Better.
Noticing his scalp was cut, he pressed a ball of snow against the wound until it stopped bleeding. After a while his eyes began adjusting to the dark. As the ice walls brightened, they seemed to become infused with the faintest milky light.
Ash exhaled purposely. He clasped his hands together, closed his mouth to stop his teeth from chattering. He began a silent mantra.
Soon, a core of heat was pulsing outwards from his chest, seeping its steady course into his limbs, his fingers, his toes. Vapour began to rise from his goosebumped flesh. His shivering stilled.
High above his bald head, the wind keened through a small airhole in the dome-like ceiling, as if calling to him, carrying with it the odd flake of snow.
*
He imagined he had erected his heavy canvas tent, and was now huddled inside it, safe from the wind, warming himself at the little oil stove made of brass. Broth simmered with smoky cheer. The air was steamy, heavy with the stench of his thawing clothes, the sweetness of the broth. Outside, the dogs moaned as they hunkered down in the storm.
Osh was with him in the tent.
'You look bad,' his old master told him in their native Honshu, lines of worry creasing ancient skin as dark as Ash's own.
Ash nodded. 'I'm almost dead, I think.'
'You are surprised? All of this, at your age?'
'No,' confessed Ash, though for a moment, chastised by his master, he did not feel his age.
'Broth?' Ash, asked, as he scooped some into a mug, though Osh declined by raising a single forefinger. Ash drank on his own, sipping loudly. Heat trickled down into his stomach, revitalizing. From somewhere elsewhere a moan sounded, as though in longing.
His master observed him with interest.
'Your head,' he said. 'Any pains?'
'Some. I think another attack might be coming on.'
'I told you it would be this way, did I not?'
'I'm not dead yet.'
Osh frowned. He rubbed his hands together, blew into them.
'Ash, you must see how it is time, at last.'
The flames of the oil stove sputtered against Ash's sigh. He looked about him, at the noisy flaps of the canvas, at the air rolling visible from the broth. His sword, perched upright against his leather pack, like the marker of a grave. 'This work… it is all I have,' he said. 'Would you take it from me?'
'Your condition does the taking, not I. Ash, even if you survive tonight, how much longer do you think you have?'
'I will not lie down and wait for the end, no purpose left to me.'
'I do not ask you to. But you should be here, with the order, and your companions. You deserve some rest, and what peace you may find while you still can.'
'No,' Ash responded hotly. He glanced away, staring far into the flames. 'My father went that way, when his condition worsened. He gave in to grief after the blindness struck him, and lay weeping in his bed waiting for the end. It made a ghost of him. No, I will not squander what little time I have that way. I will die on my feet, still striving forwards.'
Osh swept that comment aside with a gesture of his hand. 'But you are in no shape for this. Your attacks are worsening. For days you can barely see due to them, let alone move. How can you expect to carry on in this way, to see a vendetta through to the end? No, I cannot allow it.'
'You must!' roared Ash.
Across the sloping confines of the tent, Osh, head of the Rshun order, blinked but said nothing.
Ash hung his head, then breathed deeply, composing himself.
Softly came the words, offered like a sacrifice on an altar: 'Osh, we have known each other for more than half a lifetime. We two are more than friends. We are closer even than father and son, or brothers. Listen to me now. I need this.'
Their gazes locked: he and Osh, surrounded by canvas and winds and a thousand laqs of frozen waste; here in this imaginary cell of heat, so small in scale that they shared each other's breath.
'Very well,' murmured Osh at last, causing Ash to rock back in surprise.
He opened his mouth to thank him, but Osh held up a palm.
'On one condition, and it is not open for debate.'
'Go on.'
'You will take an apprentice at last.'
A gust pressed the canvas of the tent against his back. Ash stiffened. 'You would ask that of me?'
'Yes,' snapped Osh. 'I would ask that of you – as you have asked of me. Ash, you are the best that we have, better than even I was. Yet for all these years, you have refused to train an apprentice, to pass on your skills, your insights.'
'You know I have always had my own reasons for that.'
'Of course I know! I know you better than any soul alive. I was there, you recall? But you were not the only one to lose a son in battle that day – or a brother, or a father.'
Ash hung his head. 'No,' he admitted.
'Then you will do so, if you make it safely out of this?'
Still he could not look directly at Osh; instead his eyes were filled with the scattering brilliance of the oil stove's flames. The old man did know him well. He was like a mirror to Ash, a living breathing surface that reflected all that Ash might try to hide from himself.
'Do you wish to die out here alone, in this forsaken wilderness?'
Ash's silence was answer enough.
'Then agree to my offer. I promise you that, if you do, you will make it out of this, you will see your home again – and there I will allow you to continue in your work, at least while you train another.'
'Is that a bargain?'
'Yes,' Osh told him with certainty.
'But you are not real. I lost this same tent two days ago… and you were not journeying with me when I did. You are a dream. An echo. Your bargain means nothing.'
'And yet still I speak the truth. Do you doubt it?'
Ash gazed into the empty mug. The heat had faded from its metal curvature, leaching the warmth from his hands.
Ash, long ago, had accepted his illness and its eventual, inevitable outcome. He had done so in much the same way as he accepted the taking of those lives he took in pursuit of his work; with a kind of fatalism. Perhaps a touch of melancholy was the result of such a vantage, that the essence of life was bittersweet, without meaning save for whatever you ascribed it: violence or peace, right or wrong, all the choices one made, though nothing more – certainly nothing fundamental to a universe itself purely neutral, seeking only equilibrium as it unfolded for ever and endlessly from the potentials of Dao. He was dying, and that was all there was to it.
Still, he did not wish to end it here on this desolate plain. He would see the sun again if he could, with eyes and mouth open to savour its heat; he would inhale the pungent scents of life, feel the cool shoots of grass against his soles, listen to the flow of water over rocks, before that. And here, in his dream fantasy, Osh was a creation of that same desire: in that moment, Ash dared not hope that he could be anything more.
He looked up, speaking the words as he did so. 'Of course I doubt it,' he replied to his master's question.
But Osh was gone.
*
It was a slow, nauseous pain that now came upon him, sickness washing his vision. The headache tightened its vice-like grip against the sides of his skull.
It drew him out of his delirium.
Ash squinted through the darkness of the ice hut. His naked body shook, convulsed. Minute icicles hung from
