The Story: Mystery of the Bounty Hunter

[annarti.livejournal.com]

Eighth Birthday

Sen sat at the end of the jetty tossing pebbles into the sea, throwing them as hard and as far as she could until she had run out of pebbles to toss. Then she went back to shore, picked up another batch, and carried them in her shirt front to the end of the jetty to start all over.

‘I don’t think she’s coming,’ Kaiji told her, quietly.

‘You don’t know that.’

‘She’s never been this late before.’ Tu always came around about the same time every year, but the ocean was hard to predict even for such a seasoned sailor as Tu, so sometimes she was a few days early or a few days late. This time, though, she was at least two weeks later than she had ever been.

‘But she promised!’ Sen hurled two fistfuls of rocks at the sea all at once. They landed with a spatter into the rippling waves.

‘Well, so did you!’ Kaiji accused. ‘You said you wouldn’t let this come between you and Mama.’

Sen folded her arms and glared at the horizon, saying nothing. She could feel her eyes stinging with tears and angrily wiped them away. ‘Why didn’t she come?’

Kaiji sat down next to her and rested her head on Sen’s shoulder. ‘Maybe something happened to her,’ she guessed, then she sat up as an idea came to her. ‘What about we go and ask around town? More ships are docking now, maybe somebody knows where she is.’

‘Maybe,’ Sen sulked. ‘But Tu said not to listen to rumours, because mostly they’re not true.’

‘Well,’ Kaiji tried. ‘We’ll just decide which ones are real. We know her better than the rumours, so we’ll know which ones are true.’

It felt like a good idea. After all, if Tu wasn’t around to give her the truth, what other choice was there? ‘All right.’

Kaiji climbed to her feet and yanked Sen’s arm. ‘Come on, lazy bones.’

Sen reluctantly got up and let herself be dragged, heavy footed, up the jetty towards the village.

They started at the house closest to the jetty, where sailors were all most likely to go when they disembarked. Three boys lived there with their parents, the youngest two years older than Sen, the other two already teenagers. They liked being with the adults and the bigger kids of the village more than the little kids like Sen and Kaiji.

Their father was the only one at home, preparing lunch from the morning’s catch, and directed them to where Ekin would be, helping his brothers mend their cousin’s fishing boat.

Sen ran, hand in hand with Kaiji, to the fishing boat on the beach crowded with people. The hull was turned on its side and people were banging at it with hammers. Ekin’s job, it seemed, was to hold the box of nails when people needed more.

‘Ekin!’ Sen shouted as they got closer. ‘Ekin, I need to talk to you!’

Ekin looked up from his box of nails, clearly eager to have more to do now than just hand out its contents.

‘I’m trying to find out what happened to Tu,’ Sen panted. ‘You get a lot of sailors coming to your house when ships dock. Have any of them told you what happened to the Horizons?’

Ekin frowned and thought long and hard about the question. ‘There was one man who said he thought he had heard the Horizons was wrecked by sea dragons,’ he said slowly, thinking carefully about every word.

Sen went cold.

‘But then one of the others, because this was when there were two ships docked, one of the ones from the other crew said that was silly, they were just called a black spot ship now. But then the first one said that was silly, because how can a ship be made a black spot when it’s a bounty hunter that gets paid by the king and queen? Then the second one said everyone has to pay taxes until they can prove the king and queen have to pay them, like bounty hunters. Then I got bored and went away.’ He smiled proudly at having remembered all that.

That was months ago. Sen remembered when two ships had come into Jita at the same time. They had both been small compared with Horizons but it had been exciting all the same.

‘Oh yeah.’ The man who spoke, Tem, lived in the house next to Sen and Kaiji. ‘I remember that. Horizons always makes it into Ryas right on time, but last year they missed it. The last ship that came in said it was big news all over Ryas, what had happened to Horizons.’

‘But she must be somewhere!’ Sen cried. ‘She can’t be wrecked.’ Not Captain Tu. She had fought off a leviathan, and then killed it and taken its head back to Ryas. She was invincible.

‘That’s what everybody says,’ Tem said with a shrug. ‘There was a storm between here and Ryas about the right time when the Horizons would have been passing through.’

‘I heard it was a dragon storm,’ Meji added. She lived with Tem but they weren’t married. ‘Whirlpools, lashing winds, the whole bit.’

Everyone working on the boat had stopped now to add in what they had heard. Most seemed to forget Sen was even there and just wanted to say their piece.

‘The Yuki said they got caught in it, just on the edge, and even that was bad enough. They swear they saw sea dragons in the waves, riding them like it was good fun. If anything was in the middle of it, they said, there’s no way they could have gotten out.’

‘I remember that! They said it came out of nowhere, not showing at all on the horizon, just suddenly there.’

‘Tell-tale sign of a dragon storm, right there. Not even the greatest captain in the world can see them coming.’

Tu could, Sen knew. She knew Horizons hadn’t been wrecked, she just knew it.

‘The Yuki mustn’t have been their target, then, or they would have gone straight for them in the storm.’

Sen chirped up, feeling that everyone was getting distracted. ‘But what about Horizons? What about Captain Tu?’

The adults all smiled knowingly. ‘Well, now,’ Meji said. ‘If ever there was a captain as could get out of a tight spot, it’s our Captain Tu.’

‘But then why didn’t she make it to Ryas? And no other ship has seen Horizons again since the storm.’ Tem reminded her, then answered his own question. ‘Because they’ve been declared a black spot. They used the storm to hide and get away, faked their own wreck and hightailed it off to the Pirate Isles. Taxation office put a black spot to her name, and now she’s gone pirate.’

Sen found herself getting angry on Tu’s behalf. ‘Tu’s not a pirate!’

‘But that doesn’t make sense,’ Kili interrupted, deep voice booming over Sen’s shrill one. He was the cousin who owned the fishing boat they were repairing. ‘Horizons is a bounty hunter, so they get paid by the treasury. They don’t pay taxes; they’re the sorts of people what taxes get paid for.’

‘And she was clearly making a pretty sum out of it, too,’ Meji added.

‘Exactly. Doesn’t make sense to go pirate.’

‘Hey, hey.’ Tem raised his hands defensively. ‘I’m just saying what I heard.’

Sen stamped her foot down. ‘Tu’s not a pirate!’ she yelled, as loudly as she could. ‘She’s a good person. She gave us gold to build the jetty and she saved me when I was a baby and she’s not a pirate!’

Silence fell on the group. Sen hoped they were feeling guilty.

Teza, Kili’s sister, cleared her throat. ‘I heard they’d been taken by pirates themselves. Took on a bigger ship than they could handle on their own.’

Somehow, that was even scarier than the monsters Tu fought. Pirates could do anything to you.

But not Tu. She wouldn’t be taken by pirates. She was too smart to let stinky pirates take her.

‘You’re wrong,’ she decided, then turned her tail and ran.

Nobody knew what had happened, really. Tu was right. It was all just stories and lies, things people made up to try and fill in the gaps. The didn’t know Tu. Even with whatever reputation she had, they still didn’t know just how strong and invincible she was. She could take on a dragon storm. She could fight off pirates. Did they forget she had fought a leviathan, and won?

Sen knew why Tu hadn’t come back, and it had nothing to do with pirates or dragons or any other monsters.

She ran home, hearing Kaiji’s footsteps in the sand behind her. Kaiji was faster, though, and caught her around the wrist and pulled her to a stop. Sen tried to wrench herself free, but Kaiji held her firm.

‘Let me go!’

‘Wait!’ Kaiji yelled back, and Sen could suddenly see that she was crying. That gave her pause, at least. ‘You still don’t know for sure that Mama’s the reason Tu hasn’t come back. She promised, and she’s not scared of Mama, so Mama’s not going to scare her away.’ She frowned, deep in thought. ‘What if the Horizons did get taken by pirates? What if, maybe, Tu is such a good bounty hunter and she caught so many pirates, that the pirates all got together in a big fleet and they caught her? She might be in prison on the Pirate Isles even now. And that’s not Mama’s fault.’

Sen was crying now, too. ‘I just want her back,’ she wailed. It wasn’t just for the presents and the stories, either. Even though Tu wasn’t really her own mama, she sort of felt like it, sometimes. ‘I miss her.’ She fell on Kaiji in a hug, and Kaiji cried with her.

‘I miss her, too,’ her friend cried. ‘But we just have to… be brave, like she said.’

Sen nodded and wiped her eyes. ‘What if… we could try to give her a message?’

‘Yeah!’ Kaiji pounced on the idea. ‘When the next ship comes in, we can ask them to write a message to her, and leave it in the tax office in Ryas, so when she does turn up again then they can give it to her.’

‘Yeah!’ Sen frowned. ‘Do you think Sula could say something in it, too? What if we get her to ask Tu to come back?’

Kaiji’s shoulders slumped. ‘Maybe. But we’ll have to ask really, really nicely. And convince her Tu’s not a pirate.’

‘She’s not!’

‘Yeah, but Mama still doesn’t believe that.’

Sen pouted again. ‘A pirate doesn’t just give away gold. They hoard it and spend it on themselves. That’s what makes them pirates. And she bought her own ship! A pirate doesn’t do that, they steal other people’s ships.’

‘Yeah!’ Kaiji agreed. ‘And they don’t save little babies, either. Mama said Tu said she went to five different villages before she found us. No pirate would do that! Pirates are big and mean and scary.’

Sen grinned despite herself. ‘Tu’s big and mean and scary,’ she said, ‘but only to sea monsters and real pirates.’

‘Right,’ Kaiji decided with a nod. ‘Let’s go and find Mama, then we’ll wait for another ship to come and tell them what we want to tell Tu.’

Sen held onto Kaiji’s hand as they walked. ‘Do you think the message will get to her?’

‘Definitely,’ Kaiji said with a firm nod, and Sen felt better. They would find Tu, somehow. And they would bring her back.

STUFF

o The last 300 words of this are SO obviously padding. Omg hurry up and grow up, childs.

o Yuki in the Hills is an awesome little Japanese restaurant in Aldgate.