Flame of the Ocean - Chapter II

The East Sea was not a massive body of water, but it was one of the richest on Earth in life. Algae that shone with all the colors of light, casts of crabs that warred in the seabeds, pods upon pods of whales, and rafts of friendly sea lions were always in Kasumi’s sight whenever she left the palace. More than that, there were the ruins of a lost city from the lands above long sunk, the reefs built by many generations of coral, and the play of the sea itself with the sunlight above. Now it was a pure blue, and clear to see for miles; now it was jade, streaked with sunbeams; now it was an opaque azure, where anything beyond the nose on Kasumi’s face was a rippling shadow.

She loved it all. And she loved it best when she could explore it on her own, even the borders of the East Sea that no mortal of land may see but dragonspawn know at a glance. Many times, Kasumi gazed at and beyond those lines, tested them once or twice, but never dared cross them. She might roar at Father, even defy him in some things, but not in his law forbidding his brood from leaving the waters or beaches of the East Sea, or its supporting estuaries and their banks. But Kasumi had her pleasures and escapes in those waters, in their depths and in their lands up above.

There were never many ships or boats on the water’s surface above the dragon king’s palace. Every fisherman for miles along the nearest shores knew that those were his waters, and that he would take ill to any great culling of his subjects and livestock. What few craft Kasumi saw along her swim were hardly big enough to hold their riders, simple fisherman who guessed correctly that they were too small a blot on the surface for the dragon king to bother with, what meagre catch they made too small to miss.

If the fishermen spied Kasumi breaching the surface, they paid her no mind. They never did, and never saw her for what she was. They took her for a small shark or a lesser sea snake. It would mortify her sisters, Kasumi knew, to be taken for a sea snake, but no one from the surface ever mistook Namika. People would watch for hours when they breached the surface, rolling and leaping and diving.

“That’s lovelier than the crane’s dive,” the fishermen would call to them. “Come! Come to shore with us!”

“Take us with you to the sea!” cried others. One poor pearl diver drowned herself trying to follow them below, for no one of land can live under the sea without the invitation of dragons or dragonspawn.

“They might love you the same,” Namika told Kasumi, “if you swam more prettily.” Everyone said that Kasumi swam like her father, with a dragon’s force and fury. “Why would I want them to like me for that?” she always replied.

She passed by the small boats, the birds drifting in the waves, and the finer ports and docks along the nearest shoreline. She followed the coast until she came to the mouth of a wide red river and swam against its current. She fought its flow until the banks narrowed and the water turned clear, all the way up to the tiny lake that fed the river.

The village was there, just as she always left it. It was a very tiny village, not big enough to fill the grounds of Father’s palace. It was rough and sparse, its few people scrawny weather-beaten and plainspoken. Her family would have hated them.

Kasumi saw very few of them about as she settled into place just below the surface of the lake. The water was so clear that she could watch the lakeshore through it, like through a big sheet of living, dancing glass. The surface was held in a summer’s day, so hot and sticky that Kasumi could taste it in the water, and such days usually brought all the village to the lake. It was always a great game, darting in and out of shadows to see but not be seen by them. But it wasn’t to be played on this summer’s day. Filtered through the water, which never stopped making its gentle, roaring breath, Kasumi heard laughter, and cheering, and horse hoofs clattering at wild tempos. The sounds of a land festival. That must be what everyone is about. Festivals and competitions were a greater draw than the lake to these surface dwellers, even in the heat of summer.

The only people near the water that Kasumi could see were a short, thin boy sat on a moss-coated rock by the shore, and the good woman Hayami on the shoreline, with her silver hair and bent back. She was shooing her old spotted horse uphill.

Hayami’s was the house nearest to the lake, and Kasumi had seen the most of her household from anyone’s. The work that she put into the harvests from her little plot of land, the stubbornness of that horse, the smile that never left the old woman’s face.

The boy was Hayami’s son, Satoshi. He had a tangled nest of ebony hair, eyes the color of sunlight on chestnut wood, and a taiko drum in his lap.

It was a flute last time, Kasumi remembered. Before that, it had been a bow, and still before that a brush and ink pot. Satoshi was always throwing himself into new passions, but Kasumi had never seen him master a one. When a hunt with the other village boys had come down the lakeshore, she had seen Satoshi fire arrow after arrow at a fawn, none of them landing. He caught butterflies in a big net, but he always let them go. His own mother had asked him, gently, not to practice the flute anymore. And whenever he tried to ride the family horse at full speed – which ways always – it threw him. What a fool, thought Kasumi. She wondered why she paid him so much mind.

It was no surprise that Satoshi and his mother weren’t involved with the celebrations out of sight. Hayami never seemed to leave her little plot of land. Kasumi knew that Satoshi would love to run and play at whatever was going on, but she had also seen the other children of the village.

“Go away, little Satoshi,” they said. “You can’t keep up with us.” “Run along, little Satoshi. You’re no good at this game.” “Get going, you little mouse! Who needs you on a hunt?” Satoshi always seemed most upset at being told he was no good at these things, not at losing company.

The hair on top of Satoshi’s head rustled. A little grey dormouse, no bigger than his palm, crawled out of it, down Satoshi’s face and along his arm to reach his left hand. Kasumi always liked to see that mouse.

Satoshi smiled down at the dormouse and picked up a drumstick with his right hand. “Ready, Denko?” he asked the dormouse. Denko gave a tiny squeak, and such a small shake of his whiskers that Kasumi thought at first it was just the dancing of the water.

“OK, then,” said Satoshi. “Here we go!” With the taiko held tight between his legs, he attacked the drum. The water above Kasumi rippled and shimmied, quick little pulses with every beat. All the sound of the crowds and hooves were lost to the rough whacking of the taiko drum, which flirted many times with a steady tempo but never found its way to it. Through the shaking water, Kasumi saw the horse stamp and Hayami shake her head. She could just make out the gray shape of Denko spinning about on Satoshi’s left hand; it was dancing.

Satoshi’s face was all grins as he struck the drum firmly, quickly, furiously – too furiously, his hand lost its grip on the drumstick. It flew away from him, spun around again and again in the air as it went out over the lake, and then into the lake, right on top of Kasumi’s head.

“Drat!” she heard Satoshi say. “I guess that’s the end of that.”

Kasumi flipped down and caught the stick before it could fall to the lakebed. She shed her tail. Underneath it was a pair of long, spindly legs. The scales of her tail flattened, the fins stretched, and they became a pink-trimmed jade yukata. Kasumi slipped inside it, cinched it shut around her waist, and broke the lake surface. She swam until she had to stand, then trudged up until she was all the way onto the shore, right beside Satoshi. She shook the stick at him and said, “You be careful!”

Kasumi had watched her sisters come on to land like this, with their fine blue yukatas and wet hair shining in the sun. Everyone who saw them would look on them and weep.

Satoshi looked at Kasumi, tilted his head, scrunched his nose, and asked, “Can all girls do that?”