Dororo: Part One
Nakamura Masaru
Part 2: Dororo
Chapter 9
Six huge man-eating caterpillars gathered outside the room where Dororo and Hyakkimaru were staying. One of them slid open the rice paper door. The door made no sound as it slid along its grooves. There was a woman inside the room, lying down and snoring loudly.
The caterpillars didn't need to bother with stealth to surround the female, who thrashed in her sleep and snored obnoxiously loud.
"But where is the male?" one of the caterpillars whispered.
The others recoiled a little, startled. Where had he gone?
Hyakkimaru lay in wait, crouched in the space between the ceiling and two walls, ready to spring. He removed his left arm by tugging at it with his mouth, revealing the demon-killing blade. His discarded arm fell to the floor, twitching.
He didn't need eyes to perceive the demonic caterpillars with perfect precision.
The caterpillars' first reaction was to freeze. They sensed a threat, but only one of the caterpillars had caught sight of Hyakkimaru so far, and it was not entirely sure what he was. A spider? A fly? In any case, they had at least one meal in front of them. The caterpillars opened their huge maws gaping wide, exposing sharp teeth and predatory fangs.
Dororo didn’t move as the caterpillars closed in, intent on devouring him. He blinked, awake, and wiped drool from his chin. "What the fuck?" He locked eyes with Hyakkimaru, who was perched above him. The caterpillars went utterly still for a split second. They hadn't expected Dororo to awaken. They were unaccustomed to interruptions while they ate.
Hyakkimaru struck while the caterpillars were surprised, leaping from the wall with his sword out. He landed heavily, kicking one of the caterpillars in the head as he descended. The caterpillars scattered like skittish crayfish, narrowly evading being slashed by the demon-killing sword.
The room descended into absolute chaos. Hyakkimaru was attacked by four caterpillars at once, their legs moving smoothly over the wooden floor. The sound of the battle was like that of stones being thrown to collapse the room's walls: echoing and violent. Hyakkimaru darted through the caterpillars toward Dororo's futon, avoiding their fangs as he went, and chopped the caterpillar closest to Dororo in half. The creature's blood splattered on Dororo's face.
"Damn it, not again! What…" Dororo jumped up off the futon and turned around. The injured caterpillar trembled slightly before stiffening and curling into a ball. It was dead. Dororo grasped that Hyakkimaru had killed it, but he hadn't had time to take in everything that was happening: he'd only just woken up.
The dead caterpillar exploded, much as the crab demon had done in the bar at Dororo and Hyakkimaru’s first meeting. Dororo got some of the demon blood in his mouth this time. "Yuck! Gross!"
The caterpillars reacted to Dororo's voice as if it were a signal, darting to and fro, upending a folding screen and disturbing cushions as they retreated toward the corners of the room. Hyakkimaru chased one and engaged it head-on. He was so focused on the battle that he didn't react to Dororo shouting, "Hey! I swallowed some of that shit, you know! What's wrong with you?!"
Hyakkimaru said nothing in response. He sensed movement coming from the garden—outside the room and beyond the folding screen. He dashed out of the room. Dororo's eyes followed him.
Dororo blinked when he saw, of all things, the collective spirit of the children who had burned to death in Jishōni's temple. The spirit was weeping with its face in its hands.
"What? Why are you here?" Dororo asked.
The spirit lifted a trembling hand away from its face and pointed at two storehouses in the middle distance. It was unclear which one they meant to draw attention to—or maybe they wanted Dororo and Hyakkimaru to investigate both.
Hyakkimaru didn't hesitate: he sprinted in the direction of the warehouses.
"Hey! Wait for me!" Dororo called after him. By the time he caught up, Hyakkimaru had entered the nearest warehouse and found a trapdoor leading into a cellar.
Dororo frowned. "Why is this here? Did you know about it before?"
"No," he said, "but I guess they used this place to hide food and other things from the Kaneyama Clan." There was a hole in the floor of the cellar. He lowered himself into it and was swallowed up in the darkness.
"Oi! Didn't I tell you to wait, you inconsiderate moron?!"
Dororo followed Hyakkimaru down the hole. It was pitch dark, so Dororo navigated slowly, one step at a time. He found a rock wall and tried to travel along it, but it was too sharp and jagged to be used that way. "Ouch! Hey, where are you?"
He saw nothing but shadows as someone—or something—seized his collar from behind.
Dororo thrashed around and shouted, "Let me go!"
"Be quiet," Hyakkimaru said calmly. "It's just me." He maintained his grip on Dororo's collar and started walking with confident steps. The darkness meant nothing to him: his world was always dark.
"You're pretty amazing sometimes, you know that, aniki?" Dororo said.
"It doesn't make any difference to me if it's noon or it's night," he said.
"'Cause you're used to being blind, right?" Dororo asked. "Do you even know the difference between light and darkness?"
"I understand that your eyes can't see anything at all right now."
There was light ahead: dim and faint, but there. Dororo felt a slight incline under his feet: they were going up. The walls were no longer jagged, but smooth: this passage must be older, or at least more traveled, than the one Hyakkimaru had found leading down into this hidden space. The light sputtered and almost failed, but then brightened.
There was a torch just ahead. Torches meant people.
"D'you see that?" Dororo whispered. "What is it?"
"Don't assume I know everything just because I can see what you can't, sometimes."
They turned a corner and entered a much larger space that was roughly circular. More passages opened in many directions. It had the feel of a burrow or a nest. The torchlight they'd seen came from an extravagant brazier, recently lit, that stood next to a large, luxurious bed.
"What's all this?" Dororo walked toward the light, but stopped when he stepped on something hard that cracked when he put his weight on it.
Bones.
Dororo's eyes adjusted to the new light source. He spun slowly, taking in the entire space, and gulped. The floor was completely covered in bones, and all of them were small. "These...is this where the children were..."
Dororo didn't move. He kept looking around, horrified, and noticed that there were a few adult skeletons mixed in with those of the children—but only a few.
"So they were eaten," Hyakkimaru said flatly.
"Huh? What are you talking about?"
Hyakkimaru gestured to a darker area. Dororo saw huge piles of dead skin that were the same color as the giant caterpillars they'd seen—and roughly the same shape and size, too.
"No..." Dororo saw more piles of molted skin everywhere, now that he was looking for them. "So, they ate the children...and then molted? To get bigger? That's just sick."
"They got in here somehow..." Hyakkimaru frowned. "There." He pointed to the bed. There was a hole dug behind it, about two feet high. The bed served to conceal the hole from easy view.
Dororo peered into the hole. Inside, he saw eggs—thirty or forty of them—each the size of a large coconut. The egg-laying pattern resembled that of a butterfly's eggs on a leaf, only on a much larger scale. Dororo rubbed his eyes and leaned in closer. He could swear there was something moving back there, in the shadows. Something alive.
"Are all of these eggs going to hatch into those caterpillar things?!"
"Maybe Jishōni's still alive," Hyakkimaru said speculatively. "She wouldn't be the first person to be possessed by a demon. That would explain why all the children are here."
"A demon...one of the ones who stole your body?"
"I've never seen this before," Hyakkimaru muttered. "A demon taking human form and giving birth...to what? Half-human hybrid children?"
Hyakkimaru felt a gentle breeze in his hair. Wind meant that there was a way out of here, close by.
Dororo felt it, too. The breeze wasn't coming from the direction they'd entered, but another passage. "I wonder where this goes..."
"The temple," Hyakkimaru said. "I was looking around it this morning, and I saw a hole. I just thought it led to a store-room, and the whole thing was burned out anyway, and there was no time to look..."
"You found that when I was sleeping?" Dororo asked. He remembered waking up and finding Hyakkimaru gone. He and Hyakkimaru traveled along the passage and emerged, as predicted, just outside the ruin of the burned temple. Dororo gazed at the children's pinwheels spinning in the cool night air and clenched his fists, feeling rage well up inside him again.
"I thought Jishōni was a nun," Dororo spat. "How could she be a demon? Isn't that totally impossible? She'd never do something as horrible as kill all these children…"
"No, she didn't kill the children. I'm fairly sure of that. But any human can be possessed by a demon. There's definitely a demon here."
Dororo's face was red from anger. This demon, far more than the crab demon he and Hyakkimaru had encountered, affected him far more personally.
Killing children to eat them.
I won't forget it. And I'll never forget it. This demon has to die.
"Why did you bring those strangers home, Lord Sabame?" the woman asked. She looked exactly like Jishōni, but there was no trace of Jishōni's compassion and kindness in her features. Lord Sabame saw a faint aura around her sometimes. The aura frightened him. It was the only evidence he had that the woman in front of him was not quite human.
"I always invite strangers home," Lord Sabame said. "You know the reason."
The woman put a naked sword lightly against the side of his throat. "Those two are too dangerous to be easily cornered and devoured. They are predators and devourers themselves—they will destroy us." She ran the point of her blade lightly along Lord Sabame's face, not quite drawing blood. Then she turned the blade and placed the hilt into Lord Sabame's hands.
"It is too late to go back now. We are bound together by fate for the remainder of our lives. You have no legacy, no other path in life, unless you protect your precious descendants. You have sworn that you will do this—an unbreakable oath.
"One of your daughters is dead. You must avenge her without delay or hesitation. If you do not, you might as well throw your life away like a fool. Come. Take the sword, and act swiftly."
Lord Sabame gaped at her, at a complete loss for what to do. He understood the oath he'd sworn, but he was still human, and suffered from the pangs of his conscience. The sky outside the room's window was overcast, but the light of a few stars broke through the cloud cover, hopeful and shining.
A sound disturbed the evening stillness. Footsteps echoed in the hall, loud and getting louder.
"They're coming," the woman with Jishōni's face said. She got behind Lord Sabame, using him as a shield. "Kill them."
Lord Sabame gripped his sword firmly in both hands and lunged at Hyakkimaru as he sprinted into the room. Hyakkimaru didn't bother to dodge: he caught Lord Sabame's sword on his own and stared at him.
"Open your eyes! If you don't get rid of her, she'll make you into a monster, too."
Sabame's hands shook. He tightened in on himself: his heart and memories were closed to Hyakkimaru.
"I feel sorry for you, in a way," Hyakkimaru said. "You were in love with her, weren't you? Jishōni. The real one."
Lord Sabame was raised by indifferent parents and knew little about himself except that he would one day be the lord of the village. He tended to avoid other people from a young age, and spent most of his time alone. The only emotion Sabame remembered feeling during the earliest days of his childhood was loneliness.
There was a lump on Sabame's back that seemed to feed on his emotions. It was so closely entwined with his feelings that he felt like it was most significant and important part of himself.
Feeling and remembering his own isolation made the lump grow larger. Sabame's father passed away in the war, and his mother died from illness shortly after, leaving him truly alone in the world. He hadn't taken a wife, and wandered the large, empty estate on his own. The lump only grew over time.
Lord Sabame turned to beautiful objects to soothe the emptiness in his heart. He loved flowers, elegant tools and tableware, and delicate art. He grew up handsome and noble-looking, though he did not realize this, and sought out things that would bring his emotions into harmony with his sense of self. The lump remained, large and hideous beneath his clothes. He spent his days maintaining his collection and keeping his home clean, and rarely saw anyone at all.
That was about the time when Lord Sabame started calling out to travelers on the road. He would feed them and give them a place to stay for the evening in exchange for tales of the world. Many tales were beautiful, in their own way, and he considered this a fair trade. Dororo and Hyakkimaru were far from the first travelers he'd invited home to his lonesome estate.
Jishōni had been traveling along the road with two or three children when he'd first laid eyes on her. He'd never seen anyone so beautiful and compassionate before in his life, and fell almost instantly in love with her.
What made him love Jishōni so quickly, and so completely, was her smile. No one had ever offered him a genuine smile before, not even his own parents. He recognized the false smiles of servants and strangers seeking his approval. Jishōni's smile was entirely different. He rewarded Jishōni's sincerity with special consideration, which was surprising and unexpected even to him. The people of the village weren't sure what to make of this sudden change in his personality. They had once offered him polite smiles, but no one did that anymore: not since the land became embroiled in war after his parents died.
Jishōni treated Sabame with a kind of forthright directness that was completely alien to him. Surely people weren't this honest, or this kind, in real life? She must have some ulterior motive, but if she did, he did not discover it. The existence of someone like Jishōni, who offered her honest smile to him with no expectation of anything in return, shook him to his very foundations.
He thought that Jishōni was too good to be true. She must be luring him in, trying to deceive him somehow. He was familiar with over-dramatic songs full of men swearing their undying love—or even that they would die for the woman they loved. But Sabame was not that sort of man. He did not want to die for a woman; he wanted to die, period. But he couldn't die: not now. There were times he wished that Jishōni had never smiled at him, so that he wouldn't feel this way. The times when she left the temple to walk in the village with the children caused him great internal turmoil, but he also lived for such times. They might be the only thing keeping him alive.
Jishōni was a nun, so he had no fear of another man coming into her life and sweeping her off her feet. He could love her as much as he desired, so long as he kept it a secret from everyone. Besides, he did not want to disrupt her life's path. She was a true believer in God, radiating compassion and sympathy wherever she went. Her soul would remain on that path forever, and it was good for the village to receive her blessings and her help.
But then...the demon came.
Most people believed in God, but very few people believed in demons. Yet demons there were—rare and powerful creatures too wicked and violent for any ordinary human to destroy.
One such demon passed through Lord Sabame's lands one day in the guise of a young woman. Being ignorant of the demon's true nature, Lord Sabame invited the traveler home.
"This is such a lovely village," the demon said. "It's so quiet and out-of-the-way. The people are friendly, and the little children are so sweet. You're fortunate to live here, sir. This estate is so large and grand—perfect for raising children of your own. Forgive me if I'm prying, but do you happen to have your eyes on anyone special, sir?"
"I...that is to say...what a question!" Sabame was completely flustered.
Before his eyes, the traveler transformed into Jishōni.
"So this is who you like, huh? Well, you can have her, if you want. All you have to do is make a deal with me."
There were so many reasons why he should have refused, but at the time, he wasn't thinking about them. All he could think about when he saw Jishōni in front of him was a wife, children, a family—and sex. He saw an end to his own loneliness in the demon's perverted mockery of Jishōni's smile.
"With you? Why would I? You're not Jishōni."
"Then who is she?"
"A nun who walks the sacred path of enlightenment and compassion," he said.
The demon smiled sweetly at Sabame. The smile was not the same as Jishōni's—it wasn't—but it was honest and direct, and the demon's face belonged to the woman he loved. His heart wavered. He couldn't have Jishōni to himself: her concerns were not worldly, and the whole village needed her, not just him alone. Having a woman who looked like her and made him feel as she did by his side was a poor substitute for the real thing, but he wasn't thinking clearly.
"If you show me proof of your devotion, I shall swear myself to you, binding us for all eternity."
Sabame spent the night in the demon's arms and swore his oath to her the next morning. The demon murdered the real Jishōni and assumed her shape and role in the village. No one in the village realized that anything was amiss. They continued to leave their children in the false Jishōni's care.
But the children noticed. The demon whipped them to keep them quiet and bound their hands and feet at night so that they couldn't run away. The children started digging a tunnel under the floorboards of the temple, connecting it to Lord Sabame's estate secretly. The demon worked them day and night; some of them even slept in the tunnel to maximize their time spent working.
Lord Sabame saw a child being whipped when he was riding past the temple. Until that time, even he hadn't noticed that the demon had replaced the real Jishōni. He'd assumed that the demon would remain with him, at his estate, and that the demon and Jishōni would never meet face-to-face.
What have I done? What will happen to the temple—and the children?!
Lord Sabame dismounted quietly, then peeked inside the temple through a small hole in its siding. The demon was switching the children as they carried dirt up from the tunnel and dumped it outside.
The demon turned to face Sabame and locked eyes with him. Her smile was not beatific like Jishōni's—it was the same smile she'd given him the night he'd sworn himself to her. Perverted, and corrupted.
That was all the evidence he needed to prove to himself that the real Jishōni was dead. His heart pounded painfully loud in his own ears. He wanted to flee, but it was too late for that.
Every night after that, Sabame called out to Jishōni in his dreams, his forehead damp with sweat. "Jishōni! Jishōni!"
The demon always came to him when he called...and after the birth of their daughters, children started disappearing from the temple through the secret tunnel. They went to Sabame's estate, led by the demon, and never returned.
Sabame kept himself deliberately deaf and blind to what was happening: he didn't want to see the tragic consequences of his one stupid, selfish decision. He resumed his usual activities, tending to his house and collection of beautiful objects and embracing the false Jishōni every evening. He only ventured out of the estate now to capture food—in the form of travelers—for his young daughters.
Over time, Sabame settled into his new life, which was very similar to his old one, apart from the crushing sense of loneliness. He was grateful that none of his habits needed to change. He invited travelers home as he'd always done, heard their stories—and gave their bodies to his children to eat. The days passed quietly and peacefully.
One night, there was a commotion in the tunnel that woke Sabame from a sound sleep. Some of the children selected to be eaten managed to slip free of their ropes. They freed more children, who freed more, but they were set upon by gigantic, man-eating caterpillars before they could get away.
Some of the children rushed back toward the temple to find help in the village. The caterpillars signaled to one another with strange sounds and worked together to block the children's escape. They captured the fastest runners and dragged them back to the tunnel.
The other children in the temple caught wind of what was going on and also tried to flee. In the end, the giant caterpillars forced all the children down into the tunnel and guarded it at both ends so that none could escape.
Wiping out all the children at once, and Jishōni too, was dangerous. People would wonder where they'd gone. The villagers had proven remarkably unobservant when it came to the demon, but people would definitely notice that their own children were missing. The demon's solution to this problem was to set fire to the temple and hide all traces of the children's bodies in the tunnel beneath Lord Sabame's estate. She had him spread the rumor that Jishōni and the children had gone to heaven, and that this was why there were no bones.
"My lord, you must set the temple on fire, and quickly," the demon said. "Go."
Sabame left for the temple, but he had no desire to burn it. He hadn't wanted or expected things to turn out this way.
If only Jishōni had never smiled at me. If only I'd never met her...
But he had, and the destruction of this temple was the result—and by his own hand, too. Burning the temple now was the only way he had left to protect his life and livelihood. The people of the village could remember Jishōni as a saint, and grieve their children. No one needed to know of his own heinous crimes.
Jishōni... He swallowed. The children...couldn't run. They can't get away, and neither can I.
Jishōni was no longer human, but a demon. He, too, had become a demon a long time ago, though he couldn't remember the exact moment. This was the fate he'd chosen for himself.
Jishōni, forgive me.
Sabame set the temple on fire.
Lord Sabame trembled from head to toe.
"You explained the children's disappearance through those strange rituals, claiming they'd gone to heaven with Jishōni."
Lord Sabame said nothing to this accusation. The silence was broken by the sound of a high-pitched alarm blaring in the distance.
"Oi, everyone!" Dororo shouted. "Get out here and help me take out the damn trash!"
The bewildered villagers came out of their houses and looked up at Dororo in amazement. He tossed monster eggs down at them. The eggs shattered on impact, splattering the villagers with shell and gunk.
Dororo threw eggs with furious speed so that they fell down like rain. "Take a good, long look! All of this is your fault. You should see it. See it all!"
He kept hurling eggs off the watchtower until his arms were tired. "You know what these are, don't you? Don't play dumb. Maybe you wanted to turn a blind eye to it, but you can't deny reality forever. These are the eggs of the monster that ate your kids! I'll shout it so loud that the whole world will hear me!"
Sabame's hands shook around his sword. His grip loosened.
He and Hyakkimaru were surrounded by his children, who were coming in through the garden and down the hall. They were in half-human shape, carrying swords, spears and naginata. Hyakkimaru sensed something moving on the ceiling above him.
There are five. Six of them surrounded Dororo, and I killed one—but there were seven girls who came out to greet us. Where is the seventh?
One of the caterpillar monsters slithered around Hyakkimaru to her mother, who was hiding behind a folding screen, and handed her a spear. The demon stood and lunged, trying to run both Hyakkimaru and Sabame all the way through with the spear.
Hyakkimaru managed to pull Sabame out of the way and dodge the spear's point. He seized the handle of the weapon, but Sabame knocked him a little off-balance. Hyakkimaru yanked the spear away from the demon, but she wasn't weaponless for long: one of her daughters tossed another spear to her.
"You will not harm my daughters," the demon said.
Hyakkimaru laughed.
The demon sneered at him. "You want your lump of human flesh so badly that you're willing to spill all this blood to get it? Fine." The demon's face warped and twisted until it bore no resemblance at all to Jishōni's. Her body elongated and grew toward the ceiling, large white wings sprouting from her shoulders. Her sharp fangs exactly mirrored those of her daughters.
She was Maimai Onba, one of the forty-eight demons of the Hall of Hell. Her human disguise fell away completely, revealing her true form: a toweringly huge, poisonous moth.
Sabame had never seen the demon's real shape before. He took in the sight a little at a time, feeling the cold wind blow against his face through the wide-open window.
He'd know the demon as Jishōni for years. He realized now that he'd completely forgotten what the original one was like.
Maimai Onba circled around Hyakkimaru, waiting for her chance to strike. Her richly colored claws dripped poison. The fuzz on her back and head stood on end like hair.
Suddenly, Maimai Onba sprang at Hyakkimaru's throat. Hyakkimaru dodged easily, almost lazily; his attention wasn't on the demon, but on Sabame.
"Those children you abandoned and killed are here," Hyakkimaru said. His unseeing eyes tracked toward the window that opened out on the estate's garden.
The collective spirit of all the children who had burned to death at the temple stood there, weeping.
"What you thought was divine judgement was really all a result of your fucking selfishness!" Dororo shouted at the villagers in the darkness. "You sacrificed your sons and daughters to a monster, and now they're dead because of you," he spat. "Well, you can't turn a blind eye to this anymore. I'll show you everything. I'll shout it until there's not a single one of you who can pretend not to know."
The dumbstruck villagers looked up at Dororo. No one moved or spoke.
"But I don't have time to yell at you all night. There are at least forty more eggs to destroy, and we have to break them all! If we don't, your entire village will be devoured by demon spawn! So what will you do, stay here and wait to get eaten, or come with me and chase the monsters down!? Those with me, grab your hoes and pitchforks, and any weapons you've got on hand!"
The collective spirit of the children caught sight of Lord Sabame and started drifting toward him.
"Forgive me," Lord Sabame said. "I never meant..." Tears overflowed in his eyes. "I was tricked into doing what the demon wanted...I'm so sorry..." He wished that he'd set fire to himself instead of the temple.
"Don't pretend you were duped into the whole thing," Hyakkimaru said. "The demon gave you something you wanted. That's why you went along with it. And you knew."
Maimai Onba and her daughters continued attacking. Hyakkimaru dodged their claws and their blows, focusing primarily on Sabame.
"I should have hanged myself, rather than accepting that deal! You, demon—take it back! Return things to the way they were!"
But of course, there was no way to do that now, even if the demon agreed. Sabame could never have predicted the terrible outcome of his choices, which had all sprung from the tragic seed of his inescapable loneliness.
"I'll make it right," Lord Sabame said. "Before this demon kills me, or I fall into Hell—I will fix this." He fell to his knees with his hands clasped in prayer, looking up at Hyakkimaru.
"What the hell are you doing?!" Hyakkimaru shouted at him. "Move! You'll be killed!"
There was a commotion coming from the garden. Dororo and the villagers had arrived.
"Oi, aniki! I brought some help!"
Maimai Onba saw the sheer number of villagers and realized quickly that she was outmatched. She glared at Hyakkimaru. "If only you had never come... I will not forget this, insolent wretch!"
Maimai Onba spread her enormous wings, preparing to take flight. Poisonous scales fell off her wings, as light and delicate as snow. "Fools! I shall devour you all!"
Hyakkimaru dove at Maimai Onba before she could fly off, but he missed. She flapped her wings strongly, flying through the sky as straight as an arrow.
The collective spirit of the children who had died at Jishōni's temple suddenly split in two. Ten or twelve individual spirits crawled out of the larger spirit like they were shedding a shell. They chased after Maimai Onba, gripping her wings and head, trying to weigh her down.
"Let me go, you filthy brats!"
Maimai Onba tried to shake the children's spirits off, but they only clung more tightly. Several children linked arms and cooperated to maintain their hold on her.
Carrying the weight of the children was so exhausting that Maimai Onba could no longer fly. She fell straight down into the garden with the children's spirits crawling all over her. Maimai Onba spun in midair, dislodging many of the spirits.
"Coward," Hyakkimaru said. "You won't even face your victims?"
Maimai Onba was flying toward him, and fast: her spin had given her too much momentum. She couldn't dodge even the slightest bit when Hyakkimaru moved to slice her head off.
Blood sprayed from Maimai Onba's lifeless body. Her eyes glared up at Hyakkimaru, angry even in death.
"Aniki!" Dororo called out. "What was that? What happened?"
"This isn't over yet," Hyakkimaru gasped.
He was right. Maimai Onba was dead. Her head and body dissolved like so much white ash into the air. Her daughters were still alive, though—and they were closing in on Hyakkimaru, Dororo and the villagers fast.
Dororo ran to Hyakkimaru's side, followed closely by the villagers. The villagers were entirely repulsed by the caterpillar monsters and gathered together in protective clusters to beat them to death with their hoes, axes and pitchforks.
"We can't let them get away!" Dororo yelled. "Kill every last one of them! Their nest is in there!" He ran toward the storehouse where he and Hyakkimaru had discovered the secret tunnel.
Before he could reach the storehouse, he stopped, stunned. The other villagers looked up at the sky and gasped.
"Tatsuzo! Tatsuzo!" Yohei cried out. His son's spirit, along with the spirits of all the other abandoned children, were gathered in the sky above. Their outlines were pale white, as if they were formed out of starlight.
One by one, the spirits flew down from the sky and alighted in front of the villagers. The shell of the collective spirit that they'd all been part of remained still, but it started glowing slightly. A bell rung, clear and high, and then the shell re-formed, taking on a new shape.
It was Jishōni.
"Jishōni!" Lord Sabame was devastated, and could think of no other words to say except for her name.
Jishōni appeared completely exhausted. She'd been keeping all the children's spirits safe with her, unified and in one place so that she could protect them all. After her death, she'd continued watching over the village, taking each child who died into herself in the hopes that the demon who'd killed them would be destroyed someday.
Dororo remembered thinking that Jishōni had been possessed by a demon. He remembered Lord Sabame telling him and Hyakkimaru that Jishōni was selling some children due to lack of resources. Nothing could have been further from the truth.
Dororo wasn't sure he would ever want to tell anyone what had happened here. Jishōni was a nun who'd run afoul of a demon and been murdered, along with the children in her care. Dororo would feel the tragedy of it more if the war-torn world weren't filled with so many similar stories.
So, yes, the story was a sad one. But without Jishōni to take them in, the poor abandoned children would have had nowhere else to go. Choosing to care for them prolonged those children's lives. It gave them hope. And the children had a hand in the cruel demon's downfall. Dororo considered that fitting and right, at least.
Dororo took in Jishōni's exhausted smile and thought that the woman was a saint. Was she really human once? Or was she always like this, so much better than the rest of us?
Hyakkimaru felt Jishōni's presence and approached her slowly. He knew her name, the one she'd been born with: Jishōni was the name she had been given after taking her religious vows.
Mio.
The children surrounded Jishōni, giving her a big hug. She flew upwards with the children still attached to her. Unlike Maimai Onba, she wasn't weighed down by the children; it was like she was being lifted by them instead.
The sight stunned the villagers. If any demons had been around to see it, the pure radiance of Jishōni and the children's spirits might have caused them harm. Beasts and birds looked on in confusion. Parents cried out the names of their children as they vanished into the night sky.
"Jishōni! Jishōni!" Lord Sabame called after her.
Jishōni didn't react to Lord Sabame or the voices of the villagers. They would never see her smile again. She looked at all the children's spirits with tears in her eyes. The children, for their part, kept looking at Jishōni and did not spare their birth parents so much as a passing glance.
"Tatsuzo! Tatsuzo!" Yohei and Oshizuka cried.
Dororo scowled. "Oi! You have no right to see your kid at all, since you threw him out. I wouldn't want to see you, either," he spat.
Yohei swallowed heavily.
Dororo cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled up at the children, "You kids have suffered enough! Let your nice, real mom take you to Heaven with her. Go on, now! Your parents'll come soon enough. All you have to do is wait for them! Wait, and be happy, okay? You've gotta be happy now!"
Tatsuzo grinned at Dororo and waved. Then he disappeared, along with Jishōni and the other children.
There was a silence. Yohei broke it, his voice breaking on sobs.
"You bastards." Dororo folded his arms. "You shoulda been with your kids, from the beginning to the end. Am I wrong?" His words were sharp and pointed, but he wasn't angry.
After all, didn't all this happen because of the war, too? It's not entirely their fault...just mostly.
Hyakkimaru let out a low cry and clutched at his stomach, face twisted in a rictus of pain. He fell down face-first and curled into a ball. His entire body shook with spasms. His legs kicked out in all directions and he started choking.
Dororo sprinted up to Hyakkimaru and started rubbing his back. "Aniki! Hey! You okay? Is it your stomach? Where does it hurt? Don't tell me you busted your gut from laughing too much!"
Hyakkimaru's liver fell, wet and slimy, out of his mouth, and landed with a loud plop on the ground.
The villagers were so shocked by this that they ceased their weeping and stepped back, giving Hyakkimaru plenty of room.
Hyakkimaru gasped, then struggled to regain his feet. He still appeared to be in great pain. Dororo could only guess what it would feel like, growing a normal human liver in place of the one he'd had before.
Dororo kept rubbing his back in encouragement. "Yo, aniki. It'll stop hurting soon, when the new liver's all grown in. Hang in there."
The villagers gazed upon Hyakkimaru with expressions of disgust. Dororo didn't notice. Hyakkimaru still needed help. He'd finally stopped shaking and pulled himself up to his knees when a villager said, "Isn't he a demon, too?"
The villager's voice wasn't loud, but everyone heard it.
The words rekindled Dororo's rage. "What the fuck are you talking about, loser?"
The villagers all retreated a step. Those with weapons tightened their grips.
"Get out of here!"
"You're not welcome in our village!"
"Get out!"
The villagers had largely forgotten about Lord Sabame during the battle. Now, their eyes fixed on him again. He had no time to run or plead his case: a villager thwacked him hard at the base of the skull with a sword hilt, and he fell unconscious.
Dororo gaped at the villagers in utter astonishment. "What'd you do that for? Wasn't he tricked, just like the rest of you?"
"Well, he won't be tricked anymore," someone muttered darkly. "Can't lie to us, either."
Three villagers surrounded Lord Sabame and started bludgeoning him with their weapons. The lump on his back burst open, staining his clothes with blood. More blood trickled from a cut on his forehead.
"That's enough! You'll kill him!" Dororo tried to pull the villagers away from Lord Sabame, but more took their place. A sound like a scream echoed from far away, but Dororo didn't think it was a human scream. If he had to guess, he would say it was the anguished cry of one of his half-human daughters.
So many of Lord Sabame’s children were dead—in front of the estate, behind it, underground, inside. Many had died before they could hatch. The few that remained clung desperately to life. They were monsters, not children—but they were also Lord Sabame's only lasting legacy. The villagers' faces as they slew them were not heroic or relieved, but fearful, twisted and bitter. In that moment, they appeared every bit as monstrous as the creatures they were killing.
Unable to stop the villagers from murdering Sabame, and unwilling to interfere in the matter of the monsters any further, Dororo turned back to Hyakkimaru.
Hyakkimaru was dead on his feet. Dororo had never seen him looking so weak before. Later on, Dororo would tell himself that his concern was overblown by the circumstances and that he'd only overreacted because he wasn't used to Hyakkimaru's freakish body-part growing powers yet, but the truth was that he felt every bit of the anxiety showing on his face. He hadn't thought of it before, but when Hyakkimaru killed a demon, he had no idea which of his body parts would be restored. He couldn't choose it.
He hadn't chosen to lose his body parts, either. It was possible that Dororo was imagining it, but he thought that he was getting his first real glimpse of who Hyakkimaru really was. A boy without limbs, without eyes, a nose, ears, anything. Human, but not human. His own humanity had been stolen from him at birth.
Dororo looked at Hyakkimaru struggling to retain his balance in the light of the moon. For a split second, he understood Hyakkimaru's pain as if it were his own.
The earth beneath Dororo's feet felt unstable, like it would collapse in on itself and swallow him whole. This whole damn country was unstable: soaked with the blood and violence of constant war. These villagers were part of it, too: there was no one innocent left, no one good except the corpses and bones littering every roadway. The only people that could remain alive through all this turmoil were the strong, the evil, or the hypocritical.
I ain't no innocent, either. I'm just a thief.
But Hyakkimaru was strong: Dororo had no doubts whatsoever about that. He might not be handsome, but his features were unmistakably that of a person. The doctor who'd raised him had given him that much. It was moments like these that showed Hyakkimaru at his most vulnerable: one of his true body parts had just returned to him. He'd regained it by performing the very human act of saving all these people from demons—not that the villagers seemed to remember that at the moment.
He was too exhausted or injured to keep standing upright. Dororo bit his tongue to prevent himself from gasping when Hyakkimaru collapsed to one knee.
I wonder what he looked like when he left the mountain for the first time. Shattered, like this? Beaten?
"Leave!"
"Get out! Now!"
The villagers grew bolder. They surrounded Dororo and Hyakkimaru. One man brought his club down heavily on Hyakkimaru's spine.
Dororo's temper flared. There were so many of them...
“Leave! Get out! Go!”
The villagers timed their blows with their shouts, surrounding Hyakkimaru and beating him, just like they had beaten Lord Sabame.
Dororo wrenched the club out of the hand of the man who’d started beating Lord Sabame. He kicked, screamed, and struck the villagers around Hyakkimaru, forcing them back.
“Stop, you fuckers! What the hell is your problem?! You should be thanking this guy. And he’s hurt! He needs a doctor, and you’re beating him up and kicking him out?! All of you simpering morons would be as good as dead without him! I’ll kill you myself if you attack him again.”
The villagers weren’t cowed by Dororo’s insults or his threats. They chanted for Hyakkimaru and Dororo to leave, waving their weapons around in a shared rhythm.
Hyakkimaru let out a short, cynical laugh. “It’s no use. Leave them alone. I’m leaving.”
Dororo was left wondering whether he did understand Hyakkimaru or not. What he was saying now didn’t make any sense.
“They’re scared of me,” Hyakkimaru said wearily. “They’re not evil, so...let’s go.”
Dororo didn’t move. What--these people weren’t evil? Then who was? They were hateful. Dororo felt that they deserved his anger and his ire, but Hyakkimaru didn’t seem to feel the same way. Why wasn’t Hyakkimaru angry, or frustrated? He was so resigned to the situation that it was depressing.
Who was to blame for these people being so utterly rotten? Dororo wanted to know that. He wanted to find out who was responsible and kick their ass.
“I guess the name ‘Dororo’ suits me better,” Hyakkimaru said with a sad sort of smile.
‘Little monster.’ That was what the word dororo meant, in the lands far to the south.
Hyakkimaru was percieved as a monster, but he actually hunted monsters. He was on a quest to regain his body. He must hate the demons, but...well, Dororo hadn’t noticed any particular contempt aimed at Maimai Onba, and he showed no hatred nor anger toward these piss-poor excuses for human beings called villagers, either. Was there another reason Hyakkimaru was fighting the demons--a reason he hadn’t told Dororo about?
If Hyakkimaru wasn’t going to rage at the villagers, Dororo was more than happy to do it for him. He stared them down, hands and shoulders trembling finely.
War only explained part of why the villagers were like this. Even if the wars of the past twenty years hadn’t happened--or if war as a concept didn’t exist at all--there would still be stupidity. Stupidity almost certainly came before war, on a conceptual level, since war was such a stupid, senseless act. Dororo could hate the people who had suffered in war because they were stupid, and hate war because it was even more stupid. But Hyakkimaru...did he hate anyone, or anything?
Hyakkimaru finally stood up, not exactly steady, but he also didn’t look like he was about to fall. The villagers struck him as he walked past, more tentatively than before. Dororo beat them all back with his borrowed club and seized Hyakkimaru’s arm.
“Fucking bastards. Worms for brains, all of ‘em.”
Dororo led Hyakkimaru over to Sabame and took his hand, too. Sabame was able to walk--just--and stumbled after Dororo.
The villagers appeared less than pleased to let their lord go. Dororo kicked at them, brandishing his club. The crowd parted before them. Dororo leaned close to Hyakkimaru and whispered, “Where’s the next demon, anyway? You’ve gotta get your body back, now. Five minutes ago. Don’t let anyone treat you like shit ever again.” The villagers shouldn’t be treating him this badly now, but if his body were completely human, they would have no excuse to ostracize him.
Dororo, Hyakkimaru and Sabame passed out of the estate’s front gate. Hyakkimaru sensed light from above and looked up. The deep blue sky was dotted with clouds. It was past dawn.
“We can’t stay here,” Dororo muttered. “Where is the next demon? Do you know? Don’t just stand there. I’m not leaving ‘til I get my hands on that sword in your left arm.”
Hyakkimaru didn’t respond.
“C’mon,” Dororo said, tugging on his arm. “Let’s get going.”
They got back on the road in the gray light of the early morning. Sabame pulled himself free of Dororo’s grip and said, “I’m going to the burned temple. I want to rebuild it.”
Lord Sabame was still alive, for all the good it did him. He was determined to rebuild the temple where Jishōni had lived. There was still value in the smile she had given him so long ago, even though he would never see it again.
“Are you an idiot? You can’t stay in that village anymore, you dolt. They’ll kill you.”
Lord Sabame was not deterred. “I can’t think of a more fitting place to die than at that temple,” he said. Truthfully, he wouldn’t have minded dying at the villagers’ hands—but dying at the temple, especially if he was allowed to rebuild it first, was preferable.
Well, he did say that he wanted to take it all back and make things right…
Hyakkimaru was content to let Sabame learn from his own tragic mistakes. Maybe he was hoping to atone so that he could meet Jishōni in the afterlife.
Dororo and Hyakkimaru watched Sabame walk away. They continued down the road at a steady pace with the cold wind against them. The road was mostly uphill here, and the light on the eastern horizon was blue-purple like a bruise. Neither one of them knew precisely where they were headed.
“Hey,” Dororo said. “I got something to ask ya.”
“What is it?”
“Have you ever heard of a thief so stupid that they’d give back something they stole?”
Hyakkimaru frowned at Dororo in puzzlement.
Dororo dashed out a few steps ahead of Hyakkimaru and gave him a mischievous, cat-like smile. “I’m Dororo, the greatest thief in the universe.” He struck his hand drum for dramatic emphasis. “I ain’t giving you back my name. Not now, not ever.” The next strike of his drum was as loud as he could make it. Then he put his back to Hyakkimaru and ran ahead.
The sound of Dororo’s drum echoed in the stillness. Hyakkimaru quickened his pace. Dororo didn’t see it, but he was smiling.
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