“The mist isn’t lifting,” I said to Himiko as we both waited, sitting on a rock by the shore. “Do you think they’ll come?”
It was already late in the morning, but still no sunrays pierced through the thick blanket of fog that had covered Umeshima. We had moved out early to reach the northwestern shore where the island’s largest dock was situated. It was here that merchants came to trade plum liquor for grains, cloth and ores. It had been two weeks since the death of Masuda and Gin-san’s sudden madness, two weeks since the merchants last came.
“That is when Daisuke-kun said they were scheduled to, did he not?” Himiko replied after a long yawn. “I trust the boy, they’ll come.”
She reverted back into a fox, and snuggled by my side with her head on my lap. We stayed there for almost an hour, as I gently stroked her fur, before her ears suddenly perked up. She jumped up to all fours, eyes intensely piercing the fog and whiskers fluttering as she smelled the air rapidly. She let out a low growl, meaning: “This is it.”
We jumped off from our rock, leaving the cover of the forest, and walked into the open grass field and towards the pier. When we arrived, right after dawn, I was confused by its appearance. It was solid, like a rock, but smooth and without any seams or other signs of craftsmanship. It looked alien to me, an unnatural simile of limestone shaped into a human’s tool, as if the earth itself had created a dock for us to use. Himiko called it “concrete”, a foreign technique rarely within the closed borders of our country. The dock was large enough for several oxen to walk side by side, and so long that it took us a couple of minutes to reach the end. There, when I looked down into the crashing waves, I saw nothing but darkness.
We heard it first, a mechanical sound of something breaking through the waters, followed by a strident fog horn. Soon enough, I saw a shape in the mist, which grew, and grew, until it towered over me like Umeshima’s mountains over Himura. Out of the fog emerged a black behemoth of steel and rivets, chimneys spewing smoke and horns crying out like a beast howl. It was like no ship I had ever seen before: it was tall like three of Himura’s houses stacked together, black and gray like coal. On its sides, paddled wheels plunged into the water repeatedly, like arms crawling on the ground. Its bow, headed straight for the pier, readjusted its course to slide past us, slowing down to a halt quietly as its tall white sails were pulled down by an invisible crew.
Himiko jumped up, climbing my leg and my back to stand on my shoulder.
“Are you ready?” I asked, and she nodded.
I extended my arm, and she jumped onto my palm.
For a few seconds, we scanned the side of the ship as it approached the pier, its wheels slowly grinding down to a halt. Himiko pointed at the back of the ship with her nose and looked at me expectantly. I nodded in understanding.
“Here goes, hold on,” I muttered.
I spun twice to gather speed, and threw her as high and as far as I could. Her shape quickly disappeared in the mist as she flew like an arrow over the ship’s side. I waited, but I did not hear her fall in the water, or any voices of alarm onboard. With a sigh of relief, and turned to watch the rest of the ship. It had no name, nothing to denote its nature or identity. In a sound of steel, a walkway crashed onto the pier, and a man walked down, alone.
He was wearing an elegant fur coat; not a ragtag patchwork of pelts like me or other Himurans wore, but a slick, clean and thick mantle. He looked around, confused at first, and saw me. He approached, hesitant. He looked older than me, somewhere in his late fifties, a thick beard covering his lower face with gray streaks in his short black hair, hidden under a white and gold cap. His face looked strange, wide eyed, white.
“Who are you?” he asked, in broken Yamataï. “Where’s Gin-san?”
“You first,” I said, sternly.
I was firmly holding on to my knife behind my back, ready to pounce.
“I… I don’t understand,” he said, searching for words. “Merde, just tell me where’s Gin-san, the… the big man.”
I took a step forward, and he immediately reached for his belt. I ducked down, instinctively, as he pulled out what looked like a handgun. Swiftly, I dashed and grabbed his wrist with my left hand as my right hand held my knife to his throat. He let go of his gun, breath shaking under his walrus mustache, and looked at me with fear in his eyes. I pushed him back, and picked up the gun as he held his hand on his neck, where my knife was just a second ago. The gun was strange too. It had a handle, a trigger, and a barrel, like the ones I was used to, but also a strange cylindrical apparatus in which I could see shining brass bullets. I shoved it in my pocket.
“How many men in your crew?” I asked, slowly.
“Just… just four,” he said. “This was just a delivery job.”
“Where from?” I asked.
The man swallowed with difficulty, his mind racing as his eyes searched for an answer in mine.
“Otaru harbor,” he said after a moment. “In Hokkaido.”
I walked up to him again, my knife pointed straight at his stomach.
“Don’t lie to me,” I said. “You’re not from Raiku, are you?”
Himiko had warned me: if they are not Yamataï, I should listen for words in their own language. She had pronounced a few Raiku words, but that “merde” sounded nothing like them. Very few foreigners were allowed in Yamataï; a few dignitaries from Qin or the White isles in the south, but the only western traders were from Raiku.
“Where is this ship coming from,” I asked again, the tip of my knife slowly making its way to his throat.
“Hu Du,” he said in a whisper, staring down the blade.
“And you?”
“Me?”
“You don’t look Qin to me, so where are you from?”
The man looked at me, seemingly confused.
“My crew is,” he replied after a moment. “They’re Qin. I’m from the Latin Free States.”
I nodded, feigning comprehension even though that name meant nothing to me.
“What’s in the ship?” I asked again.
“Tools, wheat, rice, cloth, the usual,” he replied, slowly regaining his composure.
“On whose orders?” I asked.
He fell completely silent, mouth slightly open.
“Merchant ship captains are not often armed with such modern weapons, are they?” I asked, pulling out his gun from my coat to examine it under the light.
“Why don’t we go inside?” I continued. “Let us talk somewhere warmer.”
With a wave of the gun, I invited him to walk back up the ramp. The inside of the ship was as startling as its hull, a mixture of wood boards and steel. We were in what looked like a small hangar, several times larger than my own home. There were four men, barely my age, busy loading wooden crates onto carts, all stamped with the sigil of the North Raiku company. They turned towards us when we walked in, nonchalantly at first, then shocked and alert when they saw their captain’s gun in my hands.
One of them said something, in Qin, and he replied in the same language.
“They want to know what’s going on,” he said to me.
“You and I are going to your office,” I said. “Tell them to continue unloading their cargo.”
He obeyed, and he led me through the insides of his ship, a confusing labyrinth of steel-clad corridors. When he finally pushed through a simple looking wooden door, he stopped at the threshold, in shock.
“She’s with me, sit down,” I ordered.
Himiko was there, perusing through a wooden wardrobe in the corner of the room. I had picked up her dress when she transformed into a fox, but it seemed that she had found a replacement: she was wearing a thick fur coat, not dissimilar from the one the captain was wearing. The office itself was a mess, with papers laying around everywhere, dirty plates piled high on the ink-stained desk.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“Just who are you?” he asked, as he let himself fall in the armchair behind his desk.
“Let’s start with you,” I replied. “Mr Captain from the Latin Free States, coming from Hu Du. What is your name, how did you find your way to Himura, and how often do you come here?”
The man crossed his hands in front of his chest pensively.
“I am Captain Duval,” he answered, after a moment of thought. “I work for the North Raiku company. We have specific instructions to come here, every few weeks, using this ship and this ship only.”
“Because it’s unmarked?”
“I don’t know, I follow my orders, I get paid and I go home.”
“Are there others?” Himiko asked suddenly. Her attention had shifted away from the wardrobe and towards the small round window on the side of the office.
“What others?” Duval asked, confused.
“Other ships like this one,” she continued. “It is unusual for the North Raiku company to have steel ships like this, is it not? No name, no company sigil…”
“I don’t know,” he grumbled. “This assignment existed before I ever joined up.”
“How did a Latin ever get hired by the Raiku?” Himiko asked.
“Same answer, I don’t know. Someone found me in the Latin concession in Hu Du, and I got the job.”
“When you come, Gin-san meets you, alone, right?”
“Yes,” he replied. “We always get the same payment, a cart of plum spirit, and we give him all the crates we received.”
“You ‘received’?” I repeated. “You don’t decide what comes onto your ship?”
“As I said,” he grunted, visibly aggravated. “I just follow my orders. It comes down the company line, and we just obey.”
“Who gives you the order,” I asked, as he rolled his eyes.
“Some guy in an office, who gets it from another guy in another office, I don’t know! Why do you even care?”
“No Yamataï involved?”
“None,” he replied, gravely. “I’m not allowed to say we’re Raiku, if a Yamataï ship finds us they have every right to board us and take everything.”
“I see, does that mean you’ll keep this discussion of ours quiet then?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“Correct,” I said with a smile.
I placed his gun back on the table.
“Is this yours, or did it come with the job?”
“The latter,” he replied. He seemed resigned to his interrogation now.
“What for, pirates? Yamataï authorities? For us, if we ask questions?”
“I suppose, I have to protect my cargo and my company’s interests somehow.”
The gun seemed to attract Himiko’s attention. She picked it up and examined it, her eyes widening when she looked inside the cylinder.
“Last question,” I said, to get back the attention of Duval, who was absently staring at Himiko’s legs, where the fur coat stopped slightly above the knees. “Have you ever seen a man in black robes, wearing a wicker basket over his head? He smells like sweet alcohol, holds a calabash gourd over a long walking stick.”
“Never seen anyone like that,” he replied, his eyes now moving up to Himiko’s chest.
“Look at me, not her,” I said, exasperated. “The name Caretaker, does it mean anything to you?”
He shook his head.
“Nope.”
I looked at Himiko, who returned a simple stare. “We’re done here.”
“You’ll find the cart of spirits higher up the road, tell your men to go fetch it,” I said, as I stood up. “We’ll send our own to take the crates later.”
“I need my gun back,” Duval said suddenly. “There’ll be questions if it’s missing.”
Himiko laid it back on the table gently.
“I know your name, I know your face, and your scent,” she said softly. “Hu Du, Raiku, the Latin states, I can find you anywhere, captain Duval.”
He chuckled.
“In this brave new world? Somehow I doubt it,” he replied with a smirk.
Himiko leaned down, putting her hands on the table. She smiled, and Spoke.
This time, I managed to make out the words she pronounced.
“Maya liet jinn valia.”
Her voice echoed in the small office, and Duval shrunk in his armchair, his hands clutching around the handles until his knuckles turned white.
He looked scared, pathetic, almost shaking in his proud captain’s coat and hat.
“I can find you anywhere,” Himiko repeated in a whisper, before turning around and leaving the office.
Before I followed her, I saw the captain’s empty gaze, staring into a corner of the room.
“What did you do to him?” I asked, as we walked through the steel guts of the ship.
“Put some fear in him, that’s it,” she replied nonchalantly, smirking slightly. “It is no replacement for trust, or loyalty, but it will have to do.”
“You enjoyed it.”
“For a long time westerners were scared of approaching our shores,” she continued. “I’m just setting things right.”
We stayed on the shore until the Qin workers finished unloading all the cargo, and watched the ship leave. It was no less terrifying than when it arrived, as its engines roared and steam spewed from its chimneys, and the black shape finally disappeared into the mist again. On the way back to the village, the fog slowly subsided while the noon sun shone high. It was a day of late winter, early spring, with half melted snow on the sides of the road and a gentle cool breeze blowing through the trees.
“He didn’t know anything worthwhile,” I grumbled.
“Not on the Caretaker, no,” she said. “He was genuine then, but I think his ignorance reveals something else.”
“And what is that?”
“Umeshima is not his work alone,” she said pensively, staring at the path as she walked. “At first I thought that the ship would be local merchants, from Yamataï, but somehow the North Raiku company is involved. It’s an enterprise, the most powerful one in Raiku, with tens – no, hundreds of thousands of men on their payroll around the world. In essence, they are a state of their own, with their own army and navy. I’ve heard tales of them winning wars with empires, even Qin.”
“So what,” I replied. “It seems they are trying to keep this quiet, with their black ships and all the secrecy, I doubt we’ll see an army land here.”
“Still,” Himiko said. “Consider the ramifications; either the Caretaker is using the North Raiku company to keep his garden running, or the North Raiku company is using him. I know not which is the most dreadful idea. Then, he could also be just a simple henchman, and that spell is the work of the company itself. In that event, it means an even foggier enemy for us to fight.”
“Did this encounter bring us more questions than answers then?”
“You noticed how advanced that captain’s gun was, did you not? The ship too, top of the line. I learned one thing; whatever is happening here is important to someone. Important enough to muster the most advanced technology available, to keep it hidden from the authorities of Yamataï, to Raiku nationals, even to the people working on the ships themselves. In Duval’s papers, I found some logs. They’ve been making these supply runs for decades before you were even born – and even then the oldest log started on the first day of the year. I suspect it’s been going for far, far longer. Whoever, or whatever it is that we’re up against is powerful in more ways than strength, ki or kotodama. There’s a terrible influence at work here. ”
I grunted in acknowledgment. So be it, I thought. We’ll fight.
“Where’s this… Raiku, anyway?” I asked, breaking the silence of our walk.
“Over to the West, a long way past the Qin empire. If my memory serves, Raiku means “empire” in their language too. The Latin Free States are their rivals on their continent.”
“Just how big is this world…” I wondered out loud.
“Bigger than you can even imagine,” she said with a smile. “But I should not be the one to answer your questions; I have seen very little of it myself.”
“This… ship of his, this monster of metal and steam, is it common out there?”
“In his country? I believe so, but they are still rare in Yamataï.”
We arrived in Himura a couple of hours later. Daisuke-kun was eagerly awaiting our return, and set off immediately towards the docks with a handful of workers. Gin-san’s condition had not changed, for better or for worse. Without eating, his gigantic body had shrunk, his face caved in and his usual globe-like belly turned into pleads of saggy skin. It was painful for me to see him like that, weak and shaking like a wet dog, but no matter how hard Daisuke-kun or I tried he simply would not eat a single bite.
I trained harder than ever that evening, breaking rock after rock until the walls around my house had all turned to ash. Even then, Himiko and I ventured into the forest to find larger boulders, and kept on working.
Over the next month, I had grown stronger. I could rival Himiko in strength and speed, and she even taught me a few words of kotodama, though they had no effect when I tried to pronounce them. Eventually, we started working on my first advanced technique, fire breathing. I practiced the stance, the focus, every step of it, but stopped short of actually spewing any flames.
We embraced each other most nights, though Himiko’s body had started changing quickly, her stomach now grown enough to show a round shape even through her dress. I was excited at the idea of a child, though terrified of the danger it would be in the moment it left her womb. I thought of names, sometimes, but the idea of naming it scared me too.
The black ship of the North Raiku company kept coming, and Himiko and I went to watch from afar everytime. Duval would come down, meet with Daisuke-kun, and leave once all goods were exchanged and accounted for, like a well-oiled machine.
Through these weeks, Gin-san’s condition deteriorated, and we grew stronger, but no closer to a solution. I tried every herb and trick in my knowledge to trigger his senses, or at least his appetite, to no avail.
It was almost three months after Himiko’s arrival, while we were lazing around in bed, nestled against each other that our peace was finally broken.
Daisuke-kun had stormed up the hill and through my door. Himiko had barely enough time to turn back into a fox when he emerged, distressed, heaving for air on his knees. He did not seem to even notice Himiko’s transformation when his eyes, filled with panic, looked up at me. Through coughs and heavy breathing, he managed to say only a few words. When I heard them, my heart sank and I sat up, instinctively reaching for the knife by the side of my bed.
“Thistle,” he said. “Ships, in the harbor, with purple, thistle flags.”