The Bread of Grandma Coto

There is no way to keep the village from becoming a battlefield.

The enemy forces have crossed the northern pass and made their camp close by.

The home forces are here, too, sending one unit after another into the village to resist the enemy's attack.

The place is a powder keg.

Ringed by mountains where two highways intersect, the village is a crucial focal point for transport.

It cannot be allowed to fall into enemy hands, while its capture is essential to any hopes the enemy might have for victory in the war. Long years of fighting have come down to this one major battle.

It is a battle that must be waged.

The logic is clear, simple, inevitable. And it will transform this tranquil village into a battlefield at any moment.

The army has ordered the villagers to evacuate.

Noncombatants can only get in the way.

"The enemy wants to settle this before the weather turns cold,"

"So, what does that mean? Another month? Two weeks?"

"Got your stuff packed? No sense getting caught in the middle and killed. Talk about dying for nothing!"

"Better forget about taking any pots and pans with you. Pack as light as you can and get away as far as you can."

"Think of all the generations our ancestors guarded our houses and land. I hate to think it's going to turn into a wasteland when the fighting starts..."

"There's nothing we can do about it, it's just plain bad luck, that's all."

"We just have to hang in there till the war is over and come back when we find out who won."

"The main thing is to get out now."

"Right, it's all we can do."

"We've got to stay alive. Better not hope for anything more than that."

"Why the hell does this have to happen to us?"

The villagers leave a few at a time, beginning with the first ones to find temporary shelter.

By the time the forest is lightly tinged with red, the village is practically deserted.

The only ones left are old folks who live alond and have no one and no place to run to.

The army has built a crude refugee camp for any evacuees able to cross several mountains to reach it. The aged poor stagger in with little more than clothes on their back.

The only one left in the village is Grandma Coto.

As a mercenary, Kaim first met old Coto shortly after he joined the unit protecting the village.

He was on an inspection round at the time when he spotted an old woman working in the fields. She turned out to be Grandma Coto.

A soldier with him yelled at her, "Hey, old lady, enough of that!"

Another man shouted, "You'd beter get out of here now if you want to stay alive. The fight's going to start in two or three days. How many times do we have to tell you to go to the damn refugee camp?!"

But old Coto stayed hunched over, digging in the dirt.

Obviously, she was not harvesting anything.

If this had been a time when the grain had ripened and she was hurrying to harvest her crops, it might have made sense, but she was just turning te soil as if she had forgotten that a battle was about to start here at any moment.

"Is the old bag deaf? Or just senile?"

With a disgusted look, the captain caled over to Kaim, "Hey, new guy! Do something about this one! Drag her to the refugee camp if you have to tie a rope around her neck! We can't have her wandering around out here. She's just going to get in the way whenthe fighting starts."

The captain's tone was arrogant.

The more cowardly a commanding officer is, the more arrogant and overbearing his style becomes--and the less he is able to conceal his nervousness--when a battle is nearing.

Kaim strode silently toward the old woman in the field.

"Well go on ahead!" the captain called out behind him, but he did not turn around.

Only a few days would be needed to decide the outcome of the battle for the village, which was a reflection of how violent it promised to be.

For this reason, working in the fields now was pointless. Even the most carefully cultivated patch of ground would be crushed under the soldiers' boots. A harvest next year was out of the question. Nor was it even clear how many years it would take to restore the village to its former tranquility.

When Kaim approached her in the field, the old woman kept working and said,

"Don't try to stop me!"

She looked--and sounded--much tougher than she seemed from a distance. She might have been one of those stubborn, cranky old folks that people kept their distance from when the village was at peace.

"You're not going to evacuate?" Kaim asked.

"What the hell for?" she spat out.

"They've built a camp you can go to..."

Old Coto gave a snort and said to Kaim,

"You're a new one. I've never seen you before."

"Yes..."

"So you don't even know what the camp's like. You soldiers have nothing to worry about."

"What do you mean?"

Old Coto said nothing but pointed toward the steep mountain standing like a painted screen on the west side of the village.

Kaim asked, "Is that where the camp is?"

"Hell no. You have to cross that mountain and another one to get to it. Nobody my age can walk that far. What's the point of building a camp in a place like that? How many old folks do they think are going to make it over there? They might as well leave us out in the hills to die like in the old days."

Kaim was at a loss for an answer. Continuing her digging, the old woman grumbled,

"That's how the government does everything..."

She was clearly angry, but perhaps less angry than sad.

"You're on an inspection tour, right? Well, don't let me stop you..."

"No, you see..."

"You're not going to get me to go to any damn refugee camp. That's all there is to it. I'm not going anywhere. This is the village I was born in, and I've lived here all my life."

"I know how you feel, but this place is going to turn into a battlefield soon."

"I know that."

"So then..."

"So what?"

Kaim was at a loss for words again.

When she saw that, she smiled and said, "You're a sweet young man. Kind of unusual in a soldier."

Her expression had softened for the first time.

Once she stopped being so prickly, the smile she produced was actually rather endearing.

"When this place turns into a battlefield, people will die. Lots of them. I know that much, don't worry. But I have work to do, soldier boy. Telling me to leave my work and run away is like telling me to die anyway--and it won't be long now--I want you to let me do what I want to do. You shouldn't have a problem with that."

Kaim fell silent. Not because he was at a loss for words yet again, but because he believed she was right. "If I'm going to die anyway." she had said. Knowing that he would bever be able to speak such words, he had no choice but to bow silently to her will.

"All right, then, run along there, sonny. I've got work to do."

"What are you doing now?"

"See for yourself!"

"Sorry, but I don't know much about farm work."

"Like all the other soldiers." old Coto said with a smile.

"The only thing you people ever think about is killing enemies. You don't know anything about nurturing life." She let a hint of sorrow show again.

Perhaps somewhat taken with Kaim, however, she favored him with an explanation.

"I'm planting seeds." she said.

Grains of wheat:

you sow them in the fall, they mature over winter,

shoot up under the spring sun, and turn the fields golden in summer.

"I always do my planting when the northern mountain peaks turn white. Every year. And this year's not going to be any different."

Would the seeds mature in the trampled fields? Kaim had his doubts.

Grandma Coto, however, displayed not the least anxiety or resignation as she scattered seeds in the newly-turned soil.

Her hands performed the age-old ritual with the ease and naturalness, as if to impress upon Kaim the fact that what she was doing this year was nothing more nor less than what she had done every year before.

As a result, Kaim's next words emerged with a smoothness that he himself found somwhat surprising.

"What if the seeds don't grow?"

"The I'll just do it again next year. And if next year's bad, I'll do it again the year after that. You have to plant the seeds. That's how I've lived my life. If you don't plant, nothing will grow. See what I mean?"

"I think so..."

"Whether there's a fight or not, it doesn't matter. I'm just going to do what I have to do. That's all."

She spoke with certainty, her wrinkled face softening into smile as she added, "You can'teven enjoy a meal if you know you haven't done things right."

"You're saying that this is what gives your life its meaning?"

This was the question to which Kaim had long searched for an answer.

For what purpose had he been born into this world?

What was he supposed to accomplish here?

He had continued to roam thyough his life's enless journey without knowing the answers to the questions--indeed, because he didn't know the answers.

"I don't know about deep stuff like that." Grandma Coto said shyly.

"I just mill the wheat I've harvested, and bake bread in the fall. That bread is really special. Nothing tasted as good as the first bread you make with te wheat you grew that year.

That's what my grandson looks forward to every year. I can't just decide to take a year off now, can I?"

"I see what you mean."

"No you don't." she declared. "You're nothing but a damn soldier."

Her face had turned hard again. There were no more smiles from her that day.

When Kaim returned to the barracks, a soldier who had been stationed in the village for six months or more said to him, "That old bag hates our guts."

"Because we've ruined the village?"

"That's part of it, I suppose, but it's got deeper roots than that for her."

Grandma Coto had lost her entire family to war. First her husband had died in the war forty years earlier, then her son and his wife in the war twenety years earlier, and now the one grandson they had left was taken to fight in the current war.

"What's his unit?" Kim asked the soldier.

The man gave a helpless shrug and named a unit that had been sent t an area with the most intense fighting.

"Talk about bad luck! The fighting's so bad out there, if it was me, I'd take my chances on being executed for deserting under fire. He's got maybe a 50-50 chance of coming back alive. No, maybe 30-70."

If her grandson were to be killed, Grandma Coto would be all alone in the world. She would have no one to feed her bread to.

"It must be tough to be left alone at that age." the soldier said.

"Looking at old Coto, I can't help thinking of my mother back home. There's no way I can let myself get killed. She'd never stop crying. Same for you, too, eh, Kaim?"

Kaim said nothing in reply. He had no right to put himself in the same category as this soldier.

The battle started three days later.

The enemy army's attack was even fiercer than expected. The defense forces had no choice but to put everything they had into the fight.

Kaim slipped away from the battlefront and headed for Grandma Coto's house.

He found her leaving for the field as always.

She gave no sign that she was afraid of the fighting. People who know exactly what they must do, and who refuse to be distracted by anything else, can be strong beyond all reason.

Kaim saw now that there coud be far greater strength in a finite life than in one that lasted forever. Because he sensed this so deeply, he stood before her, blocking her way.

He lifted the tiny old woman in his arms an carried her bodily back to her house.

"What are you doing? Let go of me! I'm not going to follow some soldier's orders! I have work to do!"

"Yes, I know that." Kaim said.

"So put me down now!"

"I don't want to let you die."

Holding her against his chest, he looked her in the eye and pleaded with her.

"I want you to bake bread next autumn again from a new crop of wheat."

She stopped flailing her arms and legs in avain attempt to get free of his grip. She looked straight back at him as he said,

"As long as you have someone to feed your freshly-baked bread to, I want you to keep baking bread year after year."

Old Coto heaved a huge sigh and muttered, smiling, "I knew you were a very strange soldier."

The batte raged on for several days.

The arrogant, cowardly captain died in the fighting.

The soldier who had told Kaim the story of Grandma Coto also died.

Countless defense troops died, and countless enemy troops died.

The village was consumed in flames of war, and old Coto's field was ravaged under the heels of the military.

Kaim's side managed to stave off the attackers, then followed the retreating enemy to the north.

All that remained in their wake was the empty, devastated village.

The war ended as spring was giving way to summer.

At the cost of massive casualties, the army repulsed the enemy's invasion.

The village began to recover little by little.

As Grandma Coto had predicted, not one old person who crossed the mountains to the refugee camp came back alive.

Autumn, and Kaim has come back to the village.

He feels warm in the chest when he looks across the fields and spots old Coto sowing wheat.

So...she's doing it again this year.

And next year, and the year after that, for as long as she is alive.

She notices Kaim, and crosses toward him with a welcoming smile. A year has passed. She seems to have shrunk somewhat with a year's worth of aging.

"Haven't seen you in awhile." she says. "So--they didn't kill you!"

"And I'm glad to see you looking well, too."

"I heard you stayed near my house during the fight--you single-handedly fought to keep enemy troops away from it!"

Kaim gives her a shy smile. "How was your wheat?" he asks.

"All ruined, of course. Worst crop I've ever had--a few scrawny stalks. Barely enough for one loaf."

She tells him all this with surprising ease.

The she fixes her eye on him and asks, "Have some?"

"What...?"

"Bread, of course! I'll bake a loaf now if you'll help me eat it."

"Well, sure, but..."

Grandma Coto sees through Kaim's hesitancy and says with a calm smile.

"Yes, he's dead, my grandson, I got word at the end of the summer. I was waiting and hoping...planning to bake him a loaf of bread as soon as he got home."

When she sees Kaim hanging his head in silence, she asopts a spirited tone as if she has to be the one to cheer him up.

"Come on, then, you eat what he would have had. It'll probably be tougher than usual,what with the wheat harvest being s bad, but I'm sure my grandson would be happy to know I fed my bread to the man who saved my life."

So, this old woman has lost her entire family to war.

In other words, there is no one left to enjoy her bread.

Still, se urges Kaim to "Wait just a minute while I finish this up," sowing the wheat for next year's harvest.

She does it because that is what she has always done.

Because it is what she is supposed to do.

Kaim stops himself from speaking the words, "Let me help," and stands staring at old Coto's bent back.

In the glow of the setting autumn sun, she is sadly small and sadly beautiful.

Kaim eats the fresh-baked bread.

Old Coto was right: made from wheat grown without its full measure of care, the bread is hard and dry, and poor in taste.

Still, of all the bread Kaim has eaten--and will go on to eat--in his long, long life, this is by far the most delicious.

End.

Don't Forget Me Now, You Hear?

“Brother dear!”

The cry comes from someone behind as he wades through the post town's crowds.At first Kaim does not realize that the person is addressing him, and he walks on in search of lodging for the night.

But the cry comes again, all but clinging to him, “Brother, dear! Big Brother!”

This is puzzling.

He last visited the town eighty years ago. There can't be anyone here who knows him.

“Wait, Big Brother! Don't go!”

His Puzzlement begins to take on an eerie edge, for the voice Addressing him as “Big Brother” can only belong to an old woman.

Without letting his guard down,he turns around slowly.

Just as he thought---it is an old woman.

Dressed in the clothes of a young girl, the tiny old woman is looking straight at Kaim with a bright smile on her face.

“I think you may have the wrong person,” he says, allowing his discomfort to show.

“No I don't,” She says with a big shake of the head and an expanding smile. “Your Big Brother Kaim!”

“What. . ?”

“What's wrong, Kaim, did you forget me?”

“Uh. . .well. . .I mean. . .”

He can't place her. Even if he were to succeed in doing so, he knows he has no acquaintances in this town. He wonders . . . could this be a chance re-encounter with someone he once met on the road? But no, he is sure he doesn't recognize her, and strangest of all, why would should this woman who looks old enough to be his grandmother address him as “Big Brother”?

“Don't pretend you don't know who I am Kaim! You're so mean!”

She yells at him loudly enough that people in the crowd stop and stare at them.

It is not just the fact that she is shouting, of course, People always have to shout to be heard in these crowded streets. That alone would not attract attention. The old woman's voice is different from a normal adult yell. It is like the innocent, unrestrained cry of a little girl who throws her whole body into her scream.

People turn shocked expressions on the old woman and quickly avert their eyes.

Their dismay is understandable. The old woman has her stark white hair up tied up with a colourful ribbon, and her dress has the same floral pattern and floppy sleeves as a little girl's.

Many of the passerby look at the old woman with a mix of sympathy and pity on their faces.

Gradually, Kaim begins to comprehend the situation. This old woman has simply lived too long. This is why the past, locked away in her memory, he become realer to her then the reality before her eyes.

A middle-aged passerby tugs on Kaim's elbow.

“If I were you I would just walk away. Don't get involved with her. She'll be nothing but trouble.”

“It's true.” says the wife by his side, nodding. You're a stranger here, so you don't know, But this old woman is senile. You can ignore her. She'll forget everything in five minutes.”

They may be right, but the fact remains is this old woman knows Kaim's name.

In the little girl part of her mind, she thinks of Kaim as her “Big Brother.”

He tries probing his distant memories.

He spent no more than a few days here so long ago. He got to know very few people, and there can't be any of those left who still remember him.

When Kaim goes on standing before the old woman, the nosy middle age couple become indignant. “You try to be helpful and what does it get you?” Snorts the husband.

“Let them work it out themselves.” adds the wife. “let's just go.” Which they proceed to do.

Winding up he voice for maximum shrillness, the old woman calls out to them as they walk off in a huff. “Don't forget me now, you hear?”

In that instant, Kaim's memory makes the connection.

The old woman greets his look of recognition with an expression of joy.

“do you remember me now?” she cries. “I'm Shushu. It's me- Shushu!”

He does remember her. A little girl hi met in this town eighty years ago.

Perhaps five or six year's old at the time, she was a precocious little thing whose lack of shyness with strangers came from her being the daughter of the innkeeper.

Somewhere along the way, she had probably picked up a phrase she heard someone using and so whenever a guest would depart after a number of days at the inn, instead of the standard “Goodbye” or “Thank you” she would see the person off with a smile and a cheery “don't forget me now, you hear?”

Only now is he suddenly able to see the girl beneath the wrinkles, Kaim must advert his gaze from the old womans face.

“What's wrong Big brother?”

He cannot bring himself to look directly at Shushu's vacant stare.

Eighty year have gone by! What can they talk about when a man who never ages meets a little girl from the distant past who has aged too much?

“Let me through here, please. Sorry, let me through here, please.”

Forcing his way through the crowd, a young man rushes up to where Shushu and Kaim are standing.”Great-Grandmother!” How Often do I have to ask you not to go out without telling me!”

After scolding the old woman, he turns to Kaim with an apologetic bow

“I'm terribly sorry if she's been a bother to you. She's old and get ting senile. I hope you can forgive her.”

Shushu herself, however, angrily purses her lips and demands to know, “What are you talking about? I'm just playing with Big Brother Kaim, What's wrong with that?

She peers at the young man and asks, “ Who are you?”

The young man turns a sad gaze on Kaim and begins to apologize again.

With a pained smile, Kaim stops him.

Kaim knows that, at times, it can be sadder and more heartbreaking for a life to be prolonged than for it to be cut short. Sad and heartbreaking through a life may be, however, no one has the right to trample on it.

“She just can't seem to get it through her head she's old.” Even if I hold a mirror up to her she asks, “Whos that old lady?” The young man , who's name is Khasche, further explains the situation to Kain, “she might forget that she ate breakfast, but her memories from childhood can be clear as a bell.”

Kaim nods in silent understanding.

Khasche and Kaim sit on a bench in the town plaza, watching Shushu pick flowers.

She is apparently making a floral wreath for her long-lost “Big Brother.”

“But really sir, do you have time for this? Weren't you in a hurry to get somewhere? ”

“No, I'm fine, don't worry.”

“Thanks very much.”

He smiles for he first time and says, “I haven't seen her this happy in ages.”

The young man seems convinced that his great-grandmother has encountered in Kaim a person who resembles someone she knew as a child. Kaim allows him this. He knows that Khasche cannot, and need not, imagine the existence of a person who never ages.

“Her health has really deteriorated lately. When ever she runs a fever, we wonder if this is going to be the end for Her and we prepare for the worst. But then she springs right back. Sometimes we joke that her mind is so far gone, she's forgotten to die.”

Kaim sees the young man in profile, Khasche has a gentle smile on his face as he speaks of his great-grandmother,No doubt, when he was little, she used to hold him and play with him. Grown up now, Khasche watches over his Great-grandmother like a parent watching his own child.

“he calls out to her, “That's nice, Great-Grandmother. I haven't seen you weave flowers together like that for a long time!”

Squatting in the grass with a fistful of flowers, Shushu answers, “That's not true. I made a wreath for him yesterday!”

Then she says to Kaim, “isn't that right, Big Brother? You wore it in your hair for me didn't you?”

Kaim cups his hands around his mouth and calls back to her, “I certainly did, it smelt so nice!”

Shushu's face became as mass of joyful wrinkles. Overcome with emotion, Khasche bows his head.

Kaim asks Khasche, “are you the one who takes care of her?”

“Uh-huh. Me and my wife Cynthia.”

“How about your parents? Or even your grandparents? Are they still living?”

Khasche shrugs and says, “I'm the only other member of my family left alive.”

His grand parents both died in an epidemic twenty years ago.

His father lost his life in the war that enveloped this area ten years ago.,

His mother, Shushu's grand daughter, aged more rapidly then her own mother, and the lamp of her life was snuffled out five years ago.

“So my great-grandmother has had to keep holding funeral over the years-for her Children and grandchildren, Before we even noticed, she had become the oldest person in town. It must be lonely living that way. . .”

“Im sure.” answers Kaim.

“It might even be a kindness of the gods to let people fade out of mentally when they've lived too long. At least that's how I've come to see it lately. You would think she would feel lonely to be left behind that way, but she's not lonely at all. To live long means you have a lot of memories. Maybe it's not such a bad thing to live in the world of you memories during the last days for your life.”

Shushu stands up, her arms filled with flowers.

“Big Brother Kaim! I'm going to make a floral wreath for you right now! And if I have any flowers left over, I'll make one for this other person too.”

Kaim and Khasche look at each other with bewildered smiles.

Why are you smiling like that? Shushu asks. “Are you two friends now?”

She opens her wrinkle-ringed eyes wide in surprise and gives the two men a joyful smile, And collapses into the grass.

Khasche starts to run for a doctor but Kaim grabs his arm and holds him back, saying, “You'd better stay with her.”

Ironically, Kaim who can never truly know what it feels like to age, has been present, for that very reason, at countless deaths over the years.

His experience tells him that Shushu will not recover this time.

Shushu is lying on her back where she has fallen, her armload of flowers Now spread over her chest.

Her face wear's a smile.

“wait just a minute, Big Brother Kaim. I'll make your wreath for you right away. . .”

Her mind is still lingering among her memories of the past.

will she stay like this to the very end?

“Keep fighting Great-Grandmother! Don't let go!”

Khasche clings to her hand, tearfully shouting encouragement, but she may not even realize that this is her own great-grandson.

“it's me, Great-grandmother, it's me,Khasche! You haven't forgotten me, have you? I bathed you last night, you knew who i was then, didn't you?”

Khasche appeals to her with all his might.

But Shushu, a girlish smile on her lips, is departing for that distance world.

I'm going to be a father soon, Great-grandmother! Remember? I told you last night. Cynthia has a baby inside. It's going to make you a Great Great grandmother! Our Family is going to grow---Another person with your flesh and blood.”

still smiling, Shushu grasps one of the flowers on her chest in her trembling fingers.

She thrusts it towards Khasche and in a voice no more than a whisper, she says, “don't forget me now, you hear?”

Khasche doesn't understand.

Indeed how could her know the little phrase she always used to speak Long before he was born?

Kaim puts his arm around Khasche's shoulder and says “Answer her.”

“I know what you mean Great-grandmother. I won't forget you. I will absolutely never forget you. How could I forget my own Great grandmother?”

“Don't forget me now, you hear?”

“ I won't forget you, Great-grandmother. Believe me. I'll always remember you.”

“don't forget me now, you hear?”

Shushu closes her eyes and lays her hand on the flowers on her chest as if groping there for something. She seems to be trying yo open the door where the memories are sealed.

A soft breeze moves over her.

The flowers adorning her chest dance in the wind along with the memories. Surely among those memories is the Kaim of eighty years ago.

Kaim snatches at one of the petals dancing in the wind, enclosing it in the palm of his hand.

Shushu will never open her eyes again.

She has left on a journey to a world where there is no past or present.

The only ones she has left behind are Kaim, who will go on living forever, and Khasche, who is about to welcome a new life into the world.

Clinging to her corpse, Khasche raises his tear stained face to look at Kaim.

“Thank you so much.” He says to Kaim the traveller.“Thanks to you, my Great-grandmother was so happy to be picking flowers at the very end.

“No. It wasn't thanks to me,” Kaim says.

He closes his fist on the petal in his hand and says to Khasche. “I'm sure if she had made a wreath, she would have given it to your sweet new baby.”

Khasche shyly cocks his head and mutters, “I hope you're right.” But then smiling through his tears, he declares. “I'm sure you are.”

“About that promise you made to her---be good and don't forget her.”

“No, Of course not.”

“People go on living as long as they remain in someones memory.” With these words, Kaim begins to walk slowly away. Behind him he hears Shushu's voice.

Don't forget me now, you hear?

It is the voice of the little girl from eighty years ago, ringing ever clear, sweet, and innocent, declaring farewell to the man who will travel life forever.

End

The Talkative Mercenary

The ramparts will fall to the enemy. It is just a matter of time. They will mount their attack at dawn. The main body of the allied forces has already drawn far back from the front. Only the mercenaries are left behind the barricade. Their orders: defend it to the death. These men, who have gone from battlefield to battlefield, know exactly what that means.

"They've just left us here to die," chuckles the one called Toma in darkness too thick for a person to make out his own hand.

"They want us to buy time so the main force can pull farther back. We're supposed to be their shields, performing our final service for our employers."

His dry, papery laugh shakes the darkness.

Kaim says nothing in reply. Other mercenaries must be gathered there around them in the blackness, but all keep their thoughts to themselves.

Mercenaries have nothing to say to each other on the battlefield. They might be on opposite sides in the next battle. At a time like this especially, when they have to defend the barricade against the enemy's withering attack, they can't spare time even to look at each other's faces.

Kaim knows nothing about this fighter called Toma. His voice sounds young. He probably has very little experience as a mercenary.

If a man grows talkative in the face of death, it means that, deep down somewhere, he has a weakness that prevents him from becoming a true soldier. A mercenary with even a hint of such weakness can never cheat death and live to see another day.

It is the law of the battlefield, and a man like Toma will only learn that law in the moment before he loses his life.

"We're done for. We'll all be dead in the morning. We'll have that 'silent homecoming' they talk about. I can't stand it. I just can't stand it."

In the darkness, no voices rise to second these sentiments. It's too late for talk like this. The day they chose the mercenary's path was when they should have resigned themselves to death.

They will sell their lives for a little money. They prolong their lives, a day at a time, by taking the lives of one enemy after another. That's what a mercenary is: nothing more, nothing less.

"Hey... can anybody hear me? How many of us are here? We're all going to die together. We'll just be a line of corpses in the morning. Don't shut up now. Answer me!"

No one says a thing. Instead of voices, the silent darkness begins to fill with a tangible sense of annoyance.

Wordlessly to gather on the battlefield; wordlessly to fight the enemy; and just as wordlessly to die.

That is the rule of the mercenary, the "aesthetic" of the mercenary, if such an expression may be permitted.

But Toma has taken it upon himself to abandon that aesthetic.

"I knew it was hopeless from the start. Headquarters didn't know what they were doing. There was no way a strategy like that could work. You know what I'm talking about, don't you guys? We had to lose. It's a total mess. I wish to hell I had joined the other side. Then we could have gotten a mountain of cash for winning. We could have drunk ourselves blind. We could have had all the women we wanted. I could have gone either way on this one but I picked the wrong side to fight on..."

"Hey, you!" an older voice booms out of the darkness. An angry voice.

"Yeah, what?" answers Toma, his voice more vibrant now at having at last found someone willing to talk with him.

As if to crush his momentary enthusiasm, the other man goes on, "How about shutting up a while? If you really want to run off at the mouth that much, I can send you to the next world a step ahead of the rest of us."

"I-I'm sorry..."

Instantly dejected, Toma falls silent and the darkness grows still again.

The stillness is charged, however, with a deep tension. Far deeper, even, than before Toma started talking.

The veteran warriors know: watch out for a talkative man.

Being talkative means trusting in words--trusting too much in words.

Words are useless on the battlefield. You take up your weapon in silence, you fight in silence, you kill the enemy--or he kills you--in silence. All the mercenaries here have lived this way. All but the talkative one.

A soldier who clings too desperately to words may cling just as desperately to something else--to the sweet trap of betrayal, for example, or the seduction of desertion under fire, or the lure of madness.

Kaim has often seen pitiful mercenaries who, unable to endure the terror of being surrounded by the enemy, go beserk and attack men from their own side.

Will Toma prove to be another such case? The possibility is great, and no doubt the other men are thinking the same thing, too. In the stillness, they turn the same gazes toward Toma that they reserve for confrontations with the enemy, looking for any signs of change in his demeanor. The moment they perceive the slightest threat in him, a blade will soundlessly pierce the left side of his chest.

The silence continues. Not even the usual all-night cries of insects can be heard tonight as they were last night. Perhaps the insects knew enough to clear out in advance of the enemy's dawn attack. The thought reminds Kaim that he saw no birds in the area yesterday, either. Although animals came to snatch food when the men first built this fortification, there has been no sign of them for several days now.

Animals have mysterious powers of foreknowledge that humans have lost. This becomes painfully obvious from any visit to a battlefield.

There can be little doubt that the animals have turned their backs on this barricade.

Right about now, in some distant forest, a huge flock of black birds may be taking wing in search of humans corpses to strip of their flesh:

"It's feast time, boys!"

They already know, somehow. Once the sun is fully up, the battle will be over. If they don't get here first, they'll lose some of their feast to a flock from another forest. Their black bodies hidden against the night sky, those birds now are probably flying for all they're worth.

A voice in the night. Toma's voice.

Weeping.

"Listen, you guys... I don't know how many of you are out there, but we're all going to die in the morning... or most of us. Maybe one or two will live to escape, no more. Think about it: those are lousy odds. You've all been through this before. You're veterans, war heroes, you're probably not scared. But even so... even if you're not scared, don't you think this is stupid? Huh? Tell me! You've been through a lot more battles than I have, so tell me... what the hell are we here for? We don't hate the enemy, we don't owe the leaders on our side anything, but we've got to kill the enemy and follow our leaders' orders... and we're still going to end up dead. Tell me you guys... don't you think it's pointless? Don't you think it's stupid?"

The only response to Toma is the impatient click of a tongue in the darkness followed by someone else's sigh of annoyance.

"I can't take it any longer," says Toma. "I hate this..."

and now he is sobbing.

"All I wanted was some money and maybe something better to eat and maybe nicer clothes. I would have been happy with that. What a mistake I made, taking work like this. I never should have done it..."

Kaim keeps all his senses open for movement in the night.

Aside from himself and Toma, five other soldiers are crouching down in the darkness. Not bad: all are experienced warriors. They would not have been able to put up with Toma's whining otherwise. If they let themselves get angry and started shouting at him or grabbing him by the throat or whaling away at him, they would just end up consuming their strength and energy before their "work" started at dawn.

If this is an assemblage of men who know how to keep their silence, the chances for "life" are that much greater, assuming, that is, that the talkative, weeping man does not become too great a burden for the rest of them.

Still sobbing. Toma continues to curse his fate.

Suddenly, something is different: something stirs in the silence.

This could be bad, Kaim thinks, sharpening his attentiveness still more.

When dawn breaks, Toma will get in our way. Because of him, the possibility for "life" will wither. The mercenaries know that, and because they know it, they might do whatever it takes for them to secure for themselves even the slightest added chance to live.

"I don't want to die here. I tell you. Not now, not here, like a worthless dog. You guys feel the same way, don't you?"

Moonlight shines down from a rift in the clouds.

For a split second, Toma's tear-stained face appears in the darkness. He is even younger than Kaim imagined from the sound of his voice. He is practically a boy.

The clouds hide the moon again, and thick black darkness enfolds everything once more.

A dull light stirs in the deph of the darkness.

Without a word, Kaim darts, wind-like, toward it. He was able to gauge the distance between himself and Toma during the flash of moonlight.

Kaim grabs Toma's arm. Something hard falls to the ground. The dull light flashes again, this time at their feet, and melts again into the darkness.

A knife. Driven by the fear of death. Toma was trying to slit his own throat.

Toma twists away and tries to free his arm from Kaim's grasp, but Kaim chops him in the solar plexus.

Without uttering a sound, Toma passes out.

With Toma slung across his back, Kaim strides through the darkness.

Eventually Toma wakes and thrashes his legs to get loose.

"Stop it! Let me go!"

Kaim lowers him to the ground.

"Every once in awhile, the moon comes out. Check your direction when that happens. Go straight toward the setting moon," Kaim says gently.

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"It's the only way you can get out of here."

Kaim has chosen the thinnest part of the enemy's encirclement. Of course, there is no guarantee that getting through here will save him. From now on, Toma will have to believe in his own luck and abilities.

"Are you coming back, too?" Toma asks.

"No, I'm going back. You escape alone."

"Why? You come, too. Let's both escape. Come with me!"

Toma clings to Kaim's arm as he pleads with him, but Kaim gives him a hard slap on the cheek. The flesh of that cheek is too soft to belong to a veteran warrior. It is the flesh of a boy. A kid.

"You go alone."

"But why?"

"To live, that's why."

"What about you? You want to live, too, don't you? You should run away with me. You don't want to die, do you?"

Want to live? No. Kaim has no great desire to live. He lives because there is nothing else he can do. He lives because he has to. Toma is far too young--his own burden of life far too fragile--for him to know the pain of such life.

"We live to fight. That's what mercenaries do."

"But..."

"Get the hell out of here. You're ruining it for the rest of us."

"You guys'll never win this battle. So why not run away?"

"It's our job to fight."

With that, Kaim turns on his heels and starts back the way they came.

Toma stands there, watching Kaim move away, and a moment later he himself darts into the western forest.

To fight or to flee: Kaim cannot know which holds out the greater promise for life. He also believes it is better not to know.

Except--

"I hope you make it, boy," he mutters, walking on.

The eastern sky is beginning to brighten little by little. Soon the enemy's attack will begin.

From the western forest, a few birds take to the air.

Perhaps it means that a small-scale battle has started in the silence. Or that the poor young mercenary has been felled with his back to the enemy.

Kaim does not look back or break his stride.

He feels certain he has seen that talkative mercenary before. Before the war broke out, the boy was selling fruit in the market along the highway. He was a good boy, took good care of his mother, the women of the market were saying.

Live a long, full life, Kaim wishes for the boy as he himself walks on, glaring at the lightening eastern sky.

End

Letters from a Weakling

Once there was a woman who came from a foreign land to marry into an old family.

Her husband was from a tiny village in the mountains but he was working in a thriving harbor town abroad when he met and fell in love with her. At the time he asked her to marry him, his father in his home country collapsed and died. Being the eldest son in his family, the young man had no choice but to return to his homeland—taking her with him, of course.

Her name was Myna. This was not a name used by the women of his homeland.

Indeed, her name was not the only thing about her that was different.

The color of her skin, hair, and eyes, and the language she spoke were all different.

Had the young man’s hometown been a harbor city where people of many different lands cross paths, there would have been nothing unusual about this. In such places there were any number of homes that welcomed foreign men and women into the family, generation after generation.

“But this is about as deep in the country as you can get.” The young man told Kaim, sighing, on the night he made Myna his wife.

Kaim had rushed here all the way from the harbor town in the far country to attend the wedding.

At the banquet, the young man had given Kaim a look, and the two had slipped away from the festivities. They were standing in the garden, looking up at the night sky.

“When the eldest son marries, his wishes are of no importance. What matters is ‘family’.

The two families negotiate the engagement, and a bride is chosen who is acceptable to the groom’s parents. That’s how it was with my parents, and my grandparents did the same.”

“I know what you mean.” Kaim said with a nod.

Judging from the formal wedding ceremony, it was easy to imagine the highly conservative nature of the area, and just as easy to imagine that the relatives had not welcomed Myna into the family.

“Alex” Kaim said to the young man.

“Yes?” the young man answered, still looking up at the sky.

“You are the only one who can protect Myna, you know.”

“I know that much, Kaim.”

“Myna is a wonderful girl.”

“I know that, too, of course.”

The three were good friends. Kaim and Alex had worked together offloading ships at the same pier, and also together they had often gone to the neighborhood where Myna worked in an outdoor stall. Even now Kaim retains the bitter sweet memory of Alex and Myna struggling to communicate in each other’s languages.

“You know, Kaim” Alex said that night under the sky, “I think you sensed it, too, but Myna was drawn less to me than to—”

Kaim cut him short. “Never mind.” He said with a pained smile.

Of course Kaim knew how Myna felt. And if he had responded to her feeling, she and Alex would not have been married here today.

But Kaim had held back. Instead, he had urged Alex to pursue his love for Myna and helped the two come face to face. He felt no regrets about having played the part of an unlikely Cupid for them. Destined to continue his never-ending journey, Kaim was unable to love Myna in return.

One of Alex’s uncles stepped out of the house, drunk.

“Hey, Alex, what are you doing out here?” he growled.

“The groom can’t be absent from the reception!”

“Sure, I’ll be right there.” Alex said, turning toward his uncle.

Kaim tapped him on the shoulder.

“Make Myna happy, Alex.”

“Leave it to me.” He answered with a smile.

“Come on,” said the uncle. “Hurry up. The groom’s supposed to sit there the whole time! The entire family is here, and we’re going to drink the night away!” He grabbed Alex’s hand and dragged him back into the house.

The man was all smiles with Alex, but when he glanced at Kaim, his borderline polite smile could not disguise the gleam of distrust in his eye for an outsider. Kaim was sure he had noticed that same gleam, though perhaps not as openly displayed, in eyes that alighted on Myna.

So that was the kind of village to which Myna had come as a bride.

“You’d better make her happy, Alex.” Kaim called out again toward his friend’s receding form. “I'm counting on you!”

But now the uncle had his arm around Alex’s shoulders, and he was noisily monopolizing his nephew’s attention. Alex never heard those words from Kaim.

It was three months later when Alex came to visit Kaim at work on the pier.

“I'm in town on a buying trip. So I thought I’d stop by to say hello.” Alex announced.

But, judging from the fatigue evident on his friend’s face, Kaim had a pretty good idea of his real reason for coming here.

As casually as possible, Kaim asked, “How is Myna doing?”

With a feeble smile, Alex replied, “After the wedding…things happened.”

Myna had been accepted neither as a member of the family,
nor as a resident of a village.

There were too many differences: in daily customs, in culture.
But the one thing that made Myna too different for the tiny village was
the brown color of her skin.

“If only she could speak with people! Myna is trying her best to learn our language. But my mother and the other relatives make no attempt to learn hers. Not so much as a ‘Good morning’ or a ‘Thank you.’ They insist it’s up to the daughter-in-law to do all the adapting.”

Still, Myna was working hard to draw closer to Alex's family and birthplace. She would be the first one out to the fields in the morning, work without a break until the sun went down, and do sewing until late at night. She would try to talk to people in the local dialect that Alex had taught her, using gestures and body language, and she would apologize profusely, with abject smiles, whenever she failed to understand what they were saying.

Kaim could easily imagine Myna going through these exertions, which made Alex’s report all the more painful to him.

“You should come to visit us now and then, Kaim. Myna would love to see you, too” Kaim responded vaguely with a silent nod. When Alex added “I want you to come and cheer her up,” he said nothing in reply.

“What’s wrong, Kaim? Are you angry?”

“I'm not going to visit.”

“Why not?”

“You promised me you’d make her happy, remember? We agreed that you’re the only one who can do that.”

“But still…”

“Sorry, I haven’t got time for this. I have to get this ship loaded before it sails at sunset.”

With this curt dismissal, Kaim turned away and continued working. Alex
stared at him from behind, looking frustrated and confused. Kaim could
feel his friend’s gaze on his back. Because he could feel it, he kept working
without another backward glance.

Eventually, Alex game up and left.

Neither man spoke words of farewell.

A year after the wedding, Myna gave birth to a son.

The boy had brown skin like his mother.

He had just started crawling when Alex visited Kaim again.

There was talk of a divorce, Alex said.

“There's nothing wrong with our relationship. Myna and I love each other, that’s for certain. But my mother and the relatives say there is no way they can accept a brown-skinned child as the family heir. His existence supposedly harms the marriage prospects of my younger brother and sister, too. So they want us to send the baby to Myna’s family. It’s gone that far…”

Alex had lost a great deal of weight. He was obviously living with much pain every day, trapped as he was between “family” and Myna.

None of this made sense to Kaim.

However “trapped” Alex might be, as long as he was firm on what was important to him, there could only be one answer to his family’s demands, and he should be able to arrive at it without anguish or confusion.

“I know how strong you are,” Alex sighed, speaking to Kaim’s back as Kaim went on hoisting huge, spine-snapping crates in silence.

The longshoremen here were well paid for handling crates on their own—loads that it would take three ordinary men to lift. The daily wage was calculated by the number of loads each man lifted, so asking for help would result in a pay cut.

For this reason, Kaim and the others never complained or asked for help. They would lift even the heaviest loads by themselves.

Alex had been like that, too.

If someone nearby asked him, “Are you going to be okay with that?”
he would be all the more determined to do it on his own.

“Fine, fine.” He would smile and, gritting his teeth, he would lift the giant load.

But Alex was not like that anymore.

“I'm starting to think that, maybe, in the long run, tying Myna down to a life in my village, is just going to make her unhappy. My relatives say they’ll support Myna and the baby. So It’s not as if I’d be abandoning her or chasing her away. It’s just that, for both our sakes, starting a new life…”

Having finished piling crates on the deck, Kaim turned toward Alex for the first time.
He was looking down at Alex on the pier.

“And you’re all right with that?”

“Huh?”

“If you’re convinced it’s the right thing, then go ahead and do it.
It’s not for me to interfere.”

Alex’s features distorted under the impact of Kaim’s words.

Kaim said nothing more but went back to work.

His anger and frustration were reaching the boiling point.

Alex had no idea that Myna had been writing to Kaim on occasion since shortly after the wedding.

About the hardships she had been facing in the home of her husband’s family, she said not a word.

Instead, she would spell out how happy her current life was and declare repeatedly how much Alex loved her.

Always, the letters would end like this: “I'm sure you, too, must be living happily, Kaim.”

This was why Alex's report of the situation at home had filled him with such intense anger and frustration.

He had never answered Myna’s letters.

He felt certain that if he were to write to her—whether with words of encouragement or comfort, or even playing along with her sad lies—something important that gave her spiritual support would snap in two.

“Come see the baby, Kaim.” Alex pleaded. “Myna would be thrilled if you’d do that.”

Instead of responding to Alex, Kaim called out to him from on deck,

“See that crate over there? Can you lift it?”

The crate near Alex was of the same size and weight as the one that Kaim had just loaded onto the ship.

In the old days, Alex would not have hesitated to carry it up to the ship, every muscle in his body shuddering.

Now, however, Alex gave Kaim one timid glance and, smiling to hide his embarrassment, said only, “Not me.”

Kaim said nothing more.

He felt strongly that their long friendship had come to an end,
though in fact, for Kaim, whose life would go on through all eternity,
it had been nothing more than a momentary acquaintance.

Kaim has been on his endless journey ever since.

Now and then he thinks back to those bygone days.

Both Alex and Myna long ago came to dwell among his distant memories—
the kind of memories that revive with a deep sense of bitterness.

And they are there to this day.

Alex made his third trip to see Kaim a year after the baby was born.

Having wasted away to a mere shadow of his former self,
Alex stared vacantly at Kaim, and his voice lacked all intonation
as he announced Myna’s death.

She had killed herself.

“Hanged herself in the barn…”

Kaim was amazed at his own detachment as he took in Alex’s words.

Myna’s letters had stopped coming several months earlier. Either she no longer needed to spin those sad, little lies about being accepted by Alex’s family and the townsfolk, or she had lost the strength to invent them anymore. In effect it was the latter, Kaim was learning now.

“To the very end, she could not make anyone accept her—my mother, my family, or the town.” Alex said tearfully. “She was all alone, finally, to the very end…”

Without a word, Kaim punched Alex in the face.

Alex seemed to know and accept the fact that the punch would be coming. He did nothing to resist or defend himself. The fist hit him full-on and sent him sprawling in the road.

“Why?” Kaim demanded to know. “Why did you say she was all alone?”
and when Alex righted himself, he smashed him in the face again.

Alex began coughing violently and uncontrollably, and when he spat up a gob of blod, a broken back tooth came out with it.

Kaim knew well enough that Alex had been suffering, too, that he had been engaged in a desperate struggle to do something about being trapped between “family” and “wife.” Otherwise, he would never have wasted away so dramatically from the brawny young man he used to be.

As well as he knew this, however, Kaim could not forgive him.

He had promised. He had given his word. He would make Myna happy.
He would protect her.

Kaim could never forgive Alex for failing to make good on his oath.

Wiping the blood from his mouth with the back of his hand, Alex dragged himself to his feet. “I know how strong you are,” he said to Kaim as he had once before, but this time his words took on a far sadder tone.

“But let me tell you this, Kaim. My mother and my relatives and the others… their way of looking at things is not completely crazy. To live in peace and quiet in the country, you have to follow the country’s special rules. It just so happens that one of those rules was not to accept a ‘bride’ like Myna. I was born and raised in that village, and I know the village code, know it all too well, which is why I have been in such pain all these months. I'm a weakling, I suppose. In your eyes, I'm probably so weak you want to spit on me. So laugh at me! Hit me! Despise me if you want to! Come on, hit me again!”

Alex thrust his face at Kaim for more punishment, and Kaim threw another punch.

This one landed squarely on his nose—and may have broken it.

Alex crumpled to his knees. The blood that gushed from his nose was blacker than the blood from his mouth. Alex looked up at Kaim with a smile of self-derision.

“Myna should have been with you. That’s what I think. If she had married you and not some weakling like me, she’d still be alive.”

With a wordless, strangled cry of rage, Kaim lunged at Alex, grabbing him by the collar and hoisting him to his feet.

Another punch.

And still another.

Kaim was not planning to stop punching Alex.

Now, though, with Kaim’s hand still fastened to the front of his shirt,
Alex looked straight at Kaim for the first time since coming to the dock.

“Why didn’t you ever answer Myna’s letters? That’s all she was hoping for—a letter from you.”

So he knew. Alex knew everything.

“It’s terrible out there in the country. Anybody who wants to can find out who wrote letters and who got them. Everybody out there is like family—everybody but Myna, that is.”

If Alex had wanted to, he could have quashed Myna’s letters easily. Then, not one of her sad, little lies would have reached Kaim.

But instead, Alex had read the letters, resealed the envelopes, and sent them to Kaim one after another. He had internalized Myna’s sad, little lies and started looking for Kaim’s answers even before she did.

Kaim stopped his fist in mid-air and asked, “How could I have possibly answered her?”

“Why not?” Alex retorted, “You knew how trapped she was feeling. You must have known how much encouragement one word from you could have given her.”

“But you were Myna’s husband.”

“Yes, that’s true, but you were always the one deepest in her heart. I knew that, and because I knew it, there was only one thing I could do.”

No, that couldn’t be!

Astounded, Kaim lowered his fist as Alex said to him, “I wrote to her, I pretended I was you, and I wrote her letter after letter. ‘Be strong,’ I told her. ‘Keep your spirits up.’ ‘I’ll come to see you soon.’ You’re too strong, Kaim, so you can’t understand the feelings of weak people. But I don’t have that problem: I'm weak, I understood how a weakling like Myna felt.”

Alex cried, the blood streaming from his nose and mouth.

“There is one thing I don’t know, though, Kaim. I don’t know whether Myna actually believed that the letters I wrote were from you, or whether she knew what I was doing and pretended to believe. I wonder. Was life in my village so painful to her that she couldn’t go on living there without pretending to believe?”

Kaim made no attempt to answer Alex’s question.

Slowly, he let the strength go out of his clenched fist and released his grip on Alex’s shirt.

Alex drew a step back from him, then took another step, putting distance between them before his final revelation.

“There was one letter, just one, that I didn’t send to you. That was three months ago. It was the first letter in which Myna begged you for help. She said she wanted to run away and asked you to come and save her. As soon as possible. To rescue her and the baby.”

That was the letter Alex threw away.

Posing as Kaim, he wrote a two-word answer:
“Be strong.”

The day after she read the letter from Alex, Myna hanged herself in the barn.

Kaim stood rooted to the spot, crestfallen.

This left him momentarily defenseless.

Alex shot his fist at Kaim’s solar plexus, though his feeble blow could hardly be called a “punch.” The pain it inflicted might have been greater for Alex’s own fist than for Kaim’s superbly conditioned muscles.

“What an idiot I was! ‘Be strong!’ Such words might have meant something to somebody like you, but to burden a weak person like Myna with them…no, they could only break and crush her.”

Alex gave another tearful, self-disparaging smile and thrust his face toward Kaim.

“So hit me! I don’t give a damn! Hit me all you want! Beat the hell out of me! But let me ask you this, Kaim, If I had sent her last letter to you, would you have finally answered that one? Would you have been able to accept Myna in all her weakness?”

Kaim did not know how to answer this question. Nor did he raise a clenched fist to Alex again.

So ended the story of Kaim and Alex.

Alex turned and walked away, but Kaim could not bring himself to call out to him. He simply stood there, drained of all emotion, and watched him go.

Alex did, however, turn to face Kaim again when he had put enough distance between them so that Kaim could barely make out his voice.

“I can tell you this much, Kaim.” He shouted. “I am going to raise that boy of mine! I’ll make him into a man of my village! I may have been too weak to be a husband, but as a father, I’ll do better. I’ll make him happy.”

Kaim returned his words with a silent nod. Alex allowed the hint of a smile to show on his badly swollen face. He then turned on his heels once more and strode away.

Kaim never saw Alex again.

Every now and then, Kaim remembers Alex and Myna as he proceeds on his endlessly long journey. When he thinks back on what he himself was like in those days, wanting only to be strong in all things, the memory is a bitter one.

If only he had been the person he is today!

The present-day Kaim would not have rejected such human weakness. Now he can accept the fact—sometimes with a pained smile, sometimes with genuine heartbreak—that everyone is weak.

If only he could begin his journey again!

Myna might not have had to die.

But this is no more than a hopeless dream.

He meets them only once, and they are gone forever—the mortals, the humans, the ones without eternal life. This is what makes them all the more dear to him. This is what makes his breast burn for them.

Aware now that he has failed to love human weakness throughout his battles and his wanderings, Kaim turns his steps toward Alex’s old village.

Alex himself, of course is long since dead.

But Alex’s descendants he can tell at a glance. They have brown skin.

Brown-skinned youths are the ones in charge of the village festivals.

Brown-skinned old women teach girls how to weave floral decorations.

Brown-skinned children and those who are not brown play together in all innocence, free of care.

Perhaps this can comprise a tiny epilogue to the story of Alex, Kaim, and Myna.

The graves of Alex and Myna lie side-by-side atop a low, wind-swept hill.

Kaim picks flowers from the field and offers them at the doomed couple’s graves before returning to the road.

What is human strength after all?

Kaim still does not know the answer to this question.

And this is why again today his journey must go on.

End

The Upstreamers

Strong winds have always blown across this vast grassy plain.

Perhaps he area's topography has something to do with it, but the direction of the wind remains constant, irrespective of the time or season:

From east to west, from the horizon where the sun rises to the horizon where the sun sets. Swept by the unceasing winds, the misshapen trunks and branches of shrubs all incline to the west. Tall grasses do not grow here, and the grasses that do grow all lie flat on the groun, bendinf westward.

Caravans and herding folk traverse the single road that crosses the plain. They do not “come and go,” they only go, moving from east to west, using the wind at their backs to gain distance. Travelers heading west to east always use the circuitous route that snakes around the southern mountains. It is much farther that way, but much faster than crossing the plain head-on into the wind. The road across the plain is called the Wind Stream. Just as the flow of a great river never changes direction, the foot steps of those who use the road have not changed direction since the distant past, nor are they likely to change far into the future: from east to west.

Human shapes that appear from the horizon where the sun rises disappear over trhe horizon where the sun sets.

They never pass oncoming travelers—with only the rarest exceptions. The first time she passed Kaim on the Wind Stream, the girls was just an infant.

“So, my grandmother was alive then?”

In response to the girl's untroubled question, Kaim smiles and answers,

“She was. And I remember what a nice old lady she was, too.”

Looking back down the road, the girl points toward the line of hills fading off into the distance.

“My grandmother crossed seven hills on her journey.” “Is seven a lot?”

“Uh-huh. Grandma lived a long time. Most people end their journeys after five hills. The people the leave behind build a little grave where they ended their journey, and then they keep traveling...”

The girl points down at the ground where she is standing.

“This is as far as I've come,” she says with a proud, happy smile.

The religion of the girl and her family professes a pious believe that if they devote their lives to walking eastward, against the flow of the Wind Stream, they will arrive at the easternmost source of the Stream itself. People call believers in that religion, “The Upstreamers.”

The word carries a hint of fear and sadness, but also a trace of contempt and scorn.

The upstreamers are devoid of worldly desires. They live their lives for no greater purpose than traveling eastward on foot. They are free of doubt. They give birth to children en route, and they continue their journey while raising their children. When they age and their strength gives out, their journey ends. But their family's journey continues.

From child to grandchild to great-grandchild, their belief is carried on. The journey of this girl's family was begun by her late grandmother, who began walking from the Wind Stream's western verge with her son, who was then the age the girl is now.

The Upstreamers do not walk for the entire year, of course. During the season when the winds are especially strong—from the late autumn to to early spring—they take up residence in various post towns scattered along the road and earn day wages by performing tasks that the townsfolk themselves refuse to do. Some Upstreamers choose to stay in the towns, while others, conversely, take townspeople with them when they return to the road in the spring.

These are people who have fallen in love during the long winter,

Or boys who dream of travel,

or grown-ups who have tired of town life. Such are the reasons the townsfolk look upon the Upstreamers with complicated gazes.

The little girl's mother was one of those who joined the journey mid-way, and he girl herself, some years from now, miht fall in love with someone in a post town somewhere. She might choose to live in the town, or she could just as well invite her lover to join her on the road.

She has no idea at this point what lies in store for her. The girl's father calls out to her: “Time to go!”

Their brief rest is over.

She seems sorry to leave and stands up reluctantly. “Too bad,” she says. “I wish I could have talked to you more. But we have to get to the next town by the time the snows start.”

Constantly exposed to upwinds, her cheeks are red and cracked, her lips chapped, but her smile is wonderful a she wishes Kaim a safe journey.

It is the serene smile of one who believes completely in the purpose of her life, without the silghtest doubt. “Will I see you again somewhere?” she asks.

“Probably.”

Kaim answers, smiling back at her, but he can never match that smile of hers. He is now in the midst of a journey that will take him beyond the western end of the Wind Stream. He heads to the battlefield as a mercenary, and by the time the western battle is over, a new battle will have begun in the east.

It will be a lon, cruel journey, with nothing to believe in. When he meets he girl again along he way, Kaim's smile will have taken on even more shadows than it has now. Perhaps as a parting gift for him, the girl sings a few short lines for him:

This wind, where does it blow from?

Where does it start its journey here?

Does it come from where life begins?

Or does it begin where life ends?

“Goodbye, then,” the girl says, trudging on, one labored step at a time, hair streaming in the headwind.

Ten long years have flowed by when Kaim next meets the girl.

It is spring, when the grassland is dotted with lovely white flowers.

She has become the wife of a young man who does tailoring and shoe repair in one of the post towns.

“This is my third spring here,” she says, patting her swollen belly fondly.

In a few days, she will give birth to a child. She will become a mother.

“And your parents...?” Kaim asks.

She shrugs and glances eastward.

“They are continuing their journey. I'm the only one who stayed on here.” Kaim does not ask why she has done this.

Continuing he journey is one way to live, and staying in a town is another.

Neither can be judged to be more correct than the other. The only answer for the girl can be seen in her smiling face. “But never mind about me,” she says looking at him suspiciously.

“You haven't changed one little bit from the time we met so long ago.”

For the thousand-year-old Kaim, ten years is nothing but a change in season.

“Some lives are like that,” he says, straining to smile.

“Some people in this world can never grow old, no matter how long they live.”

He looks at the girl, now grown into a woman, and wonders again, Living through endless ages of time: is it a blessing, or a curse? Kaim's remark hardly counts as an explanation, but the girl nods with a look of apparent understanding.

“If that's the case,” she says, “You should be the one who goes to the place where the wind begins. You'd be the perfect Upstreamer.”

She could be right: after all, the lifespan given to humans is far too short for anyone to travel against the Wind Stream as far as the starting point of the wind. Still, Kaim responds with a few slow shakes of shis head.

“I'm not qualified to make the journey.”

“No? Anybody can be an Upstreamer. Anybody, that is, who wants to see where the wind starts with his or her own eyes.”

Having said this, however, the girl adds with a touch of sadness, “No one has actually seen it, though, I guess.” The place where the wind begins: that place is nowhere at all. Even if, after a long journey, one were to arrive at the eastern end of the Wind Stream, the wind would be blowing there, too. And not just an east wind. West wind, north wind, south wind: winds without limit, without end.

Human beings, who cannot live forever, daring to take a journey without end. This might be the ultimate tragedy, but it could just as well be the ultimate comedy. Kaim knows one thing, however: one cannot simply dismiss it as an exercise in futility. “How about you?” he asks the girl. “Aren't you going to continue your journey soon?”

She thinks about this for the space of a breath, and caressing her swollen belly, she cocks her head and says, “I wonder... I might want to go on living the way I am now forever. Or then again, I might feel that desire to reach the starting point of the wind.” All the Upstreamers without exception say that you can never know what might trigger a return to the journey. One day, without warning, you slough off the entire town life and start walking.

It is not always a matter of running into an Upstreamer and being lored back to the road: plenty of people set out on their own all of a sudden.

The teachings of the Upstreamers say that all human beings harbor a desire for endless travel. They probably are not aware of the desire because it is stashed away so far down in the breast that it is deeper than memory.

The instant something brings it to the surface, a person becomes and Upstreamer. “Even if you have the desire,” the girl says to Kaim.

“I wonder...”

“It's true,” she says. “No question.”

The look in her eyes is as straight-on and free of doubt as it was the last time he met her.

Fixing him with that look, she points to her own chest.

“I haven't completely lost it myself.”

“But I'm sure you'rehappy with your present life?”

“Of course I am.”

“Do you really think the day will come when you will want to set out on the journey even if it means giving up that happiness?”

Instead of answering, she gives him a gentle smile. Many years flow by, but every now and then, something reminds Kaim of the girl's words—that everyone harbors a desire for endless travel.

For Kaim, living itself is a journey without end.

In the course of his journey, he has witnessed countless deaths, and he has also witnessed countless births. Human life is all too short, too weak, and fleeting.

Yet, the more he dwells upon its evanescence, the more he feels, inexplicably, that words such as “eternal,” and “perpetual” apply more properly to live, finite as it is, than to anything else. Traveling down the Wind Stream for the first time in many years, Kaim spies the funeral of an Upstreamer.

A boy in mourning dress stands by the road holding out wildflowers to passing travelers, and urging them to “offer up a flower to a noble soul who has made the long journey this far.”

Kaim takes a flower and asks the boy, “Is it a member of your flamily?”

“Uh-huh. My grandma.”

The boy nods, his face the image of one Kaim knew so long ago.

The old woman lying in the coffin must be the girl. Kaim is sure of it.

“Grandma traveled a long, long time. She brought my daddy with her when he was just a little boy. See that hill over there? She started walking from way, way beyond it, and she got all the way here.”

So, the girl must've set out on her journey after all.

Turning her back on he town life, leading her child by the hand, she trod her way along the endless journey.

Her wish to aim for the place where the wind begins would be passed on to her child, her grandchild, and on through the succeeding generations.

To head for a land one could never hope to reach, and to do so generation after generation: this is another endless journey. Is it a tragedy?

A comedy?

Perhaps the serene smile on the face of the old woman in the coffin is the answer.

Kaim lays he flower at her feet as an offering.

The family members who have traveled with her join together in a song for the departed:

This wind, where does it blow from?

Where does it start its journey here?

Does it come from where life begins?

Or does it begin where life ends?

The wind blows.

It sweeps the vast grassland.

Kaim takes one long, slow step toward his destination.

“Have a good trip!” calls the boy.

Red and cracked as the girl's were so long ago, his cheeks soften in a smile as he waves to the departing traveler.

End

Hanna's Departure

The family members have tears in their eyes when they welcome Kaim back to the inn from his long journey.

"Thank you so much for coming".

He understands the situation immediately.

The time for departure is drawing near.

Too soon, too soon.

But still, he knows, this day would have come sometime, and not in the distant future.

"I might never see you again," she said to him with a sad smile when he left on this journey, her smiling face almost transparent in its whiteness, so fragile---and therefore indescribably beautiful--as she lay in bed.

"May I see Hanna now?" he asks.

The innkeeper gives him a tiny nod and says, "I don't think she'll know who you are, though."

She hasn't opened her eyes since last night, he warns Kaim. You can tell from the slight movement of her chest that she is clinging to a frail thread of life, but it could snap at any moment.

"It's such a shame. I know you made a special point to come here for her..."

Another tear glides down the wife's cheek.

"Never mind, it's fine." Kaim says.

He has been present at innumerable deaths, and his experience has taught him much.

Death takes away the power of speech first of all. Then the ability to see.

What remains alive to the very end, however, is the power to hear. Even though the person has lost consciousness, it is by no means unusual for the voices of the family to bring forth smiles or tears.

Kaim puts his arm around the woman's shoulder and says, "I have lots of travel stories to tell her. I've been looking forward to this my whole time on the road."

Instead of smiling, the woman releases another large tear and nods to Kaim, "And Hanna was so looking forward to hear your stories."

Her sobs almost drown out her words.

The innkeeper says, "I wish I could urge you to rest up from your travels before you see her, but..."

Kaim interrupts his apologies, "Of course I'll see her right away."

There is very little time left.

Hanna, the only daughter of the innkeeper and his wife, will probably breathe her last before the sun comes up.

Kaim lowers his pack to the floor and quietly opens the door to Hanna's room.

Hanna was frail from birth. Far from enjoying the opportunity to travel, she rarely left the town or even the neighborhood in which she was born and raised.

This child will probably not live to adulthood, the doctor told her parents.

This tiny girl, with extraordinarily beautiful doll-like features, the gods had dealt an all-too-sad destiny.

That they had allowed her to be born the only daughter of the keepers of a small inn by the highway was perhaps one small act of atonement for such iniquity.

Hanna was unable to go anywhere, but the guests who stayed at her parent’s inn would tell her stories of the countries and towns and landscapes and people that she would never know.

Whenever new guests arrived at the inn, Hanna would ask them.

“Where are you from?” “Where are you going?”

“Can you tell me a story?”

She would sit and listen to their stories with sparkling eyes, urging them on to new episodes with “And then? And then?” When they left the inn, she would beg them, “Please come back, and tell me lots and lots of stories about faraway countries!”

She would stand there waving until the person disappeared far down the highway, give one lonely sigh, and go back to bed.

Hanna is sound asleep.

No one else is in the room, perhaps an indication that she has long since passed the stage when the doctors can do anything for her.

Kaim sits down in the chair next to the bed and says with a smile.

“Hello, Hanna, I’m back.”

She does not respond. Her little chest, still without the swelling of a grown woman, rises and falls almost imperceptibly.

“I went far across the ocean this time.” He tells her. “The ocean on the side where the sun comes up. I took a boat from the harbor way way way far beyond the mountains you can see from this window, and I was on the sea from the time the moon was perfectly round till it got smaller and smaller then bigger and bigger until it was full again. There was nothing but ocean as far as the eye could see. Just the sea and the sky. Can you imagine it, Hanna? You’ve never seen the ocean, but I’m sure people have told you about it. It’s like a huge, big endless puddle.”

Kaim chuckles to himself, and it seems to him that Hanna’s pale white cheek moves slightly.

She can hear him. Even if she cannot speak or see, her ears are still alive.

Believing and hoping this to be true, Kaim continues with the story of his travels.

He speaks no words of parting.

As always with Hanna, Kaim smiles with a special gentleness he has never shown to anyone else, and he goes on telling his tales with a bright voice, sometimes even accompanying his story with exaggerated gestures.

He tells her about the blue ocean.

He tells her about the blue sky.

He says nothing about the violent sea battle that stained the ocean red.

He never tells her about those things.

Hanna was still a tiny girl when Kaim first visited the inn.

When she asked him “Where are you from?” and “Will you tell me some stories?” with her childish pronunciation and innocent smile, Kaim felt soft glow in his chest.

At the time, he was returning from a battle.

More precisely, he had ended one battle and was on his way to the next.

His life consisted of traveling from one battlefield to another, and nothing about that has changed to this day.

He has taken the lives of countless enemy troops, and witnessed the deaths of countless comrades on the battlefield. Moreover, the only thing separating enemies from comrades is the slightest stroke of fortune. Had the gears of destiny turned in a slightly different way, his enemies would have been comrades and his comrades enemies, This is the fate of the mercenary.

He was spiritually worn down back then and feeling unbearably lonely. As a possessor of eternal life, Kaim had no fear of death, which was precisely why each of the soldier’s faces distorted in fear, and why each face of a man who died in agony was burned permanently into his brain.

Ordinarily, he would spend nights on the road drinking. Immersing himself in an alcoholic stupor — or pretending to. He was trying to make himself forget the unforgettable.

When, however, he saw Hanna’s smile and begged him for stories about his long journey, he felt a far warmer and deeper comfort then he could even obtain from liquor.

He told her many things...

About the beautiful flower he discovered on the battlefield.

About the bewitching beauty of the mist filling the forest the night before the final battle.

About the marvelous taste of the spring water in a ravine where he and his men had fled after losing the battle.

About a vast, bottomless blue sky he saw after battle.

He never told her anything sad. He kept his mouth shut about the human ugliness and stupidity he witnessed endlessly on the battlefield. He concealed his position as a mercenary for her, kept silent regarding his reasons for traveling constantly, and spoke only of things that were beautiful and sweet and lovely. He sees now that he told Hanna only beautiful stories of the road like this not so much out of concern for her purity, but for his own sake.

Staying in the inn, Hanna waited to see him turned out to be one of Kaim’s small pleasures in life. Telling her about the memories he brought back from his journeys, he felt some degree of salvation, however slight. Five years, ten years, his friendship with the girl continued. Little by little, she neared adulthood, which meant that, as the doctors had predicted, each day brought her that much closer to death.

And now, Kaim ends the last travel story he will share with her.

He can never see her again, can never tell her stories again.

Before dawn, when the darkness of night is at its deepest, long pauses enter into Hanna’s breathing.

The trail thread of her life is about to snap as Kaim and her parents watch over her.

The tiny light that has lodged in Kaim’s breast will be extinguished.

His lonely travels will begin again tomorrow---his long, long travels without end.

“You’ll be leaving on travels of your own soon, Hanna.” Kaim tells her gently.

“You’ll be leaving for a world that no one knows, a world that has never entered into any of the stories you have heard so far. Finally, you will be able to leave your bed and walk anywhere you want to go. You’ll be free.”

He wants her to know that death is not sorrow but a joy mixed with tears.

“It’s your turn now. Be sure and tell everyone about the memories of your journey.”

Her parents will make that same journey someday. And someday Hanna will be able to meet all the guests she has known at the inn, far beyond the sky.

I however, can never go there. I can never escape this world. I can never see you again.

“This is not goodbye. It’s just the start of your journey.”

He speaks his final words to her.

“We’ll meet again.”

His final lie to her.

Hanna makes her departure.

Her face is transfused with a tranquil smile as if she has just said,

“See you soon.”

Her eyes will never open again. A single tear glides slowly down her cheek.

End

A Thousand Years of Dreams

A jrpg released for the XBOX 360, Lost Odyssey was a 50+ hour long story involving a handful of robust characters. What made this title stand out from others within the genre are the Thousand Years of Dreams stories told mostly by the main character, Kaim. He is an immortal who has lived on the planet over 1000 years, but at the start of the game, has had his memory wiped. Living for that long has changed Kaim as he begins to remember his past and reflects on stories that depict the horrors of war, the shortness & frailty of life, and the accounts of normal people who are able to touch others' lives in extraordinary ways by simple actions.


A rough description of format from the story from lostodyssey.wikia:

A Thousand Years of Dreams is a collection of short stories that tell of Kaim's past experiences. The stories become available for reading at various points during the game. Reading the stories isn't necessarily required, but will surely provide important information regarding Kaim's past.

The stories contain a variety of characters and each story is different from the next. Each is presented in a different style, accompanied by a musical score, sound effects, and background imagery. Some of them will make you laugh, others cry, but for any hardcore fan it brings a welcoming break from the main storyline and adds character to Kaim.

These stories truly enhanced my experienced playing this game, but I had trouble finding them fully typed out on the web without squinting at a youtube video.

Feel free to comment about the stories if you wish. Enjoy.