“But if it’s all the same…”
“Huh?” Lawrence replied, looking to the barmaid as she hefted the pail of shell meat.
The barmaid began to walk toward the kitchen but stopped and looked back over her shoulder. “If it’s all the same, you’d rather receive a different sort of letter, wouldn’t you?”
Was the faintly lonely smile on her face a fake one? The thought crossed Lawrence’s mind for a moment, but then he realized what the girl was getting at and answered. “Letters tend to be sent from distant places, so will that be all right?”
“Hm?” replied the barmaid, confused.
Holo, too, seemed not to understand. She was looking up at Lawrence from beside him.
“If you wouldn’t mind me sending such a letter from a far-off land, I’d be happy to write and say that I long to eat the food here while it’s still hot.”
The girl raised her chin and curled one corner of her lips up in a half smile. “I don’t much like the idea of going far away to serve just one person. Better to stay here, where I can serve many.”
With rumors of countless love affairs.
Were it not for Holo, Lawrence might well have been taken in by her himself.
He watched the girl disappear into the kitchen and chided himself for thinking it.
But when their business was complete and they turned toward the wagon, Holo looked squarely at Lawrence. “If I’d not dug you up, you’d’ve spent your whole life in the ground,” she said.
A gem was only a gem once it was pulled out of the earth. Don’t imagine you’d remain a gem if you leave the gem cutter who found you, she was surely saying.
Lawrence sighed. “Quite so, my lady,” he said and respectfully took Holo’s hand. He thanked God for the good fortune he had had to make it out of the tavern alive.
Nothing aroused the appetite like the smell of thinly sliced garlic, coated generously in oil and tossed in salt.
Lawrence was disappointed in himself for going through the wine so quickly, and despite his best efforts collapsed into drunken sleep even before Holo did.
He had vague memories of, while being helped to his feet by Col, looking past the boy and finding Holo grinning triumphantly—as though she were enjoying his pathetic state as a side dish to her own drinking. But he had no idea how much of that was reality.
He raised his head, which felt as heavy as though it were packed with sand. Sitting upright, the first thing he was sure of was that the sun had long since risen and his body reeked of alcohol.
Also, that Holo and Col were nowhere to be seen.
He gave his head a vigorous shake, which gave him a glimpse of hell. With his hand he gently rubbed his head, then slowly stood up. It seemed the iron pitcher on the table had been refilled with fresh water, cold enough to have condensation on it.
Lawrence took a careful drink, then looked around the room.
There were no overcoats or robes to be found, so he presumed his companions had gone out somewhere.
In a sudden panic he searched the table for his coin purse, but as far as he could tell, the number of silver pieces it contained was unchanged.
“Where did they go?” He cocked his head and yawned, then opened the window’s wooden shutters, which let the painfully bright morning sunlight come stabbing into the room.
He narrowed his eyes for a time, then looked down onto the back alley, where he saw a woman balancing a basket on her head as she ambled down the way. A young boy with a sack wrapped around himself ran alongside her.
It was a completely ordinary day in the city.
He sighed again, intent on checking the state of his beard, when something white caught his eye.
He looked and saw two familiar forms making their way along the narrow path that wound up the hill.
“To the church?” Lawrence asked as he looked down at the reflection of his face. The water was held in a bucket, which sat at the edge of the well.
Also sitting on the well curb was Holo, who nodded. “Aye. My nose was finding the scent of garlic and wine in the room rather tiresome, you see. The lad was begging me, so we went to ‘morning prayers’ or whatever they’re called.”
She was complaining incessantly about the smell, but in truth Lawrence could smell it himself and could thus hardly refute her. He lightly rinsed his knife in the bucket, then put its blade to his cheek. “Was it well attended?”
“Aye. It seemed they might not let us in at all, but one look at Col and I and they relented.”
With a traveling nun on one hand, and wandering boy on the other, even the hardest-headed church guard would find himself moved to sympathy, no doubt.
But given that Col was only studying Church law in order to better use the Church, why would he want to attend the morning prayers? Of course, there were many who believed quite seriously in the existence of three or four gods and that so long as there was something to be gained via just one of them that was enough devotion. And while Col’s plan was to use the Church for his own purposes, it would hardly be strange if, in the course of studying its law, he had become a believer himself. Or perhaps it was simply that the serene aura within the sanctuary was to the liking of a quiet boy like Col?
“Still, you must be in fine spirits, to venture so boldly into enemy territory.”
Holo dangled her feet over the well’s edge like a little girl. And even if she had not, a glance at her profile made her good mood altogether obvious.
“Aye. Col was so delighted, you see. Though my smile was a wry one, we went to the church, and I felt refreshed.” She grinned, somewhat abashed, and Lawrence, too, had to smile.
“How very like you, to share him like that.”
Holo heard Lawrence’s words as though they were a faint song carried to her on the wind.
As far as her relationship with the Church went, Holo’s face ought to have been complicated, as though it were a difficult matter to explain with mere words. But her expression was clear, and she spoke with a note of pride in her voice. “Unlike you, I am well aware of what is important in life.”
Lawrence answered as he checked the sharpness of his blade with his hand. “Meaning?”
“Meaning Col’s happy face is more important to me than more trivial manners.”
Lawrence followed the image of Holo’s face as it was reflected in the knife blade, then carefully put it to his jaw. “So, when he begged you to come with him, you were even happier, you mean?”
He had meant it to tease, but Holo ducked her head and chuckled. She was making it quite clear to Lawrence what made her happy and what she disliked.
“So the notion that he just ought to have been more honest from the beginning is just a foolish wandering merchant’s simpleminded thinking, then?”
Holo had constantly worried, as they traveled in the wagon bed, about Col’s reluctance to ask about the things that were bothering him. As Lawrence shaved his beard after laying the problem bare, Holo hopped down from the well curb and made some rustling noises.
Lawrence straightened, but there was no need to look.
Holo took a step or two, then sat again such that she was back-to-back with Lawrence. “Am I not a wisewolf in the end? I’ve my dignity to think of.”
Lawrence smiled, because the ticklish amusement in her voice was communicated via the place where their backs touched. “It must be difficult,” he said.
Holo’s tail swished. “’Tis difficult indeed.”
It was not clear how serious she was, but at the very least, she did not seem to be doing things on principle just because she was a wisewolf. Being clear about one’s feelings and thoughts was a source of great comfort, especially for merchants.
Perhaps Holo was thinking the same thing.
Completely out of his field of vision, her presence only clear via her body heat at his back, Holo continued. “Would you be angry if I said I was excited to go to Yoitsu?”
Their arrival at Yoitsu would mean nothing less than the end of
their journey. But Lawrence only smiled ruefully. “I would not. I myself would like to play at being a wise man, after all.”
Somehow, Lawrence could tell that she smiled.
She said nothing after that, so Lawrence resumed his shaving.
Still silent, Holo got to her feet behind Lawrence. When he had finished shaving, the man checked his face in the bucket’s reflection again, then scattered the water onto the plants in the courtyard. Like a butterfly flapping away after being disturbed by a human, Holo moved away from behind Lawrence.
Lawrence returned the knife to his side, and as he rubbed his cheeks, Holo wordlessly drew alongside him.
She seemed to want to hold hands.
Lawrence smiled and reached indulgently for her small one. It was just then that Col passed by the open door that faced the courtyard.
“Hn!” Holo grunted, for Col held a shallow bowl in both hands. The Beast and Fish Tail’s name seemed mighty indeed, and the innkeeper had prepared a hot breakfast for the travelers. Holo ran off as though she had been waiting for this all along, and Lawrence was left to keep his own company.
The hand he had reached out to grasp hers closed, pathetically, on empty air.
“…”
To return the grasp of an extended hand was to seal a contract between merchants. He thought about explaining this at length, but looking at the happily trotting Holo as she followed Col, he thought better of it.
Quietly, quietly, the end of their journey was approaching. If there were smiles to be had, it would be best to let them happen.
Lawrence looked up at the brilliant morning light, then followed after Holo as she hurried Col along.
Having finished breakfast, Lawrence and company ventured out into town.
Their destination was a general store run by a former mercenary named Philon, about whom Fran had told them. Evidently, despite his “general store” front, he still quietly supplied mercenary bands with goods and related services on the side.
Lawrence prided himself on having some small ability to remain calm in most situations, but this made even him nervous.
While merchants frequently claimed to be willing to throw their lives away for profit, there were in fact few who were ready to make such huge gambles. More than anything else, they knew in their hearts that bankruptcy did not mean death.
But there was no shortage of stories where mercenaries killed a merchant who had injured their pride. Given that they were not so very different from out-and-out bandits, there were surely some who would simply steal what they wanted.
It was dangerous enough to do business with mercenaries in a town like this, but there were even riskier duties. For example, the members of the mercenary troop who actually moved the goods. Once they headed out on their travels, they would become the exclusive suppliers to the avaricious mercenary bands, so as a business it was very lucrative. Mercenaries liked to spend money: They ate huge amounts, drank heavily, and would buy anything. Becoming the supplier to a troop whose star was rising and held fast for two or three years, even an apprentice just starting out could make enough money to open a shop in a town. Lawrence had heard of such things happening.
Of course, such lucrative stories always had complications. To begin with, mercenaries were an untrustworthy lot, and even supposing one found an unusually kind troop, it was not as though they could be expected to win every battle. When they lost, they would be treated just as they had treated others when they won—killed, stolen from. A mercenary merchant then faced both kinds of death, and such risk-taking men had fundamentally different ways of thinking than a traveling merchant like Lawrence.
So naturally, he was nervous.
The general store in question was situated along a lightly trafficked street and had a rather dingy facade. But its roughness gave it a rather smart, fierce aura, and as he stood before it, Lawrence took two deep breaths.
Col, too, seemed taken in by the atmosphere, and he gulped.
The only one who had not the slightest worry over mercenaries was Holo, who yawned a carefree yawn and seemed to hold an entire silent conversation with a cat curled up in a sunbeam in a corner of the street.
“Well, shall we?” Lawrence summoned his courage, walked up the steps, and reached out to open the door.
Which is when the door quite suddenly opened.
“I’ll be counting on you, then. I haven’t been able to hear a damned thing.”
“Not with that face! You should’ve hired a handsomer fellow!”
“I used to be, but my old general was a rough one!”
Amid such conversation, out from within the shop came a large, bearded man, who Lawrence could tell at a glance was a mercenary.
His gray beard burst forth like smoke from his wine-ruddy complexion, though whether it had always been that way or came with his age was impossible to tell.
He had a large scar that ran down his left cheek to his chin, which drew his left eye into a permanent squint.
Just when Lawrence noticed those blue eyes catch sight of him, the man standing opposite the big one spoke. “Oh ho, this fellow looks promising. Reckon he’ll be of use!”
“Hm? Hmmm…” The portly man leaned back thoughtfully as he listened to the other’s words, then bent forward, as though moving some great boulder, his face coming close to Lawrence’s.
He could not kill a man with a smile on his face, surely? It was a terrifying presence, more frightening than any wolf.
Trying to escape, pretending at strength, offering greetings—none of these seemed the right course of action. Lawrence simply kept silent, and tried a pleasant smile.
“Bwa-ha-ha-ha! I don’t think so, shopkeep! This one’s no good. He’s just a no-good merchant, waiting for his chance to snatch your treasures!”
It was a terribly rude thing to say, and yet strangely, Lawrence felt no malice—probably because this was a man who simply said everything that came to his mind.
“Still, you seem a splendid young fellow. Should we meet again, let’s help each other out, eh?” said the big man, patting Lawrence’s shoulder with his thick hand twice, hard, then laughing a hearty laugh as he strode away.
They had not even been introduced, but the man’s face was unforgettable. Lawrence would recognize it instantly, even on a cloudy night.
“I daresay he’d be an amusing male to share wine with sometime,” offered Holo, much to Lawrence’s chagrin.
It was then that the man standing on the other side of the shop’s doorway spoke. “Well, now,” he said, clearing his throat, “How can I be of service, my young merchant friend?”
Lawrence hastily composed himself and made his introduction.
It was dim inside the shop.
It was not as though there was much inside, but it still felt rather cramped, perhaps because the windows were so small. Only the nobility could afford to have glass windows, so most town homes covered theirs with oiled cloth or else let the light in through wooden shutters.
But the windows here seemed a mockery of the very idea of such attempts. It felt more like a storehouse than a shop.
Philon, the man who introduced himself as the shopkeeper, was a middle-aged fellow of about Lawrence’s height, and his left leg dragged a bit when he walked. If he had claimed to have once swung a sword on the field of battle, there would be no cause to doubt him.
Philon came to a table at the back of the shop and gestured for Lawrence and his companions to sit on a couch that seemed used to receiving visitors.
“It’s a shame about your timing, truly,” he said, pouring wine from a plain earthen jug into a wooden cup.
“My timing?”
“Aye. Timing is the essence of success. Unfortunately, most of the assignments were worked out last week. If you plan to stay a good long while, you could leave your life in the hands of some lead-footed band, perhaps, but…do you plan to travel with those two? The heavens will punish you for that, surely.”
It was here that Lawrence rea
lized that Philon had misunderstood. “No, no, I’ve no intention of trying to supply any armies,” he said quickly, then laughed and added, “Nor have I come to offer services as a chaplain.”
Philon made a face, as though he had just watched a child stumble and fall in the distance. A smile then gradually appeared on his face. He shook his head, and it seemed as though he were about to complain about getting old. “That so? You’ll pardon me. I’ve been so busy with work these days. I jumped to conclusions, clearly. But…”
He paused, looking down into his cup before taking a drink. Among the traveling merchants who loved making big bets, many of them favored the same gesture while drinking.
“…If so, what brings you here? You certainly haven’t come to buy wheat, have you?”
Operating as a general store, a signboard saying as much hung from the eaves of the building. But given Philon’s words, it was clear this was no simple shop.
In the first place, in a growing town, the tendency was toward specialization, with different merchants selling different things. The cobbler sold shoes, the pharmacist medicine, and so on. Occasionally, the sheer force of money would allow a merchant to increase the types of goods he sold, and some even became more like large trading companies—but this place did not have that feel.
So there had to be a special reason for this to be a “general store.” Something such that no proper merchant would come here to buy wheat.
“Fran Vonely sent me.”
When in an unfamiliar place, it was a very heartening thing for a traveling merchant to be able to use the name of someone they knew. For the one who lent their name, it was because they had a debt they expected to be repaid, even years later. And more than the simple profit that might be had by using the name, it was the confidence that came with it that Lawrence was most grateful for. In front of him, Philon’s face drew tight at the mention of the name, in contrast to his earlier mild teasing.
He slowly put the cup down and looked Lawrence steadily in the eye. “So they’re still alive, are they?” His tone was almost reverential.