The Book of Heroes
The Book of Heroes (EIYU NO SHO)
by MIYABE Miyuki
Copyright © 2009 MIYABE Miyuki All rights reserved.
Originally published in Japan by MAINICHI NEWSPAPERS CO., LTD., Tokyo. English translation rights arranged with OSAWA OFFICE, Japan, through THE SAKAI AGENCY.
Cover Illustration by Dan May
Design by Courtney Utt
English translation © VIZ Media, LLC
No portion of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from the copyright holders.
HAIKASORU
Published by
VIZ Media, LLC
295 Bay Street
San Francisco, CA 94133
ISBN: 978-1-4215-4288-1
Haikasoru eBook edition
The Prayer-Song or
The Lament of the King in Yellow
CHAPTER ONE
Something Important, Which Was Broken
CHAPTER TWO
The Hermit's Library
CHAPTER THREE
The Nameless Land
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Knight and the Princess
CHAPTER NINE
The Land of Fear and Loathing
TO STUDY THE SELF IS TO DIE
.
The Prayer-Song or
The Lament of the King in Yellow
Amidst the mists and clouds of ashen blue that blur the line between Heaven and Earth. They drift along and together, hanging over all, cold and silken as a funeral pall.
In this land, here since ancient times, here still in distant future.
A stillness near to nothing its only master. Cast from time’s grace, free too from time’s yoke.
No country, nor village. We who live here call it simply this land.
Those whom fate brings here read, in that eloquent silence, a truth:
This is the nameless land, they say.
To you, who for reasons unknowable glimpse here these words. Good people, do not mistake the terms of the agreement:
Do not ask men for the story of the nameless land.
Do not move lips and tongue in an imitation of the tongue of the nameless land.
Do not treat as men those who are imprisoned in the nameless land.
The story that shall be told for all time, henceforth, is the cursed tale of two children, one monk, and one traveler without a soul.
We weavers have glimpsed these cursed lives time and time again swimming in time’s eternal flow. We record it, we repeat it, we revere it as we revile it, and so does the shaft of dark brilliance that this cursed tale travels from world to world, from age to age, from the old gods to the new.
We are the inculpated.
All stories are the sin of their weaver.
Good people, may you know peace in your dreams. The light in the window of the house where you rest shines in a paradise that does not suffer us to tread.
Do not wish for this cursed life to visit your light.
Do not extinguish your light and wait by the window in silence to hear the footfalls of this cursed life as it passes.
Do not do these things, and your path will not lead you to the nameless land. This story will not echo past the words upon its pages, never barring your swift progress.
This cursed life is called the Hero.
At times, the King in Yellow.
PROLOGUE
Prison Break
Halfway up the long slope to the Threshing Hill,
the youth heard the sound of a tolling bell.
He stopped and looked around. The sound came thickly through the chilled ashen-blue mist that rose all around him, yet he heard it as sure as he felt the vibrations in the ground beneath his feet.
The First Bell was ringing in the bell tower.
The youth remained standing still, uncertain of his next step. He knew all too well what the tolling of the First Bell meant, though it had never been sounded in his living memory.
He could continue to the top of the hill, but there he would only find his brothers standing still as he was standing now, their hands stopped from their work of pushing the Great Wheels. He should run to them, join them, become one of their number. That had to be better than standing here, frozen to the spot while this unspeakable unease rose inside him.
But is there not more here than just unease?
he wondered. The youth put the palm of one hand to his black-robed chest.
As a nameless devout, the youth had no word with which to refer to himself. He had no self. He was a part of this place, the nameless land—a fragment, made to express its will and nothing more.
He had no soul.
Yet still, perhaps because of this, in these eternal lands free from the yoke of time there was something that settled in those vessels, an essence that lodged in the hollow voids where their souls belonged. There were people, besides the devout, who had in this past visited this land from other worlds. They came from the stars or other countries, full of life and possessing both color and names. These visitors called this thing that filled the nameless ones by many names. Some called it
emotion
. Others simply
heart
. Others called it the very stuff of humanity.
Regardless of what it was called, the youth knew it resided here, beneath where his palm touched his chest.
There was no time in this place. No time meant no daily routine. For the nameless devout, there was only the work to be done on top of the hill and the guarding of the Hall of All Books; that was all. They did not rest, but also they did not tire. The only unpredictable elements of this place were the ebb and flow of clouds and mist, and the coming of visitors.
Once a visitor had asked whether the devout found their lives boring.
What does that mean?
It means tiring of something. Becoming weary or jaded, the visitor had explained.
Anyone who has to perform the same task over and over tires of it eventually.
But the devout aren’t anyone. They aren’t “one.” How then could they tire?
But that was not the whole truth.
The youth felt a shivering well up from inside his sparse frame under his black robes. It was a fact that he did not feel boredom. Yet now, he had to admit, he was feeling the exact opposite emotion.
Where there are opposites, there is also truth.
The youth realized that somewhere inside his body, inside this hollow vessel lacking even a soul, something had been waiting for that first bell to ring.
Something is happening.
Events
are happening.
Soon a new visitor would surely arrive.
This pleases me!
The youth clenched his hand upon his chest into a fist. Closing his eyes, he let himself feel the trembling inside his body.
The First Bell continued to toll. The mist brushed against the youth’s shaven head, condensing into tiny droplets of dew before collecting to run in a rivulet down his temple. He exhaled deeply, his breath a plume of white in the air. The soles of his bare feet were caked in mud from the trek up the hill.
At length, he heard something else through the mist: the faint sounds of the invocation. The youth opened his eyes to look up toward the top of the hill. He still couldn’t see anything. Then the mist shifted, and he heard through it again the chords of the song.
My brothers.
The youth squinted, and eventually he was able to make out the lights of their torches, soul-wisps darting aimlessly through the mist. Now going to the side, now up or down, drifting through the air, yet definitely coming closer.
A group of the devout was descending. The youth was one of them, a part of them, as they were a part of him. The black-robed devout.
Their heads were shaven, like his. Their feet were bare, like his. Their voices were the same. Their faces were the same. There were too many of them to count, and yet there was only one.
The youth unclenched his fist and began to walk, his voice joining the chorus as he slipped in among them.
They, his brothers, who were also him. Yet the youth felt that he held within his chest a note absent from the melody of his brothers’ prayer-song.
As they descended the slope, the tolling of the First Bell grew clearer and more fierce. The mist thickened, swallowing their invocation, even as the peak of the roof over the Hall of All Books cut through the mist’s gray veil. The youth drifted back toward the tail end of the procession, and again he stopped, looking up, a whisper on his lips.
It is free.
Soon, there would be war.