Khoe; A Tale of Sadness & Joy Ch. 01

But that was not where the woman was sent. She arrived at what had been an outpost of the prison far to the north. Other than her and one guard, who was one of the indigenous groups on the island engaged as more of a caretaker, she was alone. Once there, she was forgotten officially. The only person who knew and had arranged the often infrequent shipments of food and supplies died of a cardiac infarction at his dacha one winter night a year later and the shipments stopped, but by then, Taeko's mother was no longer there anyway.

She'd made her escape by seducing her guard and the two of them had gone after hearing nothing for several months. That guard was a man of the Nivkh people and was a shaman himself, so out of boredom, they'd grown close and taught each other of their own beliefs.

They lived for a time in the wilderness together, but she had to leave at his insistence when he'd heard that someone somewhere had discovered that there was supposed to have been one prisoner at the prison and that an investigation was underway. That pointed to the only guard and caretaker as someone who would know. Taeko's mother journeyed back to her mainland clan and the man vanished into the taiga forestland even farther north. She'd come back only because it had been stipulated as the place where she could have the details of the impending birth taken care of quietly and where there was a home there for the child.

The two women didn't know each other and they never saw each other again afterward.

After Taeko's birth and the departure of her birth mother, the trawler sailed and did what fishing trawlers do with the 'new mother' and her infant aboard. The fish were running and the village needed the food and the fish to sell. By the time that it pulled into port again, there was little to be seen of any signs of a completed pregnancy anyway and the child's birth at sea was documented by the local authorities, who were Russian, of course.

A half a week later, the same woman took the same infant to the Japanese authorities at a different fishing village on the island of Hokkaido, where the child was given Japanese citizenship, neither nation knowing about the other in this. Little Taeko was raised and taught in both places by members of the same family -- also in both places.

For everyday use, she went by the name Khoe, the name of a small place on the island of Sakhalin.

'Taeko' was what she knew herself as. It was a name which she kept very privately. It was the name which her birth mother had passed on to the woman who had adopted her and raised her for the relative wealth which she was paid to do that by the clan there.

That night in the monsoon, when she'd tried to speak to the woman who she'd learned had given her life, and who stood in the shadows of a barn in the teeming rain not knowing anything of the reasons why she was being pursued by this stranger, she'd pulled back her hood, held up her hand and pointing to herself, had said only 'Taeko'.

After a long moment of shock, the sound of that name had changed everything for them both and her mother knew that the pursuit had been nothing more than a young woman who sought to know her mother. So to a very few people, she was Taeko. To everyone else who might inquire, she was Khoe.

Khoe was the name of the girl who grew up learning to fish on a trawler and hunt in the taiga forests when she wasn't learning many ways to fight or end lives. Her many teachers taught her many things; languages, reckoning, the 'art' of concealment and the skill of disguise. Though she shuttled back and forth between Sakhalin and Japan and understood the Japanese culture as well as the Russian one, in her heart, she loved the wilderness and tramped there alone whenever she had the time for it. By luck or fate, that was how she met her father.

She was hunting alone in the forest and as skilled as she was, she was astounded to find a man next to her in the snow. He spoke to her a little cautiously in the northern Nivkh dialect and she answered just as carefully. Since there are only less than five thousand people of Nivkh extraction on and around the island, and due to the policies of Russian governance over the past century and a half which left only about thirty percent or so still conversant in the language, it didn't take them long to figure things out.

Nivkh people tend to run to the shirt side and she stood a bit above that, equal to him. Her skin was a bit dark for an ethnic Japanese and it was light for an Nivkh person. There is a population of ethnic Japanese there, but the number of people of mixed blood on the island is small indeed. Far easier to find people of Russo-Japanese heritage.

She tried to seek him out whenever she had a chance. She knew how to survive there year-round, having learned from the men in her family, but he had things to teach her and she treasured what she learned. To her, it was the difference between surviving and living well and comfortably in the taiga as though she belonged there.

She'd never told anyone about her father because she knew that he lived as he did because of what he'd done with her mother. She was the result of that, and so to her, it was something which she respected. She asked him once if he thought that he could ever return to a regular life there and he'd shaken his head. With such a small population and with the way that Russian authorities had of never forgetting anything, he doubted it.

Another thing which she never spoke to anyone about was her knowledge -- gleaned over careful evenings, that her birth mother wanted to see her father again and though Taeko had never said anything of it to him, she knew that it was mutual. One day, she thought, she hoped to call in a few favors and arrange for her father to escape his island prison and perhaps they might meet again.

She had it in her to be something of a spy, though not in the way that such things went today. She was adept at gleaning information in many ways; that was all. It was something which had been drilled into her along with everything else.

She had it in her to be a lot of things as needed and if necessary.

Not that there had been anyone in a position to notice or admire it besides the men who had been sent to set this stage, but Taeko also had it in her to be an instrument of her family's vengeance. The four dead young men might one day have had to serve a little time for the brutal sexual assault and murder of her half-sister. Then again, to Taeko's mind, it largely depended upon the quality of the legal firm or firms which had been engaged to defend them. She'd come to circumvent that.

Where she was from, that didn't matter. The clan had existed ages before there were such things as legal counsel and attorneys, before the land under her bare feet now had even had the ability to form itself into anything like the nation which it had become. Her family had done their ancient ways of business before there even was a nation unified into something called Japan or any federation of united soviet socialist republics or the federation that it was calling itself these days.

Long before any of them had even had any sort of criminal code, her family had on occasion meted out their own brand of cause and effect.

That was how it had always been.

When word of the horrific death of her sister had reached her, there were already four men on their way to where it had happened. They ranged in their ages from twenty to forty-seven and between them; they learned what needed to be known and made preparations. Taeko had been in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk at the time. Before the first round of her own tears had even dried, she was on a plane flying over the Tartar straight to the city of Khabarovsk.

She was given the job on behalf of her clan by a representative of another old family, this one Russian, the man telling her that they had sent two of their own in the group out of their respect for her clan and their combined history and since there was no one else available on short notice. Taeko had accepted and then boarded an Aeroflot flight to the west.

If anything, her birth mother knew that she was aware of her sister's passing. She thought it likely that her mother knew that the crime would be answered, but Taeko doubted that her mother had the slightest idea by whose arm that answer would come.

When Taeko had arrived two days after her mother had confirmed the identity of the deceased young woman, there was already the framework of a life for her to step into; already a thick dossier for her to read which covered all that the men had learned for her. The home which she lived in had been rented months before on the unlikely chance that there might be some business for the family in this area, so it would serve by good fortune.

The rest had taken three days to put into effect inside an abandoned abattoir far from where the crime had occurred. Taeko hadn't been involved in the abductions. That wasn't her role in this. She was only there so that she could take their privileged and self-important lives with a piece of steel. The families took care of their own as they always had. She'd been given the honor of the final stroke; that was all.

The young men knew the features and general ethnicity of the girl who they'd beaten, sexually assaulted and murdered. She guessed that it couldn't have been too great a stretch to be faced with an assailant whose eyes resembled those of their victim. Those eyes were all that they saw of her face. Given what was normal and usual in her trade, speaking was unprofessional in the extreme, and she'd said nothing.

There was nothing to be said anyway, though they all begged for their lives. One of them made all sorts of outlandish promises that his rich and powerful father would pay her a lot of money to return him unharmed.

Taeko had stopped her preparations then and looked at him for a long moment as he interpreted the action as something to hope for. He babbled on for a moment, trying to convince this silent woman; the pitch of his voice rising.

She slowly shook her head and waved her hand from side to side a little so that he knew there were going to be no deals here.

She hoped that he could see that this was a lot closer to the heart than that but he didn't get it. She decided that he would be the last and would see the passing of the others before him.

He didn't stop babbling. He thought that he might bargain for his life in the same way that he'd likely sold magazine subscriptions door-to-door when he was a kid. Worst of all, he wouldn't shut up and it gave the rest of them a little hope. It was something that she was not prepared to allow.

Taeko set her blade down on a table and walked to where the babbler stood bound. She looked into his eyes and he still kept on. She held up her hand and waited for him to wind down and once he finally petered out, she whispered one word in English as she pointed to herself.

"Sister."

That shut them up -- at least it took them back to quiet weeping.

Taeko went back to her preparations.

In each case, the images of their second-last sights on earth were of Taeko coming to them with a sword of a type not in use by the famous samurai of long ago. Hers was far more utilitarian, though the type had been seen in a few fanciful movies within the past thirty years. When she walked toward them each time to take the next, the diminishing chorus of frightened screams rose. Taeko didn't care much, particularly. She just thought that it said something that not one of them had a gram of stoicism in them.

It's not difficult to die, she thought, why not just close your eyes and say nothing if you are afraid?

She'd said nothing each time that she'd severed a head, bending down as quickly as she could to lift up the gory trophy by the hair. It had to be done as fast as possible for the final touch.

Their last sights were of their own bodies dying as she held their heads up so that they could see it as they passed. Like everything else in this, there was a tiny bit of tradition.

Holding up someone's severed head to force them to watch themselves die was a very ancient insult.

The bodies were loaded up and taken away by two of the men and a third had handled the distribution of the smaller pieces while she and the fourth did the wash-down of the place. All of it had taken the one long night, especially after the last man left. Each man had sent her a curt text message about fish on her cell and then boarded one of four different flights in two different general directions.

Now, she was tired and her sword arm ached. It was never as easy as it looked in the movies. A human neck is not a sausage and the placement of the killing stroke was important.

She rotated her arm and shoulder as she looked once more at the photographs.

On the whole, she felt empty inside. Though she hadn't known Yukio for more than a couple of years, they did share something and it prevented Taeko from maintaining the distance which she normally felt at times such as this.

It took the better part of three weeks for the feeling of loss to ease for her.

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Kerry Browne had little on his mind today. He needed a few office supplies for his ... 'office', such as it was. That consisted of his laptop for the most part, though every once in a long while, he did need to actually use paper.

Which he now held two blocks of under his arm, along with some black ink and a couple of small brushes. Not ink cartridges, mind you, real ink, the wet kind. The brushes had been an impulse, since when he was here he seldom played at calligraphy, but he was finding that he needed at least some sort of creative outlet these days and he was too busy to do much of anything else.

His uncle had amassed a few fields near to his own either through purchasing them directly or by rental and over the years, he'd farmed mostly cash crops. But the heart attack had stopped things cold late in the winter and a lot of it was out of the question now. That was where Kerry had come in.

Kerry Browne had lived an interesting life to this point -- well, it might have been interesting to him if it wasn't his own, though perhaps to many people it likely wasn't, he'd say. He'd always wanted to be a cop, and with a lot of work, he'd achieved that goal, but once he'd gotten there, he'd found it to be somewhat boring.

Since he'd always been an active sort, he transitioned to a tactical unit and found it a lot more satisfying because of the requirement to stay fit and active. The actual action wasn't all that much to him. He could do that no problem, you just had to remember that you wanted to continue to have a life to go home to at the end of it.

That was the problem.

They hadn't planned it, but there had been the thing with Lauren. They'd worked together often and a friendship had grown out of that. The friendship became an affair, and they loved each other deeply. For the first time in either one's lives, their thoughts turned to marriage and it had amazed them both. But that was dust now and had been for two years.

It hadn't been any of the things which relationships might succumb to in the lives of regular people or even law enforcement officers. It had been just shitty luck which had separated them forever. By luck of the draw, he'd been tasked as the sniper and the overhead eyes in the take-down of a group of particularly rabid gangbangers -- kids mostly -- whose activities with drugs and gun trafficking had gone far into stupid more than once.

The shooter had been high as anything, just like the others and there was no reasoning with him under those circumstances. Lauren had been in the wrong place at the wrong time due to the layout of the junkyard where it had gone down, and a tactical vest can't do a thing to stop a head shot.

Lauren's departure from Kerry's life had crushed him and he found that there was no more wind to fill his sails anymore after that. He'd taken the mandatory leave and tried to come back, but ...

These days, he was just drifting, so when his uncle Robert had called for some help to get a few crops going this year for a bit of money, Kerry had fueled up his truck and headed east. He didn't mind and it gave him something to keep himself occupied with. He'd spent whole summers here as a boy and a teenager, helping out in what used to be the fresh air, though these days the slow creep of urban sprawl was getting a little close to his way of thinking. Where he used to be able to stand on one of the low hills and see nothing but other fields and farms, he now saw subdivisions here and there, so the writing was on the wall.

Kerry still missed his Aunt Rachel and wondered how Uncle Robert had gone on alone for so long, but he had, quite obviously. The couple had never had children and they just acted as surrogate parents to him whenever he'd come to work for them back then. Kerry had arrived in early April and had just gotten started preparing the fields when the roof fell in on him again.

He'd come in one day, covered in mud from the wet fields to find his uncle on the floor. Robert passed within a day, and Kerry then found that he was the sole beneficiary of the will as well as the executor and his busy life grew even busier as he tried to sell off what he could, though with crops already in most of the fields and most of them ready for a first harvest not long after, he planned to get what he could out of the harvest, since it was now his to reap.

He lived in what had been his uncle's house, but there had been a couple of other farmhouses which his uncle had acquired and leased out. Three of them had leases which were running out over the summer conveniently, and he'd already informed the tenants that he wouldn't be offering renewals. Kerry wasn't terribly driven by gain, and he told the people affected that if they were interested in the homes, he might entertain serious offers from them, but only one family had gone for it and that sale was underway. The others had been listed for sale. There was a fourth which had been rented as short-term through a realtor, since his uncle had wanted to tear it down the next year and there was a tenant, though Kerry had never been able to contact the man, so it was on his long list of things to do now.

The weekly checks arrived always two weeks ahead of time and he was careful to cash only the ones which corresponded with the actual date, but he had noticed a change in the handwriting as well as the cheques themselves and it was just another thing that he wondered about and had no time to check into. All that he knew was that the checks cleared the bank every week so he wasn't too bothered about it.

Kerry wanted to close this off and go home, but he saw himself as stuck here until the late summer at least and probably well into the fall. If he could have found a way to turn all of this into a pile of money, he'd already be gone.

'Home' to Kerry wasn't a place yet. Well it was, but it needed a ton of work. He'd bought a home a little in the mountains of his native British Columbia because he and Lauren had stumbled upon it on a vacation and had fallen in love with the possibilities. It had been built by a couple of immigrants from Japan not long after the war, a pair of brothers and their wives. Over the years, they'd lived there quietly, engaging in selling art and writings which they published themselves and sold. The rather remote location had kept the price down and it had been an estate sale. The place needed work like crazy and that was the puzzle to Kerry. He loved everything that he saw in it -- he just didn't know how to go about restoring it.

But he meant to try. Lauren was gone and he needed a home, so ...