Year of the Demon (24 page)

They came nine days after the big red ship had foundered, but Kaida knew immediately that they had come for the ship. Outlanders didn’t come to Ama-machi. There was nothing for them here—nothing, unless Ryujin’s Claw seized some treasure of theirs. That was why Kaida had been sneaking out every morning to dive on the wreck.

She was treading water over the skeletal hulk when she first spied the strangers. The sun had not yet risen high enough for its light to reach Ama-machi, so the village was still asleep. That meant Kaida was the only one to have spotted the strangers. If only she had already found what they’d come for, she could have delivered it to them before anyone else was even awake. Whatever the outlanders were looking for, Kaida could use it to buy her way out of Ama-machi forever. It did not matter where the outlanders took her, whether they took her back to their home or simply dumped her off as soon as they tired of her. Anywhere was better than Ama-machi.

She took a deep breath and duck-dived straight down. The wreck was below her—the front half of it anyway—purple, not red, at that depth. To her left loomed Ryujin’s Claw, sharp and menacing. A little school of hammerheads circled the Claw, but only five or six of them, not enough to threaten Kaida. Paying them no mind, she swam deeper.

The carrack’s bow pointed straight down into the chasm the villagers called the Whore’s Cleft, a name Kaida didn’t wholly understand. The only thing Kaida knew about whores was that the village didn’t have any and that they sometimes did was what Miyoko had been doing to the boys with her hand and her mouth in quiet, secluded places the village. The Cleft was the only rift in the wide, black shelf of rock that formed the belly of this side of the cove. The white sand of the sea floor was much deeper down, all the way at the bottom of the Cleft, deeper than any
ama
had ever dived in Ama-machi’s collective memory. Now the snarling dragon that had been the figurehead of the outlander’s carrack was buried in that sand, and their ill-fated ship had jammed herself between the sharp black walls of the Cleft.

No one else in the village would dare to dive here. Not since the shipwreck. Usually the hunting was good; the wide rock shelf lay at an easy depth and was pocked with hundreds of holes for abalone to grow in. On flat days one or two boats would risk rowing a little past the Maw and the Claw to anchor out here. This morning the sea as was as calm as a sleeping baby, but Kaida knew she would be the only one to dive here today. Everyone else was worried about the ghosts. Too many dead sailors, they said. Only three had washed up ashore (and of course Miyoko missed no opportunity to ask whether Kaida might beg one of them to mount her, to get her pregnant so she could keep him). Those three burned on a single funeral pyre, but there would be no such satisfaction for the spirits of those who were swallowed up by the waves. That meant dozens of hungry ghosts, so everyone else stayed well clear the great red wreck.

Kaida was more worried about sharks than she was of ghosts, and sharks didn’t concern her much. The big ones didn’t like the riptide near the Claw, and the little ones that could easily ride the riptide were more dangerous to fish than to people. Besides, the sharks she could see weren’t the scary ones. The ones to worry about were the ones she didn’t see. An
ama
knew what to watch for, how to tell an aggressive shark from one that just wanted to snatch her catch bag and swim off. But then there were the sharks that hit so hard they knocked you silly, and they disappeared so fast that sometimes an
ama
didn’t even know she’d been bitten until there was blood in the water.

So it wasn’t the sharks that bothered her. The ones she imagined being out there were scarier than the real ones. What really frightened Kaida was the wreck itself.

It yawned open before her, a blue pit deepening into blackness. Oddly it was the empty parts, the parts that weren’t there, that scared her most. The hull of the ship was arguably the most dangerous. Its mouth was a misshapen perimeter of spiky timbers and beams, hundreds of them, any one of them sharp enough to run her through if she didn’t judge the riptide right. Snapped spars, equally sharp, hung from tangled lines snagged here and there, swaying in the currents. They too could cut her open, or the lines could catch an ankle, even slip around her neck if the riptide and bad karma went against her. But for all of that, what scared her most were those deep, dark pits that once were holds. Two of them, one stacked on the other, separated by the jagged plain of the deck between them.

Kaida didn’t like closed spaces. Her throat grew tight whenever she felt the walls were too close. It was worse when she was underwater, and not because her racing heart burned up more of her body’s breath. Her cool, wet, quiet world was her home. She did not like feeling afraid here.

But whatever it was the outlanders had come to find, it would be in those deep blue pits or it would be nowhere at all. Ryujin’s Maw had chewed up the other half of their huge red carrack and spat it back out into the sea. Kaida had looked for it. She’d even risked a swim out to the Maw itself, to get a firm grip on one of the teeth so she could look underwater for as long as her breath would hold out. There were no timbers there, no corpses, only a few lines draped on the coral, undulating back and forth in a rhythm half a beat behind that of the waves.

So if the outlanders had come to find sunken treasure, they would find it in the wreck Kaida was diving on. She hovered over it. It took a lot to convince herself the walls wouldn’t close in on her and swallow her up. The tides were strong. The hull was weak. It wouldn’t take much to collapse the whole thing.

She dived deeper anyway. Not into where it was dark. Just past the toothy timbers that held siege around the open holds. The sunlight still made it here. She loved the way water caught the light, diffusing it, bending it into areas that should have been shaded. Sunlight didn’t work that way up above.

What should have been a bulkhead now lay like a deck beneath her. Ryujin’s Claw had ripped out half of it and the tides had demolished much of the rest, but there was still enough of a ledge for Kaida to hook with her stump and hang from while she inspected the inside of the hold. Just looking inside wasn’t so bad.

She saw some coins she hadn’t seen on previous dives. For the last eight mornings she’d brought her catch bag out to the wreck, and every time she swam back in to shore to build up her little treasury: a dead sailor’s coin purse; a bow case with some kind of pattern worked into the leather, the details of which were swollen and spoiled by the salt water; a jeweled brooch; a collection of hairpins, all contributed by the dead; chopsticks inlaid with mother-of-pearl, kept in a slender golden case; even a short sword, taken from the belt of a drowned man. She kept them all in a little hollow at the base of the cliff behind the village, buried in the sand so her sisters would not find them.

She had a feeling that nothing in her collection was valuable, but she thought that perhaps when the outlanders came, they might see how diligently she’d been collecting and how cleverly she’d chosen what to gather and what to leave behind. The coins, for example, were meaningless. There were probably hundreds more down there, but tens of thousands more in the great cities she’d heard about in the elders’ stories. A few more taken from the wreck wouldn’t matter. The hairpins, though, or the sword, or the chopsticks in their ornate case, any of them might identify the bearer. Perhaps one of the passengers was important. Or perhaps the outlanders had search parties looking for survivors. If the brooch belonged to some noble lord, Kaida could present it to the outlanders and they would know their lord had been aboard after all.

So Kaida did not bother swimming down to collect the coins. She did not want the outlanders to think her stupid. She swam back up to the surface, filled her lungs again, and dived on a different part of the wreck.

She went on this way for some time, and each time she returned to the surface, she assessed the progress of the outlanders. By the time the sunlight reached down far enough into the bay to strike the beach, the outlanders had dropped long lines from the top of the cliff and several men had descended them. Other men readied large wooden boxes, which Kaida guessed they would lower to the men below. The ones up top had a huge creature with them, its body bigger than a dolphin’s, with four tall, spindly legs. Its head was strange too, its neck long and thick, and it had a long tail of seaweed hanging from the back, just like an old turtle. She wondered if this was one of the horses she’d heard about in tales. If so, it was much bigger than she’d imagined.

Kaida dived again, this time gliding down along the starboard side until she reached a rent in the hull. She couldn’t guess what had staved it in, but through the gash she could see more dead sailors. One wore a breastplate, and it took her several dives to cut all the cords that fastened it to the body. She used another corpse’s knife to do the cutting, which she thought was very resourceful of her, and she tucked the knife into her thin rope belt for future use. She wondered hopefully whether Miyoko would think twice about threatening to drown her now.

She dived again, found the soldier she’d been working on, and pinched the breastplate between her knees to get a good grip on it. With her new knife she cut the last cord free.

The listless corpse lolled to one side, floating out from under the armor. In the next instant the breastplate pulled her right into the dark hold of the carrack. Armor was heavier than she’d expected, much heavier, and now she was in the dark and alone and there were walls on all sides of her. She let the breastplate go. Something massive gave a loud thunk just below her, maybe a big shark trying to bash its way inside. No. It was just the breastplate. The noise gave her a start nonetheless. Her throat tightened; her heart flopped and shuddered like a netted fish drowning on air.

The jagged blue window overhead was the only thing she could see. Everything else was black. She swam toward the blue, but something pushed her away from it. The riptide, making crazy currents over the hollow of the hold. It bounced her into something solid. The wall. It was caving in on her. She screamed a torrent of bubbles and swam like mad.

Then she was bathed in blue light and then she was at the surface again. It took a long time for her to calm down, and when she was calm again she was surprised she still had the knife in hand. She’d have guessed she would have dropped it in her manic scramble out of the hold—which, she realized now, was never in danger of collapsing. She’d bumped into things she couldn’t see. That was all. And all too easy to rationalize too, now that she was safely on the open water.

To the best of her knowledge, her sisters didn’t know about her fear of tight spaces. Kaida was glad they weren’t with her now. If Miyoko ever found out, she’d bury Kaida alive just for fun.

23

K
aida had only her knife to show for this dive, but she swam back to shore anyway. The whole way in she tried to persuade herself that she was returning because she was tired, not because she was still scared. By the time her feet touched down she still wasn’t convinced.

She followed her new morning ritual, which was to skirt the village, keeping her catch bag out of sight, until she reached the big camphor tree. Its biggest root was gnarled and arched like a crone’s finger, pointing at the sea cliff. Following that root in a straight line, she found her treasure cache, which for the first time she unburied in its entirety. Except for this morning, she’d always returned with a full catch bag, satisfied with the fruits of her labors. But now that she looked at her entire collection, it seemed insignificant. The wreck was so vast, and everything she’d reclaimed she could gather in her own two arms. Why should anyone care about what little treasure a crippled girl could carry? She wondered whether it would be enough to buy the outlanders’ favor.

Kaida gathered it up anyway, trapping the bigger items against her belly with her stump, collecting the smaller things in her right hand. She followed the little sandy strip between the sea cliff and the tall grass that filled the back quarter of the cove. She stayed low as she circled around toward the outlanders, lest one of her sisters see her and call the other two.

She saw Sen before she saw the outlanders. He followed a few other men, and Kaida was surprised to see her father at their head. He rarely left his bedroom this early in the morning. His new wife seemed to have fishhooks in him, or else their bed did, because since they’d married a year ago he seemed unable to spend so long as an hour apart from her.

He was a big man, his forearms as broad as the blades of an oar. A lifetime of rowing and rope making tended to shape a man’s arms that way. All the men of Ama-machi had muscular arms, and all the women had lithe swimmer’s bodies.

“Good morning,” her father said, and Kaida peered over the high grass to see him approach one of the outlanders. Her father smiled amiably, not his lady-killer smile but his pacifying smile. The stranger did not smile at all.

“We came to welcome you to our village,” her father said, though Kaida could tell he was lying. He had three burly men behind him. That was no welcoming party. And he used the same overly friendly voice he’d used when he’d explained to Kaida that he’d be marrying Miyoko’s mother.

There were four of the outlanders, though only one had even recognized the villagers’ existence; the others were busy untying the long box that those up above had just lowered down the cliff. Kaida could tell the stranger’s silence put her father ill at ease. He did what he could to mask his apprehension. “We wondered if we could help you,” he said. “It promises to be a hot morning, and you look like you’ve got a lot of hard work ahead of you. May we ask what you’re doing here?”

“I’m going to break every joint in your arm,” said the stranger. His voice was soft and calm, eerily so. Kaida placed him at a little over forty, with a bald head and a neatly trimmed black beard. From the way his jacket flowed in the light breeze, Kaida could tell it was of finer cloth than any in Ama-machi.