Year of the Demon

by Steve Bein

  She thought about this for a while as she watched the sunlight play on the ocean. Waves rose and fell, all of them devoid of boats. Dinner in Ama-machi would be sparse tonight. Dinnertime conversation would not. Every tongue would waggle with tales of the outlanders, of preternatural speed and superhuman strength, with talk of portents and kami, with frantic speculation about what might have brought demonic outlanders and ghosts from the sea to visit Ama-machi at the same time.

  It was stupid, Kaida thought. Embarrassing, even. Her whole village, everyone she’d ever known, cowed by four strangers. For all Kaida knew, only Genzai was dangerous. The other three might have been sand sharks, scary to behold but utterly harmless—unless you were a mollusk. Kaida harrumphed and frowned. She lived in a village of mollusks.

  Part of her knew that was unfair. The fate her father had suffered was scary. Giving Genzai a wide berth was prudent, not skittish. Once she made that observation, Kaida realized she’d never grasped the difference between being cautious and being afraid. Every morning she’d gone diving on the wreck she’d felt what she thought was fear. Now she identified it as caution. And being cautious while diving on that wreck wasn’t weakness; it was . . . what had Genzai called it? Foresight. That was it. Swimming near Ryujin’s Maw was dangerous enough even when there wasn’t a wreck lurking out there, ready to swallow her up if the current swept her the wrong way. Being wary of that was no weakness at all. It was wisdom, if someone in her teens could be said to have any of that.

  She’d just made her mind up to recruit a rower and go abalone hunting when she heard her stepmother calling for her. “Kaida, you’re father’s well enough to speak to you now. You poor little thing, you must have been worried sick. Come on inside.”

  It was much cooler in the house, though it also stank. The elder women must have made a poultice of some kind, and whatever it was, it left a cloying bitterness in Kaida’s nostrils. Her father sat on a futon with his back against the wall, naked to the waist, his right arm wrapped up from his collarbone to the tips of his fingers in strips of whatever cloth was ready to hand. His arm reminded her of a sea cucumber, fat and strangely rigid, as if it would have been flexible if only it weren’t so swollen.

  Cho had been in the doorway to call Kaida inside, but now she sat with her husband, stroking his unbound shoulder. Kaida stopped short when she saw Cho’s three daughters kneeling in a row beside her.

  “Kaida-chan,” her father said. “Come here. Don’t be afraid.”

  “I’m not afraid. How are you feeling?”

  “They say my shoulder will probably get better soon.”

  Typical, Kaida thought. Trying to seem strong in front of his women. “Come in,” he said. “Sit with your family.”

  “Standing is fine,” she said, her hand resting on the doorframe. “What do you want to talk about?”

  “Kaida-chan, you must get this evil idea out of your head. You cannot run off with those men. Think of what everyone will say.”

  “I already know what everyone says. If I leave, at least I won’t have to overhear them anymore.”

  “You’re thirteen. I will not have people whispering that my daughter is a whore.”

  Kaida felt the muscles quiver below her right eye. She bit her lip to keep it from quivering too. For the briefest of moments she thought her father was cross because he’d miss her if she left. And perhaps some part of him would. But what he wanted most of her was for her to have been born a boy, and since he couldn’t have that, what he wanted now was for her not to malign his good name.

  It wasn’t so long ago that he hadn’t thought that way. When Kaida’s mother was alive, he’d still wanted sons, but he’d still treated Kaida with affection. But after her mother was killed, after Kaida lost her hand, he’d never quite looked at her the same way. She felt like scar tissue, a reminder of what had once been whole, and it horrified her to think that her own father thought of her the same way she thought of the ugly, jagged, slick-skinned, distended worms that twisted this way and that on the stump of her left arm. When she looked there she felt anger and loss, and if she didn’t want to feel those things she just looked somewhere else.

  “A whore?” Kaida said. “The ones who say that about me are sitting right there. I heard Miyoko this morning, saying I’d bought your life with my mouth. She didn’t mean talking to the outlander, either. Go on, ask her what she said.”

  Miyoko gasped. “I don’t understand what you mean,” she said. “Kissing? What is she talking about, Mother?”

  “Miyoko never said anything to me,” said Shioko. “Did she say anything to you, Kiyoko?” Kiyoko shook her head and shrugged.

  Cho clasped her hands in her lap. “Kaida-chan, you’re a very sweet girl, but I won’t have you putting filthy ideas in my daughter’s heads.”

  “They don’t need me for that. The boys put filthier things than ideas in their—”

  “Kaida!” Her father winced in pain and bit down on the knuckle of the hand he could still move. Shouting must have shifted something in his arm. With his fist still pressed to his face, he said, “I will not have you speak of your sisters that way.”

  “They’re not my sisters.”

  “They are. I married their mother. That’s all there is to it. Now you will put this nonsense about running off with foreigners out of your head.”

  He had more to say, but Kaida was distracted by a shout behind her. Over her shoulder she saw two of the outlanders standing by a row of overturned fishing boats. Genzai wasn’t one of them. Some of the villagers had gathered there too, forming a makeshift fence between the boats and the outlanders.

  At last. Some backbone. Kaida twisted around to see what was going on. Someone shouted that this was his boat. One of the strangers replied, but Kaida couldn’t hear him over the protests of other fishermen. There was more shouting, and the fence closed in around the strangers.

  The outlanders waited to react until they were wholly surrounded. Kaida could not see what happened first. What happened second was pandemonium. The fence disintegrated; the strongest men of her village scattered like sand crabs fleeing a shadow. Of the five that were left behind, three were bleeding from the mouth and nose and the other two nursed broken bones. The outlanders seemed unscathed. One of them stood at the prow of two boats and picked up one in each hand. The other did the same with the sterns and they walked back toward their little encampment on the north end of the strand.

  When they came back for the next two boats, no one offered resistance.

  25

  Since no one but the outlanders was diving, Kaida had a lot of time to think.

  She sat atop the Fin, a high, sharply angled rock in the middle of the beach, watching the waves and running through the conversation with her father—with her “family”—over and over in her mind, wondering how she could have made it go better. When that grew tiresome, which was almost immediately, she recounted the fight on the beach. To see Ama-machi muster its courage had caused such a swell of pride in her. It proved that hers was not a village of mollusks after all, that there were a few vertebrates among them. But then it was all the more heartbreaking to see their backs broken instantly, to see their courage crushed like a paper boat.

  It surprised her how much she wanted to root for the people of her awful little village. Perhaps she hoped to see some saving grace, some virtue—any virtue—that made it shallow for her to want to leave. But there was no such grace, no such virtue. And in any event, even if she never rooted for the outlanders, she hadn’t yet lost her fascination with them, either. If anything, her curiosity bored deeper, pressing on her, demanding her attention. It seemed strange to her that the outlanders waited until they were wholly encircled before they attacked. As handily as they’d defeated the mob of fishermen, it was self-evident that they had risked little by giving their enemy a superior position. But why risk anything at all? The outlanders could have won just as easily by charging straight in.

  The moon rose behind her,
the sun sank before her, the stars came out one by one, and still Kaida could not figure it out. She thought about other things in the interim, to be sure: how Shioko’s malice was different than Miyoko’s; whether malice in order to fit in, to avoid being left on the losing side, was better or worse than malevolence for its own delights; why Kiyoko seemed to have no voice of her own, wicked or otherwise; why outlanders didn’t know how to dive—as, surely, they did not, if Genzai’s people were any guide; whether Miyoko had any control over her cruelty, or whether it was the true puppeteer and she the puppet; whether Kiyoko made any moral judgments at all; whether Miyoko was capable of feeling guilt or shame; what the difference was between Miyoko’s being amoral and Kiyoko’s having no position of her own to call moral or immoral; how the Fin came to be there; whether her father and Cho could go about their rutting with his arm as badly injured as it was; why her father had yet to thank Kaida for sparing all his fingers; whether standing by one’s word was an admirable thing if one spoke in Genzai’s merciless language. But wherever her thoughts meandered, they always came back to that fight on the beach.

  All the ones who had fought—or been injured, anyway; it was hard to say the villagers did much fighting—were now in the one house left in the village where fires and lamps still burned brightly. All the elders were in there. Kaida’s father, youngest of the village elders, had to be carried there by his wife and stepdaughters. The fathers of all the village families were there, along with all the injured men who could walk or limp their way to attend. They were meeting to discuss how to deal with the outlanders. No one had announced as much, but there was no other explanation for the gathering.

  That left the mothers and grandmothers of the village at home, and left the children to do whatever they had a mind to. No sooner did that thought occur to Kaida than she wondered what mischief Miyoko was brewing. That was when she heard footsteps in the sand.

  They were nearly inaudible, all but drowned out by the hissing surf, but Kaida had sharp ears. “I’m going to break every joint in your hand,” she said loudly, “starting with the thumb and working my way across.”

  “What?”

  It was Miyoko’s voice, below and behind her, off to the right. That would put Kiyoko on her left flank, also down on the sand. Shioko, always needing to prove herself, would be climbing the spine of the Fin to push her off.

  “Shioko-chan,” Kaida said, not turning around, keeping her voice as tranquil as she could, “I’m telling you, if you put your hand on me I will break every joint in it.”

  “How did she—?” said Kiyoko.

  “Never mind,” said Miyoko. “She’s a freak. Let’s go.”

  “I can still get her, Miyoko.”

  “You can’t,” said Kaida. “Climb down now, Shioko, while you still have two good hands to do it.”

  “You don’t have two good hands,” said Shioko. “You’re a freak.”

  “Follow Miyoko. It’s what you’re good at.”

  Kaida forced herself not to turn around and watch them go. Part of her wanted to know what they’d been planning, and whether they’d brought anything with them to play their little game. Miyoko often armed her sisters with sticks and ropes, sometimes with an oar or a spare scrap of net, but this time Kaida wouldn’t indulge her own curiosity. Better to savor the moment. Better to let them think she didn’t need to turn around to watch their retreat. Better to know that the next time they called her bug-eyes, they’d have to wonder if she really did have bug-eyes in the back of her head.

  Once again her mind returned to the puzzle: why did the outlanders allow themselves to be surrounded? Just now, Miyoko and Kiyoko had tried to flank her while Shioko moved in to push her off the Fin. Why wait until they were in position? Surely it was better to strike first, or at least to choose Kaida’s path and ward off the attack before her enemies seized the advantage.

  At last Kaida could tolerate the riddle no more. She jumped off the Fin, sinking to her ankles in the cold, wet sand, and walked to the outlanders’ camp.

  She caught their scent before she heard them. They had a fire going, but she smelled only wood smoke, not fish or rice steam or any other food. A steady breeze pushed at her, weighted down by the scent of salt water as well as the other smells.

  As she drew closer the breeze carried a strange guttural chant to her ears. Closer still, she made out muted conversation, and she thought she could pick out a pattern in the chanting. She could see little of the outlanders, as they’d built up a high mound of sand and rock, almost like a dune. The glow of their fire rose from behind it, as if a tiny sunrise were about to happen just on the north end of the beach.

  As she made her way around the leeward side of the dune, sand shifted behind her. She whirled, but not in time to keep something from grabbing her hair. She let out a squeal and grabbed whatever was holding her. She’d half expected to find Miyoko’s fist there, but it was a big man’s fist and for all she could move it, it might as well have been made of iron.

  She clung to it anyway, hoping to support at least a little of her body weight with something other than her scalp. “I’ve caught us a fish,” said the one who caught her, and he dragged her by the hair into their camp. Her heels scrabbled for purchase the whole way, but there was nothing but sand to push against, no way to reclaim her balance.

  “I seem to remember throwing this fish back into the ocean,” said a bemused Genzai. His deep voice unsettled Kaida in a way she could not quite understand, though she did understand that with a big man dragging her around by her head, the fact that she even noticed Genzai’s voice indicated full well how scary she found him.

  “Let her go, Masa-san.” Kaida fell to the sand the instant Genzai spoke. “What are you doing here, little girl?”

  Kaida looked up at Masa, who in turn looked down at her. He was surprisingly skinny for one so strong, but Kaida saw his skin was drawn tight across his chest and arms, as if there was nothing soft in his entire body. He wore his hair long and scraggly, and that was what made her remember him: he was one of the two on the beach who let themselves get surrounded. He cocked his head to one side, studying her as if she were an insect he’d never seen before. “She’s got ears like a wolf, this one.”

  “Does she, now?” said Genzai.

  “Heard me coming,” said Masa. “Me.”

  “I didn’t,” said Kaida. “You got hold of me before I could get away.”

  “True, but you started to turn around before I caught you. I must be losing my touch.”

  Who are these people? Kaida asked herself. Masa was skinny, yes, but not so skinny as to slip between grains of sand. She’d walked right past him on an empty beach and never noticed him. She’d heard travelers’ stories of yuki-onna who could turn their very bodies into snow, and she wondered whether Masa had a similar ability to turn himself into sand. In the stories the snow was always whipped up by the wind, just as the wind sometimes whipped up sand into whirling spouts. She wondered if snow was some outland kind of sand.

  “Well?” Genzai said. “What are you doing here? Has your father hurt your feelings? Do you want me to break his fingers after all?”

  “No,” said Kaida, taking in the rest of the camp. Four men sat around a little campfire, all like Masa, skinny and strong at the same time, though among all of them Masa was the only one who struck her as friendly. Two of the others busied themselves around a second fire. They’d built a sort of house for their fire, a three-walled house mostly embedded in the little dune they’d piled up. Its walls were flat and straight, more of a wind shelter than anything, and as Kaida could not see the long boxes they’d lowered from atop the cliff anywhere, she guessed the outlanders must have broken down the boxes to build the little house. The floor of the house was a deep ring of stones filled with glowing red embers.

  Tending the fire was a one-eyed hunchback close to Genzai’s age. The empty socket of his missing eye seemed to stare right at her. The hunchback worked constantly at a bellows, a device Ka
ida had only seen once before. She was little at the time. An outlander’s ship had run afoul of the Maw and they’d unloaded everything to row it ashore. The outlander had told her a bellows was a house for a little birdie, and when Kaida peeked inside he shot a gust of wind right in her face and made her giggle. That outlander hadn’t been sweating like this one. This one knelt beside the ember bed, and pumping his bellows seemed like a lot of work.

  The one squatting beside him chanted ceaselessly, heedless that his wild, white, wispy hair might well catch fire. At first Kaida thought he was naked and entirely covered in hair, but as her eyes acclimated to the flickering red light, she saw he had clothes—or what passed for them, anyway. He wore nothing but tattered ribbons of threadbare cloth, seemingly colorless except for the orange glow of the fire. Clothes, beard, and hair alike floated on the breeze. He took something out of the fire, banged it with loud, ringing strokes of a hammer, and pushed it back in among the coals.

  “I don’t remember you being so easily distracted, Kaida-san. Is it past your bedtime?”

  “No,” she told Genzai. “It’s just—I’ve never—well, what are they making?”

  “That’s none of your concern. What are you doing here? Have you come to ask to go with us again?”

  “Go with us?” Masa said. His scraggly hair rippled when he laughed. “Where?”

  “Anywhere,” Kaida said. “Anywhere but here.”

  Masa chuckled again. “And what is it you think you’ll be doing once you get there?”

  It was the same question Genzai had asked. Kaida thought it was weird that these outlanders all had the same question. “I’ll do whatever you want me to do,” she said. “Dive. Fish. Whatever you—”