Part III, Chapterlet 8

8.
When the demon arrived at the center of the village and stood with the soles of his feet on the baked clay of the square which was still hot from the sun’s day-long embrace, he found it deserted. Everywhere, torches and paper lanterns were lit, and the shaking of the flames in the light caused his various shadows to writhe all around him. His throat tight with fear, the demon rushed into the nearest hut, but he found it empty of people. Little wooden bowls and palm leaf mats were strewn about, as if the owners expected to come back, but the demon, looking around the village by fire light, could see that all the fishing nets were gone, and all the boats missing. They had left the island, sealing him in with the child’s corpse.
Tears making everything stretch and shift before him, the demon ran to the beach on the far side of the island with a terrifying speed. He moved over obstacles and open stretches with equal ease, his steps growing farther and farther apart. He dove into the water and swam against the shore-bound current’s push until he felt it change, pulling him out into the night. When he was no longer in sight of the beach, or any of the lights that burned on the island, he sank.
He sat upon the black, coarse sea bottom, feeling his fur pushed back and forth with the large, invisible motion of the water that had disappeared around him into only the barest sense of being surrounded by a dimness beyond night and the salt sting on his face—the natal taste of the water making memory and gorge rise equally in a sickening symmetry.
Whole segments of time opened up to him in the roar and silence of the water, and he sank through them to previous moments, moments before the loneliness had come upon him, and he was almost peaceful. He knew that he did not have much time remaining before he needed to return to the surface or his lungs would force him to take a saline breath. He waited. A seemingly endless succession of moments passed, filling him with more recollections and experienced objects than he would have believed that he contained, and the pain in his lungs increased all the time. Still, the demon sat on the ocean floor without moving. One of the little crabs he preferred could be felt moving over the horny contours of his feet, somewhere very far from the pain in his chest and head. Still, he waited.
Eventually, his stomach began to heave, and his lungs forced him to draw in a breath. In addition to the horror and bodily disgust the inrushing water evoked in him, he felt a sense of relief that was beyond his ability to understand in those terrible moments, his whole chest spasming and his lungs dying to stillness in water that seemed as thick as blood.
As his mind’s light dimmed to something like the darkness in which he was now suspended, he experienced one final agony. A pain pushed its way in behind his ears, and another pale memory of his brother rose before him in an instant. He was swimming in a mountain pool that seemed without bottom.
Carp swam below him, the largest ones barely shadows, their distance below him apparent despite the translucency of the water. His brother stood on the beach, warning him not to dive too deep. When he asked his brother why, the answer came that diving too far was as deadly as staying under too long. When he asked his brother how he knew, his brother said that a fisherbird had told him. When he asked his brother what distance was too deep, his brother replied that he had no answers. The demon had later sought the counsel of a fisherbird, who, mocking his ignorance of facts that every new-hatched fledgling knew, smugly told him that pain in the head was the sign that you had gone beyond your depth. The greater the pain, the greater the danger.
At that moment, with the black salt water blending with the coruscating surfaces of the mountain pool, the demon came to the conclusion that he had gone beyond his depth. Abruptly, he realized that the pain in his head was dissipating. Amazed that a doorway to his mother’s domain, the pure, painless realms of the West, could be found in so unlikely a place, the demon took stock of his situation.
Clearly, he had come to the lands of death, for no being could die and fail to proceed thither. His father had told them that much when they were children. And yet, the water around him, the sand beneath him, everything was the same. There was no directionless light, no mountain, no ubiquitous lotus. Most of all, his mother’s face was not smiling upon him. No, everything was the same in death except the pain.
Reaching up to touch the spot where the pain had entered his head, the demon received a shock: a warmer jet of water moved over his fingers and cooled as it swirled in the depths around him. He touched the formerly tender spot and found a quivering opening. He was not dead. He had grown gills. The demon was amazed and heartsickened with this new development, the reality of the storm, the deserted island, and the gruesome offering of the corpse crowding back amongst his thoughts in a great confusion of bitterness, grief, and surging up through it all was a frustration that the surcease he might have had in death was denied him.
Cursing the proud wisdom of the fisherbird, the demon began walking slowly along the bottom toward the place where the underwater mouth of the grottoes must have been, his every step buffeted by the waves that rolled overhead. On his walk, he considered what he knew. Everything he knew, he knew from others. His brother had told him not to stay under too long or he would die, the fisherbird had mocked him and told him not to dive too deep. Certainly, his brother was old and wise—but how much older and wiser could he be?
The demon considered that his thoughts were not properly humble, and this concerned him until he remembered what humility had brought him so far. Out of humility, and the desire to free his brother of his burdensome grief, he had fled the island of his home. He was in a strange land when he had sought consolation. He was alone when he had sought companionship. He was filled with grief when he wished an end to grief. He was accounted a monster where he brought only compassion. And how could the villagers have judged him any differently, when he had waited with humility in the shadows to be invited among them?
His father had taught them to shun the carrion birds that picked the bones of dead creatures and kept their distance from the living. He must have seemed kin with such, wretchedly slinking from shadow to shadow and sleeping so uncouthly in a cave. To imagine that he had been eating with his hands and sleeping on bare rock simply because he had not dared to shape wood or work stone for fear that his own arts would surpass his father’s. Humility had, in this respect, made him live like an animal, when he was descended from gods.
Was not his father the smith born of the sun, the smith who shaped the sword that killed the world serpent? He batted away a fish that nibbled at his cheek. And was his mother not the daughter of the moon, that held court both in the mirthless realms and the valleys beneath the moon? And why consider his parentage? Surely, his own strength was not to be denied. It had been, after all, sufficient to swim across the ocean from his former home to this, his current one.
Surely, a being that could not drown, who, when drowned grew gills and lived still, surely such a being deserved the carvings and lanterns they had placed outside his door. They had meant it as a warding, but the demon now thought that it seemed only to be his due. He laughed as he moved through the dark beneath the waves.
As the demon walked, his passage through the water grew easier, but he did not notice, caught up, as he was, in the snarl of his own thoughts. The water around the demon began to roil and surge with his passing. By the time he reached the entrance to the grotto, the steam rose above the surface of the water over him in a pillar that reached half way to the stars. When he climbed out of the waters, the rocks under his feet began first to hiss and crack, and then to run.
Hot streams of rock flowed from his footprints to pool in low places, and the glow from the caverns around him seemed to reflect his resentment from the thousand faceted teeth that depended from the caverns, thrusting their jeweled lengths into the heat that blazed from him. The parlors and secret pockets of stone warped around him as he seethed, but he did not notice.
He noticed nothing until he came once more to his sheltering cave. He noticed the wall. Snarling, he breathed and pushed the wall out into the night. Bright streamers of molten rock exploded outward to land in the sea, and clouds of mist billowed in on the perpetual breeze. Something caught fire at his feet. Looking down, the demon’s pain and anger faded in the flush of grief that overcame him. The body of the little boy was burning candle bright in the yellow-orange wash, the semi-darkness of the cooling stone.
The demon gave a pitiful yell, and, scooping the fickly burning body up, he rushed out amidst the tumbled remains of the wall and the crude statue to wade into the breaking waves and douse the flames. The demon cried out again as he realized that the water had extinguished the flames but that he was binding the broken thing’s skin to his own simply by touching him.
The demon was almost overcome when he saw the skin coming off in sticky sheets as the boy’s body moved and shifted in his grip, with clumps of his own fur sticking to the burnt and pitted surfaces. The demon knew that the boy would never wander in his mother’s halls; the rites that had ensured his passage had been disturbed and the body defiled by fire and water and salt. The body was desecrated beyond any hope of redemption.
A different kind of anger grew in him then, one textured with grief and loneliness and pity. The feeling rose in him until it seemed the sky broke and crashed upon them both like the waves around them, and when, after it felt as if the world was going to heave them up or crush them into a point, the demon finally looked down, the boy was feebly prying at his hands and desperately trying to raise his head above the choking water, his yellow eyes gleaming palely in the night. The demon seemed to shrink then, and grow tender. He carried the boy out of the surf, his body falling limp as soon as the danger of drowning was past. He placed him on a slab of still-warm stone and knelt down to watch him sleep. Kneeling there, while the world wheeled on toward day, the demon decided that no harm would come to the child through inaction on his part, and he resolved to keep the boy close until one of them died or the stars went out.