28 – Blood and Ash

When the excitement of the bandit attack had fully passed, and the damage and the bodies had been fully cleared away, I was able to turn my attention back to more important matters.

The extension on the side of the house was gradually taking shape, growing more defined as we built around the frame. And the more that was added, the more the whole house seemed a strange chimera. I was using the western style for this side, with a flatter roof and a door that opened and shut outward as opposed to sliding.

I wasn’t an architect but the practice wasn’t alien to me. In my old life I’d been involved in the construction of many barns, coops, and huts. And we did have a bit of help from a local man, Jago, who was well versed as an architect and a shipwright.

He’d tried to insist on doing things his way, despaired as he heard the things we did back west, but ultimately he had agreed to follow my designs. A few stacks of gin helped in that regard.

Plus the fact that he wouldn’t have to live here.

I knelt upon the roof, hammering the roof slates in one by one, until a layer of red scales had taken shape upon it. Haita’s two friends worked the other side, at a slower pace, while Haita went back and forth to fetch more slates.

He was sweating and redfaced, huffing and puffing a little harder on each return trip, but the good thing about youth was that such things were easy to recover from. When I’d been that age I could have worked dawn to dusk and woken up fine the next morning.

Before my rebirth, even working a few hours took the wind right out of me. Getting old was no fun. Silver lining, I suppose.

“Hey, Aniki,” Haita said, the lilt in his voice making it clear he had a question in mind.

“Yes,” I absently replied, focused on the rows of tiles before me. I kept checking for gaps, any space a leak could come through. Thus far it seemed we were doing fine.

“Do you… have a wife, or anything? I mean you’re old enough for it.”

“Haita!” his two friends hissed, glaring daggers at him. Even they knew it was stupid to go poking and prodding at such things.

And, indeed, I probably should have told him to mind his own business. Instead, without thinking at all, I said “I used to.”

“Oh.”

“She… was killed a few years back.”

“Oh,” Haita repeated, sounding much more pained this time.

I should have been mad, but… instead the thought of my wife, all that I once had, sent a strange wistfulness through me. I had tried not to think about my loved ones but the truth was, that was foolishness. Their memories had been the coals that stoked the furnace in my heart, driving me every step of that bloody campaign until the rage sputtered out.

But when had I last thought of them in a positive way? As something other than losses to be grieved? Injustices to be avenged?

And was there anyone else left, in all the whole damn world, who knew the names of my wife and daughter? Who could speak their names, or tell of the kinds of people they had been?

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A small sigh escaped me.

They said the Old Stranger was the Great Equalizer of men. That no matter how old or young, rich or poor, good or evil, all had their hand taken in his in the final voyage beyond the Living Realm. But folks also said that people lingered, in a fashion, even after that. In the memories and stories of others. It was only when those stories faded that the last echoes of a person did too.