Year of the Demon fb-2

by Steve Bein

  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.

  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.

  Miyok
o 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.”

  “But I saw it,” Kaida said, trying to look past him, to get just a peek at whatever his companions were taking from the rowboat.

  “You see too little and assume too much.” He reached down, grabbed a fistful of her hair, and twisted her head around so she could see full well what she’d been trying to catch a glimpse of a moment before.

  His companions were carrying Masa’s dead body.

  Masa hung loosely, held up by his wrists and ankles, his mouth leaking salt water. His long black hair hung from his head like clumps of seaweed, dribbling shining ribbons of water. When they dumped him on the sand, he landed bonelessly, limp as a rolled-up fishnet.

  “There,” Genzai said. “Have you seen enough now?”

  Kaida’s eyes were locked on Masa, whose eyes stared blankly back at her from behind the demon mask—the same one his friends were finishing the night before. Thin ribbons of blood striped his face, matted his eyebrows, trickled in nigh-invisible rivulets down his cheeks. The mask had killed him. Kaida was sure of it.

  It was stupid, Kaida thought, diving with a heavy iron mask on; it was as good a way as any to drown yourself. Masa would have known that. Like Kaida, he was a survivor—and unlike Kaida, he was vibrant, full of life. There was no reason for him to kill himself. So had Genzai executed his friend by drowning him? Kaida didn’t think so. Genzai was distraught. No, it was the mask that killed Masa, and Genzai knew it too, but Kaida couldn’t imagine how a mask by itself could do that to someone. It was as if wearing the mask had caused him to lose his mind.

  Now that was a terrifying thought. Kaida wasn’t afraid of hungry ghosts haunting the wrecked carrack, but the mask was something she could see, something Genzai’s friends had made with their hammers and tongs. She remembered the one-eyed hunchback, the man with the wispy white beard chanting his spells, their faces sinister in the red-hot glow of the mask. What had they done? Channeled some demon into it? Was that why it was demon shaped?

  It wasn’t so long ago that Kaida had looked down on her fellow villagers for fearing Genzai and Masa as evil magi. Now she found herself fearing the outlanders and their witchcraft. What else could have killed Masa? And what was in that shipwreck that was worth dying for, worth risking a friend’s life for, worth provoking the wrath of evil spirits?

  “Throw it away,” Kaida whispered, only half aware that she’d spoken aloud. “That mask. Melt it down. Let the sea turn it to rust.”

  “It frightens you?” Genzai said.

  “Yes.” She was not ashamed to admit it.

  “It should. And you are a wise child if you can see how afraid you ought to be. So do not let foolishness escape your lips. That mask is too important to be destroyed. Someone will dive with it again, and may die because of it. And since I have so few of my own men to risk, perhaps the next one to dive will be you.”

  BOOK FIVE

  HEISEI ERA, THE YEAR 22

  (2010 CE)

  28

  Mariko ate her ramen and reflected absently on the nature of her missing finger. She was sitting on her bed, a polystyrene container of Cup Noodles in her right hand and chopsticks in her left, because her right hand couldn’t manage the chopsticks anymore. Losing her right forefinger wouldn’t have mattered so much if she weren’t living in a chopstick culture. Forks and knives worked perfectly well in a four-fingered hand.

  No matter where she lived, she would have had to retrain herself to shoot left-handed—assuming she still wanted to be a cop, of course. The
re were plenty of professions in which a missing finger wouldn’t have caused the slightest inconvenience, but Mariko had chosen the one job in which the loss of that particular finger could actually cost her her life. Learning to shoot as a lefty hadn’t been any easier than learning to eat as a lefty. She figured she should have logged enough practice by now—a few thousand rounds on the pistol range, three meals a day for a couple of months—but her marksmanship still wasn’t where she wanted it to be, and eating still made her feel like a clumsy gaijin tourist using chopsticks for the first time.

  She supposed that losing a forefinger might have been a particular hassle in the twenty-first century, but Mariko didn’t participate much in the trends that would have been a pain in the ass given the state of her hand. She’d been a ham-handed typist even before her fight with Fuchida. She had no interest in Facebook and Twitter, seeing them as two more items on a to-do list already full to bursting. She didn’t text more than once or twice a day, and then only to her sister, who was living proof that Mariko wouldn’t have needed her forefinger for that: Saori texted at lightning speed using only her thumbs. Mariko had a harder time with old technology: keys, coins, and most importantly, her sword.

  She’d skipped her kenjutsu class tonight. It was hard enough to come home and see the empty sword rack where Glorious Victory should have been; its absence would loom all the larger in the dojo, proving more and more distracting with each new drill. And her new sensei, a wizened war veteran named Hosokawa, did not admit distraction in his dojo, least of all from his sole female student. He was of the old guard, the generation that thought it unbecoming to teach swordsmanship to women. His view was hardly unique; for hundreds of years, everyone thought that way. But Hosokawa-sensei had earned his belt ranks under Yamada, and as Mariko had the honor of being Yamada’s last student, Hosokawa had accepted her as a matter of fealty to his late sword master.