Monsters and Magicians (23 page)

"And did one of your ancestors make the axe, as well?" asked Kaoru in curiosity, "Or can you tell?"

"Yes, sir," answered the sergeant. "It was first cast, then tempered and decorated by some bronze-smith priest. But how long ago? Time beyond the reckoning, sir. Before men had learnt the arts of iron or steel, most likely. Those worn markings which adorn the flats of the blade are not mere aimless, attractive tracery, either. When I was a boy, my honorable father took me up high on the slopes of

certain mountains and there showed me huge stones upon which—dimmed and nearly erased by who knows just how many centuries of rain, snow and wind-blown sand—were almost-identical markings, and he attested that they were the writing-signs of a language of such antiquity that the very name of it has been forgotten by even us of the purer heritage.

"Sir, you think of only the spear and the swords as weapons and despise the axe as a mere, commonplace tool, but sir, you do not realize that the axe was weapon long before it was altered to become tool. Indeed, the sword is only a kind of long-edged, short-hafted axe, sir—actually, an amalgam of knife, axe and spear, that is the hatana and, especially, the old no-dachi, the sword of the olden days, with the longer, thicker, wider, heavier blade.

"This bronze axe and the one I fashioned of steel from off the tank for Private Ota are in no way mere woodchoppers' tools, for all that they can be used in butchering carcasses of dragons and other large game; they are weapons. In addition, however, I am certain that the older one, the bronzen one, is also a god-relic, a talisman, wrought in incredibly ancient times in some distant land by a god-man for himself or for another of his sacred ilk. Where it has travelled since that day in the dim past, how it has travelled to at last come to rest for just how long beneath the bones of that dragon, these are questions that only a true god could answer.

"But soon after it had been found and I had cleaned it, restored its edge and properly hafted it, I had another god-sent message in a dream."

"And where did this dream order you to go, pray

tell?" asked Kaoru. "Did it by chance tell you just how to get through these damned, unmapped Burmese hills and valleys back to where we can find our battalion before we're all listed as missing in action or even as deserters in the face of the enemy? Sergeant, I'm still a young man; I could enjoy life far more I think than I'd enjoy seppuku."

"I am to go nowhere else, sir," said the sergeant, gravely. "A god is on his way here, toward this place. The axe is intended for him, for his holy use, as was long ago foreordained."

"On his way here, is he?" commented Kaoru, "And just what does he look like—Japanese, Chinese, Burmese or what? How are you supposed to know him when you see him? Will he have *G*0*D* in fine calligraphy upon him somewhere, Sergeant?"

Kiyomoto shook his head slowly. "The how of recognizing this god was unclear, as dream-messages often are, sir, but I trust the true god who sent the message. I know that it will all be made clear to me in the true god's own time; I will be shown, will know, this god who is to receive the bronze axe.

"But, sir," he dropped the level of his voice, for all that they two were just then the only men in the log house, "although I have said nothing, even intimated nothing of it to the men, I am certain that we are no longer anywhere in Burma ... or even in any part of that world in which lies the countries known as Burma, Japan and China."

"Whaatt?" the officer burst out, clean forgetting his rank and its dignity, "Sergeant, are you ill? Did you sample some strange new plant, perhaps? You're not going mad, I hope, for the company needs you.

You should make the time to get more sleep, you know, you do and try to do too much, and extended loss of sleep can cloud the mind and the judgment, that was taught to us in the Imperial Military Academy; at a battle called Five Days in the American Civil War, a rebellious general called Jackson Thomas Stonewall did not sleep and so misjudged the ..."

"Sir, no, please do not worry yourself on my account," the noncom interrupted, hesitantly. "I have good, sound reasons for believing as I do about this matter. Does the honorable lieutenant choose to hear me?"

At Kaoru's nod, he said, "First, there was the matter of the maps, sir. Back in the place of the ruins, we still were in our own world, for marks on the maps matched marks on the face of the land. But when we came out from that tunnel, nothing upon the land has ever since even faintly resembled the markings on the maps and, in this place, none of the compasses will behave as they should, a thing that I never saw good, Imperial Japanese Army compasses to do in all my nine years of service to the Son of Heaven.

"Then there is the matter of the animals. Sir, there are no animals like these dragons in any place that I have ever been and in no place that I ever have heard anyone describe. Also, we have in our journey about these hills and valleys seen and often killed and eaten animals that never roamed the land of Burma or even China, India or Tibet. Who ever saw or heard of a tailless rat weighing at least thirty kilos in Burma, sir? Yet we have killed and eaten and tanned the pelts of no less than three of them, over the years ..."

"Oh, Sergeant," said Kaoru, "enough is enough. Besides, we've not been here much more than one year. That's my estimate. We're none of us any older than we were when first we came out this end of that tunnel through that hill."

"Sir," asked Kiyomoto, "what of the mules? Why does the most honorable lieutenant think they died?"

Kaoru shrugged. "I cannot really say. I know very little of anything pertaining to animal husbandry. Perhaps a lack of the proper foods? Maybe the hard work to which we had to put them?"

"No, sir," Kiyomoto demurred. "None of those things. Those two mules, when they and the cart and tank joined our column, I examined closely. They both then were young, strong, healthy animals, in good flesh and as well cared for as can be any draft animal under combat conditions. Their army ration was hay and millet and what they were fed here was, if anything, a better, more varied and nutritious diet. If the honorable lieutenant will care to recall, after we set up camp here, we did have cause to use the mules for snaking out logs and many other draft purposes, but after that, once the palisades were up, it was seldom that we needed or used the mules.

"You are correct, sir, you are no older than when we all came here, none of us is. Indeed, I feel now much younger than a man of nearly forty years has any right to feel. Apparently, men do die here, but they do not age. Not so mules and other beasts, however. The mules, when they died despite all that I or their driver could do for them, were the very same pair of mules with which our column set out on the night march, the very same pair of young, strong

mules. But when we cut up the carcasses of those two dead mules to use for dragon-bait, sir, it was apparent to both the driver and me that they were very elderly mules. How old were they? I would say, at least thirty years, maybe more."

"Impossible!" snorted Kaoru. "Had any such amount of time passed for us, we'd know it . . . I'd know it, realize it. Yes, we have been here for some time, but I last estimated that time at no more than fifteen to eighteen months, Sergeant. And what land of a country would this, could this be to hold such properties, anyway? Tell me that!"

Kiyomoto sighed. "Of my own knowledge, I cannot, sir. However . . . there are old tales, legends of long ago, coming from many, many lands and races and realms, that tell of the cruel fates of men who found such lands and returned from them to tell the tales and, invariably, suffer most cruelly.

"It is said that, just before the most honorable Hideyoshi invaded Korea, long ago, a man named Shengin was sailing with his followers to join the army of his daimyo when a strange and sudden tempest blew the ship far, far out to sea. The ship was so badly damaged by lashing winds and crashing seas that it almost sank, but it did not and, with the abatement of the tempest and the calming of the waters, Shengin and his surviving followers set to effecting repairs and bailing out water. But they still had little control over their small ship when they saw that the sea was bearing it and them fast upon what clearly was a line of fearsome, rocky reefs, a beach lying beyond them and tall trees beyond the beach.

"When certain death of both Shengin and his fol-

lowers seemed imminent, a fortuitous swell rose up under the ship, lifted it over the reef and deposited it safely within the quiet waters just beyond, and a gentle current bore it toward the sparkling beach until its keel grated on sand. All of them exhausted and some of them injured from their long, harrowing ordeal, Shengin and his followers dropped overside of their beached ship and waded through the warm, shallow water to the waiting shore.

"After they had rested long enough in the shade of the trees to somewhat restore them, Shengin ordered two of his samurai and their servants to take containers from the ship and proceed inland in search of fresh water and fruit, or whatever else they could find that men might eat, most of their own stores having been either lost or damaged in the tempest.

"The two samurai, each with his servant, went off in different directions and the youngest presently returned with a cask filled with fresh, cool water and another cask full of strange-looking but tasty and wholesome fruits. It then was long before the return of the elder samurai and his servant, and they did not come back alone or empty-handed.

'"The folk who dwelt in that land called it Hai-bara-zir. They were not a people who in any way resembled Japanese, Koreans, Chinese or any other people Shengin had seen or heard described by others. Tall were they, taller than any of Shengin's men, and well-formed of body; though tanned by the sun, their skins were white and their hair and beards were none of them darker than a soft brown or dark red, their eyes either blue or grey or hazel or green.

"Many of these folk bore weapons—strangely formed

swords, spears, axes, dirks and odd bows—but they were more than merely friendly to the shipwrecked men. They all spoke a Japanese as good as Shengin's— his own, regional dialect, in fact—and they conducted Shengin and all his followers to their city, where much was made of these strangers. They all—from Shengin even to his lowliest go-kenin —were housed in luxury, feasted endlessly on myriads of strange but always delicious viands. Though mostly larger of body than Japanese women, with much larger breasts, the females of that city were nothing less than willing bed-partners to the party of Shengin, more than merely complaisant and fantastically stimulating in their actions. Available for but the asking, too, were both beverages and foods that could soothe body and mind to gentle languor, others that could quickly give energy and renewed strength and vigor to even the most exhausted.

"Not ever a willingly idle man, Shengin and his samurai did ask for service as warriors, only to be told that warfare did not exist, only hunting, fishing, farming and the gathering of wild-growing foodstuffs. He was told that there were but few folk in all the vast lands—seven cities, the inhabitants of all of them related and always friendly one toward the other. Few strangers ever came to Hai-bara-zir, they averred, and those that did were always treated well and allowed to stay or go, as they wished.

"Shengin was also told that the folk had once lived in another land, far, far away, but when threatened by a huge and most savage horde of barbarians, all had left their homeland, flown to Hai-bara-zir, settled, built their cities and since lived in peace and

harmony. He was advised to forget all his arts and skills of war, as had they, and learn to enjoy life for the sake of living.

"But poor, loyal, dutiful Shengin could not so do. Nothing that he did, nothing that he ate or drank, no delicate pleasure that his body enjoyed could take from his mind the fact of his oaths given to his daimyo, his duty to honor them."

Kaoru waved a hand preremptorily. "Yes, yes, Sergeant, I recall that hoary old children's tale now; 'The Far Traveller' is what I remember it called. I heard it as a child in a slightly differing version and I'd forgotten it as I've forgotten so many of the fantastic fictions we then were told.

"When this character finally arrives back in Japan and goes to his home, his grandson rules there and the only one of his generation still alive to recognize him—although feeble with age and almost blind—is she who had been his youngest wife. After suffering many slights and injustices, he finally goes mad and, after somehow—I forget just how, now—acquiring a small boat, he sets sail eastward and is never again seen.

"But what does this errant nonsense have to do with anything, Sergeant? Or is your mind slipped and just rambling?"

"I must beg the pardon of the honorable lieutenant," said Kiyomoto, respectfully, "but the tale called 'The Affair of the Far Traveller' is no mere legend, though many today think it such. It is at least part truth. A man who called himself Abe Shengin, the same man of that clan who was thought to have been lost at sea during the time of Toyotomi Hideyoshi,

did arrive in Japan in the third year of the Shogun Tokugawa Ietsuna; this is fact. Although appearing to be of no more than perhaps thirty years, he claimed to in fact be the grandfather of the then-family head and he bore the swords of that very man, assumed by all to be more than sixty years dead, he and all his war band.

"No one believed him, of course, and he suffered many, many indignities and vicissitudes first at the hands of the man he claimed to be his grandson and that man's housemen and servants, then at the hands of the head of the Abe clan. And he might well have finally been killed had not his informants in the land gotten word to the Shogun at Edo of these strange happenings, and ever a curious and enquiring man, the Shogun ordered that the man who called himself Abe Shengin be brought to tell his tale to him.

"When Tokugawa Ietsuna had heard the man out and had also questioned him at length and in great depth, he had the lands searched thoroughly for any still alive who might have known Abe Shengin prior to his supposed death. Two such were at last found, sir. One was an aged, almost sightless woman who had been the youngest wife of Abe Shengin for two years before he went away bound for the marshalling of the armies for the Korean Invasion; the other was an even more venerable priest-smith who had forged swords for Abe Shengin. This man was at the time of his being summoned to Edo by the Shogun Ietsuna more than ninety-three years of age; he also was one of my ancestors.