by Steve Bein
47
Kaida was heartbroken. All she could do was sit dripping in her wet yukata. She’d sealed her own fate.
On any other morning, she would have no fear that Miyoko would claim the sword. The water was just too deep. But between the anchor line and the extra weight of the mask, Miyoko could reach the carrack with no effort at all. Worse yet, all the ama who dived before had worked out a sort of verbal map of the ship’s innards. Kaida’s best advantage had been her knowledge of the wreck. She’d dived on it dozens of times, while everyone else came to it for the first time. Now Miyoko had detailed instructions about which holds had already been combed over, which way to turn after swimming through this hatch or that one.
On top of that, Miyoko had the mask. Every ama who wore it said she felt it pulling her toward the sword. Kaida didn’t quite understand how that worked; all of them admitted they hadn’t seen the sword, and Kaida could not grasp how they knew they were being pulled toward something none of them could see. But that hardly mattered. Miyoko had one unsurpassable advantage over Kaida: she wasn’t scared of closed spaces.
Miyoko positively glowed as Tadaaki fixed the mask to her pretty face. “Take care not to snag the line,” he told her, just as he’d told every ama before her. “Should you lose the mask, we will send your corpse down to join it. Understand?”
He’d said that to all of other divers too. Miyoko nodded and promised and did everything else a good little girl was supposed to do. Then she flashed Kaida a sinister smile and made her first dive.
Kaida hoped she’d drown. Then she saw Cho’s face.
Cho knew perfectly well that none of her daughters had ever been as deep as the wreck. Kaida’s aptitude for deep diving was freakish for girls her age. Cho couldn’t hide her apprehension: she bit her lower lip; her hands clasped tightly to each other; she held her breath.
Only when a slender white form slipped out of the battered hull did she allow herself to breathe normally. Kaida saw the tension pour out of her shoulders, and she realized then that she couldn’t wish any of her stepsisters dead. Not really. She imagined her father with the same anxiety, and then with the same relief. He would have been a more attentive father if Kaida were a boy, and that was wrong of him. The death of a son would have hit him harder than the death of a daughter. But whatever his failings, a father should not have to bury his child, and the same was true of a mother like Cho. Kaida could wish her stepsisters would disappear, but she couldn’t wish them dead.
“Too deep,” Miyoko gasped when she surfaced. “It’s too—I can’t—”
“I can do it,” said Shioko, exactly in time with their mother’s saying, “It’s all right, sweetheart, they can send someone else.”
“Get back down there,” Genzai said, as deadly calm as ever.
“I can’t,” said Miyoko, still panting. “It’s too deep.”
“Not for me,” Kaida said. “Give me the mask, Genzai-sama. I’ve been down there. You know I can do this.”
For once Shioko ignored her. “Did you see the sword, Miyoko? I can do it. Just give me the mask.”
“No,” said Genzai. “This one goes next.” And he pointed his finger at Kiyoko.
Ever the follower, Kiyoko agreed. But she trembled as Miyoko removed the mask and actually broke down crying when she donned it herself. She did not shed tears so much as squirt them. Fear gripped her entire body; she looked as if she was about to faint.
“You don’t have to do this,” said Cho. “Please, Kiyoko-chan. . . .”
As it happened, Genzai and Cho both got their way. Kiyoko dived, but she only made it halfway down to the wreck before she lost her nerve and flailed for the surface.
“I can do it,” said Shioko. At last she had the chance to outdo both of her sisters. All she had to do was touch the hull and she’d have surpassed Kiyoko. Surpassing Miyoko had been her goal for as long as she’d been alive. Her whole life she’d been catching up. Now, at long last, she had her chance to excel. And Kaida wasn’t sure she’d survive the attempt.
“Shioko, this is foolish at best,” she said. “Suicide at worst. You’ve never been that deep. You only stand to get yourself hurt.”
“Shut your mouth!” Shioko said. “I’m a better swimmer than Kaida. Just look at her. Please, Genzai-sama, let me go next. I can do it.”
Genzai looked at Kaida, then at Cho. If there was even a trace of compassion in him, Kaida could not see it. “This one goes next,” he said, and he summoned Shioko into his boat to don the mask.
She rushed her first dive, paddling with her arms to hasten her descent; by the time she reached the wreck, she had to come right back up. With coaching from Miyoko she made the second dive in fine form. Kaida started counting when Shioko disappeared within the wreck, beating time with her thumb against the haft of her hidden knife, which she’d been concealing by crossing her arms and sitting hunched—no doubt seeming sullen to everyone else. Now she forgot herself, counting forty-nine raps of the thumb before Shioko emerged again. It was a good dive. At this depth Kaida herself didn’t always stay down that long.
Shioko came up gasping, swallowing as much air as she could. Cho’s relief was almost palpable; Kaida imagined waves of it rippling through the air. “Well?” said Miyoko.
“I saw it,” Shioko said when she could manage to speak. “With the mask I saw it. It’s just as you said, far forward, almost at the bow. It’s so dark in there. You can only see with the mask.”
Kaida couldn’t make sense of that. The mask had eyeholes, not eyes. But Miyoko and Cho nodded as if Shioko made sense, and in any case Kaida had other worries. As Shioko described it, the sword was in the deepest, darkest, narrowest part of the wreck. The mere thought of such a place made Kaida’s throat grow tight.
A sudden splash broke her out of her reverie. Miyoko was back in the water. She swam over to Shioko and gave her a hug. Then, softly enough that their mother couldn’t hear, she said, “You have to get it, Shioko-chan. She can go deeper than either of us. We can’t let her have it.”
“You’re a fool,” Kaida said. “Better to cut her throat than to kill her this way.”
Genzai shot her a sharp glare; he must have thought Kaida was talking to him, and clearly he wasn’t fond of peasant girls calling him names. Cho made a face at her too; she’d heard none of her daughter’s conversation and she must have thought Kaida was talking to ghosts.
“Cho-san,” Kaida said, “you must get your girls out of the water. Do it now, before—”
“Enough,” Genzai said, as angry as Kaida had ever heard him. “You, girl, get back in your boat. And you, the mask stays on, you stay in the water. You will dive. Now.”
“Shioko, you must,” Miyoko said. Then she did as she was told, returning to Sen’s rowboat.
Shioko dived again, and again Kaida beat time with her thumb as soon as her stepsister entered the broken hull.
She reached fifty-nine and there was still no sign of Shioko. Kaida told herself that was to be expected; she was going a little deeper this time. At seventy-nine Kaida feared the worst. At eighty-nine, everyone but Cho understood what had happened, and at a hundred there was open weeping in every boat but Genzai’s.
Tadaaki tugged at the thick, taut tether. When it suddenly gave way, it was obvious he’d snapped the mask from Shioko’s corpse. Nothing floated to the surface.
“You dive next,” Genzai told Kaida, before Tadaaki had even finished reeling in the mask.
48
“It’s her fault,” Miyoko screeched. “She was the one who told us how to dive deeper. If it weren’t for her, Shioko never would have stayed down that long.”
Kaida didn’t bother to defend herself. The truth was plain for anyone who wanted to see it: it was Miyoko who killed her sister. In fact, it had been a joint effort, Shioko’s sheer competitiveness weighed down by Miyoko’s prodding. Kaida had seen it coming before it happened. She’d warned them all. No one listened.
Cho sat dumbstruck in her boat, so
stunned by her Shioko’s death that she couldn’t do anything but stare at the water. The tears ran down her face but she couldn’t even cry out loud. Kiyoko was at her side, hugging her close, Cho returning the embrace. But more importantly—to Kaida’s eye, at least—was that Cho made no effort to console her eldest daughter. Apart from Kaida, Cho might have been the only one who grasped the whole, horrifying truth.
Guilt and shame tugged at Kaida like sandbags, pulling her mind into deep, cold places. She should have said something more convincing. She should have argued more forcefully with Genzai. But her better judgment said none of that would have mattered. No one would have listened. No one ever listened.
But they were listening to Miyoko. “She killed my sister! Kaida killed my sister!” It was a litany, a mantra, maybe even a magical spell. If she said it often enough, perhaps she could beguile herself into forgetting her own part in her little sister’s suicide. A part of Kaida hoped it would actually work. Make yourself happy, Kaida thought, so long as I can get away from you first.
She swam to Genzai’s boat and clambered in. “Someone shut that girl up,” she heard Genzai say, “or I’ll send her down to join the other one.”
“Don’t,” Kaida said. “Her mother has lost enough.”
Genzai snorted. “So says the one who means to abandon her own father. Since when did you start listening to conscience, Kaida-san?”
“Shioko wasn’t the evil one. She was only trying to keep pace.”
“And you? How evil are you?”
Kaida didn’t know how to answer that. Not long ago she thought she wanted her stepsisters dead. Now she thought that was wrong. Not long ago she’d been certain she wanted to leave Ama-machi behind her. This morning, having seen her father take a stand for the whole village, she’d felt qualms about abandoning him. But Shioko’s death would drive Miyoko to new depths of cruelty. Leaving Ama-machi was no longer just a dream. She’d be killed if she stayed. And it would break her father’s heart if his stepdaughter murdered his only trueborn child. So Kaida’s only answer to Genzai’s question was “I’m not evil. I just do what it takes to survive until tomorrow.”
That earned her an approving grunt from Tadaaki. “Spoken like a true shinobi,” he said. “You may be one of us after all.”
Kaida felt a strange sense of satisfaction in hearing that. She didn’t know why. These men felt nothing at having just sent a young girl to her death. For Kaida to throw in with them now was almost suicidal. Of course, staying in the same village with Miyoko was suicide as well, so Kaida supposed she might just as well have the admiration of her potential killers, rather than their scorn.
Kaida stripped off her yukata and was now naked but for the knife strapped to her left arm. Genzai narrowed his eyes at it and gave a little harrumph. Kaida took it as a sign of approval. The strangest of the outsiders, the one with the streaming white hair, stared at her, and she felt his gaze as surely as she felt the sun. He muttered guttural chants as he caressed the demonic half mask. When Tadaaki took it from him, the old man seemed reluctant to give it up. Something in the way they handled it made Kaida suddenly afraid of it. They held it as one might hold a sleeping venomous animal.
Tadaaki leaned in toward her, and being so close, she could see into the bottom of his hollow eye socket. It was awful, all filled with scars. She supposed everyone must have looked at her stump the same way. She hated the way their eyes lingered on her scars, then darted away as if they’d never seen a thing. Now she condemned herself for doing the very same thing to Tadaaki. She looked away from his missing eye, focusing on the iron mask she’d inexplicably come to dread. Tadaaki cupped the back of her head in one hand, and with the other he pressed the demon mask to her face.
The metal was coarse, pointy in places, and the instant it made contact with her skin she felt a strange hunger she’d never known before. Hunger wasn’t even the right word for it. Hunger could be patient. Hunger could be sated. This was like a new set of muscles under her skin, writhing with need. It made her want to move, to go and take hold of something she simply had to have, but she could not figure out what that thing was. Suddenly she understood why the wild-haired one never stopped moving his hands over the mask. The same force that moved her was moving in him.
She felt Tadaaki’s fingers move to and fro around her head, around her mask, but paid them little attention. Even when he pulled the bonds tight, mashing the coarsest part of the mask against her forehead, she paid him no heed. Such trivial concerns were nothing in the face of this new craving.
The strangest thought occurred to her, one that distracted her from her fear, if only for a moment: was this the way Miyoko felt? Was she driven by some deep-seated hunger? One like the mask’s, a nameless, formless, all-compelling need? Perhaps some demon possessed her, one with a face like the mask, one that spawned a visceral urge to dominate and subjugate and hurt. If so, then Kaida could understand why Miyoko took such pleasure in it: the greatest hunger promised the greatest satisfaction. She knew what she needed. She had only to dive down and get it. Without the mask, impossible. With it, inevitable, even if it killed her.
“You know what must be done,” Genzai told her. “You understand the price of failure.”
Kaida barely heard him. She got in the water and fixed two sandbags to her feet. Tadaaki handed her a modified kaigane, its scoop curled like a bird’s talon so Kaida could hitch it to the anchor line leading down to the wreck. Everyone else could do that with one hand while holding on to the prow with the other. Kaida could not, so as soon as she hooked the line she was already plunging toward the bottom.
She’d never gone down this fast. Equalizing the pressure in her ears was impossible without a free hand. She felt like someone was pushing chopsticks into her ears.
But soon enough her toes touched down on the broken, silt-covered carrack. When she freed herself from her sandbags, one of them slipped into the hole in the hull and instantly vanished. The sight of it terrified her. In her eyes the wreck had just devoured the sandbag, and now its mouth was open and waiting for her.
Even the mask’s strange hunger did little to quell her fear. Her throat grew tight. Her heart started pounding; she knew it would consume her body’s breath too quickly. The sheer length of the mask’s tether frightened her too. She’d only used a third of its length in getting down this far. She had a long way to go yet, and all inside the gutted wreckage.
Steeling herself, she drew her little knife from its sheath on her stump, and in one deft stroke she snipped the tether linking Tadaaki to the mask. The outlanders wouldn’t be happy with her for that, but she’d planned on doing it long before it was her turn to dive. The thought of being snagged by the face while trapped in the wreck was too frightening to contemplate. Freeing herself of the tether was the only way she could make herself go in.
She let the mask’s weight pull her inside. Its craving had a direction now. She could not yet put a name to that hunger, but its object was directly below her. And the hold was not as dark as she thought. Remembering what Genzai had taught her about imagination and fear, she let herself fall deeper.
An open hatch lay before her. She swam through it face-first, pulled downward by the mask. The light was lower in here; what little she could see was purple, not blue, except for the yawning black mouth of another open hatch. She avoided that one. Others had gone down there. It was a dead end. But there was supposed to be a second hatch here, right next to the first. Was she in the wrong hold? Had she gotten lost already?
She looked up to find the sun and find her bearings. Shioko looked back down at her.
It was her stepsister’s last ambush, but it gave Kaida such a fright that she thought her heart might jump out of her chest. Shioko’s pale face almost glowed in the twilight of the wrecked ship’s bowels. Her eyes stared blankly; her mouth hung open. Her arms and legs dangled like braids of seaweed from a mooring line.
Recoiling in horror, Kaida accidentally found the second hatch. It must
have fallen shut somehow, and in the low light it was indistinguishable from the rest of the bulkhead. She’d only found it by backing into it. Now she wondered: had it fallen shut on Shioko, trapping her? Had she spent her last breaths pushing it back up? How hard she must have fought to free herself, only to see daylight just as the water filled her lungs?
More than anything, Kaida wanted to retreat. Push off hard and kick for the surface. Get her panic under control and dive again. But she knew she could never make herself enter the ship’s corpse again. Not after seeing Shioko. Not after seeing where her own body would come to rest.
Kaida hefted the closed hatchway and fell through it. It was the hardest, bravest, most foolhardy thing she’d ever done. Drawing her knife again, she stabbed it into the swollen wood, jamming it so that the hatch could not close. It would still be heavy, held down by all that water, but at least Kaida would be able to see its outline when she came back up. If she came back up.
And now she had no choice but to surrender herself to the mask. She could sense the object of its desire quite clearly now. It still lay deep below her, calling to her somehow. A long, graceful curve, glowing in the darkness the way sunlight glowed through closed eyelids. It could only be a sword.
The mask pulled her straight down. Kaida couldn’t see a thing. Something clubbed her in the shoulder. Kaida tried not to imagine what it might be. She tried to focus more on the craving of the mask than the demons conjured by her imagination. Her throat was as tight as if Miyoko were choking her.
She fell headlong, cold water flowing over her skin, and soon collided with a wall of soft, waterlogged wood. She hit face-first; tiny pinpoints in the mask bit into her forehead. She pushed the pain out of her mind. In so doing, she became aware of her body’s other pains. Those chopsticks were back in her ears, pushed in deep by all the water overhead. Worse, her lungs burned as they’d never burned before. Now Kaida understood how Masa had died. It was the mask that killed him after all. The demonic hunger of the mask erased the pains of the body, and those pains were the only voices telling Kaida to go back up for air. The closer she got to the sword, the less she feared drowning, and that lack of fear was more dangerous than anything else in the ocean.