You Who Have No NameBy Jens Wilkinson

1In the days when Ryunosuke first came to the mountains, the village of Ryunomi was a forgotten place so far from the center of the world that the sun sometimes lost its way in the mountain trails and the sky stayed dark for days. There were paths that wound up into the mountains, but they were like a deep labyrinth winding between the beech and cedar trees that lined the slopes like a rank of soldiers. Many years later, people would begin to say that the town had taken its name from the old man, but it wasn't true. The village of Ryunomi had borne the same name since times before the leper king when there was not even a path down the mountainside and the people were ignorant of a world outside the boundaries of the village.

For Ryunosuke, it has been a long path to the village. He had wandered the wilderness for more than seven years, down the coast from the imperial Heian capital, the city in the clouds, past the fishing port of Kobe with its emerald sea, past the crystal cliffs of Shimonoseki from which they'd thrown the last prince of the Taira clan, across the Kammon Straights in which the little prince had drowned, and down the coast of hell into the mountains from which they said the first of Japan's imperial line had stepped onto the earth to light it with his glory. There in those forgotten mountains Ryunosuke, had found a place to disappear. To disappear.

Years later the villagers would still remember the day the old man had first tottered through the stone pillars that made up the village gate, pale as a ghost, draped in tattered rags that had just barely survived the seven-year journey, and smelling like a marsh. His dry white beard trailed halfway down his chest. As he knelt down the kiss the ground of this forgotten place the villagers saw behind him four other figures, three men cloaked in the same destitution and one old woman, stooped over so low that her shoulders dragged nearer the ground than her knobbed knees. The old woman was draped, however, in a cloth that none of the villagers had ever seen before. In a moment they swarmed around her and were running their hands

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over her clothes, amazed by the flock of bright painted birds that seemed to be flying up and down the length of her sleeves. They were so overwhelmed by the sight of the silk, trapped by the desire that catches children when they see colorful flowers for the first time, for nothing like the old woman's dress had ever seen in this desolate place, that they didn't see that the old man had stopped kissing the ground and was now crying so hard that a small puddle had gathered at his feet, shocking in its presence because there hadn't been rain there for nearly a month. This was not unusual. Not only the sun, but the clouds as well often lost their way in the mountains that surrounded the village. The paths that wound up into the mountains were, after all, like a labyrinth.

As the dust on the road sank bank to the ground, the village chief approached Ryunosuke. He addressed him in hushed tones, ignoring the other villagers, at least those who had grown tired of the painted birds and were straining their ears to hear any bit of the secretive conversation. The chief was an enormously fat man, incredible for a place with so little food, and so strong that it was rumored he had once killed a bear with a single blow, because in those days black bears still roamed the countryside when they weren't busy changing into human form and playing pranks on poor ignorant villagers. The chief seemed as if he has been destined to take on his ceremonious role; his body thrived even in the bitterest times, when others starved.

Ryunosuke was quite frank. He told the chief bluntly that he had nowhere else to go, that for is old tired body this was the end of a long journey. He might have been slightly disengenious, for if the sun in fact occasionally found its way into the sky over the village, it was only with great effort, and it was unlikely that it would have gotten any further. Not only that, but there were rumors that the Earth dried up at some point, or that it plunged into a terrible abyss, and it is unlikely that Ryunosuke and his party would have dared venture much further.

The chief seemed surprised to hear that the old man intended to stay in the village until the end of his life, wondering why of all places the old man would choose this dustheap at the edge of the

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world. He could not cast away an annoying suspicion, as he was sometimes heard stories of demons in the guise of old men entering villages, eating up the children and disappearing back into the hills to seek new hunting grounds. But just a glance at the old man with tears dripping off his cheeks and the ragged band behind him looking like dry grass ready to be tossed into a fire, convinced him that this old shadow, whether demon or not, would never be match for a man who had once smitten a bear dead with his fists. Besides, the chief guessed that someday he'd be able to extract some tax out of the family. He was a good judge of character. The old man bowed humbly, asking for permission to stay in the village of Ryunomi. The chief lost little time in hesitation. He quickly stood up on the nearest rock, of which there were many because of the lack of soil, and bellowed that the old man would stay and furthermore that they would hold a feast in ten days time to welcome him to the village.

It was a memorable feast. But in the ten days before the special day, Ryunosuke and his ragged band of followers had to settle themselves down in the little village at the end of the world. The old man himself seemed immensely relieved by the chance to plant his feet solidly in any place at all.Even while the others were busy building a place for them to sleep, he would often wonder off to the edge of the village, and spend hours on end sitting on the rocks of the village stream, staring up into the sun. Despite the rays, however, his face remained as pale as it had ever been, and the villagers began to wonder whether perhaps after all he was some kind of ghost that had come down from he sky to haunt them. Ryunosuke's wife Giyo, unlike the old man, seemed driven by a desire to make things better.

This all happened in the days before the Edo shoguns forbid their people from moving through the countryside without official permission, and people gathered from places people had never heard of, places beyond the mountains that surrounded the village, drawn to the village because they had met the little old man with the white hair and whiter face and had a feeling the priests tried to explain later as the will of merciful Lord Buddha that there would be a feast up in the desolate mountains at the end of the world. Some of them arrived

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days late, but it didn't matter because the feast dragged on for so long that even the priests lost count of the days, and the village was so ravaged that people began to lose their way in their own village and sometimes ended up sleeping in huts that weren't their own. But nobody seemed to mind except the chief. He shut himself in his own hut after the third day, angry at himself for having let the old man into the village, and vowed that somebody would pay him back for this fiasco.

A few men came from so far away that they smelt like the sea. Nobody paid much attention to their presence until they took some foul-odored fish of some kind out of their cloth sacks and lit a fire in the middle of the village square to grill them on. This was too much for the fat chief, who came out and kicked the fire out over the protests of the fishermen and despite their offer to let him taste the delicacy they'd brought from the coast. Afterward he vanished back into the doorway and didn't reappear until the mountains had grown calm again. This was the last great feast they held in Ryunomi for it was only a short while after that the shoguns forbid the people from traveling around the countryside without special permission, though in places so far away from the center of the world the soldiers rarely came to enforce the orders and it was always easy to get move to some extent.

During his early days in the village Ryunosuke never told anyone the reason he fled the capital, but people who knew him at that time would later say that he was not a naive man and must have understood that sooner or later the half-wit he had dragged with him across the valleys would be unable to restrain his tongue and would whisper the story into someone's ear and from there his words would spread, likely faster than the wind, down every lane and into every corner of the village as if the stream had overflowed it bank as it sometimes did though there was no chance it would that year. Eventually the cook did tell the story. What was surprising in the whole affair was not that it happened but rather how long the half-wit managed to hold out against the taunts of the village men.

The cook himself had accepted the voyage into exile because he had come to understand after a long career in the shabby quarters

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of the capital that he would never fulfill his dream there, a dream he had told no one but which was to build an inn so great, greater even than the great temples of the ancient capital of Nara, that would move even the emperor to tears. He could see a full painted picture, in fact, of a vaguely feminine figure with a trailing white beard and a great puddle of tears stretching out like Lake Biwa in front of him. He remembered back further than anything else in his life a strange vision, his father dragging him across the countryside though long dry trails to a sight that filled him with something he couldn't describe even now, even though he had learned in the intervening years that it had been the great Buddha in Todaiji, the greatest work of ancient emperors in the days before the capital had begun to fall into its present state of decadence. He had never been back and still retained the same hazy vision of his childhood, and he remembered it as great. But his inn would be greater still.

It was undoutedly because of this vision that the the cook let out the secret one evening in a drunken stupor that Ryunosuke had fled the capital so many years before to escape the ire of a jealous husband, for indeed it was true and it would have been better for him if the man whose wife he had chosen hadn't been the minister of the right, and it might have been alright if he hadn't in his arrogance spent the whole morning in her chambers until he was discovered by her husband. The minister hadn't even looked at Ryunosuke. He had merely glanced down at his wife icely and said to her bitterly, "you little tramp, you let yourself be fooled by him. Why you know, I heard he isn't even any good in bed." Those words had been the worst of the ordeal for Ryunosuke, and as he walked through the countryside he had often thought back on them and wondered where they'd come from, whether the husband had invented them in a fit of jealousy or whether one of his lovers had spread them. In any case he didn't have much time to ask around because he heard soon afterwards that he was being sought by some unsavory characters and he decided the time was ripe for flight.

At that time Ryunosuke would have been able to seduce any of the ladies of the court, for he was the most popular actor in the capital, favored by the emperor and blessed with a taste so delicate

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that the great houses quarreled over the right to have him. A great laughter spread through the village on the night the cook told Gen and Gen told everyone else the story, because finally they understood that the old man's face was white not because of some accident of nature but because he had worn powder every night for so many years that it eventually became a permanent part of his skin. They didn't know that in the beginning of his journey while the others rested he had gone down every night to the edge of the sea and tried to wash the mask off, but somehow he'd been marked. About halfway between Kobe and Shiminoseki in a tiny village he hardly remembered and after three flasks of sake he'd finally abandoned the practice and abandoned himself to the kinship of spirits.

The journey had been more difficult for the old man than for any of the others, for he had been so high and had sunk so low, had seen himself, as few men ever do, reduced to this state of misery from which there seemed to be no outlet. His wife has resigned herself a long time before that this would all happen, because she knew of his nocturnal habits, and the half-wit was so driven by his dream that every new village they crossed seemed to him a wonderful place ripe for his vision, and in fact he usually walked around ever place they stopped and planned the construction, but his disappointment never lasted very long when they moved on the next morning. In fact villages began to blend one into the other until he realized he could build his dream anywhere and it would still be so great that the emperor would weep.

He didn't know then, of course, that his dream would be the source of the great tragedy that was to befall his master many years later, couldn't understand that a little error on his part, insignificant perhaps in comparison to the many things he had done, would start the trickle that would grow into a stream and wash away the village. Even had he known things would not have been any different. Things came and went and his will had little weight in their flow.

Ryunomi and his family arrived in the village just ten years before the arrival of the little boy. The inn hadn't grown into anything like the cook had planned in the early days but he knew these things took time and hadn't resigned himself to failure yet, though he could

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console himself that he ran the best in the town, albeit the only inn in town. Before they built the sprawling structure on a nearby hill the men and women had always eaten in their own homes or in the fields but now the men had grown into the habit of tramping up the hill and spending their evenings in the company of their brothers under the thatched roof listening to the old man's tales of his life in the great city of gold and wondering over the wonderful things that happened in the inn, things they never told their women.

The inn's best customer from the very beginning had been Gen, a prodigious drinker for his tiny size and one of the strongest farmers the village had ever known, inconspicuous but for the fact that his eyes had gone bad years before and the world around him had blurred to such an extent that the ruts in his fields ended up so twisted that other people would get lost. He would stumble into the vaulted drinking room every night before the sun set, often with a face bruised by something he ran into on the way, and by the time he left the others were either sleeping off their sake or dancing around the place. The only man in the village who could drink more was the village chief, and he rarely came in order not to create any friendly bonds with the innkeeper. He needed the taxes more than the friendship. When Gen drank he tended to draw into himself, ignoring everything around him so well that even when there were fights, which there were often enough, he would sit on the bench hunched over his jug and complain to the half-wit about the noise in the place.

He liked to complain because it made him feel more comfortable with the barren world he'd been born into. On the night the boy came he had advised the old man not to let the two shredded figures in. "Ryunosuke," he'd said gravely, "it's a bad sign." He'd been right, of course, but nobody understood that until so much later that by that time people had forgotten he'd even said it and had almost forgotten the day the boy first came into the village. In the end , against Gen's advice and against their own sense they'd let the figures in from the cold.

The boy and his father arrived one night in the middle of the winter, looking as destitute as Ryunosuke himself had seemed during his early days, and the old man took pity and agreed to let them stay

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for free, against the advice of almost every customer, including Gen, but with the bubbling approval of the cook who was elated at the prospect of having his first real customer in the ten years he'd been doing business. It was raining cold rain and the the water had already began dripping into the rooms in the back of the place, but the man didn't complain and the baby he'd carried in on his back didn't even cry throughout the night.

As soon as the old man told him he could stay the wanderer, a pale-skinned and beautiful man, lay the baby out on the bed and went out to drink in the front with the others. The others looked at him suspiciously, but he diplomatically sat down on the vacant bench next to Gen and bowed down deeply to the innkeeper who felt a knot in his thoat remembering how he'd done the same thing to the village chief many years before. Gen, who hardly spoke to anyone, asked the man from whence he'd come and the pale man began to tell him in a whisper nearly drowned out by the rain outside. Little by little his voice rose in intensity amd as the night wore on the other groups gathered around or fell silent until he was the only one speaking. He said he came from an ancient line of kings who'd been exiled from their kingdom seven hundred years before, though he couldn't tell them where the kingdom had been, and he cried as he said that his beautiful wife, fragile as a lily-of-the-valley, had just been stolen out of this desolate world by a terrible fever on the bank of the river- what river he couldn't say either but the men around the table guessed it was the winding stream that tumbled through the village but which would surely grow, the guessed, at it snaked its way toward the sea from which those smelly fishermen had come. The pale man said he hadn't slept a moment for the last passage of the moon and they began to understand the haggard look and the circles under his pale black eyes.

"But I am the last of my line to live in exile." he finally said triumphantly as if a terrible weight had been lifted from his shoulders and he stretched out his arms. "What do you mean?" Ryunosuke muttered over the counter, but the man just shrugged as if he didn't want to say. Others began to tap him on the shoulders, though, and it quickly became clear he wouldn't leave his bench until he satisfied

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their curiosity. "I can't tell," he nearly growled, "I won't speak..." he said, "until

I know the time is right." And just as he said it, as if to fulfil some prophecy a plate rose from the table, still full of rice, and dropped on to the floor, smashing into a tiny pile of porcelain that seemed never to have been a coherent object. The others looked around as if to check their senses but the man merely shrugged. When the ceiling started to shake so violently that plates were smashing all over the dirt floor Ryunosuke jumped up behind him, grabbed his throat and prepared to strangle him. "If one more of my plates breaks I'll break your neck. I had a feeling you would be trouble, but let's not tempt spirits..." Ryunosuke was terribly worried that the spirit, whatever it was, would tear his place down if this man didn't spit up whatever he was going to say. It was a great relief to his nerves when the haggard man began to talk.

A fortuneteller, he said, had told him many years before that his son had been destined, by who she didn't say, to be either a great king or to renounce the world and become a great saviour of mens' souls. He grinned and said that both seemed worthy but that he himself would rather be a king. "Either one," he added, "would be better than the fate I drew." "I don't know," piped in Gen, "Wanderers don't get their heads chopped off." And the place erupted in laughter. But Gen suddenly turned sour again and looked suspiciously at the man. "Only two roads?" he asked. "There is always another one, but the fortunetellers are blind to it."

"Yes, I suppose so," the man sighed.Gen was about to tell a story of a man whose fate had been

completely different from what a priest had said, but he had told it so many times that he felt certain he would be silenced if he even tried. He was also anxious to hear the story of the wanderer.

The haggard man looked up at the thatched roof as if he were preparing to admit a shameful deed. "And listen old man." He looked at Gen, for the first time, and the farmer tried to see into the darkness of the man's eyes, but he couldn't see beyond the glassy film. "I am not a wanderer. In the capital they have men who spend the days drawing pictures in ink of beautiful things, and I am one of them."

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Ryunosuke sighed as he remembered the truth of this, the great scrolls he'd seen hanging on the walls of palaces whose hallways and smells he could still remember after all these years in the wilderness.

Suddenly everybody wanted to see these pictures the wanderer had made but the pale man confessed sorrowfully that he didn't have any. "So many times I've tried to make beauty, just like those men in the capital do every day. But the world around me is too beautiful," he explained. "I can't injure it with my clumsy hand..." They all laughed and in their revel didn't see that the man was crying again.

He disappeared before dawn. Nobody was quite sure when he'd left but in the morning they found the baby crying on the bed and the man's belongings gone. All that remained was a small scroll scribbled upon in ink. At first Ryunosuke supposed he had finally decided to try his luck but it became clear as he examined it that they were words. He couldn't read them, though, and the village chief had to send a youth from the village down to the temple in the valley to have it interpreted by one of the priests.

It turned out to be a plea for forgiveness for the night he spent uninvited and for the innkeeper to take care of the boy he'd left behind. This is the way little Taka found his way into the village. Ryunosuke didn't hesitate a moment to decide to keep the boy, but the household was thrown into disarray by the new member of the family. Ryunosuke had been so full of sympathy for the poor wanderer that he was happy to relieve him of this burden. Giyo, his wife, who had never forgiven her husband for having dragged her along to the end of the world, was furious. "First you let your lust ruin us and now you expect me to raise a child that isn't even ours!" In the end, though, she fell in love with the child and forgot it wasn't of her blood.

When Giyo began to take care of the little boy, against her will as it was, her husband looked at her carefully for the first time in many years and noticed how much younger she seemed than what he remembered, as if this little place had rejuvenated her flesh as well as spirit. He asked her and she confirmed with a laugh that it was true indeed, that she'd noticed the same thing in him years before and that it must have been, she guessed, that he had last seen her, or

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seen her truthfully, on the journey from Kyoto, in the days when their lives were so full of pain." Our faces," she said, "seemed older then, because they were marked by so much trouble."

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2In which the old man Gen dies, his son comes to work at the

inn with Ryunosuke, Giyo and the half-wit cook, and in which a little boy named Taka is abandoned at the inn.

Gen died early that spring. Throughout his life he'd believed he was fated either to prosper and raise a happy family or to starve in his old age, but had neglected to remember that in his case too there was a third path. His two sons Oka and Kan trodded up the barren hill among the just blossoming rose mallows to let Ryunosuke know he had lost his best customer, and Ryunosuke immediately offered to help the family in whatever way he could. "We don't need any of your help, old man," Oka, the elder boy said. Ryunosuke didn't understand the significance of the boy's words until later when he walked down into the village and learned the old farmer had blundered, in a blind stupor, down the opposite side of the hill and had wandered in a panicked run around the countryside for hours looking for the village he was sure had been taken away by evil spirits until he finally collapsed with his heart broken by exhaustion. The family naturally blamed the innkeeper for letting Gen drink so far.

Ryunosuke was crushed by the revelation. When the village chief went up to the inn to talk try to reconcile the families he found the old man stretched out on the floor with a pool of vomit at his side and a broken flask of sake in the palm of his hand. The chief had never seen the inkeeper drink before and was so incredulous at the sight that he didn't help the old man to his bed but instead went through the spacious building to search for the others. He discovered the half-wit missing and guessed he had gone for provisions, and then he found the old man's wife on the sleeping mats crying. The baby was screaming so loudly that the house was shaking. When the old woman saw the chief she sobbed softly, "Look what's happened now."

Together they cleaned the old man's clothes, carried him up to his mat and laid him out to sleep. Years later Ryunosuke wouldn't even remember that night, and it was perhaps better for him for it allowed him to dissipate some of the guilt he felt. For a long time afterward, though, they left the bench where Gen sat empty.

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The two boys stopped coming after that and didn't go back to the inn until nearly a year laterwhen Kan started to work there. They never were truly reconciled with the death of their father. In fact though the ties between the old man and the two of them had been strained for a long time, since Ryunosuke found them one day in the back of his storehouse with their hands full of some sweet he'd been planning to serve his customers later on as a surprise, they had seemed to degenerate further after the death. Ryunosuke knew that old farmer Gen was one of the wealthier villagers and he was surprised his sons would be so ill-mannered as to steal provisions. He never told Gen about it, though later he began to think that things would have been better with the boys if he had. They were only seven and five years old when they broke into his storehouse, and in later years he would hear increasingly disconcerting stories of their exploits. Years later there were even some who said that the two boys had in fact killed their father, led him into the wilderness, so that they could inherit his farm. If those stories were true the boys had been foolish as well as cruel. The family's fortunes plummeted after the father's death.

Only days after Ryunosuke first heard the news their pigs began to die one by one as if they couldnot bear to go on living without their master. The first one was struck by a freak lightning bold thatexploded out of a cloudless sky, burning several trees along with the hapless pig. The second,which had always been well behaved before the incident, suddenly scurried out of the village threedays later and was never seen from again, and the third, seeming to follow its sibling's lead, boltedout into the wilderness the morning after but was found impaled in a trap the villagers had left tocatch deer. The fourth and fifth, in apparent shock over the dissappearance of the others, stoppedtaking food or water and then six days later caught a terrible disease never seen before. Their skinerupted in blistering pustules and began cracking so badly that the

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pigs were squealing ceaselesslythroughout the night and Gen's sons realized that only thing to do would be to kill the poorcreatures. The villagers kept a close watch on the other village animals for a long time afterwardbut whatever they had never spread beyond the confines of Gen's old farm.

Even after it became apparent that they couldn't manage the fields by themselves Ruyunosukecouldn't help remembering the time they'd come to steal his goods and was loathe to help them inany way. One night the village chief walked up to the inn and suggested, in a none too friendly way,that it would mend some of the feelings if Ryunosuke hired one of the boys to work in his kitchen.The old man didn't need the help even though the two old servants he'd brought along had died inthe intervening years but accepted in order not to cross the chief, his acceptance based on thecondition that it be Kan and not Oka because the elder boy had an icy gleam in his sunken eyes thatdisconcerted the old man and gave him confidence in his belief that the ill luck that had befallen thefamily was somehow brought on by those eyes.

In the days Kan first started working at the inn the baby Taka was just beginning to take his firsthalting steps. In fact the child was to become the vessel of reconciliation between the old man andthe boy named Kan, long before the baby could have any understanding of the part he was playingin the drama, long before he could understand that he was playing for the first time the functions ofthe long line of kings he had had the misfortune to be born into.

In the beginning the young Kan refused to speak to the old man and acknowleged his infrequentrequests with a silent nod and a puzzled stare into the imaginary

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space behind the old man.Ryunosuke tried his best to awaken the boy's sympathy in order to relieve his own guilt over thefather's death, and so it wasn't soon before he realized that Kan seemed to take an interest in thebaby. He told his wife to let the new boy take care of the child from time to time. His wife was furious when she heard this. "First you expect me to take care of some stranger's child, and once I begin to feel as if it were my own you expect me to give it over to the care of some poor farmer's boy!"

Ryunosuke exploded. "Some poor farmer's boy? You foolish woman. Don't you forget that his father was my dearest friend in this world. Don't you forget that."

She answered icily. "Friend or no friend, that boy's a thief, and I won't have him taking care of my child."

She was adamant. This conversation would really have had little significance in the relationship between either of them, for they often quibbled over things of little importance, but Kan had been within earshot and had heard the whole exchange, and in the space of those few lines he'd begun to understand that there was nothing for him to reproach the old man for. Afterwards he began to play with the baby when Giyo was away and became the second human being the baby came to know, closer either than the adopted father or the half-wit who never considered the baby more than a nuisance until it grew large enough to be able to start helping him in the kitchen.

That summer, in the baby's second year, Kan's brother Oka began coming back to the inn and proved himself as great a drinker as his father. The first time, after a day spent slaving up in the hills cutting wood for the village chief and on orders of someone even greater, he walked though the front door as if he'd been there the night before, sat down, and bellowed across the counter, "let me have some sake old man." His brother was so surprised that he dropped the dish he was carrying which smashed into a spray of clay fragments, reminding the old man of the baby's real father who had passed through so many years before.

The older boy had grown into a stunning image of his father.

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For a moment Ryunosuke thoughthis friend had come back from the dead and clasped his hands but then he realized that the fatherwould have been much older than the face across the counter and he realized that the older son wasfinally ready for reconciliation. Later on in the evening the village chief even scrambled up the hillto see for himself if it were true, and he didn't even order anything, but just stuck his head inthrough the new sliding door, looked around, and disappeared back into the night.

Even Ryunosuke's wife Giyo, who usually stayed in the sleeping room with the child, came outunder the pretext of tidying "this filthy place", as she put it, and then sat down in the corner with ascowl etched across her face and a began nibbling at the bowl of rice in front of her. If it had been ausual night Kan would have gone into the back and watched over the child in her absence but hewas so proud of the presence of his brother and so ashamed of having dropped the dish in front ofhim that he strutted back and forth with an energy nobody had ever seen before in this forsakenplace at the end of the world. In the end he sat down with his brother and the innkeeper and theystarted to sing a song Gen had loved when he'd still been of the same world. Later other people inthe room would report having seen a pale white presence floating around the room and wouldswear that the old farmer had been there but with a face devoid of any sign of pain.

The joy of reunion was short lived because a terrible typhoon descended onto the village the nextmorning. Ryunosuke hadn't had the time or energy to close up the place properly the night beforeand the inn was badly damaged. For three days the sky seemed to be

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made of water and the windlashed at people, trees and houses with the fury of waves. The torrential rain kept everyone indoors.The fat old chief feared the nearby mountains would dissolve into mud and sweep the village awaybut didn't have the courage to rise from his comfort. One house, which belonged to an old childlesscouple, was washed away into the swollen stream and the villagers didn't even bother to gosearching the valley for their remains. After the weather cleared the village gathered in the centralfield, more like a pond at that time, and dedicated a small uncarved stones to their memory.

Many years later Ryunosuke would remember that morning the sun came up for the first time inthree days. At first it had seemed a wonder but soon the burning rays turned the water into anoppressive steam that burned the skin and made breathing nearly impossible. The villagers quicklyretreated into the shade of their huts, though even the solid bamboo walls could not keep out thevapor, so thick that the village children stood in silent fascination watching it seep through the wallsof their cottages.

It turned out to be a gross mistake when the woman appeared in the town in tatters a week later.She had been carried nearly down to the sea, owing her life to a log she'd happen to get caught on,and had climbed all the way back through a succession of villages whose names nobodyremembered. A long branch still dragged from her hair as proof of her exploit.

Her husband had drowned, though, and at the woman's angry insistence a priest was brought upfrom down the valley to carve the name on the stone. By the time he arrived the village had been

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mostly restored to its former its self and the paths had relapsed into their former dusty selves. Thethatching on all the huts had to be redone and some needed new frames, but for the most part thedamage was easily undone. At first some of the villagers blessed with cruel hearts had proposedthat they abandon the old woman in the mountains as she had no husband, but Ryunosuke's wifeGiyo promised she would keep the her fed, arguing so persuasively that the fat old chief had nochoice but to let the others build another small cottage near the washed away hill where she hadlived before.

The inn sustained more damage than most of the other homes in the village both because of itssize and location on the side of the hill above the town. On the first night after the water recededback into its traditional banks the kitchen was emptier than usual but Ryunosuke insisted on servinghis customers in the devastated dining hall while Kan and the cook carried out harried repairs onthe structure. Kan was sure the roof would collapse on them at any moment but it didn't, and by theend of the night the place looked presentable enough that the customers didn't feel any obligation toleave early and Ryunosuke never thought of asking them to. From the second night the inn was aslively as usual.

The calm was broken on the third night, though, when the village chief stormed in and began toberate the village men for the sloth. "There are people struggling to survive down the valley, andyou are all here filling your bellies with sake!" He neglected, in is anger, to mention the fact thathe'd been ordered by the local authorities to assemble his men into a work crew to help the

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reconstruction of less fortunate areas. Most of the customers understand this but Kan's brother Okadidn't. "What do you mean?" he spitted.

The chief walked over to his bench and barked into his nearest ear, "I mean," he paused, "that youare going to be in the square first thing tomorrow morning and are going to follow me down thevalley to help our less fortunate brothers. That's what I mean."

"And?" the boy asked."And," and the chief paused again, longer than the first time.

"You'd better go home and get somesleep." Oka just snickered quietly. It was clear he was drunk. The chief's face darkened like a stormcloud.

Ryunosuke saw a scene approaching and decided to act before it was too late. He asked the chiefto leave the boy alone, pleading that he'd been drinking and probably didn't mean what he'd said.The chief refused to accept that and flushed a deeper shade of crimson, and with a vindictivenessthat surprised even those usually on good terms with him ordered everyone out of the inn.Ryunosuke protested vehemently, and the the chief suddenly turned to him and bellowed, "Whydon't you stay out of this, old man. You don't need to come!"

That was too much. "Old man?" Ryunosuke demanded. "Why I don't think I've seen a singlesummer more than you."

"But I promise you you won't see as many more as I do, old man." The chief seemed to chew thelast phrase.

"Well we'll see about that, won't we."The conversation died and the men filed out of the inn.

Ryunosuke knew he'd lost the row buthe'd at least set out a challenge. That night the two men started a long waiting race that wouldn't

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end until the day so long away when the village would be wiped from the face of the earth the waythe old couple's hut by washed down the valley by the overflowing stream, and scarcely a day wentby without the two men glancing at each other, scrutinizing the aging bodies for signs of impendingdeath. The awareness of the challenge soon spread throughout the village and became a matter ofpublic concern. Neither of them could so much as cough without setting off flurries of excitementwhich wouldn't settle until it became apparent after a few days that they would each remain,stubbornly, in this world for a very long time. At the very end of the race it began to seem more andmore that stubborness was all the propelled them.

Later on it began to take on the weightlessness of comedy but on the night the words wereuttered so heavily Ryunosuke went into the room, cast himself on the mats and burst out cryingbitterly. His wife left the baby's side to begin stroking his hair and asked what was wrong. "Am I todie in this desolate place?" was all she could get out of them despite all her coaxing. She didn't saywhat she wanted to say, which was to ask by what right he was complaining about this place whenhe was the one who'd dragged her for seven years and four months on muddy trails, just to forgetthe world.

In the end Ryunosuke went along with Oka and Kan, less reluctantly than the others, to help theother villages who'd suffered more heavily the anger of the typhoon. The chief accepted thepresence of the two boys wordlessly but decided despite their hard work that they were disobedientand dangerous. He watched over them as if they weeds growing in a garden of golden fruits,

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waiting for the right moment to tear them screaming out of the ground so that they wouldn't sproutagain. It wasn't until much later that he realized how clear-sighted he'd been.

Ryunosuke and the chief trodded down the path side by side but without exchanging a singlephrase. They eyed each other haughtily, watching for signs of the others decay, measuring the workthe other had done, the chief imagining that Ryunosuke's paleness would suddenly spread to hislimbs and he'd collapse gasping for air, and Ryunosuke fancying that the fat man would fall in a pitsomewhere and perish on his back like an insect, kicking his legs but not able to lift himself out ofthe prison. Their contest ended in deadlock.

Oka got his revenge on the chief by stealing two young women from the devastated village, onefor himself and one for his brother Kan, and this was the beginning of the rumors of sexual exploitsthat began to plague the family. Kan protested at the prospect of stealing a woman from a family insuch straights so his brother went around the village until he found one whose father, mother, aunts,uncles, grandfathers, grandmothers, brothers, sisters and livestock had all perished in thecatastrophic autumn storm, picked her up around the waist and dropped her to the ground at thefeet of his brother. "This one's yours." he laughed. In those days it was looked upon badly to takebrides from outside the village.

She had a flat face a bit like a ceramic plate and in fact bore a great resemblence to the man she'dbeen chosen for. It was impossible not to be taken aback by the fact that Oka and Kan werebrothers. Oka was inconspicuous but for his temperament. Like his father his eyesight was

21

degenerating at an early age in an age when it was rare, and like his father he drank prodigiously.Kan, on the other hand, was practically without a nose, having been graced with a smallproturbance that might have been a mole had it not been for the two nostrils, and seemed always tobe smiling. Kan's woman, too, had a grin carved into her features. Her name was Sasa.

Sasa was quickly welcomed into Ryunosuke's clan, perhaps most importantly because the old manwas happy to have any young women in the house, not only to satisfy his own perversities butbecause he thought it important for the baby to have a woman the age of his natural mother aroundhim.. In those days Kan hardly slept in his birthplace, had given up his childhood allegiance to theplace where his mother and brother still lived when he'd began working at the inn. There was stillplenty of unused space, despite the spacious area set aside for guests who never appeared, in thecorners of the great sleeping hall that filled the north end of the place, and the girl quickly settled inas if she'd been living there since her birth. There was some tension, understandably, between thenew woman and Ryunosuke's old wife, especially when decisions had to be made about the babythat was now beginning to have pretensions of speech. Sasa was stupified to see the lengths towhich Giyo would go to protect the child, and often chided the old woman, complaining that thiswas the desolation at the end of the world and not the city of dreams at the center of the world, andthat people couldn't afford to give their children such comfort. "You're going to make a littlenobleman, and what we need is a cook," she once commented offhandedly, and Giyo quickly

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responded, "He comes from a line of kings."Sasa laughed when she heard this and laughed all the way

through the story which Ryunosuketold in an all too solemn voice that only served to make it sound sillier that it might have been. Shebegan refering to the baby as "King Taka" and the name stuck.

Red Arai, one of the village's wealthiest farmers, was furious when he heard the new name for thechild. His nickname had been granted him long before in his youth because of a streak in his beard,running straight down his chin, the perfect color of the summer sunset. He was an old and bitterman. He had been in the crowd that gathered around Ryunosuke and Giyo touching her beautifulcloth when they first came, and had detested the other man from the very beginning. "He doesn'tknow how to work, he just knows how to make pleasure," he would tell anybody who'd listen.

But Red Arao underestimated the power of that pleasure. In the whole village there were only afew older farmers and woodcutters who listened to the old man's calls and stayed away from the inn,and even they occasionally let themselves be dragged up the hill to spend a long night surroundedby the haze of sake. Arao, however, began to gather power in the town, and after Gen's deathbecame one of the most powerful and influential, helped undoubtedly by his constant efforts to gainthe favor of the chief and, incidentally, by the fact that they were cousins.

When Red Arao lost his temper over the fact that the child was being called a king, however, itwasn't really the title but rather the fact that he and his wife had been condemned to childlessnesswhile the innkeeper had been granted the favor of some spirit and had managed to get his hands on

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a healthy baby who was now starting to speak and would soon be able to start working. A fewyears later Kan's brother Oka would die and the innkeeper would inherit yet another child, and atthat time the unfairness of the world would become too large a burden for Red Arao to bear. Thefirst one was tolerable but humiliating.

He went into the inn that night and asked for a flask of sake, ignoring the flabbergasted look onthe innkeeper's face, and then without even asking slipped into the back room to see the small childGiyo was caring for, and Ryunosuke, who had heard of what the farmer had been saying about thechild, was afraid he the child would be strangled and ran in front of the old farmer. "I only want tosee it, fool," Arao practically spit across the mat. "Yes, of course," answered Ryunosuke, whosehair and face were whiter than they'd ever been, and led the wrinkled farmer back to where thechild was playing. The old farmer began to cry and left the inn without drinking the wine he'dordered.

Arao returned the next day with the fat chief. They made quite a contrast, the enormous bulk ofthe chief waddling up the hillside with sweat pouring off his face like a stream and the diminutivefigure following behind him, practically eclipsed in the shadow. He said he merely wanted to showthe head of the village the wonderful health of the child, but in reality he meant to pass a curse overits future. He'd remembered the old woman whose husband was washed away in the floodmuttering some evil words when she found out she'd been cremated in absencia, and he'd gonedown to her cottage the night before to find out just what they were. Such was the depth of his

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jealousy. His anger might not have been so violent if he or his wife had

been infertile. In fact, however,they had been a prolific couple in their youth and had faithfully produced a child a year for nearlytwenty years, but from a combination of congenital frailty and bad luck none of the babies hadsurvived their first year. But Arao, used to babys' faces being pale green, was so moved by theresplendent pink of little Taka's cheeks that he forgot his pronouncement and went homewondering why he'd brought the chief up there in the first place. Later on when he remembered heplanned to go back but the chief became suspicious and persuaded him that any healthy child waswelcome in the village. In the end Red Arao abandoned his plan.

It was perhaps not because of the curse that the child fell terribly sick the next morning. Giyo,habitually careless of such matters, noticed that the child's skin was yellow and she asked Sasa, whonearly screamed as she proclaimed the name of the deadly, contagious illness. In the end the childdid not die and the disease did not spread thoughout either the village or even the household, so itseemed she'd been mistaken. Her misdiagnosis was normal in times when the plague was soepidemic that whole villages would often perish in a single sweep of pain.

Little Taka did not escape unharmed, however, for he paled from the force of the demonsweeping through him and never recovered his previous color. It seemed to many that his skin wastaking on the appearance of his guardian, and Ryunosuke began to speculate, although privately,that what the father had meant by throwing away the world might have been that the child would

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escape to the capital and take up Ryunosuke's previous life.The scars the boy bore were more that just the sallow skin. He

never quite regained the strengthhe'd lost in the struggle he would never remember in his later years, even at the end of time as hewatched the Yamato army wipe the village from the face of the world.

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3In which Taka grows up, and in which a monk named Jozan tells

the villagers the story of the leper king, about which the young man named Oka is very impressed.

The village of Ryunomi was laid out on the bank of the small stream that cascaded through the center of the valley, but just upstream of the last farm huts the water widened into a small pond full of floating water lilies that the children used as boats, ripping them off their roots and sending them to founder in the stream's rapids. At the end of Taka's second year of life his adopted mother decided it would be a peaceful place to bring up a child, out of the smoky air of the inn, and she began to take him down there in the afternoons to bask in the evening sun.

She sometimes left him alone on the bank while she went up into the nearby woods to collectmushrooms, but then one day he fell into the pond and would have drowned had he not been ableto pull himself out of the muck. She found him soaked and muddy and screaming as if a demon hadtried to steal him away. This didn't deter her from leaving alone, though, and it wasn't until an oldwoman found the child talking to a snake wrapped around his neck and alerted Ryunosuke to thesituation that she stopped the strange practice. Ryunosuke himself was less saddened by the factthat he'd been left alone than that he spoke to snakes rather than to people. He wondered pehaps ifthey'd let him crawl too much in his infancy and he'd aquired the habits of a serpents. He tried toaddress Taka in hisses but the child merely laughed at the strange sounds he made.

Later on Ryunosuke remembered a snake he'd seen once during his childhood in the capital. Inthose days he often found himself reminiscing on his youth, perhaps because of the baby or perhaps

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because certain things seemed to be repeating themselves, and the conviction gradually grew in himthat good fortune was to be born out in the wilderness as little Taka had, far away from nightmarauders, safe from everything but the power of the earth itself, and nobody could be immunefrom that. His own birth in the center of the world seemed the greatest misfortune he could imagine.

The half-wit laughed at him for this propsterous belief. "There's nothing here," he lamented, "butmountains." He regretted the things he'd left behind in the great city of gold, the great palace andmost of all the towering bronze Buddha he'd seen as a child, seated so peacefully on its lotus bed.

Years later Ryunosuke would think back to the half-wit's nostalgia with an almost childlike glee,because one day a monk with bright red cheeks who came up from the sea told him that up in thehills above the village, near the twisted tree, there had once been the greatest temple in the entirekingdom, that the leper king had built it there because his sages had told him it was a sacred spot.

"The leper king?" Ryunosuke had never heard of such a strange idea. He imagined the poor king'sarms rotting away as he sat crosslegged on a lotus pond.

The monk, whose name was Jozan, explained with simple words, interupting himself at frequentintervals to pick up some thread he'd neglected, that the leper king's kingdom had been founded atthe edge of the ocean down the valley some, well he didn't know how long before it had been butfor some reason he couldn't remember it had been crushed by the emperor of Yamato, and all thatremained had been the great temple but in time even that crumbled into dust.

"You can still see the outlines on the mountain," he claimed,

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and indeed when they stepped outonto the hillside they could make out the dim outlines of a stone foundation. Taka, who was thennearly five years old, was enraptured by the story and asked Ryunosuke if they could build it onceagain. The old man lauged, and said, "As soon as your chores are finished." He expected the boy toforget by that time but he didn't, and he began to dream of the great temple that had once stood inhis little village at the end of the world.

Later on, when the day's work had been finished and the half-wit cook had lit the cooking fires inthe inn, the priest admitted to the curious villagers, after a few cups of sake, that he did know muchmore about the leper king than he'd let on at first. He agreed to tell them the whole story, though hewarned it would be long and perhaps frightening. The cook was happy to hear the first description,because a long story would mean abundant sake and abundant money for the inn.

"I told you it was the story of the leper king, but that's really not true, because there were manyother people. The leper king's father was a terrible man they called the conqueror. They say he wasalready crazy as a child and was so full of life that he could skip across the stream like a flat stone.They say he was born in one of these villages in the hills, and I suspect it was here, not becausethere is any sign left but because this is where the leper king chose to build his great temple, and Isuspect he chose it as the birthplace of his father.

"By the time he became an adult it was clear to everyone he was crazy. Nobody understands thereasons clearly anymore, but when he reached his sixteenth birthday he suddenly left the village,with a small group of youths, and went down the valley to the town by

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the sea, the town where mytemple lays. That is why we know the story."

The priest let the story be interupted by the first few stalks of onion brought fresh off the fire, andate them with a serious look on his face. The others, who had spent the day setting rice plants in theflooded fields, devoured theirs though with less apparent pleasure. The priest was used to theblandness of temple food, so the spices the innkeeper used were one of the pleasures of traveling upthe countryside. He continued, though, and the cook left some roots burning on the grill to hear thestory, because he found it difficult to concentrate on cooking food when somebody was talking ofsuch momentous events.

"In the town people remembered the conqueror for a long time, because even down there in aplace with so much bustle he stood out, perhaps, they say, because his eyes seemed always to burn.It was if some terrible thing had befallen him and the anger had carved itself into his face.

"As he grew older and stronger he started to assert himself, murdering those who stood in hisway, and working his way into the circles of the elders. Then one day, for reasons nobodyunderstands and perhaps even then did not understand, he was declared the heir of the chieftain,who did not have any children and was rumored to by barren. Just like that... Only the godsunderstand what drove the old man to the strange conclusion. Perhaps it was threats, perhapsthings more unnatural.

"Whatever the reasons, the chieftain soon died and the boy was left as inheritor of the villagetreasures. Soon he showed himself discontent with that and declared himself the king of Osumi."

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There were a few laughs, but the priest waved his hand. "Don't be surprised yet! You'll see thatlater he named himself king of the island and then went on to declare himself rightful usurper of theEmpire of Yamato. He might as well have called himself king of the world. But you see he wassmart, because in those days Yamato was just beginning to assert its power, and the farmers wereangry, poor, starving, and when the conqueror offered to free them from their misery they wereoverjoyed. They were of the race they called the Hayabito, the race who are our ancestors, and theysaw in him the possibility of victory.

"The conqueror was merciless in his dream. He started with nearby villages, murdering those wholived from the riches of Yamato and setting up his own people as chieftains, and before long hiskingdom spilt over the mountains and down the coast until he ran into the first castles the Empirehad built, and although the battles were hard he burnt many towns to ashes.

"It was said that after the bloodbaths he would come back triumphantly into the city and sit fordays at the window of his tower, watching the sun rise and fall over the ocean, perhaps dreamingthat one day he would conquer the sea as well as the land.

"His kingdom spread, and some really believed he would conquer the kingdom at the center ofthe world. In those days they say the sun stayed up even at night so happy it was to feel the warmthof the conqueror's power.

"Of course in the end he was defeated. It was not by his enemy, but by his very son, by the boy hehad brought up to be his heir. Somewhere during the conquests the boy had heard stories of China,the great kingdom beyond the seas, and from the first words he'd

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become impassioned with thetales of mountains higher than clouds and cities of gold. Most of all it was the stories of the templethat impressed themselves in a twisted pattern on his spirit, and it was perhaps the same afflictionthat befell his father. They say he actually traveled to China, on a small ship he took from his father,and that when he returned his father cried and said he hadn't slept a night in seven years out of fearhis only child had perished.

"The boy was the only thing the conqueror really cared for, but the boy repaid the kindness bytaking over the palace. He'd brought back with him a group of priests, who advised him carefully,and one morning he calmly told the old half-crazy man that the palace and the great army were nolonger his. The conqueror hugged his son and wished him luck, and the only mercy the boy showedon his father was to lock him in his room at the top of the tower and let him open the hinges everyday so that he could contemplate the sunset as he had done in the days after the conquests. The oldman was thus given the joy of seeing the disintegration of his empire.

"I don't really know if this was true, but it is easy now to imagine the old man staring out of thewindow onto the sea that stretches out forever in every direction except the West, because that iswhere the great land lies, remembering all the things he'd done, remembering the blood he'd seenspilt on the hills all the way up North to the Kammon Straights, remembering how the hills hadbeen green until he'd stained them with the blood of so many warriors that nobody could wash thered out any longer, and he remembered the nights he'd spent in camp out among the bamboo forestslistening to his brave men tell stories of their day's battle. I don't

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know whether he really missed allthis or not but I can imagine he did.

"But it is well known in the valley that everything changed when the leper king took the kingdomaway from his father." He hesitated for a moment as he'd forgotten a part of the story. "Yes, theleper king. You see, I said before that he'd brought back monks from China, but he also got sick onhis journey, and little by little his body desintegrated. Some say now that he might not haveinherited the illness of his father, that his own madness might only have been a result of his leprosy.In any case it is certain that his desire to take the kingdom from his father was spawned in theknowledge that his own years were numbered.

"And now I'll begin the story of the great temple that once stood on the hill. They say that if whatdrove the conqueror was desire, it was justice that drove his son to his folly. Perhaps it was theteachings of the priests he'd brought back from the great land, but even before he imprisoned hisfather in the tower the leper king had set his entire existence, indeed the existence of his kingdomitself, on a plan to build the greatest temple the world had ever seen. He was sick, he said, and itwas recorded by the priests, of the terrible things his father had done. His soul was weary of theblood that had been shed in the conquest of the kingdom, and besides this he feared divineretribution. He felt that if he built a great temple to Lord Buddha, greater than those he'd seen inthe cities of gold across the sea, that the gods would forgive his father's merciless.

"And so he set his army to building the thing, a wooden and stone shell that he said would be sogreat it would eclipse the mountains that stood around the village, so

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tall that even from the sea thepeople would see its shadow stretching down the valley...

The priest was ready to continue, but the air suddenly darkened and the half-wit cook begged himto pause for a moment, just enough time so he could throw away the fish he'd burned and put somemore on the fire. The priest agreed and leaned back to the floor, running the story through his mindjust to assure himself he hadn't left out any of the major incidents. It seemed odd to him all of asudden that he was telling a story that would finish with the destruction of the temple, the village,and the flight of the villagers into the mountains. He looked at the men gathered around him andwondered if the same thing might happen again. He imagined the tiny village burning with the lightof a thousand cooking fires, not knowing that years later his thoughts would probably have beenunderstood as prophesies if anybody had remembered that the village had even existed.

The cook took a long time preparing the main course, perhaps because he was in such a state ofexcitement over the terrible story, imagining the blood running down the mountains, imagining thestream itself turned red, that he couldn't even remember the way to cook the things he cookedevery other day without difficulty. He dropped a dish and it shattered in the corner.

As soon as Ryunosuke, Giyo, Kan and the cook had restored the inn to its pristine condition thepriest continued his story. The air inside the building was beginning to grow stale.

"It must have been colossal, as you can see from the ruins, but I don't know how far it stretchedin reality. I don't know how high it was. It is said the leper king wanted to build a tower in the

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center, so high that he could walk up its steps and join the most merciful Lord Buddha in hisheavenly abode, without understanding it takes more than a stairway. The leper king put his wholekingdom into the effort, so much that he didn't even listen to those warning him about the armiesgathering like weeds in the hills to the North. Perhaps he thought they would see the great templeand forgive all the killings and all the disgraces they'd suffered.

"But they didn't, of course. The leper king had a son, and it was in his son's fifteenth year that thearmies invaded the valley, breaking back the last desperate efforts by the conqueror's great army tohold the land they'd conquered with the blood of so many friends.

"His son, the leper king's son, was another crazy man. I don't know what it was with that line, butsurely some evil spirit had targeted them from the very beginning when the conqueror was just achild light enough to skip over water. The young prince sought only pleasure. In all his years herefused to deal with the affairs of his father. In the end he fled, before the armies burnt down thecastle and the temple, taking with him a girl so young that even the Chinese priests had beenscandalized. He disappeared into the mountains, and was never seen from again.

The priest seemed to have finished, but he had left certain roads explored in the tale and the roomerupted with voices demanding details or explanations. The priest thought it interesting that hecould almost guess the questions he'd be given just by thinking of their minds.

"How old was the girl?" asked Oka."What did the temple look like?" asked Ryunosuke.The little boy was shouting, in a squeaky voice barely audible

above the din, that he wanted to

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know what happened to the leper king and his terrible father. The priest seemed most interested bythat question.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I made many mistakes, I left out too much. I'm not much of a story teller,really. You see, we priests have the sutras written out and all we have to do is recite the words,whether we understand them or not. It's easy, you see, and now I find myself not evenunderstanding the words I utter, or at least not understanding that you don't know the things Iknow.

"Yes, the leper king and his father. It's a tragic story, little boy. I said before that the young princefled into the hills with his princess. I don't know how many years she'd seen, but clearly she was stilla child. I don't know truthfully what was so scandalous, but it seems logical to believe now, withthe hindsight of so many years, that she must not have been a woman, that her body was certainlypossessed by the spirit of... Perhaps a fox, perhaps... There was certainly something unnatural aboutthe little princess.

"And after the prince and princess fled into the mountains, disappeared forever, the enemy droveinto the town by the sea and burned the tower to the ground. They didn't let the kings to burn,though. They took them out and walked them up through the valley up to the temple, and therethey burnt the temple too. They say the fire was so bright that for ten days there was no night. Theleper king just sat on the hillside and watched his dream erupt in flames and vanish.

"Afterward they carried the two, the mad conqueror and the broken-hearted king, by almost deadfrom his disease, just a lump of numbed flesh, and killed them on the

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mountainside. They say thesoldiers took cooking knifes and carved them up like pigs, though I don't know if that's true or justwhat people say. Then the enemy general pickled their flesh. I don't know, perhaps the two madkings were eaten."

"What did the temple look like?" Ryunosuke repeated softly."There is a picture in the temple." the priest said. "It was a

great, well they say it was just like thegreat Todaiji in the old capital. They say the emperor saw the temple of the leper king and followedits style. There was a great Buddha inside, but nothing like the size of the other."

Ryunosuke nodded, having himself seen the great Buddha in the old capital, and thought itsomehow wonderful that this village lost in the mountains had once been as magnificent as the cityin the center of the world.

"It was wooden, of course," the priest continued, "like a great box, and inside the Buddha sat ona bed of lotus, contemplating the valley below. They say that in those days one could see the oceanfrom the great place on the hill.

He seemed about but stopped as the chieftain suddenly appeared at the doorway of the inn. Hegave Ryunosuke the same bitter look he had gotten used to casting him ever since they'd made theirbet. It was as if he were saying silently, simply with his eyes, "So, old man, you are still alive."

The chief seemed to have been listening, for he trodded over to the spot of ground where theothers had gathered and squeezed his enormous frame into an empty spot, yelling at the cook for adish of sake. "Tell me this, priest," he interupted. "What happened to that little prince and hisprincess. Do you really think they disappeared?" Ryunosuke noticed

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that the chief glanced at thelittle boy sitting near the priest.

"Did they really disappear? How do you want me to know the answer to that question. It wassaid, of course, that for many years he wandered in the hills, that he even had a son and that his sonhad a son and that perhaps they were crazy too, that perhaps there are still mad souls in themountains waiting to restore the kingdom of the leper king. But they are just stories, you know."

"Stories?" the chieftain asked, almost belched. "Did you know..."

Ryunosuke turned pale; he was afraid the talk would drift into stories he never wanted anyone totalk about. He ignored the chief and called little Taka with his fingers. "It's too late at night for littleboy. Soon the tengu will come and you'd better by asleep."

Reluctantly the little boy retreated to the back of the inn, trying to catch words now and then butnot really understanding. The old woman was already sleeping, and he curled up on the mat next toher warmth.

Ryunosuke had known the priest for many years, perhaps since that first festival. He was a thinman with a dirty face and he often came up into the mountains to perform the ceremonies that werenecessary as the seasons passed and as people died and were born. He had come up into the villagea few days after the old woman discovered the child playing with snakes and Ryunosuke had goneto ask him what this terrible thing meant.

The priest just laughed at the old man and told him it surely meant his boy would grow into asplendid Buddha because he remembered a statue he'd seen somewhere, perhaps in a temple in the North ofthe island, where the sun still shone, of a sitting Buddha clutching a

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snake in his right hand, and the chiefmonk had told him some strange story about the statue. The story must have been far less impressive thanthat of the leper king, because he'd soon forgotten it. All he remembered now was the statue itself.

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4Oka used the opportunity of the monk's visit into the

mountains to announce that his woman waspregnant and that he was expecting his first son. Ryunosuke wasn't surprised as he knew they wereyoung and was only really taken aback by the way Oka said with such confidence that it would be aboy. He asked him later what this meant and the young man answered calmly that he felt it in hischest, that he was so proud that it would certainly be a boy. "No baby girl could make me feel thisway," he laughed.

Ryunosuke felt an icy touch in that laugh, and he thought suddenly that someday that boy wouldcome to no good, that something terrible would happen and that it would be that boy'sresponsibility. He told his wife later on and she just brushed away his suspicions. "It's his eyes," shesighed, "they just make you distrust the boy." Giyo was elated at the thought that little Taka wouldsoon have a friend and that he wouldn't grow up as a lonely child in these mountains talking tosnakes and whatever else he talked to when she wasn't around him.

Kan's woman Sasa was not so cheered by the news. She was angry that she was not yet with childand began to tease her man that he'd better not drink so much in the inn while he worked so thathe'd have more energy for her later on, and Giyo laughed when she heard this, though Kan turnedred and assured everyone he only drank as much as was proper for a man in his position.

"In what position?" Ryunosuke asked, and everyone laughed, so Kan went out into the kitchenand started to prepare some small vegetable dishes which he thought of poisoning, but in the endhis anger seemed to seep into the flavor itself and the customers that

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night agreed unanimously itwas the best dish the innkeeper had ever served, and that night Kan held his drinking down to asingle cup of sake, althout by the next night he was back to his regular habits. Sasa didn't conceivea child until nearly a year later, but it turned out to be a beautiful child and she smiled as she toldeverybody it had been worth the wait.

Oka's child, which did turn out to be a boy, wasn't as lucky. The mother and child both died inchildbirth. Oka was crushed by his misfortune and disappeared into the countryside the followingday without waiting for the cremation. There was no monk in town at that time, because none ofthem could stand the perpetual darkness, and the village chief had to carry out the ceremonyhimself, remembering as best as he could the proper chants, which he could, and so he ended upchanting the lotus sutra over and over, but nobody else noticed and they were really more worriedabout the whereabouts of the young man than the proper disposal of the child's and woman's bodies.

Kan was especially shocked by the disappearance and wondered at first whether his brother mighthave been taken by the tengu they say lived up in the mountains. Little Taka, who was still soyoung he didn't understand the meanings of really common things like bears and deer, asked withwide open eyes and Giyo explained with great patience that they had red faces and noses as long asa normal man's arm, and furthermore that they ate young children who disobeyed their mothers. Forthe rest of that evening the child was so careful of Giyo's words that he ended up doing silly things,but by the next day he had forgotten all about the tengu. When the child first asked about it

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Ryunosuke felt a suspicion he might have been out talking with one while Giyo gathered hermushrooms, but he remembered that the things the child wanted to talk about would surely be ofno imterest to a tengu. A snake, perhaps.

When two days had passed and Oka had failed to reappear Kan decided boldly to go out lookingfor him. He packed a small clothful of food, went to visit his old mother who was still shaken by thedeath of her husband Gen, and started off down the valley, ignoring the supplications of both Giyoand Sasa, hoping to catch some news at least in the small villages downstream and perhaps even tocatch a glimpse of the sun since it hadn't been seen in the village for a long time and the trees werebeginning to die from the darkness.

As it turned out the village children found Oka, or at least what was left him. They found a singlearm stuck into the mud at the foot of the great twisted laurel tree that stood at the top of the hillthat overlooked Ryunomi, the same tree from which they'd hung the leper king and from whichlittle Taka would one day watch the destruction of the village, and the only reason they hadn'tfound his arm before was that it had been so dark out. Near the arm they found a pool of blood andgreat handfuls of frizzy black hair, thick as cord, surely not that of a human. In the arm too they'dfound great toothmarks, wide around as a man's finger. It was clear he'd been eaten by a bear. He'ddisappeared nearly four days before and the pieces of his body had been chewed on by roamingmarauders that may as well been tengu as crows. Ryunosuke's only words as he saw the tatteredpieces was that it had been better that Kan had gone the other way, down the valley, that he'd failed

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to find his brother's body. At least it would give him the chance to tell him slowly.

For Ryunosuke that most unpleasant aftereffect of the death was that Oka and Kan's family nolonger had anyone to till their land and the chief decided that Red Arao, who was looking for moreland anyway, could use it. This meant that the boys' old mother was forced to go up to live at theinn with last remaining son, terrified both by the thought that he would leave her too and the chancethat the village would abandon her in the mountains if the last man of her line passed away, and theinn began to show the stress of so much activities and so much worry. One night soon afterwardRyunosuke woke in the dead of night in a cold sweat, certain he had heard the bamboo walls thatheld back the fetid mountain wind were creaking from the strain. It struck him then in the middle ofthe night like a lightning bold in the center of his forehead that the inn needed more space, that hewould need to build another wing. He told everyone his plan in the morning and the half-wit wasnearly drooling at the thought that his dream would be fulfilled. He imagined the inn growing andgrowing until it stood higher than the hills where they'd found the remains of Kan's lost brother.

The old woman, despite the inconvenience of their silent presence, added life to the inn. Yearslater after they had passed into the next world Ryunomi would remember and still cherish the bedof poppies she laid out along the path down to the river, marking out a clear path to the inn thatwould guide visitors for many years. She worked with a vigor that astonished even Ryunosuke,digging and planting with small flips of her hand that were almost unintentional, and the flowers

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sprouted like a bed of snow. Kan finally returned, dejected after seven days of wandering

up and down the valley all the way tothe sea without so much as a single sign of his brother's passage, and he was so tired out that heseemed unshaken at the news that his brother had been found. He did break into tears but not untilthe next morning when he went into the village to ask if it were really true or if he'd dreamed thewhole thing.

They put the ashes of the mother, father and son together in a storehouse behind the inn and leftthem there until the priest Jozan returned early next spring after the mountain snow had melted andthe stream had shrunk back to its usual condition. The villagers prepared to greet him as usualwhen they caught sight of a small troup coming up the path to the village though they were puzzledthat he was accompanied by two other monks in robes as dirty as his and a small figure walking inbetween the others.

He performed the ceremonies in some haste, laying the pot of ashes in a small corner of thevillage near the river where, he said, the dead spirits could contemplate the flow of water, andexplained to the elders that the young girl he'd brought with him had burnt down the temple forreasons no one could fathom, for the girl herself could not speak let alone read or write, and theyhad been sent to abandon her in the mountains. Red Arao asked why they didn't simply kill her andthe monk said with a look of impatience that it was against the laws of his most merciful lordBuddha to do such things, so that the leaders of the temple in their wisdom had decided it wasmuch better to let the girl die on her own. The village leaders were

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enchanted with the beauty ofthe logic and solemnly promised Jozan they would study the teachings of the master arduously untilthey, too, could see things so clearly.

Ryunosuke, as he always did, invited the whole group up to the inn to rest them for their journeyup into the mountains, though he was leary of the effect the young girl would have on Taka,remembering especially the words Taka's father had spoken that rainy night, that the boy wouldeither be a great king or would throw away the world, and it occured to him that this "throwingaway the world" might just as well mean becoming a thief as a priest. Jozan assured him the girlwas really quite pleasant-natured and that in all sincerity he regretted having been assigned thedifficult task he found himself confronted with, so Ryunosuke was not as angry as he might havebeen when Kan's woman Sasa brought the baby out to see the people who had come from down thevalley. The priest had just mentioned that two monks had died in the fire, two boys scarcely olderthan the girl, and so Ryunosuke turned pale when Little Taka ignored the priest, perhaps distraughtby their dark cloaks, and went to sit on the lap of the young criminal. He grabbed the boy, whobegan to cry, and muttered something about Taka carrying the blood of kings.

Giyo told the monks the story while her husband was taking the boy back into the sleepingquarters, and they all laughed at the old man's preoccupation with the little child. "The child's willsurely grow into a strange being," Jozan whispered to the old woman, "for not only has he beenpredestined to kingship, but he has three mothers!"

Kan's old mother was so disturbed by the story of the girl's

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crime that she went out in the middleof the night and began working tirelessly on her poppy bed, so needless of sleep in her decrepitudethat she scarcely noticed the sun rise for a second time in as many days and fell asleep only late thatafternoon after helping the half-wit ready the night's dishes. Her great age had robbed her of all tactand she had acquired the habit, extremely annoying to the cook and to Ryunosuke, of telling themthat everything they were doing was wrong, that fish should be cooked on the right side instead ofthe left, that garlic should be chopped finer, and they were happy when she finally fell asleep on thefloor behind the counter.

Jozan and his followers stayed in the town overnight and set out for the mountains early in the morning just as the sun was appearing for the first time in many days, presumably dragged along by the holiness of the priest, and as the dew was just beginning to dry off the grass. Kan thanked the priest for having taken care of his brother, and he was crying, not for the memory of Oka but rather for the poor girl who was being taken up into the mountains to die but didn't seem to know what has being done to her. She seemed so innocent. He followed the party as they climbed into the hills and didn't take let his eyes fall away until the glare of the sun was so bright that his vision began to blur. He thought of going up after the girl and rescuing her from her fate but quickly realized it was the same kind of foolishness that had killed his brother.

In those days little Taka had begun to speak in words that seemed almost like those of adults, perhaps too much like adults for a child his age, and so Ryunosuke and Giyo were happy when Sasa announced that she would soon bear a child. They waited impatiently through the spring, remembering what had happen to the last child brought into this land, but the child came into the world in perfect health, although it was a girl. Sasa brought the baby into the sleeping quarters where little Taka was being fed by Giyo and showed him the little ball of flesh. "This is your new sister," she said, but Taka was

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more interested in the rice ball he was stuffing into his mouth. He had just turned three years old and didn't understand what it meant to have another child in the house.

Years later as he sat on top of the hill watching the last remnants of the charred village wash away with the stream like black chrysanthemums flitting in the wind, it would occur to him strange that he had so little understood the things the child would become, had so little understood that someday they would stand together on the banks of the river and chase each other through the bamboo grass, that one time his little sister would fall into the mud and would crawl out, her laughing face transformed mysteriously into a grimace of shame and terror. He would wonder also if the old couple who'd inherited him that rainy night so many years before, so many years that he couldn't remember, had understood the things he would become, had understood that he alone would survive the destruction of the village.

At the beginning little Taka didn't understood what it meant to have a sister, but he quickly learned, and quickly discovered so many ways to terrorize the baby with antics that he might have scarred the little girl's mind had she not been graced with the stoicism of her father. Kan was a man who never let a complaint slip out of his flattened mouth and who had even felt ashamed to have cried at his brother's death. His father's death some years before had been more traumatic for him because it had meant the end of his livelihood, but his brother's had touched him more deeply.

Sasa caught Taka hitting the baby a few times and quickly understood that the feelings between children could be just as disharmonious as those of older people. She scolded him but it was difficult because he didn't seem to understand that he was hurting the other child. One time little Taka stole into the kitchen at night and fed some sake to the baby until her face turned bright red. The tiny creature didn't sleep the night and was crawling all over the mats, hiccuping with a joy that kept everyone else from sleeping too, and they didn't understand why all of this was happening until Kan went into the kitchen to have a sip himself, hoping it would help him sleep and discovered the glass that Taka had left behind on the floor behind

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the counter. He started laughting. Giyo wasn't nearly as amused, however, and smacked little Taka across the cheek until he cried.

When Taka was three years old, just before his fourth birthday, a small misfortune befell the family, though to Ryunosuke it bordered on propitiousness. The wizened grandmother of the little baby, the mother of Kan and Oka and the keeper of the poppy bed, passed into the next world. In the middle of the summer the old woman complained one day of an ache in her stomach, refused to go outside for the first time in her life in the early fall, unaware even that Sasa had begun to care for her flowers, by winter was laying on her mat gasping for breath, reduced to a skeleton with a thin layer of wrinkled skin stretched over it, and died in the spring. The priest, by chance, was trodding up the trail into the village just as the old woman was losing her breath and came running because he knew something was wrong. From the last village he had begun to smell the fragrance of some mountain flower he remembered from Ryunosuke's inn, and as he approached it grew stronger until by the time he entered the village gate and noticed nobody was there to greet him it was assaulting his nostrils like a fire.

He hurried up to the inn and found the entire village gathered outside the on the hill listening to the agonized breaths of the old woman and the tears of her son Kan dropping onto the wooden floor they'd just put down over the dirt. He rushed into the building just in time to see the old woman's eyes glaze over and quickly chanted a sutra, all the time wondering where that wonderful smell was coming from. When he'd finished he asked Ryunosuke what it was and the old man said he too had noticed it increasing over the past few months but didn't know about it either. When they put their noses close to the body they came to the inescapable conclusion that it was coming from her pores. They put her ashes in a little clearing behind the inn and even as they were burning her emaciated flesh the fragrance spread throughout the village and down the stream into the villages below and a crowd of people who'd never been seen since the time when the old couple first came into the mountains and they'd held the festival that everybody still remembered, some with good and some with bad impressions.

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To Kan it was a terrible loss, for seemed as if his entire world had been erased from the earth, that all the memories he had of his childhood running around the old home that had become just a storehouse for Red Akao's growing wealth, that all his dreams of days sitting around the cooking fire had been blown out by the death of his mother. He wondered also if a curse may have been laid on his house, perhaps for some exploit of his brothers', and he feared that it would catch him too.

The village chief, for his part, was afraid this death would become the same fiasco as the last festival he'd allowed, and tried his best to send the people home, but they kept emerging from the narrow path and he lost the energy to keep up the work and disappeared, just as he'd done the time before, into his hut and refused to come out for anything for the next few days.

Many years later the fragrance still surrounded the inn and people began to appear at the doorway not because they'd heard of it of the place from anybody, not because they'd heard of beauty of its silence or the delicacy of its food but because they'd been attracted there and wanted more than anything else to get to the heart of that fragrance. It was, of course, the scent of the poppies she had cared for so carefully during her last years. By that time the people walking through the town had so vastly increased like a stampede or a sudden typhoon flood that the sun never lingered anymore and the streets were always bright in the day and dark at night like they were supposed to be.

Kan's pain was such that he cried for many days, and Ryunosuke had to close the inn for nearly a month, not because he himself was melancholic, just the opposite, because Kan's sadness was so deep that even Ryunosuke felt so much pity that he had begun to find himself incapable of remembering the recipes he needed to make his dishes. The cook insisted they could do it, being immune to sorrow, but found himself powerless in the face of the arguments of the old man, who refused to hear anything he said.

Little Taka never found out what happened. Ryunosuke, remembering the admonition of the boy's real father never to let him see sorrow, arranged to have him sent early in the spring to the home

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of an old woman who lived alone at the edge of the village. The little boy rebelled with a ferocity that surprised even Giyo who was so used to his antics, and the first day when she went to visit him he made her laugh by saying it was incredible anyone could be expected to live in such a place. She served him rotten food, he said, and kept him inside when he wanted to play in the hills. Besides, he didn't understand why he'd been sent there in the first place, and refused to listen to her excuse that they were doing some important things and that a little boy would only get in the way, and afterward she thought they would have to find something to do just to show him what they'd done. How strange, she thought.

Little by little the child grew to like the place, and, as could be expected, didn't want to leave when they came to take him back after the bodies had been buried with proper ceremony and proper solemnity.

Kan and Sasa took advantage of the mourning to take the two children up into the mountains nearly every day. Little Taka seemed to love the freedom, perhaps as much out of joy of escaping from the old woman as from the love of the mountains, though he took advantage of the wide fields to take his little sister out and torture her when they were out of the reach of the adults. She cried but was still too young to say anything about it and much too young to be able to do anything but cry as loud as she could.

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V

In the summer of little Taka's twelfth year an emissary came to Ryunomi, a middle-aged man with the long hair and bright robes that were the court costume of the time, and he brought with him a long trail of attendants, scribes, guards and concubines. Like Ryunosuke years earlier, he was traveling through the countryside, but unlike the innkeeper he planned to return to the capital. He had been sent, it was said, by the emperor himself, to report on life in the country, and had promised his holiness that he would not return until he had visited every hamlet in this great land. He might not have gone if he'd known he was fated never to return to the great city of dreams, but he might have anyway because to his obedient soul a word from the emperor was worth any tribulation.

The villagers gathered at the village gate when they caught sight of the trail of figures trodding up the hill and were especially curious at the two box-like carriage in the center of the party. They had never seen such things, and Ryunosuke and the half-wit chef, the only ones who had, had to explain to them that this was the way nobles traveled through this world, never touching the hard ground, always held above it by the people who'd been put on this earth to serve them.

Little Taka peered into the darkness of the first carriage as it passed, and caught a dim glimpse of the emissary. The boy was deeply impressed by the pale color of the face, thinking silently that it resembled his own reflection in the lotus pond, and he wondered if perhaps the man had never been out to see the sun. He imagined the great men of the city of dreams living in palaces that sheltered them from all the things that ruined men. The little boy seemed, however, to see the outlines of some great sorrow on the man's face. It was sorrow, because the emissary had been traveling for four years now, and the things he'd seen had troubled him so deeply that he was dreadful of the moment he'd have to confront the holiness with the things he'd seen. To be safe he'd even started to collect the words of the peasants into a great scroll he imagined he could present the holiness with, avoiding the need to have the words come out of his

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own lips. The emissary stopped the carriage just on the other side of the

torii that marked the border of the village and waited for his attendant to open the little door that exposed him to the fresh air of the outside world. The village chief was waiting for the appearance and prostrated himself on the ground, mumbling a greeting that he felt vaguely inappropriate, but he had never been taught what one should say to an imperial envoy.

The sight inside the second carriage gave the boy a terrible shock. Hidden in the deepest folds of the blankets was a terribly wrinkled man, his face the very image of a dried fruit, just slightly bigger, his eyes bloodshot and his skin covered with black marks pocked with dry hair. All of Ryunosuke's heroic efforts to keep the boy from seeing the face of decrepitude floundered in that single glance through the lattice. He walked over to his adopted father and asked him, but the innkeeper refused to talk about it. "Don't worry about that, child. It's just a strange monk, and they have strange airs to them."

The child wasn't satisfied, however, and vented his curiosity on the old woman he'd once been sent to live with, whom he hadn't seen for many years but within whose cottage lingered memories. "What is wrong with the man in the carriage?" he repeated, and as he described the symptoms of that decrepitude she answered with a laugh, "He's old, child, that's all, older than all beings in this desolate place. One day I too shall look just like that, if I'm lucky enough."

"And shall I too?" The boy seemed at the verge of tears.The old woman misinterpreted the question, presuming he was

showing fear of the alternative, and she answered cheerfully that he would. The child left in a sullen mood, leaving the woman puzzled as to how she'd somehow led him down a dark path.

This incident was the beginning of the collapse of the wall Ryunosuke had built around the boy's fears. Throughout Kan's old mother's long illness they'd sent him away to the little cottage, and they never took him to places where death was spoken of nor talked to him of the subject. If it had their own child they wouldn't have gone to such lengths to keep the boy in the morrass of uncertainty, but

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whenever Ryunosuke remembered the words of the father he was replenished with the righteousness of his course. It wasn't long, however, before the wall moved a step closer tocollapse.

The envoy traveled across the fields to watch the peasants tending the rice, sticking his fingers into the mud and ordering his men to write down colors, sizes, and other scribblings that nobody in the village could really understand, though they needed need to understand anything more than that these obscure notes would someday be known to the great ruler of the world, that their lives would come under the scrutiny of the living god.

In the evening the envoy took his men to the inn up on the hill and complemented Ryunosuke on the bed of white flowers that lay on the hill, noticing also the cool fragrance that seemed to drift down the hillside. The innkeeper showed them inside and told them to sit on a special straw mat they'd prepared for the occasion, decorated with leaves and petals Sasa had spent the morning collecting from the mountains.

The whole village gathered there, including the fat chief who was still bitter at Ryunosuke for being alive, and Red Arai, who sat down in the small space between the chieftain and the emissary, oblivious to the fat man's darting glances which to the others seemed bathed in fire.

The emissary quickly demanded songs, sad songs, for it was his greatest hope to collect the lamentations of the people, the cries of woe, and to send them back to the august place where they would be heard by his holiness the emperor.

The fat chief was puzzled, and looked around at the people, his village people, trying desperately to think of whether he'd ever heard them singing a sad song, and it occurred to him that he'd never heard any songs in Ryunomi. He was terribly embarrassed and glanced pleadingly to the other elders, hoping that one of them would have heard something somewhere that they could at least pass on to the emissary, but their eyes were all downcast and he suddenly felt abandoned by his people.

"I'm sorry, your excellency," he gulped, "but we have no songs

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in Ryunomi.""I knew it," the man sighed with a pale smile, "I knew it. This

valley is truly, truly the end of the world. Ever since I started up that path I felt it. Each village we entered has fewer songs than the last." He paused for a moment, and then looked quizzically at the chief. "Don't your people feel sorrow?"

It was such an unexpected question that the chief let out a guffaw, more of shame than of genuine amusement. "I suppose we do, but we just don't know how to sing."

Little Taka was fascinated by the envoy, especially by the long hair trailing down his back and the pale flowers on his robe, but his most vivid impression, especially in the days following the tragic thing that was soon going to happen, was the bright tunics of the fifteen guards who had entered the inn at the same time but who were still standing at the edge of the shadows, present and yet transparent, refusing drink and food. They didn't move and the boy wondered whether they were really alive.

In truth there had once been songs in the valley. In the days of the leper king the little village had been filled with so much song that the words were still echoing in the mountains days after the temple was burnt to the ground. Neither the emissary nor the chief nor Ryunosuke knew that the songs had been killed by the great army that had butchered the place's spirit when they butchered the leper king at the top of the hill.

The emissary was disappointed with the lack of songs but at least he had caught a glimpse of a despair beyond measure, so extreme that songs were perhaps themselves unnecessary. He wanted desperately to capture the atmosphere he'd breathed in this place, for he felt that if he could share it with his holiness the emperor, if somehow the emperor could partake of that aura he would understand the true decrepit state of his kingdom and would cast out those pigs who cared for nothing but which one would be the minister of the right and which the minister of the left.

He didn't understand, of course, how far his thoughts were from those of the people gathered in the room. To the little boy reveling in the smells of a capital he never knew but whose stories

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he'd breathed and drank for twelve years the city was a place of dreams, an incorruptible place, a place where all the troubles he knew would be erased in a timeless glow, a place where the sun would always shine, and it seemed odd to his young heart that the envoy would want to hear sad songs. Perhaps, he thought, the many was so tired of the brightness that he wanted for a time to walk in the darkness.

The envoy would have been more happy speaking to the young boy than to the chieftain. The fat man, accompanied by the silent nods of the others, began to complain of the high taxes levied on his people. The emissary was terribly bored, for he'd heard the same accusations so many times before that he wondered if there were another man traveling a few days ahead of him putting these annoying ideas into their midst.

Ryunosuke went back to the kitchen to help the half-wit. He had heard enough boring words and needed the refreshment of moving his hands. Little Taka followed him and complained that he was sleepy, so the innkeeper sent him back into the sleeping quarters. Before he went thechild told his adopted father that one day he would like to be a man like the emissary. "Why?", the old man asked, and the boy said shyly that the man was invulnerable, that surely no man or creature could harm his greatness. Ryunosuke laughed. A few days later he would think back to those words and be amazed he'd laughed at all.

People were talking and for the first time since he came to this forgotten land he noticed an echo in the hall, an echo he presumed had always existed but had somehow escaped his attention. The half-wit was grilling some fish on the fire in the corner of the dark room. Ryunosuke inhaled the sweet smell. "Everything is so peaceful here," he muttered to himself.

Just as he said that a muffled cry rose from the floor. Ryunosuke looked over the counter and his face whitened as he saw the envoy stretched out on the straw, clutching his chest with both hands and quivering like a fish on the riverbank. His face was green and sweat was pouring out onto the floor into a puddle. The men were gathered in a circle, asking him over and over, "What is wrong?" but

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his only answers were the sickly gasps that bubbled out of his throat. One of the guards suddenly shouted at Ryunosuke, "Help him

old man! What have you done to him?"Ryunosuke felt blood rush into his head. "Done?" he wondered.

In the few moments he'd watched the grim spectacle it hadn't occurred to him that he himself might have been responsible for it, that the man might have been poisoned.

"What did you give him!?" the guard insisted. The words echoed in the new space the screams had dug into the hall. Ryunosuke glanced at the floor in front of the envoy and saw the carcass of the fish he'd been eating. One look was sufficient- it was a poison fish. He'd seen them before in his days in the capital, had eaten them, but that had been so many years before that he could only barely remember the thin taste as an outline like so many things from his former life.

"Where'd you get that?" he whispered to the cook, his trembling finger pointing at the carcass. The half-wit suddenly understood he'd done something terribly wrong and broke into a stutter. "I caught it in the stream this morning."

"The stream?" Ryunosuke didn't know much about the poison fish but he did know it didn't come up streams and he even suspected it didn't live in the seas of the Land of Fire.

The cook was lying, for although it was true he had found the fish swimming in the stream, he had had enough sense and culinary training to realize it was no trout, and had casually mentioned it to the men who had gathered early to await the arrival of the emissary. Normally they might have been out ploughing their fields but the arrival of the envoy had excited everyone so that the occasion was being used as a festival, permitting the villagers to live lightly for a few days.

When he'd came back from the stream he'd shown the strange fish to the men, and one of them had recommended against using it. "You never know in this land, it might have been sent by a vengeful demon." The others had quickly taken the opportunity to test the chef's courage. "Don't be frightened, just use it." " You're not afraid of some silly demons, are you?" "We didn't know men from the capital

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were such..." They had taunted him, and in the end he'd given in, so confident of his courage that he'd served it to the emissary himself. He'd noticed, though perhaps not at the time, that the fish had given him a slight smile as he prepared to gut it. What had that meant? Now that it was all done he began to imagine all the terrible things that might befall him, but he was happy that he'd given it to the emissary and not to somebody he knew. He hadn't guessed, however, the end to which his slip of the knife would reach, couldn't imagine that nothing anybody could do now would save the village from the destruction it had been fated to years before. The fact, however, was that he'd had at least the suspicion there was something wrong with the fish. This little bit of truth he hid, with the tacit consent of everyone else, from his master.

The old, old monk, who had gone to sleep earlier in the chieftain's hut, had himself carried up the hill in a semi-sleeping state as soon as he heard the news. The entire village had been awoke and crowded into the inn of course, so there wasn't a single corner or alley into which the alarm had not been called. The porters let him out near the narrow doorway and then helped him into the place. He could barely walk, for his legs were no more than barkless sticks. The little boy, if he'd been there to see, would undoubtedly assumed that the old man's legs had been weakened by so much sitting in boxes. The monk approached the convulsing figure and chanted a long sutra into the space above him. The guards cleared the other villagers out of the place, leaving only the innkeeper and a small group of elders to watch the agony. The old man barely noticed that the elders were whispering among themselves, murmuring, imagining the dire consequences this might have, the shame that had suddenly been rained on them from the foolish chef who was still behind the counter, face twisted into a grimace that seemed neither laughter nor sorrow.

As the night stretched into morning the monk chanted like a bubbling stream though it was clear after a time that he had fallen asleep. The others slowly rose and slinked out into the darkness, leaving the innkeeper and the cook alone to contemplate the calamity they'd wrought. Ryunosuke went to sleep without another word to the chef.

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-As he lay in bed thinking over why such a terrible thing had

happened, Ryunosuke couldn't help coming to the conclusion that it had all been deliberate, that some force had wished this misfortune on him, and he suspected the tengu they said lived up in the hills. What other being, he asked himself, would have the force to pluck a fish from the sea and place it leagues away in this little village, and furthermore who would want to do such a terrible thing.

The only bright spot in the whole affair was that the envoy didn't die, but remained in a delirious state, clutching his chest as if he were going to cross the line into the next world any moment but somehow never reached that borderline.

The room was quite, as if nobody dared to speak, and the moans of the sick man echoed through the night, so that each member of the family was perfectly aware that nobody was sleeping in the whole place, probably in the entire village. The one thing that comforted Ryunosuke was that little Taka hadn't seen the suffering. As he lay in the stagnant heat feeling beads of sweat seeping from his pores he watched the boy sleeping peacefully. It occured to him that the boy would wake to the groans and would feel something was wrong. He thought of taking him from his mat to the cottage of an old woman where he'd sent the boy once years before, to the cottage of the old woman who lived at the other end of the village.

Ryunosuke fell asleep before finishing the plan or at least before gathering the strength to execute it, and he wasn't able to prevent the inevitable. Taka woke in the dead of night to the whimpers of agony and went into the dining hall. He felt a cold wave climb up his spine as he watched the desperate gasps of the man he'd been admiring just a little while before. He went back to his mat but the twisted face etched itself in his memory, and he woke the next morning to the nightmare he'd seen the night before.

The innkeeper was unaware he'd seen the stricken man when he took him to the old woman's cottage the next morning. "Just for a few days, dear boy", was the only explanation he'd give.

Taka didn't bother arguing; he knew there was no way he could change the granite will in the old man's head. The first time he'd been

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sent many years before, when the old woman with the flowers "left the village", as his family later told him, had seemed an adventure, and he'd gradually come to find a fascination with the old woman who served him food full of bugs. Now, to a twelve-year-old it seemed a great humiliation and a disruption to the regularity of his life. He had begun to help his adopted father and the others many years before, in his sixth year, but recently it had become much more important to him. He could see that the old man and woman were growing tired, were beginning to wear the same lines he'd seen etched on that old man's face.

The only consolation to him that at least this time the old man and woman had had the courtesy to send his little sister along with him, so that it had more the aura of a game than a punishment. He'd stopped teasing her years before, more because of the horrible screams she produced than any change in his own being, but perhaps that, he would think later, is the way it always is. Their relationship had also changed, though not perceptibly to him, as she had grown old enough that he could speak to her and expect an intelligent answer. He didn't remember any longer the days when her infant mind was so occupied with simple thoughts of food and warmth that the things he said had no effect on her at all.

He hadn't stopped scaring her, but his he had gradually been forced to change tactics, so that nowadays he had to find surrogate objects, frightening outside things, perhaps the same things his own mother had once told him about, the ogres and the demons and the tengu. As they walked down together, jumping over puddles, following Sasa to the old woman's cottage, Taka whispered to his sister that the old woman was fond of demons and had them for supper every night, and the little girl started to cry.

The next morning the sun was there again, and to Ryunosuke it seemed a bad sign. "The sun is the eye of the emperor," he muttered, and it was perhaps true, for the guards who had stayed awake all night watching over their charge were whispering until morning. For the village elders the most important task was to find some way to demonstrate their remorse for what had happened. They considered banishing the innkeeper and the half-wit cook to the mountains of

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death but decided in the end that it wouldn't be enough. The old chief understood what needed to be done and there wasn't a moment of hesitation in his voice as he told the leader of the guards that he would leave the village himself to express his shame. "You won after all, old man," he murmured to the innkeeper. As his last official acts he ordered the inn closed until the end of time, asked that a magistrate be sent to settle this matter once and for all, and appointed Redbeard his successor. Then he packed a small bag, ignoring the tears of his aging wife, and disappeared into the mountains, leaving behind a trail of deep footprints that others would find, many years later and after the village had been destroyed, crisscrossing the mountain range like the trail of some wandering ogre. Little Taka noticed that there were salty puddles of tears filling the holes.

The closing of the inn was certainly the greatest blow to the village of all the events. The men lost all will to work because they couldn't remember the days before the old man had stumbled up the hill into the village and thus could not remember either that they had once had other ways to keep themselves busy. Redbeard started thinking that his own hatred for the innkeeper might have been more than just personal dislike, that there was perhaps something truly terrible or at least misfortunate about the old man. "Wherever you go you seem to drag trouble," he once said, but Ryunosuke was resigned. "I can't escape any further, can I. I've already reached the end of the world."

Months later a wandering merchant who appeared at the village gate hoping to stop in the inn for a cup of sake reported that he'd heard that the chief had crossed the ocean to the great continent, that he had told some other wanderer that he meant to enter one of the great temples in the Chinese mountains. Little Taka heard the story and wondered if the chief was repeating the exploits of the leper king, if he too would return one day to build a temple greater than any other up on the hillside above the village. The half-wit had the same thought and was so excited by it that he went back to the inn and began preparing dishes in great haste, waiting for Ryunosuke's appearance and forgetting that they'd begin forbidden to

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do so. Sasa heard the commotion and went out to the kitchen, walking careful over the old priest still chanting prayers over the agonizing emissary and slipping between the immobile soldiers who had taken up their guard again before seeing the cook stirring great pots of soup that she knew were unnecessary now. She laughed at him and he suddenly remembered the orders.

The same morning six of the soldiers set off to fetch the magistrate the chieftain had ordered sent.

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6Little Taka gradually lost count of the days he spent at the old

woman's cottage, though this time it didn't get any better as time wore on. She had the same bugs in her rice, but at least now he was old enough to suggest it would be better if he took care of the cooking, as he was after all training to become a cook, and now he had his sister to share his sorrows. He asked the old woman if she'd heard about the agonized groans of the man lying on the floor of his adopted father's inn.

"Of course I have," she answered. It seemed a foolish question, since everybody in the village had heard and even if they hadn't the boy lived in the very place it had happened. She suspected there was something else he wanted to know.

"Why was he making those sounds?" the boy asked innocently.The old woman gasped. She felt like laughing but restrained

herself so she wouldn't shock the child. "He's sick, he's sick, boy." She remembered how just a few days before he'd asked her why the man had wrinkles on his face and wondered what kind of things the innkeeper had told him over the twelve years of his life. She looked at his blank expression and suddenly broke out, "Don't you know what it means to be sick?" His face remained blank, as white as it had ever been.

"What does it mean?" burst out the boy. There was a pleading tone to his voice she'd never heard before and her heart grew heavy out of pity for his ignorance.

She explained to him sickness, she explained to him that terrible things happen to people and they live in a desolate state as barren as the soil of Ryunomi not knowing what will happen next, simply feeling the pain overcoming their resistance and knowing there is no escape, and then the boy posed the question she'd been dreading, "Could it happen to me as well?"

Now she could hardly restrain her surprise. "Yes," she whispered. She felt excitement overcome her and explained to the boy all the terrible things that could overcome a man, the agony of what the leper king had felt, the plagues that tormented farmers every single day, the epidemics that spread through the world like

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typhoons with no regard to whom they struck. "Of course it could happen to you. You're just lucky you're not the one who ate that evil fish."

That single line shook the boy more than any other. He often tasted the food, often took morsels right off the grill to fill his young boy's stomach, and he wondered how close he'd come that night to taking some of the poisoned fish. He turned a shade paler than he'd ever been and nearly collapsed on the dirt floor from the terror of a spinning world.

His head spun as he wondered what might have happened had he given a piece to his little sister or at least turned away while she nibbled on the dishes before they went out to the dining floor. He imagined that twisted grin on her small face. That night he couldn't find his way into sleep and spent the long hours twisting on the mat, counting the beats of his heart because it was the only sound that lasted. The next morning the woman noticed the dark circles under eyes but thought to herself that it was perhaps the stress of being apart from his clan. "What's wrong?" she asked, and the boy confessed he hadn't slept a moment, and when she asked why he answered simple, "I was afraid I might also eat some of that fish," and for the rest of the day he refused all nourishment.

In a few days full of haunting screams he'd been confronted with two terrible things, growing old and falling ill, and the barrier his adopted father had erected around him with the care of a farmer setting out his fields began to collapse with the inevitability that only time can produce. Ryunosuke perhaps did not realize that all the precautions in the world are not always enough to overcome what the passage of time decrees must be. In the late afternoon he was still sitting in the damp hut, ignoring his sister's supplications to go out an play with her.

Little Taka began crying in the darkness of the room. The old woman was overcome with pity and folded her wrinkled hands around his neck, pushing his into her lap where he soon fell asleep, but even as he slipped into oblivion he imagined his own face twisted into the mask of rage and shame he'd seen in the emissary's eyes, and for many days the picture haunted him. The old woman decided to go

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talk to the innkeeper, see why he had played such a terrible trick on the poor boy, but in the morning she lost her courage.-

Village life soon returned to its normal state, though the shadow of the magistrate's imminent arrival deprived it of its normal state of timelessness. Suddenly a limit had been placed on all activities and nothing could happen without reference to that great event. The fall arrived, and when the harvest was due the farmers celebrated with a festival tainted by a feeling no one really wanted to talk about. It almost seemed the village was counting the days until the arrival of the magistrate, wondering what sentence he would utter, wondering how far his anger would go. The emissary was not dead yet, of course, and some in the village even believed he would get better, even went as far as to go down the valley looking for women with the healing powers they'd heard about, but as the days wore on and his agony continued it seemed he had reached a stable state from which he might not ever emerge. The old priest kept chanting and the guards kept guarding and the inn remained closed.

One old woman appeared under the village gate one morning, no doubt attracted by the rumors that had spread of a man laying at the brink of death, and she offered her services, said she could bring him back to the valley of brightness the lived in now, though the innkeeper, who was in earshot, remarked bitterly that to call a place like this bright was a terrible injustice. In any case the old priest dismissed her with a wave of his clenched fist, "We don't need shaman magic here. The love of his most merciful Lord Buddha is enough for any illness." She laughed sarcastically, asking him with a smirk that cut her face from ear to ear why the man was still lying in such a state of agony, but the priest was too busy chanting sutras to answer her query.

The emnity between Ryunosuke and Redbeard, if anything, was worse than that between the innkeeper and the old fat chief who had now left the village. The two didn't need any bet to keep them at each others' throats. The old farmer had always held a grudge against the innkeeper, perhaps before he even knew him, a grudge that had grown heavier with the arrival of little Taka and then with the birth of

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Kan and Saka's child. The most exquisite pleasure he'd gained from his promotion to village chief had been the fat man's order that the inn be shut down. He himself had proposed they burn the place to the ground, but other more impassive voices had prevailed and an uncertain truce now reigned in the village.

The winter arrived before the magistrate. It was the first bashful days of spring that the villagers suddenly caught sight of a line of figures struggling up the valley path, moving as slowly as clouds over the mountains, and there was no doubt it was the magistrate at last. As Ryunomi looked out of inn at the column of dust that trailed behind him the long summer, fall and winter suddenly felt like a dream that he'd just woken from, because all through that time that seemed to have lost its existence life had seemed unreal, as if he'd been living but not understanding why. He'd visited the little boy and girl nearly every day, walking down the trail of flowers an old woman he barely remembered had planted, crossing the brook just below the lotus pond where little Taka had once spoken to a snake, trodding through the dusty streets of the town which was full of people whose faces he knew so well he could have drawn them in himself.

Little Taka was afraid of the magistrate but he didn't really understand why, though he was certain his coming had something to do with the incident that had led to his exile in this little cottage at the bottom edge of the village. Ryunosuke thought of his own exile, imagining that he'd inadvertently sentenced his boy to the same fate. He prepared himself silently to greet the magistrate, knowing that something terrible would surely happen to him and much sooner than he'd expected.

The new chief Redbeard was confronted with an embarrassing situation as he sincerely wanted to treat the magistrate to an exquisite meal, the kind only Ryunosuke could provide, but he had shut down the inn and there was no way to arrange that. He thought for a moment of allowing the innkeeper and his staff to use his own great hut, but he hesitated at the thought that thenmisfortune, without doubt supernatural that had pursued and stricken down the emissary might visit on the magistrate too unless he could he kept

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away from that misfortunate inn.It was necessary, of course, for the magistrate to up the hill to

visit the sick man, and for this purpose he had brought a veritable regiment of priests in different robes, all anxious to call with their prayers the mercy of Lord Buddha that the venerable priest hadn't manage to bring yet. There were even some who considered sending the sick man into the next life, and a great dispute arose, tearing at the roof of the former inn, but in the end they decided they would have to leave such matters to the power of Lord Buddha, though they wondered what was keeping the great one from making up his mind. Perhaps the emissary had done so many things, both merciful and not, in his life that the great one was taking time deciding where to send him in the next life.

The magistrate spend a bare moment observing the damage to the emissary, not speaking a word, and then told the chief Redbeard who had following him all evening and all morning like a dog that he would convene a meeting that very evening to pass his judgment.

In reality there had never been any judgment to pass. He'd known what he'd say that evening long before he ever left his master's castle up the coast, for the memories of the leper king's days were still alive in many places. The first time he went up to the inn to meet Ryunosuke he'd been overcome by a strange sympathy at the sight of the old man he was fated to condemn to death. He kept a vivid picture of his master's face screaming, kill that old man, I won't have another rebellion from that cursed town, kill that man, and it was no use explaining to him that it was an accident, he screamed, how could it have been an accident, everyone knows there's no poison fish in the rivers of that forgotten place, they must have done it for a reason. So the magistrate came reluctantly, knowing he had a duty to fulfil and knowing that he would, in the end, fulfill it.

The magistrate didn't know, of course, that his obedience would render the destruction of the village inevitable, that events were following each other in a pattern not even he with his wisdom could understand, with a perseverance that all his years in the capital studying under the great master could not even enlighten.

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That evening he dutifully called the village together to pronounce the verdict. The elders sat in a circle, and in the center old Ryunosuke sat facing the magistrate. The guards stood outside, as impassively as always, and outside the ring they formed the other villagers stood, stretching their necks to hear the magistrate's voice even though it was loud that they could have heard it from the top of the mountains.

It seemed that none of the villagers or soldiers gathered in the square had noticed that the half-wit cook was standing directly behind the magistrate with a fish-knife gripped in his hands under his robe. Neither had they noticed a ghostly pale one-armed man who had slipped into the crowd.

No sooner had the magistrate finished his pronouncement, finding Ryunosuke fit to die for the terrible thing he had done to the envoy who had been, after all, only seeking the best possible life for the villagers, that the cook suddenly bounded forward, grabbed a fistful of the officials, hair, pulled the man's head backward until the magistrate was looking straight up into the dark sky above, and sliced through the tender flesh as if he were opening the entrails of a fish. The dying man gurgled a few words that made no sense and collapsed into a lifeless mass on the ground.

He hadn't really wanted to kill the man. In his jumbled mind he had hoped that his master would give such a rousing speech that the magistrate would have to forgive him. He remembered a story he'd heard many years before in the capital about a warrior who was captured by his enemies but asked for the right to play a tune on his bamboo flute, and that he'd played so beautifully that the enemy commander, overcome with tears, had forgiven him. The half-wit had imagined that his master would somehow do the same, that he would stand before the crowd and sing the way he'd sung in the years before the exile, sing the way he'd sung to charm the women of the court, but in the moment after the pronouncement the old man done no more than lower his head to the ground and cry bitterly. He had been ready to raise his eyes again and beg for mercy, not for any noble motive but because he wanted to hang on to life just a few years longer, when the chef cut off any possibility of redemption by

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slicing the magistrate's throat.For a few moments a profound silence reigned over the village

square and nobody dared to move as if by remaining still they could freeze time also and prevent this all from spreading any further. The soldiers seemed as bewildered by what had happened as the villagers. The dim-wit broke the silence by vomiting a howl that echoed both victory and madness.

In the moments that followed a storm broke loose. The soldiers stepped forward to seize the murderer but they ran into a wall of resistance from the villagers standing between the two parties. The commander of the guards suddenly raised his sword and swiped through the cook's neck, leaving the neck hanging by a loose thread. The cook collapsed, gurgling, onto the ground next to the magistrate. The captain might have swiped at Ryunosuke too but the old man had fallen, quivering, and was behind so many other people that the guards would have had to massacre a whole horde of villagers. The ghostly-pale one-armed man who had slipped in unobserved suddenly stepped forward and belched at the commander of the guard, "Go away while you can still walk. Go back to your kingdom." He spoke with a voice full of iron but also with a voice that Ryunosuke and Kan both recognized.

It was Oka. He had returned to the village, no more dead than the day he'd left, and had brought with him three thugs and a harlot he'd found on the streets of a great city somewhere along the coast of China, a place where, he later said, the palaces were made of gold and silver, a place where people said that Kyoto, the great capital of all these islands, was a miserable provincial town.

The soldiers were intimidated by the pale face that looked as if it had met death itself and perhaps even more intimidated by the three scarred figures standing behind the one-armed man. It occurred suddenly to the commander of the guards that there were many more villagers than soldiers, and even if they managed to kill the four rebels they might not survive the anger of the villagers. He was gripped with a fear he couldn't understand, and ordered his men to withdraw. He shouted up to the villagers, "We'll burn your village to the ground!" as he stepped backward into the mud.

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The pack of armored figures retreated down the hill, leaving behind both the dead magistrate, the agonizing emissary and the old, old priest. The three thugs, thrilled by the odor of victory, started pelting the soldiers with rocks, and soon the whole crowd of villagers followed their example. The guards quickly abandoned their helmets, stripping themselves of their bulky armor as they fled down the path toward the sea. "We'll never see them again!" Oka shouted triumphantly, and the people fell silent because they knew, as Oka perhaps did not, that they would surely send an army to silence the irritation or to revenge the magistrate's death and the soldiers' lost honor. The new village chief, in the meantime, promised his entourage that they'd give the magistrate a decent wake. "He was, afterall, performing his duties." It was a terrible blow to Redbeard, for he had been the chief for barely a season and already the world was crumbling around him as if willed by the same evil spirit that had condemned his wife and him to childlessness. He was thinking of ways to redeem his people, but there seemed to be none. He thought of sending the half-wit chef and Ryunosuke up to the castle under his own guard but he doubted if even that would make a difference anymore.

Later that night, after the villagers had finished crying over the death of the half-wit cook, Oka told the crowd who'd gathered at the inn he hadn't stepped in for the five years that had passed since he disappeared in the darkness, leaving behind a single bloodied leg about his travels in the great land to the West. Officially the inn was closed, of course, but Oka managed to convince the chief, or rather to intimidate the chief, into letting it open again. "There'll be trouble," Redbeard or not."

The other villagers and especially Giyo, were especially worried about Ryunosuke's state, for he had sunk into a state of shock after the pronouncement against him. At first he'd simply wept but eventually the tears dried up or he tear ducts emptied, and he found himself staring vacantly into space as if the whole world was moving but that he'd been left behind. He was the only one not listening as Oka began to tell his story.

"I really died," he started, and explained in a weak voice that

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matched the pallor of his face that he'd gone up to the tree at the top of the hill to mourn his wife and child, that all he'd really wanted to do was to kneel there, cry, and ask lord Buddha to return his child, but that all of a sudden a great black bear, darker even than the night, had come running up the hill and pounced upon him, its ivory teeth gleaming at him, and that despite his courage he'd been ripped by the claws and fangs, until he was just a pulp of torn flesh with only the life of a spirit. His arm he'd had to leave behind because its severance had been so complete there was no way to take it.

For a long time, so long that the seasons began to blur into each other, he'd wandered the countryside as a ghost, passing through countless villages but never daring to show himself, and in the end he'd jumped on a ship bound for China, a ship full of young monks eager to see the other world where they said Lord Buddha still reigned, and for the months of the voyage kept himself hidden in the storerooms, hearing the voices of the living beings but being condemned never to speak, only to listen. "I reached China," he said, "and the whole world changed. I was in cities of gold, and the people saw me but they took me for another lost soul and let me wander. I met an old man there, a little man with the face of a hawk, and he told me a secret I could use against gods, a mystery I cannot reveal even now. He taught me his wizardry" Oka told the villagers he'd found the three thugs and the harlot living in the same dirty streets, living the same dirty life, but for them, who were still alive, things had been very different. The villagers were not reassured by his description.

"You see," he told them, "the streets were lined with gold, and yet the people still lived like fish in a pond, living in their own shit and condemned never to escape from the cage they'd been born into. The streets were lined with gold, but they were forbidden from ever touching it." Little Taka, who was listening intently, wondered suddenly whether in the city of dreams that the half-wit cook had always spoken of, whether in that city the people could touch the gold the temples were coated with. He wondered whether the people could touch the gold on the leper king's great temple. The force of it descended on his shoulders like the winds of a typhoon and he felt

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staggered by the scope of the thought. What if all these dreams had been phantoms after all. As his consciousness fell back into the world Kan's voice emerged from a mist.

"I told them the story of the leper king, in the deep hours of the night among the cries of murder I persuaded them to follow me back across the ocean. We embarked on another great ship, but half way cross the channel a storm caught up with us and flipped the ship like a beetle. The monks grabbed on to each others' robes but they all sunk in clumps, screaming curses to their master. It was easy for me, for I was so light that I could nearly walk on the crests of the waves, and my companions braved the water as they'd braved the streets of the city of gold. But the waves," he paused, "the waves were like mountains." They'd finally landed somewhere on the coast of the Isle of Fire and had wandered the mountains for many long days.

"Somewhere in the mountains I found a tengu, a spirit, and he told me many things. I realized that the mountains of the island are full of such creatures, but perhaps the living cannot see them, that it's only when one has crossed the boundary between this world and the next that one can see such things. They live together and talk of many things, and they know the things that happen in the world of men below them. I believe they decide many things, that they decide what we will do on this earth. They knew many things about our village." He stopped and took a deep breath as if he wasn't sure he should have said the last phrase. The villagers interrupted the silence, asking him what they knew, but he dismissed their queries with a wave of his hand. He told them it was one of the tengu that told him with a taunting expression that the creature that had killed him--killed him and taken off his arm--was not a bear but some vengeful mountain god. Oka, in his delirium, had then remembered the words of the old Chinese man and realized this was undoubtedly true, because in China there were many such tales. The villagers fell silent.

"So I ran back to the hill above this village, right up above this inn, and I searched the woods until I found the mountain spirit. Then I used that wizardry and stole back my spirit, and I was alive again. I don't know if it was the best thing to do," and he laughed, "because suddenly I found myself back among the torment of this world. But I

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couldn't get my arm back. You see, somebody buried it!" He burst out in hilarious laughter, as if it had less consequence to him than a bruise. Kan, who had buried his brother's arm, thought the laughter was aimed at himself and began to regret his previous decision. He couldn't remember that in the days when his brother had disappeared to do anything different would have been unthinkable.

Oka told them how wide the world really was, told them that so many cities lined the coast of the great land across the sea that one could walk along the coast and never come to the end. He introduced them all to the three thugs and the harlot he'd brought back, assuring them all they were good people, people who lived in the world of truth far beyond this forgotten place.

Ryunosuke was still in shock in the back of the inn when Oka gave his talk. The old man was infuriated at the pale one-armed creature, infuriated by the things he'd said and infuriated that he'd created such a terrible situation. The old man's will had suddenly changed. The night before he had prayed for nothing better than to be allowed to live, but now that the half-wit had died in his defense and the whole village was poised at the verge of decimation he suddenly wished it had all finished with his own neck. He felt a great burden for the tragedy he knew couldn't fail to come. He remembered the guard's words, "We'll burn your village to the ground."

He was also angry at the boy, if Oka, with his lost arm and pale face could still be called a boy, for bringing back a new woman when his wife had died trying to bring his first child into the world, and he was even angrier that he had the gall the bring a woman back from the far corners of the world. "What good will she do," he despaired, "when she can't even cook or speak to us."

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7In which life in Ryunomi is made miserable by a drought, and in

which little Taka flees to the mountains, meets a tengu, and finds out many things about the beginning of the world, about the coming of a young prince from Yamato, and the truth about the leper king.

Little Taka was confused by the celebration. Nothing could ever the same for him, for the fence the old innkeeper had erected to protect him from the viscisitudes of this world of sorrow had collapsed in the last moment when he saw the dead magistrate stretched out on the ground with a trail of blood dripping from his tongue. The first pieces of the fence had been torn away by the glimpse he'd had of the old, old monk and then the agony of the wandering emissary bitten by the poison fish, and seeing death was only the final gust that blew down what was left of the barricade.

The half-wit's death added to the feeling of desperation, of course, because it was someone he knew well, but the magistrate's killing was the first time he sat face to face with the mask of death. It somehow seemed pitiful to him to remember the cook's fantasies and then to see the body laying in the street with all the dreams evaporated by the hot afternoon sun. He didn't know whether to weep for the poor man or to rejoice for his delivery from the ambitions that kept him frustrated through his life. He wept, of course, not for pity for the other but for his own loss.

The boy could barely understand how people were dancing in the street when his own heart was so full of sorrow that he would have gladly cast his body in the stream had he had the courage. He felt as if he had been suddenly robbed of the joy that had filled his childhood, that like the unheralded attack of a storm he had been burdened with too many truths for his slim shoulders to carry, and that most terribly of all he hadn't received anything to compensate for the loss of innocence. He felt dizzy. In the delirium of the moment though he saw that his only recourse was to flee into the mountains. He remembered the story Oka told just the night before, how he too had fled into the hills and been torn apart by a frightful bear or rather a mountain spirit, and he secretly hoped the same misfortune would

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befall him. China, he thought, would be lie paradise compared to this desolate place. He fled without telling anybody.

He felt the air thinning as he ran up the steep path, and thought that perhaps it was not truly that the air was thinning but rather that the sounds from the village were fading into a mist of insect voices. How much more beautiful were the sounds of the bugs. He remembered too how the old woman had told him his own father was wandering among these hills, and it occured to him that perhaps the man he'd never known but who was tied to him more closely than anyone else in the world had been waiting for him all this time to hand to him his inheritance, and that he would find a pale man rather than a bear when he reached the top of the hill. It seemed impossible, though. That had been many years before.

He did, of course, find a beast at the top of the hill, waiting for him under the twisted laurel tree that had stood there for longer than any of the villagers could remember, so long that even the priests in the valley knew no stories of who had planted it there. In fact it had been there for longer than time itself, had been there before the wave of time that swept over the world on a distant day long before the days of the leper king fell upon the tiny village of Ryunomi. What he found, standing, hunchbacked and as twisted as the tree, was a tengu. As a child he had heard stories of tengu, of their bright red faces and long noses, of their appetite for children, and just the night before he'd heard pale Oka talking about their mysteries, but had never imagined they would be so wrinkled.

The creature was standing under the tree that stood on top of the hill, the tree from which they'd hung the leper king's dismembered corpse. The boy wasn't sure whether to say or do something or to just wait to be addressed. As it turned out he didn't have to wait long.

"So you were expecting a bear, yes?" The tengu asked him softly, and little Taka overcame the desire to flee that had been the first instinct to rush through his veins as he was confronted with the beast. Taka laughed, as it seemed the only appropriate gesture. "Come closer, little Taka..." the thing continued, and then another wave of fear swept over the boy.

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"How do you know my name?" he asked timidly, and the tengu answered patiently. "I know many things, little boy. I was here on this same hill when your father carried you up that little path," and he pointed his twig-like finger down the hill past the village, "and I saw your baby face crying then and many times since. I was standing on this hill when Oka came up here, I was hiding just over there," and he pointed toward a large rock," as he lost his arm to the bear. But the bear was only for Oka to see, not for you. Oka was a strange boy. You must have heard the story that they couldn't make him cry when they took him to the shrine, and it is true. I was there, hidden in the woods behind the buildings, and I saw it all. I was standing on his hill many other times too, and I saw many things you wouldn't believe even if you'd seen them. I've seen gods stepping down from the heavens onto the earth and I've seen men sprouting from the earth like flowers and fading before my eyes when the rain stops falling. Look now, you must see, because you have clear eyes, that a drought had fallen on the village."

Indeed the boy turned his head all around, scanned the horizon from the mountains rising in the North all the way down the valley stretching in the South and back again, and not a single cloud dotted the blinding sky. Even since the poisoning of the emissary the sun had never lost its way, and people in the village were happy, though Ryunosuke felt it ominous. "It means," he'd said softly one morning, "that they haven't forgotten us."

The boy hadn't had time to notice what all the farmers knew, which was that it hadn't rained even a single drop since early that spring. It was the drought. The first sign the other villagers really received was when the little stream dried up so much that they wondered why somebody had taken the time to build a bridge over it when it was just as easy to walk across. The lotus pool, too, had lost so much of its water that the frogs were dying of thirst on the banks.

The new chief's entreaties to the gods hadn't been successful. When the farmers first came to petition him for action he'd gone up to the shrine in the bamboo grove with the delegation to pray for some mitigation however slight of the tragic weather, but even then he'd suspected that the crimes that had taken place since the arrival of the

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poor emissary would exclude any chance of intervention on their part. He'd gone through the motions but without enthusiasm. Now, from the mountaintop the boy could saw yellow fields stretching away as far as his sight could carry and he felt the dry wind and knew it would be a difficult year even if the Yamato army didn't come.

"I'm glad you're here, boy," the tengu said to Taka, "for I have many things to tell you." He talked to the boy through the night, ignoring the little boy's hunger and sleepiness. He told him the story of how the first child was born in Ryunomi, of how the village had always been there, unchanging, since forever, how nobody had ever been born or died until a farmer and the shamaness had committed the act that set in motion the time that was destined to wipe the village from the face of the earth.

"But you see, child, the farmer and the sorceress, it was not of their own will that they committed the sin that brought the first child into the world. All over the land the same acts were performed, not because of some change in their spirit but because time had come and with it desire. The first incident, the first apparition of the wave that spread over the land, was just a few weeks before the farmer and the sorceress met each other in the darkness of the bamboo grove you can still see standing."

Taka knew it well, and imagined the two figures intertwined among the strangely angled trees. It filled him with disgust, but he didn't know why.

"Just a few weeks before," the tengu continued, "a fragile boy, a prince from the empire of Yamato, came up the path into the village. His name was Yamato-Takeru no Mikoto, and he was the one who brought the things that you see all around you now. He was the one who truly brought death to the village. For when he appeared at the village gate he cast the village into the maelstrom of history.

"He came into the village and stayed for just few days. You might not believe we were so foolish, but the truth is that the poor prince was at the end of his strength and collapsed under the gateway to the village. We, in our kindness, helped him regain his strength, helped him continue on his quest, and in exchange, well in exchange were cast into this world of horror.

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"We?" the boy asked. The tengu ignored him and continued. "The prince had come, you see, to crush the world into

submission. In those days there was a fearful tribe of men they called the Kumaso, men they say ate their own children in days of drought, and the empire of Yamato wanted to make sure there would no longer be any challenge to their rule. They wanted the hearts of all men. They sent the boy, you see, really no more than a boy even though he was a prince, and Yamato Takeru no Mikoto went to the great village of the Kumaso and murdered their chieftain. It's a well-known story, but in the wilderness where you live it is still unspoken. The young prince slipped in during the Kumaso festival, disguised as a serving girl, and as he was about to serve a cup of wine to the great chief, as the chief had raised the chalice nearly to his lips, the little prince drove his dagger deep into the man's chest. Thus the Kumaso were conquered, and later wiped from the face of the earth. Just as our village is destined to be.

Taka was listening to the tengu's story but his eyes were still wandering the horizon, stretching to catch sight of the cloud that would signal that the words of the beast were wrong. There was nothing, and he felt tears welling in his eyes for he was afraid of the things the demon was saying. He listened, dreamily, as the tengu continued.

"That was truly the beginning of time. Before that nothing had ever changed, life had repeated itself everyday without meaning, you see, and we had been free, because there had never been any reason not to be."

To the boy this sounded like a strange kind of freedom, but he thought that perhaps his life wasn't so much different from that of the villagers before the young prince came and took away what they'd had before.

"And what happened after that?" the boy asked. He didn't want to hear any more about the prince, but of the things that came later, especially the tale of the leper king, because for his uncle Oka that seemed the most important thing in the world.

"Afterward, afterward... Well, it's a long story, so don't be impatient, little boy..."

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Taka was suddenly struck by a strange phenomenon. They were sitting under the twisted laurel tree, right beneath one of its sparse branches, but the shadow hadn't moved away from them, even though the sun spinning lazy circles through the sky, unsure whether to rise or fall. As the tengu went on with the story the boy watched the shadow carefully, and his suspicions were confirmed. No matter where the sun went the shadow seemed to be fixed to the earth.

"... You see, there were two young boys in the village in those days, perhaps no older than you now. When the great army came through the mountains on their way to annilhate the remnants of the Kumaso, they took the two boys with them. One of them was killed somewhere on the other side of this great island, and the other came back. But you see, he came back not as the innocent boy who'd been dragged along with the soldiers but as a warrior with a warrior's heart, and nothing in the village remained as before.

"He turned the place upside down, banished the sorceress, banished the farmer who known her flesh, banished the village chief and set himself in his place, set up farms all along the mountainside, made the village part of the world, you see. And nobody could stop him because they didn't have the strength and they didn't even understand what was going on because they had all been brought up in the time before time began.

"There was only being who understood, and it was the girl, the baby brought into the world by the union between the sorceress and the farmer. They called her Sparrow, I don't know why, because her mother and father had never been given the chance to give her a proper name, and she was strong, stronger even than the boy who took over the village and made it part of the world. She killed him, not with any weapon, but she killed him by convincing him that like was not worth living. One day he threw himself off some mountain because he couldn't stand to go on living in this world of misery. I can tell you this, little boy, because know you know death." He laughed lightly. "Afterward the girl came up to the top of this hill, right where you are sitting, and sat here for a long, long time, so long that she eventually melted into a puddle in the ground."

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"And did the tree's shadow stop moving for her?" the boy suddenly asked. The tengu seemed surprised by the question, and a twist that seemed almost a smile floated onto the monster's wrinkled lips. "Yes," it whispered.

"You have seen that, too. The shadow never moves when one of you is on the mountain."

"One of us?""Yes. That is the next part of my story. Now you know the story

of the beginning of the village.""There's one question I'd like to ask," the boy asked.The tengu just waited.The boy stuttered as he began, "You said, 'we', you said, "we

took care of the prince. Did you live in the village then?"The tengu sighed. "Yes, I did. I told you there was a farmer and

a sorceress, and I told you they were cast out from the village.""Yes.""Well, little boy, I was the farmer.""So you're a man after all!" the boy exclaimed."No, litle boy, I'm not a man. I'm a tengu, as you can see.

That's what we are. All of us, all of us creatures of the mountain. Once we were men, and somehow. Well, when I was cast away I escaped the wave that poured over the village and cast it into time. All the others were made human, were made to live and pass like the seasons, to create and destroy, but we were cast out of the world like stones, to linger forever in the hills, understanding all the world but never permitted to enter it.

The boy was listening intently now, for he felt he was being told things that surely he was the first to hear, that all the ignorant villagers down below, suffering now from their drought and readying to be slaughtered by a great army, would never hear, that they were condemned not to understand how deeply things dug in the past, how closely what was happening this season was tied to other events that stretched to years so remote as to be nearly incomprehensible. They didn't understand, really, that there was anything before the year before. He felt strangely privileged.

"And now I'll tell you the story of your race. Surely you know

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that you were brought to the village by a wanderer eleven years ago, when you were still so small that whatever you remember isn't real but merely the force of stories you've heard over and over." The boy nodded and the tengu continued, relieved that he hadn't revealed any secrets unknown to the boy. "There's more though. Nineteen generations, you see, separate you from your ancestor, the leper king. You have become the first in your line in eighteen generations to live in the town of your family's birth..."

"...and the last, I suppose." The boy half-asked, half-stated. "Yes, and the last. You are a strange lot. There is something I'm

sure you don't know yet, because nobody here knows besides the tengu on the mountain, and I haven't told you yet. You aren't Ryunosuke's son, of course, but neither are you the son of the man who brought you that rainy night eleven years ago."

"And how do you know that?" The boy was becoming assertive, now that the words had begun to describe his own life and not that of men who lived so many years before that the trees themselves were different.

"I know, because not once in the life of this barren village has a member of your family ever been born to the last of the line. Not even the leper king. His father, the tyrant, found him in the ruins of a village during one of his rampages. The village had burned to cinders, nothing could be recognized, and suddenly a child, blackened but uncharred, walked out of the fire with a stare of complete passivity, as if he hadn't even seen the fire raging around him. His father before him too...

"That's why, little Taka, you are not tied to this world like the rest of the people around you. I have seen inside you, and I know what you think."

Taka was startled by this sudden revelation. He had come up the mountain really believing he knew everything about his past, knowing of course that he wasn't the son of Ryunosuke the innkeeper, but ignorant of the fact that he wasn't the natural son of his father. Years before when Sasa had first called him King Taka he'd been too young to understand what she meant but now he could piece together the puzzle that had ruled his fate since long before he was

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born. He began to wonder whether it might all have been his fault

after all, if somehow the emperor in the city at the center of the world had known that he was the ancestor of the leper king, if the emperor had sent the emissary simply to be killed so that he could, at last, exterminate the race that had taunted his own ancestors so many years before. He remembered hearing the monk Jozan speak of how the fates of men were linked in invisible threads that only Lord Buddha could understand.

He thought of how the others in the inn were still suffering for that tiny thing, for the tiny fish he cook had found in the river. Down in the village the emissary still lived and the old monk was still chanting over his bedside, and though he sleep and chant at the same time he needed to rise when his bladder or his bowels became so bloated that he had to run outside and breathe the outdoor air for a few moments. At those times he would ask old Giyo to take over the chanting until gradually she learned the sutras so thoroughly that she too could sing them in her sleep.

Ryunosuke found himself surprised at how she'd changed since the old monk came into the village with the magistrate. Perhaps it was those sutras, he thought, but it seemed that she complained much less about the world these days. In their younger years he had been impressed, not nearly as much by her beauty, although she had undoubtedly been beautiful, than by the number of unsatisfactory things she found in every thing she looked at. The first baby, a blessing sent by the gods, had changed in her eyes into a cursed being left there for no other reason than to torment her.

One day Ryunosuke found her in the poppy bed singing one of the chants out loud and smiling. He asked what was wrong with her and she told him that the monk's presence had lifted from her some of the burden of living out here at the edge of the world. He told her she was crazy.

Neither of them had noticed yet that their boy was missing. He had been gone for nearly day but it had never been unusual for him to disappear suddenly into the woods for he still, Ryunosuke often joked, had the habit of talking to snakes. But the boy for his part was

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too interested in the tengu's story to worry much about his parents. He wanted desperately to know how he fit into this magnificent tale.

"Whose son am I, then?" he asked. "That even I don't know. It's only important that you know that

you are not even your father's real son, because perhaps one day a child will come to you and you must know what that means. Your race, your race of kings, was not created out of nothing, for it was only in the days when that little prince from Yamato came to the village that your lineage was made possible. It was, in truth from that little girl named Sparrow that your blood emerged, for the sorceress, you remember the sorceress and the farmer, it was the sorceress who shouted, in a trance, that the little girl was destined to give birth to a great race of kings, that she would sleep in the bed of a great man who would give birth to these things, who would in reality give birth to the being who would guarantee the end of the village.

"It's a strange story, little boy, but I suppose there's no harm in telling you now, now that the world is collapsing around us. I told you that the girl Sparrow convinced the warrior to give up his life and die, but there was more to the story to that, for before his death he lay with the girl and together they bore a child. She knew the child would come and despite that she sent the warrior to the mountains, sent him to die alone and abandoned in the shadow of the cedar and bamboo, sent him to die because she knew that anyone who ruled could suffer no better fate than death.

She told him that what he had done was no better than to kill a king and replace him with another, that if he'd wanted to live he should have replaced the laws of the kingdom, not just gone to the Yamato empire and given his loyalty in exchange for a pledge that he could rule the kingdom for a thousand years. She'd spoken these words at the edge of the river, surrounded by the scent of rose mallow rising over the sound of the rustling water, repeating the words over and over until finally he'd realized with a sorrow no one could overcome that this world was truly a world for the dead, that nothing he could do could change the laws that had governed men since the time before time began, and in his sorrow he disappeared into the forest and was found weeks later, his body devoured by

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creatures who could not understand his quandary.But after she's sent the warrior to die, you see, the child

remained, and for the rest of her life she worried of the fate he would suffer. In those days it was custom to sent abandoned children up to the mountains to suffer the fate of their line, to live for a few days weakly calling for food and then to disappear from the face of the earth, metamorphosized into a pile of bones devoured by vultures. The woman lived for many years, though, and in the end her child lived longer than she, long enough to see its mother dissolved into a puddle of blood on the mountain under the laurel tree and to wonder why any being would have to suffer such an ignoble fate.

"But that child, you see, was to be the creator of the race to which you belong. Through circumstances I don't understand, a hundred years passed and then the leper king arose from the ashes of a family that seemed no greater than any other band of farmers. From that point on, however, nothing could ever be the same, and even after the kingdom of the leper king was wiped from the face of the earth by the Yamato the race remained, wandering the hills of this desolate land, eeking out a humble existence at the edge of villages, avoiding the ones who sought them out to ensure such revolts would never arise again. But they did, you see, and each time a member of your race was behind them.

"And for so long that even I can't remember the children were found, sometimes on the mountainside being cared by a family of eagles, sometimes in the stream feeding off crawfish pulled from under rocks, but each time, and I don't know whose plan this was, a small child appeared at the gate of the king and became the next of the line. You too, were found, by your father, washed up on a beach somewhere in the country of Hyuga, perhaps near Takachiho, crying at the injustice of the world. I didn't see it myself of course, since I can't see beyond the village gate, but I heard it from a brother in those mountains.

The Tengu leaned back against the laurel tree and let out a great sigh. "Everything is ending now."

Down in the village the sky was cloudless and clear as if the gods themselves had blown away the rain from the mountains. When

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the wind drifted up the valley in the mornings the streets were filled with the dust of the past and it was impossible to walk outside. A few brave farmers tried to go out to care for their devastated fields but they soon suffocated in the heat and were found laying in the paddies like dried fruit.

Soon there was nothing left to drink in the inn and the villagers lost their last way of passing the time, for even the flowers had dried up and it was impossible to watch them grow. They stayed in their huts during the day watching the straw grow brittler and at night when the heat was blown away by the dry wind they gathered by the stream filling their bellies with the only nourishment they could find. Ryunosuke wondered silently what the old chief would have looked like had he still been there, whether his gigantic abdomen would shrink or whether it would resist even the drought's ravages.

The lotus pond thus became the village's center in those days. The elders took to sitting on the banks remembering the days before the emissary came and thinking of what they'd do to stop from being wiped off the face of the earth. One old man suggested that they send a mission to the castle down the valley to beg forgiveness, and Redbeard supported him at first, but it was clear to most that it was much too late for such simple measures. A few days later the pond dried up and the village lost even that measure of comfort. They began eating pine needles as monks sometimes did. They were living in the last days of the world.

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8In which the village continues to suffer from the drought, and

in which the remnants of the Heike clan suddenly appear in the valley and make a deal with Oka to make an alliance against the Yamato, and in which a typhoon finally breaks the drought.

Late one afternoon the boy saw flames of dust in the distance and imagined the Yamato army had finally arrived. Just a few days later as he watched the village exploding into fire like a bed of red poppies he would think it strange that the dust cloud hadn't been the army but a much stranger group.

They were the remnants of the Heike, driven from the city of dreams by their rivals the Genji, stripped of all rank and stripped of their lives as they were gradually caught fleeing into the outer lands, chased down like rabbits by foxes, with no hope and yet no choice but to run.

To the villagers in the hamlet where the sun sometimes forgot to come the capital seemed a place of such grandeur that they could not imagine the intrigue and the loneliness that lived in the center of their world. A hundred years before, terrorized by the decay of his kingdom the emperor had summoned warriors from the outer lands, fierce men without the weakness in the heart that drove even the emperor's guards to spend their days in hopeless romance rather than the in the defense of his kingdom. The warriors had come, yes, but had given the emperor much more than even he'd bargained for.

The emperor had rid himself of the stench of a thousand ill-hearted men, of a thousand soft-willed men who preferred to engage their time with scandals rather than to face the reality of a world that was falling apart at a pace that astonished even the oracles. Among them, and perhaps worst among them, had been a handsome young actor.

To fight these things the emperor had called in the tribal lords, and they had taken over the capital with their poor manners and poorer customs, walking on the straw floors with their muddy sandals, sitting on their heels as people do in the country, putting their fists through the paper walls, not out of malice but out of surprise than

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anyone could live in a paper house. They talked to the emperor as if he were a man, looked him straight in the eyes and said in loud voices that this palace wasn't such a glorious palace, continuing until the poor old man began to drip golden tears on the straw floor.

Later on, of course, they'd changed their ways, seen that the city was in their power and gradually had fallen into the same decrepit state as their predecessors, struggling for power because it was the only way to pass their time. They chopped one another's heads off in the middle of the night as the city slept in darkness just to show that they could, and the next day despite all the precautions power could buy they would be slaughtered themselves, in plain day and before crowds of laughing merchants, laughing not because the slayings were amusing but because they offered a distraction from the tedium of their own marketplaces.

In time the corridors of power became stained with the blood of intrigue and the silence of conspiracy, and in those days the struggles grew so formidable that in the end the clans began to struggle for access to the old man who still sat in his corner, crying every day now, crying for his own spirit that he'd sold for a little peace, waiting for the day he'd die so that the nation would mourn as he would never mourn himself.

He watched in silence as the leaders of the clans sat in different rooms of the same palace plotting murders that materialized in the silence of the night on moonless nights, watched in silence as they came to him with decrees to stamp, never asking what the decrees said and never worrying that the decrees he stamped one day might have been the contradictions of the ones he'd stamped the day before, that in the morning he might stamp the death warrant of a soldier and in the evening the same soldier's appointment to minister of the right.

The intrigues had burnt themselves out and in the end the Heike had been thrown out of the palace walls like dogs, pulling back along the coast, fighting back the assaults of the dragons of the Genji, leaving a trail of blood dragging down the beaches past the fishing village of Kobe and the emerald cliffs of Shimonoseki where they cast the last emperor of their blood into the sea to sleep among the coral

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reefs, and finally had crossed, now merely a tattered band of demoralized spirits, into the mountains of the land of fire.

Little Taka watched the dust clouds rise and fall like the breath of giants, until finally at nightfall the band of wanderers entered the village lost in the mountains, astonished that they'd found anything alive in these barren hills, and begged mercy from the peasants who'd gathered at the summit of the nearest hill, armed with bamboo poles and waiting for the great army to break over the parched buttes.

The leader of the Heike fell to the ground before the farmers, begging just a few more days of life, and gradually it became clear to both parties that they were being pursued by an identical enemy. Oka urged the chief to let them stay in the village to help defend their fields, bellowing with his voice that had grown mighty with the intoxication of power, and although the fat chief didn't want to make things any worse for his people one glance at the thugs was enough to convince him it would be the safest path.

The leader of the Heike, a prince whose name nobody remembered even then, was a cowardly, degenerate being with no more than a thin ring of curly hair around his circular skull, a man who was constantly turning around to see what was behind him as if traitors with daggers were always there lurking in the shadows. The prince's general was small and rotund and obviously so tired of so many hopeless battles that he'd lost all will to fight. His eyes were surrounded by deep black circles that were only symptoms of his feeling of desolation. He had planned for many months to escape into the mountains and enter a village temple so far away from anything else that he'd never be found, but when he reached Ryunomi and found that they too were being pursued he realized that perhaps there was no such place.

The ragtag band was really held together by a young princess who had somehow, by mere willpower, been able to evade the battles and the slaughters that had decimated the ranks of her family, and she alone of all the decrepit figures had the will to fight. She had spent six months already in the Land of Fire, kicking her men when they refused to march and encouraging the leaders to chop of the heads of mutinous soldiers. She didn't know where the end of this

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would all be but she did understand that once she stopped struggling there would be no hope.

That night when Ryunosuke had invited the fugitives to eat in the inn, to share the last crumbs of the scorched land, a miserable meal which seemed like a feast to their starving flesh, Oka spoke as if they would defeat the army that was sure to come, especially sure to come now that two bands had aroused their wrath.

The villager most surprised by the Heike was Kan. He found himself strangely allured by the princess who held up their ranks, attracted by the determination carved on her face. Sasa suddenly seemed no more than a miserable creature who had never done anything more than hang in the shadows of the inn taking care of the children, taking care of the dirt that built up in the corners, taking care of everything but never really living. It was as if he'd suddenly been blessed with the dream of a faraway place and had discovered all familiar things to be hopelessly provincial.

In the following days Kan seemed possessed. He did anything to get close to the brave princess, a dream made easier by the fact that the prince, the general and the princess were sheltered in the inn while their men stayed outside in the sweltering, windless night. The first night he stayed up into the early hours of the morning, listening to Oka and the others talk into the twilight about the many things that had happened to the clans, about the way things were in the center of the world. Oka was keenly interested, hoping to find their weaknesses, and he ruthlessly interrogated the hapless prince and his general. From time to time the princess would pipe in a word in her low pitched gravely voice but Oka refused to acknowledge.

Kan, on the other hand, merely sat in the corner cathing the fragrance of her every word and savoring the flavor as if she spoke with the authority of the gods. Nobody but Sasa noticed that anything was amiss. At first she was surprised and then later was gradually overcome with a creeping jealousy by what she suddenly understood when she saw him lurking in the shade. The next morning she exploded, "Just what's wrong with you?" but he could only answer, "Can't you see, this place is so barren, I need to get away." He couldn't escape, of course, but at least he could dream of running

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away.It was the first time in his life he'd ever done something out of

the ordinary and the other people around him were taken aback. Oka was too busy preparing for his imaginary war to pay much attention but Ryunosuke, who really knew Kan better than anybody else, could see that somewhere the fantastic events had caught up with the man's lack of will and had sent some new feeling rushing into his mind. It was as if the imminent end of the world was so overwhelming that Kan was lashing out against the world that had never taken account of his desires.

Kan's mind had fallen into dreams, of course, but somehow the dreams had liberated him from the oppression that had held him down for so many years, held him in the kitchen doing the same things for so many seasons that standing in the kitchen he'd often found himself wondering whether the trees were about to turn colors or whether the new leaves had just sprouted.

If Oka was ignorant of his brother's folly, Kan was not naive enough not to understand what his elder brother was doing. He was surprised when he first heard them talking about a deal.

He was even more aghast when he learned of its contents. Oka had agreed to give his support and the support of all his followers to the Heike in order to restore their kingdom, and in exchange they promised in vague language to make him governor of all the provinces of the Island of Fire. Ryunosuke laughed when he heard the plan. Giyo didn' even laugh; she went back into the rear of the inn and started sweeping dust out with a vitality surprising for a woman of her age.

Late the next afternoon the conspirators trudged up to the village shrine to give offerings to the god who would presumably protect their cause. The village chief refused to play any part in this, as he called it, 'folly', and so the Heike and Oka were alone in the bamboo forest, alone but for a few villagers who entered the precincts more out of curiosity than hope.

The enthusiasm that had gripped the village immediately after they sent the soldiers fleeing down the valley had soon worn out, drained more by the persistent drought than by the fear of reprisal for

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their harsh actions. The cook's death had obviously dampened many of the villagers' desire to fight, but they also knew that they no longer had any choice. There were some who said it would be better to flee into the mountains and live like animals in the forests but others replied that they would surely be caught sooner or later, and that they it would be better to die in the village alongside their ancestors' graves than to be hunted down like wild rabbits.

At the shrine the Heike and Oka carried out their farce as if it were the most serious thing in the world, with the pale one-armed warrior calling them "your excellency" and the prince and princess calling him "governor" as if it grasping power were a simple matter of assigning grandiosetitles.

Sasa, who didn't even go to watch with her husband, suddenly remembered how she'd often called the little boy King Taka in his babyhood, and as she remembered it she became the first of the family to notice that he'd disappeared. In the confusion of the previous nights, in the heated discussions and the simmering heat they had all failed to notice that anything was amiss. His little sister knew had known all along but nobody had had the patience to listen to her.

Confusion broke out that evening. Oka, upon hearing the news of the missing boy, and remembering his own father's disappearance many years before, declared that the village should search the nearby hills. Although he'd been a mere boy when old Gen suddenly vanished after a night of sake and stories leaving a widow and two boys behind to lose his farm, he'd always believed that the old man might have been saved if the other villagers had been more ambitious in their search.

The chief Redbeard was immediately opposed, not entirely but certainly partly because the boy was, after all, of his rival's clan. He reluctantly called for an assembly of the elders to discuss the plan but the time was far too late for such civil measures. By the time he had gathered them half of the villagers had already disappeared into the hills searching for the boy and the other half had already gathered in the square to listen to each others' stories of how dirty and unkempt

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the Heike warriors were. In the end the warriors walked out of the fields where they'd

been sleeping and into the village and let it be known in no uncertain terms that anyone not going out after the boy would be considered a coward and a traitor, and Oka's forked tongue was forked enough to make most of them understand that they'd better follow him. The villagers spread into the hills in a long line but they failed to find the boy.

The chief, as his predecessor had so often done, refused to deal with the problem and shut himself into the big hut at the center of the village, refusing to respond to either the taunts of the soldiers or the bleating complaints of people who still expected him to take control of the events that were coming so quickly that in reality his most compassionate Lord Buddha was the only being who could have grasped them with any certainty. So thought the chief as he listened to the shouts of hilarity and of despair.

The little boy at the top of the hill saw the tiny figures stretching out over the countryside and he understood that they were searching for him. He was surprised that nobody came close to the spot where he sat, that none of the villagers climbed the mountain to the tree under which he was sitting. The tengu was still there next to him, watching the falling sun, and the boy guessed that somehow the creature had persuaded them not to find him.

The boy looked down at the figures stumbling through the valley and they suddenly seemed pitiful, as if they'd been so weakened by the drought that they could barely walk, and in fact had he been closer he would have been surprised by how tattered their clothes were, by how taught the skin gripped their faces, by how their tongues hung out nearly halfway to the ground.

He did see them gather back in the village after the sun had set and he could feel inside his chest the tears that Giyo was shedding, because even though she was out of his sight, locked up in the inn, he had seen her cry so often that he knew she'd be crying now.

The drought broke the day before the army came to eradicate the village for the last time. The soldiers who were slowly moving up

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the valley, passing through village after village and asking each one what it was named, did not know of course that five hundred years earlier a similar band of men, moving with the same slow steps and wearing the same steel helmets, made the same trip and burnt down the magnificent temple that stood on the hill.

Little Taka, who couldn't remember how many days he'd been on the mountain, was both relieved and frightened when he saw the storm clouds moving in from the ocean. He felt by the wind that it would be a typhoon, perhaps as cataclysmic as the one that passed when he was only a few years old. He couldn't remember it but had heard so many stories from the women, especially from Sasa whose parents had been stolen by the torrential rains, that he could imagine the sky turned into a river. This time, though, the storm was only an omen of the army that was even now marching up the long path through the valley.

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9In which the Yamato army enters the village, the villagers are divided between those who wish to surrender and those who wish to struggle, and in which the village is burnt to the ground.

The typhoon lasted for three days full of fear. The ground was so dry that the torrents roared down the mountainside like rivers, tearing up the flowers and the bamboo grove like weeds, and it was only with the blessing of Lord Buddha that no villagers were washed away by the waters. The streets were washed away and the huts were so terribly damaged that for the last few days the villagers had to sleep under the stars as their ancestors had done centuries before the coming of the little prince who cast them into the world.

Taka's little sister Mie was in the inn watching her mother cut some mountain radishes when she heard the first thunderclaps and had buried herself into the mats at the back of the place by the time the first streams had surrounded the bamboo walls and began to seep through the cracks. As it turned out the wall of water came no closer to the inn than that and the walls remained standing after the sun emerged from under the clouds, but when Sasa, Kan and Mie went out into the flower bed they were startled to see that the rest of the village resembled a giant pond with people swimming around in circles like stranded fish, drinking the precious water the way old Gen had once drank sake.

The lifting of the rain was a blessing, but a strange one, for in the hours that followed the villagers caught sight of shadows moving in the valley below and then as the steam rose and the air dried the shadows turned into figures of men burdened with swords at their sides. The Yamato warriors had come.

The monk Jozo was there with them too, just a small cloaked figure among so many others, and he'd surrounded himself with the rest of the priests from the temple who'd lost any desire to deal with the matters of the other world when it was clear that so many people were soon to be sent there. Jozo knew many of the people, Ryunosue best of all, and he wished there was some way he could prevent the disaster but he understood it was too late for one man to do anything

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so he sat down on the hillside with the rest of his brothers and waited for the spectacle to begin.

Ryunosuke fell into shock again. He didn't take the time to watch the masses hording under the village gate in perfect formation, didn't watch them hacking the torii to pieces with their swords, but trudged up to the inn and collapsed onto the floor like a baby.

By night the army had surrounded the village but showed no sign of being ready to attack. The chief was hopeful but Oka spit out bitterly, "What do you think they're doing? They're just making sure nobody runs away." The chief was deeply impressed by the thought and decided then and there that he would go to beg the general to spare at least his own life and as many of the villagers he could save.

He didn't tell any of the elders and especially not Oka, out of fear as much as anything else, and as the moon rose over the mountains he walked straight out toward the village gate and prostrated himself on the ground in front of the burly guards. "I have a message," he stuttered.

He offered to give them Oka, to give them Ryunosuke, to give them the corpse of the cook to do anything they'd like, and he offered to burn the despicable inn. The enemy general eyed him suspiciously at first and then with an air of great civility told him he'd consider it that evening. In the meantime he asked Redbeard if he'd join them in a feast that very evening.

It was a dream for the chief. He hadn't had a decent meal in months, had gotten used to eating pine needles in the place of rice, and the smell of cooking animals filled his stomach with such rage that he nearly jumped into the cauldron. He nearly fainted when the burly guards brought him into the clearing where the leaders were gathered and sat him down next to the enemy general. He was unable to think about anything else beside the stew he could see boiling in the great vats just beyond the shadows.

He didn't get a chance to eat any, however, because before it was ready a serving girl came up to him with a dishful of sake and before he knew it had taken a dagger out of her long robes and driven it up to the hilt into the soft flesh of his stomach. Before he collapsed he thought it terrible that after so many years of hard work in the

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fields his stomach should still be so soft. They had played the same trick on him they played on the

leader of the Kumaso five hundred years earlier, and still the people hadn't learned that the same tricks could be used over and over again.

It was only when they heard his bloodcurdling scream that the other villagers noticed he was missing. At first they thought that he'd been captured but they soon understood the truth although they couldn't know what he'd spoken to them about. Kan imagined he'd given away all kinds of secrets that would expedite the battle and fell into despair again, a despair so deep that even looking at the princess was not sufficient to lift him out of it. He ignored his older brother's taunts, for they had ceased to have any meaning, and went back up to the hut and joined Ryunosuke on the straw floor. He woke up a little later, went into the sleeping quarters and picked up little Taka's wooden clogs that the boy had left behind as he fled up into the mountains. He looked at the little girl Mie, his own daughter, who was sleeping on the hard mat next to the outside wall and suddenly seemed much older than he remembered. The darkness inside had so little to do, he thought, with the bonfires burning at the outskirts of the village. Kan lay down next to Sasa and his little girl. He was resigned to whatever was fated to happen the next day but he prayed to his most merciful Lord Buddha for at least a last night's peace. His prayers weren't answered. Late that night the rampaging hordes crossed the bridge, trampled the flower beds the old woman had once cared for so and burnt the bamboo walls down.

Earlier that evening Oka had realized the attack would come before dawn. When he heard the scream and understood that Redbeard has been murdered he was overcome with an intoxication born out of the knowledge that he alone held power in the town, that he could now call himself the chief of Ryunomi and nobody would raise their voice in protest.

He summoned the warriors of the Heike clan and all the villagers to the center of the town so that they could raise their voices together and give each other courage, but the only two villagers who showed up were pale and so overcome with fear that Oka had to send

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them back to their huts, weeping at what a shameful race of beings he'd been born into. "Perhaps the pigs will fight," he cursed.

The warriors sat in the circle and listened to him speak though they were so listless that he wondered whether they spoke a different language. The princess assured him they understood his words but pleaded forgiveness, complaining that they had, after all, been fleeing for a thousand days and that they hadn't eaten a decent meal since they left the great capital. In the end Oka gave up hope of rousing them from their lethargy and simply told them to prepare to defend their lives against the empire. "If you don't fight well," he warned, "it will be the end of us all."

The three thugs showed no signs of fear. Oka thought that perhaps the years of living in the streets of their great city had rendered them immune to the panic that had overtaken the rest of the villagers. Even the harlot, who he'd sent back to the inn to hide from the destruction, was sitting in the flower bed staring at the ring of soldiers as if they were no more than trees planted a few days earlier. Later that evening when the soldiers were running around with torches in their hands readying to cut her head off she would be looking at them with the same seductive eyes.

The scene turned into a dream for Oka as soon as he saw the enemy commander walk to the front of his troops and raise his sword up to the sky. He suddenly heard a flute whistling over the wind and a felt the occasional pounding of a heavy drum that had been beating for nearly two days but that Oka had not heard because its sound was cloaked behind the thumping in his own chest. The terrible anticipation that had clogged his throat just moments before seemed to dissipate in anticipation of the burden that had fallen on his shoulders.

Then the sword fell, accompanied by a rousing scream, and the soldiers launched down the hill into the ring of Heike warriors like the torrent that had swept off the mountains just days before, carrying with them piles of mud so heavy that after the massacre the little boy up on the mountain could see their footsteps printed clearly on the hillsides.

Oka had expected a terrible clash, and in his heart there was

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little hope left that the ragged army he'd found a few months earlier wandering through the valley could withstand the shock of a thousand bloodthirsty and well-fed warriors, but he could never have fully comprehended the extend of their weariness.

First he looked to the East, toward the village gate where little Taka had first seen the bent old man in the palequin, and he saw the row of Heike warriors collapsing before the onslaught as if they were no more than blades of grass in a field, as if their blood had already been drained by their troubles and they had no more to give even to their enemies. Next he turned beyond the river to the inn to the South where the boy had first seen the sick man agonizing in the silence and there he saw the line buckling like a wall of mud before a running river, and he began to cry though his tears seemed to evaporate before they reached his cheeks.

By the time he turned his eyes to the North where the boy had seen the magistrate sliced and bloody and lying on the ground he knew what he would find, though at that gate the resistance was so weak that the Heike braves seemed to be disappearing of their own volition, as if no more than the voices of their enemies had been sufficient to sweep them from the world.

His eyes were barely open as he finally turned them to the West, to the place where he had just seen the sun set for the last time and where the mountains rose, to the place where the young boy had climbed and found the tengu waiting to enlighten him. He squinted to see them in the darkness but was sure there was nothing there. He wondered whether the whole ragged army hadn't been a dream all along. Earlier in the evening when they'd stared off into the distance as he spoke rousing words he would never have believed such a thing to be possible but now as he confronted it in terrifying reality he wondered why he hadn't guessed it all along.

Indeed even the inner circle of guards chosen specifically for their remaining strength to protect the princess, prince and general were fading into the dust that was rising from the footsteps of the wave of warriors pouring down the mountain slopes. Oka tried to grab one of the men, hoping to keep him in this world by sheer force of will, but the flesh was insubstantial. He swung his fist at the

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apparition but it didn't even flinch but simply disappeared into the mist. He realized with horror that he was alone, that his only force, the Heike leaders and the three thugs would have to fight a valiant defense but had no chance of holding even a moment against the bloody screams and flailing arms of the Yamato soldiers.

Seven days earlier when the remnants of the Heike slid down the mountainside begging for refuge looking like a band of wanderers or mendicant priests and he received them like an imperial delegation he hadn't had the barest doubt that he would defeat the grand army the Yamato had sent against him, but now he was merely living on the desire to end the affair honorably. He realized suddenly that it was he as much as anybody else who had plunged the village into this inescapable trap.

Even the last hope of an honorable end, however, was dashed as the three thugs fled from the center of the village, not knowing where they were headed but understanding very well that they had nothing further to gain from their association with the crazy man with the pale face and the missing arm. Oka watched them run helplessly and saw their bodies cut down by the tremendous force of a thousand swords ripping though them as if their bodies were no more than mud. Oka felt a sudden fear pinch him as he realized that in just a few moments he would suffer the same dreadful fate. He thought for an instant of running too, seeing how far he could get, but dismissed the very idea as ridiculous and cowardly. He stood and watched his comrades chopped to dark red chunks.

A few moments later as he faced the torrent of metal with his own sword swinging it would occur to him how strange it was that he alone of all the men he'd known had fought to the last moment. As soon as the three thugs were killed the prince and the general fell to their knees, begging somebody they couldn't even see to spare their lives, mumbling mindless words that Oka in his anger and in the din of the fires that were now sprouting like flowers could not understand. Only the princess stood with him in the middle of the closing circle of swords.

"Are you giving up now?" Oka screamed out, but the two remained motionless, gazing at the shadows moving in the distance.

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Oka still believed they could fight and win their empire back and he could become the governor of the island of fire.

"What are you, cowards, if you have no kingdom," he asked impatiently. "You're nothing!" he shouted.

The leader of the Heike looked at him icily and answered in a tone that seemed to carry the weight of the North wind in it, "At least we have our name."

That was the last word he ever uttered. Oka was ashamed for the two and ashamed that he had ever trusted such cowards. He didn't wait for the enemy to dispatch them but swung his own sword around and dug into their necks into they were both lifeless masses on the ground. It was only then that he saw the princess digging into the ground a few steps from him, clawing with her fingers into the hard dirt because it was the only way left to escape. He was so incredulous at the ingenuity and the pure perseverance that he let her go, watched her disappear into the black dirt below, imagining for a moment that she would reappear some day in a valley far away with a new name or perhaps no name at all, perhaps to live in some lost place that even now the sun hadn't found and where the Yamato would never go. A moment later he felt the first swords dig into his shoulders and he suddenly wondered what it would be like to have been the poison fish on the half-wit's chopping block, feeling that same cold metal slicing into flesh. He swung his own sword in a few lazy circles, trying to show that he still lived despite the blood and vomit that were dripping from his mouth, but it slipped out of his hand and he collapsed under the dizzying weight into a dirty bloody corpse.

The Yamato had crushed the rebellion, and though not a single one of them remembered the leper king's uprising five hundred years before they brought the second down with the same fierce vengeance as the first, and after they finished with the warriors, or rather the single warrior they'd found standing at the center of the thatched huts they spread out to destroy what they'd left standing. They started near the village gate, pulling it down from its posts and beating it into tiny slivers, and then slowly they moved up into the village itself, burning all the cottages down and slaughtering the villagers as the rushed out to escape the flames. Most of the people

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didn't even bother to scream, so resigned they were to the fate that awaited them. They'd sat in their huts through the night, listening like cats to the sounds in the valley and trying to understand the movement of the battle, hoping that somehow the one-armed man would save them from what they knew would come.

At the moment they heard the last scream of rage they didn't know that the their pale savior had just been torn to pieces by the invaders but most of them felt something terrible had happened because the hot air rising from the first fires entered their huts and wrapped itself around the bodies huddled near the firepits, caressing their skin like tender fingers.

Most of the villagers were surprised when the warriors ripping down their doors and throwing them to the ground with blood dripping off their swords asked them in angry tones where they'd hidden the sick man, and most of them in their fear and desperation were too busy vomiting or soiling their pants to remember that he was still in the inn with the old priest chanting over him, and it was only in the center of the village in the hut of an old man too wizened to even realize what was happening that the chief of the guards belted out the question once again as he'd done a hundred times before and heard a puny voice mutter, "He's in Ryunosuke's inn."

"Is he still alive?" the guard asked, and he waited for the affirmative reply before driving the tip of his sword into the old man's neck, not even waiting for the gurgle to stop before turning his back and shouting at his men to head for the inn on the hillside.

It was only when the warriors reached the door of the inn that Kan woke up and heard the heavy footsteps outside. Ryunosuke and Giyo had already gone out to the front of the large dining chamber where they'd served so many people in the years since they'd come to the village, and it seemed ironic now that they'd come to be forgotten and in reward they'd found themselves at the wrong end of a slaughter. They were talking in whispers, remembering Gen who disappeared in the forest and the two young boys who grew into Oka and Kan and the pale dying man who'd left little Taka behind, and Taka who'd disappeared just a few weeks before and the old woman who'd planted the poppies that had spread all over the mountain. Kan

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began to weep because he didn't know what else to do, because he wanted to flee but he knew there was nowhere to go. He listened to the sounds of the swords banging at the doorway and the trample of muddy feet into the wooden planks strewn over the floor. The old priest was still chanting as if nothing else was happening in the world, but soon his voice too was drowned out by the war cries.

Kan watched the first warriors run in and chop the old man and woman to the ground, and he ran into the back of the chamber just soon enough to catch a glimpse of a pack of wolves in leather cloaks slipping in through the windows and thrusting their swords into his wife who still hadn't woken and into the girl who was looking up at the invaders with wide open eyes. The tears overwhelmed him and he was unable even to raise his arm to defend himself against the sword that slashed down at his neck. In the last few moments as blood gurgled out of the wound and his eyes began to blur he was overcome with a grief so profound that he was able to wish with all his might that he might go back to the days long before when he'd first come to the inn, and he realized how much he'd really loved the old man and how unfair it was that they were doing this to him now. He couldn't understand why it couldn't have all been better, why the cook couldn't have spotted the poison fish and why so many things couldn't have been different. When the chief of the guards stepped into the room a few moments later to rescue the old man and the ailing emissary he was taken aback by the ghostly look on the young man's still open eyes, feeling somehow that in the moments before he died the corpse must have seen something truly incredible.

There were only bodies in the village then. The world slowly collapsed around them and dark blood flowed through the streets already clogged with the littered corpses of beasts and children lifeless and mutilated, and the parched earth shook with the thunder of the rage of centuries of wounds reopened again and again so many times that they'd given up all hope of ever closing up again. The huts burnt the ground and collapsed into ashes that might have been a forest as easily as a village, and the animals that hadn't been slaughtered with their masters fled up into the mountains to try to live off the barren landscape.

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Jozo and the other monks were astonished to find the venerable priest still huddled over the twisted body of the emissary chanting sutras, and the old man seemed equally surprised and full of joy to see a whole legion ready to replace him at last, imagining that they'd been sent from his own temple and guessing that he didn't recognize them because he'd been there so long, that they were just more of the countless faces he'd seen come and go every year of his enormously long existence.

He began to weep and threw his arms around the other monks, welcoming them to the temple, forgetting that he was sitting not in some warm, quiet corner of a mountain retreat but in the middle of a battlefield or rather the site of a massacre, blind to the blood that was flowing through the dirt to either side of his feet.

The soldiers were already leaving the village in small groups, trudging down the same way they'd trudged up the hill, some thankful that it had been easy as it had and others already worrying about the next village they'd travel through. But up under the tree on the mountain the boy sat immobile, barely breathing.

A wind rose out of the valley, carrying the fragrance of death from below. The old tree swayed in the wind and seemed weary of its centuries of bending to winds it hadn't sent for. Gradually the sky darkened.

Moments later the sky erupted in pouring rain that swept down the hill into the village, cleaning the streets and washing away the blood of memories, washing the earth clean of the memories of men that had lived there since the beginning of time.

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10

In which Taka has a dream, the monks find him sitting alone at the top of the hill, the princess of the Heike comes back out of the earth into which she'd dug herself, and in which Taka goes out into the world.

Taka didn't really grasp the full meaning of what had happened until he finally got up from the tree and went down into the village to see with his own eyes. He was surprised at how the twisted tree's shadow actually lengthened not because the sun was setting, as it was burning brighter than ever, but because the shadow seemed to be doing all in its power to follow him wherever he went.

By the time he reached the place where the village of Ryunomi has lain for centuries and centuries since the time before time began the rain had stopped, but while he was walking, or rather sliding down the mountainside the sky was still erupting in anger at the tragedy it'd witnessed the night before and tears were still falling from the sky in sheets as if they were the tears of the gods who'd been broken down by what they'd seen.

But as he walked down the hill he couldn't imagine the desolation he found in the place from where only a single night before he'd heard screams rising, or rather he underestimated the power of the typhoon to clear sad memories from the face of the world. When he reached the bottom and started toward the inn which was the only home he'd ever known he was shocked to see nothing but a torn up flower bed and a few bamboo scraps scattered around the ground like the petals of a giant flower that had been uprooted by the anger of an empire.

The rain was enveloped in a mist so thick that he couldn't even see the rest of the village as he stood in the spot where the inn had once stood looking for friends or at least bones but not finding any of either, just a ditch and a dribble of water still flowing where the swollen river had poured through just a little while before. The village was buried in the fog as if the sky had decided to cover the sight of what man had wrought, to hide the evidence that man hadn't learned a thing in the five hundred years since the leper king was

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dismembered on the tree at the top of the hill. The rain was still falling but lightly enough now that he could step forward through the sheets without being pushed backwards to where he'd come from. He couldn't see the way down, of course, but the memories from his childhood of playing with his little sister who was already dead though Taka didn't really know. Only a few days earlier when the typhoon passed the first time and broke the drought with its downpour he'd been sitting on the mountaintop exposed to the daggers that were tumbling down from the heavens but perhaps the tengu's way of speaking had fascinated him enough that the whole storm had been no more than a dream to him.

There was no trace left of the village though, and the only the way he could be certain it had really stood on that spot and not some other valley was that he suddenly caught sight of the blurry figures of four transparent monks and realized it was the priest Jozo and a small group of younger acolytes sifting through the ruins, like him searching for any remnants of the people who had just a few months earlier been planting rice in their fields the way they had since the time before time began only this time with the foreboding that it would be their last harvest. One of the monks who later walked back down the village would be the only one to ever know the truth as he listened to villagers downriver telling of the bloody corpses they saw riding the waves down to the sea where they disappeared from the earth with a finality that made even time seem trivial.

Taka was so exhausted when he reached the top of the mountain again that he fell asleep immediately under the tree, with the sun still shining as brightly as it had in the years of the leper king, as brightly as it had been shining without rest for the last three days. As soon as he closed his eyes he saw a dream of a small white egret circling far above the ground, stretching its neck out and spreading its wings like flower petals, falling slowly toward a small field hidden between three mountains.

He didn't understand what the egret was until he caught sight of a small crowd of men standing below in the fields stretching their necks up over the wild weeds and watching the bird with faces full of desire, stretching their hands out like small children reaching for food.

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At first he didn't recognize any of the faces though there was one that seemed strangely familiar to him as he'd seen it once and then forgotten it like so many other things, like the vague memories he still had of his youth that had once seemed clear he knew but that now were so cloudy that he even began to wonder whether they'd really ever happened at all. Eventually he came to the conclusion that it could only really be one man, the father he'd hardly known who'd left him here in this doomed place, perhaps not knowing what tragedy would befall it but knowing without doubt that something would, that something could not but happen.

He had no way to recognize the other ragged creatures though he felt he was somehow linked to their sad faces, linked in a way to by the sadness the old woman in the hut at the bottom of the village had remembered when the little boy came to her, devastated by the sight of the emissary crushed in the agonizing pain of the poison fish's secretion's assault on his frail body.

He noticed among them one man whose long fingers were eaten and disintegrated like rotten fruits who'd fallen off a tree and been attacked by insects, a man whose flesh was so pale that it was easy to see things that should have been hidden behind his body. He was dressed in silk clothes but of a design that seemed made by the same Chinese craftsmen who had made the robes that little Taka had seen years before when the monk Jozo took him down the valley to see the temple that overlooked the ocean.

The boy instantly recognized the pale creature as the leper king who he'd never seen, of course, but whose story he knew so well that visitors to Ryunosuke's old inn had often been surprised by the little boy suddenly barging into coversations he didn't really understand telling stories from those long-past days as if they'd happened only yesterday, and it gradually became clear to Ryunosuke that the boy had somehow confused the past with the present, had somehow come to believe that the kingdom of the leper king was something he had seen with his own eyes and not heard about from the mouth of the monk. That was why the leper king, who had lived five centuries before his birth, seemed more like a friend he'd spoken to but never seen than a figure from the distant past.

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There was another man there standing in the shade behind the leper king, a tall bearded barbarian whose eyes flickered like those of a snake searching for prey and with arms tanned by a tropical sun that shone all the time, and there seemed little doubt to the boy that this was the father of the leper king, the madman who had conquered half the world with the strength of his ambition before falling into a lethargic well of insanity and living out the final years of his life in the lonely decrepitude of the tower he'd built above the town, leaving only to see the sun as it set over the mountains.

Taka could not recognize any of the others though he knew that if he searched well enough he would see the young prince who'd fled the city with a twelve-year old serving girl at his side and that the others were the kings of his own lineage, the long line of paupers and madmen who had survived at the edge of possibility for nearly five hundred years, wandering around the islands with the silent hope that one day their kingdom would be restored and they would bask once again in the luxury of a palace on a hill somewhere of a temple built to the glory of their reign.

Years before during his childhood he'd never watched dreams like this, never seen things so full of color and sound, and all the other dreams and nightmares seemed like pale spirits in comparison to the pit he felt open in his stomach as he watched the pale kings and would be kings reaching toward the bird with the same innocence that children reached for fruit on a tree. The bird was always just out of reach but far enough that it might as well have been over the mountains or across the sea in the cities where the streets were lined with gold.

In the days before the massacre he often told his dreams to Sasa who listened patiently as she peeled vegetables, laughing when she was supposed to laugh and gasping when he told frightening things. Later on after he awoke from his dream he would remember her flat face and cry at the thought that he wouldn't be able to hear her sighs anymore.

It was easy to understand what has happening in the dream though he didn't have the vision to understand what the egret meant or why they were all reaching for the white wings arching above their

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heads. He asked the creature and it answered simply that, "I am the bird of happiness, and it is only natural that they reach for me."

In the few moments he ruminated over this revelation it occured to him that it was all true, that he know the stories of many of the assembled men but he knew that the leper king's father had tried to conquer the world in the strange belief that he would find happiness once he'd fulfilled the holy mission and that in fact he'd died a broken madman in a solitary tower with no friends and perhaps not even any memories. The leper king too, had thought he would find happiness if he took his energies and drove them into a temple of mercy that he didn't realized had been built on the blood of his father's victims. Taka wondered what the leper king had been thinking in the last few days as he saw the imperial army marching over the hills, joined by tribes and tribes of chanting men anxious to avenge the deaths of their own at the hands of the madman who was still in the tower counting the days on his toes since he came back to the palace he'd built.

The boy didn't know which one was the last prince who escaped with the young serving maid for there were several who seemed to fit the part so perfectly that even the old actor wouldn't have been able to distinguish the one who wasn't playing a role. The boy wondered whether the young prince had believed he could find happiness in the soul or in the flesh of the little girl he'd taken by the hand and led into the mountains and he wondered even more whether they little girl had understood what she had been brought away for. It saddened his heart because it reminded him of his own brother Kan who had spent his youth in the same way running through villages looking for ways to satisfy his appetite that seemed to grow stronger with night he spent sheltered from the cold and from his loneliness in the arms of some abandoned woman living in the depths of towns so forgotten he couldn't have found them again even if he'd wanted too.

He suddenly started to laugh at the group of fools gathered below the bird because he knew that he alone could not be held back by the woes of the world that wore so heavily on their faces. He jumped up effortlessly, jumped higher than any of the others and

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pulled the bird screaming and wings flapping to the hard ground. It spat out at him, yes, boy, yes you little shit you've found my secret, but saying it with a smile even as it belched out foul words that in the recess of old Ryunosuke's inn had often signaled the beginning of the kind of fight that destroyed the walls on the night that Oka discovered that his woman had lain with another man. Taka understood that the creature was simply playing a final game with him, that it knew that he'd defeated it but that it didn't care because if the bird really was happiness then it couldn't have lost anything by being possessed or rather by being fulfilled.

The sun was rising over the mountains but the boy was still sleeping and still absorbed in the dream that had possessed when he lay down under the tree. Words were sifting through his head, words he couldn't remember ever having seen though in fact they'd been stained in dark ink on the face of a scroll he'd seen once on the wall of the temple by the sea but that he hadn't been able to read of course, and now they were rolling through his mind like stormclouds spouting thunder in the valley where the kings stood with sad looks on their faces realizing at last that they'd lived in vain.

The bird alighted again and Taka climbed onto its silver back as it arched high above the others, and he felt so proud that he had at last reached that they for all their suffering and all their pleasure-seeking had been unable to lay their hands on.

After the end of the dream he wouldn't remember the long moment he spent hovering in the air above the others but he flew for a long time, so long that he might have flown over the mountains and across the straights to the great land to the North if he hadn't suddenly been roused by the touch of a cold hand on his face. It was Jozo.

The monk was in tears at the revelation that somebody had survived the massacre and he was even happier that it was Taka, for he'd developed a profound affection for the boy since the time he'd taken him down to see the temple. He'd wandered the washed away ruins for the whole night, followed by his ragged acolytes, hoping to find even a trace of life, and this sudden discovery was more than he'd hoped for. If anything had survived, he'd reasoned at first, it

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would be an old widow living somewhere in the depths of the village in a place so dark that even the soldiers wouldn't bother to look. He couldn't really understand why he'd suddenly been hit with the urge to climb to the top of the mountain where they dismembered the leper king.

The sun had circled the sky nearly three times when Taka awoke from the dream. It wan't until the sun had risen into the Zenith and the boy had spoken the words that were weighing on his heart that the old monk noticed, though it was a suspicion even then, that the tree's shadow was moving to shelter the figure against the burning sky. It was a miraculous thing. The other monks noticed that Jozo's color faded a shade lighter but they didn't know what had happened inside him, couldn't feel how his long held fantasy that the history of man had truly been divided into endless cycles had been shattered, his belief that when Prince Siddhartha had found enlightenment a millennium earlier the world had been filled with magic but that now somehow the magic had evaporated into tales which alone reminded men of the glory of those times.

As the boy awoke from his dream Jozo tried to speak to him but it seemed that the boy barely recognized what was around him, for his eyes were still half-shut and he acknowledged the presence of the monks with nothing more than a shallow nod. In no time at all, however, he was coughing up all the things that had been weighing on his mind while he dreamed and the things that had solidified in rock-like phrases that were only truly amazing because the boy didn't know that they'd all been said before. Years later some of the younger monks would to begin to doubt what they'd seen with their own eyes and imagine that it might have been the heat and the rain or that the boy had really seen the phrases written on some temple wall, neglecting the obvious fact that the little boy couldn't read, but old Jozo would like on his deathbed and still believe with all his large heart that the boy had really become a Buddha.

"I have seen a deep truth, friends." It was the first time he had ever called anyone, let alone a monk, by the simple words "friend". "I have seen a great secret, I have seen the cycle of cause and effect that drives this world on and on like a great wheel." How odd, the old

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monk sighed. He knew that in the world outside there were carriages that rolled over the countryside but surely the boy had never seen anything like it, for such wonders had not spread and, the monk felt sure, would never spread into such a desolate place. The boy never stopped, as if he were remembering something like a secret that he'd known for a long time but never told anyone, "Existence is suffering. Birth is suffering, sickness is suffering, death is suffering."

The old monk did not remember that the boy had seen the three visions, the old man and the sick man and finally the corpse of the magistrate with its throat slashed wide open and blood trickling onto the ground, could not see that all the boy's dreams had been conceived many years before as he grew up like a weed in the darkness of the inn that had been burnt down three days before.

"But suffering is born is desire," the boy continued. "If you cling to bodies, to sensations, to forms, to impressions, then you will know nothing but suffering. It is desire that leads men from one life through rebirth to the next life, and I say to you that only by conquering desire will you know peace."

He continued speaking throughout the day, as lost as the sun in the days when it couldn't find the village, lecturing the clouds and the monks on the great eightfold path that had first been told a thousand years before in Benares, telling them again and again of the four noble truths he'd discovered in the shadows of the dream, that life was suffering, that suffering was brought on by desire, that suffering could be stopped by stopping desire, and finally, as the sun reached the zenith again, that desire could only be suppressed by following the eightfold path.

Neither he nor the monks ever noticed that a new figure had appeared and had been listening since he first touched upon the idea of desire. The monks had been straining too hard to catch the spirit of his words when a small hole opened in the ground behind them, a whirlwind of dirt flew out as if a badger was digging up from below, and finally as a great mud-caked head emerged from the bowels of the earth, followed by two rounded shoulders, a torso and two short legs. It was the princess of the Heike.

She'd been wandering below the mud for nearly three days

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and was nearly dead of thirst. The youngest of the monks didn't notice as she reached into his belt and pulled out his flask and pulled it into her burning mouth. Neither did the second, the third, the fourth or even the old monk Jozo who in his younger days had had a head clear enough to hear dust falling from the ceiling of his chamber.

The mud had dried into muck and then sand and flaked off her clothes by the time the boy had reached the explanation of the eightfold path, of the duties of right understanding, purpose, speech, conduct, occupation, effort, attention and meditation. Finally the women could bear no more of his nonsense. She stepped between the two youngest monks, knocking them over with her belligerent gait, stopped above the boy and slapped him right across the face

"You silly boy," she screamed. The monks were astonished at her rage more than at her sudden appearance. "What's this all about?"

Taka was scared at her assault but he had thought too much to retreat from his spot under the tree. "I have reached enlightenment," he answered softly.

She roared again as she yelled back the word "enlightened" to him as if it were a word to be despised rather than revered. "What good is it to you up here when the rot of humanity is festering below you, right down in the valley. Were you too blind to see what was happening?" Suddenly the memories of his sister, his mother and father and the old man were pouring down onto his sweat-soaked hair and he couldn't bear to listen to her condemnation. "There was a mist," he whispered to her, but she laughed at him for the naivety he was showing now that he had been challenged. "How can you sit under you miserable twisted tree," she said, "when all around you the world is being swallowed by a monster you don't even understand because you've never met it. You may go up into the mountains as far away as you want, over the sea to China if you want, but still, never will you change that you are made of the same flesh as those who died in your village."

The boy remembered the prophecy, and it occupied his mind like the sole star in a sky that was fading before his eyes. "But I am destined..."

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"You're not destined for shit." she spit, and she told him they were just fantasies he'd seen many years before, that none of them had had any meaning, and then she told him what she'd really seen in the tunnel as she dug through the history of a thousand years. "You are lucky, though, for even though this disaster has brought the end of all you know it opens things I will never know. My name may seem like a blessing to you, I of the Heike, the Heike, always the Heike, but it's a curse you can't imagine, for wherever I go throughout the kingdom it rests on my shoulder, a burden I will never escape until the day they corner me somewhere, as they did to my brother and my dearest friends, and drive a spike through my body.

"You've escaped that all. You were once Taka of Ryunomi, the innkeeper's little boy, but now it's all gone, you see, and now you name is gone too. It doesn't matter who you are now. Nobody will chase you down and nobody will ever think they know who you are before they ever look into your eyes." Then she turned down the hill, leaving the monks still entranced in the dream the refused to believe had ended.

Taka felt a deep pity for the woman he could still see disappearing down the hillside, and he watched her form until she disappeared behind a butte.

On the pinnacle far below the boy gazed down over the ruins with his bright eyes and thought suddenly that perhaps the village had never been there at all, that the temple of the leper king had never been and that the poor wanderer who'd called himself his father had never stopped in this forgotten place. He forgot for a moment that he was the little boy named Taka, and he saw before him a field stretched out so far that he couldn't see the other end.

He started down into the valley, leaving the tree where the leper king had been chopped up behind, leaving the monks in their dream, and went down slowly, knowing he would never climb back up to the place from which he'd first seen the world. A long time before, when he was still a young boy and the innkeeper was still alive and smiling because he didn't know what was bound to happen, he had first seen the village stretched out from there and had felt a keen sense of wonder that it was so small and that the world around

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seemed so large. Now for the second time he'd the same vision but in the icy eyes of the princess, but this time the world had grown so large that he knew he could never go back to the place he'd just been.

Down in the ruins of the village that had already been swept away by the rain he thought he saw shadows of beings he'd once known and others he'd only seen in a dream, but they were all creeping through the mist with their shoulders bent under the weight of a pain that seemed just at the verge of crushing their bones into dust, and he couldn't even look into their eyes because he knew they would only plead with him to deliver them from the horrible things that had befallen this world.

He felt a sadness, not yet despair but rather shame at the way they struggled against fate as if it had been thrown at them by cruel gods who had left them abandoned and alone, at the way the clawed at the mud they'd been cast in to try to reach the surface because only there they thought they could escape. He wanted to tell them to rejoice in the mud but his voice could not reach them through the mist. He saw the place where the inn had once been and saw the old man and woman walking through the streets with their bodies stained with thin trails of blood, and he saw Sasa and the little girl, so pale he could see through their bodies, and he started to weep. Then suddenly he felt a hot breath on the nape of his neck. It was the old tengu.

The red-skinned beast saw the sorrow in his eyes and started to laugh softly. "You're not the first to walk this trail, little Taka. There was another a long time before, and there was the leper king after him, though the world was still a cage to them. Rejoice, because you have lost your name. All the years you ancestors wandered the mountain paths they were still trapped in the village at the end of the world." He saw the tears in the boy's eyes and asked him if he was crying for the ghosts of his kin.

"No," he said, "not for their ghosts but for what they were. I thought just a little while ago that I could escape everything I saw, but now I see I can't and yet I haven't fallen in to despair. There was a time I believed I could escape, and I think they did too, and that's why

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the burdens seemed so heavy to them. "But if other men could see what would they think, watching

their crippled shapes laboring, fighting back and trying just to reach for something they are always destined to fail to grasp. That's why I cry. I'm ashamed to be made from the same blood as these pigs." Suddenly his tears had turned to hysterical laughter.

"The world was once a burden, but now it's only a dream, and my name too had faded into a daydream I once had in the days when Ryunosuke first came to the little village in the hills."

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