took turns watching over the stranger.

Gennou gazed at their quietly-sleeping patient. The medicine had calmed him at last; earlier he and Kaken had been forced to restrain the youth, to keep him from injuring himself in a fit of screaming delirium. Kaken’s massive bulk had barely sufficed; for all his diminutive size, the redhead was as strong as an oni.

Hitokiri Battousai, he thought to himself. It was hard to reconcile this slight, tormented youth, little older and no larger than himself, with the stories he’d heard. Battousai was a demon with hair and eyes of fire, a cold-blooded slayer raining blood with every stroke of his invincible sword. How could this delicate-seeming boy, who screamed a woman’s name in his nightmares, be such a creature? Yet there was the hair, and the crossed scars, and that uncanny strength… They say he has slain a thousand men…

He examined the stranger’s clothing. A hakama of sturdy cotton, a little frayed at the bottom, and a kimono of lighter fabric, its deep red fading to the color of sakura buds. Neither bore slashes or bloodstains, though here and there the garments had been inexpertly mended. They looked like the clothes of any ronin down on his luck.

Trembling with terror and curiosity, he pulled the man’s sword a few sun out of its saya. A sword that has killed a thousand… NANI? He almost dropped the weapon in amazement.

He knew little of swords, but he had never heard of one sharpened along its inner curve. A reverse-edge blade… why?

“Tomoe…”

The stranger was starting to toss and mutter. Better give him some more medicine before he went completely out of his head again. I wonder if Tomoe was the woman in the snow…

She was cool around him, surrounding him with her soothing cold. Her lips, her hands like ice on his burning skin, her hair sliding over his face and chest. The clean scent of snow scouring away the metallic tang of blood. There was fire in his soul, in his body, fire that burned and hurt; her touch, her kiss drained it away, left nothing but cool white peace…

Anata

Tomoe was here… so why was she calling him?

Anata…

He was burning up, fire in every part of his body, his feet and hands scourged with needles. Tomoe was gone, the peace and coolness that had surrounded him were gone, there was only the torment…

Bitterness flooded into his mouth. Sake… sake tastes like blood… Then the burning faded, and he could hear Tomoe’s voice again.

Come back, anata…

Come back? But I’m here…

He was confused. He wanted to be back in the cool white nothingness.

Tomoe… where did you go, Tomoe…

Anata… you mustn’t go back into the snow… I’m not there… Pulling him, pulling him back into the burning pain…

But I lost you in the snow… Tomoe…

Aloes-and-sandalwood incense… the half-understood drone of a priest’s prayers… he was back in the little temple outside Kyoto, listening to the priest conduct the funeral service for Tomoe. It was a dream, then, that she was here with me…

Coarse cotton against his skin, the level hardness of wooden floor under a thin futon, the weight of covers over him. The heat of a hibachi, somewhere nearby. More scents, under the incense: charcoal, rice, vegetables, miso… a bitterness that stirred nightmare memories. Sake tasting like blood… but that isn’st sake. Medicine? And a presence, no, two presences. One young, curious and confused; the other older, his ki as steady and warm as the heat from the hibachi.

Priests… a temple…

“Welcome back to the world of the living.” The calm, steady presence belonged to a priest as plump and cheerful as Hotei. “I am called Kaken – head priest of this temple, such as it is – and this is my acolyte Gennou.”

“Kenshin… Kenshin Himura. Sessha… this unworthy one is a wanderer.” It came out in a cracked whisper, barely audible.

“You don’t need to say anything just yet,” the priest went on. “You must be hungry. Our fare is simple, but you are welcome to share what we have. Rest and recover your strength. It will be some days before the road is fit to travel again.”

“I am very sorry about your wife,” Gennou said.

“Oro?” The man’s eyes were wide, innocent violet, not the blazing amber slits that Gennou had been expecting.

“The woman you were traveling with? We would never have known you were lost in the snow if she hadn’t guided us to you, but then she disappeared in the blizzard.”

The stranger shook his head, red bangs falling over his eyes. “There was no woman… I was alone.”

“In your dreams, you called out a name. Tomoe.”

There was a long silence, a stillness so complete that Gennou drew away, anticipating the explosion that must surely come.

“If I have caused you pain…” he began to apologize.

“It’s all right.” Kenshin handed the soup bowl back to Gennou. “Sessha did have a wife by that name, but she is… she died. Three years ago.”

Kenshin snuggled under the futon and watched the hibachi cast flickering shadows across the ceiling. The monk’s story seemed very strange; he wondered what had really happened. But he still felt weak, and the food had made him sleepy. He closed his eyes.

An opened door somewhere in the temple let a swirl of cold air into the room. It brushed over his face as tenderly as a woman’s hand, leaving a faint scent of white plum.

NOTES, EXPLANATIONS ETC.

This is the first of an indeterminate series of “rurouni years” kaidan (ghost stories) based very loosely on traditional tales. While this does owe a little to Tae’s “Fever Dreams,” the real inspiration was the opening to Fox’s “Dancing Madly Backwards,” which gave me the idea of Tomoe-as-yukionna. Not all yukionna are evil; there is a tale about a woman who died in a snowstorm, whose ghost visited her husband and urged him to care for her elderly parents.

I don’t know the conventions for Buddhist religious names, so I simply steal them from old literary sources – anything from Heike Monogatari to Great Mirror of Masculine Love. Kaken is modeled very loosely on Kuukai in Flame of Recca; Gennou is simply an earnest young acolyte with a head full of nonsense.

Okusama is pretty much the Japanese equivalent of “ma’am.” It’s an honorific used to address a married woman – though never one’s own wife. (Though that’s moot for these guys, after all they’re sworn celibates, at least where women are concerned…)

A sun is a unit of length, 1.2 inches or 3.03 cm according to the table in the back of my kanji dictionary.

The location and nature of Kenshin’s scars are from his fight with the Yaminobu. And I’m quite sure that legend exaggerated both Battousai’s ferocity and his body count.