Year of the Demon fb-2

by Steve Bein

  But her mother would protect her. Even in the face of this hell-spawned storm, she sang the song of the little Kaida-fish.

  Thunder clapped again. A wave moving in the wrong direction smacked the stern and spun the boat like a little child throwing a stick. Kaida’s father lost his grip on one of the oars. Her mother’s hand darted out faster than Kaida thought possible. She snatched the oar’s grip in midair and thrust it back toward her husband, who damned the wind and the waves and his spent, wet hands.

  Kaida felt her mother’s arms wrap around her once more. She would be all right. All of them would be. Storms are stronger than men, her mother always said, but they have no patience. We only need to outlast them. That’s what she always said, and already Kaida could tell the thunderheads had blown out most of their anger. She could hear her mother’s lullaby a little better now.

  Her father never saw the other boat coming.

  It caught them broadside, flung by a rogue wave. Wood screeched louder than thunder. Then it burst apart, shooting splinters everywhere. Kaida caught a volley full in the chest. Only afterward did she realize her mother took as many in the arm, protecting Kaida’s face.

  Kaida watched her family’s boat crumple like washi paper. The other family’s boat plunged on, shearing itself in half like a giant barracuda opening its mouth wide, bearing down to bite Kaida’s boat in two. The sidewalls split down the middle, the bottom half submerging with the keel, the top half exploding into a hail of splinters as big as the bones in Kaida’s forearm. The bottom half of the boat dragged its occupants down with it. Still the two boats plunged on, ripping each other apart. Huddling against her mother, Kaida watched the other family go under. She could feel it through the soles of her bare feet when one by one the keel crushed their heads to pulp. It was merciful; at least they would not drown.

  Drowning was every ama’s worst fear, and Kaida knew she and her parents were likely to face it soon. Their boat wasn’t taking on water; the water was taking it. The starboard side was no more than a jumble of ragged timbers. Kaida felt her guts heave up into her throat. The boat crested high above the sea, carried by the biggest wave Kaida had ever seen. For a terrifying moment she could see Ryujin’s Maw. Its black teeth dripped with white foam.

  Then the sea dashed her family right into the Maw.

  The world was nothing but darkness and noise. Kaida thought drowning would be quiet. She did not expect it to thunder so loud that it drowned out her other senses.

  She tried to clap her palms over her ears, but she could only move her right arm.

  Just for an instant, the noise abated. Just for an instant, there was light. Kaida saw her mother huddled over her, hugging her close. She saw her father too, his back against sheer black rock, holding on to the inside of their rowboat as if some crazed mob were trying to pull it away from the other side. Then she understood. Somehow they’d landed between two of Ryujin’s fangs, and the weight of the water wrapped their little boat around them, trapping them as snugly as a turtle in his shell. But a turtle had flesh and bones to keep its shell attached. Kaida had only her father, fighting the sea with a tenacity found only in wild animals and madmen.

  Kaida tried to help. It was stupid—she was a little girl, without a tenth of her father’s strength—but she tried to grab the boat anyway. She couldn’t reach with her right hand; her mother was in the way, so she tried with her left. Once again her left arm would not move. She looked down to see why.

  Her hand looked like a stomped-on crab.

  It was almost next to her nose when she turned to look at it, so she could see all the details clearly. Part of the boat pinned it to the black, bloody rock. Some of her fingers were still intact. The hand itself was nothing but jagged bones. They stuck out in crazed directions, all a-jumble.

  The world went black again, the water pressing their turtle shell back down with deafening fury. When the noise relented the light came back, and Kaida got a good look at her dead mother.

  • • •

  Kaida sat bolt upright under her covers. She didn’t scream—not with her stepsisters around; she knew better than that—but she remembered screaming back then. She remembered the echoes of her cries within the wreckage of the boat, the intermittent fits of blackness and noise, the hope in every black moment that perhaps when the light came again she’d see she was mistaken about her mother. But the dark had been worse than the light. In the light she could see what was. Once the dark closed in around her, she could only imagine, and imagining made it worse.

  She pressed her stump to her chest, trying in vain to slow her panicked heart. The house seemed smaller when she was afraid; the ceiling felt too close, as if it might collapse at any moment. She couldn’t stay inside. She couldn’t stay inside.

  As silently as she could, she slipped out of bed. She tried to think of Masa, how quiet he could be, how he had melded into the sand the night she met him. Then she thought of how his dead body slumped when his friends dropped him in the shorebreak.

  A moment’s inattention was enough. She didn’t crouch low enough when she passed by the window. She’d exposed her silhouette, and she should have guessed her father’s injuries would make it hard for him to sleep.

  “Kaida? What are you doing awake?”

  “I’m sorry, Father. I just have to go outside.”

  She tried to make it sound like she just had to pee, but her heart was still racing; she couldn’t keep the tremor out of her voice.

  “Kaida-chan, what’s the matter?” said Cho, her voice raspy and sleepy. Even now, after all these nights, Kaida still forgot Cho slept with him. Hearing Cho’s voice coming from her father’s bedroll startled Kaida every time.

  “It’s all right,” her father said. “She just gets frightened sometimes.”

  “Father, no—”

  He didn’t hear her, but Kaida couldn’t risk raising her voice, couldn’t risk waking her stepsisters. They couldn’t hear what was going to come next. They just couldn’t. It would be the end of her.

  “Father—”

  “She was right next to her mother when she died,” he said, oblivious. “Dark, close spaces have troubled her ever since.”

  Kaida froze. She held her breath, the better to hear whether anyone else was awake. If even one of the other girls overheard him, Kaida’s life would descend into a kind of misery that made everything she’d suffered so far feel like a mild sunburn.

  But no one stirred. No one’s breath changed its pace. Kaida lingered for a moment just outside the door, listening, but she was safe. Her stepsisters were all asleep.

  All the same, she stayed outside until she could make herself pee, close enough to the hut that Cho would hear her. Better for Cho to be confused in the morning. She was still groggy from sleep; maybe she’d remember the peeing and not the rest.

  Kaida crouched outside and hugged her knees. It was cold, but she forced herself to count to a hundred before she went back inside. If the disturbance has jostled any of her stepsisters even halfway out of sleep, Kaida would allow them plenty of time to sink back into their dreams.

  At last she crept back inside. Wiping the sand from her feet first, she padded over to her little bedroll. Just as she reached it, skinny, cold fingers tightened around her ankle.

  “To think,” Miyoko whispered, “all the things we’ve contrived to torture you, and all we really needed was to put a sack on your head.”

  Kaida’s guts went cold. She wanted to cry. She wanted to stomp on Miyoko’s hand, maybe break some bones. But that would only make things worse. Her father and Cho would hear. Then Kaida would be the villain, not Miyoko.

  “Or maybe flip over a boat, neh, Kaida-chan? Sit on it with you under there. Maybe even bury it. What would you think about that?”

  Kaida could almost hear Miyoko’s triumphant smile.

  45

  Ama-machi was just waking when the outlanders invaded. Kaida was the first in her house to hear them; her father lived close to the center of
the village, and screaming from somewhere on the outskirts roused Kaida from a fitful sleep.

  She felt like she hadn’t slept at all. First the nightmare, then thinking of Miyoko’s new weapon all night; it was enough to make anyone exhausted, and an ama’s life was exhausting to begin with—especially an ama with only one good arm. Nonetheless, Kaida pushed herself out of bed, shivering at the transition between the warmth under her covers and the cool dawn air. She knew she had to move quickly, just as she knew it was the outlanders who had caused the screaming.

  A loud shriek from next door woke everyone else in the hut. Her father sat up in bed. In his dreams he’d forgotten his injuries; instantly he was flat on his back again, favoring his ruined arm and wincing. Kaida could see his teeth clamping down, oddly bright in the twilight. She wished she could stop for him, tend to him, do something for him. But she also knew that Miyoko might well kill her today—and if not today, someday soon. Miyoko already had no sense of when to quit. She could not begin to guess how terrified Kaida was of close spaces, and that meant every word of protest would goad her on. Even Kiyoko and Shioko wouldn’t be able to talk her down.

  And that meant Kaida had to escalate weaponry too. She’d figured that out last night, lying in her bed and staring up at the thatch, listening intently to Miyoko’s breathing and wondering what would happen if she just smothered Miyoko and got it over with. In many ways that was the easier course. She’d do more than free herself of Miyoko; she’d be exiled from Ama-machi for life. It wasn’t much of a punishment for someone who wanted to leave anyway. But Kaida wasn’t like Miyoko. She didn’t delight in causing pain. And as much as she hated Kiyoko and Shioko, as much as she wished her father had never met Cho in the first place, she knew Miyoko’s death would hurt them so deeply that they’d never recover. Kaida knew what it meant to lose family. She wouldn’t resort to anything so extreme unless she had no other choice.

  And since Miyoko had no such compunctions, Kaida knew she might have to resort to extreme measures soon. She slipped through the doorway and immediately saw one of the outlanders moving in her direction. His back was turned—he was talking to someone just out of sight—and Kaida threw herself behind her family’s hut before he turned back around.

  She pressed herself to the wall, heart pounding, and heard him barge into the hut. There were shouts, protests, the sound of ripping cloth. “You get out there or I’ll kill you in here,” the outlander said, and everyone inside had wisdom enough to see he meant it.

  Kaida froze, listening to them make their way outside. It sounded like Cho wasn’t alone in getting her father to his feet; Kiyoko might have been helping, but it was hard to be certain. “Get out,” her father said. “What right do you have to threaten my family?”

  “Is one broken arm not enough for you?” There was a grunt from the outlander, a slapping sound, a cry of pain. “I’ll break the other and send you out for a swim. Move!”

  A small part of Kaida wanted to have sympathy for her father. He certainly wanted for it. But the greater part of her was bitter and hurt. “My family,” he’d said. He could have asked the outlander what they’d done with his trueborn daughter, but no: his first concern was for Cho and her evil offspring.

  It was not hard for Kaida to wait in silence as the outlanders dragged her “family” away. She heard her father groaning in pain, but she could do little to help him even if she wanted to, and at the moment that urge was unusually easy to suppress. She didn’t move a muscle until everyone was well clear; then she sprinted toward the sea cliff behind the village.

  She found the old camphor tree with its big gnarled root pointing at the foot of the cliff. When she dropped to her knees, she was still panting so hard that she could see each breath hit the sand. A flat rock the size of a rice bowl lay nearby; she picked it up and started digging.

  When she was elbow deep she wondered if she was digging in the wrong spot. Then the edge of the rock rasped on something hard, and with a little more digging with her fingers she found her knife.

  Yesterday she’d given thought about keeping it under her pillow, but that was far too risky. Nowhere in the village was safe enough; there were too many eyes, too many people wandering about, too many little children playing games in all the good hiding spots. The knife didn’t do her much good this far away, but she didn’t want to just throw it back in the ocean either. And now she was glad she hadn’t; if Miyoko wanted to take their little war to deeper and more dangerous depths, now Kaida could go deeper too.

  It took a little work to hide the knife properly, but for once her stump worked to her advantage: her yukata never fit right—the left sleeve was always much too long—and with her teeth and her right hand she found a way to tie the scabbard tightly enough to her stump that she could hide the knife up her empty sleeve.

  By the time Kaida got back to the village, everyone she’d ever known was huddled together on the beach, a dark, whispering mass not far from the Fin. Kneeling and sitting as they were, they looked like a shoal of big, docile birds. The outlanders surrounded them—but only if surround was the right word to use for six people corralling a hundred. As soon as she thought of it that way, Kaida marveled at it. How could six men imprison a whole village? And how could the people she’d grown up with be so utterly cowed by only a handful of outlanders? She had no love for life in Ama-machi, but she did respect many of her neighbors. That respect was ebbing away even as she looked at them.

  She moved cautiously, remembering all too well how easily Genzai and Masa had disabled her, fearing what the outlanders might do if they found her armed. Genzai might believe her if she said the knife was for her stepsisters, not for outlanders, but none of the other outlanders would care. Flitting from the shadow of one house to the next, she got as close as she could to the beach without being seen. In the end she had to sneak into one of the elders’ huts—a grave transgression; she could hardly believe she was bold enough to do it—and peer out the window.

  Genzai marched up to the base of the Fin, holding one end of a long, bulging, rolled-up tarpaulin. The one-eyed hunchback held the other, and Kaida wouldn’t have been surprised if they had a full-grown seal rolled up in there, because it looked unbearably heavy. Genzai was as strong as any man in the village, and the muscles in his arms stood out as if they were about to tear free.

  “We come with an offer,” Genzai announced. As ever, his voice was deep but soft, emotionless but utterly riveting. The villagers strained their necks forward to hear him.

  “There is a shipwreck in the bay, and somewhere deep in the wreckage there is a sword. Its name is Glorious Victory Unsought. No doubt that name means nothing to you. In a place like this its power is meaningless. This is a sword capable of carving out an empire, while your village is no more than a barnacle clinging to the edge of the empire, so far away from anything that matters that you’re not even aware it’s an empire you’re clinging to.”

  He said it without the slightest hint of derision. For him it was a simple observation, and if any villagers took offense to it, Genzai showed no sign of noticing. He spoke to them just as he might have spoken to a cluster of barnacles, Kaida thought.

  Genzai still held his end of the heavy, rolled-up tarpaulin; the tendons in his arm quivered, taut as an anchor line, but he still spoke as if he were sitting calmly on the beach. “Even the dullest of you will already have guessed we have taken our turn at diving on the wreck,” he said. “The brightest of you have already guessed that we have not yet found the sword. I have decided that one of you will find it for us.”

  “Why should we?” said Kaida’s father. Even with a ruined arm, even though his every breath pained him, he was always the first one to defend Ama-machi’s interests. Even though she still felt hurt, Kaida found herself feeling proud of him too. “The Maw is treacherous. Why should we risk our lives for a sword that’s no concern of ours?”

  “Because you’ll be amply rewarded,” said Genzai, and without ceremony he dropped his
end of the rolled-up tarpaulin. Gold spilled out like water. And not just gold; jewelry, jade, treasures of every sort Kaida had found and then some. Miyoko gasped with delight. Shioko did too, and a beat later Kiyoko followed suit. Their mother, Cho, had a similar reaction, and she was not alone; at least half of the adults rose halfway to their feet, the better to see the riches gleaming before them.

  Kaida thought it was stupid. What could they buy with all that pretty gold? The sea provided everything needed for life in Ama-machi, and to the best of her knowledge, Kaida was the only one who wanted a life elsewhere.

  “Name your price and you shall have it,” Genzai said, “if you are the one to retrieve the sword.”

  A wave of chittering swelled up among the villagers, but the loudest voice belonged to Kaida’s father. “What price is so great that we can enjoy it in the afterlife? Show us what else you took from the sea yesterday. We saw your friend’s body.”

  That caused chittering of a different tone. “You said it yourself,” Kaida’s father went on. “That sword of yours means nothing to us. We have no intention of risking our daughters for it, and neither will we risk them for you.”

  “A commendable position,” Genzai said. “I salute you.” He scratched behind his beard. “You put me in a difficult position. I told my men any ama village worthy of the name would provide us with good divers, and as you well know, I am a man of my word. So if none of your daughters will dive for us . . . hm. I’ll have broken my word. That won’t do.”

  He folded his legs and sat in the sand beside Kaida’s father. As if speaking to a co-conspirator, his voice so low that Kaida could scarcely hear him, he said, “But I think there may be a way out. If I were to kill every last one of your women, down to the newborn girls, it would no longer be an ama village worthy of the name, would it?”

  Seated as he was, he was vulnerable. The villagers outnumbered the outlanders more than ten to one. And Genzai had just threatened every family among them.