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Here’s a truth about the Mad Sea Dog—a proper truth, not just one of the many stories told about him. Every year, on one night towards the end of the year, when the sea churns with the cold that would kill an unlucky man toppling into the water, the captain of the black ship Goromaru leaves both ship and crew at port, and takes off from the Kamurocho harbour on his lonesome in a skiff.
Such things leave a man open to ambush, but he comes back at sundown on the next day, nary a scratch on him, and with none the wiser as to where he’s gone or what he’s done. Neither his first mate or his right hand man can, or will, speak of it, even deep in their cups when they’ve been pressed to talk.
The weaver maiden, Nishida lets slip once. The kokuto-shochu had been particularly strong that night. He’s going to meet Orihime.
Anyone in earshot is so roaring drunk with laughter that they forget it by morning. Nishida himself only realises when Minami smacks him over the head, snarling that idiot slip-ups like that are expected of him, not Nishida. Neither dare leave the tavern or take their hands off their cutlasses until they’re sure every man who drank with them that night remember only that Captain Majima slips away, with no reason known for it, and certainly not in search of maidens, celestial or oceanic.
After one year of being put through hell and two years of being made to run The Grand like it was proper tavern instead of the cage that it was, Sagawa told Majima to find him someone by the name of Makimura Makoto. In return, Sagawa would put through a good word for Majima, the sort that would start spinning the cogs that would get him off being landlocked for the last three years.
What for? Majima asked, not really caring. Makimura was already sunk to the bottom of the harbour, with stones in his boots and rope around his wrists, if Sagawa was looking for him. Usually, though, it was other, better skilled men doing the hunting – Majima didn’t factor into these equations, where his punishment in Sotenbori was concerned.
For whatever reasons Shimano has, Sagawa had said. He left Majima to stew in his thoughts. No need to kill him. Just bring him here.
Majima stared out into the Sotenbori harbour, thinking of his three lost years. One eye gone. Saejima, jailed, alone, when Majima ought to be there with him, or cold in a pauper’s grave together. Yasuko, somewhere only heaven knew where, with both her protectors gone. In all that time, he’d been trapped in this port city, barred from the sea, left to stare at what he was denied while under the heel of Sagawa and the watchful eyes of men in his employ.
He was going to find a way back. He was going to return to the sea. Whatever it was that Sagawa wanted, Makimura was good as dead.
It took very little for the Lord of the Night to charm answers from young pretty women, with her lips loosened with a drink and a smile. It led him to a clinic he passed enough times without frequenting, because he needed neither massage nor acupuncture from strangers. Fool on him for that – the Hogushi Kaikan was run by goze, and blind girls were none the wiser to the tattoos that marked him as pirate on his back and arms.
Majima wheedled conversation from a girl who was happy to work on him. Okyaku-san asks strange questions, his masseuse laughed, but she answered them. Makimura-san was a good man – a tōjin arriving here in search of a goze to teach his daughter, when he thought she’d outlive him enough to need a trade to provide for herself. That had been years back – the daughter, sicklier than most, was now departed, but Makimura remained in the hope that the kindness extended to his daughter be repaid by ensuring other women like her would not be lost in the world. This clinic would outlast them all and stay a haven for those in need in Sotenbori.
Majima, who had seen plenty of the world even with only one eye, kept the thought that Sotenbori was many other things to himself. “Haven, huh? Ain’t that a sight to behold.”
“Don’t jest!” she scolded good-naturedly. “Makimura-san’s kinder than most men in this world. He’s even brought a mute girl here—it’s awful, really, knowing that she can see but things are no better for her even when she can.”
It was the mute girl that Majima encountered on his second visit to Hogushi Kaikan. There was still no Makimura, but this was a good chance to case the joint again if he wanted a way in which didn’t involve smoking him out and risk setting the neighbourhood up in flames—and since he was casing the joint, she brandished one of the many canes left for the staff at him. The slightness of her build belied how nimbly she handled the cane: Majima had the blunted tip swinging too close to his face until he put his hands up and spluttered out the lie that he was a client in search for God Hand.
Between her wordless gestures and his hand waving, they reached an agreement: God Hand was away for the rest of the day, but Majima would have to stay for a session, as proof that he was a client. She was even offering it for free, as apology for nearly taking his eye out.
If she was startled by the ink on his skin when he peeled his shirt away, it never showed on her face.
“I figure ya might not answer me,” Majima started. The mute were often deaf too, from what he had seen. “But ya reckon it’s nice workin’ here?”
She paused in her work and tapped next to his face. When he looked up at her, she nodded and pointed to herself smiling.
He filed the thought away. Best not to say too much, in case she understood enough to warn away Makimura when he appeared. They managed a lop-sided conversation through a series of tapping – one for ‘no’, two for ‘yes’ – before Majima surprised even himself by dozing off on the clinic table. The first goze who’d worked on him was good, but this one was incomparably better.
When he woke, groggy from the best sleep he’d had in ages, Makimura was as thrilled to see Majima as Majima was to see him.
Here’s a story – not about the Mad Sea Dog, the stuff of pirate legends, now and for a hundred years hence. This one is about a girl, and her story would be forgettable because there are as many girls in the sea as there are on land, if hers wasn’t the tale that birthed the legend of a pirate captain.
There was a girl who left home searching for her brother. Something had turned his heart away from the water and up to the land, for all the warnings that he would dry out, or be salted and eaten, or any of the nightmares told to children of the sea. She travelled down the western coast, around the seabound islands to the south, then back up the eastern coast, before she realised that he might not be found anywhere bordering the sea. He was brave, or reckless, enough to go further inland.
With that decision made, she found a cove a day’s swim away from a harbour city, and shed her skin to practice walking and the ways to mimic a human.
That was where the man with the bat tattoo found her.
In three days—two days of hiding girls in warehouses, trying to talk them out of their anguish by sharing some of his own, throwing Sagawa off his scent, and fighting an entirely different pirate crew on the hunt for the same girl; and one day on the water—Majima found himself back on his beloved sea, on a sampan that fit him and one mute passenger. There were enough pursuers on his tail, which guaranteed two things: Sagawa would rather see him gutted, than to let him return this Makimura Makoto he was searching for; and he was in far over his head.
The girl in question wasn’t looking at him as he put as much distance between themselves and their pursuers as quickly as humanly possible. She might have been still looking at that point in the distance, where they had been forced to leave her tōjin guardian at the burning remains of Hogushi Kaikan. She might have been thinking on how much of a black-hearted coward Majima was, pulling her away to leap into the sampan and flee, exactly as Lee had ordered him to do. She might have been doing any one of a hundred things that Majima had no way of understanding, no more than he did of understanding how not-human she was.
“How ya feelin’?”
It was the first thing he’d said since last night. On another day, he would be happy for a peaceable silence, shared in understanding with Saejima at sea.
Makimura Makoto turned to him, her shoulders hunched, the look in her eyes distant, her thoughts elsewhere. Looking at her, this mute girl he never would have guessed Sagawa or Shimano being much interested in, Majima wondered if Lee had been mistaken. She was nothing but unremarkable and quiet, as human as anyone could be.
She nodded at him: fine, not good. Her fingers were curled into fists. Her eyes were the black of the sea churned up in a storm.
She doesn’t talk, Lee said on the second day. Didn’t when I found her. Hasn’t said a word since. But I heard her sing one night and…
He shuddered, pulling his fist away from Majima’s face. She had hummed one night, a simple lullaby of the sort used to settle children, and in his sleep, Lee found himself in his sampan alongside his daughter, years before she passed. He dreamed of a day spent fishing on the water, and when the sun downed, his daughter had looked at him and said thank you in a voice that wasn’t hers.
Lee had not said, don’t let her sing. He’d only said, get her out of here. Make sure she gets her freedom back, and shoved at Majima a letter he couldn’t even read.
It was that freedom Majima was thinking of now, with the quiet terror of what he’d gotten himself into anchored in his mind. He’d come into this thinking Makimura was a dead man, where Sagawa was concerned—but if he made it to the next port, dodged those other pirates still gunning for this girl, and got himself into Sagawa’s good graces by groveling and handing this one back, roped up like a gift for him…
He thought of what Lee had said. How Lee had found her. He thought of how Sagawa had come to be who he was, by sinking bodies into the harbour or shuffling them around in the flesh trade.
He turned his eye to the map, hating Lee, hating her, hating himself for considering doing the scummy shit that earned Sagawa’s respect in the sordid city of Sotenbori, and kept them on the route to Edo.
The man who appeared at the cove told her the harbour city was great and her search for her brother would be long. But a man like him, a smuggler who made his trade knowing the ins and outs of a great city like that, could more than easily find her brother, if all the young lady would give him was a picture.
For drawing, he offered her rough paper and charcoal, where she etched out her brother’s face as she’d seen it last. As a gift, he offered a kimono he’d planned on moving – his gesture of goodwill, as the young lady would need human clothes, to disguise herself in a human city.
In three days, he returned with a different portrait. Her face was above the water. The shape of a coiling serpent, shadowed in the water, was beneath her. He’d never seen her with her skin – she’d hidden it well, before he stepped into the cove and found her – so it would only be her brother who would know that truth. With that decision made, she went with him.
Lee had prepared the sampan for travel, and the stores of food and barrels of water could stretch them a good way on the sea route to Edo, but what Majima needed was news. He took them to a port where gossip and talk were bound to sweep in from Osaka and told her to stay put.
If Sagawa had sent men, or the pirates who were hunting them down tailed them this far out from Sotenbori, Majima had better luck outrunning them on his lonesome. More than the need for news was the time away from her to think.
Because she had sung last night, that child-like lullaby that Lee had told him about – and Majima had dreamed. Of the sea again, the way he remembered it last, on a ship with Saejima and crewed by their own kind. Oddly enough, Yasuko was there, wandering around deck and never within reach when he looked for her.
In the back of his mind, he knew that Saejima should have aged and that few men would let a woman onboard. But other than the day he’d fallen asleep at a masseuse’s table, this was the closest he’d come to true rest in years, so he put one foot ahead of the other, steadying himself on the deck of a ship swaying with the waves.
At sundown, Yasuko drifted towards him, staring at him with her dark fathomless eyes. For her part, she did have some of Yasuko’s habits down, but Yasuko tended towards better cheer and good-natured sweetness.
“This is all you, right?” He gestured around the ship. “It ain’t bad. Real close to what I remember.”
“It is what you remember.” Her voice wasn’t quite Yasuko’s either: more melodious, but more uncertain around the likes of him, a pirate in exile suddenly in charge of safeguarding her future. “No story is woven from thin air.”
“That right?” He turned his face to the sea. He’d been warned enough times to shut his ears off against women in the water singing them to their graves. Was that what her song did? Did it snake into the mind, burrowing in and pulling out threads to weave together her night-time mysteries?
“I wanted to thank you.” She leaned against the railing beside him. “Lee-san said you wanted to be at sea again.” Somehow that conversation must have happened in his absence, during those two days when they didn’t know if Majima was worth trusting. “I thought this might make you happy.”
“Like I said, it ain’t bad.” And it acted to serve, more than ever, as a reminder of what he had to lose if this wild adventure to free her went badly. “Is this why Sagawa’s after ya? Him an’ all those other guys?”
Lee had said the flesh trader was small fry where pirates were concerned, but he’d only known so much. Majima wanted to hear it from her.
“The man with the bat tattoo didn’t know about this. Not many do. The dream that the singing lulls someone into… makes men more susceptible, and most don’t live long enough to realise that.”
Majima snorted. “Ya tryna eat me?”
She peered up at him, utterly mystified. “How do men dream up these tales? It’s better use to drown a man trying to hunt us down than it is to eat him.”
“So who eats ‘em?”
She looked as though she’d never even thought about that. “Sharks?”
His splutter of laughter spurred her on too. It was strange hearing her talk. Stranger to hear her laugh.
“Lee said you can’t… talk, after all that horror happenin’ to ya. But how come ya didn’t talk to him?”
“I did talk to Lee-san.” On Yasuko’s face, the earnestness could not be faked. “He only remembered what he needed to.”
Lee remembered being thanked, so that must have been the most valued thing they talked about. Majima, on the other hand, remembered everything. He didn't know what to make of that, if all they'd talked about was important enough to be remembered. Diving back into the danger of a different port city to suss out the news was a comparative relief.
He did find news. He also found that danger. That other group of pirates tailing him were as disdainful of Sagawa as he was, but that didn't spare Majima from being chased by them, or their battle-hungry captain. It was a long day that couldn't end soon enough—and when he returned to the sampan at twilight, he found the boat empty.
Fuck, Majima thought. How the fuck.
He stared at the empty sampan for another moment, then turned back. Time to hunt Nishitani down.
Makoto pillowed her head on the rock shelf and peered over to him. “Was that when?”
“Haw? When what?”
“When you decided I was worth fighting for, once you’d lost me.”
She’d told him later that the effort of talking to him the night earlier had exhausted her, and that was why she sparingly did such things. She'd slept like the dead when they showed up in search of the foreign sampan, which was not nearly as well hidden off the coast as Majima had hoped—and all they had to do was carry her off, without even the insult of burning down the sampan or poisoning the water or throwing away the food to dissuade him from following.
“Nah. That ain’t it. I figured I was in it fer the long haul before that.”
—when one of Nishitani’s men said to him, in that chase through Sotenbori: you’re a fool. You think you’re a player in this game, when you don’t even know her worth?
Of the many things Majima was accused of being, fool was correct more often than not. But fool as he was, and pirate as he was, he knew the worth of freedom, even if it wasn’t his. Treating people as merchandise had never been the right price for his freedom. Before Lee had told him what she wasn’t, and before he’d been told there was a mysterious letter, courtesy of one Sera no-other-names-given, telling Lee to bring her up to Edo as means of her salvation, and before he’d known that her brother was willing to move a mountain of gold to have them reunited, some part of him had felt dragging off mute women without even a voice to protect themselves was low, even for a disgraced exile of a pirate. So he hadn’t loved her then, when the chase up to Edo had been about saving her—but her worth had never been tied to money or his freedom.
Makoto looked up at him. “Say that again. Please?”
“Say which part?”
She heaved herself up, rising out of the water on the length of her tail, until she could reach his face. Majima made a grab at her before she could tip over and onto him, but in the water, she was at her strongest, and her hands around his face held firm as she loomed over him still sitting on the rock shelf.
“When you decided you loved me.”
“Oi, oi. Busy week, wasn’t it? Hard fer a guy t’ keep his head straight.”
He caught her around her waist gingerly. Even where she looked more fish than person had him hesitating, as though she would always recoil from human touch.
“All I know is, at some point, the thought that I gotta get you away from the likes of Sagawa or Nishitani or whoever had ya at Edo was stuck in me. And then it became makin’ sure you were free. And then it became that trite shit you always keep hearin’ – loving something means lettin' it go.”
“How strange.” Makoto leaned down to slide her mouth against his. “Would you let me go now?”
Nishitani had been happy to see him. Too happy, by Majima's reckoning – he was of the thought that after this fight, which involved far too many cutlasses kicked blade-first into people than normal, Nishitani ought to find himself more agreeable company in a brothel and burn through that excitement, lest Majima find himself at the receiving end again.
Nishitani dusted himself off after getting his face beaten in. He spat, clearing the blood from his mouth, then clapped Majima on the shoulder. “Right. Off to save your lady love.”
There were no guarantees that Nishitani would let Majima keep her—let the best man win in this race—but where Nishitani was concerned, he was only here to bring Makimura Makoto to Edo alive. He wasn't a flesh trader and he had his doubts the man paying him for this work was one either, so in his eyes, he and Majima were allies for the time being.
“That ain’t it,” Majima snapped.
“Ain't it? I got double the number of eyes as you, an' I think I see what's goin' on.”
“You don't see shit. Love's got nuthin' to do with it. Girl like that, not even able to use a word to protect herself, deserves to get away from the likes of shit like us.”
Nishitani had laughed—look at that, Majima-kun, it's like yer tryna prove me right—and he was still in high spirits when they caught up with Sagawa's men.
High spirits did not save him from the bullet that caught him in the ribs, but it did spur him onwards until the favour was returned, with his knife in his killer's belly. Majima reached him before the end – it was a slog, wading through a crowd that meant to drag the girl back to Sotenbori and end him where he stood – and even then, Nishitani fought death like he had fought everything else.
"Ya keep goin'." Nishitani spoke against a torrent of blood. "Onto Edo." His hand fumbled around Majima's. "Put a bullet in Sagawa's head fer me."
Majima divvided up his loyalty sparingly. Most of it went to Saejima and Yasuko. Somehow, against his own plans, it'd latched onto Lee and his girl. Nishitani and his lot had planned to chase him down and nab the girl, with the only plans on killing him being if business called for it. Sagawa would have done it personally, would have made it slow. If not for his own deadline, Sagawa might have treated this one like a hunt.
"Yeah," Majima said. He felt Nishitani's hand grow slack in his own. He pulled his tricorne off as the only faint sign of respect he imagined Nishitani would care for. "Seems like bad luck, denyin' a madman his last wish."
Nishitani barely wrote out plans and Majima could barely read them even after taking them off his body, so it was the maps he relied on once he’d wrung them off of the dying men who killed Nishitani. He recognised the route to Edo and after turning several maps around, he recognised one as his old haunt of Kamurocho. To go back there meant certain death from Shimano if he was caught. To not go back there meant worse for Makoto.
He took Nishitani’s sword – respect for the dead meant not letting worse robbers loot his body – and cut the purses from the men who’d killed Nishitani. Robbing the dead that killed him was some pragmatic and petty shit which Nishitani would approve of beyond the grave. Sagawa’s men were well-paid. He boarded the fastest merchant vessel heading to Edo that very night.
Majima, wearing a dead man’s clothes, tucked himself into the background and kept his ears open. Heading up The Grand for two years had polished the skill for standing around and being overlooked until he was needed. There was talk, supplementing what he’d already heard around town, about a merchant in Edo, rising out of nowhere to buy up swathes of land in the commercial district, gradually including nearly all red-light areas. Rumour had it that he was looking for family: a sister who might be so unfortunate to end up in such a place, blinded, or with her tongue cut out, or her legs broken to keep her behind a wooden barred window. Woe be to the man who was keeping her there – there was no end of brothel owners giving away their fortunes and deeds to those places, in order to flee Edo and this Tachibana-san’s wrath.
Majima hunted down the weediest, bespectacled merchant, who looked as though he could read and would be the easiest to throw overboard if he talked too much. He lightened the load in his stolen purses, in exchange for the nervous man to go through the notes and maps looted from Nishitani and his killers, and tell him that no less than five pirate lords were willing to find this missing sister and buy Tachibana’s share of Edo off him in exchange. One had gotten a head start in Osaka, and another was on the tail of that first. Heaven only knew what the rest would do, but the note writer did not rule out several kidnappings in the same chase to get the girl in their hands until they were in Edo.
“Got any names on there?”
The merchant looked like he’d rather eat his own tongue. He cowered under Majima’s gaze and stammered out a list. Shimano, he knew only too well. Shibusawa, the letter writer (what idiot signed a letter planning for named crimes?), Awano and Kuze, he recalled as distant acquaintances of Shimano’s. Sera was utterly foreign, until Majima fished out the other letter Lee had left him—with another coin for payment, why rip the merchant off and get snitched on for his trouble?—and got that translated too.
“There’s also someone without a name,” the merchant pointed out, counting off each instance in the notes that had come from Nishitani. “Just ‘my helpful acquaintance’.”
Majima flipped him another coin for his trouble. He was certain that Sagawa, being aligned with Shimano, would not be selling his loyalty elsewhere. He’d rather have this ‘helpful acquaintance’ found.
He barely slept a wink that night. In the past three years, he’d spent every night imagining being back on the water and drifting right off to the sway of the waves. But there was a shadow cast over the short time spent on Lee’s borrowed sampan, and now on this merchant boat – the sea was not the sanctuary he’d once yearned for, because of Saejima’s absence, because he was still a dead man now that he’d fled Sotenbori, because he was now responsible for safeguarding a mute girl’s freedom.
Perhaps it wasn’t Edo that Tachibana wanted, Majima thought. Perhaps it was only his sister.
He couldn’t imagine doing all that work, of buying up a city in the chances of finding someone on that same stretch of land. But here he was, sailing blindly into Edo, risking whatever his life was worth to find someone with even less certainty.
“Your words kept me going in Edo.”
“Heh. Which ones?”
Makoto would have a better time of sliding her fingers through his hair if her fingers had not been so webbed—and that would have meant shedding her skin again—but if Majima minded or noticed, he said nothing of it.
She told him of the rest of the journey to Edo, once separated from him. Sera Masaru had left Lee’s sampan alone, because while Majima was a pirate who might be bought for any coin and could not be trusted, he’d been worth leaving alive if the cards fell poorly. There’d been enough eyes on him while he chased after them, being not as overlooked on that merchant ship as he imagined, and it had turned things in Sera’s favour.
She’d left towards Edo on a fleet-footed ship, with two guards at her side. Both were sworn to her brother. One young would-be pirate and competent enough sailor, she was willing to trust. The other who knew the sea far better was not to be trusted at all. Even exhausted, she found the chance to corner the younger pirate with a faint scrap of song. The murky dream-state which Kiryu found himself in could easily have been brushed aside as a hallucination born from stress, but she made herself clear: if this Oda who’d come along with him bore a bat tattoo on his forearm, then Oda could not be trusted.
A sea route between Osaka and Edo could be done in a week in good weather, but in winter, it dragged towards two. The wait was enough for Oda’s patience to fray. When their ship was finally set upon by pirates, far more bloody-minded than the likes of Kiryu and later than what Oda had scheduled, Oda let the captain and the crew die and was close to letting them both be shot, before deciding to do it himself. It was Kiryu he focused on first, for Kiryu would have laid his life down for her as part of his promise to her brother. For that, Makoto found herself overlooked, and it gave her time enough to jam a knife Sera had gifted her—a true gift, not a poisoned chalice to put her in a trap, like Oda’s—into his thigh.
“Shibusawa’s not far off,” was Kiryu’s parting words. He heaved Oda up by the neck. “You might make it if you swim hard enough.”
They did not turn back to see how far he swum or how quickly he sank. Nothing would have saved them from the pirates at their heels, if not for the storm that came suddenly. The rain came down in a sheet of grey – they could barely see past their outstretched hands in such weather. The sea swelled, sweeping them forwards and Shibusawa’s ship back. If it made no sense to Kiryu, he could not put it into words, just as much as he did not want to put into words how Makoto had clambered to the stow, with her hands still bloody, and pointed him in the direction he should go.
Kiryu steered them to a beach just as the rain washed the last of the blood from Makoto’s hands. As a result, the landing on the sand was rough, but still softer than what it would be on the rocks just off the coast. The rain had not stopped – they could still hardly see through it, even straining to spot if Shibusawa had made it through the storm after them. They could only hope that Shibusawa’s ship overturned, though theirs was hardly in better shape – the sail ripped, the hull taking on water, and all crew lost to the sea.
Makoto slid into a dead faint that lasted three days. Kiryu would explain later that he’d carried her, and all the coin Sera had granted them, to find another merchant vessel headed to Edo at the next port. For three days, his stomach was in knots. There was a chance that she might not wake from her sleep. There was still Shibusawa, who might make someone cough up about two odd travellers heading to Edo. There was the horrifying notion that he was going to return to Tachibana-san, bearing a corpse instead of a sister.
Mindless to Kiryu-san’s panic, Makoto dreamed out the three days she’d spent in the company of a pirate exile.
“C’mon, really?”
—yes, that pirate exile, no matter how he tsk-ed at her. The pirate exile who’d shoved her in a warehouse and argued he’d yet to decide to kill her or not; and offered her grilled octopus while she stared listlessly into the empty air; and told her, awkwardly, that it seemed like he wouldn’t understand, a guy running his mouth off as she sat there in blank-faced silence, but he did, because even though losing an eye wasn’t the same as being struck mute from unnameable horrors, there were enough nights where he woke in the cold sweat of a nightmare, voiceless from screaming down under the earth, in a hole meant to kill off pirate exiles like him.
And in return for that sad story, she’d given him the broken red coral cord she’d taken with her from the sea. Once it had been slung around her waist, drifting in the water, a girl’s fancy that could be disguised as an obijime and obidome for human clothes, but it had been dropped and stepped on for too long.
Lee had washed the dirt from the cord, but the coral carving was hardly worth saving. Pirates, even in exile, were drawn to tokens and charms and knick-knacks – this one was welcome to have it, even if he hesitated. Only after she made repeated gestures of it being thrown away—its eventual fate if it were to stay with her—did he take it.
“Hey, speakin’ of.”
Majima's coat had been left in a pile behind him. He dug through its assorted pockets, muttering to himself, while she watched on in amusement. Finally, he turned back to her, triumphant.
“Close yer eyes. Humour me, alright?”
Makoto did. She let her hand be taken and her fingers unwound—and then his palm closed over hers, much like that first night in Sotenbori, with something cool and solid held between them.
The coral had dulled and dented, but whoever restored it had done their best by carving it down into a smaller charm and polishing what was left until it shone again. It lay on a new cord, one that was the bright red of scorpionfish. The old cord, he gestured, was looped and knotted firmly around the hilt of his cutlass – waste not, after all.
“It ain’t what you remember, sure. But uh, it was always yers, right?”
She looked at the red coral cord in her hand and put it back into his. “Help me put it on?”
Majima looked between his hand and her—everywhere—utterly perplexed. She heaved herself out of the water and onto the rock shelf, with the fluidity of a dolphin arcing up above the waves. There was enough of her out of the water: the upper part that mimicked human form, if a human form were covered with scales up to the throat, red-tinged at the midsection and darkest over her belly, lightening gradually to the colour of her skin from her ribcage and upwards.
“Here. Like for an obi.”
She arced her back up, gesturing to a waist where he could slide the cord around. He stared at her as though she’d presented her stomach up to be disembowelled.
“I won’t die if you touch me.” Short of asking, she feared he might never do so.
Even being asked, his hands, usually so good with cutlasses and pistols and knives, fumbled with looping the cord around her.
She steadied herself on her elbows. “Goro-san.”
Cautiously, she reached forward, found the side of his face with the palm that had held her precious coral only moments early. Cautiously, she loosened the eyepatch from him, putting it down between them and easily in his reach. If he’d had complaints about her scaled webbed hands being clammy on his skin, he’d yet to say so.
“Thank you.”
It was easy to reach up to his mouth, even with him so tense—but her kiss softened the tension in his shoulders, as did her second, and then her third—and he eased enough to steady himself with his arm braced on the rock beside her, and if that slackened as he folded himself over her, she had no complaints to voice.
“You’re here,” was how she greeted him in Edo.
“You talk now,” was what he said in return. The distance of two-and-some weeks had returned her voice to her – the horror of seeing her brother’s dead body had broken the other horror that left her mute. It had also dimmed the light in her eyes and put a knife in her hands, one that was raised to him now, when once she’d held onto caution and hope, enough to thank and laugh alongside him in dreamscape.
Kamurocho had grown no kinder in his absence. Majima expected as much, for these were the streets which made him the man he was, but even after the cruelties of Sotenbori, Kamurocho had hollowed her out.
He’d landed at Edo only a day ago. As soon as his feet touched ground, the men under the employ of Sera Masaru-if-that-was-his-real-name had found him and given him an ultimatum – whatever ill Majima had towards them for not being to spare Lee from the burning remains of Hogushi Kaikan ought to be weighed against this: Sera was not his enemy, Sera had been an ally of Makimura Makoto’s brother, and for what they understood of Majima’s goals, they were unable to bring him to Makoto as a gesture of goodwill and trust.
“‘cause ya up an’ lost her, dipshits,” Majima snapped.
—because she’d found an opportunity to run off when her bodyguard’s back was turned, and for someone not known to be familiar with Kamurocho or the many other districts of Edo, she had incredibly stayed out of reach.
“If yer as much as the good guys as you’re claimin’, how come she up and ran off?”
Tachibana was dead. That was why.
How had that happened, when all the vermin vying for his money had done their best to kidnap his sister and ransom her to him, alive, and Tachibana would presumably also need to be alive to pay out? That was a question with no clear answer. The best answer offered to him was that pirates liked their drink, their pistols and their dick-measuring contests, but they certainly didn’t like waiting. So it was that one of the three unfamiliar men, the distant acquaintances of Shimano’s, had goaded Tachibana with a line too far: that he was going to get his sister back, alive, not necessarily in one piece, like a pitcher cracked with the water dripping out, because that was the state of her mind and that was what was left of her after Sotenbori. They’d take her off his hands if it bothered him so much.
(It bothered Majima, even hearing it second-hand. He looked at his own hands and thought about what he’d do to the next pirate who tried to take her out of them.)
Tachibana had kept his calm and walked away. That was what killed him: that he was willing to wait just a bit longer for his sister’s return, but some underling was not, and the sword that was raised to Tachibana had been done so when his back was turned.
The bodyguard who ferried her to Edo had brought her to her brother’s body, still warm and newly dead. When he looked away to find someplace new to keep her safe, she’d fled. But with Majima here—that was one more person in Kamurocho to help in finding her. She would need to be found: Tachibana’s fortune was left to his heir, and the pirates who’d searched for her before as a ransom were still happy to wheedle her brother’s fortunes out of her hands and into theirs.
Shimano’s men were still on him, headed by Sagawa himself – Sagawa took the betrayal personally, but word was that Shimano was willing to waive the bounty on Majima’s head for breaking his exile, so long as he returned to the fold with Makoto and her inherited fortune in tow.
What Majima said didn’t cover what he felt. What he felt, trudging through Kamurocho as snow began to fall, was: he was a fool to be yanked around like this, and losing her in Edo when he’d been so close was a kick in the dick, and nothing else had changed. Whether or not she was a long-lost sister to a shadowy merchant buying up Edo, or the heiress to a fortune everyone was gunning for, or a not-human thing who could conjure a ship out from dreams and memories, he had come this far to secure her freedom. There was no turning back from it now.
And so stuck was he on that thought, that it was child’s play for Sagawa with a cluster of Shimano’s guys to sneak up on him.
Here’s how the legend of the Mad Sea Dog is made: with betrayal.
The first betrayal, by the Mad Dog, of the man who brought him on to trade a girl’s freedom for his own.
The second betrayal, of the Mad Dog, by the man who held enough sway to grant him freedom from his exile. The girl was never in danger of being sunk to the bottom of the harbour or being moved into the hands of flesh traders – but if her worth was no longer in being a ransom to her brother, now dead, then her worth was as an heiress with no means to spend her money sans a husband or other guardian.
The third betrayal came from the girl herself.
Majima put his hands up, because she had a knife and it was pointed at him, and because he’d done this once before, at their first meeting in Hogushi Kaikan. Any more surprise meetings like this and it might become habitual.
“Where’d ya get that?”
“A gift from Sera-san.” Her voice rasped from too long without use. Then she lowered it, because the disdain she held was for other men. The knife was small and the blade no longer than the length of her hand – but grief made a person mad, so his eye never left it.
“Why come to Edo? I thought you'd give up after we were separated.”
He lowered his hands too. “Why give up? That letter told Lee to bring ya here. I got word that’s where you were bein’ taken to. Lotsa rumours flyin’ ‘round said that you were gonna be alright as long you ended up—” then he bit his tongue, because why bring up the dead brother now? “—in the right hands, but how’s a guy to trust who those are?”
Snow landed on Makoto’s cheek and melted. The drop under her eye looked to be the tears she refused to shed.
“How kind of you.” She sheathed the blade and tucked it away into her kimono, between the front fold and her obi. “To have done this much and asked for nothing in return.”
He’d never seen her so pragmatic. It wrenched at him to see her so. And he could not tell her now what he had been sent to do by Shimano’s order. Shimano, not himself a flesh trader, would be no better than one if Makoto was sent to him by Majima’s own hand, to have her inherited fortune exchanged for calling off all the pirates out for her head.
“Haw? Ya want me to ask fer something?”
Makoto lifted her head. Once he’d thought there was a storm-churned sea in her eyes. Now there was even less than that, not even light reflected on stagnant water. The step that she made toward him had him backing away on instinct, even though her knife was already sheathed—and then another, and another, until his back hit a wall and she closed in on him.
He blurted out: “I wanna see ya happy.”
He’d been so focused on attaining her freedom that these two things were one and the same to him. Now, with Lee dead, and her brother dead, and an inheritance of gold so worthless to a girl who didn’t even belong on land, he was less certain. He swallowed, not daring to look away from her. “As long as yer outta here, I figure you’ll be happy someday.”
Even if he would not see it.
“Well.” Her voice was so soft it was barely heard. Her eyes did not leave his. “You’ll need a boat.”
This part of the story does not make it into the legend of the Mad Sea Dog: they stop at the harbourside for grilled octopus.
She’d not eaten since her brother died, even though the hunger could not hollow her out any more than grief already had. He needed enough strength to row his way to what cove she meant to direct them to. The grilled octopus seller, still selling her wares despite the snowfall in midwinter, was a sensible stop before they departed.
He had enough coin left, robbed from Nishitani’s killers, to pay. Fishermen had long pulled their boats in, with the sky so dark and the sea becoming so choppy, and if there was a place to cut a boat loose and borrow it without permission, it was here.
“Looks to be a cold night,” the vendor said. “You two young’uns stay out of it, you hear?”
She nodded. He kept his eye on the boats that were tied up at the side. With the snow falling and the sea rough, the harbourmaster might be expected to doze on the job, for only a madman would want to steal and sail off with a stolen boat on a night like this.
“It smells wonderful,” the girl said. She might have been thinking of her gnawing hunger, or pleasantries to pass the time, or the last time she’d shared grilled octopus with this pirate, or any number of things.
“Isn’t it just? Where are you two headed after this?”
“C’mon, lady,” he said, with the exhaustion that only a longer than anticipated voyage could bring in his voice, “ya don’t gotta talk this much to sell octopus, do ya?”
His companion elbowed him in the side. He frowned down at her, then his gaze softened when he made to brush the fresh snow, not yet melted, from her hair.
“He’s a better man than he makes out to be,” the vendor said, looking between them. She handed over the first skewer of octopus to keep him happy, even though his focus was fixed only on the girl beside him.
“Yes,” the girl agreed. There was a flush in her face, brought on by the heat of the grill, or the warmth of good food on a winter’s night, or by any number of things. “It was a long difficult journey to Edo. I would have never made it without him.” She pretended not to see the astonished look he gave her, and stuffed her mouth full of octopus to spare herself needing to explain more.
The vendor kept her knowing look to herself and flipped over another skewer of octopus.
(Perhaps there were no grilled octopus stands at the harbourside, on an unseasonably cold winter’s night where the storm blew a young man and a young woman into a cove, and swept out a would-be pirate lord of legend back to Edo.
Perhaps, if there were, it did not matter to what happened next.)
Fortified by octopus, he stole a fisherman’s skiff. Whoever losing it ought to thank him, for the harbourmaster would have his pay docked in the replacing of it. With another rough day at sea, it would be taking on water, but on this evening, it held the girl at the stow and the pirate in exile at the oars. With a lantern between them and hastily stolen straw capes to ward off the snow from their backs, they set out.
Rowing at night was the forte of pirates and smugglers. That there was a full moon that night might have made it easier, but it was hidden by clouds. The cold from the snowfall chilled them both and the rough and choppy sea dragged the journey on. But the girl sitting at the stow pointed the way, for all that she could see no further than he could, and he rowed on.
They did not talk. His fear was that whatever it was she might say next, it would be farewell, and his own words might only spur her on.
When they arrived at the cove, after too much time spent navigating the rough water, the thought came: they were being followed. The coastline, with its coves and inlets, was the stuff of smugglers’ dreams. Any number of boats might be hidden there on a night like this, shadowy despite the moonlight, no matter how well they had set off in secrecy and no matter how a rough sea should have turned most men back.
The girl extinguished the lantern – however dark it was, she seemed to see better than he could. She declined the hand he offered her to disembark, and waded through the water up to shore. In silence, he drew his cutlass and followed.
The cove led to sea caves that led further up to the hills, but they stopped at only one cave for the girl to pick through it. She let him relight the lantern, but brushed away his offer to help. Whatever she was looking for might have been hidden under or between rocks, or piles of seaweed and flotsam and jetsam washed up in precarious situations, and he had no understanding of what it was she wanted.
Eventually, she drew it out from the nook she’d hidden it over two years ago – he caught a glimpse of it, silvery like fish scales, but the lustre of it so much greater even in faint moonlight, that he suddenly remembered a tale told to him from a fisherman who’d been at sea so long than his wisdom was indistinguishable from madness.
The ryugu no tsukai, shining like real silver even though it was already rotting on the shoreline. That thing, longer than the height of five men standing atop of each others’ shoulders, a sea god’s messenger portending our doom. We not knowing any better, hadn’t been ready when the tsunami rolled in. If you see it, lad, you best head inland and run.
He could not imagine her bringing doom, even to the men who deserved such a thing.
“That’s her then?” came the voice out of the dark.
They’d been followed. Sagawa, with more at his heels. Whoever Shibusawa or Awano or Kuze were, they would have thrown their chips in together for this last chance to grab her.
He looked out at what was creeping towards them, carrying their own lanterns, and felt his heart fall.
“Attaboy, Majima. Hand the girl over and you’ll be square where Shimano is concerned. Back in the fold for a job well done.”
Majima looked over at her, clutching her silvery grey thing to her. It looked like a moth-eaten and ragged pelt, for all its brightness, and whatever unfathomable thing it was, he understood well enough that it was of the stuff that let her singing lure him into strange dreamscapes, and it was the thing that would finally set her free.
“Oi.”
He grinned.
Let her last memory of him be that cocksure smile. Why leave her mourning?
“Get outta here.”
He unsheathed Nishitani’s sword, carried with him all this way, and finally loosed to taste Sagawa’s blood in his stead. He charged.
This was the third betrayal: she ought not to have helped. It was not meant in her nature to do such things, but the scales tipped towards the men who had come to help her over those who had meant to pick over her body and her brother’s ill-gotten wealth like carrion birds.
She threw her skin on, the warmth of it better than sunlight and summer ocean currents, and she flung herself back into the water. She heard the gunshot before she was safe in the water, and while her skin wrapped around her like an embrace, slower to work over human clothes than if she had stripped herself bare, she’d thought: it’s not him. He’s too clever and fast by far, to have made it here by himself and to fall like this.
The laughter that sank into the water was too loud to be from one man. He had not carried a pistol with him, from what she recalled, only two swords, one in each hand, as he charged into his last fight.
She undulated in the water, turning towards the open sea, as her tail reformed, sleek and silver, three times the length of her upper body. Even for the two years away from the sea, this came back to her as easy as breathing, and if she kept going and headed home, it would be as though nothing had changed.
But the nature of her had changed, not only from an unnameable horror, like the one that the pirate in exile had cautiously shared with her. It had changed because of the men who had died for her, and it had changed when she’d taken her own vengeance with a gifted knife, and it had changed when she’d eaten octopus on a harbourside like it was a parting gift.
She turned back, breaking the surface of the water and rising on her tail, a messenger from the sea god’s palace, and brought the sea heaving down with her.
Here’s how the legend of the Mad Sea Dog comes to be: with the storm that nearly sinks part of a coastline. Pirates and smugglers mourn the loss to be sure, but for the girl who nearly sank it, it was where she had decided her nightmares and his nightmares would end.
If it killed her, then it would keep them together. If it sank his body into the sea, then it would stay hers, instead of buried in a shallow grave in this cove.
So she rose out of the sea, with a wave that came high and crashed down over the man who had laid his life down for her and the men who would have torn her skin from her shoulders in order to keep her human enough to claim her brother’s wealth, and dragged them all with her into the churning sea.
In the years that followed, people in Edo would say it was a strange winter's night: first the storm where rain and snow fell together, then the winter thunderstorm where all the rain froze and came down as snow instead. The waves were so rough that nearly all boats in every harbour of Edo was sunk, and if any unlucky fisherman found his skiff gone in the morning, he had the sympathy and coin of his peers, gathered together to help him buy another, as they were only glad that it was not their boat that was lost in the storm. So loud was the thunder that people felt their ears ringing far into the morning, but for the men at that cove, the thunder did not compare to the roar of the sea when the wave hit. Between that, and the gusting cold and snow of the storm that came down as suddenly as the wave, they were already reeling when they sank. For all their mastery of the sea, there was little to do when they were freezing in it.
Makoto swam around them, out of grasp of the reaching hands of drowning men. Her tail rippled with each twist and turn as she sought her pirate, already still and bleeding in the water, and when she found him, it was harder still to drag him up to the surface. The storm was taking her too—not as easily as it did for human men, but children of the sea knew that churning up the sea did not promise mastery over what followed. She would need to get him back to land before the exhaustion took her, so she heaved him into her arms, taking care to keep his face above the water, and swam.
This part has no place in a legend!—for Sera Masaru would not deign repeat it, and Majima Goro is fond enough of his legend striking fear in the heart of every man who hears it.
What it is, is: Sera Masaru has a ship on the sea, with all his men fighting to keep it from overturning, headed towards this cove where many men have already died frozen in the waves. Nothing would have convinced him to turn back, if not for the creature coasting along the surface of the waves, bearing a dying pirate in her arms.
She looked at him with the cold of the winter thunderstorm in her eyes. Sera, whose faith in kami was limited to the obligatory praying for good fortune and laying waste to his foes, understood suddenly what it was that tied this girl with the ruthlessness he'd known in her brother.
His men heaved Majima onboard. “Make sure he lives,” she said over the roar of the waves. “And you will have every coin that I would have inherited in my brother’s name.”
She did not say what would happen if he did not survive. Sera had the ship turned around immediately, and was glad that she took to the sea and did not follow.
Here was the cost of casting up a storm: at least a year under the waves, spent recovering. In that time, Majima Goro did recover, although the bullet that pierced his side left him bedbound for over a month, and being bedbound meant that he was obliged to sit there and let Lee hobble into his sickroom and tell him off.
“Get off my back,” he snarled. “You said to make sure she got her freedom back, an’ she has it.”
Even being burned, and recovering slowly from it, did not stop Lee from crossing his hands atop his cane and glowering. “Are you sure?”
“Haw? Whassat meant t’ mean?”
“Are you sure,” Lee repeated, with the infinite patience of a Buddhist monk bestowing unintelligible wisdom, “that she is free, at last. Have you seen her?”
Majima’s response, however vulgar, pointed out that he was bedbound, but he had Sera’s word that she had not been seen around the Edo coastline. “An’,” he added, feeling his chest tighten, “there ain’t nothin’ for her here.”
Lee nodded slowly. “Good.”
If they never saw her again, so much the better.
The wealth Sera inherited paid for the treatment. He gave them both a share, with the courtesy that meant fuck right off after this, as well as the vague statement that a year from now, it would be worth reconvening and seeing how Kamurocho had changed. And it would be polite to pay respects to the dead, for it was Tachibana’s wealth in their hands and someone ought to light incense over his gravestone.
Lee went back to Osaka. Hogushi Kaikan would need to be rebuilt, but he had hopes that once things settled, he’d return to set up a new clinic in Edo, for there would always be goze with a trade to learn here too.
Majima stayed put. With Shibusawa, Kuze and Awano dead, and Sagawa too dead to be of help, Shimano was fighting to keep control over his slice of Edo from any upstart coming his way. Majima figured they had a score to settle once he left this sickbed. Sera offered assistance, even after the fuck right off once this is settled payment.
When Majima declined, Sera said, “Take the ship. A few men, if you want them. Do what you want with Shimano, but if you aren’t alive and sailing off the coast of Edo a year from the day I rescued you, whatever storm that sank part of a coastline might return to drown this city next.”
Majima took the ship, and the few men that Sera offered, being better at sailing than the wetwork that Sera tended to favour. Whatever happened to Shimano was another story, but what made it into the legend of the Mad Sea Dog was that he set off from the Kamurocho harbour at one night towards the end of the year, every year.
Once a year in a summer, on a clear night without rain or cloud, Orihime and Hikoboshi met, crossing the heavenly river atop the blackbird bridge.
This, not being a folktale, meant that Majima was sat in the dark in midwinter while a storm came down, freezing his ass off and wondering what the fuck he was doing, sitting under an upturned skiff that acted as a shelter, on a rocky coast just outside of Edo. He’d been there since sunset, waiting, and now it was dark, and he was still waiting.
There was enough oil in his lantern to last the night, but the notion of sleep was becoming tempting. Spite towards Sera for his vague statements drove that on, but curiosity on what might happen kept him awake. Already, strange things had happened on this coast – sea fireflies and firefly squid, both months out of season, had clustered in this bay, in strange patterns, like a path extending from sea to shore, and highlighting the coastline like a beacon in the night. If it weren’t an inopportune night to be at sea, anybody on the water would be headed this way to investigate.
The moon was out, though dim through the clouds, when she appeared.
Majima sat up, suddenly awake. Kamurocho had made him the man he was once, but so had the month where he’d thrown everything he'd known out the window and laid down his life for a strange mute girl, and this year apart had transmuted him in different ways too. Out from exile, a strange mania of Nishitani’s nature had swept over him whenever he came into a fight, and fights were often; and the rumours that followed him as a pirate deemed him no less than a mad dog; and he’d shed the sensible clothes that reigned him in at The Grand for a snakeskin monstrosity, dyed black and trimmed in purple. He might seem like a stranger to her.
None of that mattered as he waded into the sea, on the bridge made in the water by the blue light of unfathomable sea creatures, and when he opened his arms, she swam straight to him.