by Fuyumi Ono
Her legs lost their grip. She pitched into the air.
Before her startled eyes charged a beast like a wild boar. In her right arm she felt the impact as steel severed muscle and bone, heard the roar of the eviscerated monster, her own screams.
And then nothing. No sight, no sound, no taste or touch or thought. Only her falling and falling through the endless dark.
Part II
2-1
Youko awoke to the sound of crashing waves. She felt the spray of the ocean on her face. She opened her eyes, raised her head. She had fallen onto a sandy beach not far from the water's edge. A big wave broke against the shore. The water swept along the strand, bathing her feet.
Unexpectedly, the water was not cold. Youko lay there on the sand and let the waves wash against her. The rich smell of the ocean surrounded her, a smell something like the smell of blood. The sea was in her veins. That is why, when she closed her ears, she heard the distant roar of the ocean.
The next surge flooded to her knees. The sand churned up in the tide tickled her skin.
That deep scent of the sea.
She looked at her feet. The water lapping against her body was stained red. She glanced at the gray surf, up at the wide, gray sky. She looked down again. The water was indeed red.
She searched for its source. "Ah," she said.
Her legs. The crimson streams were washing from her skin. She bolted to her feet. Her hands and feet were stained red. Even her navy blue school seifuku uniform had turned a dark maroon.
Blood.
She moaned. Her whole body was soaked with blood. Her hands were black and sticky with the gore, as were her face and hair. She cried out, splashed down in the midst of the breaking waves. The water rushed in muddy gray, receded crimson. She scooped up water in her hands. It bled between her fingers. As much as she scrubbed at her hands she could not uncover the natural tone of her skin. The surf rose to her waist. A pool of color spread out around her, scarlet beneath the charcoal sky.
Youko again raised her hands to her face. In front of her eyes her fingernails lengthened, grew to sharp claws half again as long as her fingers themselves.
"What … ?"
She turned her hands over. There were a multitude of small cracks or fissures running along the skin. A fragment of her skin peeled away, wafted away in the wind, tumbled into the water. Beneath the skin was a matt of short-haired red fur.
"No, I don't believe this."
She brushed her hand against her arm. More skin flaked away revealing red fur. Every time she moved she shed flesh. A wave swirled against her. Her uniform shredded as if eaten away by acid. Water washed the fur and the ocean ran red.
The claws on her hands, the fur growing on her body, she was turning into one of the beasts.
"No, no, no," she sobbed. Her uniform fell to pieces. Her arms wrenched about like the forelegs of a cat or dog. The blood, the blood of those creatures, it's made me into one of them. It was not possible. She screamed, "God, NO!"
In her own ears she heard no recognizable sound, only the roar of the crashing waves and the inarticulate howl of a beast.
Youko opened her eyes to a pale blue sky.
Her whole body hurt. The ache in her arms was excruciating. She held up her hands and gasped in relief. Normal. She had normal human hands. No fur, no claws.
She sighed to herself. She wracked her brain, trying to remember what had happened. All in a flash it came to her. She was about to clamber to her feet but her muscles were so stiff she could barely move. She lay there taking one deep breath after another. Little by little the pain subsided, some kind of motion returned to her limbs.
She sat up, spilling off herself a blanket of pine needles.
Pine. It certainly looked like pine. She glanced about her and saw a forest of pine trees. The tops of the trees were snapped off, revealing the white wood underneath. A bough must have fallen from those trees.
Her right hand still tightly gripped the hilt of the sword. So she hadn't dropped it after all. She examined the rest of her body and found no serious injuries, nothing except for many minor scratches and bruises. Nothing out of the ordinary. Similarly searching her back, her hands ran across the scabbard tucked into the belt of her uniform.
A light haze drifted across the early morning sky. She heard the distant sound of waves. She wondering aloud, "What kind of dream was that?"
It came back to her, the fierce struggle with the beasts, their blood drenching her.
And the sound of the waves.
She groaned to herself.
She surveyed her surroundings. It was before daybreak. A pine forest crowded the shore. She was alive, she had suffered no life-threatening injuries. That was the sum of it.
It did not seem to her that any enemy was close by. Nothing foreboding lurked in the forest. And no allies either. When they had slipped into the halo of the moon, the moon had hung high in the night sky. It was almost dawn. For that long she had been a castaway. Keiki and the others must have strayed far from their intended course.
When you get lost, she reminded herself in a small voice, you're supposed to stay right where you are.
Surely they were looking for her. Keiki had promised to protect her. If she started out on her own they'd never find her. She leaned against the stump of a tree and grasped the jewel bound to the scabbard. Little by little, the aches and pains began to dissipate.
How strange. But it really did work. She peered closely at the jewel. It seemed like an ordinary stone, though with the luster of polished, blue-green glass. Maybe it was jade.
Still tightly gripping the stone she sat down and closed her eyes.
She had intended only to take a quick nap but awoke to a bright morning sky. "It's getting late," she noted.
But where was everybody? Keiki, Kaiko, Hyouki? Why hadn't they come to get her? Finally she said, "Jouyuu-san?"
If he was still inside her he wasn't telling. She could not feel his presence at all. In other words, he wasn't going to show up unless she started waving that sword around.
"Hey, you there?" she asked herself again. "Where's Keiki?"
No answer. Nothing. A big lot of help he had turned out to be. She raised her head nervously. What if Keiki came looking for her and missed her? She recalled the yelp of pain the instant before she fell. She had left Hyouki behind, surrounded by the monsters. Had he survived?
The unease pressed down on her head and shoulders. She jumped up, quelling the scream of panic rising from deep inside her.
Looking around she spied to her right a break in the woods. Nothing between here and there struck her as dangerous. She could at least venture that far. Beyond the forest was a fallow field. The field was strewn with a thicket of shrubs plastered against the discolored earth. Beyond the field a cliff leaned out over a black sea.
Youko approached the edge of the cliff. Closer, and it was like standing at the top of a tall building and looking over the edge. What she saw amazed her.
It was not the sheer height of the cliff . It was the water, black as the night sky, almost blue in its blackness. Even in the light of dawn the sea looked like night. But then, as she followed the face of the cliff down into the water, she realized that the water itself was not black. It was perfectly clear. How deep she could not begin to imagine. The sea must be so vast, so deep, that no light could penetrate its depths.
Then, from deep within the deep, she saw a glittering point of light. At first she could not make out what it was, but then there were many more of them, the small specks of light spread out against the wide black like grains of sand. Together the light gathered into a faint, background glow.
Like stars.
Vertigo overcame her. She sat down. She knew what it was. She'd seen pictures of stars and nebulae and galaxies. Reaching out below her was the universe. Her thoughts suddenly overwhelmed her. She could no longer turn her face from the truth in front of her: I don't know this place. This was not the world she knew, not the
ocean she knew. She was in a different world altogether.
Oh God.
"It can't be true," she said aloud.
Where was she? Was this place safe? Dangerous? Where would she go? What would she do? Why did this have to happen to me?
"Jouyuu-san." She closed her eyes, raised her voice. "Jouyuu! Please answer me!"
She heard only the roar of the ocean in her ears. Not a whisper from the being that possessed her.
"What am I supposed to do? Isn't somebody going to help me?"
One full night had already passed. Her mother must be worried sick about her. Her father would be furious.
"I want to go home."
Tears tumbled down her cheeks. She choked back a sob. "I want to go home," she said again. She couldn't hold it back. She hugged her knees, buried her face in her arms and wept.
Youko finally lifted her head. She'd cried so hard and so long that she felt slightly feverish. Crying her eyes out had made her feel better, but only a little. She slowly opened her eyes. The ocean stretched out before her like the universe.
"How very strange--"
She felt as if she was gazing down on a sky shot through with stars, a starry night arraigned against the serene blackness, the galaxies turning slowly in the water.
"So strange and yet so beautiful--"
In time Youko calmed down and managed to collect her wits about her. Absentmindedly she gazed down at the stars in the water.
2-2
She sat there staring out at the sea until the sun had risen high in the sky. What kind of world was this? Where was she?
They had passed through the halo of the moon to get here. That alone was hard enough to believe. In any case, to capture a moonbeam like that, it seemed equally unlikely that you could do the same thing with the light of the setting sun.
Then there was Keiki and all those strange creatures. None of them were from any species on Earth. They must come from this world. That's the only thing that made sense to her.
What was he thinking, bringing her here? He said it was dangerous, he said he would protect her. Yet here she was. What were they up to? Why did those monsters attack her? It was like out of a nightmare, the same dream she'd been having for the past month.
From the beginning, from the moment she met him, none of it had made sense. She knew this much: she was lost. He had shown up out of nowhere, had dragged her off to this strange world without a second thought about the circumstances of her life. It wasn't because he hated her, she was sure. But if they had never met she wouldn't be stuck here, she wouldn't have had to kill all those creatures.
So it wasn't that she missed him. There simply wasn't anybody else she could trust and he hadn't returned to retrieve her. Perhaps something had happened during the battle with the monsters that kept him from coming back for her. Whatever the reason, it only made things worse for her now.
Why must I keep dwelling on it?
Because it wasn't her fault. It was Keiki's fault. It was his fault the monsters came after her. The enemy is at the gates, the voice in the vice-principal's office had said. But that didn't mean they were her enemies. She had no reason to make them her enemies.
And that business about calling her his lord. She'd been thinking about that as well. Because she was his lord, his enemies had gone after her, not him. She'd had to use the sword to defend herself, and she'd ended up here.
Nobody had made her lord of anything.
He'd made the whole thing up. Or he'd made a mistake, a really dumb mistake. He said he'd been searching for her. You'd think when somebody was searching for their king or whatnot, they wouldn't screw up this bad.
"So who are you protecting now?" She grumbled to herself. "This is your mistake, not mine."
The shadows lengthened. Youko got up. Sitting here complaining about Keiki wasn't solving anything. Glancing to her right and left she couldn't find the gap in the trees she'd come through before. Whatever, she told herself, and marched off into the forest. She didn't have her coat but it wasn't that cold here. It must be a warmer climate than where she lived.
The forest looked like it'd been hit by a typhoon, broken branches strewn all about. The forest was not deep, and when she emerged she found herself at the edge of a wide marsh.
It was not a marsh but a rice paddy. Directly in front of her a causeway jutted above the water. She could see the tops of some kind of short green vegetation blown flat against the muddy lake. Beyond the rice paddies a handful of houses formed a small village. And beyond that, the steep slopes of a mountain.
There were no telephone poles or power lines. No television antennas. The roofs of the houses were made of black tile, the walls of yellow adobe. The village had once been ringed by a line of trees. Most of the trees were toppled over.
Youko pressed her hand to her chest. With a great sense of relief she took in her surroundings. It wasn't the sight of the buildings, or the strange landscape she had more or less been prepared for. This could be any plot of rundown farmland scattered around the back country of Japan.
Some distance away she spotted the forms of a number of people working in the rice paddies. She couldn't make out any details, but they didn't look like monsters.
"Oh, thank God!"
The exclamation rose unconsciously to her lips. She was still recovering from the confusion of seeing that black sea of stars. But, finally, here was something comfortingly familiar. If she ignored the complete lack of telephone poles she could pretend it was an ordinary Japanese village.
She took a deep breath. She decided to call out to them and see what happened. She hated the thought of talking to people she had never seen before. She didn't even know if they spoke the same language. But if she wanted any help she didn't have much choice. Partly to encourage herself and partly to calm her nerves, she said aloud, "I'll explain my situation and ask if anybody's seen Keiki around."
It was the best she could be expected to do.
Youko returned to the causeway she had seen earlier and made her way toward the people in the fields. As she drew closer to them it became apparent they were not at all Japanese. There were brown-haired women, red-haired men. Many reminded her somewhat of Keiki. Their features and stature weren't Caucasian, either. Their oddness seemed mostly due to the color of their hair. Take that away and they'd be quite normal.
Their clothing wasn't that dissimilar from traditional Japanese garb. All the men had their hair grown out and tied back. They were breaking down the causeway with their shovels.
One of the men looked up. Seeing Youko he pointed her out to his companions. He shouted something at her, but she couldn't make it out. The eight or so men and women there turned and looked at her. Youko acknowledged them with a slight bow. She couldn't think of what else to do.
A black-haired man in his thirties scrambled up the bank to the causeway. "Where you from?" he asked.
Youko registered the question with a deep sense of relief. They spoke the same language. She almost felt like laughing. She wasn't as bad off as she thought.
"I was over there, by the cliff," she said.
"The cliff? I mean, what's your hometown?"
Tokyo, she started to say, and changed her mind. She'd decided simply to explain her circumstances, but she doubted now that they would find anything she said believable. As she stood there trying to think of what to say, the man pressed again, "You're not from around here, are you? You come from across the ocean, huh?"
It was close enough to the truth. Youko nodded. The man's eyes widened. "Yeah, figures. A real pisser, you know, your kind showing up out of the blue like this."
The man grinned at her, as if comprehending something that she did not. He stared, his look approaching a leer, until his gaze fell on the sword she held down at her side. "Hey, what have you got there? Looks important."
"Someone … gave it to me."
"Who?"
"His name is Keiki."
The man closed the distance between them. Y
ouko took a step back.
"Looks heavy. Don't worry. I'll take care of it for you."
The look in his eyes did not assuage her. She didn't like the way he spoke to her, either. She clasped the sword to her chest and shook her head. "It's okay. Where am I? What is this place?"
"This is Hairou. Frankly, missy, a dangerous thing like that, don't want you waving it around, specially when you don't even know where you are. Hand it over."
Youko retreated again. "I was told not to."
"C'mon, give it up."
The force of his demand made her quail. She didn't possess the courage to tell him no. Reluctantly she held it out to him. He snatched it from her and examined it. "Yeah, fine work, this. The guy you got it from must have been loaded."
The other men and woman gathered around them. Somebody asked, "One of those kaikyaku, is she?"
"Yeah. Look at what she was carrying. Must be worth a fortune." He went to pull the sword from the scabbard. The hilt did not budge. "So it's just an expensive toy!" He laughed and tucked the sword into his waistband. He reached out and grabbed Youko by the wrist.
"Ow! Let me go!"
"Can't do that. All kaikyaku get sent to the governor. That's orders." He gave her a shove. "Get going. And don't try anything." He raised his voice to his companions as he pushed her along. "Hey, I could use some help, here."
Youko's arm hurt. She could not begin to guess this man's true motives, nor where he was taking her. What she wanted most was to be free of him.
Immediately as the thought entered her mind a cold sensation crept into her hands and feet. She jerked her hand free of his grip. Her arm, quite on its own accord, reached for the sword at the man's waist and came away with both it and the scabbard. She jumped back from him.
"The bitch! Watch out! She's got the sword!"
"What? It's just an ornament. Hey, little girl, calm down and come with us."
