The Sword of Heaven

by Mikkel Aaland

  Table of Contents

  Travelers’ Tales Books

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  prologue

  PART ONE

  chapter 1

  chapter 2

  chapter 3

  chapter 4

  chapter 5

  PART TWO

  chapter 6

  chapter 7

  chapter 8

  chapter 9

  chapter 10

  chapter 11

  chapter 12

  chapter 13

  PART THREE

  chapter 14

  chapter 15

  chapter 16

  chapter 17

  chapter 18

  chapter 19

  chapter 20

  EPILOGUE

  sword of heaven placement information

  Acknowledgements

  about the author

  Copyright Page

  Travelers’ Tales Books

  COUNTRY AND REGIONAL GUIDES

  America, Antarctica, Australia, Brazil, Central America, China, Cuba, France,

  Greece, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Nepal, Spain, Thailand, Tibet,

  Turkey; Alaska, American Southwest, Grand Canyon, Hawai‘i, Hong Kong,

  Middle East, Paris, Prague, Provence, San Francisco, South Pacific, Tuscany

  WOMEN’S TRAVEL

  100 Places in Italy Every Woman Should Go, 100 Places Every Woman Should

  Go, The Best Women’s Travel Writing, A Woman’s Asia, A Woman’s Europe,

  Her Fork in the Road, A Woman’s Path, A Woman’s Passion for Travel, A

  Woman’s World, Women in the Wild, A Mother’s World, Safety and Security for

  Women Who Travel, Gutsy Women, Gutsy Mamas, A Woman’s World Again

  BODY & SOUL

  Writing Away, You Unstuck, Stories to Live By, Spiritual Gifts of Travel, The

  Road Within, A Mile in Her Boots, Love & Romance, Food, How to Eat

  Around the World, Adventure of Food, Ultimate Journey, Pilgrimage

  SPECIAL INTEREST

  Wild with Child, Mousejunkies!, What Color Is Your Jockstrap?, Encounters

  with the Middle East, Not So Funny When It Happened, Gift of Rivers, How

  to Shit Around the World, Testosterone Planet, Danger!, Fearless Shopper, Penny

  Pincher’s Passport to Luxury Travel, Make Your Travel Dollars Worth a Fortune,

  Gift of Birds, Family Travel, A Dog’s World, There’s No Toilet Paper on the

  Road Less Traveled, Gift of Travel, 365 Travel, The Thong Also Rises,

  Adventures in Wine, The World Is a Kitchen, Sand in My Bra, Hyenas

  Laughed at Me, Whose Panties Are These?, More Sand in My Bra

  TRAVEL LITERATURE

  Cruise Confidential, Marco Polo Didn’t Go There, A Rotten Person Travels the

  Caribbean, A Sense of Place, The Best Travel Writing, Kite Strings of the

  Southern Cross, The Sword of Heaven, Storm, Take Me With You, Last Trout

  in Venice, The Way of the Wanderer, One Year Off, The Fire Never Dies, The

  Royal Road to Romance, Unbeaten Tracks in Japan, The Rivers Ran East,

  Coast to Coast, Trader Horn

  For my daughter, Miranda Kristina:

  May your enlightened heart guide you.

  And to my wife, Rebecca:

  I love you.

  It is not power that corrupts,

  but fear.

  Aung San Suu Kyi

  Winner of

  the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize

  prologue

  The Amazon.

  It was my last Shinto god. I was aboard the Marreiro II, a weathered jungle boat, as it struggled against the merging currents of the Rio Negro and the Rio Solimoes just outside the Brazilian town of Manaus.

  This god, like the one I had placed two weeks earlier in South Africa, and the one I had placed a week earlier near the place where Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay meet, and all the others, was wrapped in white prayer cloth and imprinted with ancient Japanese symbols: ten (heaven) and ken (sword). I leaned carefully over the wooden railing, weak from a fever that had gripped me the day after I placed the god at the Cape of Good Hope. It grew worse as I spent days in the jungle searching for the proper resting place for the last god in my possession.

  Below me were the Rio Negro, full of minerals and humus and as dark as a bat’s cave, and the Rio Solimoes, full of light Andean silt. They mixed like oil and water. I looked up from the primordial gumbo, through the moist air, only to see where huge patches of the verdant jungle had been ripped from the earth to make room for factories made of concrete.

  This place is an ecological mess, I thought. I was mindful both of Shinto’s worship of nature and aware that most of the jungle-destroying factories were Japanese-owned. It’s not perfect, but nothing ever is.

  I removed the white cloth to uncover another familiar barrier, this one of plain white paper. Just before the boat burst free from the mottled mess and entered the Negro, I heaved the heavy stone overboard. Just as the circles in the water faded, a pink dolphin, which the natives call “devil fish,” swam by. The boat’s only other passenger, a high school biology teacher from New York, cried out in sheer joy at the sight of the exotic mammal. He began clicking his camera madly.

  I felt better the instant the hollowed stone, filled with its precious contents, splashed into the water. I watched with tears in my eyes as its impact blended the brown and black stew, creating a third distinct color, one richer and more beautiful. The mixed water, now called the mighty Amazon, moved leisurely downstream toward the distant sea.

  Nearly six years had passed since I had first heard of the Sword of Heaven. Six years, five continents, and several trips to Japan. What started as a peace project to save the world had quickly become much more, shaking the core of my Western beliefs and bringing long-forgotten demons to the surface. Now, with this last god placed, my part in a grueling and marvelous project was over. Perhaps, I thought, tonight I can finally sleep in peace.

  PART ONE

  When

  the spring gushes forth,

  it does not know at first

  where it will go.

  chapter 1

  My first placing in Norway.

  In the early fall of 1982, the relative calm of the ’70s was over, and the Cold War was back in full swing. The Soviets had invaded Afghanistan and placed deadly SS-20 missiles on the border between the USSR and Western Europe. Under the leadership of President Ronald Reagan, the United States responded with new and more potent weapon delivery systems such as the Trident submarine, the B-1 bomber, and Peacekeeper missiles. Tens of thousands of nuclear missiles were ready to launch. All it would take would be a small spark to ignite the atomic flame that would destroy the world.

  At a dinner party in San Francisco, the conversation turned from adventurous tales of the Orient to the apocalypse. After all, in those days, it was a dangerous world. Sometime during our frightful discussion, one of the dinner guests—Juan Li, whom I would come to know well—told us a remarkable story he had heard while traveling in Asia.

  “Shinto is Japan’s indigenous religion,” he began.

  Most of us nodded yes. I had heard that Shinto was similar to American Indian spirituality, focusing on nature and ancestors.

  “Many years ago,” Juan continued, “shortly after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagaski, a Shinto priest had a horrific vision of the end of the world. His spirit was crushed. He became despondent.”

  Juan paused for a moment, tugged on his scraggly moustache, and carefully watched our reaction with soft yet intense eyes before continuing.

  “But then the priest had
another vision, a vision of how to save the world. He was inspired.”

  The priest was instructed by God to break an ancient Shinto relic—the Sword of Heaven—into 108 pieces and then encase each piece in stone. The stones—which now were considered kamis, or gods—would take on special powers and become capable of battling the evil that engulfed the world.

  Juan explained that, a Shintoist, like the priest, believes that evil results when nature and one’s ancestors are not properly worshipped. Shintoists also believe that gods or spirits dwell inside inanimate objects. A stone, a sword, a jewel, a rainbow—anything that evokes or inspires awe or the divine—can possess power and become a kami. And like the ancient Greeks, the Shintoists have a pantheon of gods to whom they pray.

  Followers of the priest, Juan told us, began to place the stones in a protective ring around the world. After each stone was placed, special ceremonies were held during which the priest and his followers left their physical bodies and joined the heavenly gods in the ensuing battle. But the battle was going slowly: at this time only a few of the 108 stone gods had been placed.

  “Who told you all this?” someone asked.

  “One of the teacher’s disciples, a young Japanese man named Kazz Tagami,” Juan replied.

  Juan’s answer satisfied the questioner, but I still had doubts. Stone gods? Out-of-body travel? I liked Juan, and I wanted to believe him, but this was the stuff of fiction, not fact.

  “How do you know the story is true?” I asked.

  “Well, I just placed a god,” he answered matter-of-factly. “In Taiwan.”

  With this revelation of his involvement, my curiosity increased. Could a Shinto priest really save the world? Could a Shinto priest save us from an unthinkable nuclear catastrophe?

  Like most of the others in the room, I grew up in the ’50s and ’60s with the bomb and the Cold War as a constant backdrop. In addition, my father was a scientist at the Livermore Radiation Laboratory, which in the 1950s became the United States’ major nuclear weapons research facility. Because of the Lab, we knew our town was marked with giant X on Soviet strategic maps. My Livermore classmates and I accepted the idea of nuclear annihilation the same way that other generations accepted plagues, famine, and economic calamity. There was nothing we could do, and yet we had little confidence in the so-called nuclear priests—the politicians, scientists, and military leaders—who were in charge.

  The idea that a lone man with magical powers in a far off land could affect this situation seemed far-fetched. Nonetheless, through the years of accumulated despair, a faint hope stirred in my heart. What if his powers were real?

  As the evening ended and guests said their good-byes, something compelled me to give Juan my address and to offer my help, even though I really didn’t expect anything to come of it.

  “A package arrived for you.” My father looked troubled. As the train slowly departed behind us, I shouldered my camera equipment and luggage to his car. “It caused a lot of confusion at customs: they wanted to hold it.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked wearily. After finishing magazine assignments in West Germany and Czechoslovakia, I was headed to the family home in southern Norway. My father had recently retired from his job in California and was spending part of the year in the house he was born in.

  “News travels fast here,” he said in heavily accented English as he squeezed his large frame into the car. “People are already talking.”

  As he put the key in the ignition, he wiped his head, thinly covered with strands of white hair.

  “Here,” my father finally said, handing me the customs declaration. “What does this mean, ‘One Shinto God’?” I quickly took the packing label from his outstretched hand.

  “Where is the package? Did they hold it?”

  Starting the car, he turned to me and said, “They didn’t open it. It won’t get us in trouble, will it?”

  I had no reason to believe that the package contained anything dangerous or illegal, but how could I be sure? My response was tinged with more than a little false confidence.

  “Of course, it won’t get us in trouble.”

  “Good,” he said. “It was heavy so I left it at home.”

  We drove in silence for a while. The single-lane road, eight kilometers long, wound through forests of evergreens toward the town of Ulefoss and the family house. Occasionally the forests were broken by freshly harvested fields and the traditional red farmsteads of Telemark.

  The road widened as we entered the outskirts of town. On our left, a wide river paralleled the road, and except for a family of wild swans, the river was undisturbed. Across the river was dense forest.

  Between the road and the river were widely spaced homes. Each plot of land has a name. We passed Odden, which means “Rock Jutting Out into the Water”; Deilevja, “Dividing Inlet”; and Baerland, “Berry Land.” Finally we came to Aaland, “Land by the Water,” a piece of land near a small creek and a river. Like many other rural Norwegians, my grandfather had taken his surname from the name of the land where he was born. My father, born on the same land, also chose the name Aaland.

  We crossed the creek and slipped through a narrow opening between my grandfather’s store—where he had made and sold furniture—and the house. As the wheels of the car hit the gravel, they sprayed tiny pebbles into the small courtyard behind the house.

  My father turned off the engine and sighed. He stared across the river for a minute to the forest on the far side.

  “How’re you enjoying retirement?” I asked, my eyes following his to the forest.

  “You mean ‘forced retirement,’” he grunted. His accent was less pronounced as his thoughts abruptly shifted back to America. “Kristian Aaland. Successful scientist. Fired. I feel so useless. This wouldn’t have happened here in Norway. Thirty years of service. Here they have laws. Here they show respect.”

  “You saw it coming,” I said gently. “The Lab gave you plenty of signs.”

  His downward slide had begun ten years earlier, after I left home for college. The Lab had moved to replace older employees like my father with younger, lower-paid scientists. But after nearly twenty years as an electrical engineer, my father’s grip on his only security in America was so tight that he dug his heels in deep and resisted. Ten years later, he was finally forced out, bitter and disillusioned.

  Dad turned to me and spoke sharply. “And you? Flying here and there. Living month-to-month. No wife, no kids. How can you understand what I did?”

  He saw the pained look on my face. We had argued about this too many times before. I was 30 years old and between girlfriends. I’d published two books, and managed to make a decent living for ten years selling photographs and articles to magazines in the United States and Europe. I knew he was proud of my survival in a difficult profession, but I also knew that he thought of me as his idealistic oldest child, one who didn’t show enough concern for money and other earthly things. Of course, I thought he showed too much concern for those same material things.

  “I don’t know what you are waiting for, son,” he said.

  There was a long silence.

  “Have you heard from mom?” I finally asked, groping for some neutral ground. Mom was in Livermore, teaching emotionally handicapped children in the public schools system. She was born in Wisconsin and grew up in the U.S., and although she loved Norway, she only accompanied my father to his homeland occasionally, during summer breaks.

  “She called this morning. Everything is fine.”

  A small fishing boat glided swiftly downstream.

  “This sure isn’t Livermore!” I exclaimed, marveling as I always did at the difference between my ancestral home and the tightly placed, nearly identical suburban houses of my California hometown.

  “No, it’s not Livermore,” he said, suddenly impatient with our conversation.

  “My restless father,” I thought, as he reached for the car door. He rarely sat still for anything or anyone. I glanced
to my left and noticed without much surprise that he had begun rebuilding Grandfather’s workshop, a barnlike structure near the water, full of tools and machinery used to make furniture. He’d also started remodeling my Grandfather’s furniture store, an adjacent structure that ran long and narrow from the river to the road.

  He hadn’t changed. In Livermore, he had altered our tract home into something so unique that townspeople would drive out of their way to see it. The garage was turned into a workshop; the kitchen, the living room, and dining room were remodeled; and a towering three-story addition, crowned with a sauna, was added in the backyard. Tired of us kids damaging the trees, my father had also made a metal tree by welding together large iron pipes of different widths. Metal roots kept the towering structure from falling, even when my two younger brothers and I and six neighborhood pals hung from it.

  And then there was the bomb shelter. He built it in 1962, shortly after the Berlin Wall was erected, the same year as the Cuban missile crisis, and the year we thought the world would end. He’d wanted to build one before, but when President Kennedy publicly suggested that private bomb shelters were good for the country, it became much easier for my father to get the required permits and financing. My father bought half of a Southern Pacific boxcar from a railroad junkyard, disassembled it, and transported it to our front yard. For the next six months, night after night, he welded it together. When he was finished, he hired a crane and an operator to tear up our front lawn and dig a hole 30 feet deep. He then had the same crane lift the assembled boxcar and drop it into the hole. Finally, the whole thing was entombed in concrete.

  The shelter was finished in October, just in time for the Cuban crisis. At first the entire family—my parents, my two brothers, and I—slept there, but after a few weeks, when the crisis subsided, everyone else returned upstairs to the house. I remained, and the bomb shelter became my bedroom until I left home for college, eight years later.