by Zoe Marriott
Most of the village hunters turned back in fear, but one man – braver, bolder than the others, or perhaps simply more foolish – refused to walk away from the dark tangles of trees that had sprung up overnight. That man was my great-grandfather. It was he, with his family gift of tree-speech, who heard the first warnings of the monster that lurked within the Dark Wood. He passed that warning onto his fellow hunters. He was the greatest tracker and woodsman the village had. He refused to be barred from the place he thought of as his own home – and so, alone, he walked into those trees. Into the deep, Dark Wood. He was never seen again.
The first of our family to be taken, but not the last.
My grandmother was not yet born when it happened. Her mother told her – as all mothers tell their children here – what happened, and she told me and my brother.
Then, when I was ten, the monster took her too.
After that, my brother and I told each other the stories, so that we would not forget. Kyo was two years older than me, and in the dark, lying in our futons next to each other, he whispered the words as our grandmother had, pausing when she had, emphasizing the same parts as she had. It was a way to keep her alive, I think. A way to show that, although she might be gone, disappeared from her futon one morning with nothing to show that she had ever existed but the faint tracks of her feet disappearing into the trees, she had been ours, for a little while.
We thought losing Grandmother was the worst thing that could ever happen to us. But when I was twelve, the monster took Kyo.
Every day, the trees warned, There is a monster in the forest.
Every day, I wished – oh, how I wished – that the monster had taken me instead.
Two
What happened to Kyo was not my fault.
My mother told me, over and over again: “There was nothing you could have done, Hana. You are not to blame.”
For months afterwards, grave-faced ladies and smiling old men up and down the valley would stop me as I passed, ask how I was, press a new basket, or a carefully wrapped packet of dried fish, or a ribbon, faded and frayed but soft, into my hands. You’re a good girl. You must not blame yourself. No one could have known. How you must be feeling, you poor thing…
Even the other children, who would have died before saying such disgusting things aloud, showed me their own variety of sympathy, patting me roughly on the head and back during our games, offering to share some coveted treat made by their mothers, and taking care never, ever to mention Kyo’s name in my hearing.
If I had been a prouder person, a stronger person, perhaps I would have hated this attention, the smiles and gentleness that did not quite hide the pity. Instead I clutched at the kindness as a baby grasps its mother’s hand. I armoured myself with the assurances I was offered. No one – none of them – thought I was to blame. I knew this in my head, the same way I knew that water flows downhill, or that the sky is blue. I had to know that, or I could never have gone on.
But in my heart I was aware of a deeper truth. For water stops flowing when it freezes, and sometimes the sky is not blue but black.
One person held me responsible for Kyo’s fate. As long as he could not forgive me, it would be impossible for me to forgive myself.
It was such a silly mistake. A childish, foolish thing that in any other place would have ended with no more than scoldings – perhaps even laughter. But not on the mountain. Not for us.
We were down at the river. I crouched in the shallows, feet numb with cold, eyes wide with anticipation. Catching frogs. It was a child’s game, but a useful one. A half-dozen fat frogs would make a tasty meal for our small family. Kyo stood on the bank, holding the covered basket in which my prey, if I were fast enough, would be placed for safe keeping. He had declined to shed his sandals and wade into the autumn chill of the water, thinking himself, at fourteen, too old for such sport.
Or so he said. I thought it had more to do with the presence of the weaver’s pretty sixteen-year-old daughter, washing out reams of newly dyed cloth downstream, and always ready to giggle and blush at any boy who came within ten feet of her.
Father had told Kyo to keep an eye on me, but I remember thinking peevishly that he hadn’t glanced at me once since he had caught sight of Misaki bending over the water in her thin, kilted-up yukata. Kyo and I were hunting-partners, used to spending hours at a time in each other’s company in the hush of the friendly trees, and then laughing and singing our way home to display our catch in victory. We shared our triumphs and our disgraces. We shared our fears and hopes. It made us far closer than any normal pair of siblings – best friends, really, despite the difference in age and gender – and I wasn’t used to being ignored. Especially for a girl who screamed when she walked into a cobweb, I thought rather scornfully, pretending to myself that I hadn’t done the same thing just that morning.
After a couple of attempts to reclaim his attention, and a couple more to get the pair of them to hush and stop frightening the frogs away, I gave up in exasperation and waded upstream away from them, finding a new hunting ground where the river curved sharply.
I only glanced back once. He was standing against the blaze of autumn leaves, awkwardly rubbing the back of his neck with a hand that was just beginning to broaden out into the likeness of our father’s. His too-long, shaggy hair was tangled, and there was an embarrassed laugh tugging at the corners of his mouth. I was too far away to hear it. That last glimpse of him is how I will always remember my big brother.
It didn’t occur to me, as I waited patiently for the frogs to come, that night was drawing in.
It didn’t occur to me that the Moon would be dark that night.
It didn’t occur to me that Kyo, looking up to find, from his point of view, that his little sister had vanished from the river without a trace, would panic.
Of what happened next, I know only what I worked out for myself, and what others could be coaxed, in reluctant dribs and drabs, to tell me. While I crouched under an overhang of rock, silent and still as a hunting heron, Kyo searched the river for me, racing up and down the banks, calling my name. I didn’t hear him. I tell myself I didn’t. That the water must have drowned out his voice. That I would not have been so petty as to ignore him if I had heard. But memory is a mutable thing, and … I cannot be sure.
All I know for certain is that I did not answer.
Everything would have been different, if only I had answered.
Kyo rushed home. Our mother was out visiting a friend, so Kyo went to Father’s workshop. What our father said to him then, no one can tell me. No one knows except Kyo and Father himself, and Father has never spoken of it. All I can gather is that he sent Kyo out to search for me up along the valley wall, above the rice terraces, where I sometimes liked to play hide-and-seek among the abandoned houses. Father himself hurried in the other direction, rousing his neighbours as he went, calling for them to light lanterns and join the hunt for his daughter.
I heard the villagers shouting as I was climbing out of the river onto the bank. I was chilled and tired and furious with Kyo for running off and leaving me without a word. I was even more irritated that he had taken the basket with him, so I had to release two frogs back into the water instead of bringing them home for dinner, because I could not hold onto them. When my father caught sight of me, he gave a great shout of joy and relief, and for a little while it was like the ending of a fairy tale, where everyone laughs and weeps with happiness. In that happy chaos, lit with the lanterns from the search, true darkness fell over the mountain without anyone noticing it.
Even then, it took far, far too long for me to ask: “Where is Kyo?”
My father’s arm was still wrapped gently around my shoulder. His fingers flinched against my upper arm and then dug in, clenching, clenching, so tight that tears sprang to my eyes. I let out a choked cry of pain, and he released me as if I had burned him. As my mother caught me in her arms, I turned to see that my father wasn’t even looking at me. In the bright yellow ligh
t of the lanterns, he stared up at the impenetrable darkness of the mountainside, where the forest blended into the Moonless sky.
He whispered, “But … but I…”
And then his face – changed. When he looked at me again, I could see his thoughts as if they had unrolled before me on a paper scroll.
What had happened to Kyo was not my fault. But I will take to the grave the memory of my father’s eyes telling me:
He is gone because of you.
I wish it had been you instead.
Nothing was the same after that. My mother continued to love me, and my village showed me kindness, but from that day I was no longer truly welcome in my home. In an instant I had become a stranger to my father. Sometimes it was as though we spoke two different languages composed of the same words, and only my mother was able to translate between us.
I felt my brother’s absence like a void in the fabric of my life, in my heart, in the place at my side that had always been his. It was more than grief, or even guilt. Where Kyo had once been was only emptiness, a wound that never seemed to fade, or heal with time, as other people assumed it must. It left me hollow. And worst of all, I knew my father could see it. He preferred that empty space to me, to the living child that reminded him of what he had lost.
I grew from a skinny village waif to a sturdy hunter, with strong legs and steady hands. I learned how to braid my own hair, tight, tight, so that not a single long strand straggled free, how to run barefoot on the wind, fleet and soundless as the clouds overhead, and how to catch game where no other hunter could see it. I worked as hard as two hunters to provide for my family, and the kindness of our neighbours gradually became respect.
When I turned fifteen – marriageable age – our family’s ill fortune kept most of the village boys away. But while I was not pretty, or delicate or fine, and I no longer laughed as freely as I used to, I was a hard worker, and I was healthy. These things were valuable in their way, and one or two young men began to show an interest in me.
Shouta was the nicest and most persistent of the boys who tried to court me. His family hadn’t lost anyone to the monster since his great-aunt, before he was born, and perhaps this made him less fearful of my family’s reputation, because he never treated me any differently than any of the other village girls – except in a certain warmth in his eyes when they rested on me. In any case I … liked him. He too had endured the death of an older brother – although his had died of a fever. But I did not know what to say to him, how to deal with his attention. I did not know what I wanted.
One day he caught me as I drew water from our family’s well and said plainly: “Hana-san, forgive me – I must ask. Do you intend to marry?”
I hesitated, pretending to concentrate on balancing the full, heavy wooden bucket against the stone rim of the well without tipping it. In the tiny pause, Shouta stepped close – too close – and took the bucket from me. His arms did not tremble at all as he lifted my burden smoothly, and then placed it at my feet. The movement barely disturbed the surface of the water. It was an impressive display of strength.
Reflections shimmered and wavered in the bucket. Leaves stirred gently over our heads, clouds passed above them, and between, was the nearly soundless thrum of a flock of birds taking flight. Nothing that I could see stayed still for an instant. Nothing except the featureless shadow of my face leaning over the water: a black, unmoving void against the pale sky.
I knew that if I said I did hope to marry, Shouta would ask me to be his wife. Probably straightaway, right here by the well. I allowed myself to think about it. To marry would be to leave my father’s house. To have a place of my own. Maybe even to find some peace.
And yet wherever I went, whatever I did, I would carry the sick, hollow ache of my brother’s absence with me.
“Shouta-kun,” I began tentatively, almost in a whisper. I stopped, annoyed at myself, cleared my throat and began again. “Shouta-kun, after Nori-san passed into the Moon’s arms, did you feel … do you still feel his loss every day? As much as when he was first gone? Do you think of him, every day, all the time, even now, until sometimes it overwhelms you?” I took another bracing breath. “Sometimes, do you wish … wish it had been you instead?”
I finished with a faint gasp, almost of relief. It was the first time I had dared to speak these thoughts aloud. But in the next second I realized how clumsy my hurried speech had been, and how it must have sounded. The dawning look of dismay that filled Shouta’s eyes made it obvious. I shifted away. The urge to leave the bucket where it sat and flee towards the shelter of the trees was almost irresistible.
“We all have sad days,” he told me with ponderous gentleness. “And of course I miss my brother when I think of him. But you can’t give into those feelings, you know. In my family we always say that you can choose to be happy. I believe that, Hana-san. It’s up to you. You can’t sit and dwell upon your unhappiness until … well, until you start thinking … silly things.” He seemed to balk a little then, as if unsure whether he should go on. Finally he finished, “You must pull yourself together. Focus on what is good, and get on with your work and soon that sadness will pass, you’ll see.”
Something – something wild – something dangerous – was rising in my throat. I felt torn between bitter laughter and furious tears, and looked down sharply, pressing my lips together to keep hot words from spitting out to scald him. After all, what had I expected? It was the sort of well-meaning speech that I might have been offered by half the village if I had been so foolish as to share my real thoughts with them.
It was just that … no one who had ever felt the way I did could possibly say what Shouta had. No one who had been so lost in despair that they had forgotten how happiness even felt could believe that being happy was a choice. It was like telling someone with the lung sickness that there was plenty of air, if only they pulled themselves together and chose to breathe it. Feelings – my feelings – didn’t work that way.
I had hoped…
No. It was no use wishing. He didn’t understand.
“Your advice is good, of course,” I told him, when at last I raised my head. My voice sounded gruff and rusty, as if the force of the words I’d kept inside had burned me. “Thank you, Shouta-kun. Now that you have answered my questions I may answer yours. I do not intend to marry.”
And as I explained that I couldn’t leave my father’s household when my parents had no son any more who would bring a wife into the family to care for them as they grew older, and how it was my duty to stay with them and make sure they were well looked after, I felt no disappointment. No relief, either. Only a kind of numb acceptance. I should have known.
If Shouta himself was disappointed, he hid it well, expressing only admiration and approval. Later on I realized, from the renewed looks of pity everywhere I went, that Shouta had taken it upon himself to pass word of my decision onto the entire village. But at least boys stopped following me around and trying to give me wildflowers or rice balls and flirt with me.
And it wasn’t as if I had lied.
Though I had lived there all my life, no one in our village truly understood me. They did not know me, and after Shouta’s reaction, I was sure they never would. How could I expect anyone to perceive or accept my hollowness? My strange, dark thoughts and the wild silly impulses that drove me? Or to understand and love the friendly trees as I did, and run through them barefoot as I did, without fear of the edge of the Dark Wood, even after all the terror that place had brought us? No. It was better to keep on as I was. Alone.
And so I filled my days with work, the hunt, and prayer – but it was never enough. Nothing ever changed. My father still had not forgiven me. The terrible debt of my brother’s life was still unpaid. So, yes, I often wished the monster had taken me instead. I would have offered myself up to it gladly, to bring Kyo back. Often I looked up at the bright face of the Moon and begged: Anything, I’ll do anything. Help me, please.
My grandmother was a wise l
ady. When, as children, she heard Kyo and I offering up frivolous prayers for a new toy or a favoured treat, she would warn: Be wary if you ask favours of the Moon. She does not grant our wishes. She answers our prayers.
It was only when my chance at redemption finally arrived that I began to understand what those words truly meant – for it came with a scream, in the darkness of the night.
Three
“Hana! Hana, wake up!” my mother cried, her voice high and thin, and made jagged by fear. It cut me free of my murky nightmares with a jolt. I sat upright in my futon, gasping.
“What is it? What’s the matter?”
She huddled on her knees by my bed, just barely visible in the faint silvery light that edged the closed shutters. Her breath rasped and then drew in sharply, and in the silence that followed I felt my spine go cold with terror – because there was a sound I should have heard, a sound that should have broken that terrible quiet. My father’s voice.
My mother was crying, and my father was not there.
My father was not there.
It was the dark of the Moon, and my father was not in the house.
“No. No, Mother, no—” My words rose tremulously, a thin wail-like wind ghosting through the broken shutters of a long ruined home. I scrabbled out from beneath my blankets, cursing them when they tangled and tripped me. I kicked free savagely as if I was in a fight for my life. In the other room, the twin piles of bedding where my parents had slept side by side all my life lay empty. My mother’s was a mess, like mine, the result of a panicked exit. My father’s covers lay neatly folded back, as if he had taken care not to disturb them when he rose.
In another moment I was pushing back the screens, almost slipping on the frost-rimed porch. When I leapt down, my bare soles crunched on the icy grass, and my breath clouded in a long plume before my face. The sun was just lifting beyond the highest peak of the mountain, setting fire to the ragged clouds. Even in that dim light my eyes – hunter’s eyes – could see the trail of footprints marked in the soft dark mud, before it had frozen. The tread was heavy and dragging, as if the walker had been immensely weary. But the trail did not waver, or turn back. It led, straight as one of my father’s door lintels, towards the ridge. Towards the trees.