Adventure Magazine Cover — page 151: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

More than Half a King Yakami-hime, and when your daughter sees that apparition of wonder with the veiled eyes and the thumbs pressed together with awful power, she will remember her duty, I promise you. But, old one, she becomes a priestess, a sacred image, and will be most honorably served.” ‘Honor, of course, comes into the mat- ter,’’ the father shouted, leering. ‘I have played the game myself, and know what I am talking of.” To this testimony the abbot had no com- ments ready, although his mouth moved wryly. “We core in the morning,” he said, and left with that. The pot-cleaner grinned at the abbot’s back, stowed the gold carefully away save one piece, which, after shining it on his nose, he went to test doubly at the inn. At sun- set he came home, fuddled, yet not entirely drunk; expansive, and bearing a great basket of food and straw-bound bottles into a hut where rice and a bit of fish was the usual meal. Yoshi-Ko would have been a fool to miss this, even without his babbling. “It is all for the best,’’ he hiccoughed. “The gods will be good to me now. I shall be as good as a priest any day of the ‘seven. Ho! the wonderful things the abbot spoke of. The terrible images which kill an ordinary man simply to look at.. The closed eyes! The thumbs pressed together! The fright- ful and horrible , He did not know what else, and, by good luck, found his ragged quilts, crept between them, and Yoshi-Ko had a time for quaking. Terrible eyes in an image frightened her little, but the open ones in live priests she trembled at, remembering her excursion to the temple; powerful thumbs of a god were less to contemplate than living fingers. Yoshi-Ko wanted no priests and no temple: she wanted to get back to the little farm. Had she known the way, she would have walked, and money she had none. Thumbs pressed together! She visioned, all of an instant, the seivo-jin priest, whom © she had seen in the streets; the little plump man with pleasant face, and a smile for all, whether wealthy or poor; how was it he did when he stopped and viewed youngsters at play? How? How? She remembered! First of all he would smile, then bring his finger-tips one to the other, and finally press the thumbs together: Clark’s char- aeterietic gesture. It came to her vaguely 0 145 that he was some god for that reason; gods did that, so her father had said, and so the abbot Kagamo-san must have told him. Therefore she reasoned with what little sense she had left that it was true. The white priest was a god. There was —no, there was no question of it. She had heard that there was a Carpenter God who lived across the sea. This was the god’s servant, or possibly the god himself. All of the village feared this terrible deity and his terror-striking crown of spears, and yet spoke of the queer thing, that he cared for children. She was a child and, childlike, thus swayed. In noiseless little jerks she crossed the floor, with never a look at her snoring parent, fled into the alley like one of the many shadows and as silent, hugged the dark places until she was out of the street and into the courtyard of the Shinto temple, which she must cross to reach the szeyo-jin temple-house: here she paused in her flight, and drew a great hard breath. The night was starshot, warm; the rice- fields sent up an imperceptible gray mist lustrous as wide-meshed silk, floating in the air and whisping about the cornices of the temple like the body of a ghostly dragon, In the living-quarters lights appeared be- hind paper panels, and dark spots flitted across them. Slow nasal chants arose; once a bronze door groaned dolorously on rusty hinges and Yoshi-Ko cowered down. Each bush, each stone lantern, took fan- tastic shapes to bewilder her. She had no eye for the lakelets that trickled re- flected light, nor for the heady perfume of the flowering plants: she burst at last from the spell and, her kimono wrapping about her legs, rushed across the flagstones like a wraithy spirit, the sleeves moving gull- winglike, and found herself, all unknowing of how she had arrived, in Clark’s library. a) CLARK had heard a light step as he 2 # sat dreaming, and turned hastily sd around, to see a girl bowing and calling him a god. She was so devout, and so horribly frightened, that he was forced to say something before he could gather his Japanese. “J pray you,” he said as beginning: frightened by the strange words she bared her face, her wo and her beauty to his astonished eyes. “‘What have they done to you?” he cried COmiclboolks (©