Of Sins and Sinning
Disclaimer: Saiyuki belongs to Kazuya Minekura and associates.
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The night is strangely silent or so it seems to his ears. Perhaps he has finally learnt to block all those unfamiliar sounds out. Found a way to silence the night time sounds of insects and howling winds. The only sound that he will let himself hear is the silence where there should be a beating heart.
The body he presses himself to should be warmer than it is, should smell less of earth and dust than it does. There should be a warmth there, the faintest scent of musk and sweat but instead there is nothing. The chest against which he rests his head should rise and fall with steady breaths and the arm that holds him close should tighten reflexively as the mind wanders the pathways of sleep. Yet none of these things will happen, he may as well be curled up against a corpse.
And probably, in the most rational sense of it, the truest truth of it, perhaps that is the case. Of course, it was never meant to be this way. Nothing ever is really.
This power of his, this false resurrection as he knows it now, affects nothing, means nothing if it can not redeem this one thing that he holds most dear. And so he knows finally, why it was that they sent him away.
This Holy Mission, this Crusade, this walk into the jaws of the Beast. Except the Beast is not among these nameless, faceless youkai, nor in the strange blasphemies of an Eastern monk. He has brought this sin with him, to this impure land which may yet purge his soul.
He has spent more than 40 days and nights in the desert and has thought himself untouched by unnatural temptation. But in the end, even that is a fruitless parallel to draw because his heart has succumbed and in that he finds no wrong.
The crime committed is not that which perhaps some might call obvious, nor is it a perversion of the karmic cycle as others might say. It is his own sin, his own flaw and as insignificant as that may be, it is not his place to question that which must be punished.
Perhaps he knew, from the first, at the very start. He thinks that he might have done, deep down, in the labyrinth of the mind. In the beginning, he knew what his fate was to be. This mission handed down from the most revered authorities, those who truly knew the power of the Holy Name.
Go to Togenkyo; rid that tainted land of all youkai.
Of course it was a fool’s errand. Rid the land of Togenkyo of all youkai? How was he to succeed in the belly of the Beast? This was no Lion’s Den from which he might be, at a later date, rescued.
And of course he would not go unaccompanied which was probably, in all estimation, exactly what they wanted. Leave these Western lands and take him with you. How could it have been mistaken for anything other than the banishment that it was? Go, redeem yourself out in the wilderness and pray that death absolves you of all your sinning.
Not that he’d really sinned in quite the accurate sense of it at the time. Not that he really did later anyway.
Curled up in a bed in another wayward inn, in another forgotten town that might well have been less than a hamlet or some such, in comparison to what he would have called a town, there really wasn’t all that much occasion for sinning really. Sleep or stay awake all night and listen to the silence beside him.
Not that he would have balked at the prospect any. It was just… well, when one travelled day after day after day, in the cold, dusty nights there really was little urge to commit that crime of lying with another man. And after all, ecclesiastical precepts aside, the logistics of the matter were already… difficult to imagine. Not that Hazel was a terribly good Catholic anyway.
Because most good, pious Catholics weren’t supposed to poke holes in Papal doctrine over tea or decry the Codex Juris Canonici or raise the dead, dragging them back from eternal bliss or damnation as the case may be, and they most certainly weren’t supposed to raise the dead and then sleep soundly in their arms after dark. Though as much as the last point rather smacked of necromancy, Gato wasn’t, in any estimation, really a walking corpse. Or if he was, then he did rather make it difficult for one to feel bad about necrophilia.
And really, when one had been sent out on a suicide mission because the mother Church would rather that you didn’t ever come back, there were probably worse things that you could be doing than lying abed with a man who had risen from the dead and was lacking a heartbeat.
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In 1917, the Codex Juris Canonici abolished the use of torture by the Church. Hazel is probably talking about something to the same effect but not necessarily within the same time-period.
And surprisingly there was no call for “Yea, thou I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me; Thy rod and thy staff...” Psalm 23:4.
