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
When 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.
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
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
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.
