Year of the Demon fb-2

by Steve Bein

The stranger looked at her with a mix of curiosity and amusement. Under his knee, her father howled like something inhuman, his cries punctuated by coughs and sputtering sandy sounds. His arm was like a rope in the outlander’s hands, boneless, jointless.

  “Please,” Kaida said. She’d never seen violence like this, and with stepsisters like hers, violence was a part of her daily life. But theirs was vindictive, even joyful in its own twisted way. This was brutality at its purest, utterly devoid of emotion. “Please,” Kaida said, “let him go.”

  “What have we here?” said the stranger, eerily calm and soft-spoken even after all he’d just done. “A little girl with half an arm and an armload of gifts. What are these?”

  “From your ship,” she said. “I’ve been diving for them.”

  “Have you, now? And what else have you found?”

  Kaida looked at the other three strangers, who were still busily working at their knots. One of them looked over his shoulder, studied her for a moment, and went back to his work.

  “This is all,” Kaida said. “This and my knife.” She put her hand on it, moved to pull it from her rope belt, then thought better of it. It wasn’t a good idea to draw a weapon on this man. “You can have it too, if you want. Just let him go.”

  “Fond of blades, are you? I can see you like that little pigsticker better than all the rest. You keep it.” With his thumbnail he scratched his chin just behind his beard. “Who is this fool to you?”

  Kaida swallowed. Her throat was growing tight, just as it did back in the dark hold of the ship. The way the stranger looked at her made her want to run away. She wished she could hear some sign of agitation in his voice, the tiniest little hint that the process of tearing another human being’s arm apart caused his pulse to quicken. She wanted to run, but she forced herself to stay; she even dug her feet a little deeper into the sand. “He’s my father.”

  “And what is your name, child?”

  “Kaida.”

  “I’m afraid I’ll have to break your father’s wrist and fingers, Kaida-san. I am a man of my word.”

  Without so much as a blink he snapped her father’s wrist. Another scream erupted from her father’s mouth, stifled by sand and a fit of coughing. Every cough jostled his maimed shoulder, which made him grunt and groan, which made him inhale more sand. His whole body trembled with pain. The stranger wrapped his fingers around her father’s thumb.

  “You said arm,” Kaida said, spitting the words out all at once.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You said every joint in his arm. His fingers aren’t in his arm, they’re in his hand. You don’t have to break them.”

  The outlander cocked his head and raised an eyebrow. “Hm,” he said. After a moment’s thought, he said, “A fair point,” and he stood up, dropping her father’s arm.

  It flopped to the sand like a boned fish. Her father cried out but did not move. Was it fear or pain that pinned him there? Kaida could not tell. “I am Genzai,” said the stranger. “It is a pleasure to meet you, Kaida-san.”

  Kaida didn’t know what else to do. Somehow the words “pleased to meet you” slipped out of her mouth and she found herself giving a little bow.

  That made Genzai laugh. His unflappable calm had unnerved her, but his laugh was worse. It was a deep, sinister rumble, barely a laugh at all. “You’re a brave little girl,” he said. “Why don’t you tell me what all these trinkets are for?”

  Kaida looked at the ground, where the mother-of-pearl chopsticks in their golden case lay atop all the other treasures she’d collected over the past few mornings. They didn’t seem like treasures now. She had imagined the outlanders would be impressed by all she’d gathered for them—clues, she had thought, as to what was in the wreck, or even who. She thought they’d thank her for saving them so much work. She hadn’t imagined one person could cripple three big men in the space of as many breaths. These people didn’t need her help. They were more than capable on their own. And now all her treasures seemed like a little girl’s toys.

  “Well?” said Genzai.

  “I thought . . . maybe . . .”

  “Spit it out, child. Don’t tell me your courage has left you already.”

  “I thought maybe you could take me with you. When you leave.”

  Her father moved then. With an effort he raised his head to look at her. Half of his face was a white mask, sand clinging to sweat. “Kaida, what are you saying?”

  “She’s saying your little village is too small,” said Genzai. “I should know. I come from a speck of a village like this myself. Little wonder that she wants to escape. Have you been buggering her? Your own daughter?”

  He narrowed his eyes at her father, and for a moment Kaida feared he would go back to ripping bones out of sockets. At length he said, “No. She came to your rescue. Maybe she wants to leave because the men in your village need their teenage girls to rescue them. Is that it, Kaida-san? Is this place too small for a girl of such heroic bravery?”

  “I’m not brave,” she said.

  “Kaida, why?” said her father.

  “Shut your mouth. We’re talking.” Genzai’s tone was still calm, exactly as it had been just before he destroyed her father’s arm. He scratched behind his beard, studying Kaida closely. “What makes you think I want to take a little girl with me when I leave here—a little girl with half an arm, no less?”

  “You don’t. That’s why I brought you the . . . the treasures.”

  That earned her another smile from Genzai. He laughed like an earthquake would laugh. “Treasures? Indeed. It must have taken you all morning to haul these up, what with that stump of an arm of yours.”

  “Eight.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Eight mornings.”

  “Oh, ho. Do you mean to tell me eight days ago, you woke up and decided to dive for ‘treasures,’ just hoping that someone like me would come along to ask you for them?”

  “No,” Kaida said. Her face flushed and she looked down at the sand. She didn’t hope they would come. She knew they’d come. They had to come, because if they didn’t Kaida would be stuck in Ama-machi for two more years. At least two more, and even then her best hope of getting out was to marry some boy in another village just like Ama-machi. A bug-eyed, one-armed girl’s prospects for marriage were dismal indeed, and Kaida didn’t see much she liked in boys anyway. Most of them were mean, and the ones that weren’t had no more backbone than a jellyfish. Miyoko got them to pick on Kaida all the time. She enjoyed using her cruelty that way, the same as she enjoyed the baby sparrows she sometimes stole from nests, twisting their little necks to see how far they’d go. So either Kaida would get out with the outlanders, or else she’d stay here to get worn and hollow and brittle like a piece of driftwood.

  But she couldn’t say any of that. Not with her father listening. Instead she just said, “I knew you’d come.”

  “Then you have as much foresight as you have courage,” said Genzai. “Impressive in one so young. But useless nonetheless—and good luck for you that you are. Tell me, Kaida-san, what is it you imagine strangers would do with a little girl once they took her away?”

  “I don’t care. Just so long as I get out.”

  Her father gasped, as pained as she’d ever seen him. Genzai looked at her too, a hint of curiosity on his otherwise impassive face. “You make for interesting reading,” he said. “Too smart to be spouting such hopeless naïveté. In another girl, yes, but not you. You really are desperate, aren’t you?”

  Kaida glared at him. She felt her eyebrows and cheeks scrunch up, heard her breath coming loud through her nose. “Just take me with you,” she said.

  “I’m sorry, Kaida-san. I don’t have any use for little one-armed girls, not here and not where we’re going next. You keep your ‘treasures.’ Tell your father and his friends not to bother us again.”

  24

  It was everything Kaida could do just to help her father to his feet. His right arm hung from his
collarbone as limp as a ribbon, and the slightest movement nearly made him faint from pain. A lifetime of diving made Kaida strong, but not strong enough to carry a grown man by herself.

  No one else dared to go back for Haru-san, the fisherman whose knee Genzai had destroyed, or for Sen, who still lay curled in a ball. Kaida would have thought him dead if she hadn’t heard him breathing, his voice big and dopey even in unconsciousness. She had to go back for Haru-san alone, serving him as a human crutch, and since Sen was the biggest of them all, there was nothing she could do for him. She tried to talk some of the men in the village into retrieving him, but they would always listen to her father before they listened to her, and what they heard from her father was wails of torment as two of the elder women tried to reset his shoulder. There was no hope for his elbow; it would have to mend on its own.

  Kaida overheard the elder women saying as much while she sat outside their hut, watching another long box sliding bit by bit down the sea cliff, lowered from above by the horse, perhaps. Now and again her stepmother, Cho, would walk by. She’d taken to pacing around the hut since she couldn’t bear to watch what was happening inside.

  “You poor thing,” she said as she reached Kaida once again. “How scared you must have been. And bless your heart for bringing him back to me.”

  “I didn’t bring him back for you.”

  “Oh, of course not. He’s your father. I know that.” She crouched in the sand and put her hand on Kaida’s knee. “And you know it pains me how my girls pester you so. You do know that, don’t you? You poor dear.”

  “Make them stop, then.”

  Cho gave her a loving, pitying look, like she was trying to smile and frown at the same time. “You know that I would if I could, don’t you? It’s just in a young girl’s nature to be petty sometimes. And their father . . . well, he wasn’t kind like your father is. He hurt them in ways a father shouldn’t. Do you know that when he died, my girls didn’t even cry?”

  Kaida remembered that. No one’s death was a secret in Ama-machi. When it happened, Kiyoko and Shioko seemed more relieved than anything, and Miyoko’s grief was so obviously fraudulent that afterward she’d actually practiced lying until it was second nature.

  “They’ve been through a lot,” Cho said. “And you have too. Poor thing. Being a teenage girl is just hard, isn’t it? I was your age too, you know. I know how you feel.”

  Kaida scowled at her. Cho knew nothing about how she felt. She had two good hands. She had a pretty face. And if the other girls made fun of her when they were young, it would have been for taking too many boys back into the weeds. Some whispered as much about her even now. Kaida knew her father had his dalliance with Cho even before his wife—his real wife, Kaida’s mother—was killed. It was only natural that they should get married so soon afterward. She was still fertile enough. He was without sons. Cho might provide him a few.

  Just then Sen came stumbling groggily into the village. It seemed he’d woken of his own accord, for the outlanders had left that area. Now they were on northernmost end of the beach, closest to where the wreck had sunk. Their long, heavy boxes lay in the sand like a row of sleeping seals.

  Two more outlanders were descending the ropes, which made for a total of six down near the village. A few more outlanders remained atop the cliffs. Kaida had heard horses needed caring for, which had always seemed strange to her. Nothing in the sea needed humans to care for it; these horses must have been exceptionally stupid. In any case, the horses were up there, and the outlanders with them reappeared now and then to to toss firewood off the cliff. Their kinsmen below collected it and stacked it by their encampment on the beach. They already had a mountain of it, and they were gathering more.

  That meant they were planning to stay for a while. Kaida wondered how much time she had to figure out a way to abscond with them when they left.

  • • •

  Despite the morning’s hostilities, there was no good reason not to be diving or fishing. It was a perfectly good day for it, yet even by high noon there were still no boats on the water. The outlanders had everyone spooked.

  Kaida didn’t fully understand why. She’d never seen violence like Genzai’s before, but for all intents and purposes she was the only one who had seen it. Haru-san had dropped before the fight even started, and by the time he hit the ground he was already clamping his eyes shut and gritting his teeth, as if he could somehow squeeze the pain out of his body. Kaida’s father felt all of the violence and all of its lingering ripple effects, but he saw very little. Anything Sen had seen was locked in that turtle brain of his and wasn’t coming out. The fourth fisherman’s memory was wildly fantastical, twisted out of proportion by blind panic. His story changed by the hour; surely no one took him at his word for any of it. So while Kaida was afraid of Genzai and his companions, she didn’t see why anyone else in the village had an excuse.

  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.”