The Book of Heroes

by Miyuki Miyabe

  So people and books can fight with each other. Yuriko supposed that was possible with books like the ones here.

  “I could not fulfill Minochi’s wish. It was an impossible wish to begin with. Over the years I was here, I tried to explain this to Minochi, to convince him, but he did not accept my reasoning. He grew angry with me, denying what I had to say. He went on that trip to find another sage to replace me.”

  Yuriko wondered what kind of wish her great-uncle—a rich hermit who collected old books—might have had.

  “Minochi searched for a way to raise the dead.”

  Even despite her amazement at everything that had happened up to this point, Yuriko found herself surprised anew.

  “The dead! Who?”

  “A woman who was important to him. The only person who ever was. She died a long time ago.”

  Ichiro Minochi had lived a solitary life. But there had been a woman. I wonder if he truly loved her? “And he bought all these books, just searching for that?”

  “Yes, he did. He believed that if he could only collect all the knowledge there is in this world, he would find a way to raise the dead.”

  Yuriko looked over the countless blinking lights there in the dark room. It was a tremendous collection of knowledge.

  “I told Minochi his efforts were in vain. There is no book possessing a technique by which one can raise the dead. Certainly not the way for which he searched. I urged him to choose a different story, but he would not listen.”

  Yuriko raised an eyebrow at the word story. Even to a young girl, the way the book had used the word seemed strange. Didn’t he mean way, or path, or even spell?

  “Story?”

  She meant it as a question, but the Sage did not explain himself. His light wavered slightly. “Yuriko,” the Sage said. “Compared to me, Aju is as young as you. I can appreciate why he seeks to support you, but he is inexperienced and has brought you here without giving you sufficient knowledge.”

  “That’s not true,” Aju said. “And I’m no youth, so don’t treat me as if I were.”

  Apparently, books could also fight amongst themselves.

  “Still, it is clear you have confused this child Yuriko.”

  Aju sighed but said nothing.

  “Mr. Sage, please don’t be angry with Aju. He was there for me when I needed him. He let me know that I wasn’t all alone.” Yuriko didn’t know what she would’ve done after getting picked on at school if the red book hadn’t talked to her.

  “Then I will scold him no further,” the old book said gently.

  “Thanks,” Yuriko whispered, and she smiled. Then she remembered she was speaking to someone very old and wise, and she said, “I mean, thank you very much, sir.”

  “Yuriko. Before we speak of anything else, there is something which you must decide.” She had a choice, the book explained. She could either wake up her parents now and go home, or stay here and listen to what the book had to say.

  “Of course, you may listen to me, then depart after that if you wish. But it will be a tale long in the telling. I’m afraid you will worry for your parents. This house is cold.”

  It was true. Yuriko was shivering herself. If she left her parents out there sleeping, they might freeze to death.

  “Can’t you cast a spell to make it warmer?” she asked.

  “It is not impossible,” the Sage said, a hint of laughter in his voice. “Do I take it from your question that you do not intend to leave us now?”

  Yuriko nodded. She would stay.

  “You are a strong-minded child,” the book said. She wasn’t sure whether that was meant as a compliment or not. “Are you afraid of being picked on at school? Is being picked on so frightening?”

  “Well, yes…But it’s more than that. Mr. Sage, I’m curious,” Yuriko said. “I mean, it’s amazing just being able to talk to a book, and I’ve learned so much from Aju already. But I feel like I’ve only heard a tiny part of the whole story.”

  Then she thought she heard the Sage sigh.

  “Curiosity? Yes, the desire for knowledge. You have your brother’s eyes.”

  Yuriko’s heart tightened, then it leaped. I’m like my brother?

  The Sage called to one of the other books, which replied in turn by singing another song—a spell to warm the cottage. This song was slightly longer than the one for sleep and with a different melody entirely.

  Moments later, Yuriko felt warm air rising from the floor. The book’s magic. Real magic!

  Not wanting to let on how amazing she found all of this, all Yuriko said to the books was a polite “Thank you, that’s great,” and she sat back down on the stepladder.

  “First,” the Sage said, “I will speak of the Hero. Of all the stories in your Circle,” the Sage explained to Yuriko, “the most beautiful and treasured is the story called ‘The Hero.’”

  “That sounds more like the heroes I’ve read about,” Yuriko said.

  “But the Hero is no person, Yuriko. It is a story.”

  “But—”

  “Consider a person’s life,” the Sage continued over her objection. “No matter what great deeds they might accomplish, they are merely creating a reality, nothing more. Only when we have thoughts, and the telling of thoughts, and those thoughts become stories is the Hero first born. What we think, we tell, and are told—all are stories. But the Hero is the story that is the source of all the greatest deeds. The heroes who exist in your Circle all spring from this original story. They are like copies. The story called ‘The Hero’ came first.

  “When people in the world do something great or upstanding, they are called heroes,” the Sage went on, “and when their stories are told over the years, it means a copy of the Hero has been created. Because these copies of the Hero are themselves stories, they in turn feed the strength of the original story.

  “Now, stories run in a cycle. As history progresses, all manner of heroes are born and their great deeds are told of, and told of again, increasing the Hero’s power. In this way, a more beautiful, more noble story is formed, larger and stronger with each retelling.”

  “Well, what’s so bad about that?” Yuriko interjected. “Wouldn’t a bigger source of the Hero make better copies? Wouldn’t there be even more heroes in the world then?”

  “If that were all of it, it truly would be a wonderful thing,” the Sage agreed. “Yet,” he continued, his tone darkening, “if a beautiful, noble story shines very brightly, then the shadow it casts must also be very deep. This shadow too is the Hero. Like a coin, a story must have a front and back, right and wrong. Light and darkness always exist together, and there is no one who might separate them. It is impossible.”

  If the light is strong, the shadow is deep.

  “In the original story of the Hero, there is darkness and evil in equal measure to light and good. Both sides grow together in a contest that continues to this day. This,” the Sage said with a sigh, “also holds true for the copies produced by the source. The heroes of your Circle are ever a combination of light and dark. And if the dark side of the source should deepen, so too does the dark side of the copies deepen and grow stronger. The light leads to all that is good, and the darkness presides over all that is evil.”

  The Sage winked slowly once, looking down at Yuriko. “Now,” the book asked her, “what do you think happens when the darkness grows stronger? What do your thoughts tell you?”

  Yuriko spent a while listening to her thoughts. “I think,” she said after a moment, “that more bad things must happen.”

  “Correct,” the Sage replied. “In this Circle, there are many strong shining lights, and just as many dark, stagnant pools of malevolence. It is overflowing with both.”

  Which was why the original story, “The Hero,” had been placed under lock and key.

  “Stop the source, and you stop the cycle. While you cannot sweep away the light and the dark that already exist in this Circle, you can prevent them from further increasing.”

  So
they had stopped the great cycle, keeping it small, and hopefully, more manageable.

  “Like turning off the faucet so no more water comes out?” Yuriko ventured. “And then you just use what you already have, in a bucket or whatever, over and over again?”

  To Yuriko’s surprise, the Sage laughed. An old man’s dry chuckle. “That is a most interesting comparison. I believe you have understood me well.”

  Yuriko felt like she had just scored a hundred on a test. “But,” she addressed the Sage, “there’s something I don’t get. What’s this Circle you keep talking about?”

  Aju had used the word too. She had already figured out that it meant the world and everything in it, but she couldn’t understand why they had to call it a special word, and something told her that was important to know. “Why don’t you just call it ‘the world’?”

  “Because the world is not a Circle. Because the world is only what it is, and nothing more.”

  Yuriko frowned. I’m not sure that made a bit of sense.

  “This world in which you live was here before the world of men was born,” the Sage continued, heedless. “And this world is more than just the world of men. It is the skies, and the earth, and all living things. Everything around you is part of this world. Not so a Circle. A Circle is born of words. It only begins to exist the moment men first attempt to understand the natural world around them. It is power, it is a desire, it is hope, wishes, and prayer. It is all of these things.”

  This was starting to get difficult. Yuriko’s brain had to work overtime to follow what the Sage was saying. “So the Circle is the world of people?”

  “People are a part of the Circle, yes.”

  “But aren’t all those things you talked about, like praying and wishing, things that people do? How can we just be one part of the Circle?”

  “Do people not try to understand things that cannot be seen? Some of these things are far larger than the world of men. That is why the Circle, Yuriko, is much vaster than anything you can experience directly. Your Circle in particular has grown much larger than your world.”

  The world that is only what it is.

  And the Circle had grown even larger than the world it was trying to understand?

  “It is within this Circle that stories cycle, you see,” the Sage concluded.

  Okay, that’s it. I give up. Yuriko raised her hands in defeat. “I’m sorry, I just don’t get it.”

  “That is to be expected,” the Sage said, still gentle. She had half expected a scolding. “You are still young. What you must do now is listen. Knowing that someday you will understand is enough.”

  So that was her homework. This was starting to feel like school.

  “Tell me, are there not others who live in your world? Creatures other than man?”

  “You mean animals, like dogs and cats?”

  Yuriko had always been fond of cats, but her brother was decidedly a dog person. The memory of an argument flashed across Yuriko’s mind. “It’s got to be a dog,” her brother had said, putting his foot down. She couldn’t even get him to budge on his position—a rare thing between them.

  “That’s right,” the Sage said, snapping her out of her reverie. “Now, do dogs and cats tell stories? Do they attempt to understand the world as you do? I think they do not. Dogs and cats all live in this world, yet they do not create the Circle.”

  “But there are lots of stories about dogs and cats. Sometimes they’re even the heroes of stories.”

  “Yet these stories do not belong to them. These are stories created by people in an attempt to understand their companion animals. That Circle does not belong to the dogs and cats. It belongs to you.”

  Only people create stories, only people tell them.

  “Now, Yuriko. I would like you to consider something. Tell me, where do you think stories come from?”

  That seemed simple enough. “Well, if people are the ones thinking up stories, then don’t they come from inside us?”

  “Inside you? Where exactly inside you do you think that power to create stories lies?”

  “In our brains,” Yuriko said, pointing at her head. “Up here.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Yuriko hesitated a moment, then pointed to her chest. “Okay, maybe they come from here. The heart.” Yeah, that sounds right.

  “The heart? You can point to this with your finger?”

  “Yeah, it’s right here, in my chest.”

  “Your heart is there, surely, but is that not merely an organ? A device for circulating blood through your body?”

  Yuriko could feel her pulse beating now in the palms of her hands.

  “All stories must have an origin, Yuriko. An origin born the moment the Circle is born, when man first attempted to understand his world. All stories were born there, and from there they flowed out into the Circle, where their cycle began.”

  An origin. A source.

  With a faucet on it?

  “But that doesn’t make sense. People think up stories, right? How could their origin be some other place?”

  “Their origins are in some other place. There are many origins—as many as there are people.”

  “Doesn’t that mean the same thing?” Yuriko accused the Sage, jabbing a finger toward the shelf. “Aren’t they coming from people after all?”

  “There are as many origins as there are people,” the Sage continued, in a tone of voice that demanded silence, “yet they are all the same. There are as many origins as there are people, but there is only one. That is because there is only one desire—to try to understand the world. For one Circle, there need be only one origin.”

  Now, Yuriko thought, he’s deliberately not making any sense.

  “This single origin lies in the nameless land.”

  There it was at last. The nameless land. Yuriko looked up, determination on her face. She might not understand everything, but she wanted to get a few things straight at least.

  “That is where all stories are born, and the place to which all stories must return. This was also the place,” the Sage explained, “where the great story known as the Hero was imprisoned. The ones who guarded that prison were the watchers, known to us as the nameless devout.”

  “Devout?” The word sounded familiar.

  “Are they monks or something?”

  There was a long pause before the Sage replied. “In form they appear to be, yes. But in truth there is no way to call them, for they have no name. The ‘nameless devout’ is a convenience bestowed upon them by one from the Circle who visited that land. He must’ve thought they resembled the devout monks of a religious order.”

  “Do they pray at a temple?”

  “No, for there are no gods in the nameless land,” the Sage said. “Only the story which gives rise to all gods is there. Along with the origin of stories, and the Hero.”

  Yuriko had wanted to ask more about the nameless land, but the Sage had already returned to a previous topic.

  “As I said before, there are stories of the Hero already flowing through the Circle. They cycle and multiply, creating copies.” The Sage paused. “I would speak to you of two things. The first is human memory. The second is human record. Do you understand the difference?”

  She did, sort of. Yuriko nodded.

  “Record and memory work together, augmenting each other. Sometimes records are created from memories, and sometimes memories serve to complete that which the records lack. Other times, records can sometimes create wholly new memories, even though there may be nothing worth remembering about them at all.” Which was why, the Sage told her, even if they turned off the faucet at the source, it was impossible to mop up all of the stories that had already escaped.

  “As long as the original story was imprisoned, the shadow did not darken too dangerously. Nor could the light reach as far as it had when the Hero was truly free.” This, the Sage explained, was a mechanism for maintaining peace within the Circle.

  “Yet, it is the way wit
h men that, no matter how much time one gives them, they cannot understand this simple yet vital truth,” the Sage lamented. “Since time immemorial, men have searched for the Hero. When the Hero was imprisoned, they searched for it all the more. They dug, they looked, and they sought to claim it. In this, the copies acted to guide them toward their originator.”

  The copies were the books Aju had told her about: not the Hero itself, but a part of the Hero, possessing part of its influence.

  “Some copies are about the Hero, others are about the Hero’s deeds. Still others are the records left by those who have encountered the Hero.”

  “And the Book of Elem?” Yuriko interrupted. “What sort of thing is that supposed to be a copy of?”

  “The third kind—a record, and not a very good one. Yet enough of one to influence a child,” the Sage muttered, pain in his voice. “As a book, it has only existed for one hundred years. A young book, fit for a young reader.”

  Yuriko glanced at Aju. She felt the red book return her glance. They too were a pair: the child and the young book.

  “Through these copies, men glimpsed a part of the Hero’s power. They experienced a fragment of what the Hero is.”

  And it takes them.

  “Of course, not all who touch the copies are so possessed. In order to be possessed, one must have the necessary qualifications. These are the ones we call ‘vessels.’”

  “So what about the Summoner? How is he different from an ordinary vessel?”

  Yuriko remembered someone had called Hiroki the “last vessel.”

  “You are bright, Yuriko, but impatient,” the Sage scolded her. “You must not jump ahead like this. One has to walk through the fields of knowledge to pick its flowers. Run, and you will miss the best blossoms.”

  Yuriko sat quietly, so the books wouldn’t think she was trying to run ahead again.

  “What does a person need in order to become a vessel, you ask? Only one thing, and they must have it at the moment they touch the book, or it will not take them. They must have anger. The shadowy parts of the Hero favor human anger above all other emotions.”