Year of the Demon

everyone will say.”

“I already know what everyone says. If I leave, at least I won’t have to overhear them anymore.”

“You’re thirteen. I will not have people whispering that my daughter is a whore.”

Kaida felt the muscles quiver below her right eye. She bit her lip to keep it from quivering too. For the briefest of moments she thought her father was cross because he’d miss her if she left. And perhaps some part of him would. But what he wanted most of her was for her to have been born a boy, and since he couldn’t have that, what he wanted now was for her not to malign his good name.

It wasn’t so long ago that he hadn’t thought that way. When Kaida’s mother was alive, he’d still wanted sons, but he’d still treated Kaida with affection. But after her mother was killed, after Kaida lost her hand, he’d never quite looked at her the same way. She felt like scar tissue, a reminder of what had once been whole, and it horrified her to think that her own father thought of her the same way she thought of the ugly, jagged, slick- skinned, distended worms that twisted this way and that on the stump of her left arm. When she looked there she felt anger and loss, and if she didn’t want to feel those things she just looked somewhere else.

“A whore?” Kaida said. “The ones who say that about me are sitting right there. I heard Miyoko this morning, saying I’d bought your life with my mouth. She didn’t mean talking to the outlander, either. Go on, ask her what she said.”

Miyoko gasped. “I don’t understand what you mean,” she said. “Kissing? What is she talking about, Mother?”

“Miyoko never said anything to me,” said Shioko. “Did she say anything to you, Kiyoko?” Kiyoko shook her head and shrugged.

Cho clasped her hands in her lap. “Kaida-chan, you’re a very sweet girl, but I won’t have you putting filthy ideas in my daughter’s heads.”

“They don’t need me for that. The boys put filthier things than ideas in their—”

“Kaida!” Her father winced in pain and bit down on the knuckle of the hand he could still move. Shouting must have shifted something in his arm. With his fist still pressed to his face, he said, “I will not have you speak of your sisters that way.”

“They’re not my sisters.”

“They are. I married their mother. That’s all there is to it. Now you will put this nonsense about running off with foreigners out of your head.”

He had more to say, but Kaida was distracted by a shout behind her. Over her shoulder she saw two of the outlanders standing by a row of overturned fishing boats. Genzai wasn’t one of them. Some of the villagers had gathered there too, forming a makeshift fence between the boats and the outlanders.

At last. Some backbone. Kaida twisted around to see what was going on. Someone shouted that this was his boat. One of the strangers replied, but Kaida couldn’t hear him over the protests of other fishermen. There was more shouting, and the fence closed in around the strangers.

The outlanders waited to react until they were wholly surrounded. Kaida could not see what happened first. What happened second was pandemonium. The fence disintegrated; the strongest men of her village scattered like sand crabs fleeing a shadow. Of the five that were left behind, three were bleeding from the mouth and nose and the other two nursed broken bones. The outlanders seemed unscathed. One of them stood at the prow of two boats and picked up one in each hand. The other did the same with the sterns and they walked back toward their little encampment on the north end of the strand.

When they came back for the next two boats, no one offered resistance.

25

Since no one but the outlanders was diving, Kaida had a lot of time to think.

She sat atop the Fin, a high, sharply angled rock in the middle of the beach, watching the waves and running through the conversation with her father—with her “family”—over and over in her mind, wondering how she could have made it go better. When that grew tiresome, which was almost immediately, she recounted the fight on the beach. To see Ama-machi muster its courage had caused such a swell of pride in her. It proved that hers was not a village of mollusks after all, that there were a few vertebrates among them. But then it was all the more heartbreaking to see their backs broken instantly, to see their courage crushed like a paper boat.

It surprised her how much she wanted to root for the people of her awful little village. Perhaps she hoped to see some saving grace, some virtue—any virtue—that made it shallow for her to want to leave. But there was no such grace, no such virtue. And in any event, even if she never rooted for the outlanders, she hadn’t yet lost her fascination with them, either. If anything, her curiosity bored deeper, pressing on her, demanding her attention. It seemed strange to her that the outlanders waited until they were wholly encircled before they attacked. As handily as they’d defeated the mob of fishermen, it was self-evident that they had risked little by giving their enemy a superior position. But why risk anything at all? The outlanders could have won just as easily by charging straight in.

The moon rose behind her, the sun sank before her, the stars came out one by one, and still Kaida could not figure it out. She thought about other things in the interim, to be sure: how Shioko’s malice was different than Miyoko’s; whether malice in order to fit in, to avoid being left on the losing side, was better or worse than malevolence for its own delights; why Kiyoko seemed to have no voice of her own, wicked or otherwise; why outlanders didn’t know how to dive—as, surely, they did not, if Genzai’s people were any guide; whether Miyoko had any control over her cruelty, or whether it was the true puppeteer and she the puppet; whether Kiyoko made any moral judgments at all; whether Miyoko was capable of feeling guilt or shame; what the difference was between Miyoko’s being amoral and Kiyoko’s having no position of her own to call moral or immoral; how the Fin came to be there; whether her father and Cho could go about their rutting with his arm as badly injured as it was; why her father had yet to thank Kaida for sparing all his fingers; whether standing by one’s word was an admirable thing if one spoke in Genzai’s merciless language. But wherever her thoughts meandered, they always came back to that fight on the beach.

All the ones who had fought—or been injured, anyway; it was hard to say the villagers did much fighting—were now in the one house left in the village where fires and lamps still burned brightly. All the elders were in there. Kaida’s father, youngest of the village elders, had to be carried there by his wife and stepdaughters. The fathers of all the village families were there, along with all the injured men who could walk or limp their way to attend. They were meeting to discuss how to deal with the outlanders. No one had announced as much, but there was no other explanation for the gathering.

That left the mothers and grandmothers of the village at home, and left the children to do whatever they had a mind to. No sooner did that thought occur to Kaida than she wondered what mischief Miyoko was brewing. That was when she heard footsteps in the sand.

They were nearly inaudible, all but drowned out by the hissing surf, but Kaida had sharp ears. “I’m going to break every joint in your hand,” she said loudly, “starting with the thumb and working my way across.”

“What?”

It was Miyoko’s voice, below and behind her, off to the right. That would put Kiyoko on her left flank, also down on the sand. Shioko, always needing to prove herself, would be climbing the spine of the Fin to push her off.

“Shioko-chan,” Kaida said, not turning around, keeping her voice as tranquil as she could, “I’m telling you, if you put your hand on me I will break every joint in it.”

“How did she—?” said Kiyoko.

“Never mind,” said Miyoko. “She’s a freak. Let’s go.”

“I can still get her, Miyoko.”

“You can’t,” said Kaida. “Climb down now, Shioko, while you still have two good hands to do it.”

“You don’t have two good hands,” said Shioko. “You’re a freak.”

“Follow Miyoko. It’s what you’re good at.”

Kaida forced herself not to turn around and watch them go. Part of her wanted to know what they’d been planning, and whether they’d brought anything with them to play their little game. Miyoko often armed her sisters