He needed a way to carry the thing without cutting himself, though. He found the saya where it had fallen out of the bandit's waistband when he was dragging the body, and with some difficulty got the blade back into it. Then he went back through all the houses, looking for anything the bandits might have left. As he finished with each house, he lit a torch and set fire to the oil-soaked bodies. They smelled awful, like the time he and his best friend Akira had gone to spy on some eta burning a dead horse.
People ought to smell better than dead animals.
The dead bandit was no different than the villagers. I guess everybody's the same when they're dead. He wasn't even sure what the priest was supposed to have been praying to . So he gave up and, with nothing but the clothes he was wearing and the dead bandit's sword, left his burning village behind and trudged away, along the road that led through the forest. By the end of the first day he was awfully hungry.