Fierce dogs, racing. His soul, joined to them by spirit threads. Kenoi…
Van gazed silently into the fire as memories of that night flooded back in full force.
“Kenoi,” Hohsalle said. “Wasn’t he the father of Ohfan, chief of the Ahfal Oma?”
Van nodded. “Yes. He was quite old and sick, although I don’t know what disease he had.”
Once again, Van saw Kenoi’s tortured eyes and heard his strangled scream. Why?
“So the milk of the fire horse protects the Ahfal Oma from the illness that destroys their enemies, and that disease lives in their Kinma dogs. Who wouldn’t be tempted to see the hand of a god in that?” Van mused.
Outside the window, the blue light of dawn crept over the sky.
“You said that the disease may have affected our brains. If that’s what causes me to turn inside out…” Van stopped, then continued in a low voice. “The world I experience when my body takes over my soul is so different from this one. Everything around me slows to a crawl. Scents come alive. The rustling of the leaves in the breeze is deafening. Colors change. And there are countless lights, all subtly different hues. The earth, the grass, and the trees are filled with them. Some swirl like smoke, trailing and drifting on the air.”
His face twisted. “When I’m in that state, the Kinma dogs and I seem so close. No, not just close—we’re one.” He took a deep breath. “In that world, there’s no sense of loss or futility. There’s only life.”
A hush fell over the room when Van finished. The thin warble of a bird stole through the window, weaving through the silence. The cooks had been working in the kitchen for some time, for the faint aroma of homu, bread left to rise overnight and now baking in the ovens, drifted into the room.
Van rubbed his face slowly. “If the world I saw is conjured up by the disease agents, is that what the Kinma dogs see, too?”
Hohsalle shook his head. “I doubt it. I can’t swear to that, but if you only started seeing it after being bitten, then I think it must be the disease agents influencing your brain.”
“But why that particular landscape?”
Hohsalle exhaled slowly. “I don’t know for a fact, but if you don’t mind me hazarding a guess, I can think of one reason.” He paused to take a gulp of cold tea. “Like all creatures, disease agents are driven to survive and multiply, but they can’t do that without invading other living creatures. Perhaps they’re manipulating you to achieve that goal. You know what rabies is, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“The symptoms can vary, but once infected, some dogs become vicious and start biting everything. From the perspective of the disease agents, that makes perfect sense. When the carrier bites another animal, the agents can enter a new host and multiply.”
Hohsalle grinned. “Of course, we’ve got no proof yet that they’re actually manipulating the host’s brain. Still, I don’t think this hypothesis is too far-fetched. The mechanisms our bodies use to expel disease agents, like sneezing and coughing for example, actually help them find other hosts and proliferate.
“However, the Kinma dogs would never have attacked you, right? Not unless someone like the Dog King told them to.”
“That’s true.”
“From the perspective of the disease agents, there’s no point in having you fight with Kinma dogs. You wouldn’t die if they bit you anyway, and you’re both valuable hosts that can coexist and help them spread. It would be a waste for you to harm each other. Instead, maybe they’re trying to convince you that you’re allies, so that you won’t fight.”
Van remained silent. As he mulled over Hohsalle’s words, a bleakness gripped his heart. “What a lonely thought,” he said.
“Lonely?”
Van smiled. “If I follow your idea to its logical conclusion, then even my love for my family and friends is just the urge for survival. Basically, you’re saying that these feelings are generated by my body, because making friends and caring about my kin is to its advantage.”
Hohsalle’s eyes shone. “Oh, there’s so much more I’d like to say to you about that! If only we could talk to our hearts’ content.” He laughed and shook his head. “But there’s no time for that now, so let me return to your specific case. For you and the Kinma dogs, the black wolf fever agents are innocuous and bind you together as kin. But when they encounter other creatures, they undergo a complete transformation, turning into ferocious butchers, right?”
“Yes.”
“My brother-in-law once told me that when certain diseases transfer to similar creatures, harmless disease agents can suddenly turn savage. For example, those that coexist with ossam may become lethal when they infect wolves. The healthy proliferation of ossam, which are their hosts, means that the disease agents thrive and flourish. Wolves, however, compete with ossam for game, so my brother-in-law posits that the disease agents may actually seek to eliminate them.
“Remember the example you gave before? What was it? ‘While the fox goes mad, the pyuika sleeps’? That may be evidence of a similar principle. The disease agents have coexisted with pyuika for a long time. Foxes attack pyuika foals, so to the disease agents, foxes would be enemies that should be exterminated.”
Van groaned. “So you’re saying that those things inside us are doing all of that just to protect their hosts and themselves? But wouldn’t ashimi, which glows to Yuna and smells powerfully to me, be an enemy of the disease agents in black ticks? If your theory is correct, it would make more sense if the smell of ashimi was repellant.”
Milalle burst out laughing. “That’s true, Hohsalle. Your hypothesis doesn’t explain that one.”
“Not necessarily,” Hohsalle protested. “There could be a mechanism in your bodies that seeks to keep you alive by preventing the disease agents of black ticks from overmultiplying. It may be drawing your attention to things you should eat to suppress their spread.”
Catching sight of Milalle’s grin, Hohsalle’s mouth crooked. “I know, I know. This is all just a guess, one possibility among many. I took what happened and developed an argument from there, but nothing’s been proved.”
He scratched his cheek with a slender finger and sighed. “To be honest, whenever I pursue this line of thought, a part of me wonders if that’s really all there is. We base our theories on the premise that survival is the ultimate goal of every living thing. But sometimes I wonder if we’re right to assume that.”
A furtive shadow touched Van somewhere deep inside his head—the shadow of something that had long hovered in his subconscious. “You think there’s something other than survival?” he asked quietly.
“Mmm. If you look at the whole picture, that is.” Hohsalle gazed at the fire for a moment, then lifted his head. “Take my hand, for example.” He raised his hand and spread his fingers wide. “Did you know that the fingers of the fetus inside the mother’s womb are webbed?”
Van nodded hesitantly. Soon after their initiation into manhood, one of his clan mates had shared a story about a miscarried fetus with webbed fingers. Van had been filled with awe at the thought of the unborn baby swimming slowly in the salty fluid of its mother’s womb.
Hohsalle wiggled his fingers. “If those webs didn’t disappear, we wouldn’t be able to move our hands freely like this. So that part of the fetus expires. Our bodies are formed as parts of it die and vanish of their own accord.”
He paused and took a breath. “When I was a child, my grandfather gave me some interesting creatures called pika palu, or ‘shining leaf,’ to keep as pets, and I’ve continued raising them ever since. They’re a species of sea slug that resides in swamps near the sea in Pokishia. When the slugs first hatch, they swim, but by the time they’re adults, they become completely stationary. They cling to fronds of seaweed, looking just like leaves, and glow green in the sunlight that filters through the water.”
Hohsalle opened and closed his fingers, mimicking the way the creatures pulsed with light. “The young have mouths, but the adults don’t, yet they can live almost a whole year like that.”