Chapter Five: The Road To Bakur Canyons

The road went on considerably longer than Naruto had been emotionally prepared for.

He walked it for four days and the henge never once slipped, which took a discipline he had not needed to exercise since the Mid term Academy Exams and which he was quietly proud of. The forest thinned out as he went, giving way to rolling open country, then to fields with crops in them that he did not recognise, then to long stretches of grass broken up by the occasional stone marker standing crooked at the roadside with letters carved into it that meant nothing to him at all. He studied one of them for a full ten minutes before conceding defeat.

At night he slept under the open sky, wrapped in the sheet against a cold that came in off the fields after sunset. He held the transformation through every one of those nights, even asleep, because the one thing he was certain of was that he did not want to find out what happened if a farmer walked past at dawn and got a good look at what was actually lying in his ditch.

On the fourth afternoon he heard hooves behind him.

He turned. A cart was coming down the road at the pace of an animal that had been doing this particular job for a great many years and had no intention of rushing. It was a plain wooden thing with high sides and a canvas lashed over the load, drawn by a brown horse with a grey muzzle and an air of profound resignation. The driver was an older man, thick through the shoulders and sunburned on the back of his neck, in a shirt that had been patched in three colours by somebody who cared more about function than appearance.

Naruto stepped off to the side of the road and raised a hand as the cart came level.

The man nodded back, and was about to roll past, and that was when the ditch exploded.

The thing that came out of it was a lizard, if a lizard could be the size of a horse and made of wet stone. Its scales caught the sun in slick grey flashes. Its head came up and its jaw opened wide enough to take a man in one piece, and the teeth inside were not the neat rows of an eater of insects.

The horse screamed and went up on its hind legs. The cart lurched, one wheel coming clear off the ground. The driver shouted something and threw himself sideways across the bench, groping under the seat for whatever he kept there for exactly this kind of afternoon, and the lizard was already moving, and he was not going to get to it in time.

Naruto did not think about it. His hands were up before his brain got a vote.

"Kage Bunshin no Jutsu."

Two clones appeared on either side of him and went forward without waiting for instructions, because they never did. One went high, springing off the side of the cart. One went low, sliding through the dirt. The lizard's head tracked the high one, which was the mistake, and in the second and a half of confusion that followed Naruto crossed the ground between them.

Energy gathered in his palm and spun itself tight, deep green, humming.

"Rasengan."

He put it into the creature's flank.

The impact made a noise like a door being taken off a house. The lizard left the road entirely, went over the ditch, and rolled twice through the grass before it got its legs back under it. It came up hissing, slit-pupiled eyes fixed on him, and for a moment it made the calculation that predators make.

Then it decided that this was not going to be worth the trouble, turned, and went into the undergrowth at a speed that suggested it had somewhere better to be.

The road was quiet again except for the horse, which was still breathing hard and rolling its eyes and had to be talked down over the course of the next minute.

Naruto straightened up and let the clones go in a pair of soft pops. The driver was staring at him with his mouth open, in the specific manner of a man who has just watched something walk down out of the clouds and do his laundry.

"What," the man managed eventually, "in all the world was that?"

Naruto grinned and rubbed the back of his head. "Just something I picked up on the road. Ya' alright, old man?"

The driver blinked twice, and then laughed, a shaky sound that got steadier as it went. "Alright? Son, you just saved my life. And my cart. And my horse, and that horse has been with me eleven years." He climbed down off the bench, still looking at Naruto as though he might disappear. "I don't have the first idea what I could give you that would be worth that."

Naruto waved it off. "Nah, it's fine. I'm just glad you're okay."

Then he paused, because there was a version of this conversation that helped him a great deal and he would be an idiot not to have it.

"Although," he added, "if you really want to help, you could give me a lift to the nearest city. I've been walking for days and my feet are making some strong arguments."

The man's face lit right up. "Done. Get aboard. Nearest city is about two days on from here." He stuck out a hand that was mostly callus. "Dargan, by the way."

"Naruto." He took the hand and shook it. "Naruto Uzumaki. And thanks."

He climbed up onto the cart and stretched his legs out along the bench with a groan of genuine pleasure, and as the wheels started turning again he leaned back against the sideboard and let the henge do its quiet work over his horns and his mismatched hair, and thought that for the first time since he had woken up in this world, he might actually be going somewhere rather than simply away from something.

·•—–٠✤٠—–•·

The cart rolled on at an easy pace and the rhythm of the hooves was close to hypnotic.

Dargan, it turned out, was a man with an enormous inventory of stories and absolutely no reluctance about opening it. He had a wife back in a farming village two weeks east of here. He had four grown children and a number of grandchildren which, from the way he spoke about them, put the rest of creation in a distinctly secondary position. The eldest boy worked the fields with him. The second had gone off and joined a city guard, which Dargan claimed not to have opinions about and then had several opinions about. Both daughters had married blacksmiths in different towns, and this coincidence was apparently a source of family comment that had not yet worn out after six years.

Naruto nodded along and produced the occasional encouraging noise, which was a skill he had developed to a professional standard during Iruka's history lectures and had never expected to need again.

Eventually Dargan tilted his head at him. "So what about you, boy? You out here on your own? You look a bit young to be travelling alone."

Naruto shrugged and put on a casual grin. "Yeah, I'm, uh. I'm an adventurer."

The word sat awkwardly in his mouth. He had caught it twice in overheard fragments from passing travellers and had filed it away on the assumption that it meant something like a mercenary, or possibly a hunter, or possibly some local variety of contract shinobi. Whatever it meant, it had sounded professional enough to hide behind.

Dargan raised an eyebrow. "An adventurer, is it? Well, that explains how you handled that lizard." His eyes went down, deliberately, to the bedsheet knotted toga-fashion around Naruto's henged body. "Although most adventurers I've met wear armour. Or, at the very least, clothes."

Naruto laughed, and it came out only slightly strangled. "Yeah, about that. Had a bit of a campfire accident. Burned everything I owned down to ash. Wasn't exactly carrying spares, you know?"

Dargan's laugh was deep and entirely genuine. "Ha! I have been there. Nearly set my own beard alight when I was younger, and my wife has never once let me forget it."

He twisted around on the bench, rummaged in the back under the canvas, and came out with a folded bundle.

"Here. Nothing fancy. A spare shirt and trousers I keep for the road. And this old bag, you keep that as well. I'll not have the hero of the afternoon walking into the city looking like a man who escaped from somewhere."

Naruto blinked at him. "You sure?"

"Son." Dargan pushed the bundle into his hands. "You saved my life. This is the smallest thing I could possibly do and we both know it."

Naruto looked down at the folded cloth in his lap for a moment longer than was strictly necessary.

He had been given things before. Tsunade had given him a necklace worth more than most districts. Jiraiya had given him three years and a technique. But those had been people who knew him, who owed him something or wanted something from him or loved him, and this was a stranger on a cart who had known him for about forty minutes.

"Thanks," he said, and meant it more than the word could carry.

·•—–٠✤٠—–•·

By the time the sun went low and stained the horizon gold and rose, the walls came into view.

Naruto sat up straight when he saw them. They were tall, built of pale stone that had been weathered into streaks by centuries of rain, and they ran off in both directions further than he could see. Towers stood at intervals along their length, and there were men on those towers, in steel that caught what was left of the light. Beyond the wall he could make out roofs, and banners moving in the wind, and rising off the whole of it the low continuous murmur of a large number of people finishing their day.

He had changed into Dargan's shirt and trousers an hour back, sitting in the rocking cart with the canvas pulled across for privacy. They hung a little loose on him, and they smelled of somebody else's house, and they were the best thing he had worn in a week. The old travel bag went over his shoulder. The bedsheet, folded, went into the bag, because he had no intention of throwing away the only thing he currently owned outright.

The henge held. His horns were not there. His hair was one colour. His eyes matched.

Even so, something in his gut tightened as the walls came closer. Big crowds meant more eyes. More eyes meant more chances for somebody to notice that a detail was off.

Then again, that was exactly why he had come.

The road narrowed as it approached, funnelling down between two banks, and then it opened out into an enormous stone archway. Naruto looked up at it as they passed under the shadow and decided it could probably hold off an army for a while and then take a second army for dessert. The gate itself was a slab of banded timber standing half open, wide enough for two carts abreast, and it was watched the way a Kage's private vault would have been watched.

Two soldiers in steel stood at the mouth of it. One of them, a tall man with a neatly kept beard and the expression of somebody who has dealt with far too many idiots and expects more shortly, put up a hand.

"Hold!  Name and purpose."

Naruto slowed. Dargan's cart had already peeled off into a separate lane where a clerk with a board was going through merchants' goods one crate at a time, and the old man had lifted a hand in farewell without stopping, which was probably wise.

The guard looked him over from his hair to his boots. Ordinary clothes. A worn bag. No visible weapon. Naruto could tell from the way the man had shifted his weight that he was balanced to move, and would move fast, if anything about this went sideways.

"I'm just a guy looking for work," Naruto said, scratching the back of his neck and letting his voice go easy and slightly stupid. "Heard there's plenty going around here."

The man's eyes narrowed a fraction. "Bakur Canyons is not a place a man wanders into for no reason. We are in the middle of a war, stranger."

War. There it was again. That word had been circling him for days now, coming up in fragments of overheard conversation, and every time he heard it he liked it less.

Naruto shrugged. "Then that probably means you've got even more work going, right?"

The guard made a noise low in his chest that was not quite a laugh and not quite a warning. Then, without any announcement at all, he stepped forward and put a gauntleted hand flat on Naruto's chest and began patting him down, quick and practised, up the ribs, down both sides, around the belt.

Every instinct Naruto had wanted to take the man's wrist and put him on the ground. He kept his hands loose and open at his sides and let it happen, because starting a fight at a city gate eleven seconds after arriving would have set a personal record even for him.

The soldier found nothing, or decided that finding nothing was near enough, and stepped back.

"Fine. You may pass. But if you cause any disturbance, you will be outside these walls again before the day is out. Understood?"

"Yeah, yeah, got it," Naruto said, already moving.

·•—–٠✤٠—–•·

The noise hit him the moment he was through.

It came at him in one solid wave, the way heat comes out of an opened oven. The Fortified City of Bakur Canyons was awake and loud and moving in every direction at once.

Soldiers in polished steel marched down the centre of the main street in columns, banners snapping above them in a wind that came off the high ground to the north. Merchants shouted over each other from stalls that had been jammed into every available space along the walls, selling warm bread and salt fish and coils of rope and, at one stall that Naruto stopped dead in front of, a tray of small crystals that glowed faintly from the inside and had prices chalked on slate beside them. The smell of meat turning on spits mixed with the sharp iron-and-charcoal smell of a forge working somewhere close.

And there were people everywhere. Ordinary people, in plain shirts and aprons and boots, carrying things and arguing about things and hauling children by the wrist. But mixed in among them were others, men and women in long robes with symbols stitched into the hems in thread that caught the light strangely, carrying staffs with crystal set into the heads, and when they passed by the air near them felt different in a way he could not name.

Naruto kept walking and let his eyes go everywhere, and kept the henge locked down tight.

Nobody gave him a second look. That was the best news he had received in a week. He was one more young man in borrowed clothes with a cheap bag, moving with the flow of the crowd, entirely and gloriously uninteresting.

He passed a knot of soldiers resting by a fountain, sitting on the rim with their helmets off and their canteens out.

"Heard the Hero's come back from the central regions," one of them was saying, keeping his voice down and failing to keep the excitement out of it.

"Doesn't matter whether the Hero comes or not." The second man scoffed into his water. "The Demon King's armies haven't slowed a step in five years. They'll be at these gates next if high command doesn't get their heads out from where they keep them."

Demon King. Hero.

Naruto kept his pace even and his face blank and did not look over, but those two names went into him and stayed there. They sounded like something out of the storybooks that got read aloud to children. Here, men in armour said them the way other men discussed the price of grain.

Finding work turned out to be almost insultingly easy. There were notices nailed to half the doors he passed. Guards wanted. Porters wanted. Couriers wanted, urgently. Labourers of any description, no experience necessary, ask within. The war had taken most of the city's strong young men north and left a great many holes behind them.

He tried a few, out of curiosity as much as anything. A tavern needed servers, which he declined on the grounds that he had no intention of carrying drinks for strangers all day. A courier service sounded promising until they asked for a registered licence, whatever that was, and he left before the conversation could develop. A crew clearing rubble off a collapsed street would have taken him on the spot, and he could have done it, and he would have died of boredom before the first afternoon was out.

Then he came around a corner and found himself in front of a squat, soot-blackened building with a heavy iron sign hanging over the door, cut into the shape of a hammer coming down on an anvil. From inside came the clear ringing of metal on metal, and then a long hiss as something very hot went into water.

Naruto put his head through the doorway.

It was a forge, and it was everything a forge should be: heat that hit him in the face like a hand, a floor of packed grit, the smell of hot steel and quenching oil, racks of stock along the walls and tools hanging from pegs in an order that only one man in the world would understand. That man looked up from the anvil, a big fellow with forearms like fence posts, and wiped the sweat off his forehead with the back of his wrist.

"You here for something, kid?"

The voice was rough but it was not unfriendly, and Naruto had spent enough of his life reading strangers in doorways to know the difference immediately.

He stepped inside. "You hiring?"

The smith looked him over slowly, top to bottom, eyes narrowing as he took an inventory.

"Depends. You got strong hands? Can you carry a load without complaining about it the whole way?"

Naruto smirked. "Stronger than you think."

"Ha."

The man turned, took a chunk of raw iron off the bench beside him without looking at it, and threw it.

It weighed about as much as a sandbag and it came fast. Naruto caught it one-handed, at chest height, and did not so much as shift his feet.

The smith's grin spread across his whole face.

"Right then. You'll do." He jerked his chin toward the back of the shop. "Work starts now. Fetch me those billets from the corner and keep the bellows moving. You put in honest hours, I pay you at the end of the week. Name's Torvan. That a deal?"

Naruto set the iron down on the bench and nodded.

"Deal."

It was not a glamorous job. It was not a mission, it had no rank, and nobody was going to carve his face into a mountain for it. But it was a start, and more than that, it put him in the middle of a city with a roof over his head and both ears open, in a place where soldiers came in every day to buy blades and stood at the counter talking while they waited.

He looked around the smoky room, at the banked coals glowing orange in the hearth, at the rows of tools, at the door to the front room where he could hear voices already.

This would do. He was good at hard work and he was good at keeping his real face hidden, and he had been doing the second one long before he ever came to this world.

It was another mission. A quiet one. But a mission all the same.

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