The Book of Heroes (14 page)

Not just patterns, they’re letters!
Letters, letters, and more letters.
Letters of all kinds, woven together like a puzzle, stacked on top of each other. Some of them looked like jumbles of random lines, and others looked like some foreign language, and they were all mixed together. She recognized Roman letters here and there, and something that looked a lot like Korean.
I wonder if there’s any Japanese?

She was so busy looking down at the tiles beneath her feet that she walked into the back of the nameless devout in front of her. Yuriko jumped back, mortified, but the monk didn’t seem to mind.

“We’ll be entering this hallway.”

Ahead of them, a long hallway led away from the room, curving gently to the right. The right-hand wall was solid all the way down, but the left-hand wall was broken up by tall, narrow windows every six feet or so. The light coming in through the windows made the hallway much brighter than the giant chamber they were leaving.

“You’ll want to watch your feet through here,” the devout warned her. Yuriko nodded and began to walk, but before she had gone very far, she stopped short and jumped.

Japanese! It’s a Japanese character!
She found it on the dark black wall on the left-hand side, between two of the window slits.

It was only a single character, carved in relief—and large, about the size of a car tire.

“
En
!” she shouted, a little too loudly. “That’s the character
en,
isn’t it?”

The two nameless devout behind her said nothing, but the one in front smiled gently and nodded.

“I’m sorry. I was just surprised to find something I could read here.”

She was surprised at how relieved it made her feel. She felt happy, and homesick. And it was also a little funny. She had never seen this particular character written so large, not even in the lobby of a bank.

“Did you know that this is the word for the money we use?”

The nameless devout nodded. “We do. Yet it also means ‘circle.’”

And by circle, he means “
Circle
.” Like the Circle I live in.
Of course. I always thought “en” just stood for money.

“I’m sorry, I talk too much, don’t I? I’ll be quiet.” She was embarrassed.
Why am I so flustered?

The nameless devout walked on in silence, a little quicker than before. In order to avoid further distractions, Yuriko kept her eyes off the walls and walked as straight as she could. But she stopped when she realized that the wall on the right side, which she had assumed was just covered with sculpture like all the rest, was actually divided into shelves stacked full of books. Their spines ran in tightly packed rows as far as she could see.

“These are all books?” she asked before she could think to stop herself.

Yuriko reached out and touched one. It felt strangely hard beneath her fingertips.

It’s like they’re made of stone. These aren’t books. More sculpture.

One of the nameless devout was looking at her. She mumbled an apology and pulled back her hand. The young monk didn’t scold her, but he wasn’t smiling either.

They walked on slowly down the curving hallway. It occurred to Yuriko that maybe she had been wrong when she thought there were no walls around the Hall of All Books. Maybe the hallway she was walking down now wasn’t the
inside
of the building. In other words, what she could see from the outside wasn’t actually the Hall of All Books, but something like a thick wall that surrounded it. Its immense size had made it look flat, like the side of a building, when she’d gone in, but they had been walking around a curve for so long, she imagined it might have been part of a much larger, circular structure.

If that were true, then the castle, or abbey or library, would be further inside. But it didn’t seem like that was where Yuriko was heading.

Finally, the end of the hallway came into view. Straight ahead was a dead end, but the right wall was open to another room, though a portcullis of thin bars blocked the way. Yuriko caught a glimpse of green grass through the bars.

The nameless devout walking behind her stepped ahead and pulled the lever on the wall next to the portcullis, causing it to creak open to one side.

If Yuriko could trust her sense of direction, going through this door should bring her behind the wall. She looked behind her and saw that this exit also had metallic double doors, though this pair had been pushed open to stand flat against the wall. It wasn’t exactly a sunny day outside, but coming out of the darkened hallway she had to blink against the brightness. Yuriko squinted her eyes—and gasped.

She had been right. The towering edifice Yuriko had first seen from the plain was only an outer wall, and only a part of it at that. It
had
been like a folding screen. One bigger than she could have ever imagined. And behind it was this: More buildings than Yuriko could count on both her hands. There was one like a long, low hall. Another like a giant’s bowl turned upside down on the ground—possibly the dome of something-or-other that the devout had mentioned. A bell tower stood next to that.

In her short life, Yuriko had never seen a bell tower other than the one on the low stand in front of her neighborhood temple, but she knew this was a bell tower immediately thanks to the three bells hanging in the belfry near the top. They were huge, these bells, each as large as a house.
Monster bells,
thought Yuriko.

The buildings were gray for the most part, though she spotted slight differences here and there. Some seemed to have a faintly purpleish hue, others were darker, and some were blue. There were wide, low buildings and tall, narrow buildings. Though each building seemed to be of its own unique design, they nevertheless looked like they belonged there together. Perhaps it was because the buildings were connected by long exterior hallways and stairs hewn from stone. Not one stood entirely apart from the others—yet the way they had been connected was bizarre. In one spot, two buildings stood so close together there didn’t seem to be any point in running a hallway between them, and yet a hallway zigzagged through the narrow gap, with stairs going up and down so that to walk along it would nearly quadruple the actual distance between one building and the other. In another part, two buildings at the very edges—as far away from each other as they could possibly be—were connected by a long aerial walkway about three stories off the ground.

The manner of their linking seemed complicated and random, following no discernible pattern. She tried following the hallways with her eyes, and it still wasn’t immediately clear what connected which building to which. It was like one of those picture puzzlers. In part it seemed like they had just kept adding buildings, linking them however they felt like at the time, even if it didn’t make any sense—but at the same time there was a certain joy to the way it looked. Yuriko felt like she had just opened a toy box filled with wondrous things. The buildings were huge and dark, towering and giant, weathered and gray, yet they were each so different and curious and strangely cute in places. Even though it was so big, and she was so little, Yuriko found herself growing quite fond of this strange and tangled town.

And there was something familiar about it too, though she couldn’t imagine how that might be possible. There was nothing particularly Japanese about the buildings, nor was there anything that seemed quite like the scenes of Europe that Yuriko had seen in movies. It wasn’t American or British either. Still, it felt curiously familiar—
and all of it was hidden behind that wall,
thought Yuriko, impressed anew with the wall’s sheer magnitude.

Green grass, cobblestone plazas, and brick roads filled the open spaces of the town. Like the buildings, none of these were the same. The first thing she realized when she saw the roads was that the steepled entrance and long hallway she had come in through were only a side entrance to the town.

Directly opposite from where Yuriko had entered, there was a two-story-high gap in the external wall, with a giant gate. The doors of the gate were reinforced with strips of ancient iron, with sharp spearlike adornments running along the top edge.
To keep out intruders? Or to keep people from escaping?

Not that she could see anyone who might try. The place was deserted.

The main gate was closed, and Yuriko imagined the chilly mist pressing against the far side. A large road passed under the gate, though Yuriko couldn’t begin to guess where it led.

One of the nameless devout noticed her looking. “We will take you beyond that gate later, but now we must hurry to the convocation.”

As she had expected, they began to walk toward the building that looked like a giant’s bowl turned upside down on the ground. The exterior walls of the dome were covered with what looked like bronze plates. They were rusting in places—here and there, splotches of vivid green stood out on the dull surface.

It was like the giant who owned the bowl had taken a paintbrush to it and made a grand mess of the thing.
Perhaps it was the giant’s child,
Yuriko thought,
playing with the paint.

At the top of the dome was a small protrusion—a handle on the kettle. It was round, like the little onions her mother used to put in her stew sometimes, or like a dollop of whipped cream on a shortcake.

Then it hit her.
This is a picture-book building. In a fairy-tale town.

A place that existed only in the imagination. A place that belonged in stories. A town that was nowhere.

Yuriko walked, her sneakers squishing across the damp cobblestones. The feel of the stones must have been just as strange to her sneakers—which were accustomed to walking on the pavement by her school, the shopping street, and the sidewalk near her house—as this town seemed to Yuriko.

I wonder if the nameless devout are cold with bare feet like that.
She could see the lines of their bones clearly where their feet stuck out from the bottom of their robes. She hadn’t even known it was possible for people to be so thin.

She wondered if life was hard in this place.

She began to think that the giant’s child had a hand in building the whole, strange, marvelous town—perhaps with a little help from its father. But the town was filled with these barefooted, terribly thin guardians who watched over all the books in the world.

Protecting the books.

Protecting the books from something.

Protecting something from the books.

One part of the domed roof straight ahead of them was curled back, like a dancer’s fingertips, creating a gap between the roof and the ground beneath it. This was the entrance. Now that she was close, Yuriko realized that the dome alone was not connected to any other building.

Steps rose in layered semi-circles from the cobblestone path toward the entrance. They were made of bronze and looked slippery. The doors at the top were surprisingly small, hinged in the middle so they folded like an accordion to one side. These too were covered with letters. Letters, letters, and more letters, all carved in relief.

A nameless devout stood to either side of the doors. Yuriko looked up at them and gasped.

They all have the same face!

The monks bowed silently, and the doors opened. When one set of doors opened, she saw behind them another set of doors identical to the first. And beyond them, another set. And another.
Wait a second. That doesn’t make sense. Are the walls to this place that thick?
It didn’t seem like there would be any space at all inside once she had gotten through all those doors. One by one, the doors opened. Yuriko passed through them as though pushed by an invisible hand from behind. No, she was being sucked in toward the center of the dome. Her feet had left the floor and she flew through the air. The black robes of the nameless devout in front of her drew closer, then farther away. She was having trouble focusing.

Then the smell of incense brought her back to her senses.

This place was toying with Yuriko’s sense of distance and space. The dome had seemed large enough from the outside, but inexplicably, the inside seemed even larger.

It’s a coliseum—an arena.
The thought occurred to her suddenly.
Or maybe it’s some kind of round theater?
She noticed the round dais that sat in the very middle. Steps circled the dais, rising up like an inverted cone. Some kind of low walls ran down the steps, or maybe they were actual seats—she couldn’t tell, because every inch of open space on the steps was filled with black-robed nameless devout.

“To the center, please,” the one who had walked with Yuriko said as he drew off to one side. Yuriko walked toward the circular stage. No one in the entire place so much as sniffled. It was perfectly quiet, but Yuriko could feel the gazes of the nameless devout on her.

Her legs felt shaky again, and she found she had trouble lifting up her feet. Her toes wanted to trip on the floor and send her sprawling. She almost did fall, but still, no one said a word. She couldn’t hear a single voice, just the gentle squeaking of her sneakers on the floor.