Юрий Мельников – Little Lily (страница 2)
It rested in her palm. Warm. Weightless. Convulsively restless – its tip still quivering like a thread in the wind. She felt it with every cell of her skin, every receptor on her fingertips, how smooth and hard-cold the scales were on the curves, and how the living, tender, pinkish skin showed between them – wet, like the tip of a tongue.
And then the smell caught up with her. It wasn't blood – lizards do not smell of iron and human slaughter. It was a different scent – delicate, dry, like a snapped green branch, like the sap that oozes at the site of a violent rupture. The scent of parting. The scent of how the living leaves a part of itself behind to keep breathing.
She looked at the tail. It had no eyes, but it lay in her palm so trustingly and heavily, as if it were the most precious offering. Finally, the tip stopped twitching. The last spasm subsided, leaving only warmth.
The girl looked up. The crevice where the little emerald dragon had taken refuge was bottomless and silent. Not a sound came from it.
The stone dust slowly settled, swirling in invisible air currents. The birds fell silent, retreating into their rocky burrows. The sun returned – exactly the same as it had been before the sound, before the terrible shadow and the birds' cry. The boulder beneath her once again swelled with golden heat, the wormwood smelled just as bitter, and on the very edge of the earth, the invisible coal smoldered just as smokelessly.
She closed her palm – slowly, carefully, the way one closes an old, sacred book – and pressed her fist to her chest, right against her beating heart. She did not cry. She did not smile. She simply sat on the scorching stone in the middle of an endless 'now,' holding what was lost, knowing that this loss was the most real and honest thing she had left.
Then sleep fell upon her. Thick and warm, like a woolen blanket.
And when she woke up, her palm was empty. The tail had vanished – carried off by the wind, by ants, or by the earth itself. But on her skin remained two thin, semicircular imprints of scales, pressed so deeply into the flesh it was as if they were a seal. Or a brand.
She stared at these marks for a long time, until the sun dipped below the peak of the cliff and a long, cool shadow fell across her lap. Then she stood up, brushed the dust from her hem, and started walking.
Where to? She did not yet know.
Chapter 1. Awakening
The blade curved like the beak of a bird of prey, and for a fleeting second, it caught the blinding, white sun – caught it so sharply, flared so brightly, that the eye inside the dream began to ache.
She stood in the yielding, cool shade of a stone archway, seeing everything around her with that terrifying, crystalline clarity that only comes a second before you wake up. The man – tall, with a face weathered by desert winds to the color of old, darkened bronze – stepped toward the man in light robes. His movement was flawless in its lazy grace, almost tender, almost loving: his hand slipped easily, effortlessly into the folds of rough wool on the other man's chest, and the metal entered the flesh with a strange, soft, rustling sound, as if a knife were slicing through an overripe melon. It was a triumph of pure geometry, an ideal, self-contained act of the merging of steel and human warmth. Instantly, petal by petal, a wet scarlet chrysanthemum began to bloom on the faded, unbleached cloth. It grew, pulsating with the very life that was leaving the body right at that moment to become a simply unbelievably beautiful, symmetrical stain on the fabric. And it smelled of hot iron, bitter copper, and scorching dust that scratched the throat.
The man with the bronze face turned around. His eyes, black and dry as sun-cured olives, met her gaze, piercing right through her, through the thickness of centuries and someone else's memory.
“Run!” his cry tore through the ringing midday silence of the square, like tearing thick silk. “Tamar! Run!”
And she ran. The narrow streets, squeezed by white limestone, rushed to meet her. The air burned her throat, smelling of fermented honey and overripe figs that burst beneath her bare feet. Her feet pounded against the scorching, uneven stone; her soles burned, but stopping was impossible, because behind her – she felt it not with her ears, but with the skin between her shoulder blades – something massive, heavy was moving, making the walls of the houses terrifying tremors. She dashed forward, her shoulders knocking aside woven baskets, and dark purple fruit oozing sweet juice spilled under the wheels of unseen chariots. She ducked into a blind alley, and bright, damp, freshly dyed fabrics hung from wall to wall struck her in the face: carmine-red, rich saffron, piercingly blue cloths entangled her, stuck to her lips, blinded her, suffocated her, stripped her of her name...
“Nakayama. Wake up. Do you hear me? Wake up.”
The blue fabric of the dream instantly turned rigid, gray, and cold. It no longer smelled of figs or oriental spices. It smelled of sour, days-old sweat, rotten straw, and an underlying, sticky fear.
Yuriko opened her eyes and inhaled convulsively, with a rasp, as if surfacing from the bottom of a deep, abandoned well. Miko’s thin, icy fingers still gripped her shoulder in a deathly hold, biting straight to the bone through the filthy fabric.
“Get up,” Miko said. Her voice was flat, dry, and empty, like an overturned terracotta bowl from which every last drop has been drunk. “Get up, Yuriko. They are here.”
All around was not a sun-drenched ancient square, but Ihamigama – a cave that had become the Third Surgical Hospital of the Okinawa Prefecture. The gloom here was not merely the absence of light; it was a dense, porous, tangible entity that pressed against the eardrums and smelled so foul that a heavy, sour nausea constantly rose in the throat. This sickening, sweetish stench of gangrene and decaying living flesh mingled here with the sharp, nostril-burning reek of chloride of lime, stagnant urine, carbolic acid, and raw earth churned by explosions. Water dripped from the invisible, moisture-oozing stone vault with the monotony of a broken chronometer.
The girls – students of the First Women’s School – sat huddled together in the damp darkness, clustered in heaps like freezing, terrified nestlings. Their school uniforms, once immaculately neat with sailor collars and starched blouses, were now stiff with ingrained dirt, clay, and dry, brown, alien blood. They were children – ordinary fifteen- or seventeen-year-old girls from the village of Mawashiasato, with sharp knees protruding from hunger, thin necks, and cracked lips bitten to the flesh. They were shaking – not from the cold, though a tomb-like, bone-chilling dampness filled the cave – but because the fear inside them had outgrown the stage of tears and hardened into a dull, numb stupor.
In the center of the cave, illuminated by the trembling, dying beam of a kerosene lamp, stood their teacher. His face, once round and kind, had sharpened over these weeks, turning into a skull stretched with yellowish parchment skin. His round-rimmed glasses were askew, the lenses covered in a web of tiny scratches and limestone dust, but he didn't notice. Here, beneath these low vaults, he seemed too large and too straight – a man who had already made a decision and was now carrying it like a tombstone.
“Girls,” the teacher said. His voice creaked and stumbled like an un-oiled door hinge, but in the silenced cave it echoed up to the ceiling, bouncing off the wet walls. “Listen to me carefully. Our duty... The Himeyuri unit is disbanded. Orders from headquarters. The Army can no longer hold this line and protect you.”
A quiet, collective, convulsive sigh swept through the cave – like the rustle of dry leaves caught in an autumn wind. Those who had been sleeping woke up. Those who had been quietly moaning on rotting mats in the depths fell silent. Duty was over? To them, who had considered their work in the hospital as something eternal and unbreakable, this "over" sounded as if they had been told the sun simply wouldn't rise over Okinawa tomorrow.
“You know who is coming here,” the teacher continued, and for a moment a mad, feverish fire flashed in his eyes, drowned in their dark sockets. “The Americans. Long-nosed demons. They will spare no one. If they take you alive... what they will do to you will be a thousand times worse than death. They will dishonor you, tear your bodies to pieces, and throw you to the dogs. You are daughters of the Emperor, students of the First School. You must not surrender.”
He turned and lowered a heavy canvas backpack to the stone floor. From the bag came a strange sound – dull, dry, purely ceramic. Like ceramic pots clinking against each other at a bazaar.
The head nurse, her face as white as chalk, began passing these round, rough objects through the rows. When Yuriko’s turn came, her hand reached into the sack, and her fingers bumped against something cold and weighty.