face, like parchment beneath her headdress with ribbons the color of forget-me-nots. Borage flowers matched their azure cheer, and there was a brisk, mischievous charm about her appearance. She went by him without seeing him and he decided to follow her. After a moment, she paused by a row of pink irises, then went into a farmyard. She glanced over her shoulder, went up the steps to the entrance, and disappeared inside. Petrus stood there for a moment, petrified. Reality was transfigured by this brief gaze, which he alone had seen, into a succession of scenes bathed in an unreal light. He now knew that the old peasant woman had given birth to a daughter, and that daughter to another daughter who, in the future, would conceive her own daughter in turn, until the line of women ended with the arrival, in the fifth generation, of a much-loved son. He knew that the last-born girl would inherit the science of simples from her ancestor, and that the true encounter would be that of the last female descendant, not yet born. And so, the theater of worlds was revealed to him. Gigantic fronts covered an entire continent, endless smoke rose toward the sky, armies gathered beneath a sky of storm, and the much-loved son lay dying on a field littered with corpses. He stood for a moment gazing with horror at this rumbling apocalypse until, without warning, the scene changed. In the sweetness of a summer twilight, tables had been adorned in the garden with large June irises, and a female voice was saying: the lovely evenings around Saint John’s Day, then, after a silence: go, my son, and know for eternity how much we love you. How is it that I can understand her language? he wondered, and at that very moment he woke up. He raised his hand to his heart. Everything is in the dream, he thought; landscape, love, and war. He recalled the words of the hare elf: the day the mist of Hanase disappears, we can bid farewell to this world—and was overcome by a premonition of coming disaster. Come now, he said to himself, I’m raving. But before the last vestiges of the dream could dissipate, he thought again: there you have ecstasy and tragedy beneath a beribboned headdress. Finally, he was fully awake.
They thought they were resting on mattresses of ash above black water, but they’d slept on layers of cool grass right on the floor of the very first platform. It was raining, and the garden was gleaming. What the showers do to the garden, thought Petrus, and in the world; here, they pass by, they concentrate the universe. Abandoning himself to the music of water falling upon water, he delighted in this liquid encounter, where the ordinary time of the living was erased.
“It is time to go,” said Marcus, “the first channel to Katsura is about to open.”
They stood up and looked at one another.
“Did everyone dream of great things?” asked Paulus.
The other two nodded their heads.
“We’d better get going,” said Petrus, “I’m hungry and I want to drink as much tea as possible before the departure.”
He suddenly felt it was urgent to get under way and, looking one last time at the pond, he thought: everything is beginning. They went back down the corridor they had taken the night before, went again through the vestibule fragrant with iris, and came out into the street in dazzling sunlight. There was no trace of the garden’s warm, melancholy rain. All around whirled ashes, stitched with clarity by the morning light. Now that they were going down to the lock, the crowd grew thick and, at last they reached the grand channel that led to Katsura. As it opened out before them, huge and grandiose, a hundred barges appeared.
“We are late,” said Petrus, before rushing into the way station building, where a host of steaming teapots awaited them.
He took long sips of a black tea that tasted of chestnut, before gobbling down a tray of little tarts dripping with honey. Paulus and Marcus, who followed at a more leisurely pace, nibbled decorously on a few mouthfuls of pumpkin mille-feuille, and after that they went out and stood at the back of the line on the pier.
The barges could accommodate a dozen voyagers, but as they quietly boarded the last one, they found themselves alone with two wild boar elves accompanied by one of their piglets. Petrus scrupulously followed the instructions of the boatmen—otters, beavers,