by Sarina Dorie
Her face cracked in the flames and melted. My own face felt as though it were on fire too.
I sat up sweaty and panting. The air was muggy, and I choked on smoke. The sky glowed orange to the north, and for a moment I didn’t know where I was. A spray of water splashed my foot. I tucked my feet underneath me and drew my knees up to my chest. I was hungry and thirsty. Two crescent moons shone in the sky, reminding me of my brother’s smiling eyes. My heart ached in my chest. I didn’t know what I’d do if I never saw him again.
That’s when the events of the day sank into me, and I realized I’d woken into something worse than a nightmare.
Shipo sat up too, gasping for breath. “I had a bad dream.”
“Me too.”
Something splashed in the water. A family of tanuki dogs swam past the rocks where we rested. Their purple and green striped tails swished back and forth.
“What was your dream about?” Shipo asked.
“That woman who was in your memory. The pretty one.” I hesitated. I didn’t want to say all I had seen.
“Me too.” Tears filled her eyes. “She was on fire.”
I gasped. “That’s what I dreamed about.”
“How can we have the same dream?” Shipo asked.
One of the grandmothers would know. They were always good at interpreting dreams. But none of them were here. I wrapped my arms around myself.
“Who is that woman?” I asked. “Your mama?”
“No. Didn’t you recognize her? She was the woman who spoke to us in the cave. Ne?”
“What woman? I didn’t see any woman in the cave.”
“She wanted us to find her heart and wake her up. I would have if you hadn’t pulled me in the wrong direction. And then your father carried us out.”
I shook my head at her. There had been no woman. There had been wind that sounded like a song and the pulse of the wall and the feeling someone had been watching us. I shivered with realization.
“She was a kamuy,” I said.
The sky rumbled. It sounded like when the ships had shot the arrows made of light at my village. Tears filled my eyes. I didn’t want another ship to attack us. Blue light flashed above. The sky opened up and poured down on us. Relief washed over me with the rain. It wasn’t the gaijin! Just thunder and lightning. Everything would be okay.
By the time we scrambled under the cover of the trees along the bank of the stream we were already soaked. We huddled together, trembling from the cold.
At dawn Shipo complained she was hungry. The good fruit was too high up in the trees to reach and we couldn’t find any midori berries on the bushes.
We were so hungry we ate raw tree snails even though they tasted bitter. They made me want to throw up, but there wasn’t anything better to eat. Shipo and I took turns staring in the direction of my village. I couldn’t even see the hills of the jungle anymore.
“When do you think our parents will come for us?” Shipo asked.
I didn’t answer. I was afraid they would never come for us.
Nonno found us the next day. She was my mother’s age and from the Chiramantepjin village. Her husband was a warrior and they had two children who were my brother’s age. I jumped up and down when I saw her. “Nonno-san! Have you seen my parents? Did my father send you to fetch us? We’ve been good. We’ve been waiting.”
She collapsed next to us by the stream. She splashed water over burns on her arms and shoulder.
“What about my parents?” Shipo asked. “Are they coming to get us?”
Tears filled Nonno’s eyes. A lump settled in the pit in my stomach.
“My family.” Nonno drew in a shaky breath. “My family, your family, everyone is gone. The ship swooped down and killed them all.” She crushed me to her and wept.
I felt like all the air had been sucked out of me. My throat was tight and I choked trying to breath. All the hope I’d been feeling dissolved into a sob.
That was the end of the safe little world I knew.
Chapter Three
A dead sugar fruit tree will not blossom.
—Ancient Jomon proverb
For a year, Shipo and Nonno were my only family. We traveled through the jungle away from the village, encountering other survivors who were also looking for their families or a safe place to live. We always hid when we saw ships fly above. They made the sky rumble and sometimes they shot out blue light and flattened the hills in the distance, sending tremors through the earth. We heard them many times and frequently saw their ships, but only once did we see the off-worlders outside of their ship.
Once was enough.
The air was warm and humid like most days of my childhood the day we saw the gaijin. Shipo and I helped Nonno collect sugar fruit that had fallen to the jungle floor. I heard a male voice say something so close to us I nearly jumped out of my skin.
Nonno pushed Shipo and me behind a large purple fern.
“Gaijin,” Nonno said. “Hush.”
The fern wasn’t big enough to hide all three of us and Nonno dove behind a tree.
Panic swelled up inside me like the stream after too much rain. I reached out for her. “Don’t leave us.”
She pressed her finger to her lips. I could hear the off-worlders trampling closer, their feet crackling over leaves and twigs with confidence. It sounded like there were a lot of them. I hugged Shipo so tightly I couldn’t tell if it was my heart or hers that pounded like a drum.
One man laughed. I couldn’t understand the tongue they spoke. If my brother had been here he would have known what they said. I tried not to think about my brother. I pushed the memory of him deep down into the pit of my belly. I didn’t have a brother anymore.
“Look,” Shipo whispered. She pointed between the leaves of the ferns.
There were about seven men, all wearing clothes as red as blood. They dragged a group of naked women and children through the jungle. They were so close I could smell their sweat. One of the men hit an old grandma. I gasped.
“Cover your ears and don’t look,” Nonno whispered.
Shipo and I did as she bade. The air tasted strange, sharp and bitter. When the screaming started, I pressed my hands to my ears so hard it hurt, but I still heard them. Nonno should have listened to her own advice. She kept watching, her eyes getting wider and wider.
The air smelled horrible, like burned hair. I held my breath. I stared down at the purple fuzz of grass growing under my feet. On the other side of Shipo’s feet, a dark trickle of liquid inched past her. Another wet worm of red water wiggled by. As more little streams seeped from under the fern, I realized it was blood.
Even when the party of men passed us and it grew quiet, we remained where we were. Silent tears spilled down Nonno’s cheeks and snot dripped down her face. But she didn’t sniffle. She didn’t draw any attention to herself. Even though my legs cramped from how I crouched, I didn’t move either.
The jungle no longer felt safe.
Nonno said one of the Isepojin villages would offer us refuge, but when we encountered a group of men and women traveling from the south, we were told their village had been destroyed as well, and they were the only survivors. The group headed north in the hope of finding the Tanukijin village.
“But the Isepojin have many villages in the plains. Surely some of them must have survived,” Nonno said.
“The metal birds from the sky swooped down and burned the plains with fire,” a man wearing a scaly pelt said.
Again, our hope was stolen from us.
I was seven when two grandmothers and a grandfather joined us and we made our own little tribe. I learned to set snares to catch game. Grandmother Ami was kind to me and showed me how to throw a stone so far and hard I could take down nose birds and other small game. I wasn’t as good as she was with a moving target, but I managed to knock down melons and ume clusters from high in the trees. Grandfather Rethar gave us hope with his stories and songs. My favorite was
the story of Hekketek, and Shipo’s was the song of Pananpne, the ballad of the beautiful princess who fell in love with the sun kamuy. Grandmother Konkani showed me how to sew and weave. Shipo was better at sewing than I was.
Shipo became very good at starting fires, sometimes when she was supposed to. Sometimes when she wasn’t. Shipo and I ran wild and we were very bad. We forgot our manners, played games instead of working, and disobeyed our elders.
The day Shipo and I accidentally walked into a bed of memory moss, we both leapt back, afraid it would burn our skin. When it tingled pleasantly and Shipo stepped back in, I did so too. Shipo dove into the moss as though it were water. She tore it up in handfuls and inhaled the spicy scent.
I laughed at her. I pretended I was swimming too.
She placed her hand on my shoulder. A flash of white flared behind my eyes. I saw a woman and man I’d never seen before. The woman rubbed green paste over a red welt on my arm—only the arm wasn’t my arm. I was a small child. I was Shipo.
The tingle felt nice and made my injury feel better. The woman—my mother—smiled at me. I hugged her and told her I loved her.
Another flash flared behind my eyes and the woman was gone. My arm still tingled, as well as my shoulder where Shipo touched me. Her eyes were closed and she smiled contentedly.
“I think you just gave me a memory,” I said. That must have been her mother.
“Did I? I can’t remember,” she giggled.
The moss made us giddy and soon we both were rolling in it naked so that every part of our body tingled. We tried to exchange memories again, but we couldn’t get it to work this time.
Nonno found us moments later.
“Memory moss is not for children to use!” She swatted us on our behinds. “And never for two girls with each other.”
“Why?” I asked.
My question was answered with a smack to the mouth.
“Yeah, why?” Shipo ducked out of the way before Nonno could hit her.
We crawled out of the moss and tried to get away from Nonno, but she followed us and threw our skirts at us.
Nonno grabbed me by one arm and Shipo by the other as she dragged us away from the moss. “It’s wrong for two men to share themselves with each other, and it’s wrong for two women to do so as well. We have these traditions for a reason, and you have desecrated them with your selfishness. You’ll regret this moment for the rest of your lives.”
Nonno spanked us so much I couldn’t sit down. I still didn’t regret the memory moss later. In fact, Shipo and I went back to do it again. It made our bruises ache less.
When we returned to our camp after our second round of memory moss, Grandmother Ami crinkled up her nose and shook her head at us. That was probably meant to be a hint, but we were too dense to realize she was telling us she could smell memory moss on us.
Grandfather Rethar waved a hand at us. “Children, go wash at the stream. You’re too dirty for dinner. Nonno will punish you.”
There wasn’t a day that went by that Nonno didn’t punish us for something. She hit us when we were naughty. She hit us when we weren’t naughty too. Each day her patience grew more fragile. Everything drove her into a blind rage.
Nonno rocked herself back and forth at night and sometimes muttered to herself. She kicked at Grandfather Rethar when he tried to console her. As time passed, she talked to herself more and more. Every day she got worse. When she hit herself, I looked away.
I was eight when she walked into jungle and never came back.
Grandmother Ami was the one who told us.
“What happened? Did gaijin take her?” I asked. We’d found the footprints of off-worlders only days before and moved our camp again, hoping to avoid them.
Grandmother Ami exchanged glances with Grandmother Konkani.
“I don’t care what happened.” Shipo lifted her nose in the air. “I hope she stays gone forever. I didn’t like her anyway.” She stomped into the trees, but not before I saw the tears in her eyes.
Nonno had been like a mother to us. It wasn’t her fault she had been baited with bad fortune and had turned mean like a chiramantep in a blood craze. Even if she did hit us, I didn’t want her gone.
“Why does everyone have to leave us?” I asked Grandmother Ami. “First my mama and daddy and now—” I swallowed, but the lump in my throat wouldn’t go away.
She patted my hand and shook her head. “I often wonder the same thing, child. But we must remember, if we let ourselves be consumed by the past, we will have no time for the present.”
I kicked at a clump of dirt, sending it into a cluster of tree snails low on the base of a tree. “If I was a good child, the kamuy wouldn’t have punished us like this.”
“You had nothing to do with it. It was the sisam.” That was her tribe’s word for off-worlder. She said everything in a funny way, her accent from the Isepojin so different from the way the Chiramantepjin spoke.
I shook my head. Grandmother Ami didn’t understand what I had done.
The earth shook and leaves showered down on us from the trees. That was the gaijin again upsetting the earth kamuy. I didn’t see any off-worlders, but I knew there must be some nearby with the way the trees creaked and the ground rumbled.
Panic swelled up in me. I screamed Shipo’s name and ran after where she’d gone. I didn’t want her alone in the jungle. What if the gaijin found her?
My heart calmed when I spotted her a moment later. Shipo giggled next to the stream. A giant shaggy animal with fur as blue as the sky snuffled at Shipo’s hand and knocked her over. Protruding from the animal’s jaw were large tusks, and rows of horns sprouted from the forehead.
I hadn’t seen a chiramantep in years. I thought they had all been poached by the gaijin.
A man of about twenty years old leaned against the animal in a cocky sort of way that told me he thought he was important. He wore a blue fur belt and a mask-like headdress that matched the animal’s pelt. His skirt was made of leaves. He dressed like a one of my family’s tribe, but I didn’t recognize him. His eboshi mask was a mark of high rank, but it wasn’t well-made like my mother’s had been. I could see the seams of this one, and the placement of horns and teeth weren’t right.
“See, I wasn’t lying,” Shipo said. “Here’s Sumiko-chan.”
The man bowed in greeting. “You are Sumiko-chan of the Chiramantepjin?”
I nodded, but I didn’t bow to him. It was rude and Nonno would have hit me for that, but she wasn’t there to remind me of my manners.
He uttered a prayer and dropped to his knees. He threw his arms around me and hugged me.
I elbowed him and squirmed away. “Let go of me.”
He looked hurt. “Aren’t you happy to see me? I’m here to take you with me to our tribe. I’m the leader of the Chiramantepjin tribe now.”
“I’m not going anywhere with you,” I said. “My tribe is here.”
“Don’t you know who I am?” He took off his eboshi and waited expectantly.
I shook my head. He was young and his face was lean. When he smiled, his eyes crinkled up into crescent shapes that reminded me of our moons. “I’m Taishi. Your brother.”
Chapter Four
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My brother let Shipo and I ride on his chiramantep as he guided us through the jungle. He chatted amiably with the two grandmothers and grandfather as he took us to his village. I was so excited I could hardly sit still. This was my big brother. He had saved my little tribe. He would be my best friend again and play with me. Everything would be exactly as it used to be before the gaijin had come.
/> I wondered if I would see my parents. He hadn’t said I would, but that was just the kind of detail he would keep to himself to surprise me. I wanted to burst from happiness.
We traveled for three hours. I kept looking up into the trees for huts and skybridges, but the trees kept getting smaller. This stunted part of the jungle wouldn’t make a very good home for the Chiramantepjin.
“Are we there yet?” Shipo asked.
“No,” I said confidently.
“Almost there. I can see our camp from here,” Taishi said.
He’d always been such a prankster. I knew he couldn’t be serious. The trees here were barren of fruit. Dead trees littered the ground. I laughed and rolled my eyes.
A moment later we arrived at his “village.” It wasn’t much compared to the Chiramantepjin tree palace where our tribe had once lived in the jungle canopy. There were only two dozen people, mostly the elderly and children. They lived in flimsy tents that didn’t look like they would withstand a hard rain. I stared with wide eyes. Shipo nudged me. She had to be as surprised as I was. I was too embarrassed to look at her. Already I could tell this village wasn’t going to be the same.
Still, I was with my family, with my brother. He would take care of me and be my friend and we would be happy here. That’s what I keep telling myself, anyway. I wanted to ask if I would see my parents, but I was afraid what the answer would be.
The elderly stared at us with hollow eyes when our small group came to the camp. Children ran up to Taishi, pulling on his arms and asking him for food. He mussed a boy’s hair and asked a little girl if she had been good.
“What did you bring us to eat?” one of the children asked.
“My sister, but there isn’t much meat on her bones.” He winked at me to show he was joking.
The children crowded around him, peppering him with questions. They smiled and laughed and seemed pleased to see him.
A hunched grandmother with a twisted back lifted herself using a stick. She squinted at us and shook her head. “Nipa, you brought us more mouths to feed, not something to feed the mouths of those already here.”