Year of the Demon

bellows. “We’re almost there. No distractions.”

“Tadaaki-san has a point,” Genzai said softly. Masa gave a little nod and, still sniggering, settled himself back on his rock. “Kaida-san, do you mean to tell us you risked your life just to ask your question?”

Kaida scrunched up her nose. “I didn’t risk anything.”

“Masa here was ordered to kill or cripple any who approached.”

“She was already crippled by the time I got to her,” Masa said with a little shrug. “You’ve got more than sharp ears, little one. You’ve got heart too.”

“I’ll go,” Kaida said. “I shouldn’t have come.”

“No,” said Genzai, “you shouldn’t have. But nor should you leave empty-handed. Tell her why you let them surround you, Masa.”

Another little shrug from Masa. “Who was the first one to throw a punch?” he said.

“I don’t know,” said Kaida.

“And who was the first man I hit?”

“I don’t know.”

“The one who’s missing all his teeth, what did I hit him in the mouth with? A fist? A knee? An elbow?”

“How should I know? I couldn’t see anything.”

“Because we were surrounded,” said Masa. “No one else in your village could see either.”

“All they’ve got is their imagination,” Kaida said, to herself as much as to anyone else. “If you don’t let them see what you do, and especially if you let them have the advantage before you strike . . . the only thing scarier than the shark you can see is the one you can’t.”

“She’s a natural, Genzai.”

Genzai scratched the underside of his chin, just behind his beard. “Not bad, little one. Is that really the only reason you came here?”

“Uh-huh.”

He laughed that deep, disquieting laugh of his again. “Sleep well, Kaida-san. You can tell your family we don’t plan to stay much longer.”

Kaida nodded, bowed, and turned to go. As she turned, her eye caught a glimpse of what the wild, wispy, white-haired man held in his tongs. It was a demonic visage, a mask, the tips of its horns and fangs glowing as red as the embers themselves, as red as the setting sun.

26

Kaida hadn’t been privy to the previous night’s discussion in the elders’ hut, but by morning she understood the agreement they’d come to. Ama boats were out on the water again, but only in the southern half of the cove. The water was deeper there, and abalone hunting went more slowly, but the south end held the advantage of having no violent outlanders floating about.

Kaida liked the deeper dives. She could go deeper than her sisters—deeper than all the girls her age, in fact—and so she could be alone. A lot of the older women encouraged her diving skills or praised her for the strength of her lungs. A few whispered when they thought Kaida couldn’t hear, wondering at how unnatural it was for a thirteen-year-old girl to dive as well as women of thirty-three or forty-three. Everyone knew an ama came into her best years as she grew older.

But no one seemed to understand what Kaida thought was obvious: a one-handed ama had no choice but to stay at the bottom longer. She could not use her kaigane with one hand and pry with her fingers with the other. To catch the same number of abalone, Kaida had to spend twice as long under the surface as her stepsisters.

Pressure on the ears was a different question, but her lovely stepsisters had taught her much about pain tolerance too. And with one good arm, she couldn’t swim back to the surface as quickly as the others either. Of course she could dive deeper than they could. To Kaida the logic was as obvious as the sun in the sky.

Today the waves rolled in high and broad-shouldered, and down deep they stirred the sand more than usual. It cut down on visibility, so Kaida had a harder time keeping track of Miyoko, Kiyoko, and Shioko. It didn’t matter, though. Down deep, the advantage was hers and they knew it. That was another reason to like the south end of the cove; there were three fewer predators to worry about.

She wished she could see the outlanders. Out of caution, not fear, she kept her distance. Like yesterday, their boats floated over the shipwreck. After a whole day of diving on it they hadn’t found what they were looking for, which was hardly surprising; even from a hundred boat-lengths away, it was easy to see they had no idea what they were doing. They dived with their pants still on. With no weights to help them sink. Their boats were ama boats, but they didn’t think to use the braziers to help their divers warm up. Nevertheless, Genzai seemed to think they’d find their quarry today—or so he’d said last night, if Kaida understood him rightly. She guessed his confidence must have had something to do with the demon face that his friends kept putting back in the fire. She thought they seemed to be in an awful hurry to finish it, whatever it was, though Kaida couldn’t guess how it could help them find anything underwater. Better for them to learn to swim properly instead. The only other outlanders Kaida had ever met had come from trading vessels, and as near as she could tell, those ones couldn’t swim or dive either.

Even so, the thought of diving inside that wreck made the water all around her seem colder. Swimming under a little shelf of coral was one thing. Having it close her in on all sides was something else entirely. There were holes in the shelves sometimes, and sometimes the other girls would swim in through one hole and come out somewhere else. Kaida used to do it too back when she was younger—back when her mother was still alive. But not since. Never since.

Merely imagining it caused her to retch. Foul, burning bile scalded the back of her mouth. Her throat grew tight; she had to kick the sandbag off her ankle and swim for the surface in middive.

“Kaida?” said Haru-san, whose mangled knee prevented him even from rowing, but he liked the sun and the roll of the surf. Sitting in his hut all day didn’t suit him, so he’d come out with the divers even though he couldn’t do anything but keep Sen company. As Sen found his two oars companions enough, Haru-san busied himself by tending the embers in the boat’s little brazier. “Are you all right?” he said.

Kaida nodded, coughed, and swished some water in her mouth until the taste of bile went away. She hooked her stump over the boat’s transom and sneezed into her hand. “I’m fine,” she said. The tightness in her throat had gone.

“You’re usually down much longer than that,” said Haru-san.

“I’m going back down.”

She scowled down at the water. It was embarrassing, not being able to dive. Diving was the only thing she was any good at. Now she’d put Haru-san to the work of pulling her sandbag all the way up to the surface, and she didn’t even have an abalone to show for his effort. She grabbed the line he was hauling in. “Don’t,” she said. “Let me see if I can get it first.”

It was a good test, and a common one—but only in shallower water. The sandbags were almost the same color as the seabed, so retrieving them was a test of vision for little girls learning to dive. The deeper the water, the less light penetrated to the bottom, and the harder it was to discern the sandbag from everything else around it. Villagers had been testing their daughters that way for generations, but never at this depth. Simply following the oarsman’s line down to the sandbag defeated the whole point of the exercise, and the deeper a diver had to swim, the more likely she was to miss her mark. “Are you sure?” Haru-san said. “I wouldn’t want you to get hurt.”

“You don’t think I can do it,” said Kaida.

“Oh, don’t get grumpy with me. No one could find it that deep. Your own mother wouldn’t have found it, and she was as strong as they come.”

Kaida scowled. She meant this test to be a way to bury her fear, and with it her shame at having been afraid. It was her mother’s memory, the memory of her death, that had panicked Kaida in the first place. Bringing it up again wasn’t helpful.

“Just let me try,” she said.