always comes from contact with everything else, through immersion into the vaporous matter. It is through that matter that we can mix with others and be transformed without losing ourselves; it is also through it that life and death are mingled. The thousand-year-old tea simply made this fluidity more perceptible to you.”
After a moment, she added:
“Otters swim at the border between earth and water, and live in the heart of the memory of sharing.”
The vision of an old, wrinkled face crossed Petrus’s mind, then vanished.
“Do humans have the same appearance as us?” he asked. “I think I just saw the old woman in the poem in my thoughts.”
“I saw her, too,” she said. “It would definitely seem that you are destined for strange encounters.”
“It’s just a vision,” said Petrus.
She did not reply.
“Does the path to the lock preserve the memory of vanished trees?” asked Paulus.
“Of all living things, trees best incarnate the reality of mutations,” she said. “They are the motionless vectors of the genesis and transformation of all things. The transparencies of the path are made from the invisible presence of trees long dead, but which, like ashes, live on with us in another form.”
They mused for a moment on this transparency beyond death.
“What does to be with mean if one is no longer conscious?” asked Paulus.
“What we are before our birth and after our death,” she said. “A promise and a memory.”
“For the living,” he said.
“For the living,” she replied. “Those who have passed are fully fledged members of the great people who are entrusted to us, and the duty to respond to their call is what we call the life of the dead.”
“Is that what the high-elves do?” asked Petrus. “Respond to this call?”
“Some are born to assume responsibility for other creatures,” she said. “That is our realm, and our mandate, the ministry that gives life to the powers of death, to their territory and legacy. This eternity and this responsibility are henceforth incumbent upon you, because today you have drunk from the thousand-year-old tea.”
The garden glittered with shards of moonlight. The sensation of immersion was growing stronger. They drank a third and last sip of tea. Petrus, in spite of his dislike for metaphysical effusions, let himself go to the peace of the mixture and wondered how the ashes were moved to these bottomless urns. At funerals, the bodies of deceased elves were burned, but he’d never known that they were subsequently taken to Hanase. They were scattered from the deceased elf’s favorite mountaintop, and then disappeared from view forever.
“Nothing disappears forever,” said their hostess. “The ashes are brought here by the mists. The bottomless urns are what is left of the eternity they passed through before returning to mingle with the time of the living.”
“So, the dead are alive?” asked Paulus.
“Of course not,” she said with a laugh, “they are dead.”
Petrus smiled. Indisputably, the trip was improving. His nausea had left him and the shock of the second sip of tea was dissolving into the third. He drifted nonchalantly about, and heard the tumult of the dead without attaching any more importance to it than to the twilight poems from his Woods. The fact she’d laughed at the thought the dead could be alive reinforced his indifference toward mystic effusions. And yet, he thought, I can hear the song of the dead more clearly than I can feel the presence of the living.
She got up.
“Your beds are ready,” she said.
But before taking her leave, she said to Petrus:
“In Katsura, you will go to the Council library and you will introduce yourself as a friend of the Wild Grasses.”
“The Wild Grasses?” he repeated, surprised.
“It is the name of our establishment,” she said.
They bowed deeply, finding nothing to say that was equal to what they had just experienced.
“I hope you will forgive us our peasant ways for not knowing how to thank you,” said Marcus finally.
“Only now is the true experience beginning,” she said.
She waved her hand toward the bottom of the garden.
“Your quarters are on the other side.”
And then she was gone.
They stood for a moment in silence gazing at the scene. A cloud drifted on a patch of moon and the world’s rhythms had slowed. The ashes rose toward the heavens in lazy swirls, the melody of the stream became more languid, and the light on the maple leaves stopped glistening. As for the song of the dead, it expanded still further, deeper, more solemn—such peace, suddenly, thought Petrus, and he felt the spirits of