Chapter 4: Red Spider Lily

The Oni was waiting for him when he arrived, sitting on the boulder with her cudgel leaning against it at her side. She looked as magnificent as ever, her massive legs crossed and her red skin shining in the sunlight, her white hair blowing gently in the breeze. She greeted him with a wave, Satou taking a moment to catch his breath. He had hurried, and the terrain was difficult.

“Welcome back, little Satou,” she cooed. “I trust that your journey wasn’t too taxing?” She was making fun of him of course, smiling at him as he recovered from his hike. “Don’t get too comfortable yet, we’re going for a walk.”

“A walk?” he asked.

“I come down to the forest to hunt in the spring. It’s the season when most of the game is looking to mate, which makes them loud and imprudent. Kind of like you actually. You can tag along, but only if you promise to be quiet.”

“I can be quiet!” he insisted.

“Have you ever been hunting before?”

“No,” he admitted, “but I’ve watched plenty of animals. I know how to stay hidden.”

“Well you managed to sneak up on me, so I’ll trust you. But if you scare away a deer, I might just decide to have you for supper instead.”

The Oni bared her pointed teeth in a grin, laughing at her own joke. She gestured for him to follow, rising to her feet and returning the heavy club to its place on her back. She was wearing her long cloak again, the patchwork of animal skins doing a good job of hiding her red complexion from view. Perhaps that was its purpose as well as keeping her warm, to conceal her from her quarry? Satou hurried along after her, struggling to keep pace with her long strides.

“So you said that you come down to hunt,” he said as he made his way into the forest behind her, “does that mean that you live higher up the mountain?”

“My village is higher on the peak,” she replied, moving between the trees and keeping her eyes on the woods as she weaved through the undergrowth. “We rarely descend this low, where the air is thick and stifling, but it’s the only way to find good game for meat and furs.”

“None of my people have ever scaled the peaks, at least not that I know of,” Satou replied. “What’s it like up there?”

“Humans like to farm, and there is no soil that high,” she said as she squeezed between two trees. “It’s cold, windy, the air is thin enough that you would probably have trouble breathing. There is snow all year round.” Despite her size, she was pretty fast, she knew the terrain well and was clearly experienced at navigating it. “I am surprised to see humans even this far up the valley. Why aren’t you down on the plains?”

“My grandfather led his people here to escape oppression,” Satou explained, “they established a farming community in the valley so that they might be free to rule themselves.”

“And you grew up here?” she asked.

“Yes, I have lived on the mountain all my life. I have never seen the lowlands, or at least I have never visited them. I can see them from the terraces on a clear day.”

“Perhaps that is why you behave so strangely...”

“In what way am I strange?” Satou asked, hopping over a protruding root.

“Well for one, you didn’t flee the moment that you saw me. The humans tell tall tales of evil Oni, they say we bring disasters and eat travelers. Only an inattentive child would be so careless.”

“I’m not a child,” he complained, “I’m old enough to marry.”

“You’re the size of one,” she laughed, amused by his indignation. “At least an Oni child, I don’t know how large humans grow.”

“I’m almost five foot six!”

“Is that supposed to be impressive?”

“Maybe not to you,” he grumbled.

“You’re also high-born, isn’t that right?” the Oni asked as she pushed a branch out of her way with a loud creak.

“What of it?”

“Aren’t the high-born supposed to stay inside their fancy castles and never interact with anyone who wasn’t born with a silver spoon in their mouth?”

“Perhaps the upper classes,” he said with a shrug, “but not me. My family might be the leaders of a shoen, but we are still only farmers. We have a respected position in society, even a Shogun cannot live without the rice from our paddies, but we don’t own castles and servants or anything like that.”

“But still, would you say that it’s normal for someone of your class to be running around the woods and exploring?”

“I suppose not,” he grumbled, “now you’re starting to sound like my father.”

She laughed at that, turning to look back at him over her shoulder, her large tuft of hair bouncing as she walked.

“So you don’t pay attention to your elders, you disobey your parents, and you’d rather be out in the woods than sitting on a silk pillow? Maybe we have more in common than I thought.”

She held up her fist and went silent, Satou stopping behind her and crouching low. He waited for a few moments as she scanned the trees.

“Never mind,” she said, “thought I heard something moving around.”

“What are we hunting?”

“Whatever I can get my hands on,” the Oni replied. “Deer mostly, maybe a bear or a wolf if one crosses paths with us. The more pelts I can bring back, the better.”

“Do you sell them?” Satou asked.

“No, we use them.”

He followed her through the woods for a while longer, the conversation dying down as she turned her attention towards tracking animals, but Satou didn’t mind. He was just glad of her company, peering up at her to admire her every so often when he was sure that she was looking away. Her hair was so huge. It was fluffy and bouncy like a cloud, extending all the way down to the small of her back, cascading over her shoulders and contrasting sharply with the dull browns of her cloak. He couldn’t see much of her figure beneath the garment, but she still radiated that confidence that he had found so alluring the first time that he had seen her. It was like she never made a wrong step, so sure of herself, moving with deliberate intent.

Satou was thrilled to be exploring the forest too. As the Oni herself had said, not many humans came up this way, and they were venturing far from the beaten path. He might be the first person to ever tread this ground. Well, the first human in any case. Perhaps the Oni had already explored and mapped the highest reaches of the mountain range? The idea filled him with wonder, he burned with the desire to know what secrets those snow-capped peaks held.

“Quiet,” his giant companion whispered, gesturing for him to stop. He listened intently to the chirping of the birds and the rustling of the treetops, then he heard it too, a distinctive sound like two sticks being scraped together. He peered past her, searching for whatever was making the noise. It took him a few moments, and then he spotted it. There was a majestic stag in the distance, he could just about make it out through the trees. It was grinding its impressive set of antlers against one of the rough trunks and making a racket, trying to attract a mate or ward off rivals perhaps?

“I’m going to get closer,” the Oni whispered, “stay here and don’t make a sound.”

He nodded, watching as she began to creep towards it. She was remarkably quiet despite her immense size, able to move through the undergrowth without making much noise at all. She crouched low, covering herself with her cloak, the skins from which it had been woven concealing her against the woodland backdrop.

Satou realized that she didn’t have a bow or a spear. How would she take the animal down? Surely not with her massive cudgel? She would never get close enough to use that without startling the deer.

He watched with bated breath as she drew ever closer to the clueless creature, which was far more concerned with making a racket than paying attention to its surroundings. She was getting incredibly close to it, freezing like a statue whenever she thought that it might be looking her way. The cloak made her look like a giant clump of brown moss, she blended into the scenery perfectly.

The Oni reached behind her back and slowly drew her cudgel. No way, was she really going to attempt to bring the animal down with that? Was she going to throw it?

When she got close enough to the stag that it ceased its strange activity, turning its head to face her as its ears twitched curiously, the Oni threw back her cloak and loosed a bellow that shook Satou’s bones. Her crimson skin flashing under the sunlight, she charged at the deer, crashing through the forest like a charging ox. She was so massive and heavy, splintering wood and tearing up the undergrowth, but she closed the distance impossibly quickly with her long strides. The stag was so startled that it very nearly fell over itself attempting to escape, stumbling and lurching as its limbs flailed, scared out of its wits by the sudden appearance of the red demon.

It was too late, and the Oni closed, bringing her massive cudgel down on the deer. She landed the blow in the middle of its back and the deer crumpled under the weight of the weapon, loosing a pained cry as it vanished out of view beneath the ferns and bushes. She hit it again with a sickening crunch, presumably in the head as Satou could no longer see it, and the animal went silent.

“Got it!” she declared, resting the cudgel across her shoulder and wiping her brow with her free hand. “Damn it gets hot and humid down here...”

Satou approached cautiously, eyeing the clumps of gore and fur that were clinging to the studs of her iron club. It seemed like overkill to him, like smashing a mouse with a hammer. The cudgel was so large that it might well have pulverized the deer into an unrecognizable pile of mush. She had said that she also hunted bears, however, and that might be a more suitable foe for such a deadly tool.

He felt like he should have been frightened by the sight, but all he could do was marvel at how powerful she was. There was nothing like her in human experience, no one as strong or as fast, no one able to swing such a giant weapon or able to smash through the forest like a rolling boulder.

He peered around her leg, itself almost the size of a tree trunk, seeing the corpse of the deer. Its spine was snapped, and there wasn’t much left of its head beside a pool of blood and bone. As barbarous as her hunting method seemed, the animal hadn’t suffered unduly, it was extremely dead...

“He’s a good sized buck,” she mused, giving it a prod with her foot. She wasn’t wearing any shoes, and her toenails were much the same as her fingernails, black and pointed like claws. “Let’s take him back to my camp and skin him.”

“Your camp?”

“Yeah,” she said as she leaned down to pick up the dead buck by its rear legs, “you didn’t think that I lived in the pool did you?” She swung the animal over her back like it weighed no more than a sack of grain, turning about and heading back the way that they had come.

“I hadn’t really thought about it,” he admitted, following along behind her. “You’re going to get blood in your hair,” he warned, watching as the deer’s ruined head bobbed with every step that she took.

“I’ll wash it out later,” she chuckled, “maybe you can lend me a hand with that?”

Satou blushed, going quiet as she looked back over her shoulder at him with a toothy grin.

The Oni led Satou to a clearing in the forest where she had set up a large tent, made from the same patchwork of animal pelts as her cloak. There was a fire pit in front of it that was full of charred logs, and there was a large iron cooking pot nearby. She made her way over to a tanning rack that was already drying several pelts, dropping the lifeless buck beside it and beginning to carve it up with a nearby knife that was the size of a Samurai’s sword.

Satou wandered around the clearing as she did her work, inspecting the Oni’s campsite. He wasn’t sure exactly where they were now in relation to the shoen, these forests all looked exactly the same. The only point of reference that he had was the nearby mountain that loomed over them, its peak capped with white snow and its bare rock face shrouded in mist. He peeked inside her tent, seeing that it was crudely stitched together from mismatched pelts, supported by a conical structure of branches and logs that were tied together with lengths of vine. It wasn’t quite large enough for her to stand inside it, but that still made it huge by human standards. She slept on a rug that was made up of animal furs, and there was a large bag inside along with a few other sundry items. Was she able to pack all of her belongings in that huge sack and lug it all back up the mountain, along her with her cudgel and her take of furs? She certainly seemed strong enough.

She quickly finished butchering the deer. Before long its skin was drying on the rack, and there was a large pile of meat lying on the grass beside it.

“You like venison?” she asked.

“Sure do,” Satou replied, marveling at the quantity of meat that lay before him. Back in his farming community, the meat was always shared between everyone when there was a successful hunt, which meant that each family got comparatively little. With just the two of them, there was enough food here for him to eat his fill three times over.