by Marie Faye Prior

It was a summerless year, the first in her memory.

An oppressive purple sky pushed down on the fields, spreading low clouds of bitter brown gas that tore at the lungs like glass. Crops choked under a blanket of grit and dust, yellow and stunted for lack of sun.

Masked stick figures worked in the fields, their backs bent. Swaddled against the chill of the solstice, they did not farm, but scavenged. Their faces were muzzled, lupine and sinister in the always-gloom. Yu could not tell which one was her mother; they all moved the same.

She picked a dandelion, and it crumbled in her hands, the stem fragmenting like boiled leaves. Insects buzzed and chittered around her face, attracted by her colour. They skittered against the scratched glass of her eyeplate, and she pulled her scarf tighter, sealing the gape of the mask at her neck.

The bitter dark came in cycles, the elders said, like the rains and the river-flood.

Yu rubbed the clinging yellow plant matter from her hands and sat down in the dirt. It swirled around her, sticking to her clothes and clogging in the fine mesh over her mouth.

The farmhouse door opened behind her, and Yu heard the rustle of Sumae’s kimono, the shuffle of her wooden shoes.

“Time to come in now,” Sumae said, her hand on Yu’s shoulder. Her voice grated a little through her own metal grid.

Yu stood awkwardly in her fat padded trousers and boy’s tunic. Sumae’s kimono showed flowers, pink and white petals against a summer-blue sky.

*

They ate congee at supper with wide-bowled pewter spoons, and drank boiled water from small leather cups. Yu’s mother had come in from the fields, red lines on her face like spectacles where the mask had pressed into her. Yu could remember when they had eaten from deep, glazed bowls; blue and white, and not the sombre brown of earth and earthenware. She toyed with her food and wished for cherries.

Yu’s mother finished her meal and stood, silent, carrying her own bowl to the kitchen. Almost instantly her seat was filled, another worker from the fields. He shovelled the watery mash into his mouth like it was sweet dumplings.

“Eat up,” Sumae told her, prodding the bowl with her spoon. “Other people want to sit down, you’re so slow.”

*

In the evening, Sumae told the children stories.

She knelt primly on a reed mat in the corner of their bedroom, eight girls and four boys in a circle around her. Their sleeping mats were piled tidily under the window.

She had changed her kimono as Yu’s mother used to do for the evening meal; its colours reflected a summer sunset in a healthier year. Her lips were painted red, and Yu watched them as she talked.

Sumae’s parents often talked about their daughter’s engagement. Yu wondered when Sumae would have to leave.

Sumae’s kimonos were not as fine as Yu’s mother’s had been, but Yu had no evidence, and so did not tell the other children. They had left all the good clothes behind, along with her father and the nice bowls and all of her toys.

*

If her father was here, Yu thought, then her mother would not have to work in the fields. He would bring her fine embroidered silks and cosmetics from the case in her dressing room, and she would restore herself. Yu had not seen her father since the last of the winter rains, on that long warm night when her mother’s steward had driven them away. The horses had steamed, and the wagon had rattled so terribly loud along narrow, dirt roads they would never otherwise have used.

She had waved at her father from the back of the wagon, and watched him until he faded into the rain.

Yu pressed her face into the weave of her sleeping mat and tried not to cry.

Something shuffled at the screen. Yu heard Sumae’s name, then Sumae responding, her voice thick with sleep. The screen door creaked slightly, and Sumae slipped out. Yu crawled softly along the floor, in the narrow aisle between the mats and their cargo of sleeping, snoring children. She stood quietly, and squeezed herself through the gap between screens.

Sumae was downstairs, in the sickroom. Yu could hear the soft, uneven rasp of Sumae’s father’s breathing, the equally soft sobbing of Sumae’s mother, the rustle of paper. Yu hunched down beside a lacquered paper partition, and watched through a tear in the wall.

Sumae’s father coughed, a gentle sound at first that got steadily louder and more violent. A man came forward to hold him up, while he spewed something thick and red into a large wooden bowl. Sumae’s mother sat down, abruptly, and Sumae held her.

Yu recognised the doctor, and an icy dread slivered through her gut.

She closed her eyes, screwing them tight against the white prickling, the cold fear that Sumae’s father would crumble like the dandelion stem.

The coughing began again. It and went on and on, and Yu huddled at the base of the stairs, snuffling into her sleeve. Sumae’s mother wailed a mourner’s cry, and Sumae knelt on the floor, not prim like a lady, but sprawled and ungraceful. Her head lay in her mother’s lap; a sheet of paper crumpled in her hand.

“I’m sorry,” the doctor said. Sumae stared for a moment, a few black strands clinging to her cheeks, then nodded. Her father lay still. Slowly, the doctor placed a white cloth over his face. Sumae and her mother stood, shakily, clasping hands. Her mother bent and set down two ring-shaped bronze coins, one atop each of Sumae’s father’s covered eyes.

Sumae said something, the paper still crushed in her hand, and her mother shook her head. “Tomorrow,” she said, and Yu slunk back up the stairs to her sleeping mat.

*

Sumae’s father burned on a pyre of dead wood and broken furniture. They stood well back, past the firebreak between the sanctuary and the starving fields. Yu wept into her mask, her tears sliding down her face and pooling at her neck where they soaked into the harsh thick wool of her scarf.

Everyone was there, all twenty-seven of the commune’s refugees and the farming family who had taken them in. Yu’s mother stood with Sumae’s mother, both silent, the backs of their hands almost touching. Sumae stood apart in her funeral kimono, the stark white of the silk broken only by the slightest line of red. It was printed, Yu noticed, and not embroidered, but somehow still appropriate.

Yu looked up into the heavy purple sky; it was dark and mottled, like a bruise. Maybe next time it came the war would be won. They would be back in their painted villa with their servants and her father, with peasants to work the fields so her mother did not have to. Yu decided that she would keep Sumae as a Lady in Waiting, now that she had no father of her own.

*

It was a bright day when the messenger came. Bright not for the sun, but for the constant splitting zip of unnatural lightning on the horizon past the fields. The brown fug had lifted slightly, and the air was uncommonly clear. The workers did not work, but stood and stared, flinching occasionally, and talked amongst themselves. Every so often there was a thud, very loud, and very far away, and smoke would rise up in a cloud like fungus.

Sumae confined the children to their room. There were dark circles beneath her eyes, and Yu noticed she had not bothered with make-up.

“Come, Yu, play monkey with us,” Sumae said, holding out her hand, but Yu clung on to the windowsill and stared out at the horizon.

“No,” she said, then, “Someone’s coming!”

The other children clamoured to see, and Sumae clamoured with them, leaning over their heads to peer through the grubby glass.

At first, Yu thought that the messenger had no mask, but when he went to talk she caught a gleam of metal around his teeth, a mesh like spidersilk tucked away behind his lips. Lightning continued to split the sky; the messenger’s horse pawed at the ground, jittery. Yu leaned closer to the glass, but no matter how hard she stared, the face of the messenger did not become familiar. She could not make him one of her father’s men.

Yu watched him leave, a trail of dust spread up, agitated by his horse’s hooves. The unnatural lightning flickered redly with some spell, a faint glow on his back.

*

Yu used the confusion to steal into Sumae’s dressing box, to look at the paper she had been given the day her father died.

The page was crisp, flatter than it had been, but scored with lines where Sumae had crumpled it. Yu stared intently at the words, working through the syllables she knew, and guessing at those she did not. She didn’t hear the screen door move.

“What are you doing? You don’t go through my things!” Sumae snatched the page from her and crammed it back into the box. Her cheeks were red and blotchy like the sky, and her eyes were wet.

“Answer me!” Sumae yelled, raising her hand.

“You can’t hit me!” Yu yelled back, but flinched regardless.

“Why not, child?” Sumae said, but she lowered her hand. She was shaking. “You go into my things without asking, you read my father’s will. How dare you? You disrespectful little goat.”

“You’re a goat!” Yu cried, her lower lip quivering. “I’m the pro-consul’s daughter, and that means you can’t hit me!”

Sumae opened her mouth, then closed it again, and walked out. Yu followed her, but her mother was in the doorway, their masks dangling from her hand.

“Yu-Shilmar, we need to go,” she said. She looked straight into Yu’s eyes, and Yu felt the ground fall away from under her.

*

There was no wagon, this time, and no horses to pull it, no snug nest of blankets to sleep in while the miles of back-country swept away behind her.

Yu walked with her mother among the farmers and the refugees, a small pack on her back, her mother supporting a larger one. The heavier goods had been piled on a cart: the food and the water, pots for cooking, the tools from the barn.

The ground shook more often now, and although they walked away from it, the lightning felt closer.

“Did they do this?” Yu said.

Her mother reached for her hand and squeezed it. “No,” she replied.

Yu thought of Sumae’s father coughing blood into a bowl, of the bitter sharp air that clouded around them, a rolling brown fog tight to the ground. An aftershock of guilt and shame rumbled through her; she had still not said sorry to Sumae. “Whose fault is it?” she asked.

“Nobody’s,” her mother said. “It was the earth, remember, a long way away. There was a volcano.”

Yu glanced behind her; the sky crackled. “The earth can’t do that,” she said, sceptically.

Her mother shrugged, hefting her pack to shift the straps. “That’s different,” she said, “It started before you were born, a long while before. If the crops fail once, people recover, if they fail year after year…” she trailed off. “Even if there are good years in between…”

“Where are we going?” Yu asked, and instantly regretted it.

“We’ll find out when we get there,” her mother replied.

Yu stared back at the patchy brown fog. The view was blurred slightly by the scratched and fogged glass of her eyeplate, but still the war blossomed red and purple and grey.

“Look where you’re going,” her mother said.

In front of her was the bright blue hem of Sumae’s kimono. She wore it over dark boots, and under a thick coat to pad against the weight of her pack. Beneath her mask, her eyes were black with kohl, the skin around them powdered white in mourning.

Yu walked behind Sumae, following her steps. The silk fluttered on, summer blooms blown against a bright azure sky.

More stories like this by topic: Characters of color, Japan, Women authors