Year of the Demon

by Steve Bein

  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

  Kaida 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 t
he 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.

  Her fear of the dark hold had gone. But where? It vanished as soon as she saw the sandbag. As soon as something else captured her attention. Because what scared her about the hold wasn’t the hold. It was what she imagined it to be.

  It was just as Masa had told her: imagination could always be relied upon to conjure greater nightmares than the world itself could ever produce. That was why he and Genzai and the others struck such terror in Ama-machi. The villagers contended not with the outlanders but with demons, hungry ghosts, dark sorcery—or so the elders said. And that was why Kaida and the rest were diving on the south end of the cove: imagined fear, nothing else.

  Kaida’s lungs burned like huge hot coals by the time she broke the surface. She sucked in a deep, loud breath, then latched on to Haru-san’s boat and let her body go limp.

  “My, my!” he said. “Am I glad to be out on the water today! I can’t believe I just saw what I saw.”

  “Believe it,” Kaida said, panting.

  “You must be exhausted.”

  Just then Miyoko appeared, just as if he’d summoned an evil spirit. Her long, pale form fluttered up from under the stern and she too took hold of the little boat’s gunwale. “Oh, Kaida-chan, look at you. Are you feeling ill?”

  “I’m fine,” said Kaida. “Come on, let’s go back to the bottom.”

  Miyoko gave her an evil grimace. Haru-san didn’t catch it. Neither did Sen.

  “Come on,” Kaida said again. “We’ll go down there together. Sisters.”

  “Sisters,” Miyoko said bitterly. Usually she regarded Kaida not with hatred but with cruel curiosity, the same fascination she had with the mice she sometimes trapped in little fishnets to see how long they could hold their breath before drowning. Not this time. The hate all but seethed from her now. Haru-san and Sen, bless them, were still blind to it, dutifully hauling in their sandbags. Hand over hand, they steadily drew in the dripping lines, and Miyoko watched on with growing dread. Diving was the only competition she knew Kaida could win. Pride demanded that she compete anyway, and that pride could not abide a loss—not to bug-eyed, one-armed Kaida.

  Kaida could almost hear the thoughts wriggling around in Miyoko’s mind, seeking some escape, just like the mice she liked to drown. Kaida couldn’t let that happen.

  “Are you feeling ill, Miyoko-chan? Not too exhausted, are you?”

  “I’m fine,” she said, her face a squinting, wrinkled mask of hate.

  All the while the wet, braided lines hummed against the gunwale of the little rowboat. At last, with a cheery “Here you go,” Haru-san passed Kaida a dripping bag. He kept hold of the line while she slipped the tether around her ankle. Sen aped him, handing over Miyoko’s bag, and Kaida felt a little thrill of triumph when Miyoko took it.

  Miyoko gave her sweet little smile and said, “You know, Kaida-chan, why don’t you go ahead and dive, since you’re all ready to go, and we’ll find something to do together once we’re back in the village? You know, something we can do with all our sisters.”

  The veiled threat was not lost on Kaida. The wisest strategy was to deflect and retreat. Go back home, stay alert, and hope that Miyoko lost interest before she got around to mounting a full assault. Kaida’s instincts pointed her in exactly that direction, but she was feeling saucy. “You’re right,” she said. “If we’re going to find something we can all do, we can’t dive here, can we? Because I’m the only one who can make it all the way down.”

  Miyoko fumed. Finally Haru-san and Sen took notice. Sen didn’t know what to do with it, but Haru-san snapped. “Kaida, that was out of line and you know it. Miyoko’s older than you. You ought to show some respect. Go ahead, Miyoko. Tether your sandbag. She opened herself to this. It’s your right to show her up.”

  Miyoko managed a humorless smile. Kaida beamed. “First one to the bottom wins,” she said. She let go of the boat and plummeted.

  To Miyoko’s credit, she made an honest go of it. She made it almost halfway down before she kicked free of her sandbag. Kaida looked up, letting the weight carry her down, watching Miyoko grow smaller and smaller as she kicked hard for the surface.

  There would be a price for that. Kaida knew it, but somehow she feared it less than she used to. Perhaps it was because today they’d been diving where she was at her best. Or perhaps it was last night’s victory at the Fin. Whatever the reason, Kaida decided she liked not being afraid.

  She stayed in the water after most of the other ama had grown cold and tired, even though her own teeth were chattering. Her legs were so sore that she was glad they were too cold to feel much. She waited until all three of her stepsisters were sitting in Haru-san’s boat, then picked a different boat to ride in on—not because she was afraid, but because she wanted to show them she’d outwitted them again. She made sure they saw her smirking at them too. That would come with a price as well, but in her newfound cockiness she chose to overlook that fact.

  For reasons she couldn’t fathom, a strange thought floated unbidden through her mind: if Genzai could have seen me today, he’d have been proud.

  27

  The sand was warm, but Kaida knew she couldn’t lounge on the beach long enough to stop shivering. Her stepsisters would come for her soon. So instead of waiting for the sun to do its work,
she forced herself to her feet and jogged along the strand to warm herself.

  That was what she told herself anyway, though in truth she knew seeing Genzai again was inevitable. It was no girlish, swooning, romantic drivel. The village girls talked that way, sometimes even about men as old as Genzai. Kaida had no thoughts in that direction. If she were ever to love Genzai, it would only be for taking her away from Ama-machi. She did not go to him out of infatuation. She went because she could see the outlanders paddling back in from the wreck, and if they’d found what they were looking for, they would pack up their camp and disappear.

  Grown men could row faster than she could run on wet sand, and though she had the shorter distance to travel, they had the surf to aid them. She drew within shouting distance as they beached the first of their rowboats. Their next three boats came in almost in the wake of the first, but Genzai had been in the lead boat and he was already marching toward Kaida, leaving ragged-edged footprints in the sand. Deep creases furrowed his brow and the corners of his mouth turned down.

  “Take me with you,” Kaida said. “Please.”

  “Go home, little one.”

  “You found what you were looking for, neh?”

  “No.”

  Kaida looked past him. Two men bent down to lift something heavy out of the belly of one of the rowboats. She ran on toward Genzai, drawing close enough now that she could smell the sweat and salt water in his clothing. “You’re lying,” she said. “Whatever you found, I can see them taking it. Please, you have to—”

  Suddenly she was flat on her back. Somehow he’d kicked her feet out from under her, though an instant before she was certain he hadn’t been close enough to do that. Now he towered over her.

  “I am not one you should accuse of lying,” Genzai said, and Kaida found it strange to hear so much emotion in his voice. Up until now she’d only heard implacable calm. Now his words came out thick, tumescent, as if his throat wouldn’t let the words pass. “You know this already. I am a man of my word.”