Year of the Demon

by Steve Bein

  Back then she still had reasons to climb back down. Her mother was still alive. Her father still knew she existed, even though he’d have preferred a son to a daughter. Even in those days Kaida found Ama-machi too small for her. The boys were boring and the girls were petty. It was a good thing she was the best ama her age—better even than a lot of the women in their twenties and thirties—because the only place she could go to feel sane was underwater. These days she wanted to escape even more than she had back then, but Kaida knew attempting the climb again would do her no good. How could she survive in hill country? There were no coral beds to forage for food, no waterfalls or rain catches for freshwater. She could not imagine how anyone could tell which direction was which; in her memory all those hills looked exactly the same.

  No, the only hope of escaping Ama-machi was to sail to another village, and she would not be allowed to do that until she was fifteen. She’d told herself a thousand times to forget about escape, and yet every time a ship sailed into view her heart betrayed her. Every single time it leaped with hope.

  This ship had no hope. It was the biggest Kaida had ever seen—far and away the biggest, in fact—and still she had no hope. She was red, the strangers’ ship, three-masted, all sails fat with wind as she raced the storm bearing down on her like a school of barracuda. Ribbons of foam whipped off the whitecaps at her prow. The colorful dragon that was her figurehead snarled in defiance as it surged straight for the Claw.

  Kaida heard gasps from all around her, and though she could not take her eyes from the dying ship, she knew the whole village must have gathered on the beach to watch. Rain pelted her, and the others too, but the doomed ship was as hypnotic as it was horrifying.

  The ship’s captain had no more hope of seeing Ryujin’s Claw than his wooden draconic figurehead. It was high tide; the Claw was submerged. And this ship clearly could not have been from anywhere near Ama-machi. Her captain did not know these waters. The elders always said outlanders never valued ama wisdom. They never hired locals to guide them, and so this stretch of the coast was dotted with a hundred shipwrecks.

  The elders were wrong sometimes, but not tonight.

  It was as if the gods conspired to let Kaida watch her hopes founder and drown. The clouds were black almost all the way to the horizon, but between the clouds and the angry sea was a long band of golden sky, and in the center of it, right at the horizon, the sun burned like a round red ember. The strangers’ ship sped past the sun. Each tooth of Ryujin’s Maw stood out as black as a shark’s eye against her red hull. No doubt the captain had seen the Maw. No doubt his steersman felt a wave of relief at having passed it unscathed. It was a common mistake.

  The Claw ripped the belly out of the strangers’ ship, stopping her dead despite her bulk and speed. Dozens of tiny human forms tumbled forward, as helpless as baby sand crabs before a rogue breaker. Some of the crewmen disappeared overboard. Others struck the gunwales and clung for dear life.

  A huge wave loomed over the port bow, big enough to toss any ama’s boat aside. An ama’s boat might have been thrown free of the Claw, but the strangers’ ship was too heavy, too bulky, impaled too deep. She took the wave broadside and it snapped her in half.

  Someone on the beach screamed. Others shouted, but Kaida only heard them say stupid things. Of course those sailors would try to swim this way. Most would die in the attempt. The rain redoubled its assault, hammering Kaida, nearly blinding her. The other villagers on the beach would be holding their hands against their wet foreheads, creating an eave for their eyes. Kaida had but the one hand, but she cupped her eyes with it anyway, the better to see. Hypnotized and horrified, she watched.

  The sailors in the water were learning now why the Claw was so dangerous. An invisible riptide tossed them from the Claw onto the jagged teeth of the Maw, just as if Ryujin was feeding himself. The sea dragon was insatiable. Kaida knew that all too well. He had devoured her mother, and taken Kaida’s left hand as a snack. And that had been in calmer seas than this.

  Kaida saw the waves pulp one man after the next against the rocks of the Maw, not because she wanted to watch but because she could not pull her gaze away. “Look at her,” she heard Miyoko say. “She looks like she’s going to cry.”

  “She does,” Kiyoko said, following along as passively as ever.

  “Cry your big froggy eyes out,” said Shioko. “They’re halfway out of your head already anyway. Neh, Miyoko? She has eyes like a bug.”

  Kaida refused to look in her sisters’ direction. Men were dying right in front of them, and somehow these three still found the time to pick on her. She debated dragging a boat out into the surf, and maybe recruiting her father and a few of his friends to help her mount a rescue effort. The thought lived only briefly; then she tossed it aside as easily as the sea tossed yet another outland sailor into the Maw. The surf rolled in hard enough to rebuff even the strongest oarsmen in the village, and if they somehow managed to row even halfway out to the Maw, even a hundred oarsmen couldn’t keep a boat steady in these seas. For the outlanders, a boat full of rescuers would only be one more weight to crush their skulls against.

  And yet Kaida really did want to row out there to save them. She wished she didn’t care, or at least that she could keep from letting her care show. As it was, Miyoko had only to read her face to find ammunition for her next attack. “Poor Kaida,” she said, mock-whimpering. “Do you want to swim out there and find a husband? Maybe you should. None of Ama-machi’s men will have you.”

  I wouldn’t have them, Kaida thought, and even if I would, half of them have already had you. Kaida had heard what Miyoko was doing to the boys of the village. She’d even done it to grown men. She’d done it halfway to Sen once with her hand, then run away giggling while he raged and cried. He’d tried to chase her, stumbling with his pants around his ankles and his member sticking straight out from between his legs. The whole village knew about Sen’s outburst, but not how Miyoko had started him off. But Kaida knew. She heard it from Miyoko’s own mouth, just like she heard all the rest: whispered boasts in the dark after everyone was abed, after Kaida’s father had finished rustling and puffing and grunting with Miyoko’s mother, after all the girls giggled about it to themselves. None of them knew Kaida could hear them, just as none of them knew Kaida could hear their insults over the drumming rain. Kaida never let it show.

  Miyoko repeated her taunt louder. Kiyoko aped her, and Shioko tried to outdo them both. Go fishing for a husband. No, go diving for a husband. They’ll all be drowned and still they won’t have you. It was all so predictable. They didn’t need to shout for Kaida to hear them.

  But they knew her every bit as well as she knew them. They knew she wanted to escape. They knew the outlanders’ ship embodied hope, and they knew what it meant for Kaida see it smashed to flinders. Yet they’d misunderstood Kaida’s hope for the sailors. She wasn’t malicious like Miyoko. She didn’t want to see these men die. And yet it didn’t matter to her if none of them survived. Even if none of them made it to shore, they were too many for their passing to go unnoticed. Someone would come looking for them. Someone whose ship would leave this place, with Kaida on it.

  As she watched the last of them cling to the tips of Ryujin’s teeth, battered by the waves, holding on for dear life even though death was certain, Kaida felt a small swell of hope. Realization struck her: regardless of whether anyone expected to find survivors, a rescue ship was certain to come. It wasn’t just the sailors who would be missed. Their ship was massive, expensive, and probably laden with cargo. Others would come looking for it after all. And when they came, Kaida meant to leave with them, never to return.

  22

  When at last the outlanders came, they came not by sea but by land.

  It was strange. Beyond strange. There was nothing up there: no roads, nor even footpaths; no villages; no food; no water. Yet there they were, a little line of men, black against the sunrise.

  They came nine days after the big red ship had fo
undered, but Kaida knew immediately that they had come for the ship. Outlanders didn’t come to Ama-machi. There was nothing for them here—nothing, unless Ryujin’s Claw seized some treasure of theirs. That was why Kaida had been sneaking out every morning to dive on the wreck.

  She was treading water over the skeletal hulk when she first spied the strangers. The sun had not yet risen high enough for its light to reach Ama-machi, so the village was still asleep. That meant Kaida was the only one to have spotted the strangers. If only she had already found what they’d come for, she could have delivered it to them before anyone else was even awake. Whatever the outlanders were looking for, Kaida could use it to buy her way out of Ama-machi forever. It did not matter where the outlanders took her, whether they took her back to their home or simply dumped her off as soon as they tired of her. Anywhere was better than Ama-machi.

  She took a deep breath and duck-dived straight down. The wreck was below her—the front half of it anyway—purple, not red, at that depth. To her left loomed Ryujin’s Claw, sharp and menacing. A little school of hammerheads circled the Claw, but only five or six of them, not enough to threaten Kaida. Paying them no mind, she swam deeper.

  The carrack’s bow pointed straight down into the chasm the villagers called the Whore’s Cleft, a name Kaida didn’t wholly understand. The only thing Kaida knew about whores was that the village didn’t have any and that they sometimes did was what Miyoko had been doing to the boys with her hand and her mouth in quiet, secluded places the village. The Cleft was the only rift in the wide, black shelf of rock that formed the belly of this side of the cove. The white sand of the sea floor was much deeper down, all the way at the bottom of the Cleft, deeper than any ama had ever dived in Ama-machi’s collective memory. Now the snarling dragon that had been the figurehead of the outlander’s carrack was buried in that sand, and their ill-fated ship had jammed herself between the sharp black walls of the Cleft.

  No one else in the village would dare to dive here. Not since the shipwreck. Usually the hunting was good; the wide rock shelf lay at an easy depth and was pocked with hundreds of holes for abalone to grow in. On flat days one or two boats would risk rowing a little past the Maw and the Claw to anchor out here. This morning the sea as was as calm as a sleeping baby, but Kaida knew she would be the only one to dive here today. Everyone else was worried about the ghosts. Too many dead sailors, they said. Only three had washed up ashore (and of course Miyoko missed no opportunity to ask whether Kaida might beg one of them to mount her, to get her pregnant so she could keep him). Those three burned on a single funeral pyre, but there would be no such satisfaction for the spirits of those who were swallowed up by the waves. That meant dozens of hungry ghosts, so everyone else stayed well clear the great red wreck.

  Kaida was more worried about sharks than she was of ghosts, and sharks didn’t concern her much. The big ones didn’t like the riptide near the Claw, and the little ones that could easily ride the riptide were more dangerous to fish than to people. Besides, the sharks she could see weren’t the scary ones. The ones to worry about were the ones she didn’t see. An ama knew what to watch for, how to tell an aggressive shark from one that just wanted to snatch her catch bag and swim off. But then there were the sharks that hit so hard they knocked you silly, and they disappeared so fast that sometimes an ama didn’t even know she’d been bitten until there was blood in the water.

  So it wasn’t the sharks that bothered her. The ones she imagined being out there were scarier than the real ones. What really frightened Kaida was the wreck itself.

  It yawned open before her, a blue pit deepening into blackness. Oddly it was the empty parts, the parts that weren’t there, that scared her most. The hull of the ship was arguably the most dangerous. Its mouth was a misshapen perimeter of spiky timbers and beams, hundreds of them, any one of them sharp enough to run her through if she didn’t judge the riptide right. Snapped spars, equally sharp, hung from tangled lines snagged here and there, swaying in the currents. They too could cut her open, or the lines could catch an ankle, even slip around her neck if the riptide and bad karma went against her. But for all of that, what scared her most were those deep, dark pits that once were holds. Two of them, one stacked on the other, separated by the jagged plain of the deck between them.

  Kaida didn’t like closed spaces. Her throat grew tight whenever she felt the walls were too close. It was worse when she was underwater, and not because her racing heart burned up more of her body’s breath. Her cool, wet, quiet world was her home. She did not like feeling afraid here.

  But whatever it was the outlanders had come to find, it would be in those deep blue pits or it would be nowhere at all. Ryujin’s Maw had chewed up the other half of their huge red carrack and spat it back out into the sea. Kaida had looked for it. She’d even risked a swim out to the Maw itself, to get a firm grip on one of the teeth so she could look underwater for as long as her breath would hold out. There were no timbers there, no corpses, only a few lines draped on the coral, undulating back and forth in a rhythm half a beat behind that of the waves.

  So if the outlanders had come to find sunken treasure, they would find it in the wreck Kaida was diving on. She hovered over it. It took a lot to convince herself the walls wouldn’t close in on her and swallow her up. The tides were strong. The hull was weak. It wouldn’t take much to collapse the whole thing.

  She dived deeper anyway. Not into where it was dark. Just past the toothy timbers that held siege around the open holds. The sunlight still made it here. She loved the way water caught the light, diffusing it, bending it into areas that should have been shaded. Sunlight didn’t work that way up above.

  What should have been a bulkhead now lay like a deck beneath her. Ryujin’s Claw had ripped out half of it and the tides had demolished much of the rest, but there was still enough of a ledge for Kaida to hook with her stump and hang from while she inspected the inside of the hold. Just looking inside wasn’t so bad.

  She saw some coins she hadn’t seen on previous dives. For the last eight mornings she’d brought her catch bag out to the wreck, and every time she swam back in to shore to build up her little treasury: a dead sailor’s coin purse; a bow case with some kind of pattern worked into the leather, the details of which were swollen and spoiled by the salt water; a jeweled brooch; a collection of hairpins, all contributed by the dead; chopsticks inlaid with mother-of-pearl, kept in a slender golden case; even a short sword, taken from the belt of a drowned man. She kept them all in a little hollow at the base of the cliff behind the village, buried in the sand so her sisters would not find them.

  She had a feeling that nothing in her collection was valuable, but she thought that perhaps when the outlanders came, they might see how diligently she’d been collecting and how cleverly she’d chosen what to gather and what to leave behind. The coins, for example, were meaningless. There were probably hundreds more down there, but tens of thousands more in the great cities she’d heard about in the elders’ stories. A few more taken from the wreck wouldn’t matter. The hairpins, though, or the sword, or the chopsticks in their ornate case, any of them might identify the bearer. Perhaps one of the passengers was important. Or perhaps the outlanders had search parties looking for survivors. If the brooch belonged to some noble lord, Kaida could present it to the outlanders and they would know their lord had been aboard after all.

  So Kaida did not bother swimming down to collect the coins. She did not want the outlanders to think her stupid. She swam back up to the surface, filled her lungs again, and dived on a different part of the wreck.

  She went on this way for some time, and each time she returned to the surface, she assessed the progress of the outlanders. By the time the sunlight reached down far enough into the bay to strike the beach, the outlanders had dropped long lines from the top of the cliff and several men had descended them. Other men readied large wooden boxes, which Kaida guessed they would lower to the men below. The ones up top had a huge creature with them
, its body bigger than a dolphin’s, with four tall, spindly legs. Its head was strange too, its neck long and thick, and it had a long tail of seaweed hanging from the back, just like an old turtle. She wondered if this was one of the horses she’d heard about in tales. If so, it was much bigger than she’d imagined.

  Kaida dived again, this time gliding down along the starboard side until she reached a rent in the hull. She couldn’t guess what had staved it in, but through the gash she could see more dead sailors. One wore a breastplate, and it took her several dives to cut all the cords that fastened it to the body. She used another corpse’s knife to do the cutting, which she thought was very resourceful of her, and she tucked the knife into her thin rope belt for future use. She wondered hopefully whether Miyoko would think twice about threatening to drown her now.

  She dived again, found the soldier she’d been working on, and pinched the breastplate between her knees to get a good grip on it. With her new knife she cut the last cord free.

  The listless corpse lolled to one side, floating out from under the armor. In the next instant the breastplate pulled her right into the dark hold of the carrack. Armor was heavier than she’d expected, much heavier, and now she was in the dark and alone and there were walls on all sides of her. She let the breastplate go. Something massive gave a loud thunk just below her, maybe a big shark trying to bash its way inside. No. It was just the breastplate. The noise gave her a start nonetheless. Her throat tightened; her heart flopped and shuddered like a netted fish drowning on air.

  The jagged blue window overhead was the only thing she could see. Everything else was black. She swam toward the blue, but something pushed her away from it. The riptide, making crazy currents over the hollow of the hold. It bounced her into something solid. The wall. It was caving in on her. She screamed a torrent of bubbles and swam like mad.