A Knight Gets a Crackdown? (3)
"You lucky bastard...!"
"...For what?"
"Cardinal Raphael...! Do you have any idea how many of the faithful would give anything just to speak with that man? There are people who would empty their coffers for nothing more than the right to share a meal with him, and some wretch who doesn't care a whit about religion is squandering time that precious...!!"
"...Yeah?"
Jake had come to bring word of the Tunnels, and once he heard the account of everything that had happened to Lee Han in the meantime, the outburst tore out of him all at once. Lee Han could only blink.
He had already been told that old Raphael was someone extraordinary, but he hadn't known how high that authority actually reached. From where he stood, the man was making far too much of a fuss.
"But why call him cardinal? He stepped down ages ago."
It was an honest question. The man was practically at the door of retirement. Was this really something to raise such a clamor over?
"...If the other believers heard that, they would turn the world upside down."
Jake, for his part, kept driving his fingers into the furrow of his brow, again and again, as though the remark were the sort of thing that could drive a man clean out of his mind.
"He only left the cardinalate because he refused it. His standing, in potential, is still above a cardinal's. He is a man it would not be strange to see become Pope-King, and if he ever set his heart on it, more than four in ten of the temple's priests would stand behind him."
"...So he wasn't an ordinary old fellow."
"......A man of the kingdom, and you don't know him. Truly."
Jake looked frankly appalled, like someone who had just heard a person admit they did not know one of the nation's great men.
"What, did you think I was a temple fanboy like you?"
"...Fanboy. What's that supposed to be?"
"It means a man like you."
"......Why does that sound so much like an insult?"
"It isn't one, so dig. Daylight's wasting."
"Mmm..."
He was turning the ground around the yard into a field.
The work was plain enough in the telling: pull every weed, clear out the stones and gravel, turn the soil and work fertilizer through it, then water the ground until it could actually serve as a field. Ordinarily it was a matter of days. Lee Han, alone, finished reclaiming a little more than two hundred and sixty square meters before half a day was gone.
"Whew. Done at last."
"...Did it really have to go this far?"
"Call it feeding ourselves. Radishes there. Potatoes, sweet potatoes, onions, and peanuts over there. Lettuce and cabbage in that bed."
"...You're serious about this. Hm? Then why leave so much of that ground empty? What are you planting there?"
"Chili peppers."
"Chili peppers? You mean that strange, fiery plant they only just started bringing in from the West? The one they say is good for nothing but torture...?"
"...It's spicy, sure. But torture? What are you talking about?"
He had never heard of such a thing in his life. He had only brought the seed because the village was selling it. What nonsense was this?
The misunderstanding, however, had already taken root.
"Cruel bastard. Who are you growing that to torture?"
"...I'm growing it to eat, you medieval moron."
Lee Han had been saddled with a false charge. They were making an absurd fuss over a little heat. Let them meet the people of a country that worked its stress off with capsaicin; they would not talk like that. A medieval knight, though, seemed convinced that eating anything spicy would simply kill a man.
"You're going to eat it? ...Are you trying to build a tolerance for pain? Hmm. It does sound like a respectable method of training, now that I think of it..."
"......"
He seemed to be nursing a slightly strange delusion.
"...We'll go with that."
Better to be misunderstood this way, Lee Han decided, and shook his head. Arguing would only wear out his own mouth.
For a good while after that, the two of them cleared the field and set the crops.
A knight who held that every calling but the sword and honorable duty had its noble and its base, stooping to a farmer's labor — there could hardly be a rarer sight. A few knights might well have fainted dead away at the view of it. Of these two, though, one had come up lowborn, and the other from poor, fallen nobility, and neither felt any particular revulsion at the work. They only dug in silence, and the thought that a day's labor might win them their daily bread left their spirits clear.
The work had gone on long enough that an assistant instructor was drawing near with sandwiches for a bite between meals when Jake spoke.
"...Facing Holy Law won't be simple."
"Hm?"
"You can take it that every inquisitor of the Office of the Inquisition knows how to use Holy Law. You've no ties to the temple, so you wouldn't know, but Holy Law is a power entirely unlike the Fighting Art. Through the Holy Power granted by the Light of Radiance, it calls forth a Mystery. Think of it as magic and the Fighting Art stirred together. But power like that has its price. They say growing accustomed to Holy Law is an immensely difficult process, and the human weapons who endure every bit of that difficulty and come out able to wield Holy Law freely in real combat are none other than the inquisitors."
"Hmm. That so?"
"...It's your own affair. Why are you so easy about it?"
"You talk like I'm definitely going to fight them."
"Not like. You are going to fight them. That's why I'm telling you to watch yourself."
"......"
From where Lee Han stood, it was a slander he didn't deserve. Where in the world was there a pacifist like him, that anyone should malign him so—
...If I had no conscience, maybe. My record's too long for me to argue.
Lee Han conceded the point. Certainly...
"They did put me in a foul mood the moment I laid eyes on them."
He had only just gotten himself tangled with a pack of fanatics, and his disgust was already at its peak. To be dragged into the Office of the Inquisition on top of that left every kind of stress stacking up inside him. And did he know what made it worse?
I still don't even know why those bastards are watching me.
Right. He didn't know the reason. Old Raphael, at least, was gentle. He never leaned on him, only talked and left, so Lee Han paid it no mind, and the old man didn't seem to mean him any harm either. So he had let it pass. But if—
If another one like the bastard I saw the other day shows up again, then...
He might not hold back.
"Take it easy. Make an enemy of the temple and living gets hard. In the kingdom above all, to set yourself against the temple is to say you cannot live in Pendragon. Be careful, in every sense that matters."
"Then I'll go into exile."
"...So you have no intention of taking it easy."
Jake shook his head. Lee Han was unashamed.
......But perhaps what followed was meant to show him how unnecessary that resolve had been.
Chirp! Chirp!
"I am told that after I departed, that child offered you a discourtesy. I wished to apologize to you, brother."
"...An apology's fine. Did you really have to come deliver it at the crack of dawn, before the sun's even thought of rising?"
He had come.
It was morning at the hour when the sparrows were still raising their racket, a visit in the early dawn, and Lee Han grumbled at the old priest while raking a hand through hair that had gone up like a magpie's nest. Even so, coming at a time like this was a bit much.
"A prayer gathering is appointed for the next four days, so this was the only hour I could find. The thought of failing to see you, brother, fairly tears at my heart. Heh heh."
"...You do live an awfully diligent life."
"It is nothing more than proper discipline. Ah, and should you ever wish to attend the gathering, come whenever you please. Our temple welcomes a new brother at any time."
"I decline. Politely, and with all my heart."
"Oh dear. What a pity."
"...Assistant!"
"Damn it... I wanted to sleep more..."
So Lee Han tried to turn the old priest around and send him off in a hurry, missionary zeal and all, first thing in the morning, while Raphael kept the smile on his face regardless.
"Ah. Now that I think of it."
"?"
Then, all at once, the old man began to utter an ominous prophecy.
"While I am away at the prayer gathering, that child, and other brothers besides, may come to trouble you."
"......"
"They are devout, but a little excessive, and I fear they will prove a nuisance."
"...If you know that, then you rein them in."
"I would like to. There are many, however, who let the words of a doddering old man pass them by."
"...Even a cardinal's?"
"Heh heh. Setting aside the almighty Light of Radiance, how could there be rank within the temple? We all merely stand in the same place."
"...You took a very long way around to say you can't stop them."
"Heh heh. Forgive me. And so, I beg you..."
Something was pressed softly into his hand.
"...Now that is a permission I like."
At the holy water of the highest grade that Raphael offered him, and at those loaded words, a smile reached Lee Han's eyes.
"I've thought so for a while. You're a proper elder, old man."
"That is a glad thing to hear."
Permission to scold them had come down from the highest elder of the temple, if only unofficially, and Lee Han was pleased. Feeling it afresh—
I really do like this old man.
An adult with ordinary good sense, he realized, was a very fine thing.
"A cheerful brother."
Raphael refused to the very end the kindness of being seen home, and walked the dirt road by himself. Without a staff, even walking was painfully hard, yet he had not received the call of the Light of Radiance. Until that hour came, ought he not carry his own steps?
"Heh heh. Only yesterday, none of this was here."
Even so, the consideration of the brother he had newly come to know was a pleasant thing. The well-cleared road was wonderfully easy underfoot. There was no stone to catch a foot, and along the way, wherever he walked, a chair had been set in the deep shade of the trees, as if to say that if he tired he should rest and go on. Realizing the knight was a more considerate man than he had thought, Raphael let his smile deepen.
And with it—
"Just as my senior said. A splendid stimulus of a man."
He thought of the senior priest who had introduced this new brother to him: a man who in earlier days had been no less devout, and who had since retired.
"...A rather undignified man, admittedly."
A senior who, after making himself young again through Holy Law, had taken up a new calling as a steward. Even so, the man did not speak idly.
"The other brothers, too, must sometimes be due a little of the rod."
In the past—
"Get down, you shameless little bastard."
Just as he himself, in his younger days, had mended a crooked faith by taking such a beating — no, such a scolding — from that senior.
"Heh heh. Thinking of it now, it is a memory I miss."
Hoping the other brothers might someday have a memory to miss as well, Raphael walked on in earnest, humming under his breath.