A Small Charred Face

by Kazuki Sakuraba

  But strangely, instead of getting angry, Father simply grinned once more. When we talked alone just the two of us like this, I felt like I could almost see how he had been a thoroughly ordinary cheerful youth before he became king. No, perhaps it was just my imagination. This great man was our king, after all.

  “Of course, as the one who rules the takezoku, I must put a stop to any independent action like that… Which is why, you see, I’ve decided to not have noticed, officially.”

  “Huh? Umm…”

  “The truth of it is, splitting our people into two groups slightly increases the probability of the takezoku’s survival, of not being wiped out. In which case, it might be that I shouldn’t stop them. No, that means…”

  Bewildered, I looked up at him. Before he left, I thought I heard him mutter, “After all, even a king is uncertain at times.” But I couldn’t have. Our imposing, powerful, emotionless king would never let slip something so fainthearted.

  “Ah! You’re back? What’s wrong?”

  Around dawn of that night, one of my friends called out to me suddenly from below, and I grew flustered. I spun round and round again in the silver sky, and then, my light-blocking cape fluttering lightly, I slowly descended and landed gently on the deck of the nearly complete ship stationed on the river.

  A few more friends came out from the hatch and grimaced at each other upon finding me there. The babbling of the flowing water soothed me. The snow had only just stopped falling, so the deck was slick with moisture, shining transparently. Hesitantly looking at each of my friends in turn, I slowly cocked my head to one side.

  “That’s right. We didn’t build it to go sailing on the river. This is—we’re planning to use this ship to leave the country. Yup!”

  Invited once more into the rough hut, I sat cross-legged on the ground. I looked at my friends out of the corner of my eye as they busily finished up work on the ship and packed their things. “So that’s it.”

  “I can’t believe you figured it out. Oh! Right, so you went back to the castle and heard the idea about the takezoku moving into the mountains, and it just came together for you like that?”

  “Uh? Y-yeah,” I assented, vaguely. I couldn’t just broadcast the fact that Father had been the one to realize what the boat was for.

  Smiles grew on my friends’ faces. Fortunately, it seemed that they had wanted to talk to me about this too. They took a break from the work and began speaking all at once.

  “I mean, it’s not like we were hiding it because we wanted to!”

  “It’s just, you’re part of the royal family. We’d only be making trouble for you. You’re so serious, you know? And…”

  “We actually wanted to ask you all kinds of questions. You’re so smart and everything.”

  “Like, those new people in the village down there, they have it in for us. And then we heard this rumor about moving deeper into the mountains. And, like, we talked about it every night. It’s true that by going deeper the humans wouldn’t find us, we’d be safe. But, like…”

  “Basically, it’d be like deliberately running away to the past, you know? Right?”

  “And we’re young and all. We don’t have property or status or anything. We live this broke life. So then, you know…”

  “We thought about the opposite. The opposite of the mountains! Down the river, out to sea! Right? So then…”

  A handsome young man in a corner of the hut who had been flipping through the poetry collection with the bright-red cover looked up. He picked up the thread in a quiet voice. “If the times are changing, then we have to go not to the past, but to a new world—the land of the future. Maybe that’s our destiny.”

  “The land of the future?” I repeated in a small voice. The words almost shone with light, surprising me.

  The young man nodded. I looked around, and the faces of my young friends seemed to be filled with a quiet hope. My heart pounded.

  “Oh!” A different, larger youth approached, looking serious. “This was my idea, wasn’t it?”

  “Was it?”

  “Now, look! I’m originally Japanese, right? I was traveling through this area, and the people in the village at the foot of the mountain tricked me. They made me a sacrifice for the harvest festival! But the old king thought I was interesting because I knew about this faraway country, so he saved me, transformed me into a takezoku! I was talking about that country on the other side of the ocean, and that’s why you guys all started talking about going to check it out, instead of being scared about the whole idea.”

  “Oh, that’s right. I totally forgot.”

  “Come on, you guys!”

  “Well, anyway…”

  I lent my ear to my friends’ conversation, and the dawn grew closer bit by bit. I smiled, listening quietly.

  “Basically, we’re going to cross the ocean and look for new land. As long as night comes and we can raise livestock, monsters like us should be able to live happy lives pretty much anywhere! As long as we have courage in our hearts!” I heard a cheerful voice exclaim, and I nodded.

  The sky outside was bright with pale light. If I wrapped myself very tightly in my blackout cape, I’d still be able to make it back to the castle. The whole point of each of us being given a cloth like this was so that we could go out during the day, after all. Aah, but…

  “Hey, can I sleep here? So much is happening, and I’m learning all this stuff all of a sudden. I have so much to think about. And I’m totally exhausted by it.”

  “What are you talking about?! A member of the royal family sleeping in a filthy place like this?”

  Rubbing my eyes, I turned around. A girl with short hair had opened her eyes wide in surprise. She hadn’t said much of anything up to that point, maybe because she didn’t quite get along with everyone.

  “Why not?” I wrapped myself in my fabric and dangled from the straw ropes hanging down from the ceiling. “It’s all the same to me.”

  “What? Really?”

  “What?”

  “Maybe I misjudged you…”

  “Huh?” I closed my eyes and fell asleep, my head spinning in a million different directions.

  The next evening.

  I stared blankly when I woke up, not knowing where I was. But then I remembered and grinned as I dropped down lightly.

  My friends’ hut alongside the river. The earthen floor was cool, damp, soft. Just like when I woke up in the hall at the castle, I assumed I was the first awake tonight, so given that I had a little extra time, I decided to take a look around. But two or three others were already awake, drinking blood from a vessel, packing up, going about their work.

  “So, um,” I said in a small voice, winding the orange light-blocking fabric around me.

  “Hello. Wait, you slept here too? I didn’t even notice at all!”

  “Yeah. So I was thinking while I slept—um, no, wait. It’s nothing.” I shook my head.

  The boy reading the poetry collection lifted his head and looked up at me curiously. A girl sitting near me pushed the vessel of partially drunk blood at me. I thanked her and took a big gulp. It was warm, filling.

  The night became quiet again. My friends woke one after the other and naturally split off into groups to attend to the livestock, work on the boat, or clean the house. It seemed that there was no one person who might have been called the leader of the house.

  I remembered the things they had told my little brother the previous night and quickly moved to help with the livestock, surprising the others.

  “You’re good at this! You really can do anything, huh?” one friend said.

  I became embarrassed, wondering if I was in fact intruding again, and stopped what I was doing.

  “You’re good at this? Then help me,” a different girl said, and handed me a tool. Quietly, matter-of-factly, each person became immersed in
their work.

  After working for a while, I muttered again to no one in particular, “I was thinking…”

  One of my friends looked up. “Wait,” she said, as if just realizing something. “Don’t you have to get home at some point? Isn’t it time for your governance lesson?”

  “Yeah. It is. Um…”

  “So what, then? That’s quite a serious look on your face.”

  At this, the twenty or so people in the hut all stopped moving and looked toward me uneasily from wherever they stood.

  I couldn’t back down now. I slowly opened my mouth, mustered my courage somehow. “Uh, um…”

  “What is it?”

  “Can I come to the land of the future too?” My small voice echoed through the hut. My friends looked at me, expressions of surprise rising up onto their faces.

  “You cannot!” someone shouted. Everyone else began to shake their heads in agreement. I looked around at them all, surprised.

  The thoughtful-looking young man with the red poetry collection stood up. On behalf of everyone else there, he spoke. “It’s just…you’re royalty. You’re not like us. You’re a girl of noble birth, aren’t you?”

  “But! I! It’s not like I wanted to be born into royalty!” Even I was surprised at the words I shouted. And then I realized that I’d actually felt like this for a long time. I sent up a silent apology to my father and my siblings. In the next instant, my opposition to the royal family, the way it placed value on only the eldest boy, exploded. But then I remembered my father’s face in profile, his expression almost that of an orderinary boy as he talked about the boat to cross the ocean, and love and respect filled my heart. I was confused. Suddenly, tears were pouring down my cheeks.

  “You can’t cry about it.” The poetry boy slowly shook his head. “You’re a noble person by birth. Er, so basically, it’s common takezoku like us who can jump on this boat and go off into the unknown. Or, you know, guys like him who were born human and later became takezoku. You’re just too wonderful for this.”

  Right, that’s right. Everyone came together, timidly trying to convince me. A friend I was particularly close to touched my shoulder as if to comfort me. “The highborn are the backbone of the takezoku. You have to go into the mountains.”

  I guess so… My head hanging, I started to agree.

  “Wouldn’t that be good, though?” came a small sharp voice from a corner of the room, sounding annoyed. “If she came with us!”

  Everyone looked back with a gasp. A girl with short hair was squatting on the ground, needlework in one hand. I remembered her from the brief conversation we’d had about me staying over before we’d gone to sleep that morning. She stared up at us, her face slightly dirty.

  “Huh? What’s with you all of a sudden?”

  “I mean! This girl, she’s supposedly smart, and she seems all right. You get to like her! I thought she was just faking it ’cause she’s a royal. I’ve hated her this whole time. But then this morning, when I saw her just sleeping all fine like that, I realized I totally got her wrong. I’m fine with getting on a boat with this girl. She doesn’t throw her weight around like the other princes and princesses. We’d prob’ly get along, actually. First of all—huh? Umm…” The girl had been speaking forcefully but then suddenly began to stammer and mumble, perhaps picking up on the still-unfavorable mood in the hut.

  “Look!” she said earnestly, jerking her chin up. “There’s that! We’re, like, going really far away, and in the end, we’re going as takezoku, so, you know…if we had a royal with us, maybe it’d give us a little courage. You know?”

  “Courage, huh?”

  “Right? Look, I mean, there’s like a toy throne on the boat, so how about if there was maybe a monarch just for us, a royal kid? But a nice one!”

  “H-huh? A monarch?” I parroted back in confusion. At most, I wanted them to let me on the boat as a nameless emigrant, but the conversation shifted abruptly to the liege of the settlers.

  My friends looked at each other, glanced at me, and started discussing it all at once.

  “Hmm?”

  “Right!”

  “Nah, we do like you and all.”

  “I mean, you’re a princess, but you never look down on us.”

  “But, like, I heard she’s the smartest and brightest of all six of the kids in the royal family. We can’t take a princess this amazing and ask her to come be our king.”

  The boy with the poetry collection cocked his head to one side and looked around like he was considering the idea. Then he stared at me, examining my face closely.

  It was time for my lesson; I had to go home. I moved to leave the hut, while the discussion continued, and put a hand on the old wooden door. I looked down on the small round hole in it and grinned, remembering my tiny brother joking that he could come and go through it as he pleased.

  I looked back quietly as I pulled the door open and saw that the poetry boy had walked over to the girl with the short hair. They looked close; they pressed their foreheads together as they talked. The girl seemed to be passionately relating her thoughts, while the boy listened with a serious look on his face. I shot up and out into the night sky. The end of winter was at hand. Orange blackout cape fluttering behind me, I flew.

  On the way home, I thought I heard a shout from the world below. Looking closely, I saw a human girl on the ground facedown, her leg pinned under a fallen tree. Given what a bother it was, I wavered between abandoning her and helping her before dancing down and hoisting the tree up. And then the girl looked up at me and screamed.

  I’d seen her face before. It was the young girl who’d been at the very back of the group with the torches. She crawled along the ground, screaming, trying to get away from me.

  I was perplexed by her reaction, so different from that of the villagers accustomed to the presence of the takezoku. “You don’t have to be so afraid. Did I do anything to you?”

  The girl looked back at me holding the fallen tree up lightly and swallowed hard. “I-I’m…sorry!”

  “If you would only learn about the takezoku.” I lowered the tree to the ground. “Hey, meeting like this is a good chance and all.”

  “No! I don’t want to…know anything!”

  “What? Why?”

  “I mean…I won’t…I’ll be different from everyone else!” The girl looked back and stared at me as if lost for a moment. And then she hurriedly began crawling away again. I simply stayed silent and watched her go.

  I danced up into the night sky again. The air of the winter night was clear and chilly, like particles of ice had been scattered across the bowl of the sky. I flew intently forward, silent. Past the castle gates illuminated by the torches of the humans, to the castle.

  Tonight again, flakes of snow floated to the ground, glittering.

  Back in the castle, the night felt very quiet. I hurried down the hallway, where flames of various sizes flickered at the top of equally varied candles, toward the small room in the heart of the building. Unusually for me, I was the last one to arrive. My older brothers and sisters were all sitting and chatting at the desks in the front. My little brother cocked his head to one side and looked up at me.

  As I listened to my father’s lecture, my brush danced across a piece of orange paper, recording the random ideas that naturally popped into my mind. When the lesson was finally over, I started to fold the sheet of paper, but my brother’s hand darted in from the side to snatch it from me. I turned around, grinning at his mischievousness, but the look on my little brother’s face was serious.

  “Sis? What’s this?”

  “It’s nothing. Give it back.”

  Before I could stop him, he had unfolded the page and sent his eyes racing across the text there. He furrowed his brow.

  Ignorant of this little exchange between us, our brothers and sisters left the small room chatte
ring happily. The flames on the candlestands flickered slightly.

  “Emigrant? Huh? The ocean? Sis, seriously, what is this?”

  “Mmm. It’s a secret, all right? I mean, I still don’t know what’s going to happen or anything.”

  We flew down the passage side by side, toward the old pond in the inner courtyard. We danced down lightly onto its surface. I sat cross-legged on a layer of air just above the cold water, floating. The look on my brother’s face as he settled down next to me was uncharacteristically complicated, sunk in thought.

  “So, basically, the takezoku are going deeper into the mountains,” I said, working hard to keep my voice calm. “But some commoners are building a boat. They’re going to go out to sea. Oh! The people you met yesterday. Father actually already knows about all this. He’s not going to say anything, though. And so, I, well…”

  My brother said nothing.

  “So, like…”

  “Sis?” He sounded uneasy when he finally opened his mouth to speak.

  “They told me that going into the darkness is the same as returning to the past. That they want to go down the river to the land of the future. And it made so much sense to me I wanted to go with them. I mean, we’ve always lived on this mountain, right? So we don’t know any other way to live, you know? And they said going to a new land, living under our own power, would be a real adventure. It’ll be hard, but it’ll be a fun life. And so, like—” I cut myself off. The wind blew, cold, yanking my long black hair up into the air like a lion’s mane. “I asked them to take me with them.”

  “S-Sis?”

  “And then they ended up talking about how they wanted me to come as the monarch of the settler ship.”

  “So then…this is—” Ever so timidly, my little brother spread out the paper he had nicked from me before, revealing the characters scribbled in black ink.