Нил Гейман - The Dream Hunters

«It is as good as done!» he said.

«But I can never be yours," she told him, «while you have your house. For I should want you to come and live in my house, with me. Indeed, my house would be yours, and would be yours forever. But if you had a house, you might sigh after it, and one day you would leave me for your own house.» She shifted then, minutely, and the onmyoji imagined he caught the briefest glimpse of the white swell of her breast within her robe.

«I shall take care of my house," said the onmyoji, his mind a single burning flame of lust.

«And there is one more thing," said the maiden, her green eyes burning into his. «And that is your magic. How can I be your love, and your wife, if I knew that you commanded Tengu and Oni, and that in your scrolls you had the knowledge to change me into a bird if I displeased you?»

She bent over to pour him more sake, which caused her robe to fall open a little more, and the onmyoji saw a white breast, tipped by a nipple as pink as the sunset. At this, the onmyoji leapt to grab hold of her but the maiden deftly moved back, avoiding his grasp as if she had barely noticed it, and she bade him goodnight.

When he realised that their time together was over he sighed so loudly it seemed that the hinges of the world were groaning. There was a madness that came on him then, or so they said.

On the following night there were two fires in the city of Kyoto. The first house to burn was that of the onmyoji, the seventeenth–finest house in all the city. He was not suspected of any involvement, having left the house, earlier that day, in a cart loaded high with all his scrolls and his implements of magic. It was a tragic fire, for his wife and his concubine and all his servants were asleep inside the house as it blazed, and it took their lives.

The other house to burn was a hovel on the outskirts of the city, in a neigh borhood of ill–repute. It was a house where three women lived, who were said to have been fortunetellers and herbalists. No one knows if they were in the house when it burned, for the only remains that were found in the ashes were the bones and skulls of babes and of small children.

It was evening when the Master of Yin–Yang arrived at the house of the maiden who had won his heart.

«My house is burned," he said, «and my women are dead. I have no one to love but you and nowhere to be but here.»

She smiled at him then, a smile of such happiness that it seemed to him that the sun had come out and shone on him alone.

«And in this cart," he told her, «I have my knowledge. All my scrolls, all my magical implements. All the amulets and wands and names that give me power over the spirits and demons, that allow me to tell the future. All of it, I have brought here to lay at your feet.»

The maiden nodded, and several of her servants took the cart, and unpacked its contents, and took the things he had brought away.

«There," said the onmyoji, «now, I am yours, and there is nothing that can come between us.»

«There is still something between us," she told him. «Your robe. Take it off. Let me see you as you are.»

The madness and the lust mingled in the onmyoji's veins. He stepped out of his robe and stood there, naked, in the misty twilight. She picked up his robe, and held it.

He opened his arms wide to embrace the maiden.

The maiden stepped closer to him. «Now," she whispered. «You have no house, no wife, no concubine, no magic, no clothing. You have lost it all. And so it is time that I gave something to you.»

She reached up her hands to his head, and pulled it close to her lips, as if she were about to kiss him, just above one eye.

«But you shall keep your life," she said, «for he would not have wanted me to kill you.»

A fox's teeth arc very sharp.

And with a flick of her tail, she was gone.

The Master of Yin–Yang was found the next morning in the grounds of a house that had been abandoned twenty years earlier, when the official whose family had owned it was disgraced. Some said it was guilt that had brought him there, for, fifteen years earlier, the onmyoji had been in the service of the lord who had caused the downfall of that family.

He was naked, and ashamed, and quite mad.

Some said it was the loss of his wife and his house in a fire that had driven him to madness. Others claimed it was the loss of his eye, while the supersti tious, speaking among themselves, claimed that it was fox magic.

His old associates avoided him in the days that were to come, when they saw him begging in the streets, with only rags to cover his nakedness, only a rag about his head to hide the ruins of his face.

He lived in misery and squalor and madness until he died, with no happiness to be found anywhere in his life, save the momentary happiness of dreams.

But of how he lived, beyond this point, and of how he died, all the tales are silent.

«But what good did it do?» asked the raven.

Good? asked the King of All Night's Dreaming.

«Yes," said the raven. «The monk was to die, and he died. The fox who tried to help him failed to help him. The onmyoji lost everything. What good did it do, your granting her wish?»

The king stared away at the horizon. In his eye a single star glinted and was gone.

Lessons were learned, said the pale king. Events occurred as it was proper for them to do. I do not perceive that my attention was wasted.

«Lessons were learned?» said the raven, bristling its neck feathers, and raising its black head high. «By whom?»

By all of them. Particularly the monk.

The raven croaked once in the back of its throat, and hopped from one foot to the other. It appeared to be hunting for words. The king watched it patiently with dark eyes. «But he is dead," said the raven, after some time.

Come to that, so are you, my raven, but there were lessons in here for you as well.

«And did you also learn a lesson?» asked the raven, who had once been a poet.

But the pale king chose not to answer and remained wrapped in silence, staring at the horizon; and after some time the raven flapped heavily away into the sky of dreams, and left the king entirely alone.

And that is the tale of the fox and the monk.

Or almost all of it. For it has been said that those who dream of the distant regions where the Baku graze have sometimes seen two figures, walking in the distance, and that these two figures were a monk and a fox, or it might be, a woman and a man.

Others say no, and that even in dreams and in death a monk and a fox are from different worlds, as they were in life, and in different worlds they will forever stay.

But dreams are strange things, and none of us but the King of All Night's Dreaming can say if they are true or not, nor of what they are able to tell any of us about the times that are still to come.