The Book of Heroes (11 page)

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 with 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.”

“So, you mean my brother was angry at someone?”

The room was silent.

Maybe I’m running ahead again,
Yuriko thought to herself, despondent. When the Sage spoke again, he did not answer her question directly, but instead observed, “Those who live in this Circle, including yourself, seem to always think of the Hero as something good and beautiful. They point at the Hero’s light parts, and call it so. Which is why, when it falls to us to explain the truth of the Hero as I do to you now, there is always this confusion, this inability to understand at first.”

He was probably right. Yuriko felt like things had only gotten more and more confused in her head since she started talking to the books.

“Yeah…” she agreed.

“Then let us call it by a different name. The good of the Hero shall be called the ‘hero’ as you have always thought of it. And the dark side of the Hero, that which is evil, shall be called the ‘King in Yellow.’”

The King in Yellow?

Next to her, Aju repeated the words.
The King in Yellow.

Suddenly, an image sprang into Yuriko’s head. The strange silhouette she had seen in Hiroki’s room did have a crown like a king’s, and a cape—though it had been too dark for her to see what color it was.

“A long while before you were born, more than a century ago, there was a weaver in this Circle.”

“That’s a person who writes the stories
,
” Aju explained.

“You mean an author?”

“Something like that.”

“This weaver, his name was Chambers, got as close to the truth of the Hero as a human being can get,” the Sage continued, “and he wrote about it in a book titled
The King in Yellow
.”

It wasn’t a novel, as Yuriko had expected. In the book, the weaver had described a play.

“Those who knew of the play shunned it, saying it would lead any who read it to their ruination. But while there were those who feared it—and rightly so—there were many others who sought it out.”

“So this
King in Yellow
book was another copy of the Hero, right?”

“Correct. One of the most powerful copies of all.”

Then she sensed that the Sage was smiling. He was pleased with her.
He’s tough when he’s scolding me,
she thought,
but sometimes he can be nice.

“That is why, when we talk about the darker side of the Hero, we sometimes call it the King in Yellow.”

Yuriko made a mental note of this. It certainly would be easier having two ways to talk about the Hero, she could tell.

“Notice, Yuriko, that the Hero changes its shape depending on who views it. In a sense, it becomes that for which they search. That is why the Hero will not always appear as a king. Nor will he always be shrouded in yellow. The Hero appeared in royal regalia when you saw it because that is what your brother wished to see. Your brother must have felt that a cape and a crown were appropriate garb for something of great power.”

Yuriko thought back, trying to remember the comics and books and movies her brother liked. “I think you’re right,” she told the Sage.

It was difficult for Yuriko to imagine some powerful person who
didn’t
look like the king she had seen in Hiroki’s room. He certainly wouldn’t look like the prime minister—that would just be a regular old man in a suit. What about a general in a uniform? No, the king sprang to mind much easier than that. Now that she thought about it, kings were everywhere. In the picture books their mother used to read to them, in the video games her brother always played.

“I think I get it,” Yuriko said slowly. “So the King in Yellow was what made my brother do what he did.”

The King in Yellow and its evil, terrible power.

“Now, Yuriko, I want you to consider something else for me. Imagine you were stripped of your freedom, locked in one place for an impossibly long time. What would you want the most?”

Yuriko didn’t have to think about that one too hard. “I’d want to be free,” she answered almost immediately.

“This too, the King in Yellow wanted. Yet to become free, it needed more power. Power to break the bonds that held it. The King in Yellow gets this power by using its copies throughout the Circle to possess a vessel. Not even the nameless devout can prevent this from happening.”

“Why not? Can’t they just gather up all the copies?”

“All of the copies in the entire Circle?”

“Sure.”

“That would take an unimaginable amount of time. And it would be in vain.”

“Why?”

“Men hide the copies,” the Sage said. “And make copies of the copies. Over and over.”

Yuriko frowned. A wrinkle crossed her pale forehead as she sat there in the darkened reading room surrounded by mountains of books. “Then can’t you just pick up the Hero wherever it is? Not just turn off the faucet, I mean, but pick up all the water and the bucket with it?”

There was a pause, and then the Sage replied, his tone soft again, “But that would mean taking all the good that the Hero had done out of the Circle as well.”

“Then, can’t you just collect the bad ones?”

“What is good, and what is evil? Where do you draw the line between the two?”

Now Yuriko was getting a little upset.
I’m just in fifth grade, you know. They haven’t taught us difficult things like that yet.

“There are some who, even though they may touch a copy, do not become vessels. Some who are entranced by a copy, and yet do good by it. Others realize the danger that a copy represents and roam the world, seeking to find them and hide them away.”