The lake they’d camped by narrowed back into a little stream, and the bioluminescent fish struggled against it, like bands of starlight caught in amber.
“Hachirō,” someone whispered.
It was Chul Soon, a Korean draftee sent to the navy as punishment for participation in a riot nearly two years before. He would never be Japanese, but he was a convert to the idea of the Co-Prosperity Sphere. He worked hard, followed orders, understood his place in the great engine in much the same way Hachirō did.
Hachirō angled his weak shuffle towards the beast, where Chul Soon hung in a gibbet.
“There is still time,” the man said. “Find a way to free us and we can still escape the island.”
Hachirō was about to respond, but a hunter approached and stabbed the sailor in the stomach. He screamed and Hachirō made to attack the hunter, but was so weak he collapsed at the man’s first parry.
“Nobody speak to you,” the hunter said in broken Japanese. “Anyone who speaks dies.”
Those few sailors still living out their short time in the remaining gibbets sealed their mouths and stared intently ahead. Maybe they hoped Hachirō would save them, maybe they were formulating their own plans, maybe they’d already resigned themselves to their ghastly fate. Hachirō couldn’t tell and the hunters would not allow him to ask. He tried to ignore Chul Soon’s whimpers as the man bled out, losing his grip on his entrails.
A light not of their making appeared in the distance. It was like another star sent into the cavernous void to guide them. As they approached, it grew, expanding from a pinprick to an all-consuming blaze. It drowned out their torches, which the party doused, returning them to a sack at the beast’s hip. The cave roof, hundreds of metres above them, softened from slick black to a soft orange, as though the sun were rising within the cave. Hachirō had to shield his eyes against the light as he drew closer. He wondered if he had truly died at some point and if his spirit was just now, finally, approaching its resting place.
He would have liked to lay down.
The wall of light was nothing: the cave’s terminus, an opening on the far side of the mesa. As he grew accustomed to the brightness, the light gave way to a wide lake and a village rising up the slope beneath him.
Hachirō’s lungs collapsed, and his legs followed suit. It was only the arms of his captors that kept him from falling onto the dirt path. If he’d been dead, at least the light might have heralded some end to this waking nightmare. He could have hoped for rest. Instead he was alive, and some of his men still lived, though none of them had any hope of escape. They would all be tortured and consumed by day’s end, but there was still time to suffer.
The lake was wide and deep, judging by the royal colour of its water. Fresh water from the cave river emptied into it, and in the distance Hachirō could see waves breaking on a shallow sand bar. The village on the hillside was small but well-constructed, with bamboo, thatch, and mudbricks smoothed by plaster. They looked like the amalgamation of a dozen rural architectures. They were sturdy and close, built to weather the island’s storms. They rose in a semi-circle up the hill, ranged around a tower or perhaps lighthouse. Between the buildings were paths of stone, though the widest roads were dirt. Above the village, rice terraces had been cut into the mountainside and Hachirō could see a tower granting access to the plateau.
In the lake, bamboo boats moved under the poles of their pilots, carrying baskets across the lake. Cormorants dived into the water to retrieve the blue glowing fish. It was not these little boats that caught Hachirō’s attention though—that made him physically ill. Nor was it the buildings, the stone pathways or the strange tower at the centre of the village.
It was the ship.
In the middle of the lake rested a vast wooden ship, many times bigger than the Yamato, the flagship of the Japanese Empire. Such a construction should have been impossible. These people, hardy as they might be, were primitives, the lost tribes of ships centuries dead, driven to cannibalism and barbarism by a violent island. A ship large enough to host a city should have been far beyond their capacity. Hachirō could not imagine the generations it must have taken to complete the vessel.
They moved along the shoreline. Men and women came down out of the village to unclasp the gibbets from the hairy beast’s side and drag the remainder of Hachirō’s men up the stone paths and into the village. Hachirō fought, screamed and struggled against his captors, but he was too weak. The last of his men called to him, but he could do nothing for them. He was powerless, a failure to his country and his family and his crew.
When his men had been carried off, the hunting party continued around the lake and followed a wide dirt road to the ship. A massive dock rose to meet the vessel, strong enough to bear the weight of both the beast and its titanic cargo.
A short drawbridge was lowered onto the dock, emerging from the hull of the ship like a tongue newly extended from a dry, splintered mouth. They entered.
Within was a riotous cacophony. The deck they entered was filled with cages: some small, holding deadly-looking snakes or praying mantises the size of dogs, but most much larger. In one, a spider the size of a car spooled its thread around a goat. In another, a massive lizard sat lazily in its cage, a tongue the size of a man flicking in and out. In another a snake lay exhausted, its jaw unhinged and its body writhing with the effort of swallowing a horse whole.
Hachirō struggled even more to stand, even with the aid of his captors. His limbs were as weak as ever, but burned with adrenaline. His heart felt like it might jump up his throat, and he realized he was breathing heavily, as though having just finished some great exertion. The hunters seemed unimpressed.
When Hachirō was a child, his father moved the family from Kobe to Tokushima. It wasn’t a long way, but their new home lay in the shadow of Mt. Tsurugi. Hachirō walked beneath the mountain, lived at its feet, was astonished by its beauty. He promised himself he would never forget the majesty of the thing, he would always remember what a special place he lived in.
He hadn’t kept his promise, though. Hachirō couldn’t even remember the last time he’d looked up at the mountain.
The hunters and the crewmen of the ship were like Hachirō beneath that mountain. They lived among predators from another geological age, they walked in the presence of god-like monsters, and they did so as casually as if they were tending cattle in a field.
The deck was a single vast space. Modern ships sectioned their hulls, so that if any one was breached it wouldn’t sink the whole ship. As impressive as this vessel was, it was an old design. At the end of the deck was a wide staircase, and Hachirō had to be carried up the flights onto the top deck. On top of the ship was a small city, with store houses and dormitories and commissaries. In the centre was a fortified castle, made of wood like the rest of the ship, with high, thick, walls.
His captors took him to the gate at the front of the fortress and though the small gatehouse. Inside the castle was a maze of rice-paper-and-bamboo rooms. It was strange to be suddenly thrust into such a familiar space. Hachirō had been in buildings of the same style a thousand times, but for such a place to exist on such an alien island was disorienting, all the more so because of its familiarity.
At the centre of the castle was a wide throne room, with low tables on either side, and pillows for kneeling. At the back of the room, a narrow staircase led up to a red-stained carved wooden throne. On the throne sat a man Hachirō thought he might recognize. A few supplicants stood before their lord, speaking in their language with its clipped, short words. Upon entering, the guards bowed and knelt, leaving Hachirō to stand under his own power between them.
The king raised his hand, silencing the man who was talking and drawing the attention of the whole room to Hachirō. With all their eyes upon him, he felt more like prey than ever. The king said another phrase and the others left them.
He walked over to Hachirō, put a hand out and brushed the man’s cheek.
“Come with me,�
�� he said in Japanese. “I have so much to explain.”
THEY ASCENDED A narrow spiral staircase tucked away behind the throne room, ending at a crow’s nest looking out upon the vastness of the ship and the village ringing the bay. It was all Hachirō could do to stand.
“What is this place?” he asked. For a moment he forgot his hatred and shame and misery. That a place like this could exist on this island defied explanation. He felt, too, immense pleasure from speaking the phrase. It felt like a lifetime since he’d last spoken to someone who wasn’t begging him to find a way to save them.
“There is a rock formation,” the king said, “you can see it if you look closely, that breaks the waves. It makes our little lake and the bay just beyond peaceful, even though the storms never cease.”
He turned around, waved along the ridge.
“The cliffs rise sheer out of the island. The only way into the bay by land is through that cave, and it is well laid with traps and snares. Sometimes monsters try to scale the cliffs, but we patrol them. We are safe here.”
“Who are you?”
“I am King Takeshi Mitsukawa. I was captain of the Akatsuki. At the turn of the century I was sent here to map the island and determine if it could be made into a staging ground.”
It was strange that Mitsukawa used the term “king.” Hachirō would never have expected it from a former captain of the Imperial Navy. Then he realized what the man had said.
“What?” he asked, frowning. “That was my purpose.”
Mitsukawa shook his head; he looked disappointed, angry.
“I was not the first either. We are part of a long lineage, you and I. When I arrived here, this ark was a dream, barely the skeleton of the vessel it is today. The king of that age was a Javanese shipwright, sent by his prince, Diponegoro, to capture the mythical beasts of the sacred island and bring them back to unleash holy vengeance upon the Dutch occupiers. He never left. His crew was lost and consumed until he found his way here and rose to the throne. When Japan abandoned me and my crew, he took pity on us, brought us in as those before did to him.”
“He brought in all of your crew?” Hachirō asked, confused and jealous and bitter.
“No,” Mitsukawa said. “Not everyone. The people here have built something extraordinary, but it is fragile. Add too many to the village and it might collapse. Besides, eating human flesh has become our culture. When a ship arrives, they chose one or two of its crew to survive, preferably the command, and the rest we use as feedstock. We have children of our own. We don’t need anyone else draining the stores.”
An itch rolled through Hachirō and he longed to escape his skin. All his men, dead of infection or poison or feasted upon by monsters or butchered by the locals, all of them were chosen. He felt the opposite of special, or blessed; like all the world was a miserable joke and he was the only one who didn’t know. He wanted a bed and warm tea. He wanted to be home, to do something as small as share just one meal with his mother.
“So, what is this?” he finally mustered the will to ask, pointing down at the titanic ship.
“It is an ark. It is big enough and strong enough to carry us through the storms shielding the island. It will carry our people away from this nightmare, and deliver our gift to the world.”
“Your gift?”
“My mentor was sent to collect the beasts of the of the island so that he might set them upon the Dutch. The ark was designed to house the island’s monsters for that purpose, but my focus is not so narrow. The world abandoned us here. I think it only right we deliver this place unto the world.”
“Set the monsters free? On other islands?”
“Not just other islands; on the mainland. They’ll feed and devour, breed and conquer the world.”
“What will you do then?”
“We’ll all be long dead by then, but at least the world will have joined us, rather than forgetting us.”
THEY DESCENDED FROM the crow’s nest, back to the throne room, where a servant waited with clean robes and Hachirō’s guntō.
“Binh will take you to your new home. I’ll send for you this evening and we’ll feast together. We have much to discuss.”
The servant led him out of the throne room, through the castle and down back onto the holding deck, where the monsters lurked in cages. Hachirō still felt the urge to flee, looking at all those beasts, any one of which could crush or swallow him without notice. The servant, Binh, didn’t seem troubled even by the ear-splitting roars some of the bigger lizards issued. They walked down the ramp and back along the shoreline.
Once, when he was a boy, Hachirō had stood on the beach outside Kobe with the other kids and watched as a typhoon barely missed Japan. Hachirō and the boys stood in the rain while the wind dug sand from the beaches and flung it at them, each grain biting at their skin, digging trench lines through their flesh for the rain to run along. The boys stood, eyes shut tight against the onslaught, skin biting, clothes waterlogged. One by one they left the beach, fled the typhoon’s kiss and returned to their homes, to the scoldings of their mothers, chastised for their foolishness. Hachirō stood in the sand while a drift built up in front of each ankle, his hair heavy with water, his white clothes turning a sallow, capillary brown. Hachirō waited until the wind exhausted itself, until the clouds grew light and stopped shedding their weight, and when he opened his eyes he was alone on the beach.
His father beat him—he had been missing more than a day—but what punishments could a man give out when a typhoon could not break you?
Mitsukawa imagined Hachirō was broken. He was not unreasonable for doing so. Hachirō had watched while his ship danced on its anchor and cracked in half to sink in water not deep enough to hide its radio antenna. He’d seen his men die one by one of stupid, inglorious things; they’d been tortured in front of him, offered up to him as sustenance. Hachirō should have been broken. But instead of snapping Hachirō’s final tether to the world, Mitsukawa had offered a lifeline. In hoping to turn Hachirō to his cause, the king had unveiled his plan. Hachirō could stop it, could prevent Mitsukawa’s apocalyptic vision from playing out. He could recast all the deaths he’d witnessed as the sacrifices needed to stop this one, final cataclysm. If he could destroy the ark, his men would not have died in vain.
“Pleasant night,” Binh said.
Storms came and went unpredictably on the island, but for now, for just this moment, the night was clear and warm and Hachirō could see all the stars above.
“Yes,” Hachirō answered. “Yes, it is.
BINH TOOK HIM to a small house on the edge of the village, up the hill, close to the cliff face. They passed under the tower Hachirō had seen; it was indeed a sort of lighthouse, with a great fire at its crown. But it was something else too, half gallows, half butcher’s post. From it hung the corpses of men, some recently dead, some dismembered and flayed, ready for butchery. At the base of the tower was a sort of amphitheatre; people gathered all around it, talking in small groups, sharing a meal. Children played by the tower’s base.
Beyond the cave, in the jungle, when the islanders hunted his crew, he’d believed they were savages, cannibals who knew no other way than mindless consumption. This, the ark, the village, told a different story. They were something more terrifying than monsters; they were men, and men could do anything given the time to grow accustomed to it. Here, children played in the shadow of human beings butchered like livestock.
Hachirō had done rotations in Korea, putting in to port and spending days in the occupied cities, sometimes venturing into the countryside on leave. He’d seen Koreans tried and executed for crimes they’d only been incidentally involved with; some of his own crew were conscripts ripped from their lives to serve Japan’s ambitions.
As Binh led him past the village square Hachirō suddenly saw himself, not as he hoped to be, but as he was. He was a soldier, a servant of a violent machine, a butcher who’d grown used to his trade. How many people had looked at him and seen the rab
id animal he’d thought these islanders were? He felt sick. The village, the island, Mitsukawa’s plan, the Hokushinron, the Nanshinron, occupation and national destiny—they all made him sick. He could barely stand. A coughing fit seized him; his body, having nothing to evacuate, settled on denying him breath.
“You must rest, lieutenant-commander. A long, wearying journey is ending. Rest now, and tonight you’ll eat with the king. You’ll feel better then.”
HACHIRŌ WOULD NOT rest, would not eat with the king, would not play a part in the wretched culture that had consumed the island and its inhabitants. Mitsukawa may have been capable of forgetting the fate of his own crew, but Hachirō could not. Men he’d fought with would be a part of the night’s feast. If Hachirō had been selected to survive, then so too had his men been selected to die; so many young, brilliant Japanese lives destroyed by the choices of long lost captains.
Hachirō understood the circumstances of the island, but he could not accept them. Had he been in Mitsukawa’s position, he would have perished before turning on his men—and he would gladly starve before he butchered them. Horrors had been visited upon this small civilization since its inception, and it had grown to reflect those horrors.
If Mitsukawa’s plan succeeded, the world would die. However broken it might be, Hachirō could not accept that all of it must burn. His country had sent him to die on a foolish mission, and others had done the same to all the people here; Hachirō’s suffering was not unique, to this island or any other. Mankind suffered greatly, every day, across the globe. It only hurt so much this time because it was happening to him. To take that pain and burn the world for it would be an act of singular selfishness. There was no question Mitsukawa had been denied the life he deserved, but Hachirō would not allow the man to do the same to others.
The True History of the Strange Brigade Page 19
