Why Do I Live? - Phi

[Canary]

The lands of this region were strategic to none. Unclaimed, unnamed as a province of the Scorpion, save by the mere fact that all of the surrounding territory had been claimed by their number. There was nothing worth having here, the waters of a series of old, stagnant lakes feeding what was a seemingly endless stretch of freshwater bogs. You could grow neither weight, nor millet, oat nor any other grain in these wretched, fetid lands. In the winters they froze on the surface and in the summers they were uneven and saturated by filthy, vile and poisonous creatures that even the Scorpion seemed to have little use for in these days.

It caused the scant foothills and the lowest slopes and clefts of the spine of the world to serve as a sort of inhospitable and fallow ground for people to live who wished never to be seen by another living soul, who wished for time to forget them, to leave them alone and in turn they would offer the same promise right back. Of all of the lands of the Spine of the World, these were the second worst in the whole of the range, the only thing worse being the rocky crags at which the ocean dashed the hopes and lives of many a fisherman, countless leagues away. None could even hope to live there but crabs scuttling in the tide pools. Here, life could exist, but only in the most basic of senses.

It was here that the Hikaru had come, some of the last of the 'True' Hikaru, as if such a word would ever be used to describe the tribe. Racial and tribal purity had never been their concern so much as whether or not all could survive on their own terms in the places where nobody cared to go. This place was a test of their resolve, just as the great mountain pass had once been their test, their proof of how the elements and the world would not make them bend knee. But those Hikaru were, in so many ways, gone. Their way of life was dwindling, for their ranks had left to chase after the wind. They had found their way, on their own terms. The freedom of the wind, the breeze blown in the hair of the kami Shinjo when she gazed upon the horizon and sought the new frontier, it beckoned to them. Theirs would be the never-ending journey, the masterless road and they would prove themselves its greater no matter what challenge it threw at them. Thus was born the first of the Shinjo.

These were not those souls, who lived here high in the hills and mountains, wedged behind pallisades of wood with weapons of bronze, staring down into the marshes far below and daring the Spine of the World to claim them this year as it had tried countless times. They were masterless and they would not bend knee to any, or so they told themselves. They would not become thieves and brigands as some had become, but they would serve no kami. So they told themselves every night over the campfire as the Xun blew haunting tunes in the air and the women of the tribe danced the dances of generations, holding to the old ways. These were the 'true Hikaru,' they said to themselves, the highlanders who held this place because none would have it, just as none would have them.

And every day, their village would send out the hunters to bring back forage for the women to cure, to ensure that there would be food preserved for the winter. They scoured the dark, dank marshes and the hills and mountains, claiming what bounty nature would grant them, and they returned each night to laugh around the fire and tell the same stories they had for the last five years, claiming that time would never find the cleft of the mountains that they put their homes in. Yet time had not forgotten them, and with every passing year their number dwindled, a little at a time.

Today was no different from any other. One more leaving, one less hunter, and one less mouth to feed. The way of the Hikaru was not dead, but it was dying.

The the thunk of a blade striking flesh echoed dully in the peat bog, the only sound at all for yards. The marsh's chorus of frogs had gone silent with the arrival of the one with the axe and his companion, squatting up in the low branches of a tree. He grunted sourly and hefted a now headless serpent, looking at it with a narrowed gaze. “Barely worth roasting up for the evening meal.”

“I suppose you'd rather it bite you?” she said, red eyes glancing down at him out of their corner, a smirk hidden behind a thin veil of black linen covering the lower half of her face. She turned her gaze back towards the surroundings, her eyes narrowed while she squinted at the morning fog that hovered over everything like a shroud. If she were another person, she might shiver at the light chill, but it felt better this way. It kept the blood flowing.

He muttered and put the serpent into a small basket strapped to his waist. It wasn't the only one he would fetch and bring back today. It was his duty to bring meat back for curing, and he had only just begun. “The game's getting scarce in this place. We're going to have to consider moving on.” His voice was like a growl, full of the displeasure he clearly felt at that. “Or become a bunch of farmers in the hill. See what you've reduced us to, leaving like this? I'll be fumbling around some damned cud patch, fending off the crows.”

She said nothing. Her lips were still pulled in that faint smile. He was probably the sixth to say it today alone, or something similar. They'd be fine. They were Hikaru, and Hikaru were survivors. They had never needed he, anymore than they had needed Chosaku or Koyama. The seasons would come and go, and the next generation would rebuild, and they would be as eternal as the mountains they called their home. Or so they led people to believe. It would not be the departure of one more hunter who would bring about their death.

“It's that damned blind hag, putting ideas in your head, kid. A year gone, but you're still wearing that stupid rag over your face, playing at being one of that Bayushi's boys. She got ideas in your head, and it's going to just get you killed like it did Chosaku.” He spat, grumbling as he pulled out his bow, watching for something, for anything with enough meat to merit an arrow. Arrows took time, and you didn't waste them on some foul little muskrat a trap could catch. “They'll never bother to come here, and we can live in the mountains in peace as long as we like. No use getting airs.”

“You're wrong, you know,” she said quietly, not looking at him while she put a hand to shield her eyes from the early morning glare, just at the edge of the low hanging fog. The path would be clear today, and after the fog was faded she would have a straight shot out of this place. “In your life, they won't come here, but they will come eventually. They will find something in the marsh or mountains of value. Your children's children will move to another place, and they will find a use for it. They are like the flows in winter. Slowly, they encroach until there is too much, and they sweep all aside. We are the past. They are the future, for good or ill.”

“You sound just like some of those who joined the Ki-Rin did. Running after the wind. The lot of them're probably dead by now” Not entirely fair. A few had kept in touch as best as he could, but they'd chosen to winter in a space that was less than hospitable even by their own rugged standards. Another spit, and he began to move forward along familiar pathways of the foothills down, into the marsh proper. She dropped down and followed right behind him, making little sound as she moved. “I still say it was that woman. She's gotten strange ideas in all of us. The shrine...”

“A memory, and you can and should take it down if he is saved,” she cut him short. “You are not hers, and I don't think any of you should belong to her. Her ways, they are not our ways. They live for their cause. You live to survive against all. What you do, you do as a favor to a grieving woman. I will send word when the deed is done. Take it down then. Put something to Jurojin up. He'd like that.”

“Then why the mask, girl? I barely understand the need to go off and play hero, but you always were an odd one. Why the mask if not for her?” He was as confused as all of them had been. They knew nothing of the kami in this place, other than that they existed. They prayed for Fu Leng as long as they were reminded and with minimal fervency in this place, but they prayed. The kami were distant things, thunder in the plains of storms that would not reach the mountains. Their names had been forgotten in ten years by most. Only Shinjo and Bayushi were remembered, and perhaps Shiba. One stole Koyama after he claimed Chosaku. One lived oh so close. The other was emperor now, if you believed such things. But they did not truly know them.

“She told me. One of them tore a strip of cloth the day that Shiba rose. He wrapped his face in it. I liked the sentiment. So all that they can see when I come for them is my red eyes. All that they can know of me is what I wish them to. It was not this Fu Leng who did that.” There was something inexpressible in the way that she spoke. Was it adulation, or was it just force behind her words, insistence and heat with no direction. “I want to know if what lies under that mask is what I seek. If I will find a place there? We have land we squat on, but no place. I need purpose.”

He growled and shook his head. No, they'd had this talk hadn't they. “You'll do what you'll do, Phi. And when he falls short like Chosaku did, you'll be back, lurking in the shadows of the fires of our homes again, like the ghost you are. You think some damned fool of a god among men has the answers hiding in his smile under some piece of cloth?” He almost sounded like he was on the edge of laughing. “I didn't take you for a moonstruck lark seeking a ma...”

She was in front of him in a second. Blood red eyes stared directly into his and the voice that came from behind her mask was cold, piercing. He took a step back, feeling his heel against a rock he'd passed over. “I am not seeking a mate. I will fuck who I choose, when I choose. And if I find one worthy, I will share their house. This is not about my loins, Choji, you oaf. Stop thinking with the sword between your legs. I want to know why I live, and to be that. Not merely to survive.” She tilted her head and spat down, a practiced motion that missed the linen of her mask before staring at him again. “Besides, he's married and you know I have no interest in breaking up a home.”

Choji grunted and had the decency to look a little embarrassed. “Sorry, Phi. Know it's not that... just poking a little fun. It's hard to see things the way you do sometimes, but you've always... gone your own way. Why should this be different. You will come back to us?” There was a glimmer of hope there. A memory of a winter night that might have been part of why he'd shot that barb out.

People could be so foolish at times. He wasn't wrong before. Phi went her own way. She was always at the fringes, in the shadows of the huts, just at the edge of view. Her eyes were never lingering long in the town or its company. She looked out into the darkness of the night, searching for something that was not here. It was a miracle she had remained for this long, but inevitability had finally caught up with her, in the form of a carrier bird with the seal of the so-called emperor calling for help.

“Fortunes willing,” she said woodenly. “I will breathe the same air as you again. You'll hear the flute on the wind, and I will bring word. But I do not promise to linger. When I return, it may be with an offer of a place.”

“We're not lowlanders, Phi. We never will be.” He snorted again, eyes narrowed.

“Maybe I'll ask the Dragon? I hear they like their mountains,” she snorted, her eyes sparkling as she said it. It was a joke, really. The little she'd heard, she wasn't sure any of them would like being up quite that far into the sky. The air got thin there, made you crazy. And those Dragon were supposed to be a little weird. Might be that thin air...

He grunted and waved once, starting down a path to the South. She'd be going West soon enough. A wave over his shoulder and he glanced back at her. “Don't get yourself killed.” When he said it, there was a sadness there, a sadness that was mirrored in the voices of all in the Hikaru when she'd left. It was the same sound they'd had when they'd seen the Shinjo ride away, and in the months after that woman Reiko had come here with her bodyguard. Even when Sora had disappeared, nobody had shed a tear back in the village and a few said good riddance, but in the time afterwards more and more had disappeared.

She nodded, more to herself, and disappeared into the fog. Here, in the shrouds of gray and the footfalls over land she knew all too well yet which shifted every day to make it impossible to track, she as finally at peace. Choji's voice did not basically plead yet another not to leave the behind. The village headman did not speak to the slowly dwindling numbers, the hundred or so that she left behind. No babies squalling in the background, women of the village asking why she had not settled down and still played at being a huntress even if she was as good as most of the others. All of it was gone. The occasional croak of a frog, whose skin was toxic to the fool's touch, and the keening of a heron could be heard. Her footfalls left barely even the hint of a splash, the sound almost thunderous in her mind's eye. She was still too loud for her tastes, a thing she would need to work on if she was to do what she intended. But this faint silence, it was her home.

She was alone with her thoughts, and they roiled as they had for years, ever since the day that Koyama had left to see the tournament, fresh and full of hatred of the kami only to come back in love with one of them. She'd been young and stupid, young enough barely to be an adult, barely fit to have gone and watched, which was why she'd hung back, stayed with the others. When he'd come back, challenged Chosaku, claimed the mantle of power and taken them all away, she'd been shocked. She'd been angry, and her mind had never truly been the same. Even after she'd forgiven them all a few months later, squatting in the marshes, she'd had her eyes fixed beyond the borders, staring at the thing that her kin wanted to bury their hands in the peat and ignore.

It was the future. They all knew it. They denied it in their words, but it hollowed their eyes and weighed on their souls. Their way of life would not last forever. The only reason they continued to eak out the existence that they did was because nobody wanted this rotten place. The place had nothing but cheap, ugly and worthless rock, barely worth considering. The bogs that surrounded this place, fed by lakes and the far away great river made it inhospitable for proper game and useless to cultivate. Wedged into the hills, they lived on a plot of land the Bayushi would care nothing about, so long as they did not come down to raid and they knew it, just as they knew that one day the Scorpion would find a purpose for this place. Something here would have just enough value and they would bend knee...

...Or the Hikaru would die.

The future hanted them as much as a specter and shade in the Chinsei forests. It lurked behind them like Emma-O, waiting to claim their lives and judge them in the dead plains of Meido. It followed them as inexorably as the passage of time flowed over them, wasting them away and tearing at the strength that had kept them alive through winter after winter in the Spine of the World. But phi did not fear the future, did not bemoan it. She embraced it.

Time demanded change. Nothing was static, and she had wandered the flows of the great ocean for too long, aimless and without guidance. She would find direction, find purpose and when she had done so, she would move as fast as one of her arrows, striking the target that she had yet to find. This Fu Leng was a means to an end. There was only so much time left, but with it she would 'play Hero' just long enough to catch the eye of one who would give her meaning, and she would finally 'be.' She would finally know why she lived.

And if she died in that blasted, blighted land she'd been warned of? Then that was an answer. “Nobody ever lives forever,” she whispered to herself, moving like a wraith through the fog towards destiny.