Chapter Fifty-One Demons
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
Demons
Spring
The girl wandered alone.
It was dusk. The field had emptied. Too late for stragglers, all lay still and silent; the hunters, such as they were, had long gone home. Hard-bitten earth lay trampled in haste. Carrion circled in the smeary sky, ash on frost-kissed puddles and the morning’s rain. Cold.
She walked the footpaths among the dead and dying, passed the broken spears and arrows on the ground. She moved through mist, a low sun failing over clouds, and a sky still open to the west. Behind her, a full, dark rain threatened to overrun the fields.
She wandered for quite some time. The dead were all around her; she paid no mind.
It had rained here once already, an icy rain, a rain that marked the end of winter and the coming of another year: spitting, gray, unremarkable.
Now, the day had shifted and recoiled on itself; another rain would come.
The field had turned to mud. Wet and treacherous, it was filled with bodies, corpses half-buried and contorted where they fell.
A battle had occurred here, not too long ago.
She walked slowly, stepping from one thick-muddied spot to the next.
The dead would never bother her. She knew she shouldn’t be here, knew that something deep inside her heart was wrong.
But she wasn’t in her own world anymore.
She walked as though she had no idea where she was, as if she had no clue as to the violence that had taken place.
She might have been someone’s daughter on her way to market for some eggs.
An icy gust whipped past; she shivered. Her thin tunic flapped about her shoulders.
She tiptoed lightly over mud, and as she took one careful step after the next, she began to sing to herself, mumbling the words off-key.
One little step, two little steps
Not quite day, not night yet
Twilight hour as the sun goes down
Twilight falling on the little river town
One more step, and one more step
Make your way home
an’ get in safe before
The hour, the hour
of the ghosts
Finally she stopped, toes squelching. She looked up: clouds lay heavy above her. She looked to the side: nothing that could move. Everything was dead.
Well, almost everything.
“Soon it will be spring,” she announced, to no one, and no one answered. “Maybe it will rain.” Then walked on, singing in her tiny voice. “One more step, one more step… The hour of the ghosts…”
A wind blew, harsh, biting. She didn’t mind. She hop-skipped a path across the corpses as the light fell. It was like she was running toward the dark.
“What’s that?” the first man said, sniffing.
Two survivors, foot-soldiers with the Keishi butterfly still clinging to their ragged sleeves.
Cold breeze billowed through the field, disturbing corpses all around them.
They’d spent the better part of the evening trying to stay out of sight.
There were roving bands out there, horsemen who sought stragglers to kill.
They’d managed to help each other to the edge of the reed-fenced field, looking for shelter, and now sat bickering and murmuring as they stripped the bodies of what valuables they could find.
“Help me,” said the second man.
“You smell that?”
They’d limped their way among the corpses. The shape of battle could still be seen, as the dead lay in scattered lines across the field, which had once been a pasture for goats. On one side, the bodies trailed away, where the ranks had broken and men were hewn down in the rout a few hours before.
“I smell rain,” the second man said. “And dead people. Help me, would you?”
The first man, the taller of the two, bent and hauled his friend to a standing position. This second man, short as his friend was tall, grunted on his wounded leg. It was unlikely that he could stand unaided, let alone travel any distance on foot.
“Smell that?” the first man asked again.
“I told you, it’s corpses,” the short man said. “We don’t got a lot of time. They’ll be back soon.”
“Listen.”
“Shut up, would you? I need help.” The short man coughed, a harsh, painful sound. “Won’t last long, we keep going this way. What’re you listening for?”
“I don’t know,” the first man said. “Thought I heard something.”
“Hunters?”
“No, I thought… I thought it was singing.”
The short man cursed. “You’re in worse shape than I am.”
An hour of limping and creeping through the flooded plain led them to a slope below the road. The short man pointed. “Look. The marker. What’s it say?”
A stone road-marker rose over the slope of the highway, the only thing still standing on the field.
“I can’t read it,” the first man said.
“Just as good,” the short man said. “Not like it’d help us get out of here any faster.”
The tall man began stripping things from the nearest body.
“You hear?” the short man said, lying with his shattered ankle spread out before him, watching as the taller man continued. “Emperor’s declared a new era, with this war.”
“There’s always war,” the first man said. “Sovereign declares a new era whenever they want. Always got some fancy name, enlightenment or peace…”
He spit to the mud, buried his arm in a piece of armor that wouldn’t come off.
The body was missing a leg, and the head had been removed.
He ignored it, covering himself with drying blood as he tried to pry the armor away.
“Always war,” he repeated, grunting. “Musta been someone important, they took his head like that.”
“They say it’s the coming of the Age of Plagues, is what this is,” said the second man. “The monks. Say it’s desolation.”
The armor finally came free. A belly-guard. Straps cut through, bent and mangled from a fall. The tall man sighed, dumped it with the rest. “’Spect they’re right.”
“Don’t seem to care much, uh.”
“Do you?”
The short man shrugged. “I’m alive. Got both my feet ’n my hands. It is what it is.”
“Is what it is,” the taller man agreed.
Soon the moon had risen. The tall man gazed up through patches in the clouds, and they made their way across the road.
An abandoned hut lay wilting at the edges of the field; it might give them shelter.
He shivered in the creeping dark. To him, it seemed that all at once, all light had been extinguished. A chill passed. “Hey. What’s that?”
A small shape in the field – a young girl hopping from corpse to corpse, holding something in her hand. He couldn’t make it out. The girl moved with an eerie calm despite the carnage all around.
“One more step, one more step…”
“Hey!” he called. “Child! Whatcha doing here?”
She looked up, blinking in surprise. “Oh,” she said. “Hello.” Then came to them, and when she approached, the man thought she seemed, somehow, sad.
“What in the hell’re you doing out here?” he said. “Y’shouldn’t be here.”
The girl seemed confused. “Really?”
“Hell’s wrong with her?” the short man mumbled. “Kid out an’ all, like this.”
“Get on home,” called the taller man. “It isn’t safe.”
The girl blinked again. So strange, so motionless in the twilight. “Maybe,” she said.
“Who are you? What’s your name?”
She shifted, like she was trying to remember. “I think I’m a ghost,” she announced. “Once I was a princess. Like the autumn princess. I had her name. And then…” She smiled a quiet, unnerving smile. “Yes, that’s right. But I died.”
She moved closer to them, one little step.
“Somebody murdered me,” she said. “You see? They made me like this. They made me. That’s why I’m still here.” She moved closer still. “I can’t rest.”
“Stay back now,” the tall man said.
“I heard what you were saying,” said the girl. “About a new era. You were right. This is the start of a new era. A whole new time… that people will remember for a thousand years.” She took another little step. Flies buzzed around them, shifting, swarming. “This is the start of it all.”
The men backed off, unnerved by the girl and her stillness, her lack of expression, the way she walked so easily through the field of the dead.
“What do you want?” the tall man said, gripping his broken spear.
She stopped, to consider it. “I don’t think I know.” She spread her hands. “Sorry.”
He edged forward, trying to seem threatening. “I said hold on!”
The girl didn’t move at all. A little statue in the melting snow and mud. She spoke quietly. “It’s not your fault, you know.”
“Huh?”
“That’s what this is really all about.”
“Who are you?”
“Hanbei, don’t.” The short man pulled him back. The girl turned, just enough to glance in his direction too, as though only now seeing him.
“Oh,” she said.
“Who are you?” the tall man said again.
The girl shrugged.
“I show you what you are.”
She drew a small, round mirror from the folds of her clothes. “You see?”
And he saw his own reflection. It was a gaunt, maggot-eaten face. Covered all over with broken skin and mud and blood. His eye had been ripped out. His throat cut.
He was a corpse.
The world changed; the spell was broken. Beside him, his friend was a dead man, leg smashed, arm missing, a spear still sticking from his shredded gut.
He collapsed, shaking, writhing with minuscule jerks. The rain scattered about. He began to change, to dissipate. It felt like he was melting in the rain, dissolving into nothing but smoke and memory.
The girl said, “I’m sorry.” Then took a breath, inhaling deeply, with satisfaction. She smiled: rejuvenated in the wet. She breathed out.
And with the next breath, began inhaling them.
First one, then the other, as they became nothing but ash.
They melted into clouds of smoke, and the girl simply stood there, watching long enough for everything to fade away.
Then she sucked the air into her mouth again.
When she finished, the men were gone. No more than the memory of a scream at midnight.
She exhaled, smoke wafting from her lips.
As she made her way back to the empty temple, a shadow stood at the edge of the grounds, watching her.
The field grew quiet again, but for the whispers of the wind.
The girl wandered on, and the shadow seemed to follow in her steps; they left the place together.
Above them, the last of night had fallen, and the smoke-black eyes of giants, the strange gods, the ones they called pilgrims, watched; silent but for the distant rattle of their breath.
Gasha-gasha, they rasped, speaking a secret tongue among themselves.
Breathing like distant thunder as the remnant spirits on the dirt went still, and the child walked away, out of the field of corpses, and into the night.
For a long while, the child wandered alone.
Spring had come, wet and chilly, soaking the hills with an icy rain that left the sky smeared with gray and the roads near-impassable with mud.
Before dawn, she arrived at an inn on the side of the road.
It was raining again, leaving her surrounded by sodden grass and drowning sludge, cold water chipped with ice.
She hopped across the stone-lined path and started talking to herself.
“Come, sister,” she said. “Time to go.” She paused, waiting for a response.
“Yes,” she said. “Take my hand.” There was no one there. The girl resumed. “Yes,” she said again, her voice somehow darker, somehow different than it was before. As though a second ghostly voice was speaking through her own. “Yes, we have much work to do.”
The girl and the ghost walked on. She wasn’t alone anymore.
Together they went through the downpour and into the inn, which remained silent, devoid of any life.
Perhaps there were bodies there as well, bodies that had no spirit left in them, but the girl didn’t stop to see.
Instead she simply held the ghostly hand within her own and padded to the stables at the back.
The road wound long and far into the hills.
The rain came down in sheets. At the far end of the path, by a gate that once held lanterns, an old man sat with his shoulders and his back against a rotten fence.
The rain was sheeting down around him, but he was still, and silent as stone.
He wore a wet round hat and a raincoat made of straw, and had a large oak staff with iron prayer rings dangling from the top.
The hat tilted toward the ground, as if he gazed at nothing; as if in meditation, or in prayer.
When the child approached, the soft padding of her feet on the stepstones made him turn, and his face was broad and empty, pale as the ash left over in a hearth.
He had the same strange, mirrored eyeshine that the woman did, whom she’d called sister, before.
Flat and glinting, like a cat. Now he sat, unblinking, his pupils catching light.
They shifted, from bright to something else, something far more dead.
The girl padded to him; the wind whispered in the air. The man, however, didn’t move. Finally, with the ghost beside her, the girl ducked closer, almost hesitant, then all at once, she nudged him and tugged at the hem of his coat.
“Uncle,” she said. “It’s time to go. You have to get up now.”
The man rose slowly, tilting his head so the rain fell to his eyes. It made a spattering across his features, his pale, blank face; little jewels catching light and vanishing as they dripped away.
“Uncle,” the girl said. “We have to go now. Are you ready?” She tugged his coat once more. “Sister’s waiting.”
She had to say it again before she got his attention, and when she did, he glanced back down to earth, to the child beside him, his eyes glinting with the flat shine that made them two shattered pearls in the rain.
“Come, uncle,” the girl said. “It’s time to go.”
The man who was Jobo Daiten turned and slowly began to gather his things.
His hand gripped the prayer staff; the rings made tiny clinking sounds against each other when he moved.
His face, slow and empty, lay marred with something worse than death.
His hat was soaked. Cold rain dripped around the brim, then down, along his shoulders, seeping through the straw and reeds. He gave a nod.
“Good,” he said at last. He took her hand. “Keep walking.”
The ghost and the dead priest led the little girl down the road.