Islands in the Stream
 
by Loren Dean

In his little leather coracle, Takehai bobbed along at the mercy of the river.

It was not a smooth ride, but the monk found it surprisingly peaceful. If I weren't in this little boat fleeing a horde of evil minions, thought Takehai wryly, I'd recommend such a ride as this. He wondered briefly how Jinjiro would feel about sitting in a boat made entirely of skin, and smiled, envisioning Jinjiro sitting stolid in his coracle, refusing to notice that an animal had once worn his boat for warmth.

He was within sight of several other villagers, and seeing them float along with him reminded him of cherry blossom ceremonies, where thousands of the delicate little blossoms were consigned to a river as an offering to the fortunes. He had always wondered where the blossoms eventually landed, and hoped that the rivers they were thrown into did not end in a hundred-foot-high waterfall as this one, he knew, did.

Floating along, his little craft rounded a bend in he river, and he came upon Konamura, who was just finishing the process of freeing himself from a low-hanging tree branch. Here was a strange man. Konamura had been at Fukawa village already when Takehai and his friends arrived. He had seemed strange to Takehai, who had detected a bit of cowardice in the man, but Jinjiro had not denounced Konamura for anything, so Takehai had remained silent. His own senses of samurai were, after all, rusty, and he determined that if Jinjiro, a samurai's samurai, sensed nothing odd about Konamura then maybe his own misgivings were needless paranoia.

He was about to call out and offer assistance when Konamura's craft was nearly upset by a grinning skeleton breaking the surface from beneath the branch. Konamura shrieked like a woman, and waved the wakizashi he had been using to hack at the branch in the direction of the skeleton. As Takehai drifted past, Konamura's blade made contact of a more or less accidental nature with the skeleton's head, and it flew right off.

Takehai sat upright, almost capsizing his boat. Who is this man, who fights like a farmwife and carries a weapon like that? thought Takehai as his boat turned again and he lost sight of Konamura.