by Steve Berman
Shiro didn’t mind the thought of a tengu scrambling his brain into incoherency. To some, that would be a fate worse than death, but thinking had only led to sorrow in his opinion. Perhaps he would find some peace in the insanity.
“You’ve brought me to a nice view, friend,” Shiro said.
“A nice view of the heights?”
“Of course. And a nice view of you.”
The tengu snorted.
“Did your fellow monks not teach you how to address us beings? You repent first and then you flatter me. If you do it well, then I’ll bring you back down the mountain. If you don’t, well … There are no riddles from me; no trickery. Humble yourself in exchange for your life.”
Shiro thought for a moment. He took a slow, careful seat on the branch and tried not to think of the drop. “Can you tell me your name?”
“My kind doesn’t give out their names freely. What’s yours?”
“Humans don’t either, at least, not to demons. Monk is fine.”
“Hm. Then you can call me Crow.”
Shiro nodded. He still had his belongings and wasn’t injured, which was good. The tengu didn’t seem particularly bloodthirsty, so Shiro scooted close to the trunk and proceeded to climb down the tree. The tengu paused, flew over to a branch above him, just out of reach.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Crow asked.
“I didn’t think you would help me down. It’s no issue. I’ll manage the climb on my own.”
The tengu jumped branch after branch, until he squatted and rested his arms on his legs, mask pointing at Shiro with an accusatory glare. “I kidnapped you to repent. You’re failing your task and cedars don’t have branches at the base. What is your plan?”
“What do you know about me that needs repenting?”
“I know you’re a monk, but your hair is long. That you are fat and slow and that the items in your bag are expensive. I saw you with your cats. Did you think you were some little god who ruled over the felines? How quick they abandoned you. And now you’re all alone.”
“You’ve been watching me for a while, then?” Shiro stood on a branch and smiled upward. The tengu leaned forward, bowing his branch so that a dusting of white snow covered Shiro’s shoulders. “I think you’re the one trying to flatter me.”
“Human,” Crow cautioned.
“You’re no different from a cat. You inconvenienced me for attention, I imagine. Or because you were bored.” Shiro laughed. “If you were really going to kill me—“
The tengu jumped down to his branch, bent it enough to send Shiro off balance, and slapped him once with the back of his wing. If it weren’t for the snow, the fall would have hurt him more. As it was, it still hurt him some.
Shiro stared up at the tree, dazed.
The tengu leaned forward.
“Run away, monk! Return to your people and tell them to never set foot in my woods again.”
The tengu made to leave, but paused after extending his wings, staring down as Shiro made an awkward limp away. “That’s not much of a run.”
“The fall hurt my ankle,” Shiro said.
The tengu hesitated. “Consider yourself lucky that I didn’t eat the eyes from your head instead.”
Crow left him to his hike.
Shiro was used to cats. Once he was aware one was around, he heightened his senses to their little tells. The shuffle of feet, the creak of wood as they jumped atop it, or the sound of nails in tree bark. Now that Shiro knew he was being followed, he hobbled slowly down the mountain and could sense the tengu nearby. Shiro found himself laughing. He was used to being left alone, not stalked. When he got halfway down the mountain and a break in the woods showed him some of the valley, he studied the miles of wilderness, the small town miles off, and the trade route cutting straight through it all.
If he was to go out and make something of himself, then these demon-haunted woods seemed a good a place as any to settle down.
CROW TERRORIZED HIM.
Shiro would wake in a cave, a cliff, and once, was adrift in a river. He often spent the better part of the day returning to his home, though once it took him almost a week. The villagers got used to their new, self-proclaimed artist stumbling through town for water with dirty, torn clothes and a bemused expression. No danger ever befell him on these mandatory sojourns, however. Whenever he heard the growl of a wolf or some other nightmare, there was a yelp and then silence. Sometimes, he talked aloud to Crow the entire way back, but there was rarely a reply. Only the occasional sigh. And, even rarer, a quick laugh from high above.
Seasons slipped by and Shiro drew them, but never failed to add in a cat. He became well acquainted with his immediate country and soon found it easy to navigate, until his longest wanderings only took three nights to traverse back to his home. Shiro came to love nature in a way he never had as a farmer. He didn’t have a knack for trying to bend it to his will or organize it, but he enjoyed building a home amidst the chaos. He cut trees, went fishing, trail-blazed a path to the main trade road, and took to lazing about, shirtless, in his wildly unkempt garden. When Crow kidnapped him and brought him somewhere new, Shiro had the feeling that Crow was trying to show off the prettiest parts of their valley.
Each time that Shiro made it back home, Crow flew ahead to wait for him on the perch of Shiro’s roof. As though Crow hadn’t been following him the entire time. The tengu laughed while mocking him—his state, his late timing, his skin burned from tan to red by the sun.
He yelled down, “Have you gone mad yet, monk? You’re more hair and beast than human! How can you call yourself anything but a failure? Look at this little lean-to in the woods you call home and despair. I’ve seen nests sturdier.”
Shiro stood by his door each time, arms crossed, craning his neck to see the tengu.
“I see you’ve stopped by,” Shiro said. “Are you coming in?” But the tengu never did.
Shiro had never been cunning enough to insult others, but he fought back in small ways. He spent a summer’s day threading a large nest atop his roof and, when the tengu arrived to land, Crow became all fluster and feathers. He cursed him and kicked the nest from the roof, claiming that he was no ordinary songbird, no pet. Shiro collected the fallen feathers. He hung them from his door and when villagers came to look at his art. They seized the huge feathers in their arms, whistle, and asked what beast they came from.
“Just a pest,” Shiro said with a smile.
Once a season, a traveler would stop by for the night, offering their life story or a trinket for board. Some were flings; most were strangers. Some asked to be painted, but Shiro said he was cursed to draw cats—only cats. Some travelers he drew as cats, and they laughed together at the portraits. Some knew of the tengu that haunted him, and asked if he needed help getting rid of it. Shiro shook his head. He had already spoken to the local monastery a year ago about Crow and they knew of him. They said that Crow was the least of their concerns. Monsters far deadlier lived only steps from the road, the monks told him. Besides, this wasn’t Crow’s territory at all—couldn’t he tell?
Shiro could. He saw it in the bent branches around his home, where Crow undoubtedly slept. He saw it in Crow’s ever watchful eyes when he peered out at their surroundings as they talked. Or when Crow was scuffed from some fight. He wasn’t too different from a cat in that manner, both being creatures of predator and prey.
When Shiro turned Crow’s discarded feathers into a cloak, the tengu refused his gift, hissing, “Would you consider wearing a shirt of your own hair or shoes from welded toenail slivers?” But the present was gone the next day, either way. And, a week later, Shiro received his first and only gift from Crow.
He woke up on the nearest mountain and spent most of the day scaling down it. He stopped in town for food, then met Crow sitting atop Shiro’s home. Clenched in the tengu’s foot was a cat. He threw it down at Shiro and Shiro dove to catch it. When Shiro put the cat down, he saw that something was wrong with the feline. It mov
ed on front paws, bore a broken, bent back and was a missing tail. It was still young. Not yet one year old. On the street, it wouldn’t survive much longer. The wounds were old, though, so Shiro discounted Crow as possibly being the predator to paralyze it.
“Do you like my gift? Long may you look at this whelp and know that it suffers endlessly. Long may you be too weak to kill it and give it peace. And long may you know that, in your weakness, you will let it limp on like this, hurt and broken for all its days.”
Shiro bent down and held out his finger.
The cat gave a nervous, though curious sniff.
“Crow, this is the kindest thing anyone has given me. Thank you.”
The tengu said nothing, but watched him bring the cat inside. After Shiro made a bed for the cat to sleep in, he turned and saw Crow’s long-nosed mask peering around the doorway.
“It will have no companions,” Crow whispered. “If you bring another cat home, I will kill it.”
Shiro offered him a cup of tea.
“Monk, why would I drink your dirt water?”
“It’s Shiro, actually.”
And the tengu didn’t cackle or curse him. Or fly off. Crow paused, lowered his face, and whispered something to himself.
It was the closest Shiro had gotten to Crow. And he knew enough about beasts to know when approaching would scare one off. Shiro kept his hands at his sides instead of reaching out like he wanted to. He sat at the table and Crow took a tentative step inside. The cat ran its awkward, sliding run under paper scrolls and hid from the tengu. It peered out with bright green eyes.
“Shiro,” Crow repeated.
“Shiro of the family of rice planters. And you?”
“I don’t remember my name. But …”
“But?”
Crow hesitated. “My family was from the coast. Fishing folk, I imagine.”
“They say tengu are born out of the souls of people who have been killed.”
“Some do.”
“The souls of vain people.”
“Yes, so it seems.”
“Won’t you sit?”
“I would never stoop so low. I’d rather sit on the floor.”
“The floor is open.”
Crow remained standing.
“I’ve been wondering, Crow. Do you have some unfinished business? What is it you want? After all these years, I can’t imagine.”
“I’m not a common ghost. What makes you think I want a thing from you?”
“Do you remember your previous life?”
“Our lives are seeds, aren’t they? You fell the crop that grows and in its place a new one sprouts. That’s what you monks seem to think, anyways.”
“Who knows? I don’t remember a single past life.”
“Not the most enlightened, are you?”
“No.” Shiro laughed. “I was far from it as a monk. I still am.”
Crow sighed. “I shouldn’t be wasting my time on somebody that isn’t a real monk. Or somebody who is selfish, though, somehow, not vain. That’s not what tengu do.”
“I’m glad you do, though.”
“I figured.”
The tengu looked over his room without moving from his spot. He stretched a wing and knocked stacks of drawings over, which further sent the cat hiding. “You’re not even good at being an artist. You haven’t made a profit from it, after all these years. You never moved away to richer places.”
“You do keep a man humble,” Shiro said.
“It is my purpose.”
“Well, perhaps I’m content here in these backwoods. With crates for chairs and you watching over me.”
Crow looked to him. There was something in that stare that made Shiro continue, emboldened.
“Tell me, friend, who is it you’ve been protecting me from? This isn’t your territory. The monastery says these are dangerous woods, but I’ve never had any trouble.”
“Don’t flatter yourself. I torment and protect a great deal of other forest homes.”
“From whom?”
Crow folded his wings back up, and gave a low huff. “The Goblin Rat. But don’t worry your little empty head about her. She won’t bother you.”
“Why?”
“You’re a poor artist. What makes you worth a thing to a rat?”
“It makes sense. In the end, I suppose I’m only worth a thing to a crow.”
As Crow turned to take his leave, he paused by the door. “There’s nothing vainer than infatuation.”
Whether Crow said that to Shiro or to himself, Shiro did not know. Either way, Crow didn’t come back.
Shiro regretted his words and spent long nights thinking them over. The truth was, he wanted a demon in his home. He wanted a tap on his door, Crow’s black eyes, and the sneak of a monster crossing the room to his bed. He wanted hands on his throat—murderous at first glance, but softening to loving. Until the two of them were nothing but bed and feathers.
Still, Crow did not come back.
Shiro was left alone for the first time in years. He kept to his cat and his art, trying uselessly to draw something not feline. But when his brush pulled away from the paper, he was left with a cat-bird hybrid. He didn’t let it dry, but tore it apart in long slivers.
PERHAPS CROW WOULD STAY AWAY forever. Perhaps the best way to banish a demon was to make them uncomfortable with the prospect of love, then never see them again. There were endless tales of monsters seducing humans, but what of humans being the one to reach out? By extending one arm, did monsters run away screeching? He didn’t want to think that Crow had fled out of physical repulsion. Shiro knew he was not handsome, but he was proud of the man he’d grown into. His hair was graying and starting to thin, but he was a human and humans were shaped by the world around them. He could trace the farmer, the scholar, and then the secluded artist in his features. He had callused hands but a taste for laying around, savoring others cooking, and going to town on festival nights.
Just as Shiro didn’t try and tame nature, he didn’t attempt to tame his appearance. He was how the world had shaped him. He was himself—hairy, burly, and with a moustache that refused to grow without a bald patch in it. There was no use trying to alter his body into what others wanted in order to appease them. And those others included Crow.
Sadly, tengu were creatures built on vanity and Crow spent more time preening every feather into its perfect place than he did flying. Shiro hoped that his friend wasn’t so shallow as to think lowly of him because of his looks, but Shiro was unsure. Crow was guarded, and now he was gone.
Shiro sat watching the changing, cycling world and petted his sickly cat. He had come to enjoy those silly kidnappings. He didn’t travel without them. Instead, he holed up in his house and kept the door open, inviting anyone to come and take him to some new mountain or forest path. He slept, rolled up amongst sheet after sheet of paper, with ink stained to his skin.
His number of visiting travelers dwindled. When people rested in his home for the night, they now only spoke of the Goblin Rat and her cohort. They asked if he knew anything at all about how to beat her or if he could sell them talismans, but he wasn’t magically inclined. He gave them sheepish smiles and said he didn’t do much but draw cats, really.
The Goblin Rat terrified the valley, but not because she was a warmonger who left scores of people slaughtered. In truth, her cohort didn’t kill many people at all. But rats were rats, and they were nearly impossible to keep out. She could fit through the smallest crack in the floor. She worked silently. While never maiming entire homes, her rats burrowed their way into the mouths of sleeping people. They attacked too quickly for the victim to scream. Then, once the rats choked the person to death with their own bodies, they took over and walked in the person’s corpse. They pulled at the human’s vocal cords and neck muscles, making them talk. The rats worked as a team for the Goblin Rat’s plans. What those plans were, nobody knew. But her corpse-walkers traded in town, bought weapons, jewelry, and the finest of foods, before hauling
it all back to the woods. Nobody knew how many had been killed by the rats, but a young boy was struck by a cart and, to everyone’s horror, when he fell down with a shattered bone poking through his thigh, there was no blood. A rat’s sniffing snout emerged from the body, startled. It alerted a pack of rodents that expulsed from the boy and into the streets until all that remained was a husk of skin and bone, everything else eaten clean away.
Perhaps the rats inhabited only one person; perhaps the rats had taken over half the town. People started cutting their hands to show that there was clean blood beneath. A few died from infections this way.
Shiro started to wonder if Crow hadn’t simply run off. Or maybe Crow was killed by the Goblin Rat the very night Crow told him about her, as though speaking her name aloud had summoned her.
It was reckless to live in the woods alone, but the Goblin Rat had never bothered him. Sometimes Shiro found the torn corpses of rats around his woods. Still, he knew his cat’s disability prevented her from taking down something half her size.
But he didn’t understand the tengu. If Crow was going to keep watch over him, Crow might as well pester him. It seemed unfair to have a friend who risked his life for Shiro without bothering to drop by for tea.
It made him feel pathetic.
Shiro took his brush out from the case, laid out his floor with paper, and stood over it. His cat went from scroll to scroll, trying to find the best place to stretch out and nap.
He breathed out. Talismans. He had seen monks and demon hunters use them before. There couldn’t be too much to them—could there? The worst-case scenario was that they did nothing but make the townspeople feel safer. He tried to make them ornate, but his characters slowly started looping and he made up the kanji he needed as he went, thinking of lofty and vague words (Justice, Begone, Protection, God’s Blessing).