Tomo Page 16

  The wind was getting stronger. She took a few deep, slow breaths, as if pulling it into her body. It would help her. She had always been good in the wind. Her mother had taught her to move with it. She’d said it was Jet’s gift.

  Ignoring the pain in her ankle, she ran again, this time moving with the wind, fitting her body to its contours so that she brushed past stones, through trees, not traveling directly toward the peak where she normally found her mother during the game, but letting the wind carry her along an indirect route that no one could know unless they too were running in the wind.

  Her feet danced from rock to rock. She avoided the moonlight, threading her body along shadows. The texture of the wind pleased her, and though she almost forgot her pain, she didn’t stop looking for the person who had thrown the knife and set the tripwire. She still couldn’t sense them or see any trace.

  The low, flat peak of the mountain came into sight past trees and boulders, and moments later, something brushed against her thigh, catching in the cloth of her pants. She didn’t stop running, and even as her fingers touched it, she knew what it was. A dart, its metal tip barbed, maybe poisonous. In her mother’s stories, they always were. She felt a sob building in her chest and tried to calm herself. Another one shot past and pinged off a rock. Where was her enemy? Above her, on the peak—that’s where he had to be.

  Move with the wind. Feel the elements. The deep hum of the earth reached up through the mud. There were the fluctuations of the wind. The heat in her chest, the air in her lungs, the solidity of her body. All this she could blend. But whoever was up there had incredible vision and aim. Another dart flickered past her face. Focus!

  And then her mind calmed and opened outward, and she could sense the world again, the life out there, across the desert’s Martian landscape that descended behind her. She knew each thing in its place. Lizards and snakes sleeping beneath rocks. Animals in burrows. A distant coyote sniffing the night air, sensing her. She had never felt this alive. Someone was on the peak, the presence faint, cloaked as if by an incredible act of focus, but still discernible. She directed her attention, searching into whoever this was.

  Her enemy’s energy hummed with anger, with hostility. In the body standing on the peak she sensed an intention to hunt and kill her, and just feeling it, she was terrified.

  What choice do I have? she asked herself. I can’t just run away. Mom is out here somewhere. I have to do this. Stay calm!

  She began to move again. Keeping close to shelter, she sprinted, twisting and leaping with the wind. She knew every ravine, every mound in the earth. She also knew how to dim her presence, to slow her heart and breath even as she ran, to let her entire existence blur into the wind. It gusted hard, and she commanded her own life force to become faint, like a drop of water wiped along the surface of a dark window.

  She didn’t head directly for the peak but around the mountain, to a cleft she knew, just at the back, at the base of a stand of gnarled trees, their branches misshapen from the wind. It was the only way she could think of to invade the higher ground. She timed it perfectly with a strong gust, with the brief passing of a small cloud over the moon, with the distant cry of the coyote that she sensed was ready to howl, and then she was twisting through the air, taking shape, her foot reaching for the earth as she swung the knife. The figure stood on the flat surface of the peak and spun toward her.

  Sparks flashed as her enemy lifted a blade and deflected the knife. The figure was wrapped in black, just as Jet was. This was no crazy war veteran, but someone far more dangerous.

  The moon appeared from behind the cloud, and the enemy kept its back to it, silhouetted, the bright pallor shining into Jet’s eyes as wind poured against the mountain with incredible force. Jet tried to use it, circling, feeling the pulse of the stone beneath her feet. But even as she twisted and leapt, the figure hardly seemed to move and yet avoided every strike, simply shifting slightly or again deflecting Jet’s knife.

  Jet never stopped, attacking repeatedly as she swirled close to the silhouetted figure. She timed her kicks and circled, trying to get the moonlight out of her eyes. She focused her strength and energy, but her fists and feet and knife passed, with each of her attacks, as if through the wind.

  All the while Jet was trying to sense this fighter’s energy, at once masked and hostile, burning with a deep core of anger. But her enemy didn’t act on this rage, didn’t give in to impatience. It easily avoided every strike. All of the tricks Jet’s mother had taught her, to dodge and fall back and attack, to follow the wind, letting herself retreat or stumble even as she struck—nothing worked.

  Another small cloud passed between the moon and the mountain, and even as Jet began to formulate a plan, she realized her mistake. She should have planned already for the split second when the moonlight would vanish. Her enemy had done this.

  As Jet was leaping to the side, trying to stay with the wind, a foot struck her stomach, suspending her in the air as if she’d been pinned there. And then she was falling, trying to find the earth with her feet even as she couldn’t breathe.

  A hand caught the back of her head, gripping her hair through the black cloth. Her enemy jerked her head back and put the knife to her throat.

  The wind suddenly died. The cloud passed from before the moon. The desolate landscape of the desert mountains stretched out like a vision of another world. Was this the last thing Jet would see?

  “You’ve been lazy,” the fighter hissed. “You’ve never wanted to learn.”

  Jet tried to pull away, but the blade stayed at her throat. The fist held her hair.

  “What good are you to me? Tell me that!”

  This time she heard clearly: it was her mother’s voice.

  “Mom,” Jet cried out. “What are you doing? Are you crazy?”

  Her mother’s lips were close to Jet’s ear. There was a long silence before she said, “I’ve trained you since you could walk, and all you think about is parties and clothes. Millions of kids go to parties and wear cool clothes. But only one or two people in the world get to learn what I’ve taught you. You still don’t understand, do you?” She sheathed the knife and unwrapped her face.

  Jet had begun to cry, shaking not just with fear and hurt, but with anger.

  “What?!” she shouted. “You almost killed me! You could have—”

  “Jet,” her mother whispered. She took a step closer and her knees buckled. Jet caught her mother’s arm and held her up.

  “Jet,” her mother said. “This was the last time. I had to make you see. I didn’t have the energy left, but I had to. I had to try to make you see.”

  “What’s wrong, Mom?”

  “Help me, Jet. Help me to the truck.”

  Jet held her mother’s arm as they walked toward the edge of the slope. Her mother leaned against her, gasping now, heavier than anything Jet had ever felt.

  “But how . . . ?” Jet began to ask, recalling the warrior she had just fought, the figure shifting almost imperceptibly in the wind.

  Her mother didn’t answer. The walk down the mountain took an hour, her mother leaning heavily against her, her breathing labored, her body exhausted in the night from which the wind had fled.

  Back at the trailer where they lived, Jet helped her mother to bed, then bound her own cut ankle. When she returned to her mother’s bedroom, she was surprised to see her still awake.

  “Do you remember the story I used to tell you?” her mother asked.

  “Which one?” Jet said. She sat in the chair next to the bed.

  “The one about our ancestors, in the country called Hinomoto. You loved it when you were a girl. It was your favorite.”

  “Yes,” Jet told her. “I remember.”

  And then her mother began telling it, as if Jet had asked again, the way she used to, needing to hear it almost every day. When had that been? When had Jet stopped asking?

  “Hinomoto means ‘land of the rising sun,’” her mother said. “It was a great land, once
ruled by the Emishi, a native tribe. Their mountains and forests gave them nuts and fruit, and their oceans and rivers held great schools of fish. Nature offered them such wealth, they didn’t have to fight their neighbors.”

  Jet nodded, exhausted but totally present, sensing how much was changing, the difference in her mother. The words that she must have heard a thousand times sent goose bumps along her arms, and she rubbed them away as if she were cold. When she was little, each word of the story had meant another night in their home, another moment of peace—not moving, not running, not looking for a new place to live, not scared.

  “But one day,” her mother said, “a tribe called the Wa arrived from the mainland. They came with many soldiers. Their king, who called himself the Mikado, said to the Emishi leader: ‘You must give your country to me. We will change the forests into rice fields and build beautiful shrines. I promise you a much richer life than now.’

  “Of course, the king of the Emishi wasn’t interested. ‘We don’t need more wealth, and for us there is no greater shrine than nature. If you want to live in this land, we’ll welcome you. But you have to keep our laws. If you don’t, you must leave,’ he said proudly.”

  Though her mother’s chest heaved with a deep, tired breath, she seemed to smile.

  “No one had ever talked to the Mikado like that. Everyone surrendered to him, either for the promise of power and wealth or because they were too scared to fight back. But not the Emishi. Enraged, the Mikado attacked with his armies. The Emishi were quickly outnumbered and defeated.”

  Her mother spoke in such a sweet, soft voice, so unlike the commands she bellowed when training Jet to fight, or the way she had spoken to her harshly on the mountain only hours ago.

  “The Emishi abandoned their capital and fled to the north, where they built new homes surrounded by mountains and forests. But the Wa were not satisfied. They invaded there, too. This time, the Emishi decided to fight back. It was a long, long battle. Many Emishi died—not just the men, but also women, children, and even babies. Finally, the Emishi surrendered. And here is the saddest part—they were sold as slaves to the Wa. Their only hope was the dream of returning to their homeland someday.”

  Her mother began to cry. Jet had never seen her do this before. She didn’t know what to say, how to react, and she bit back her own urge to cry.

  Her mother didn’t wipe her face. She didn’t try to hide what she was feeling.

  “Eventually,” she said, “the age of the Mikado ended, and the samurai lords attained power. There were various classes of samurai—the lowest were mountain bandits—and among them were different classes too. The Emishi were the slaves of these bandits, and their job was to get secrets from samurai lords and sell them to their rivals. They were skilled at moving in the darkness, spying and using weapons to defend themselves. They hid in the night. This was the time before electricity. The whole night world was dark.”

  She closed her eyes, but spoke with the same steady voice she’d used when telling this story to Jet years before.

  “One day, a girl was born to one of the slaves within the bandit society. She grew up to be beautiful, strong, and smart. Her father sent her to a samurai castle disguised as a servant so she could learn of the lord’s military strength and discover when he would attack his rival. . . . She accomplished her mission only by using the power of the elements. You see, the women in this family always had the greatest control over the elements. This girl knew how to become invisible in rain, to stand as still as stone, but it was the wind that she most loved, and it carried her through the chambers of the castle to the door, and it carried the lord’s words to her ear.”

  Her voice trailed off faintly.

  “Go on,” Jet urged.

  Her mother opened her eyes and looked at her.

  “Even though the girl had a mission, she saw only an opportunity to be released from slavery. She was independent, you know. . . .”

  Saying this, she smiled again.

  “She became close to the lord and confided in him, ‘My master has joined forces with your rival and is planning to attack you. He and other warrior families are preparing for battle. Now is a good chance to attack them first.’

  “Furious, the lord attacked his rival and the warrior families in the mountains, and defeated them. But the clever girl had already told her plan to her enslaved tribe, who escaped into the forest just before the attack. This is how the enslaved warriors were able to free themselves and return to their homeland. They rebuilt their villages and lived peacefully in nature ever after.”

  Years ago, Jet had believed in ever after. But she no longer knew what that meant. When she was little, she would interrupt her mother at this part of the story and ask if the Emishi were still there, and her mother would tell her about how they still existed peacefully within nature, how each new generation learned about the brave girl who helped their ancestors escape. But the generations were getting smaller and smaller, moving to the cities, forgetting.

  “Jet,” her mother said, interrupting her reverie.

  “What, Mom?”

  “I won’t be here much longer. You’re going to have to go back.”

  “What? Where?” Jet asked, completely bewildered.

  “To Hinamoto. To Japan . . . You see, all those times I made you go up to the mountains,” Satoko said, struggling to draw enough breath to speak, “all that hard training, I hope you will soon understand why I made you do it.”

  “Of course, Mom,” Jet replied, though she didn’t really understand at all. Almost every night since she could remember she’d had to train, in the forest behind their trailer or in dusty fields along the highway, and always on Saturdays, more seriously, in the mountains after dark, so that she could be tested. She’d often shown up at school with her clothes mud-caked and torn, and had told her teachers that it was from soccer practice. Then there were the bruises, scratches, and scars. Other kids called her crazy, but she wasn’t allowed to explain. When the school bully started picking on her, she couldn’t even use her secret training to fight back.

  There had to be a middle ground, she reasoned, but she had yet to find it. Though she’d always wanted to be an all-American kid, she’d had a Japanese mother with strange ideas about child rearing and an American father who’d left when she was a baby. Not to mention the fact that she was an Asian girl living on a Navaho Reservation in the desert. You couldn’t get much stranger than that.

  Or could you?

  Whenever she asked her mom to explain why she’d fled Japan, Satoko’s answer was always “Later. We’ll talk about it later.”

  But “later” came too late.

  “You see,” her mother confided, “our family has a treasure. People all over Japan want it, and we’ve been fighting them off for centuries.”

  “Treasure? What kind of treasure?” Jet asked, picturing pearls, jade, and gold.

  Satoko didn’t tell her. “Your grandfather and I have been protecting it for years. But now that’s up to you. Without you, it will be lost forever. That’s why you must go back to Japan. You must find the treasure and save the magic mountain. It’s your mission. It’s what I trained you to do.”

  “Me?” Jet asked. “And what is the treasure?” How could a mountain be magic? Carpets, sure, and markers, too. But a mountain?

  Satoko closed her eyes and nodded, smiling gently through her pain. “Many people will try to find you to get at it. Some of them may even want to hurt you.”

  “Hurt me?” Jet asked, disbelieving.

  “You must protect yourself. You must finally use the skills I taught you. You’ll have to dig deep down. Can you do that? For me?”

  “Of course,” Jet answered. But there were so many questions. “How will I . . . ?”

  “Be patient,” Satoko said. “And don’t let yourself be weak like I was. Trust me. Just go with the wind, become the wind, don’t try to resist.”

  “Become the wind?” Jet had no idea what her mother was talkin
g about. She was scared, and her mother’s words confused her. All of these years of training and her mother had never mentioned any of this—how was that possible?

  Satoko drew her close. “Soon you will meet your grandfather. He will welcome you, and all will become clear. Ask him to teach you more about the wind. He will help you understand its secrets. You aren’t ready yet, but you have the gift. I hope that one day you will use it.”

  Satoko closed her eyes and breathed steadily, then less steadily, and finally roughly, until she couldn’t breathe anymore.

  “I’ll find Grandfather,” Jet told her, holding her mother close. “I promise. And I’ll bring you back home and become the wind.”

  Hachiro

  by Ryusuke Saito

  translated by Sako Ikegami

  Long ago, in the land of Akita, there lived a mountain youth named Hachiro. Like all products of the mountains, Hachiro was rugged and large. So large in fact, he was as tall as that oak tree over there. And like an oak tree, he grew straight and true. The muscles in his arms, shoulders, and chest were as hard as carved oak. His height, size, and strength were so marvelous that the mere sight of him caused people to shout in surprise and laugh with delight.

  But Hachiro was such a simple youth that no matter how large he got, he wanted to grow even bigger. Every day, he would dash down from his home in the mountains all the way to the shore, and roar at the sea.

  Just imagine. With each roar, Hachiro’s chest would creak and groan and grow a little bit larger and wider, swelling like the bellows of the blacksmith, growing bigger than the baskets of the bamboo weaver, larger than the great creels used by fishermen along the shore, and finally so enormous that an entire house could have fit inside.