The Book of Heroes

by Miyuki Miyabe

  The three stopped. It had been they who were singing, but now their song ceased.

  Then one of them lowered his torch from his face. Another, torch still held high, took a step forward. Before he or Yuriko could say a word, the glyph on Yuriko’s forehead glimmered brightly, then faded again.

  “Young child,” said a youthful man’s voice, “new allcaste, we greet you.”

  Yuriko looked at the monklike figure and then up at the giant building distant in the mist behind him. For a moment, it seemed to her as though it had been the building that spoke, not the man.

  “Hello?” Yuriko ventured. Even though her throat was too tight and her voice too soft, the word seemed to ring through the air. Then the gray sky and chilly mist echoed her word back to her. Hello. Hello…

  “We are the nameless devout, guardians of the Hall of All Books,” the young man’s voice said. Then the one who had stepped forward bowed deeply, still holding his torch high. Behind him, the other two joined his bow.

  Unsure of what to do, Yuriko merely stood as straight as she could.

  The three nameless devout lifted their heads. “This is the nameless land,” the one in front said. “The sound you heard was the Second Bell ringing to mark the arrival of an allcaste. We have come to greet you.”

  Come, one of the monks motioned with his head, turning sideways to her to open the way. To Yuriko, it felt like an eternity passed before she could summon the nerve to take that first step. It took more courage than it had to step into the magic circle that had brought her here. Now I really can’t turn back. Once I go with them, it’s started. Though, in a corner of her mind, she still felt like there was time for her to apologize and just go home. She was sure they would forgive her—

  Yuriko stepped forward.

  “There’s nothing to be frightened of,” the lead devout said in a gentle voice as she approached. “There is nothing in this land that threatens you, allcaste. Come, let us take you to our hall.” The two devout in the back now led them, and the devout who had stepped forward matched Yuriko’s pace to walk beside her.

  “Is that big building the Hall of All Books?” Yuriko asked, indicating the silhouette on the horizon with her eyes. Somehow, she felt it wasn’t appropriate to point.

  “That is so.”

  “So that big building is filled with books? Like a library?”

  For moment, the nameless devout walking next to her seemed to not understand the question, then he smiled and said, “Ah yes, a library. That is what you call them in your Circle. It is something like that. A very large library.”

  The nameless devout’s features matched his youthful voice. He was a boy, and not a very tall one—Yuriko’s head came up to his shoulder. His head was perfectly hairless save the thick brows over his eyes, and he wore no clothes, jewelry, or any adornments other than his black robes.

  Yuriko imagined them to be scholars watching over the staggeringly large library as if it were a church. It made her smile to think of them as librarians. Except the people who worked at the library near her school all wore colorful aprons, even the men. She wondered if the nameless devout would look good in aprons.

  I’m just trying to calm myself down by thinking silly thoughts—and it’s not working. Yuriko sighed and put the mental image out of her mind.

  They walked steadily onward, but the hall on the horizon didn’t seem to get any closer. The way it loomed up into the sky made Yuriko jittery, and she racked her brain for something she could talk to her escort about.

  “You were singing before, weren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “What was the song?”

  “It is the invocation,” the devout replied, explaining before she could ask that it was a song of prayer.

  So they do pray, sort of. “I couldn’t understand the words—what language was that—” Yuriko clapped a hand to her mouth. Not understanding the lyrics to their song was one thing. But how could she possibly be talking with them now? What language am I speaking?

  Again, the nameless devout answered her question before she could ask it. “We of the nameless land can understand the words of the allcaste and employ them ourselves. But the words of the invocation are something else entirely. That is why you are unable to comprehend their meaning.”

  “Well, what language were the lyrics in?”

  “In the words of the nameless land.”

  So the nameless land had its own language. Guess I’m not in Japan.

  “I was wondering,” she began, “if you…if you could tell me what the words to your song meant?” She hesitated halfway through her question when it seemed to her that a dark look passed over the nameless devout’s face.

  “It is a song about the King in Yellow, and the weaver.”

  “Oh,” Yuriko said simply, then shut her mouth. She had lots of questions burning inside her now, but she didn’t want the monks to think of her as an annoying little girl.

  She looked up to see that the building loomed even closer now. Funny, it doesn’t feel like we’ve walked that far—of course, she thought, maybe it was the lack of any reference points whatsoever that was throwing off her sense of distance.

  Again, a bell began to ring, but with a slightly different tone, and at a different pace. Where the bell she had heard earlier was slow and booming, this one was light and up-tempo.

  “This bell tells the nameless devout that the allcaste will soon arrive at the hall, calling them to gather at the Dome of Convocation.”

  How does he always know what I’m just about to ask?

  “Are there lots of you?”

  “We are a thousand, and we are ten thousand,” the boy monk told her. “Yet we are only one.”

  Yuriko frowned. How could “we” be one? It took at least two people to make a “we,” as far as she knew. And weren’t there three of them with her right now? The path curved gently downhill until they were close enough to the Hall of All Books that Yuriko could make out some of the details.

  It’s a castle, was her first thought, like they have in Europe. She had never seen the real thing, but she had seen plenty of buildings like it on television, and in movies and pictures, sitting on the tops of mountains or cliffs, rising from a forest by a lake in Germany or France.

  Yet at the same time, it seemed different from those castles—though she couldn’t put her finger on why it did.

  Was it a church, or maybe an abbey? That would make sense, if monks lived there. But no, she thought, it’s something else. Something that every castle has, but the Hall of All Books lacks.

  Then it hit her. There was no wall around the building, not even a courtyard. It just rose abruptly from the surrounding grasslands. Because there were no walls, there was no gate. There was only a small, pointed roof over the main entrance directly in front of them. The double doors in the entrance were fashioned of some dark material, though she couldn’t tell whether it was metal or wood. Carved figures and shapes covered their surfaces.

  Three semicircular steps led up to the doors. To either side of the steps stood two torch poles, each as high as a two-story building, their flames giving off plenty of light and smoke. Yuriko and the three devout approached, and the doors opened inwardly, seemingly by themselves. They moved like they were very heavy, yet made not a sound.

  The two devout who had been walking in the front split off to the left and the right, opening the way for Yuriko and the one who walked with her. It was the first time she had gotten a good look at their faces.

  So great was her surprise that she almost hiccuped. At least, she thought, I didn’t shout out loud. The two in front looked identical to the one walking with her. All three of them look exactly the same! Now that she thought about it, she realized they were all the same height too.

  Are they triplets? If they don’t have any names, how am I supposed to tell them apart?

  Then the devout standing by her side bowed lightly and walked ahead of her. Yuriko looked around, then followed him
into the hall. It was dim inside, and the air smelled faintly of something pleasant—though not flowers or incense. It smelled like the air smells after a thundercloud has passed. A moist, pure smell.

  When a lot of rain falls in a short amount of time, it releases negative ions. That’s why the air smells different after a thunderstorm. Her brother had told her that once.

  The place she was standing in now was more like a town square than a hall. Looking up, she could see a vaulted, six-sided ceiling high above her. Thin light streamed through small windows that had been cut out of the walls in each corner. Yuriko lowered her eyes and found that the floor of the hall was also six-sided, with six pillars standing around the edges.

  The nameless devout in front turned to the left. Yuriko squinted her eyes to look at the carvings and statuary around her. Some of them sat on the floor, others had been carved higher into the walls themselves, and some were part of the columns.

  All of them were shaped like people. It was like a Greek temple she had read about once. Gods in robes and sandals. But then she noticed one wearing long stocking-boots, like a character in an old samurai movie. Another statue, across from him, looked just like a general in the old Chinese warfare video game her father was always playing.

  The floor was covered with overlapping patterns made from tiny, intricately arranged tiles.

  Not just patterns, they’re letters! Letters, letters, and more letters. Letters of all kinds, woven together like a puzzle, stacked on top of each other. Some of them looked like jumbles of random lines, and others looked like some foreign language, and they were all mixed together. She recognized Roman letters here and there, and something that looked a lot like Korean. I wonder if there’s any Japanese?

  She was so busy looking down at the tiles beneath her feet that she walked into the back of the nameless devout in front of her. Yuriko jumped back, mortified, but the monk didn’t seem to mind.

  “We’ll be entering this hallway.”

  Ahead of them, a long hallway led away from the room, curving gently to the right. The right-hand wall was solid all the way down, but the left-hand wall was broken up by tall, narrow windows every six feet or so. The light coming in through the windows made the hallway much brighter than the giant chamber they were leaving.

  “You’ll want to watch your feet through here,” the devout warned her. Yuriko nodded and began to walk, but before she had gone very far, she stopped short and jumped.

  Japanese! It’s a Japanese character! She found it on the dark black wall on the left-hand side, between two of the window slits.

  It was only a single character, carved in relief—and large, about the size of a car tire.

  “En!” she shouted, a little too loudly. “That’s the character en, isn’t it?”

  The two nameless devout behind her said nothing, but the one in front smiled gently and nodded.

  “I’m sorry. I was just surprised to find something I could read here.”

  She was surprised at how relieved it made her feel. She felt happy, and homesick. And it was also a little funny. She had never seen this particular character written so large, not even in the lobby of a bank.

  “Did you know that this is the word for the money we use?”

  The nameless devout nodded. “We do. Yet it also means ‘circle.’”

  And by circle, he means “Circle.” Like the Circle I live in. Of course. I always thought “en” just stood for money.

  “I’m sorry, I talk too much, don’t I? I’ll be quiet.” She was embarrassed. Why am I so flustered?

  The nameless devout walked on in silence, a little quicker than before. In order to avoid further distractions, Yuriko kept her eyes off the walls and walked as straight as she could. But she stopped when she realized that the wall on the right side, which she had assumed was just covered with sculpture like all the rest, was actually divided into shelves stacked full of books. Their spines ran in tightly packed rows as far as she could see.

  “These are all books?” she asked before she could think to stop herself.

  Yuriko reached out and touched one. It felt strangely hard beneath her fingertips.

  It’s like they’re made of stone. These aren’t books. More sculpture.

  One of the nameless devout was looking at her. She mumbled an apology and pulled back her hand. The young monk didn’t scold her, but he wasn’t smiling either.

  They walked on slowly down the curving hallway. It occurred to Yuriko that maybe she had been wrong when she thought there were no walls around the Hall of All Books. Maybe the hallway she was walking down now wasn’t the inside of the building. In other words, what she could see from the outside wasn’t actually the Hall of All Books, but something like a thick wall that surrounded it. Its immense size had made it look flat, like the side of a building, when she’d gone in, but they had been walking around a curve for so long, she imagined it might have been part of a much larger, circular structure.

  If that were true, then the castle, or abbey or library, would be further inside. But it didn’t seem like that was where Yuriko was heading.

  Finally, the end of the hallway came into view. Straight ahead was a dead end, but the right wall was open to another room, though a portcullis of thin bars blocked the way. Yuriko caught a glimpse of green grass through the bars.

  The nameless devout walking behind her stepped ahead and pulled the lever on the wall next to the portcullis, causing it to creak open to one side.

  If Yuriko could trust her sense of direction, going through this door should bring her behind the wall. She looked behind her and saw that this exit also had metallic double doors, though this pair had been pushed open to stand flat against the wall. It wasn’t exactly a sunny day outside, but coming out of the darkened hallway she had to blink against the brightness. Yuriko squinted her eyes—and gasped.

  She had been right. The towering edifice Yuriko had first seen from the plain was only an outer wall, and only a part of it at that. It had been like a folding screen. One bigger than she could have ever imagined. And behind it was this: More buildings than Yuriko could count on both her hands. There was one like a long, low hall. Another like a giant’s bowl turned upside down on the ground—possibly the dome of something-or-other that the devout had mentioned. A bell tower stood next to that.

  In her short life, Yuriko had never seen a bell tower other than the one on the low stand in front of her neighborhood temple, but she knew this was a bell tower immediately thanks to the three bells hanging in the belfry near the top. They were huge, these bells, each as large as a house. Monster bells, thought Yuriko.

  The buildings were gray for the most part, though she spotted slight differences here and there. Some seemed to have a faintly purpleish hue, others were darker, and some were blue. There were wide, low buildings and tall, narrow buildings. Though each building seemed to be of its own unique design, they nevertheless looked like they belonged there together. Perhaps it was because the buildings were connected by long exterior hallways and stairs hewn from stone. Not one stood entirely apart from the others—yet the way they had been connected was bizarre. In one spot, two buildings stood so close together there didn’t seem to be any point in running a hallway between them, and yet a hallway zigzagged through the narrow gap, with stairs going up and down so that to walk along it would nearly quadruple the actual distance between one building and the other. In another part, two buildings at the very edges—as far away from each other as they could possibly be—were connected by a long aerial walkway about three stories off the ground.

  The manner of their linking seemed complicated and random, following no discernible pattern. She tried following the hallways with her eyes, and it still wasn’t immediately clear what connected which building to which. It was like one of those picture puzzlers. In part it seemed like they had just kept adding buildings, linking them however they felt like at the time, even if it didn’t make any sense—but at the same time there was a certain joy t
o the way it looked. Yuriko felt like she had just opened a toy box filled with wondrous things. The buildings were huge and dark, towering and giant, weathered and gray, yet they were each so different and curious and strangely cute in places. Even though it was so big, and she was so little, Yuriko found herself growing quite fond of this strange and tangled town.

  And there was something familiar about it too, though she couldn’t imagine how that might be possible. There was nothing particularly Japanese about the buildings, nor was there anything that seemed quite like the scenes of Europe that Yuriko had seen in movies. It wasn’t American or British either. Still, it felt curiously familiar—and all of it was hidden behind that wall, thought Yuriko, impressed anew with the wall’s sheer magnitude.

  Green grass, cobblestone plazas, and brick roads filled the open spaces of the town. Like the buildings, none of these were the same. The first thing she realized when she saw the roads was that the steepled entrance and long hallway she had come in through were only a side entrance to the town.

  Directly opposite from where Yuriko had entered, there was a two-story-high gap in the external wall, with a giant gate. The doors of the gate were reinforced with strips of ancient iron, with sharp spearlike adornments running along the top edge. To keep out intruders? Or to keep people from escaping?

  Not that she could see anyone who might try. The place was deserted.

  The main gate was closed, and Yuriko imagined the chilly mist pressing against the far side. A large road passed under the gate, though Yuriko couldn’t begin to guess where it led.

  One of the nameless devout noticed her looking. “We will take you beyond that gate later, but now we must hurry to the convocation.”

  As she had expected, they began to walk toward the building that looked like a giant’s bowl turned upside down on the ground. The exterior walls of the dome were covered with what looked like bronze plates. They were rusting in places—here and there, splotches of vivid green stood out on the dull surface.

  It was like the giant who owned the bowl had taken a paintbrush to it and made a grand mess of the thing. Perhaps it was the giant’s child, Yuriko thought, playing with the paint.