4.

  The province where No-Belt had taken refuge lived under a ceasefire between two exiled warlords, whose bitter stalemate on the battlefield had resulted in the absence of government and the rise of various associations of unemployed samurai living off banditry.

  The lack of a State was barely noticeable. The villages’ self-management provided shelter and food for all, and even superfluous or luxury goods in relative abundance, since the region was crossed by a major trade route.

  But because it prospered, the threat of bandits was ever-present. They would appear on irregular dates, in large numbers, with heavy weaponry, and levy arbitrary taxes on the people, punishing with great violence those who refused.

  Therefore, say the widows, Hope Village extends an enthusiastic welcome to deserters from all Nations—on one condition: only the foreigner willing to take up arms against the domestic enemies is invited to stay.

  No-Belt adapted quickly. He began living in an add-on room at a boarding house along with Honda, despite the landlady’s endless protests.

  He considered his loyal steed a member of his new family, refusing to offer the mare anything less than a private room, two long brushing sessions per day, and all the fresh grass she wished to chew.

  During the day, he moved goods at the trading post, organizing the cargo for the passing merchant caravans. The porters were almost all deserters from neighboring provinces. They never spoke of it.

  When there wasn’t much work, No-Belt and his friends played finger-guessing games and drank warm beer, ate fried pastries, and counted the hours until nightfall, when they would swarm into the brothels to enjoy the company of the women and down liters of cacha?a with lime.

  Not even in the provincial capitals could a mere logistics worker afford such a lifestyle, but the refugees of Hope Village were in fact being paid as reserve soldiers.

  An excellent deal—depending on the likelihood that truly ruthless bandits would ever appear, demanding a duel to the death.

  5.

  The rainy season passed without ceremony, and No-Belt discovered that Hope Village, oasis of gentle pleasures, was also seasonally struck by a strange kind of malaria.

  A hellish fever swept through the village after particularly hot nights, when everyone would sit on the sidewalks drinking iced tea and fanning off mosquitoes with paper fans.

  The afflicted were plunged into a deep state of delirium, victims of bizarre nightmares at night and terrifying hallucinations during the day. They also suffered from weakness and muscle spasms. The episodes lasted for weeks.

  No-Belt had the chance to meet the Hope Sickness, as the immigrants nicknamed the outbreak, during the very first season of contagion he witnessed.

  The corners of his mouth foamed, and he babbled instead of speaking. He spent most of those days in his room, drenched in sweat on the straw mattress beside Honda, who was irritable and restless from the lack of care for them both.

  Ghostly objects and monstrous creatures loomed at the edges of his vision constantly, but most of all, No-Belt lost himself in reveries and imagined being at war beside his father.

  In his delirium, soldiers from both sides clashed around them, but No-Belt and Jonmon took no part in the fighting; the patriarch simply spoke and spoke and spoke, pompously, about the most irrelevant things.

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  The young deserter found some relief only when the film in his mind changed to the escape, and then to the arrival at the village—the day he met Naomi.

  He had tied the widow’s face to the hope he harbored for the new life he was building, and with such intensity that, from then on, he could no longer conceive of not being by her side.

  A burning obsession, perhaps inflamed by the early spark of love—very fragile, and in need of care—had taken root in his soul.

  Above all, they were complete strangers to one another. No-Belt didn’t even know her name—they’d only seen each other once, in the early dawn when he arrived in the village. Since then, never again.

  And so, he wandered endlessly through the slopes of Hope Village hoping to find Naomi browsing the markets or on her way to the stream to fetch water, praying at the Shrine or attending the neighborhood council meetings.

  Once, while ill, No-Belt wandered down the road late at night, carried by nightmares, chasing the ghost of Naomi. He had enough strength to stumble nearly halfway back to his home province.

  He was stopped by traveling merchants who took him in by their fire. They gave him food and drink, and let him listen. They exchanged useful news about the provinces—the ferry routes, the condition of the roads, the prices of commodities, the conflicts in progress.

  It was thus that No-Belt discovered the governor of his province had suffered an utter defeat, and the army of his nation had been completely annihilated in the battle he had fled.

  He experienced a brief, superficial kind of grief—a kind of nausea—for the restless ghost of his father, likely executed after the seizure of his manor, but soon returned to his fevered obsession with Naomi.

  Now that No-Belt knew it was truly impossible to return to his former life, he had no choice but to secure a new one.

  6.

  They drew sticks, and No-Belt lost: he would have to lead a patrol in the Marsh of Tears to search for a straw hat that had been repeatedly spotted circling the outskirts of Hope Village.

  “From the reports, it’s from the clan of the Bear-Hand Monk,” lamented one of those called for the mission, using his whole body to string an old bow retrieved from the village’s general armory.

  To No-Belt’s unfortunate surprise, his old armor was still there, and since it was fitted to his size, it was his best equipment option.

  “The colors of an annihilated State certainly don’t add value to a commodity,” he mused silently as he suited up for the mission.

  “A monk leads a crime gang?” asked another makeshift patrolman, a newcomer who had arrived less than a month earlier.

  By that point, No-Belt had been living in Hope Village for over half a year, but he too knew little about the Bear-Hand Monk. He listened intently to the murmuring of his companions.

  “No! They call him ‘Monk’ because of how many people he’s sent to the grave!” explained a third, practicing thrusts in the air with a spear.

  “And ‘Bear-Hand’ because he’s missing the thumb on his right hand, which makes it look like a claw,” added the last, pretending to stretch.

  “But how can someone with that kind of mutilation be a fearsome samurai?”

  “Well, because of that defect, Bear-Hand wields his sword with a reversed grip, and that’s why he’s so dangerous: his counterattacks come from the opposite direction.”

  No-Belt slid his sword through his belt and adjusted the hilt’s position, aligning the decorated pommel at the proper angle for a quick draw—pointlessly. The ancestral weapon of his clan was nothing more than a trinket.

  A few days earlier, when he tried to draw the sword for the first time since leaving home, he couldn’t. The blade seemed glued inside the scabbard, perhaps from years of neglect or lack of maintenance. Perhaps it had never been anything more than a ceremonial ornament.

  Silent and somber, No-Belt thought of his father, so full of bravado, ready to send his only son to the front with a toy weapon.

  “Is it possible for a man to live surrounded by his own lies, and no longer be able to tell the difference?” he reflected, isolated, leaning against a tree. So says the Buddha.

  No-Belt’s companions watched him from afar, envying the polished weapon of a traditional Guard family. They mistook his introspection for fearlessness in the face of danger and imagined they were witnessing a raw gem of the martial arts.