Year of the Demon (23 page)

Miyoko’s squeeze came as fast as a hammer blow. Kaida vomited what little air she had left. Black spots swam like little fish in her vision.

Kaida struggled to free her right arm. She’d show Miyoko how deep a
kaigane
could cut. But Kiyoko’s stout hands held fast. By then Shioko was on her, and together the three of them pulled Kaida halfway up to the surface before they let her go.

But only halfway. Kaida couldn’t launch herself from the bottom, yet she wasn’t close enough to the surface to be certain she’d make it. Black spots were already encroaching on her vision. She had only a split second to decide: dive back down—never the easy choice—or try to reach the surface without the benefit of a push-off.

She swam straight up, kicking like mad. Her lungs heaved mightily, so hard she almost threw up. When she broke the surface her inhalation was a loud, gasping, birdlike cry. It was another five or six breaths before she could hear Miyoko leading the chorus of laughter.

Kaida puked into the boat, inspiring another fit of giggling. Sen, the oarsman, chuckled too; Kaida could feel the vibrations from his deep, dopey voice through the wooden hull. She spat a mouthful of vomit on his foot, regretting it instantly. He didn’t deserve it; he was only the closest target. He was too stupid to know any better. And now Kaida had no more vomit to spit at Miyoko or the other two.

She dived back under, as much to silence their laughing as to flush out her mouth. She stayed under for a while, filling her mouth with salt water and spitting it out, over and over until the taste of bile was gone. Then she surfaced, took her deepest breath, and swam down again to recover her
kaigane
and her abalone.

The other three did not follow her this time. Once was enough. No doubt they would content themselves to watch from the surface and comment on how saccadic her movements were. Even the silence of the water was not enough to shut them up in Kaida’s imagination. A seal without a flipper. A turtle without a fin. They’d called her as much and worse before. No doubt they hadn’t bored of it yet.

Kaida wondered what she could have done wrong to deserve sisters like these.

This time she had plenty of air when she kicked off the bottom, though the whole way up she thought about how far it was and how narrowly she had escaped drowning. Again. The trick of pulling her away from the seabed was Miyoko’s newest invention. She really was a virtuoso of cruelty. One of these days Kaida wouldn’t make it to the surface, and she wondered whether Miyoko would still be laughing then.

She was certain her other two stepsisters would not. Kiyoko only picked on Kaida to fit in. Like a remora, she attached herself to the shark in order to stay out of harm’s way. Shioko wasn’t evil so much as competitive. She was the youngest, always catching up, always plagued by the need to prove herself. When she showed genuine malice, Kaida saw it as a sort of emotional karate, practiced out of some vague sense that it might protect her fragile sense of self. Miyoko’s cruelty was purer, more hateful. She indulged her malicious urges for the sheer enjoyment of it. Kaida knew about the little animals she trapped sometimes, and what she did to them. Now that Miyoko had an ugly, crippled stepsister, she’d broadened her tastes.

Kaida broke through the crest of a big wave to see the other three already warming themselves around the little fire pit in Sen’s boat. By the time Kaida got there, the tea would already be gone—“spilled” overboard, no doubt, if they hadn’t actually drunk it all. That was all right. Anger would keep Kaida warm. She did notice, though, that the wind was blowing hard, and the waves were a lot higher than they’d been a few moments before. A storm was brewing, and it was rolling in fast and angry.

21

T
he moment it sailed into view, Kaida knew the strangers’ ship was doomed, yet somehow the sight of it inspired a surge of hopefulness in her. Every time she saw a ship, she dreamed of being aboard. Ama-machi was not a village in her eyes; it was a penitentiary, and the ships were the only way out.

The features that made Ama-machi an ideal place for a settlement were the very features that made it the harshest of prisons. Sheer black cliffs walled in the beach on three sides, protecting it from the worst of the storms and from raiders to boot. The waves rolled in relentlessly, battering down the rock over thousands of years, forming the cove and driving back any who sought to swim beyond it. They’d created the beach, and there the grass shacks of Ama-machi huddled like a bunch of ducklings nestling in close to their mother, the giver of life.

To the southwest, the line of toothy rocks known as Ryujin’s Maw marked the boundary between the cove and the open sea. The sea was the fourth wall to Kaida’s prison, pitiless, beckoning eternally yet never offering escape. Out there were the biggest sharks, the strongest riptides, the coldest currents. The jagged, broken wall of the Maw fended off all those threats, but in so doing it fenced in any young woman who dreamed of someday swimming off to the horizon, never to return.

It was only when a ship sailed into view that Kaida felt any hope of escape. Even this new ship, the one that sped under full sails just past Ryujin’s Maw, caused her heart to race, though she knew the strangers and their ship were soon to be swallowed up by the waves. The elders said there was no way to reach another village except by sea. The cliffs surrounding Ama-machi were volcanic rock, sharp and brittle, and even if they were as soft as baby skin they were still vertical where they were not overhung. Kaida had climbed to the top once, back when she still had two hands, for no other reason than to see what there was to see. But there were no other villages up there, nor even a road to reach them; she found only trackless overgrown hills and a down-climb so difficult it had nearly killed her.

Back then she still had reasons to climb back down. Her mother was still alive. Her father still knew she existed, even though he’d have preferred a son to a daughter. Even in those days Kaida found Ama-machi too small for her. The boys were boring and the girls were petty. It was a good thing she was the best
ama
her age—better even than a lot of the women in their twenties and thirties—because the only place she could go to feel sane was underwater. These days she wanted to escape even more than she had back then, but Kaida knew attempting the climb again would do her no good. How could she survive in hill country? There were no coral beds to forage for food, no waterfalls or rain catches for freshwater. She could not imagine how anyone could tell which direction was which; in her memory all those hills looked exactly the same.

No, the only hope of escaping Ama-machi was to sail to another village, and she would not be allowed to do that until she was fifteen. She’d told herself a thousand times to forget about escape, and yet every time a ship sailed into view her heart betrayed her. Every single time it leaped with hope.

This ship had no hope. It was the biggest Kaida had ever seen—far and away the biggest, in fact—and still she had no hope. She was red, the strangers’ ship, three-masted, all sails fat with wind as she raced the storm bearing down on her like a school of barracuda. Ribbons of foam whipped off the whitecaps at her prow. The colorful dragon that was her figurehead snarled in defiance as it surged straight for the Claw.

Kaida heard gasps from all around her, and though she could not take her eyes from the dying ship, she knew the whole village must have gathered on the beach to watch. Rain pelted her, and the others too, but the doomed ship was as hypnotic as it was horrifying.

The ship’s captain had no more hope of seeing Ryujin’s Claw than his wooden draconic figurehead. It was high tide; the Claw was submerged. And this ship clearly could not have been from anywhere near Ama-machi. Her captain did not know these waters. The elders always said outlanders never valued
ama
wisdom. They never hired locals to guide them, and so this stretch of the coast was dotted with a hundred shipwrecks.

The elders were wrong sometimes, but not tonight.

It was as if the gods conspired to let Kaida watch her hopes founder and drown. The clouds were black almost all the way to the horizon, but between the clouds and the angry sea was a long band of golden sky, and in the center of it, right at the horizon, the sun burned like a round red ember. The strangers’ ship sped past the sun. Each tooth of Ryujin’s Maw stood out as black as a shark’s eye against her red hull. No doubt the captain had seen the Maw. No doubt his steersman felt a wave of relief at having passed it unscathed. It was a common mistake.

The Claw ripped the belly out of the strangers’ ship, stopping her dead despite her bulk and speed. Dozens of tiny human forms tumbled forward, as helpless as baby sand crabs before a rogue breaker. Some of the crewmen disappeared overboard. Others struck the gunwales and clung for dear life.

A huge wave loomed over the port bow, big enough to toss any
ama
’s
boat aside. An
ama’
s boat might have been thrown free of the Claw, but the strangers’ ship was too heavy, too bulky, impaled too deep. She took the wave broadside and it snapped her in half.

Someone on the beach screamed. Others shouted, but Kaida only heard them say stupid things. Of course those sailors would try to swim this way. Most would die in the attempt. The rain redoubled its assault, hammering Kaida, nearly blinding her. The other villagers on the beach would be holding their hands against their wet foreheads, creating an eave for their eyes. Kaida had but the one hand, but she cupped her eyes with it anyway, the better to see. Hypnotized and horrified, she watched.

The sailors in the water were learning now why the Claw was so dangerous. An invisible riptide tossed them from the Claw onto the jagged teeth of the Maw, just as if Ryujin was feeding himself. The sea dragon was insatiable. Kaida knew that all too well. He had devoured her mother, and taken Kaida’s left hand as a snack. And that had been in calmer seas than this.

Kaida saw the waves pulp one man after the next against the rocks of the Maw, not because she wanted to watch but because she could not pull her gaze away. “Look at her,” she heard Miyoko say. “She looks like she’s going to cry.”

“She does,” Kiyoko said, following along as passively as ever.

“Cry your big froggy eyes out,” said Shioko. “They’re halfway out of your head already anyway.
Neh
, Miyoko? She has eyes like a bug.”

Kaida refused to look in her sisters’ direction. Men were dying right in front of them, and somehow these three still found the time to pick on her. She debated dragging a boat out into the surf, and maybe recruiting her father and a few of his friends to help her mount a rescue effort. The thought lived only briefly; then she tossed it aside as easily as the sea tossed yet another outland sailor into the Maw. The surf rolled in hard enough to rebuff even the strongest oarsmen in the village, and if they somehow managed to row even halfway out to the Maw, even a hundred oarsmen couldn’t keep a boat steady in these seas. For the outlanders, a boat full of rescuers would only be one more weight to crush their skulls against.

And yet Kaida really did want to row out there to save them. She wished she didn’t care, or at least that she could keep from letting her care show. As it was, Miyoko had only to read her face to find ammunition for her next attack. “Poor Kaida,” she said, mock-whimpering. “Do you want to swim out there and find a husband? Maybe you should. None of Ama-machi’s men will have you.”

I
wouldn’t have
them
, Kaida thought, and even if I would, half of them have already had you. Kaida had heard what Miyoko was doing to the boys of the village. She’d even done it to grown men. She’d done it halfway to Sen once with her hand, then run away giggling while he raged and cried. He’d tried to chase her, stumbling with his pants around his ankles and his member sticking straight out from between his legs. The whole village knew about Sen’s outburst, but not how Miyoko had started him off. But Kaida knew. She heard it from Miyoko’s own mouth, just like she heard all the rest: whispered boasts in the dark after everyone was abed, after Kaida’s father had finished rustling and puffing and grunting with Miyoko’s mother, after all the girls giggled about it to themselves. None of them knew Kaida could hear them, just as none of them knew Kaida could hear their insults over the drumming rain. Kaida never let it show.

Miyoko repeated her taunt louder. Kiyoko aped her, and Shioko tried to outdo them both. Go fishing for a husband. No, go diving for a husband. They’ll all be drowned and still they won’t have you. It was all so predictable. They didn’t need to shout for Kaida to hear them.

But they knew her every bit as well as she knew them. They knew she wanted to escape. They knew the outlanders’ ship embodied hope, and they knew what it meant for Kaida see it smashed to flinders. Yet they’d misunderstood Kaida’s hope for the sailors. She wasn’t malicious like Miyoko. She didn’t want to see these men die. And yet it didn’t matter to her if none of them survived. Even if none of them made it to shore, they were too many for their passing to go unnoticed. Someone would come looking for them. Someone whose ship would leave this place, with Kaida on it.

As she watched the last of them cling to the tips of Ryujin’s teeth, battered by the waves, holding on for dear life even though death was certain, Kaida felt a small swell of hope. Realization struck her: regardless of whether anyone expected to find survivors, a rescue ship was certain to come. It wasn’t just the sailors who would be missed. Their ship was massive, expensive, and probably laden with cargo. Others would come looking for it after all. And when they came, Kaida meant to leave with them, never to return.

22

W
hen at last the outlanders came, they came not by sea but by land.

It was strange. Beyond strange. There was nothing up there: no roads, nor even footpaths; no villages; no food; no water. Yet there they were, a little line of men, black against the sunrise.