Beneath Ceaseless Skies #116 Read online

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  BAKEMONO, OR THE THING THAT CHANGES

  by A.B. Treadwell

  The Emperor of Japan punched through the soft belly of Russia on the day of my birth. My father’s men were the iron girding the fist. He showed me how it was on a rotting melon. The flesh caved in, and seeds spilled out.

  “All that is left of it is sagging flesh and a vile, clinging stench.” He dandled me on his knee. “A clean land for you to claim.”

  I knew better than to ask or correct. But he had also taught me to observe the ways of nature, the things that change, and the way each change shifts the balance of every other thing it touches.

  As he led me away, I glanced back at the spattered pulp and scattered seeds my father had left in his wake.

  * * *

  The empire and I were eleven the spring my father rode north into the hills against the uprisings. He left his handprint on my shoulder the day he left. “Victory, Katsuro,” he said. He had chosen my name to reflect his past and my future. Victory: katsuro.

  He put on his antlered helmet and mounted his great horse. In his leather armor, he looked like an animal spirit. My mother knelt beside me and pressed her cheek to mine as we watched him and his men grow small against the landscape.

  My mother trembled, though I did not know then that anticipation could resemble fear.

  We walked with proud backs through the town, bowing slightly to farmers bending over new rice seedlings and women carrying wicker baskets on their backs. Inside our house, we closed the wooden screens brought all the way from Edo, and my mother took down her long, heavy hair and knelt with me beside the low table my father had carved from a single cedar tree.

  By that time, my heart was racing, for I knew what next would come. I helped her open the box where we kept the special paper.

  It was behind the double screen of my father’s absence and our devotion to the old ways that my mother brought me into the floating world, the world of sumo and geisha, of kabuki, and all the urban pleasures she had left behind in Edo. With knives she taught me how to cut paper into lace, into mountains and samurai and kitsune. We built elaborate paper puppets that spun and leapt and waved swords on strings.

  My favorite puppets were those of the bakemono, the ones that transform. The bakemono appeared at first as beautiful young women or kind old men or even household items like tea kettles. Only in a mirror or in their shadow did they reveal their true form: cats or badgers or nine-tailed foxes.

  I loved these games because they were secret. It did not occur to me that perhaps my mother constructed these paper worlds for her own reasons, to bring color and movement into a primitive outland.

  “One day, you will return to Edo,” she murmured into my hair. “Then you will see true kabuki, and our puppets will seem like a handful of paper lanterns beside the moon.”

  My father, who loved simplicity, would not have understood.

  We always fed them to the fire before my father returned.

  * * *

  The gun crack of ice breaking along the Lena marked the beginning of school season. In Edo, we were told, the plums were blooming. I went with the children to drape paper blossoms around the shrine of Inari and her messenger, the stone fox, but my heart was far across the steppe where men hunted the hinin.

  I dreaded school, for it was only at school that we were forced to rub up against the children of the Russian captives.

  We were not allowed to call them by the name they call themselves. Most of us called them hinin, which meant things not fully human, like animals. Before we conquered them, they had never known the simple act of writing, let alone balance, movement or brush energy. In classrooms hung with carved ivory mountains and soft watercolor gardens, they scratched quietly in their notebooks. I stared out into the steppe and tried to imagine the sea.

  That year, Takami and I shared a desk under the watchful eye of our uneven-legged teacher, Ito Haru. My father had taught me carefully that as a man is, so will his son be. That is why I knew when Takami rose to the top of our archery and rifle classes, he must also be a faithless, dishonest coward. He and I kicked each other under the desk whenever Ito-sensei wasn’t looking.

  We were there the morning my father returned with new captives, he and his men riding tall and proud behind them on captured horses.

  In sidelong glances, we watched them through the window. The way they trudged down the rutted street, wrapped in fur, with loose, tangled hair and downcast eyes; feral women who had never lived outside caves in the hills. My father would give most of them to his favored soldiers as second or third wives.

  I stiffened when Takami’s elbow found my rib, and then I saw. A girl, my age. She sat astride my father’s second horse, her hands tied to the saddle. She turned her eyes everywhere, as if she had never seen a house, or an artillery shed, or a squadron of soldiers training with long spears.

  Whispers rustled around the room. Even the captives had never seen a feral child. Her skin was the color of local dust, and her brown, wooly hair hung past her waist.

  We all jerked to attention when my father’s guard opened the door.

  “A new student, Sensei.” The guard led her in.

  Her narrow face seemed even thinner beside the wild tangle of her hair. Beneath the fur that draped her shoulders, she wore only ropes of beads above her skirt, and these clicked when she moved. Her eyes were a color I had never seen before except in animals. A restless, livid amber.

  The guard prodded her toward the front of the room. When she passed my desk, I shrank away.

  Sensei thanked the guard, but as soon as the man left, he sucked his teeth and rocked on his uneven leg as if it pained him. There was only one desk with room for another girl. It was near the back door. Megumi sat there and murmured to herself. Megumi, who had a habit of biting. She scowled and hissed as Ito pushed the feral girl her way.

  It was strange to see the feral girl settle next to Megumi, whose body was so heavy and awkward she should have been strangled at birth except that her father must have been both powerful and softhearted. The feral girl moved as if she balanced on a drop of water. Her eyes flicked from window to door, the way birds trapped in houses fly.

  Takami leaned around me to stare until Sensei brought the stick down across his wrist.

  * * *

  It was for the Emperor’s honor that I fought Takami. It happened when the new girl stood apart in the yard, all furs and beads and her hair blowing in the wind.

  They should not have been behind the school, away from the other students. I rounded the corner, but neither saw me yet, so focused were they on each other. She pointed to herself and growled in her raspy, senseless dialect, and Takami repeated it.

  She repeated the sound slowly, and Takami said it again.

  The shock of what they were doing held me in place. Learning any language besides Japanese was not just forbidden in school. It was an act of treason against the Empire.

  I lowered my head and ran at Takami. I hit him in the stomach. His breath rushed out. He was on me then, and I was on him. We grappled in the dirt. The rest of the school came running, circling us. One of them went for Sensei. Blood flowed from Takami’s lip, and still I kept wrestling him, trying to get in another blow.

  Sensei pulled us apart and shook us by the collars. What he said was lost in the red haze. Takami and I stared at each other, panting, ready to go again. Sensei sent us to wash. The feral girl had disappeared into the crowd. When we were done, all that connected us was the single thread of blood staining the corner of his mouth.

  * * *

  That night I picked at my noodles while my father ate dumplings for all the days he had been traveling. I waited until he put his hands on his full belly.

  “I fought Takami today in defense of the Emperor’s honor.”

  My mother’s back, always stiff with courtesy, stiffened the slightest degree more. “Katsu, your father is eating. Show him I have taught
you polite manners.”

  I frowned at her, but her tight lips silenced me until my father finished cleaning his hands.

  My father turned to me. “How would the Emperor reward your defense of his honor?”

  “The defense of honor is its own reward.”

  The skin around my father’s eyes tightened, the only sign of his smile.

  “In Edo, he would not be roughhousing with eta. He would not be distracted with hinin.” My mother’s voice was low.

  My father let silence cover her words. My mother bowed her head, but the tension in her delicate jaw betrayed a smothered response.

  He said at last, “These long weeks of fighting to break the rebellion among the outland tribes made me long for the serenity of home.”

  Color bloomed in my mother’s cheeks. She bowed to him and rose, her spine remaining stiff as one of my father’s staffs.

  I fixed my gaze on his sun-darkened face, so different from my mother’s, and I wondered what it was to ride into the steppe knowing you had conquered it.

  * * *

  The feral girl’s eyes were yellow-green the next day. Ito-sensei stood her in front of the class and told us her name was Midori, our word for green. She blinked as if she could not stop. Tears dripped off her chin. Someone had subdued the storm of her hair into braids, and her bare shoulders had disappeared under a plain white blouse.

  Takami raised his hand. “What happened to her eyes?”

  Sensei rested his finger tips on the desk. “Have you seen the eyes of a newborn darken with time? It happens with some light-skinned people. Blue eyes darken to green or brown.”

  “Does it hurt?” asked Takami.

  “The notion of pain varies by culture.”

  I raised my hand. “Maybe her eyes can’t stand the sun, since she’s never left her cave.”

  She didn’t know our language, but when some of the other students laughed, I saw she understood.

  Sensei led the girl back to her seat, but paused next to me. “One day you will join your father’s warriors and see for yourself the hinin caves.”

  While Sensei spoke, I saw the girl sneak something from the waist of her skirt. A bundle of cloth and feathers that disappeared into her closed hand. My mind jumped to stories I’d heard the other children tell of primitive magic charms and curses the hinin witches made from the hair of their enemies.

  Perhaps she ensorcelled me in the space of that breath, but whatever it was that disappeared into her hand, I didn’t tell Sensei to take it.

  * * *

  My trouble with Takami was overshadowed by new uprisings in the hills.

  “We slaughtered every man in the stronghold,” my father said to my mother, “but now their brothers ride against us.”

  My mother bowed her head, but her back challenged my father. “Where will it end, Tadashi? Will you kill every man in Russia?”

  My father raised his hand, and my mother cringed. My heart leapt up. A ten-count passed before he let that hand fall.

  “Forgive me,” my mother whispered. “I am only thinking of Katsuro, how he will follow in your footsteps.”

  “You make him weak and womanish,” said my father. “Do you think I cannot see how stories from Edo have shaped his mind? It was to escape the excesses of old Japan that we came here. Do not speak to me of propriety when you work like a termite at the foundations of this household.”

  “Yes, my husband,” she whispered.

  My father bowed to her, and she bowed to him, and both of them left without seeing me hide behind the paper screen, my arms wrapped around my stomach as if someone had hit me there.

  * * *

  Ito-sensei seated us across the room from each other after that. I watched Takami watch the girl, who watched Sensei. He made us stay late on alternate days. It crept under my skin, the certainty that their private meetings continued. I watched to see if the bundle of crushed feathers and cloth would reappear, and when it didn’t, in my mind that made it all the more sinister.

  I could not understand how Takami could risk his family’s reputation and his own life by defying the emperor. Especially when his father had left him so little honor to begin with.

  Meanwhile, the girl’s presence distracted even the best of us. She lifted her head at strange times, as if she could hear what no one else could. Sometimes she growled to herself and shifted in her seat as if she had never learned to be still. She chewed her nails into points.

  One day I hid behind the outhouse until Sensei released Takami. I waited until our teacher gathered his coat and cane. As soon as he hobbled down the path to his house, I bolted after Takami.

  “Where are you going?” I shoved him from behind.

  Takami quickened his pace. The color came high on his cheeks, but it might have been the chill of the wind.

  “Not to see your girlfriend?”

  He walked faster. His legs were longer than mine, which forced me to run to match his pace.

  “Going to kill a chicken so she can make more of her charms? It’s no wonder you like her, you Russian-loving son of a whore.”

  He turned and caught me by the lapels. His breath came hard. I waited for him to hit me, to shake me, to throw me down, and then I would be on him. But he only held me, my coat bunched in his fists, both of us steaming in the cold.

  His eyes were two different colors. One, dark brown, the other, hazel.

  I stared. “What happened to your eyes?”

  He released me. He looked away, and then I saw that his lighter eye wasn’t tracking. “I had to know if it hurt.”

  “If what hurt?”

  “The eye drops.” His voice grew soft. “They use a chemical to destroy the pigment in amber-colored eyes, so the captives can’t attract us.”

  I stared at him. “That’s crazy.”

  He gazed at me with his two-colored eyes.

  We heard the door of the outhouse creak, and Takami hurried away, jacket flapping, head bowed into the wind.

  * * *

  My father returned with a fresh slash on his cheek and a smoldering look in his eye. When my mother leaned in with a damp cloth to clean the wound, he jerked away. “Leave me, woman!” She retreated to her cooking.

  He turned to me. “Never let them get to close to you, even when they are bound and beaten and stripped naked.”

  His eyes made me afraid. I glanced at my mother, her shoulders hunched over the stove. Something squeezed inside me, a tight, breathless feeling.

  “Look at me, Katsu. Look at what they did to my face.” He turned my chin and forced my head up. “One of the captives hid a knife in her hair.”

  His rough fingers held my head so still I dared not even swallow. It was a side of my father I’d never seen up close. The warrior side.

  “We shaved them all.” His mouth curved up in grim satisfaction. “They looked like plucked chickens, all huddled together.” An image flashed unbidden into my mind: the feral girl’s hair falling in soft tufts, her bald head emerging, naked as a plucked chicken. My father released my face and sat back on his heels. I watched the cut on his face glisten as he smiled. Then it broke open and overflowed. Two thick drops hit the table.

  My father reached for the cloth my mother had left and pressed it to his cheek.

  My mother appeared like a ghost and placed a cup of sake beside his elbow. My father downed it.

  Thoughts of the girl and my teacher and Takami and all that had happened these last days bubbled up and spilled over into words. “Father, do they use magic to attract us? The captive women?”

  He went still. “Who told you about that? Your mother?”

  “No!” I pushed my trembling hands under the table. My father’s anger blazed out with such heat I feared my skin would flash into cinders. “She—there is a girl in my class, and I noticed her eyes.”

  “Ah.” My father’s shoulders relaxed and his eyes glinted. “And more than her eyes, too, if you’re any son of mine.” He winked at me.

  My skin w
ent tight. “No, Father, I was just curious—”

  He clapped me on the shoulder. “It sounds like it’s time for you join the men.” He pushed back his chair, swung on his coat, and nuzzled my mother’s neck, surprising her into spilling miso over the coals. “Our boy’s growing up.”

  Silence fell the moment the door closed behind him.

  My mother slammed the bowl on the table so hard it cracked. “You are no son of his.”

  I felt all the air had left the room with my father. What came out of my mouth was pure reflex. The desperate kick that follows the gut punch. “Maybe I should let him beat you.”

  Her face went white as the painted women hanging below the house shrine. Her eyes reminded me suddenly of my father’s, except that seeing his cold fury on her face drove my courage deep into the hollow place where feelings went to die.

  “Never speak to me that way, Katsu. I am Sakai Amaterasu, granddaughter of one of the four great generals who placed Tokugawa Ieyasu on the Chrysanthemum Throne. You know nothing of my sacrifice.”

  Soup dripped onto the floor.

  “When you were born, I cut out the midwife’s tongue.”

  Drip, drip. My mother’s words were hard drops of water eating away the stone beneath my feet.

  “I hid you for eight weeks. When you cried, I smothered you into silence.”

  Drip.

  “I knew if my husband lived, if he returned to find you born at the wrong time, he would kill you. Just as he killed this woman who sprang at him with a knife in her hair. And for the same reason. You were not his, and never would be.”

  My ears filled with a roaring that swept my mother’s words away before I could understand them, protecting me from the hail that was still falling from her lips.