Character Cameo: Ayame whirls onto the scene as Ahame!
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Chapter 22
Of all the visions he forced Haku to live through, the Dzuni ones concerned Faran-Zhuku the most. During his more lucid moments, he constantly reassured himself that Haku had a strong character. Certainly his not having gone insane up to this point bore proof of the resilient core within him. Still, as Faran-Zhuku knew all too well, the human mind was nothing more than a house of matches: take out part of the foundation, and it would collapse, or, even worse, let a spark near it and flames would engulf it. In his bad moments, when he purposely retreated deep inside Haku's subconscious to lessen the possibility of accidentally going on a murderous spree, past memories of the men and women he'd possessed before the onset of the family curse flitted in and out. Taking a knife to their wrists, jumping from a cliff, digging a sword into their bellies…when they couldn't take the burden of the visions anymore.
During these moments of torment, Faran-Zhuku would wonder if he'd been wrong to tell the boy that he had the potential to be one of the great Faran-Hat-Zhukus. The ones who could deal with the weighty burden, learn to live with it, always deserved his most profound respect. Maybe it was false encouragement…Gods, he must be going soft if he was this concerned about Haku! In the past, when Faran-Hat-Zhukus committed suicide, the ghost merely moved on to the next newborn in the family and renewed the cycle. 500 years of imprisonment had not been healthy. Faran-Zhuku chuckled wryly to himself. Lone wolves never did respond well to being chained, unable to roam freely.
But he must try. He must try to make Haku fully understand the Dzuni fully, meaning Haku would have to experience the pain the cursed ones underwent. Faran-Zhuku growled. So frustrating, being limited to the memories of the last generation of cursed Dzuni, Asheno's generation. Transferring his memories of the real Dzuni to Haku would make it much easier to explain the true nature of the Dzuni, and how the curse started. Unfortunately, those memories existed in a jumbled format, that even he couldn't sort out. Only one Dzuni would have the power capable of interpreting the scrambled memories correctly, but some time would pass before it was born.
In the meantime, Haku should experience the cursed Dzunis' memories from their own perspectives more often. Fully comprehending their mindsets was vital to understanding the effect of the curse. The phantom wolf would start with one Haku was already familiar with: Huki.
Haku reached for his ebony pencil for a little doodling, and his hand grasped only air. Then he realized he couldn't see his hand anymore; it was pitch black in the room.
"Hey, what the he—" No vocalization came from his mouth.
"Quiet," rumbled the wolf. "I putting you inside Huki's memories. Shut up and watch."
The blackness slowly resolved itself into degrees: one small square portal, no larger than an average-sized novel, filtered faint moonlight into the blackness. His mind clearing, Haku allowed himself to melt completely into Huki's memory. This was when Huki was a very small boy, no more than five. The boy wrapped his delicate hands inside the sleeves of his hekasho, and shivered. The room was cold. And it was so small, he only had enough space to sit down or stand in place. He couldn't leave, even though his stomach rumbled with hunger and he had to pee really badly. Thirsty, too.
He had locked the door.
"You've been a bad litlle rat. I shall have to punish you," his god, Asheno, had told him. "I have a special room, prepared especially for you."
And Asheno had put him in this tiny, dark place. Huki's muscles froze at the sound of creaking.
Maybe there were monsters, lurking in the corners, waiting to snatch him if he moved. The boy remained deathly still. What had he done to deserve this? Huki couldn't understand why he was here.
Time passed, slothlike, as Huki resisted the impulse to move, drawing further and further inside himself. He shut his eyes tightly, to block out the evil shadows created by the moonlight.
"Perhaps now you shall come when I call for you, hmm?"
Huki slowly raised his head and opened his eyes. Asheno's silhouette stood before him in the doorway.
"Yes, that's it, you're learning. You may come out now."
His legs prickled in protest as he stretched them, shakily standing up. Huki took a few wobbly steps forward.
"What a shame, that you forced me to punish you," Asheno murmured, stroking Huki on the head. "As the rat, you are a special child. I do not desire to shut that beautiful face of yours in a dark room."
Beautiful face…"Why couldn't he look like a normal child?" Huki heard his mother's voice, a comment he overheard a few days ago. "He's too…beautiful and feminine."
"Your brother is waiting to take you home. Go." A wave of the hand towards the open garden doors, and Asheno swept through the door to his bedroom. Mechanically, Huki walked onto the back patio.
His older brother by ten years, Ahame, who he barely knew. The flashy, overly dramatic snake of the Dzuni. He never paid much attention to Huki, often confined to bed because of bad asthma. Huki coughed. Ahame was at school most of the time, and the rest of the time he spent with Shehure and Hathori, his closest friends.
The fifteen-year-old, who resembled Khosure exactly, stood with his back to Huki. An embryonic gleam of hope budded within Huki; maybe Ahame could help him with Asheno. He was so much older, after all.
Silently, Huki stepped towards Ahame, who remained unconscious of his younger brother's presence. Finally, the rat stood just behind the snake. Huki reached out, haltingly, to touch Ahame's arm.
The teenager turned around, surprised, and looked down at the small hand on his sleeve and the haggard face of his baby brother. Ahame shook his hand free of Huki's grasp.
"Come on, it's late." Ahame trotted off to the family house, leaving Huki standing forlornly in the moonlight.
Shoma Ahame, Haku soon learned, had a hidden dark side, like Khosure did.
A ten-year-old Ahame frolicked in the grass in his house's backyard, his mother smiling and watching from the kitchen window. Judging from the number of toys scattered in the yard, Ahame was far from being a deprived child.
"Are you watching, Mama?" he demanded loudly.
"Yes, of course, dear," responded the dirty blonde-haired woman. Her tight bun contained several gray streaks. She had dark, puffy circles under her eyes. Ahame smiled and went on with his antics. He failed to notice as his mother's face suddenly constricted, and she screamed. Haku realized that she was pregnant with Huki.
Ahame froze at the scream. He'd never seen his mother in such pain before—usually she was very stoic. Then again, he never paid much attention to people around him, except for Hathori and Shehure.
Ahame's father, an average-looking sort of man, came running to his wife's aid.
"It's too early," she sobbed. "Two more months…"
"It'll be all right," the man tried to comfort her, "lots of seven-month old babies survive." Nonetheless, an undertone of anxiety pervaded his voice.
"No! Dzuni babies are born at seven months! I don't want another one of them!" She shoved her husband's arm aside, suddenly wild-eyed and furious.
"Honey, the boy!" whispered Ahame's father desperately.
Ahame gaped, shell-shocked, in the exact same posture Huki enacted when Ahame brushed him aside five years later.
"We accept Shoma Huki, the rat, into the family." New Year's Eve, near the end of winter. Haku could tell because the room and décor were exactly the same. The antique, circular blackwood table was still used by Asheno today, for the Dzuni banquet on New Year's Eve. The Dzuni banquet was a Shoma family tradition—for those who knew about the curse, that is. On every New Year's Eve, the head of the family, the Dzuni god, would host a banquet only for members of the Dzuni. The Dzuni would sit at their assigned seats, arranged according to the order of the calendar—the god in the grandest, most elegant chair, the rat on the right-hand chair, and after that, cow, dragon, snake, sheep, bird, horse, monkey, tiger, dog, and boar. No place for the cat—the cat was expressly forbidden from attending the Dzuni banquet.
Asheno had actually condescended to explain the banquet to Haku and Hatsuharu when they were old enough, except he left out the part about the Dzuni. Since he could first remember, he and Hatsuharu had been forced to spend New Year's Eve with Asheno. The three would spend the entire night in silence, the hostility growing heavier with each passing year. The emptiness of the room only enhanced the silence, and created an echo whenever someone spoke. Elaborately carved animals on the unclaimed chairs were the three's only other companions in the room. Each chair contained carvings of its Dzuni's respective animal, usually accompanied by what Haku now knew were flame tree blossoms.
Haku usually spent the time staring at the intricate whorls and labyrinthine lines in the surface of the blackwood table. Blackwood was extremely rare—it could only be obtained from the trunks of flame trees. No other decoration adorned the table because it was considered sacrilegious to mar the wood any more than had already been done. The whorls and lines shone a deeper blac than the rest of the tabletop, and when Haku unfocused his eyes, the whorls shifted into islands and the twisty lines into waves. He fantasized an ancient map, telling of a land long gone and scintillating adventures long forgotten. It helped keep him from provoking Asheno and making an unpleasant night more unpleasant.
The boys always had to wear formal hekashos, made of a rich but extremely heavy fabric similar to brocade. Each Dzuni wore a special outfit to the banquet, which were carefully stored and refitted each year. Hatsuharu wore a relatively simple wine-red hekasho with a silver undergarment to bring out his gray eyes. The dog's hekasho, which Haku had, was deep teal, held in place by a black belt glistening with gold embroidery of a pack of dogs running. The belt miffed Haku because it looked like the dogs were eternally running and running around in a circle, never getting anywhere, no destination to reach.
At the start of the banquet, the family head would always make a traditional speech welcoming a new member, if one had passed away and been replaced. Then the head would say a blessing for good fortune, and signal the start of the feast. Servants were allowed into the room only when everyone had finished eating the sumptuous courses, to take away the dishes. This happened precisely fifteen minutes before midnight, the official start of the New Year. Five minutes before midnight, when the servants left for good, the Dzunis representing the old year and the upcoming year would rise. At midnight, they began a ritual dance, to herald the arrival of the New Year. When the dance ended, everybody was free to socialize and talk, as they wished. They never left the room before 6 a.m.
At this particular banquet, most of the seats were full. Huki had just been born, so that meant Hathori, Shehure and Ahame were all ten. Hathori kept glancing worriedly at Ahame, sitting with eyes and face carved of stone. Diminutive Huki wailed weakly, barely visible in a mass of blankets, from his portable cradle secured to the rat's chair. To Ahame's left sat a proud, elderly man, the sheep, his hair now white, his grayish-brown eyes overwhelmed by a wrinkled face. The only other elderly members at the table were the horse, who bore an eerie resemblance to a bad-tempered version of Lhurone, and the tiger, a bowed old woman with orange-brown hair and matching eyes. The cow and rabbit were missing. They had probably passed away during the old year.
On the sheep's left, the bird boy sat absolutely still. He was a few years younger than Hathori and his companions, probably seven or so. Haku thought he might be Hathori's brother—the only difference was that the bird had a sharper nose, small round black eyes, and a brighter shade of red hair. A little girl—or boy, Haku couldn't tell—squirmed nervously next to the horse, in the monkey's chair. The girl/boy sucked her thumb.
"Stop sucking your thumb, boy," hissed the horse. The boy looked down, frightened, a deep scarlet blush covering his face.
On Shehure's left sat a little female Khezuke, eyes heavy with sleep. She was practically still a baby, perhaps only three or four. Several times she nearly hit her head on the table after dozing off, and Shehure had to nudge her awake.
And in between the boar and miserably wailing rat, sat three-year old Asheno. Even then, observed Haku, he looked unhealthy. His pale face sweated under the strain of his magnificent hekasho's heaviness. Automatically, he delivered the traditional speech without any real comprehension of what he was saying.
"May the rat flourish, and may we find comfort after the deaths of the cow, the rabbit, and the mother of the snake." Ahame's mother lost too much blood during Huki's delivery. A miasma of feelings ranging from shock and grief at her death, to anger and denial over her screams about not wanting Dzuni children, roiled inside the snake.
"Let us eat, and may we have a fot-fortis…for-tu-it-tous New Year." Asheno labored through the difficult word. He plopped onto his chair, and dishes made their way around the table.
Hurried knocking disrupted the meal. A servant pushed open the main door, immediately bowing deeply in apology.
"You know you're not supposed to come in here unless I say so!" yelled Asheno.
"Please forgive me, sire, but one of the women has gone into labor. It is tradition to inform the family head if a Shoma delivers at seven months. She may be giving birth as I speak," said the servant, keeping her head down.
"Thank you, you may go now." The young head became alert. "Shina, Mihoshi, Shehure, you will take me to the woman." The horse, sheep, and dog obediently rose from their seats. "Hathori and Ahame will stay here and watch everyone else. Take especially good care of Huki. I like him, you know."
Asheno put his small hand into Shehure's. He'd always favored the dog, who could always calm him down during one of his frequent tantrums. The small group made their way to the birthing room. As they neared, they heard loud screams, followed by a woman's voice yelling, "What's wrong? What's wrong with my baby?"
"Oh, no, the cat has been born," groaned Shina. "This is going to be ugly."
"You should not see the cat," Mihoshi said to Asheno, "you're too young to see him right now."
"No! Take me inside!" commanded Asheno. They had no choice but to comply. Shina pushed open the door.
The doctor had backed against the wall, and the nurse sprawled on a chair in a dead faint. A whimpering came from the floor, under the mother's outstretched legs.
"What's that?" Asheno demanded, pointing at the wriggling brown mass, still covered in blood and mucus. It had a flat, triangular head, a stumpy neck and body, and oversized legs and arms that folded like a grasshopper's. Sharp claws already protruded from its feet.
"That is the cat, in its true form," announced Mihoshi, grimly.
The mother had managed to sit up by now. She followed the Dzunis' looks to where her new son lay on the floor.
"Is that…my baby?" she asked.
"Yes," affirmed Shina. "Your son, the cat of the Dzuni."
"I didn't think this would happen." That struck Shehure as an odd thing to say, considering mothers of the cat usually went into hysterics. "My baby..." She got out of the bed, knees shaking, and fell to her knees. She picked up the bundle, her eyes glassy. "My baby." She hugged it closer, avoiding looking at him directly.
By now everyone was feeling the effects of the smell emanating from the cat. It was the smell of bloated corpses on the battlefield, baking in the sun.
"It's disgusting! Take me out of here, Shina!" The horse yanked Asheno out of the room. But Shehure and Mihoshi stayed.
His sensitive canine nose begged for relief from the smell. Putting his hand over his nose, Shehure murmured, "Why is the cat the only one with an original form?"
The old sheep stayed silent. Shehure glanced up and saw despair and grief in Mihoshi's eyes.
"We'll have to get Hathori to erase the doctor's and nurse's memories," Mihoshi finally remarked. The other three people were paying no attention; shock continued to hold a relentless grip on them. Mihoshi looked at Shehure, then kneeled down, his arthritic knees making his movements jerky. He placed his hand under Shehure's chin, and guided the dog's face closer to his own.
Speaking in a nearly inaudible whisper, Mihoshi told Shehure, "The former cat, Omeshu, was a good friend of mine. I defied the head's orders never to visit the cat. The cat does not deserve this suffering. None of the Dzuni deserve to suffer under a curse like this. I've watched you for a long time now. You do not accept the curse blindly; you constantly question it. That is why I am telling you this now, before I die. Find the cure. For the gods' sake, for the family's sake, I'm begging you, find the cure so the needless suffering of future generations can be stopped. Please.
"Promise me the following: that you will remember the cat is just like the rest of you. That you will help the other Dzunis deal with Asheno. He likes you, but he is already showing signs of the god-sickness corrupting his mind. And find the cure. Find the cure."
Shehure remained silent, at the adamant tone of the hurried, despondent words.
"Please, promise me."
"Yes, Mihoshi, I promise." Steely determination filled the dog's eyes. Flashes of Shehure sitting on the garden wall, his very first vision, zipped through Haku's mind. "Someday, Mihoshi, the curse will end, and we can all find happiness."
The old sheep smiled and nodded. Patting Shehure's cheek, he added one final caveat. "Tell absolutely no one about this. Asheno would find out, and it would be very nasty." Sighing, Mihoshi exited the room.
"My baby. My baby." Shehure looked at the cat's mother, rocking back and forth with the thing in her arms. Her eyes glittered feverishly and a strained smile appeared on her face. Shehure knew she would have to be watched carefully in the future.
A beautiful spring day appeared before Haku. The sky a gentle blue, a benevolent breeze tickling the budding branches.
A ten-year-old boy sat on the garden wall, his black school shirt half-unbuttoned. Two boys stood below him, looking up at him.
Gazing at the sky, his voice reverent and emotion-filled, Shehure spoke.
"Last night, I dreamt I was with the one I loved. She accepted me for who I was. The curse didn't matter. We laughed, hugged, kissed. Nothing came between us, we were not punished for being together. No fear, no anxiety, just wonderful sweet, passionate love. Free to spend the rest of our lives admiring sunsets together…" He trailed off, smiling at the memory.
"Then it was gone. That sweet passion…I held it in my hands, like a little bird, but it flew away and disappeared."
Ahame sobbed, and Hathori's eyes shined. Shehure swallowed as tears flowed down his face. Defiantly, his voice remained steady.
"I will find that happiness."
"We're cursed, Shehure," spoke Hathori quietly. "It's very difficult."
"No. Someday I will grasp that passion once again. No matter what I have to or who I have to hurt to find it again, I will find it again." He wiped the tears away. "Yes, and it won't disappear next time."
Gasping, Haku found himself staring at the wall, the same wall Shehure had made his vow so many years ago. The sun shone, and the cheery blue of the sky stretched to a vast extent.
A bird trilled.
"Someday, I will be free. I'll be happy too," Haku said to the wall. The wall stood unresponsively, solid stone as before.