Niinufabushi
(For the May/June SoulCaliblr prompt: Comfort)
On the first night of the voyage from Alexandria, Maxi did not sleep long. He had dreamed he was looking over the gunwale of his father’s ship after a storm off Uchinā Island. He and Kyam were watching uneasily as his father returned from the debris in a small rowboat. In the distance, a fishing boat lay half-submerged on its side where it had struck the reef below. Its torn sail flagged in the dying wind. Maxi had been through storms at sea before, but not ones that ended like this. He stood frozen, his heart pounding in his ears as the boat drew near. He heard the voices of the crew shouting orders, but could not make out their words. He could hardly even understand Kyam.
A shivering girl clung to his father’s shoulders as they were raised onto the ship, and the rest of the awestruck crew gathered. Her face was framed by long, sopping black hair. With wide, terror-stricken eyes she seemed to stare past everyone.
“Any other survivors, Captain?” the old navigator croaked.
Maxi’s father shook his head. “Her father was in the water. He sank before I could reach him.”
The girl broke into a low, mournful sobbing.
“There, there,” Maxi’s father said to her. “We’ll be back in Nāfa soon.”
The girl rocked like a newborn foal as she struggled to find her sea legs. Maxi caught her by the hand, pale and clammy in his grasp. She seemed so small and slight before him. If she could stand, she had to have a chance.
“I’ve got you,” Maxi said. “Easy now. Small steps.”
Kyam headed straight for the cabin and fetched a blanket. The sun started to glare from a break in the clouds, but it would not be enough. Even in the hottest months, the cold of the sea could kill. Kyam helped her put the blanket over her shoulders, and the girl tucked it close to her like a cape.
“Boys,” Maxi’s father called, “take her to the cabin and make sure she keeps warm. I’ll check on her soon.” His voice seemed to falter this time. His eyes were tired and his broad shoulders slumped.
In that moment, Maxi felt the weight of his father’s guilt. If they could have just gotten there sooner, if someone could have spotted them sooner; doubtlessly many more ifs had to be running through his mind. For as long as he had been on this ship, he knew that his father had the responsibility of about two hundred lives aboard, including Kyam and himself. What kind of captain could he be if he could not bring himself to save one?
He did not remember taking her to the cabin before he woke up, but he remembered her name well enough. Kadena. Kadena!
“Maxi! Maxi! Wake up!”
Slowly, he recognized Xianghua’s voice. He blinked away the bleariness and saw her and Kilik standing by in the lamplight. Neither looked like they had slept long, though they seemed seemed more confused than annoyed.
As Maxi rose, he heard the cabin creak and muffled sounds of waves. From above deck, he started to hear footsteps and a faint conversation between the Venetian crewmen. He knew he was back on the galleon. It was the first ship to Athens that would take them, although a part of him had suspected that one the merchants overheard their talk of Soul Edge. “What? Something happening?”
“You were talking in your sleep,” Kilik said.
“I was?” Maxi straightened his mussed hair. He held back an impulse to remind Kilik that usually he was the sleep-talker, before he remembered he had been dreaming. He had to have been talking in Uchināguchi, rather than Mandarin. “Oh, right… I woke you two up, didn’t I?”
“Well, not exactly,” Kilik answered. “The sea was choppy for a while, but I think we’re out of the worst of it.”
“I couldn’t sleep through any of that,” Xianghua said. “What on earth were you dreaming about anyway?”
The memory of it steadily came back to Maxi. He noticed a flash of alarm in Kilik’s eyes, and knew at once that he had to assure him. “Something that happened years ago, when my father was still alive… Kyam and I were on my father’s ship, back from a trading voyage in Ming when we hit a storm just off Uchinā. We were lucky, but there was a fishing boat that wasn’t. It hit a reef and took on water. We came too late to help the fisherman, but his daughter survived by clinging to a piece of wood. My father pulled her out of the current and we took her back to Nāfa.”
Xianghua had listened in awe. “Was that who you were mumbling about?”
Maxi nodded. “Kadena’s her name. I haven’t seen her since I left home. She must be around your age by now, Xianghua. Give or take.”
“Oh,” Xianghua said, slightly taken aback.
“Don’t worry about her. She still has her mother.” Then he felt a twinge of guilt, and his eyes misted over. “Akisamiyō, what am I going to tell her?” He muttered this louder than he thought.
Kilik cast a sympathetic glance at him. “You know as well as I do,” he said.
Maxi fumbled for his nunchaku and held them. “Yeah. I’ll work that out when I’m done with that Astaroth. Yagaji’s going to have to hear the same story too, but at least he’ll have something to be proud of.” He tugged both handles of the nunchaku until the rope went taut.
In their travels overland through the Ottoman Empire, Maxi had told them both how often Yagaji had made him replacement nunchaku, and the leg injury that kept him out of his crew’s last voyage. He had been more than willing to repeat it after they met Xianghua. Fortunately, she had always been eager to listen, and Kilik was content to hear him recall his crew—his family—in happier circumstances. Now he possessed Yagaji’s latest and finest work, with handles of Indian rosewood he had tested with his own strength.
If he could see me now, Maxi thought. He brushed his long forelock out of his face and heard the cabin doors open. Some of the sailors were returning to their cabins for the night. He did not catch a word from them, but they sounded as tired as any sailors might after getting out of rough waters. He knew that feeling well enough.
“I need to be out of the cabin for a bit,” Maxi said quietly. “You two can come along if you feel like it.”
Before Maxi opened the cabin doors, he heard their footsteps behind him.
The sails were billowing and the sky was clear. The moon was a sliver of light, and stars shone as far as they could see. Maxi rested his hands on the port gunwale, lifted his head windward, and shut his eyes to take in the cool, salty air. When he opened his eyes, the Milky Way stretched overhead in a great, hazy band. Already he had seen more lands between Egypt and his home island than his father had dreamed of setting foot on, but here he saw the same stars he had seen since his childhood in Shui. There was something humbling in that.
“The River of Heaven!” Xianghua pointed excitedly. “I’ve never seen so much of it!”
Maxi cracked a smile. “Where I’m from, we call it Tingāra. Same thing.”
“I think I see the Cowherd… And the other side is the Weaver Girl. Do you know that story?”
“I’ve heard of it, yes. My father used to get Chinese star maps. Shame that I lost the one I had with my ship.”
Kilik, too, had been gazing at the stars. His ear was cocked toward them, but he seemed lost in his own thoughts. With his eyes heavenward, Maxi almost regretted the offhand comment about the fate of his ship.
Hey now, it wasn’t your fault. He stopped himself before he could think any more on that evening in India, when he had only wished he had rushed to his ship sooner. He had done everything he could do in the moment for Kilik, and this much he did not regret.
Xianghua cut in, “Maxi, couldn’t you ask the navigator if he has one?”
“I tried. I even got a look at the maps he had at hand. I hardly recognized a single one, but he said the North Star is in one of two bears.”
“Bears?”
“That’s what he said the drawings on his map were. What kind of bear has a tail, I said. He just looked at me funny. I didn’t feel like pushing my luck after that.”
Kilik suddenly turned his head toward Maxi. “We are heading north, aren’t we?”
“I believe so,” Maxi said, “Say, did they teach you this stuff at the monastery?”
“Uh, I’m not good with star names. I used to look at them from the monastery wall though.”
“Sounds like quite a climb.”
“Oh, it was.” There was a bashfulness to Kilik’s words, yet Maxi thought he could hear a little mischief in them. “By day, I’d look down into the mountains and on clear nights, there’d be so many stars. It used to make my master nervous.”
Xianghua giggled, putting her hand to her mouth a little too late to escape notice. “That reminds me… My grandfather had a book about constellations. Up there is the Purple Forbidden Enclosure. And there’s the Curved Array in the middle, between the Enclosure’s walls.”
Maxi squinted, then his eyes lit up. “Aha! Well spotted! In Uchināguchi, we call it Kajimayābushi—the pinwheel. And that bright star at the end is Niinufabushi, the North Star. Can you believe it? We’re still under the same sky.”
As Xianghua and Kilik gazed at the night sky and the dark, gleaming sea, Maxi began to feel at peace. Niinufabushi, by any other name, would guide them closer to Soul Edge. The same star that had led him and his father’s crew home many times before. He imagined Yagaji and Kadena were waiting for him to return with the south winds. For now, he had Yagaji’s handiwork and his companions, and with them the night seemed brighter.
