Year of the Demon (27 page)

“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 Kaida 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—”

This time Masa laughed so hard she was sure they’d hear it back in the village. Genzai laughed too, just once, a grunt more than a laugh. The hunchback at the bellows scowled and shushed them. “Silence!” he snapped. “We’re close now.”

Kaida looked at him. He was horribly ugly, and the embers made his wrinkled face as red as a demon’s, all crosshatched in black by the wrinkles. He scowled at her too, just for good measure. His missing eye was horrid, but Kaida couldn’t help looking right into it.

“Dive!” Masa said, his laughter still more in control of him than he was of it. “That’s rich. Is that really the only thing these villagers have learned how to do with girls?”

She looked at Genzai, who had regained his composure and now sat as still as the rocks around the campfire. Masa chuckled, brushed his disheveled hair from his face, and picked his teeth with a sparrow bone.

“You never answered my question,” Genzai said, his voice as flat as ever. “Did you come to see what my friends are making in the fire?”

“No.”

“Then why are you here, Kaida-san?”

He looked at her silently. The others too. Kaida knew the one-eyed man was the one her stepsisters would find scariest, but they were wrong. The one to be afraid of was Masa. She didn’t like the idea of someone that fast, someone she couldn’t hear coming. And Genzai frightened her still more, but she forced herself to stammer it out. “I’ve been thinking about this all day, and I can’t figure it out. You let them surround you. The villagers. You and your friend. And then you fought them. But you let them surround you first.”

Masa cocked an eyebrow at her.

“How come?” she said.

Masa let out such a guffaw that it knocked him backward onto the sand. Genzai just chuckled, a deep, grating rumble like big plates of rock shifting below the earth. “Silence!” said the one-eyed man, still working his bellows. “We’re almost there. No distractions.”

“Tadaaki-san has a point,” Genzai said softly. Masa gave a little nod and, still sniggering, settled himself back on his rock. “Kaida-san, do you mean to tell us you risked your life just to ask your question?”

Kaida scrunched up her nose. “I didn’t risk anything.”

“Masa here was ordered to kill or cripple any who approached.”

“She was already crippled by the time I got to her,” Masa said with a little shrug. “You’ve got more than sharp ears, little one. You’ve got heart too.”

“I’ll go,” Kaida said. “I shouldn’t have come.”

“No,” said Genzai, “you shouldn’t have. But nor should you leave empty-handed. Tell her why you let them surround you, Masa.”

Another little shrug from Masa. “Who was the first one to throw a punch?” he said.

“I don’t know,” said Kaida.

“And who was the first man I hit?”

“I don’t know.”

“The one who’s missing all his teeth, what did I hit him in the mouth with? A fist? A knee? An elbow?”

“How should I know? I couldn’t see anything.”

“Because we were surrounded,” said Masa. “No one else in your village could see either.”

“All they’ve got is their imagination,” Kaida said, to herself as much as to anyone else. “If you don’t let them see what you do, and especially if you let them have the advantage
before
you strike . . . the only thing scarier than the shark you can see is the one you can’t.”

“She’s a natural, Genzai.”

Genzai scratched the underside of his chin, just behind his beard. “Not bad, little one. Is that really the only reason you came here?”

“Uh-huh.”

He laughed that deep, disquieting laugh of his again. “Sleep well, Kaida-san. You can tell your family we don’t plan to stay much longer.”

Kaida nodded, bowed, and turned to go. As she turned, her eye caught a glimpse of what the wild, wispy, white-haired man held in his tongs. It was a demonic visage, a mask, the tips of its horns and fangs glowing as red as the embers themselves, as red as the setting sun.

26

K
aida hadn’t been privy to the previous night’s discussion in the elders’ hut, but by morning she understood the agreement they’d come to.
Ama
boats were out on the water again, but only in the southern half of the cove. The water was deeper there, and abalone hunting went more slowly, but the south end held the advantage of having no violent outlanders floating about.

Kaida liked the deeper dives. She could go deeper than her sisters—deeper than all the girls her age, in fact—and so she could be alone. A lot of the older women encouraged her diving skills or praised her for the strength of her lungs. A few whispered when they thought Kaida couldn’t hear, wondering at how unnatural it was for a thirteen-year-old girl to dive as well as women of thirty-three or forty-three. Everyone knew an
ama
came into her best years as she grew older.

But no one seemed to understand what Kaida thought was obvious: a one-handed
ama
had no choice but to stay at the bottom longer. She could not use her
kaigane
with one hand and pry with her fingers with the other. To catch the same number of abalone, Kaida had to spend twice as long under the surface as her stepsisters.

Pressure on the ears was a different question, but her lovely stepsisters had taught her much about pain tolerance too. And with one good arm, she couldn’t swim back to the surface as quickly as the others either.
Of course
she could dive deeper than they could. To Kaida the logic was as obvious as the sun in the sky.

Today the waves rolled in high and broad-shouldered, and down deep they stirred the sand more than usual. It cut down on visibility, so Kaida had a harder time keeping track of Miyoko, Kiyoko, and Shioko. It didn’t matter, though. Down deep, the advantage was hers and they knew it. That was another reason to like the south end of the cove; there were three fewer predators to worry about.

She wished she could see the outlanders. Out of caution, not fear, she kept her distance. Like yesterday, their boats floated over the shipwreck. After a whole day of diving on it they hadn’t found what they were looking for, which was hardly surprising; even from a hundred boat-lengths away, it was easy to see they had no idea what they were doing. They dived with their pants still on. With no weights to help them sink. Their boats were
ama
boats, but they didn’t think to use the braziers to help their divers warm up. Nevertheless, Genzai seemed to think they’d find their quarry today—or so he’d said last night, if Kaida understood him rightly. She guessed his confidence must have had something to do with the demon face that his friends kept putting back in the fire. She thought they seemed to be in an awful hurry to finish it, whatever it was, though Kaida couldn’t guess how it could help them find anything underwater. Better for them to learn to swim properly instead. The only other outlanders Kaida had ever met had come from trading vessels, and as near as she could tell, those ones couldn’t swim or dive either.

Even so, the thought of diving inside that wreck made the water all around her seem colder. Swimming under a little shelf of coral was one thing. Having it close her in on all sides was something else entirely. There were holes in the shelves sometimes, and sometimes the other girls would swim in through one hole and come out somewhere else. Kaida used to do it too back when she was younger—back when her mother was still alive. But not since. Never since.

Merely imagining it caused her to retch. Foul, burning bile scalded the back of her mouth. Her throat grew tight; she had to kick the sandbag off her ankle and swim for the surface in middive.

“Kaida?” said Haru-san, whose mangled knee prevented him even from rowing, but he liked the sun and the roll of the surf. Sitting in his hut all day didn’t suit him, so he’d come out with the divers even though he couldn’t do anything but keep Sen company. As Sen found his two oars companions enough, Haru-san busied himself by tending the embers in the boat’s little brazier. “Are you all right?” he said.

Kaida nodded, coughed, and swished some water in her mouth until the taste of bile went away. She hooked her stump over the boat’s transom and sneezed into her hand. “I’m fine,” she said. The tightness in her throat had gone.

“You’re usually down much longer than that,” said Haru-san.

“I’m going back down.”

She scowled down at the water. It was embarrassing, not being able to dive. Diving was the only thing she was any good at. Now she’d put Haru-san to the work of pulling her sandbag all the way up to the surface, and she didn’t even have an abalone to show for his effort. She grabbed the line he was hauling in. “Don’t,” she said. “Let me see if I can get it first.”

It was a good test, and a common one—but only in shallower water. The sandbags were almost the same color as the seabed, so retrieving them was a test of vision for little girls learning to dive. The deeper the water, the less light penetrated to the bottom, and the harder it was to discern the sandbag from everything else around it. Villagers had been testing their daughters that way for generations, but never at this depth. Simply following the oarsman’s line down to the sandbag defeated the whole point of the exercise, and the deeper a diver had to swim, the more likely she was to miss her mark. “Are you sure?” Haru-san said. “I wouldn’t want you to get hurt.”

“You don’t think I can do it,” said Kaida.

“Oh, don’t get grumpy with me. No one could find it that deep. Your own mother wouldn’t have found it, and she was as strong as they come.”

Kaida scowled. She meant this test to be a way to bury her fear, and with it her shame at having been afraid. It was her mother’s memory, the memory of her death, that had panicked Kaida in the first place. Bringing it up again wasn’t helpful.

“Just let me try,” she said.

She filled her lungs and blew them empty, filled and emptied again, filled once more and dived, not straight down like a cormorant but angling like a dolphin. Halfway down she spiraled and cut the reverse angle, trying to track back toward the sandbag. Even at the halfway point, she was deeper than any other girl her age could dive.

She thought about the wreck. At this depth she would have entered the yawning maw of its upper hold. Again, even the thought of being enclosed made her want to vomit. The memory of being dragged down by the breastplate gripped her like Masa’s fist. The darkness of the hold was terrifying, even from the opposite end of the bay. The mere thought of what might have been in there—

There it was. The sandbag. Shioko might have called them frog-eyes or bug-eyes, but Kaida’s eyes were awfully good at spotting things underwater. She reached the bag and tugged on the line, signaling Haru-san that she’d found it. Then she kicked hard off the bottom and let herself ascend, matching the speed of her bubbles.