Dororo: A Novel
Tsuji Masaki
Part Four
The Tale of Nihil, the Demon Sword
Chapter 2
The grove of trees surrounding the temple ruin pressed in close and oppressive. Fallen leaves shushed under the footprints of several children moving along the path and through the temple grounds.
A young woman called out to Dororo and Hyakkimaru from a tree that she was climbing. She slid down to greet them, dusting herself off. From the look of things, she was the oldest person here. The hem of her kimono was tattered, but the garment itself was well-made of good silk. The obi that tied it shut was frayed around the edges. She wore her hair loose and disheveled like Dororo did, though it was longer. Her clear voice was a bit tremulous, like a small boy’s. Her cheeks were rosy red from climbing and her facial features had a delicate cast. She was well-built and tall—in short, she was a lovely young woman.
Hyakkimaru got the impression of a butterfly’s wings when he looked at her, fragile and beautiful. He had no eyes, so his impressions of the world were what guided his actions. To him, Dororo appeared to be a bright light in the relative darkness of his world—so bright that it hurt him to sense, sometimes, like staring too long at the sun.
A few children jumped down from the tree and gathered around the woman in a loose circle. She appeared to be the one in charge here, but all these children couldn’t possibly be hers. The woman stepped out in front of the children and spread her arms as if she wanted to protect them from Hyakkimaru. Hyakkimaru realized that his sword arm was exposed and felt a brief flash of shame.
The strange creature that had glommed onto Dororo let out a plaintive wail, then let Dororo go. It seemed that the woman, children and the strange creature were allies of some kind. Maybe friends.
“Ah!” Dororo looked around at the gathered children. The vast majority of them were missing limbs or appendages. When he looked closer, he saw patches of shiny skin that indicated burns.
All these poor children, burned—but how?
Hyakkimaru couldn’t see in the usual sense, but he was capable of sensing the injuries of the children. He could also sense their fear.
“Who are you?” the woman asked bravely. “Why are you here? What do you want with us?”
Her voice is wonderful, Hyakkimaru thought.
The injured children were all between five and ten years old. Only the woman was roughly Hyakkimaru’s same age.
“We could ask you the same thing!” Dororo said. He’d recovered himself somewhat, now that he didn’t seem to be in danger. “What are you doing, palling around with a monster like that?”
“Monster?” The woman shook her head.
“But that’s what it is!” Dororo stood up tall, then pointed at each of the injured children one by one. “Hey! Say something, all of you! Why are you just going along with this? That thing is dangerous!”
The children had been talking a little among themselves, but Dororo’s concentrated attention made them fall silent, as if Dororo had poured water over their heads.
The woman gestured for the children to stay back. She approached Hyakkimaru and Dororo on her own. “Let’s try this again,” she said. Her eyes were bright with rage.
“Huh? Try what?” Dororo had no idea why she was angry. As brave as he was, he retreated a step when the woman’s gaze fell on him. He had a sense of his own littleness that he’d never really felt before. “What’s wrong with you people?”
The woman slapped Dororo across the face.
Dororo scowled. “What was that for?”
The woman kept attacking; her fist slammed into Dororo’s jaw. Pain burned along that side as Dororo ducked out of range.
“Hey! Wait a minute! Stop it!” Dororo shouted as he avoided her blows. He didn’t want to hit a woman. He’d never fought against one before. There were all these children watching, though, and Dororo didn’t want to be made a fool of. He gritted his teeth, then tried to grapple with the woman to hold her still.
But the woman would not be restrained. She pulled her fist back and delivered a devastating punch to the center of Dororo’s face. Blood poured from his nose.
“Gah!” Dororo’s hands came up to protect his face. The pain reached from the top of his head to his feet; he stumbled and fell. His hands were up in surrender when he said, “Stop! What kind of woman does things like this?!”
The other children cackled.
“You lose, Dororo,” Hyakkimaru said. Even he was smiling.
“What do you mean?”
“You shouldn’t introduce yourself to people by insulting them and demanding answers,” Hyakkimaru said. “I can imagine what I would do if I were them. We’re strangers to them, Dororo. They don’t trust us.”
Dororo sulked. “I guess.”
The woman was out of breath. “It seems to me that you’re used to wandering around doing as you please. As for us, the war wiped us out, and there’s no one left to protect us. Everyone here was attacked at some point—burned—abandoned—all of us. But we’re alive. I’d say it was a miracle if we didn’t all have to live through it ourselves.”
The woman put her hands on her hips, then faced Dororo. “Apologize.”
“Why?”
“Apologize to everyone,” the woman said patiently.
“Apologize to who? Shit…” Dororo wiped his bloody nose on his hands. He wasn’t about to say ‘sorry’ for saying something he meant. It wouldn’t be true to his image.
Hyakkimaru’s smile turned sour. There would be no support coming from that quarter.
Dororo hmphed. “It’s one thing to apologize to the kids, but I’m still worried about that demon! We need to do something about it, don’t we?”
“Demon?” the woman asked. Then she looked down. The creature had curled in on itself like an infant. It was staring up at Dororo and the woman curiously, and perhaps a bit fearfully. “That’s not a demon. That’s… that is, it’s all the poor children.”
“What poor children?” Dororo asked.
“The ones who… didn’t make it,” the woman said. “A long time ago, this temple served as a refuge for children who had no home or families. There was a kind Buddhist nun who took in the children and raised them. But then the war broke out. There was nowhere for the nun or the children to run to for safety. This temple was right in the middle of the warzone. The nun and more than fifty of the children died here… and to think that you would mock us! Interrogate us! Fifty children, dead! If only we could punch war in the nose and make it run away! I had no home myself, so I decided to stay here and try to make the best of things. Someone has to care for these children.”
“Are you saying that the demon thing is actually the spirits of those fifty dead kids or something?” Dororo asked.
Hyakkimaru and Dororo exchanged glances. The spirit creature stared at the ground as if it was embarrassed.
“It doesn’t have the right feel for a demon. Too soft,” Hyakkimaru said. “But it’s quite odd. I’ve never seen a collective spirit quite like it.”
“Neither have I! None of this makes any sense,” Dororo grumbled. It seemed like the world he knew was constantly being flipped upside-down. Before last week, he’d never seen a demon or any strange spirit creatures before.
Consider coral, which lives in the ocean. It's not just one animal, but a collection of many tiny polyps all stuck together. This kind of life is called a colony in science. The collective spirit of the fifty dead children was somewhat like coral: many different spirits all living together as a single larger being.
The spirit approached Dororo with tottering footsteps. Even though the spirit's body was so much bigger than Dororo's, its way of walking was clumsy; it looked like a newborn chick fumbling after their mother hen.
"Hi." The spirit extended its short, stubby arms.
"What?" Dororo asked. He stepped back; he didn't want to be hugged again. Then he took the spirit's hands in both his. The collective spirit looked up, then got clumsily to its feet.
"Is everything okay now?" the spirit asked. It looked around furtively.
"Yeah, it's fine. Hehehe." Now that he was no longer terrified of the spirit, Dororo felt a sort of kinship with it. He thought that was odd, himself, but after all, he'd never had many children to play with.
"Good! Now piggyback ride?"
"What? No! Uh, help!"
It was obvious why the spirit was so much larger and heavier than Dororo. The death of fifty children should be a heavy thing. Dororo fled before he could be drawn all the way in by the spirit's deceptively short, thin arms.
The woman laughed, and so did the other children. Hyakkimaru was smiling again faintly, but not at Dororo's antics as he fled the spirit. He was smiling in response to the woman's own bright smile. He wanted to hear her voice again.
But why? What makes her voice so special?
He'd expected to find beauty in sight, perhaps, but never in sound.
No comments:
Post a Comment