Barefoot on the Wind

by Zoe Marriott

  Into the forest.

  My mother’s thin and shaking hands were on my shoulders, scraping at me like the brush of dry dead twigs. She turned me away from the forest and took me into her arms. She was talking. Crying. But I couldn’t hear anything through the awful echoes of silence in my ears, through the overwhelming, aching cold of all around me. Inside me.

  My father had gone.

  The monster had taken him.

  There is a monster in the forest… whispered the trees.

  “No one ever comes back from the Dark Wood,” my grandmother murmured in my memory.

  But I had traced its edge. I had stalked in the shade of the dark trees and even, once, laid my hand on their gnarled bark and walked away again. And I was fast. Faster than anyone in the village.

  Faster than my father on his very best day.

  I tore free of my mother’s hold and ran. She cried out in protest behind me, but I did not stop. My feet caught flame in the cold of the hoar frost, frozen puddles cracking beneath my weight and showering my light sleeping robe and bare legs with icy water that burned and then numbed. I bolted up the steeply cut terraces, heaved myself onto the ridge and crashed through the tangled brush on the treeline. My hair snagged on stray branches and ripped free painfully as I plunged forwards, lungs already working like the blacksmith’s bellows. But I would run until my heart and my lungs and my legs gave out. I would run until—

  My foot caught on a tree root.

  I landed on one knee, my hands slamming down on the earth for balance.

  Except my hands did not touch icy dirt, or leaves. Instead, they found skin, and cloth.

  It was not a root that had tripped me.

  My mother’s cries – and perhaps my own – had awakened our nearest neighbours. A dozen or so men and a handful of women, tousle-headed and hastily dressed, were just beginning to mount the lowest terraces as I began my descent of the highest in the brightening light of dawn.

  There is a monster in the forest, the trees twittered unhappily. For once, I did not answer.

  There was a collective shocked exclamation as the villagers caught sight of me. Further away, in the village, I heard screens and shutters squeal open and bang shut as more families, disturbed by the outcry, left their houses to see what new outrage had befallen us in the night. But silence fell as they gathered there at the bottom of the slope, faces upturned, watching my laborious progress with wide eyes and open mouths.

  The first of our neighbours had gathered expecting to follow my trail into the forest, and drag back a weeping, irrational girl – if they were lucky enough to catch me before I passed the edge of the Dark Wood, and the point of no return. The second wave of villagers expected to hear that another of us had been taken, and were already praying that it was not a close relative or friend.

  What none of them, not even my mother, had expected to see was me emerging from the trees of my own volition, with my father flung across my shoulders like the bloodied carcass of a wild creature.

  I had hoisted his limp body up just as I had carried the serow the day before, wrapping my left arm around the backs of his knees and my right hand around one of his trailing arms to hold him in place. His deadweight was a great deal more than the mountain antelope’s had been, and I was wheezing with effort, breath coming in short huffs that tasted of blood. My back creaked with each heavy footstep. I kept walking. There was nothing else I could do.

  No one ever comes back from the Dark Wood.

  My mother’s voice cried out suddenly, faint but clear. “Help her! Someone help my daughter!”

  As if a spell had been broken, the people stirred and surged forwards. Shouta was the first to reach me, then Goro, the big burly weaver, with my father’s particular friend, Hideki, close behind. Shouta’s face blanched at the sight of my father’s back. Hideki hastily turned his eyes away.

  “Let us take him. Let him go now, Hana-san,” Shouta said. His words blended into Goro’s gruffer ones: “It’s all right now, girl. We’ve got him.”

  I resisted for a count of two painful breaths, but my strength seemed to have fled. I could tell by their voices, their eyes, that they thought he was dead. They thought I was carrying my father’s corpse. I had been sure he was alive but … that was impossible, wasn’t it? Kyo never came back, did he? No one came back from the Dark Wood. No one…

  I couldn’t hold on any more. What was the point in holding on? My fingers lost their grip, and my father’s weight was gently lifted from me. I staggered, dizzy, and someone – Hideki – rushed to steady me, a too-firm hand under my elbow and one on my back, bruising and uncomfortable.

  “Kaede-sensei,” I panted, naming the village’s healing woman. “She—”

  My words were drowned out by a shout.

  “He’s alive!” Goro yelled, voice cracking in his throat as if even he didn’t believe what he was saying. His head jerked up and his gaze found mine. “Hana-san, he’s breathing – he’s alive.”

  My whole body tingled with a rush of pure, undiluted relief. I felt the sunlight touching my hair, and the rough earth beneath my feet. The light-headedness, the nightmarish sense of unreality, faded.

  “Praise the Moon,” whispered Hideki.

  “Take him to Kaede-sensei,” I said. “Quickly. She’ll know what to do.”

  Before I had finished speaking, Goro and Shouta were rushing away down the terraces, my father cradled between them. He lolled back limply in the chair made of their arms. I trotted after them, and Hideki scurried worriedly behind me. At the bottom, my mother, who had stepped aside to let the two men pass, reached out to grasp my sleeve. Her eyes remained riveted on my father as she tugged me onto the pebble path that wound through the centre of the village. I was grateful for the way Shouta and Goro had turned my father when they took him from me, so that she couldn’t see … the blood.

  “Where – how did you find him? You were so fast…” she questioned. She was trembling all over, fingers clutching desperately at my kimono. “Hana, how?”

  “He was on the ridge. Right there, on the ridge. He was already almost home.” Distantly, I noticed the reaction to my words ripple through those who were silently following us. I ignored the quiet murmurs and shocked looks, and the way my mother’s last question hung unanswered in the air. I wrapped one arm around her, pulling her into the shelter of my sturdier frame to share my warmth, and to hold her steady.

  “Ichiro…” She covered her face as she whispered my father’s name.

  Someone had run ahead of us to wake Kaede’s household. By the time we arrived, the two large wooden screens that opened onto her great room had been pushed back, and sticks of precious incense lit inside. They filled the air with the distinctive spiralling blue smoke that meant illness and death to us. We had smelled it when Shiro’s ox gored him and he lost his hand. We had smelled it when Atsuko died bringing her little daughter into the world, and for three days after while Kaede fought to keep the baby alive.

  The sensei did not waste her precious incense. She only burned it when there was still a chance. We never smelled that sickly sweet perfume on the wind when the monster took one of its victims, for then there was nothing Kaede could do.

  Breathing it in now fanned the tiny spark of hope inside me into an ember that smouldered under my breastbone, painful in its intensity. My whole body wanted to curl up around it – but whether to smother it, or shelter it, even I could not judge.

  “Bring him in, and then get out,” the healer snapped as she smoothed a threadbare but shiningly white sheet into place over a thick futon. The worn tatami mats were covered in squares of clean cloth. Some held rolls of soft bandages, some earthenware pots and chipped ceramic jars, and one had strange metal tools that glittered menacingly beneath my worried gaze.

  Shouta and Goro shuffled past all this and gingerly laid my father down, rolling him at the last moment, so that his uninjured front pressed into the futon. There was a collective murmur of horror as the villagers cr
owding behind me saw the terrible wounds for the first time.

  The back of his worn cotton yukata was soaked through with blood. Half-dried, almost black and sticky like the sap of the dark pines, it marked three long gashes, inches apart, that stretched from the top of his left shoulder all the way down to his right hip. Claw marks. Claw marks from a paw wider than a man’s back.

  Father’s face was turned towards us, and it was grey: the colour of fine ash when the wood has all been consumed and there is nothing left for the fire to eat. The long silvery hair straggled, knotted and wild, around his head. He would have shaved himself bald before he willingly allowed himself to be seen undone this way. He was so still. So quiet. All the lines of his face had smoothed away into blankness. I barely recognized him.

  I felt rather than heard Mother’s gasp. Her jaw tightened and she blinked frantically.

  “Did you all go deaf overnight?” the healer demanded, staring at the people filling her porch. “Get out, I said! How can I work with you people taking up all my patient’s air?”

  As people began sheepishly shuffling away, the sensei’s gaze, dark and shining with fierce intelligence in her wizened face, ran over my mother and me. Her eyes lingered on me the longest, and her expression softened a little. “You must go too. This is no place for you now. I will do everything I can.”

  One hand, the fingers gnarled with age, came to rest almost tenderly on my father’s head. I used my hold on my mother’s arm to urge her back a step, over the threshold of the room. Kaede-sensei nodded sharply, and then turned away, calling for her apprentice, who scurried out to pull the screens back into place, blocking my father from our sight.

  Mother shuddered. “Hana – oh, Hana…”

  “None of that! It will be well, you’ll see,” cried Hideki’s wife, appearing beside us with a look of desperate cheerfulness. “Just you leave the sensei to her work. Come on, come away, that’s right…”

  Mother’s friends surrounded us, leading us inexorably from the healer’s house like a flock of small birds that chirped and squawked and fluttered softly, but could not be escaped. We were escorted home and pressed firmly to sit in the kitchen. The fires were lit, our stores rifled, cups of tea forced on us, the shutters thrown open and the futons tidied away. Goro had gone back to his own home, but Hideki and Shouta came with us. They drank tea too.

  No one ever comes back from the Dark Wood.

  The hot tea grew cold in my grasp, and was replaced. People moved and talked around me. Shouta and Hideki eventually had to leave to go about their day’s business. In the doorway Shouta spoke my name seriously. When I glanced up, he gave me a look, long and complicated, that I was too slow to interpret. I stared at him blankly. He bowed his head before turning away.

  Some of the women left too. Others soon came to take their place. The sun moved behind the shutters, and patterns of light shifted across the mats to gleam upon the polished wood of our family’s Moon shrine.

  The sense of helplessness, the suffocating kindness of the villagers that made me want to scream with frustration and cry with gratitude in the same instant – it was all too horribly familiar. I felt as if I had lost my mooring on reality – was slipping from my place in time. I closed my eyes for a second, and I was twelve years old again, weeping under my mother’s arm, staring at my father’s back and willing him to turn and look at me.

  My mother’s hand found mine, shaking fingers closing tightly around my palm. She was chilled. I clasped her hand in both of my own, trying to warm the icy skin by rubbing gently. Her eyes were like scorch marks in the paleness of her face.

  “He – he came back,” I whispered, not sure what she needed me to say. “He almost made it on his own.”

  The words were hushed, but I felt the sudden stillness in the room, a sense of breath being held. When I looked up, my mother’s friends rushed back into motion, back into speech. They seemed almost as frightened as we were.

  There is a monster in the forest.

  Never go out at the dark of the Moon.

  No one ever comes back from the Dark Wood.

  How could the rules of our reality, shaped by the last hundred years, be rewritten so utterly, without reason or warning? What did it mean?

  Oh, Moon, merciful mother of our lands, would my father survive it?

  Four

  A cloudy purple-grey dusk had fallen before Kaede’s apprentice came to fetch us. Mako was a slight, unassuming woman, a little younger than my mother, and her voice never rose above a soft, hoarse whisper – but she nonetheless extracted us effortlessly from the gaggle of Mother’s friends and our well-meaning neighbours and made it very clear that we were to come with her unescorted.

  Though it was not yet full-dark, no children ran shouting down the pebbled path, no old ladies sang as they sewed on their porches, no young men laughed and gossiped outside our village meeting house. All I could hear was the rough, quick rasp of my mother’s breath and the snared-rabbit thrum of my own heartbeat as we walked together, our shoulders brushing, through the quiet houses to Kaede-sensei’s place. Shutters and screens slid open as we passed, and I felt the eyes upon us. Fear lay like thunderclouds on the village’s rooftops, waiting to burst through the narrow streets in a crackling flood.

  The healer’s house was lit up as if for a festival night, with lanterns shining brightly through her screens. As we politely shed our shoes outside the door, the sensei herself came to greet us. Her face seemed more lined than it had this morning, the harsh light making black shadows crawl into the deep wrinkles around her eyes. With her shoulders slumped in weariness, she only came to my chin. She clasped each of our hands silently. My mother’s wide, anxious eyes kept my mouth closed as we followed her inside.

  In the great room my father lay on his back, clad in a plain white robe, with thick blankets and a mottled, slightly moth-eaten red fur pulled up under his waxen face. His hair was neatly combed and all traces of blood and dirt were gone. He looked clean and peaceful.

  He looked like a corpse.

  As I hesitated on the threshold, stricken, my mother moved forwards. She sank to her knees beside him and laid one hand on his forehead.

  “Is he…?” My mother’s voice trailed off as a movement at the other end of the room made us both start.

  To my surprise and resentment I realized that the village elders, two men and a woman were gathered opposite us. The arrangement was familiar from judgement days, when the elders sat in exactly such a neatly spaced line in the meeting house and heard disagreements and grievances, and made decisions on the matters involved. Normally Kaede was with them, but she had knelt by my father to adjust his covers instead.

  “Why are they here?” I asked. My voice came out louder and more demanding than I had intended, and my mother gave me a repressive look.

  “Hana, we are honoured if the elders choose to interest themselves in your father,” she said. But the words were not precisely a chastisement, which spoke volumes about how she felt to see these people gathered in her husband’s sickroom, apparently allowed to see him before we had been.

  One of the elders, Hayate, met my eyes. “You are fretted and worn with sorrow,” he said, not unkindly. “And wish only to learn that your father will be well. But what has happened to him concerns all of us here in this village. Remember that, please.”

  I ducked my head. “Of course. I … I am sorry.”

  The other two elders nodded gravely. Kaede made a flapping gesture at me with one hand. “Sit. You’ll give me a crick in my neck, towering over us all like that.”

  Reluctantly I eased down at my father’s feet, feeling somehow as if I had ceded precious ground.

  “Kaede-sensei, please,” my mother said.

  The healer squared her shoulders. “Physically, things are not as bad as I initially feared. His back was … cleaved open, almost as if by knives, and he must have lost a great deal of blood. But the wounds were – well, they were clean. I have washed and stitched and bou
nd them, and I believe they will heal well, if we can keep infection out, which I plan to do.”

  “Then he is well?” Mother asked, unable to conceal the hope in her voice.

  “As for that…” The usually unflappable healer seemed to run out of words. She licked her bottom lip uneasily, and my mother’s brow creased.

  Hesitantly, I asked, “Were there other wounds we cannot see? Something—” I swallowed. “Something worse?”

  “It isn’t that. At least, I don’t think so,” the sensei said. “You see, he won’t wake up. We have tried everything we know, but nothing works. He doesn’t flinch or stir when we prick him with needles, and his pupils do not react to light. I’ve seen people sleep like this before in one or two cases, but there was no blow to his head, as far as I can see – and apart from the claw marks in his back and a few minor scrapes and bruises, he seems unharmed. There is no reason why he should lie like this, unmoving. It is … an unnatural sleep.”

  “Will he recover?” my mother asked.

  At the same moment, I demanded, “Unnatural how?”

  “I fear – I greatly fear – that whatever called him out into the woods still has him in its thrall.” Kaede glanced up at the elders and let out a long sigh.

  “The monster?” My mother choked on the words. “The … the monster has a hold upon him, still?”

  “That’s the only explanation I have. I’ve always thought that people must sleepwalk into the Dark Wood. Well, he’s still caught in that sleep. And he won’t eat, and we can barely coax a little water into him. When a person doesn’t move, can’t eat or drink much, their body starts to fail very quickly. Like this … we might be able to keep him alive until the Moon is next dark. Perhaps.”