Year of the Demon

Kaida thought it was stupid. What could they buy with all that pretty gold? The sea provided everything needed for life in Ama-machi, and to the best of her knowledge, Kaida was the only one who wanted a life elsewhere.

“Name your price and you shall have it,” Genzai said, “if you are the one to retrieve the sword.”

A wave of chittering swelled up among the villagers, but the loudest voice belonged to Kaida’s father. “What price is so great that we can enjoy it in the afterlife? Show us what else you took from the sea yesterday. We saw your friend’s body.”

That caused chittering of a different tone. “You said it yourself,” Kaida’s father went on. “That sword of yours means nothing to us. We have no intention of risking our daughters for it, and neither will we risk them for you.”

“A commendable position,” Genzai said. “I salute you.” He scratched behind his beard. “You put me in a difficult position. I told my men any ama village worthy of the name would provide us with good divers, and as you well know, I am a man of my word. So if none of your daughters will dive for us . . . hm. I’ll have broken my word. That won’t do.”

He folded his legs and sat in the sand beside Kaida’s father. As if speaking to a co-conspirator, his voice so low that Kaida could scarcely hear him, he said, “But I think there may be a way out. If I were to kill every last one of your women, down to the newborn girls, it would no longer be an ama village worthy of the name, would it?”

Seated as he was, he was vulnerable. The villagers outnumbered the outlanders more than ten to one. And Genzai had just threatened every family among them.

Kaida felt a crushing surge of shame. Not one of the villagers reacted. They would never have greater provocation to kill this man, the leader of the outlanders. Nor would they ever have a better opportunity. Yet they sat and did nothing. Some even had the temerity to glance at the heap of riches Genzai and his one-eyed henchman had dumped so indifferently at their feet. Now more than ever, Kaida wanted to get away from this place. She could never look her neighbors in the eye again. They were no fiercer than a shoal of sticklebacks: skittish, flighty, impotent even when traveling in huge schools.

And yet she was proud of her father. He alone stood up to Genzai, and he was the one with the best reason not to. He knew exactly what kind of violence this man was capable of. If she’d ever felt certain about leaving Ama-machi, about leaving her father to his new family, that certainty was crumbling now. Her father would stand up for the whole village, but who would stand up for him?

She took a deep, tremulous breath and told herself it was her long run, not fear, that made the breath flutter in her throat. Then she stepped out of the elders’ hut and made a straight path toward Genzai. She had never felt so exposed.

His eyes caught her first. Then he turned to face her, arms folded, the corners of his mouth turned up ever so slightly. She wanted it to be a smile of paternal pride. More likely it was the thrill of anticipation in seeing wounded prey.

“I will get your sword,” she said, wishing her voice wouldn’t quiver.

46

“It’s too heavy,” Cho said, adjusting the demon mask on her face.

Genzai watched as the one-eyed outlander—Kaida remembered his name was Tadaaki—gave a last tug on the leather ties, undoing the little adjustment Cho had just made to the mask. Tadaaki had bound it to her head tightly, with twice as many ties as were necessary. “What does it do?” Kaida asked.

She was ignored. “I cannot dive with this,” Cho said. “We put our weights on our feet, not our faces.”

“Weight is weight,” said Genzai, rocking easily in the prow of the boat. “Diving is diving. Just get the sword.”

He and Cho weren’t in Kaida’s boat. Their boat was abeam of Kaida’s, in a whole fleet of ama rowboats. All the village women were out, and all the girls of diving age too. They were clothed in light yukata, not naked as they usually went, because usually they spent their time in the water, not cooking in the hot sun in their boats. The outlanders would only allow them to dive one at a time, for they had only one mask.

The ama boats floated in close company like so much flotsam, rising and falling each in their turn as the waves rolled in. There were not enough outlanders to go around, so Genzai could only man one boat in four with one of his own people. Once again Kaida’s village embarrassed her. In every boat the outlanders were outnumbered, and spread out as they were, none could come to another’s aid—not immediately, anyway, and it didn’t take long to brain someone with an oar.

Genzai shared his boat with two other outlanders: Tadaaki and the other one she’d seen sitting by the fire two nights ago, the one with the wild, white, wispy mane and the ragged clothing not so different from his hair. He stank of days-old sweat, and his cloth was so tattered that Kaida wondered why he wore it at all; it certainly did nothing in the name of modesty. He made a ceremony of handling the mask, caressing it almost like a lover until Tadaaki took it from him to tie to the next ama. Kaida thought she heard him chanting under his breath, but his hair and beard conspired to cover his mouth and the wind was coming in too strong for her to hear clearly.

But she could hear Cho well enough. “It is the mask that prevents us from finding your sword,” she told Genzai. “Our way is to let our sandbags carry us down, then let our rowers pull the bags back up. We never swim back up with anything heavier than a catch bag.”

“Not today. Dive.”

Cho sighed in defeat. She was the tenth diver of the morning, and the other nine had worked themselves to exhaustion, all with nothing to show for it but a series of failed experiments on how best to dive under these conditions. They’d fastened an anchor line from the prow of Genzai’s rowboat to the widest hole in the carrack’s hull, so that no effort need be spent steering the course of their descent. And they dived with extra sandbags too; the faster the extra weight could bring them down, the more bottom time they’d have for searching. Yet none of them had so much as laid eyes on their quarry.

“At least let me dive without this silly tether tied to my ankle,” Cho said.

“No. That mask is one of a kind. We need to be able to pull you back up if you should drown.”

Cho’s face blanched. Until that moment, Kaida had been a little proud of her—begrudgingly so, to be sure, but she was the first to speak up to Genzai. It was obvious to all of them why these outlanders hadn’t found their sword; they knew nothing about diving. But only Cho had said so, and Kaida thought that bespoke courage.

But Genzai cowed her with a stare. Cho got in the water and did as she was told, and to no one’s surprise she did not find the sunken sword. She dived again and again came up empty-handed. Kaida watched her as she went down. Cho was as pale and lithe as her eldest daughter, and like Miyoko she swam as gracefully as any creature of the sea—but much deeper, staying down much longer. An ama’s lungs tended to get stronger with age, and wisdom and experience gave insights into diving that none of the younger girls understood. The oldest ama didn’t move at all on their descent, and when they swam it was only little flicks, like a sea turtle’s: small, strong, precise. Every movement, every flexion or tension of the muscles consumed the body’s breath. Kaida understood the principle better than any girl her age, since with her handicap she needed to make the most of every movement. On most days, she tried to let the principle direct her dives, but on this particular morning she could not help but resent it. At this rate, one of the older women was certain to retrieve the sword before she could get to it herself.

She already knew the reward she’d ask of Genzai. She just needed to get to the sword before anyone else. But the ama had decided among themselves that the oldest would dive first. They were the strongest, and it was better for the village not to risk girls of marrigeable age. Diving on the wreck was precarious enough by itself, they said, even without the hungry ghosts that must be circling it like sharks. But Kaida wasn’t afraid of ghosts. She was only afraid that someone would find the sword before she had her turn. At thirteen, she was close to the bottom of the list.

Her mind raced. She had to think of a way to make Genzai choose her, and more difficult yet, she had to