Hohsalle heard the door open behind him. Turning, he saw Milalle enter with a tray in her hands, holding the door open with one foot in a very unladylike fashion. Hohsalle caught the scent of tea.
Two days had passed since his return to the clinic following the incident at the Cliff of Alulufan, but he was still tired. He’d spent that time mulling over the manufacture of medicine, unable to put his heart into his work. As promised, he had passed on Tohma’s message to his mother. Although he’d expected her to be frantic with worry, she’d taken the news quite calmly, much to his surprise. “Well, thank you for goin’ to all this trouble,” she’d said. “Guess I’ll stay on a while longer and wait for ’em. If it takes too long, I can always send Mino back to Oki to tell the others.” Then she’d smiled. “Yuna’s bound to find Van. She’s like that. And it’s wonderful that Sae’s gone, too.”
Her placid voice helped calm Hohsalle’s fears. He’d pictured Van as a loner and feared that he would turn into a beast and disappear into the wilds. After meeting Sae, however, he could envision Van, relaxed and smiling, surrounded by his kin.
He’s no longer a Lone Antler. Somehow, Hohsalle was sure they’d find him.
Placing the tray on a small table, Milalle came to stand beside him and peered into the aquarium. “They’ve turned into leaves now, haven’t they?”
Green waterweeds swayed gently inside the big tank, catching the rays of the afternoon sun. Flat, leaflike shapes clung to those swaying stems. Sea slugs. When they’d first hatched, they swam about energetically. Later, they’d attached themselves to the weeds and sucked in chloroplasts through their mouths. Now, however, they were completely transformed. At the tip of their flat bodies remained traces of what were their heads, but they had no mouths and couldn’t move. The veins covering their bodies made them nearly indistinguishable from leaves. They simply existed, having lost the joy of motion and eating.
In time, those green leaves would lay eggs, succumb to the disease inside them, and die. The disease agents would detach themselves from the dead bodies and float in the water to be ingested by the waterweeds. Once again, the sea slugs that hatched from the eggs would suck them into their bodies along with the weeds.
Seen from the eyes of the pika palu, the disease agents were the seeds of a fatal illness, but from the perspective of the disease agents, the leaves were the world that supported their existence. This strange and complex process, in which neither actor was the main protagonist, quietly repeated itself, unseen and unnoticed.
“When I was a boy,” Hohsalle said with a crooked smile, “I was terrified to discover their corpses. I thought I must have made some terrible mistake.”
Once again, Hohsalle felt the weight of his grandfather’s hand on his shoulder and heard him speak. It was just after Hohsalle’s mother had died. To a young boy still grieving his mother’s passing and now faced with the dead pika palu and the eggs they left behind, his grandfather’s hardheaded words had sounded cold and heartless.
“Pika palu carry within them the seeds of disease. All living things do. They live for as long as they endure but perish once they give in. Just like everything else in this world.”
Perhaps his grandfather had been trying to comfort him in his way. Rather than offering reassuring words, he’d forced a young Hohsalle to confront the uncertainty that was, without exception, part of this world. That was his grandfather’s nature. A terrible cold lurked behind his gentle, refined exterior.
But… Those words had been Hohsalle’s starting point. All living things carry within them the seeds of disease. Death always lay concealed within life.
Yet even so, we have no choice but to live. To make sure that the fragile thread of life doesn’t break, we keep mending it as best we can.
From the time we are born until we vanish, we keep on spinning and respinning that thread, tasting all life’s joys and sorrows, sometimes reaching out to help others, and sometimes being sustained by the warmth of another’s hand.
Hohsalle thought of the man who’d disappeared into the forest depths, carrying with him that dreaded disease. Another thought followed this—an image of his companions riding after him. One day, they, and Hohsalle, too, would melt into a dream.
The green leaves glowed faintly, basking in the early afternoon sun that warmed the water.
The End