Tatsu pumped his legs a little harder and stretched his arm out a little farther. One more step… His fingers closed around Kaya’s glistening black braid and yanked.
Kaya’s shriek sent the seagulls wheeling from the branches overhead. The squawking birds soon circled back, realizing they had nowhere else to go.
“Give it back,” Tatsu demanded.
Kaya whirled around and tried to bring her heel down on his bare toes. “No!”
He danced out of her way, jerking her hair again, and ran into something solid and tall and alive.
Not one of the branch-masts. Tatsu knew who it was before the figure even spoke, from the pattern on the silk that slid against his back.
“What are you up to now? How many times do I have to tell you to leave Kaya alone?” Yep, it was Mura. Cruel, cold Mura. She raised a slender eyebrow at him.
Tatsu dropped Kaya’s braid but stuck his chin out in defiance. He had no fear of Mura, no matter how much she tried to torment him. “Kaya stole my steamed bun.”
Kaya crossed her arms and scowled. “You work in the kitchen, go get a new one!”
“It’s called the galley now, dumbface, and I can’t. That’s the last one! So hand. It. Over.”
Kaya’s hand emerged from the sleeve of her robe, holding a white bun. She made as if to offer it to Tatsu, but instead raised it slowly toward lips that quirked into a mischievous smile. Tatsu glared at her. She wouldn’t dare.
Just before the bun reached her mouth, one of the seagulls swooped down and knocked it from her hand. The entire flock followed, tearing the soft dough into crumbs that vanished between snapping beaks.
Now it was Tatsu’s turn to shriek. “Look what you’ve done! I hate you!” He turned to Mura and spat at her, a dribbling attempt that was not as impressive as he’d hoped it would be. “I hate all of you! How much longer do I have to stay on this stupid excuse for a ship?”
Mura looked down at him, her dark eyes pitiless. “We go where the wind takes us, until Kōjin brings us to a new home. Now, leave Kaya in peace and I will do the same to you.”
Tatsu fell silent, his chest heaving. Mura kept her word and walked away to the nearest branch-mast, reaching out to press her palms against the wood. She leaned close to a knot in the bark and whispered her fancy-sounding gibberish into it.
Far overhead, giant leaves swiveled on their stems and billowed out as they caught the wind. Sun glowed through their veins, lighting up the brown stain that crept around their edges.
Tatsu rolled his eyes. He missed simple ropes and fabric sails. He missed a smooth-sanded floor beneath his feet instead of this rough and splintery log. But mostly, he missed Captain Yasujiro and his crew.
The sailors had always been ready with a joke and a song, unlike these stuffy women with their holier-than-thou attitude. The men had even shared their sour-tasting rice wine with the young deck-hand and let him try to work the saws. But they were all dead now.
He had no more friends, and now he had no more steamed buns.
Tatsu left Kaya staring in disbelief at the seagulls, her fingers still curled around an invisible bun. He walked toward the aft of the tree-ship and sat down to dangle his feet over the edge. Sap clung to the back of his legs and sea spray stung his eyes as he peered down at the base of the immense, sawed-off trunk.
He remembered the night they felled the Heart Tree. It was a prize fit for an emperor, Captain Yasujiro had said. After days and days of sawing, it was the captain’s honor to make the last couple strokes.
On the final pull, Tatsu threw himself to the ground and covered his head with his arms. But nothing could prepare him for the magnitude of the creaking, splintering crash. It shook the whole coast and vibrated so deep within him that he was afraid his body would shatter.
The sailors approached the fallen tree with a hushed excitement. They could build a whole city from its bones.
But someone else had beaten them to it. The trunk’s interior was riddled with holes, with rooms. Furniture grew directly out of the floors, tables set with half-eaten meals and mossy beds indented where bodies had rested.
Even after the rest of the crew retreated to discuss what to do, Tatsu wandered the rooms in a daze, his stomach tight with the feeling that he’d done something wrong.
Then the women appeared with hatred burning in their eyes, and everything plunged into chaos.
Tatsu wondered if it was the crash that had triggered the wave, that had sent the ocean sloshing in to pick up the Heart Tree like a twig and swallow them all. Just looking at the whitecaps below made him wince at the memory of water foaming down his nose and throat.
A crash sounded behind him, not in memory but in the here and now. Someone screamed, and Tatsu jumped to his feet and looked for the source of the noise. A flat, brown object twirled down from the branches and slammed into the deck. Moments later, another one splashed into the ocean on his right and sank out of sight.
The leaves - they were falling!
Tatsu sprinted toward the nearest door and dropped down inside. He moved through the warren of rotated rooms, toward safety in the galley. As he crawled through one of the stairwells, he almost rammed heads with Kaya, who was coming in the opposite direction.
“Watch where you’re going, you dolt!” Tatsu said.
“The H-heart Tree,” she gasped, tears streaming down her face and dripping onto the stairs. “It’s dying!”
“It’s been dying all along! Didn’t you know?” Tatsu had thought that magical tree-dwellers would be more in tune with this sort of stuff.
Kaya scrubbed at her cheeks, her expression hardening. “And whose fault is that?”
A voice entered the next room and stopped Tatsu from lashing out with his fists. It was Mura again.
“We can’t use the wind, can’t steer. There are no currents. We’re dead in the water!”
“Then we will launch the Heart Seed.” That creaky voice could only belong to Narisawa, the eldest on the tree-ship.
“But the seed’s only big enough to carry two people. Who will you send?” Mura paused only a moment before answering her own question. “It has to be Kaya. And I will go with her, to protect her.”
“You’re right, Kaya must go,” Narisawa said. “But the boy will go with her.”
“Are you insane? He’s one of them. You would sacrifice one of us for a monster?”
“He is an innocent child, Mura. Perhaps Kōjin spared his life in the wave for a reason.”
“Yes, well if Kōjin had answered our prayers sooner she would have stopped them before they ravaged our home,” Mura snapped.
“We cannot understand the ways of the goddess. The boy goes with Kaya. Tomorrow at dawn.” Narisawa sounded gentle but firm, and Mura did not contradict her again.
Tatsu couldn’t believe it. He looked into Kaya’s wide and tearful eyes with growing excitement. He was getting off this ship!
Clouds had moved in overnight, and rain pattered on Tatsu’s head as he climbed down onto the seed pod. It bobbed beneath his weight and almost dumped him into the sea before steadying. The robed women passed him provisions: sacks of rice, fish-hooks and nets, fresh water containers, and oars made from tree twigs.
Space was already tight when Kaya stopped embracing everyone and stepped aboard. Their knees bumped together awkwardly as they shifted around on the rounded shell, trying to get comfortable. The seed was even worse at being a boat than the tree was as a ship.
Tatsu dipped his oar into the gray water and pushed off, not bothering to say goodbye to the women who stood in silence and watched them go.
He didn’t know which direction to head, so he just paddled until the Heart Tree looked like a piece of driftwood on the horizon. Kaya didn’t say a word or offer to help, probably because she was too busy crying again.
“Hey, Kaya, cheer up.” Tatsu reached out and gave her braid a gentle, playful tug. “It’s just a tree.”
Kaya jerked back, her hair slipping away between his fingers. “You don’t understand anything.”
She turned away from him and gathered raindrops in the palm of her hand. They rolled over her skin and splashed onto a little crack in the center of the seed.
Then she began to speak in that weird language. He could hear a rhythm in her words, coaxing and pleasant. He thought of climbing a tree, of leaves catching in his hair and the strength of each branch lifting him up. Kaya fell silent, and his daydream faded.
The seed shuddered beneath them and the crack in its center grew wider. Tatsu blinked as a green stalk slithered out and up. With a poof like the sound of a porpoise’s breath, a single leaf unfurled, already taller than Tatsu. Even in the muted light, he could see how fresh and bright and green it was, covered with a fuzz that caught the rain.
A wind came up, rippling the water and making Tatsu wish for thicker clothes. The breeze met the young leaf and the seed surged forward over the ocean, carrying them toward an uncertain future.
Thanks for reading my entry for this week's Marvelous Tales contest by @playfulfoodie! The prompts are the words "leaf" and "wind". I've been on a chilly island, watching driftwood float past, so when I put my thoughts together this is what came out. I'm still trying to work on clarity in my writing, so as always I welcome editing suggestions!
-Katie, @therovingreader