The Heart of a Fox

by T. Isilwath

  ‘Goodbye Suzuka. Goodbye Kaemon-sama. Maybe someday I’ll see you again, when things are better for Joanna and me.’

  Hoisting the carry sack, and slinging Iris over his shoulder, he hopped off the long porch, jumped over the shrine wall and disappeared into the trees without a backward glance. In many ways his leaving had been long in coming, but it had taken the arrival of his vixen in his life to hasten a process that had already begun. He really hadn’t belonged or been happy there since Genkichirou had died, but he hadn’t had any other options until now. Meeting Joanna had changed all of that, and it was time for him to move forward into a new life with the one he loved.

  Joanna was exactly where he had left her when he returned to the grove, and her condition was still unchanged. He let her stay in the hollow while he rebuilt the fire and boiled water for a batch of Oshou Seigo’s medicine. He knew that the tea hadn’t helped her too much recently, but maybe if he combined it with the maitake it might be more effective.

  Digging down into the carry sack, he pulled out the vast majority of the belongings that he had placed inside of it in order to reach the mushrooms at the bottom. When his hand touched a flat object, he grabbed it and pulled it out to see what it was. He recognized the book that Joanna would write in every night, and a small fissure of hope tingled in his chest. He knew how to read English. Maybe she had written something in there that he could use to help save her. He set the book aside and resumed his search for the mushrooms.

  When the tea with the maitake was ready, he carried Joanna out of the hollow, placed her beside the fire, and tried to wake her. He noticed that she roused much more slowly than before, and it took quite a bit of shaking to get her to respond. Her eyes finally opened, but they didn’t focus on anything. She also moaned faintly and her fingers flexed, but other than some spasmodic movements of her limbs, she didn’t seem to be in control of her body.

  He was able to get her to a point where she could swallow, however, so he supported her upper body with his thigh and forced small sips of the medicine into her. He gave her half of the potion he had brewed and saved the rest for a second dose.

  “There, Joanna-sama. You’ll feel better soon,” he whispered to her, looking down at her face.

  Her eyes had closed again and she was limp in his arms. When he called her name, she didn’t respond, and he knew that she probably would not awaken unless he shook her roughly and yelled at her. It was taking longer and more effort to wake her up, and he feared there would come a time when she wouldn’t rouse no matter how hard he tried. He prayed that the maitake mixed with Oshou Seigo’s medicine would have a positive effect on her condition, hopefully enough to allow her to wake up and tell him what she wanted him to do.

  He placed her gently down on the ground after he was finished giving her the medicine and moved about the camp as if he was setting them up for an extended stay. He felt that he had to do something other than simply watch her just lying there on the ground, and preparing the camp was a good distraction.

  It seemed to him that Joanna would want the grove to look the way it had before, with everything back where she had stored it, and he wanted to please her by anticipating her desires ahead of time. As soon as she woke up, she would see all the work he had done and be happy with him.

  Thankful for his perfect memory, he was able to restore the grove to the condition that it had been in when he and Joanna had lived there. He unpacked her sleeping bag and clothing, and put everything back the way it was. When he was done, the grove and hollow looked exactly as they had before.

  Smiling at his handiwork, he returned to Joanna’s side to tell her what he had done. “Look, Joanna-sama. Everything is back where it belongs. We can live here again, if you want. I know I was worried about the winter cold and snow, but I am sure that I can make something that will keep us warm and dry.

  Maybe I could build a permanent roof over the front of the hollow that we could sit under and be protected. I can do that if you don’t want me to build you a hut,” he told her happily.

  Throughout all of his activities the trees had remained quiet, not interject-ing any commentary on what he was doing, but now he turned to them and broadcast out with his mind.

  ‘See? Everything is the same. Now when she wakes up, she’ll know that she’s home,’ he announced proudly.

  :Tree-sister fades,: they answered, their voices soft and subdued.

  Akihiro blanched, then snarled angrily. “She isn’t fading. She’s going to be fine. I won’t let her die. I’m going to save her.” He looked down at his vixen, silent and motionless, wrapped in blankets. “I’m going to save you, Joanna-sama. You’ll wake up, and I’ll give you my blood, and it will make you better.

  Then you and I can live anywhere you want, and we’ll go off together where no one will ever bother us.”

  The trees had no comment and remained conspicuously silent. He growled and ignored them as he stalked out of the grove to harvest dry grasses for his own bedding, because he felt that it was safe to leave his vixen for a short time.

  She was still asleep when he got back and didn’t move while he made his bed next to her sleeping bag and covered it with his Cherokee blanket shawl.

  Joanna’s blanket shawl was finally dry, but he left it hanging from the rope strung between two trees because he planned to clean it later.

  He didn’t really give his actions a second thought. Working gave him something to do and lessened the hollow feeling in his chest. He couldn’t even consider the fact that he might lose her; that she might never wake up. If he faced that possibility, then he would have to accept the reality that his vixen was dying before his very eyes. In his mind, Joanna had to live, because if she died, then he would die with her.

  He had noticed that her skin was cold to the touch so he kept the fire going to keep her warm. Her scent hadn’t changed much, and she still smelled like her blood sugar was too high, but now there was an additional odor and he didn’t like it. It smelled stale and sour, and it made him nervous. She’d been pretty much unconscious since he’d found her, and, depending on when she had fallen into this deep sleep, she could have been like that for almost three days.

  He didn’t know how long someone could stay in such a state and not suffer irreparable harm, but he had seen other humans fall into the same sleep and never wake up.

  His own mother had fallen into a deep sleep just before she had died, but her sleep had not been like this. His mother’s breath had been heavy and labored, and her skin had burned with fever. Joanna’s body was cool, and her heartbeat was so soft that he was certain a normal human would have pronounced her dead. If not for his fox senses, he would have thought she was dead too. But as long as there was life in her, he would cling to the hope that he could save her. As long as she still drew breath, however faint and shallow the breaths might be, he would do everything within his power to bring her back to him.

  Toward the middle of the day, he reheated the medicinal tea and tried to give her the second dose. Again, it took a great deal of effort to get her to a point where she would swallow the tea, and he was only able to give her half of it before she lost consciousness. Her deteriorating condition was worrying him, and he feared that the medicine wasn’t enough, but he didn’t know what else to do. He did think that the medicine was working because the odor of high sugars was fading from her scent, but he wasn’t sure if it was coming down fast enough to make a difference. For all he knew, his efforts might be too little, too late.

  His stomach growling reminded him that he hadn’t eaten yet, and he decided that it was safe to leave Joanna while he went to the stream to catch some fish. Placing her in the hollow, he covered her with her sleeping bag and gave her a tender kiss on the temple.

  “I’ll be back soon, Joanna-sama.”

  His fishing technique wasn’t the cleanest, but it was highly efficient and soon he had five fish wriggling on the stream bank. Since he hadn’t eaten in over four days, he was hungry and he knew
he would eat all five of them, and probably come back for more later. This time, however, he did take the time to clean and cook the fish before eating them, unlike his last meal where he had just eaten the fish raw.

  It was days like these when he dearly missed Joanna’s cooking. No matter what the meal was made of, his vixen had a way of turning any ordinary food into a feast fit for the Emperor. His cooking was barely passable even by his own standards, and he had no talent for spices or mixing flavors. Were Joanna awake, she would have taken the fish from him and worked her magic with her black pot and dried herbs, but he had to settle for roasting them on crude spits with a little bit of salt. Being that the fish was only half cooked and barely touched the back of his throat as he practically swallowed them whole, their bland taste went almost unnoticed.

  As night fell, he tried to give his vixen a third dose of the medicinal tea he had brewed, but this time she would not awaken at all. He tried everything he knew to wake her short of resorting to causing her pain, but nothing he did seemed to elicit a reaction from her. He finally gave up, hoping that he would have better luck later after her blood sugar came down some more. The scent of high sugar was still fading, but for some reason she didn’t seem to be coming out of her stupor. Based on previous times when her blood sugar had risen too high, she had come out of her lethargic state relatively quickly, but this time she wasn’t recovering.

  It made him worry that something else had gone wrong. Kaemon, and even Joanna herself, had told him that her illness could affect the body in many ways, so it was possible that another part of her had begun to fail as a result of the high sugars. He was also concerned that she did not seem to be passing any water.

  While not looking forward to cleaning her up after she had soiled herself, he did know that it was an unavoidable necessity, and it bothered him that she wasn’t urinating. He knew that she had lost control of her bladder at least once because she had smelled of urine when he had found her, but as far as he could tell she hadn’t gone since. It wasn’t natural, and he would be very worried if she didn’t pass water soon. He thought about returning to the shrine to grab Kaemon and get the young priest to help, but he decided not to because he did not want anyone to know about the grove or the home he and Joanna had made there.

  A short time later, he went fishing again and caught three more trout plus a ptarmigan that was unlucky enough to flush right in front of him. He packed the gutted bird in wet clay and put it directly in the hot coals of the dying fire the way he had seen Joanna do. With luck it would be finished cooking by morning.

  When he was done eating his second meal, and had prepared the camp for the evening, he crawled into the hollow and settled down on his bed next to Joanna’s sleeping bag. Then he lit one of his vixen’s tallow lamps and picked up her book, opening it to the first page. On the inside of the front cover was one of Joanna’s “photos” of her and her betrothed in Cherokee clothes. He scowled and turned the page quickly to see the first entry.

  Joanna’s writing on these pages was different from the writing she had used to teach him how to read. In those lessons, the letters were distinct and separate from each other, but here all the symbols seemed to run all together.

  At first he thought it was a completely different language, and he started to get upset, but then he recognized some of the letters and realized that it was English, just written differently. He set his sharp mind to analyzing the new kind of writing, and soon he was able to puzzle it out.

  He quickly figured out that the sets of her English “numbers” were her way of noting the date of the entry. He wasn’t familiar with the way she counted the days, but he was able to read the pattern of ascending numbers. The last entry had the date of 10/16/2012, but he didn’t know what that meant in her language. He only knew that the previous entry was marked as 10/15/2012. The first entry was 5/5/2012 and he noticed that the first number of all the entries stayed the same until the second number reached 30 or 31, then the first number changed and the second number went back to 1. The last number, the 2012, remained the same, and he surmised that it represented the year.

  It felt strange to be reading Joanna’s journal, but the chance of finding something that could help his vixen was too much of an opportunity to miss.

  The task proved very difficult because there were many words he did not know, and even with Joanna’s “dik-ton-arie,” it was still hard to understand what she had written.

  He read about the first few days after her “accident” and tried to understand her theories on what had happened, but the words she used were alien to him and only a few of them were in the word book. There was something called a “Quantum Gate” and it was the cause of all her heartache. He knew what a gate was, but the word Quantum was unknown to him. Whatever it was, it had done something wrong and had changed time as well as place, sending her back into his time by mistake. Joanna didn’t know why the gate hadn’t worked the way it was supposed to, but she had some ideas about the stars and something about time. The word “temporal” was there and he knew it was important, but that term wasn’t in the word book either.

  After the first couple of days, the entries changed from dealing with what had happened to her, to dealing with how to survive in a place she didn’t know, and he was awed by how well she had adapted to her new surroundings. He had always known that his vixen was a remarkable woods-woman, but to read how she had discovered the grove and how she had managed to survive was amazing. He wasn’t sure if he would have done so well if their places had been switched.

  On the entry marked 6/1/2012 he read about the day she had saved his life.

  He smiled proudly as he learned how she had knocked out one of his attackers and frightened off the other, then carried his unconscious body all the way from the trade road to the grove. He fought back tears as he read about her efforts to keep him alive; how she had fretted over him and tended him when he was burning up with fever.

  She wrote about how frightened she had been that he was going to die, and how she had prayed that his fever would break. For the first time he realized what a monumental effort she had put forth on his behalf, even when he was a stranger and she did not know if he would be friend or foe, and he was humbled and moved beyond words. He’d always known that no one else would have done for him what she had, but to read it firsthand was another thing entirely.

  He looked over at her unconscious body and gritted his teeth. If she would fight so hard to save someone she had just met, he could do no less for her. Honor alone demanded it, but he would fight just as hard because he loved her, and he would do anything to save her life.

  Turning the page, a folded piece of paper fluttered out, and he recognized the letter Joanna had written to him. He hadn’t read it yet because he had left it behind when he went in search of his vixen, and also because he was half afraid of what she had written. Both Kaemon and Suzuka had tried to tell him that Joanna had wanted to spare him the pain of seeing her die, and he vividly remembered her pleading with him not to kill himself should he fail to save her.

  He didn’t want to know what she’d had to say in her final words to him; he didn’t want to read her reasons or explanations for leaving him behind. She hadn’t trusted him to save her and had taken it upon herself to handle her inevitable death.

  ‘You didn’t trust me. You didn’t have faith in me. If you had, none of this would have happened, and you would not be suffering now,’ he thought sadly.

  She’d tried to write his name using the kanji symbols next to her English spelling, but she’d gotten a stroke or two wrong. He could read it anyway because he knew what she’d been trying to draw and didn’t fault her for her efforts. Still, it was nice of her to have made the effort. The only person other than himself to ever write his name in kanji had been his mother.

  With shaking hands he unfolded the letter and smiled when he saw the neat, clear script. This was the type of writing that she had used to teach him how to read English, and he co
uld understand the words perfectly. His eyes scanned the lines, reading her final message, and trying to take it all in. He could almost hear her voice speaking softly to him from the page, her last words of affection and entreaty.

  She told him that she loved him and that she hoped to spare him the horror of her death. She asked him to forgive her for leaving him and tried to make him understand why she had to go. She said that she had made peace with her fate and that she wasn’t afraid. She asked him not to look for her and begged him not to kill himself. Then she told him that Suzuka loved him and said that he should take her away from the shrine and make a new life with her in a different place. He almost tore the letter to pieces right there, but he stopped himself at the last moment.

  “Never,” he said aloud, even though he knew that Joanna couldn’t hear him. “How could I replace you with Suzuka? She could never love me as you have. No matter where we went, she would always see me as a tainted half-breed. You are the only one who ever saw me for myself.” He set the letter aside and reached over to cup Joanna’s cheek in his palm.

  Her skin was still cool and damp to the touch.

  “Joanna-sama, don’t you know that there is no one else for me but you?

  I’ve given you my heart and, once given, I cannot take it back. Either both of us live or we both die, and I swear that I will save you. I wish you had told me the truth before it came to this, but I forgive you. You’re only human. You couldn’t have known what I am capable of doing. You only did what you thought was best.”

  He leaned down and kissed her brow. Her skin didn’t taste quite as awful as it had before, and he took that as a good sign. Her scent had changed too; it wasn’t as sweet or pungent, but the stale, acrid odor remained.