WAP 38

CHAPTER 38

The next few weeks actually felt like work worth doing. Aiko slipped into basic tabi and let her feet get dusty on the way between towns, dressed in the iconic red and white of a servant of the people. Something about the pretense of humility felt right. She wasn’t really a priestess, she wasn’t anything in this world but a violent fraud with a goal. But it felt right.

Every morning, she walked into a new village in the early hours, Fumiko at her side. They spent the day looking for problems– was there someone with an injury she could treat? Was there a field where the crop had failed? Were there families that needed food or other help?

Aiko cleaned and bandaged injuries from sharp farming implements. She advised on how to heal a broken bone. She dredged gunk that was blocking the path of an irrigation ditch, high in the mountain where it was difficult for the townspeople to reach. There were a hundred little things to do and she could have stayed longer in any town.

Every night, she prayed for anyone who wanted it. She laid down Izanami’s blessings for mothers, children, and safety. She told people where she had come from and where they could go to join her shrine. And then when she felt Madara or Tobirama approaching, she excused herself and took Fumiko away by Hiraishin to the other side of the country where no one could track them down in time.

Maybe the Senju and Uchiha thought they needed her, to add a veneer of religious respectability or intimidation to the proceedings. Aiko couldn’t find it in herself to care. They had solved this problem without her, in one universe. She wasn’t here to hold their hands. She was there to make Izanami powerful enough to leave Hell, and follow up on her end of their deal. Aiko didn’t want to make friends. She wanted to go home.

On the fourth day, a hungry-looking priest in a local shrine halfway up a sharp incline above the local village quietly asked about joining her denomination. He was a middle aged man with sunken eyes and arthritic looking fingers. Working alone had clearly been a life of thankless toil.

Aiko looked him up and down and welcomed him. 

Priest Tarako had the space, experience, and respectability to take an apprentice. He did not have the ability to feed them. Aiko and Fumiko spent a day scrubbing his shrine and filling his stores from her home shrine. She dug her fingers into his little back garden and encouraged it to bloom with unnatural lushness, vines sweet and dropping with produce. They brought jars for pickling and preservatives, they beat clean the old futons and then they promised to be back in two days’ time, once any followers would have assumed she had moved on. 

She came back to the village like a whirlwind with not just Fumiko but Hana, the three girls, and a couple of strong young people from her local village. They fixed fences and roofs and Aiko abused the absolute hell out of hiraishin and mokuton to turn the town from a shabby little wide spot in the road into a little oasis. 

The interaction opened a floodgate- this old woman wanted help turning her front room into a teahouse to feed travelers for a brass coin, that young man wanted to know if there was a career and education for him if he became a priest. Priest Tarako agreed to train the man for 6 months before sending him on to the new shrine in the Senju stronghold. Aiko privately asked him if he would train others under the same deal if she sent them to him. He agreed, as long as the next acolyte stayed with him permanently.

Aiko decided it was worth spending the night, despite Tobirama’s proximity. She felt him enter range in the early hours. She thought that he must be exhausted, and then turned over into her futon and slept another hour. 

She was decorating the shrine with some of Izuna’s metal depictions of the goddess when Tobirama staggered his way into town on bleeding feet. That would have to be handled sooner rather than later. “Have a seat,” Aiko called out without bothering to look at him. “Fumiko-san, could you fetch a bowl of water? He can heat it himself.” She carefully crossed the rafters and pulled the broom off her back to sweep away spiderwebs that Priest Tarako could not reach, and then she jumped down. She left the broom against the wall and brushed against Tobirama on her way out into the sunshine. She felt more than saw him turn his face to keep her in sight.

Fumiko was walking around the corner to the little irrigation trough, a bowl in hand. 

There was silence between them for a few moments, a quiet that allowed the sounds of a sleepy village roused to work to float over them.

“You are fast,” Tobirama said. “I am quite tired. Why did you let me catch you?”

Aiko raked her hands through her hair. She wasn’t actually sure. Was it just that she wasn’t ready to move on from this village? Her deal with Tarako was a very good one. It would be stupid to pass up the opportunity to have him train at least one more apprentice for her. “I want the Senju to offer apprentices,” she said, for lack of anything else. 

“We have volunteers, after your discussions.” Tobirama said it mildly. “They have gone to stay at the shrine in our compound.” He looked at Fumiko as she came back with the water. He accepted it with both hands, blinked at Aiko, and then heated it with a spark of ninjutsu.

She nodded sharply. That wouldn’t do. They needed to integrate groups. “I’ll take you home. Introduce me to two who can train here under Priest Tarako. How many are there?” She took the bowl away from him and took the supplies that she would need from the nearby basket, clean cloth and ointment brought from home for cases like this.

“Ten.”

Aiko resisted the urge to pump a fist. That was a huge intake. Granted, any recruit was months and years away from social respectability and community leadership. 

‘But it’s progress I didn’t have before. The best time to plant a fruit tree is ten years ago, the second best time is now. If I get more converts like Tarako, I can expedite my timeline. I can tell that this is working. If you feed people and solve their problems, improve their lives, they’ll believe whatever you tell them.’

It was a mercenary approach to religion. It was effective. Aiko washed the mud and blood off of Tobirama’s feet wordlessly, wrapped them, and then took him to the Senju compound. He accepted her ministering without complaint in a strange, heavy silence. She let him lean on her when he told her where to go and introduced her to the potential acolytes. She chose two- one male and one female, both in their upper teens. Tobirama let her leave without a word, watching her with calculation ticking behind his eyes. 

No one bothered her for the next week as she crossed Fire Country. She felt the heat flare up across her mental map of the country in tiny shrines as people started to pray to the icons of Izanami. In a bit of spiteful insight, she spent three days deep into Hyuuga territory solving problems and sowing dissent for them among the locals. She didn’t dare take Fumiko for that. Fumiko instead stayed at the second roadside shrine that asked to take their iconography and sponsorship, this one run by a tremulous elder woman. 

She had been alone for three nights when she suddenly had the sense that something was very wrong. Aiko excused herself and traveled to the little farming village that was hers in time to find out that Hana was in the middle of giving birth, and it was going badly.