Chapter 3 - interlude at a pub

Hatsumoto accompanied me to the pub where we were greeted by Taruzarco, already on his second pint. Our discussion began in mythology and personal worries, and some fish talk, but turned rather quickly to talk of odd happenings, of legends… of miracles… and finally of one miracle in particular, very recently, concerning Diomakari herself.

A child had fallen from a second story window, head broken on a rock below, leg twisted. No one else had been nearby except Taruzarco, and he’d watched Diomakari sitting on the rocky, lifeless, hard packed clay of the path before the building, holding the child, crying over him, her hands on him, head in her lap, and as her father’d watched, it had become very warm suddenly, as if near a furnace, and… the child had woken, had stood up slowly in a patch of flowers, and just stared. His leg was fine, his small skull apparently unharmed by the fall… but Taruzarco was sure the child had been dead, or nearly, had seen the blood… which was now gone. And Diomakari on the other hand, after chiding the child and shooing him off home, had reached out to her father for a hand up. He’d taken it, but she was frail, her hand thin and her body slightly concave, as if some small part of the life in her had… had gone into the child.

Conversation continued, curiously, but eventually strayed back to the mundane, and then to my plans to move on in a day or two. But as we were drinking our last afternoon draught, the ground began shaking again…

We burst out into late afternoon light, to another earthquake occurring all around us… and talk of the mountain smoking. But the quake was very short this time, and again no one was seriously injured, though Taruzarco retwisted his knee, an old injury, while trying to pull an old couple to a door frame for safety. I walked Taruzarco home, against his dismissal, to find Diomakari asleep on the couch, lean as when I’d first met her, and nearly impossible to rouse.

She’d been like this often recently, her father finally shared with me, fatigued one day and full of energy the next, asleep for a day at a time and ravenous on others, and putting on and losing weight very quickly… impossibly quickly… He’d been about to call for a mushi master, in fact, before I’d arrived in town…

I told him that my time was limited by my work, a recent case of a village-turned-death cult in the northeast for which I needed to recruit outside help. Though I’d likely have to return sometime after that, I promised him I’d do whatever I could to discover her plight.

But I never did...


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