How a Knight Treats Beasts (1)
When merchants and mercenaries from other continents—or, failing those, scholars and adventurers—first entered the South, what startled them most was nothing other than the weather and the land.
More precisely, weather and land that changed from one region to the next.
A domain visited only the day before yesterday might have blazed under a fierce sun and a refreshing wind, while another lay so packed with cloud that three hundred days of the year amounted to a rainy season. There were mountain villages that held nothing but a springlike warmth, and others with neither a coast nor so much as a river that remained endlessly hot and humid all the same.
It was an environment possible only because the South was steeped in the blessing of Mystery, and for that reason travelers newly arrived there sometimes collapsed, unable to adapt to the weather and the land. Certain scholars even claimed that this jumbled environment was why the knights of the South were peculiarly stronger than the knights of other continents, though nothing of the sort had ever been clearly proven.
Thus the South kept the turning of four seasons, and yet that did not mean a place was obliged to wear the weather proper to the season it was in. No one could know what Mystery had come through a given region or village and gone again.
In that sense—
Whooosh…!
It was not especially strange that there should be a domain drowned in fog all year round.
Plip. Plip.
Fog the whole year through meant the domain lived in a perpetual dusk even at midday, as if twilight were always settling over it. To exaggerate only a little, without a lamp one could scarcely find the road, and once rain fell, water pooled on the ground and did not vanish for a fortnight. The people of the domain always took up shovels and brooms the day after a rain to clear the standing water, and it was no oddity that so many of them were out doing the work.
Seen only this way, it was a truly wretched land. It was not, however, without its merits.
"I hear this year's cherry crop came in well?"
"Not just the cherries. The grape harvest was a smash, too."
"Ho! Then I'm looking forward to this year's wines."
"Later, to celebrate, you ought to have some wine with grilled trout."
"I'll do that. I'll take a bit of bacon and some vegetables with me as well."
It was a land where farming succeeded to an absurd degree. Common sense said the crops ought to fail where fog kept the sun from showing itself, and yet, strangely, the harvests here were always a windfall. Word had it that the domain's fog drank in only the sun's good essence and shared it out among the vegetables and fruits grown beneath it. There were many such stories, and nothing certain among them, but that the farming went well was, in itself, as good as a blessing to the people who lived there.
This year especially, thanks to the new, high-quality fertilizer Crown Princess Isis had spread through the summer, the harvest was more spectacular still, and the domain folk went so far as to worship Princess Isis, whom not one of them had ever seen.
"We ought to present the finest wine to the royal house."
"Who's arguing?"
Wales. Mordred's domain, famous for being closed to the world, and one of the places in the South that produced the finest wine. The grape itself was a variety that could not be cultivated anywhere else; it grew only in Wales, and so Welsh wine fetched whatever price one cared to name. Thus the domain had an unusual number of vintners and coopers—and yet…
"Hello!"
"…Ah. It's you."
"Come again today?"
"Yes. Looking at the weather, I thought the fish might bite."
There were a fair number of anglers as well.
Of course…
"Go on, then. Fish hard."
"…Want some grape juice?"
"Thank you!!"
A child this young being one of them was rare.
She took the grape juice the adults offered, broke into a bright smile, and trotted off, while they watched her go with complicated eyes.
"Only eight years old, and already…"
"Sharp as a tack."
Watching the little angler stride grimly on with a rod far taller than she was strapped across her back, the adults could not help the tangle of their feelings. She was a child one pitied, and yet wanted to cheer for.
Wales had a river that ran together with a fairly large waterfall. The fog lay so thick that the falls were seldom easy to see, but on the rare day the mist cleared, the waterfall was magnificent beyond words, and when the fog wrapped it like cloud, nothing could have been more mysterious. A rainbow made it lovelier still. The villagers often came down to the river for the sake of that sight, but the child was not lingering near the falls merely to admire the beauty.
Swish!
She cast the line with practiced ease. The rod was one she had made herself, and so was the paste bait. She kept strictly to the method an old man who had once looked after her had taught her, and not long after the line went out—
"Hup!"
A trout broke the surface with that tingling tug in her hands. A girl of that age would ordinarily flinch or recoil at the sight of a living thing writhing so, but the child looked at the trout almost fondly and dropped it neatly into a keep-net woven of branches. Then she cast again, and fished again, over and over.
Watching, one might have thought it easy. Looking was all that was easy. The work itself was perilous in the extreme. The current was already on the strong side, and there were plenty of spots deep enough that a single slip would drop her straight into the water. Trout had considerable strength of their own; hook one wrong and it might slap her across the face, and a child's tender skin would split at once. It was tightrope work in the literal sense, a string of tasks perilous for an eight-year-old to attempt at all.
And yet the child—
Swish!
She simply fished in silence, and the moment trout and the other fish had filled the net to a certain point, she set about gathering them at once.
"This much… I might even get a silver coin."
Two hours of fishing in the fog. In a sense she had fished with her life on the line, but when she thought of the money it might bring, she was satisfied beyond words. She smiled and left the river as she was. To someone else it might have been work that wagered a life. For the child, there was no earning so satisfying as this.
I have to earn hard before it gets cold.
Even now, the weather was hardly mild enough for standing in the water to fish. She would pretend otherwise, but her feet had to be numb. She had stood in water cold as ice for more than an hour. Had she not been sturdier than most, and possessed of a stubbornness unlike other children's, she would long since have teared up, saying her feet felt ready to crack. Even so, she did not so much as complain of the pain. She simply did her work in silence.
More than anything—
"Auntie, how much will you give me for these?"
She had a reason she needed to become an adult quickly, and so it was not hard in the slightest.
…Not in the slightest.
"Hehe, a silver coin!"
She was elated. A whole silver coin, come into her hand. Fewer people had been fishing for trout of late, so the woman at the inn had paid a little more, and the child could laugh brightly at having come into a rare sum.
But…
Step. Step.
The farther she walked, the more the smile left her, and a bleakness gathered at the corners of her eyes. The nearer the house drew, the heavier her heart became.
I don't want to go…
For a moment her steps faltered. She wanted to run, right then, rather than go home like this—
"—Lady Louise, what are you doing there?"
She jolted.
"Out playing again, I see."
Louise said nothing.
"Hah! If you would only stay quietly in your room. Why you must come out again…"
The girl called Louise shrank in on herself at the sight of the old maid scolding her. Why did they have to meet in a place like this? She went tense, and her heart pounded so hard she thought it might burst. That was how frightened she was of this old maid, and just as she squeezed her eyes shut—
A soft breath of air.
"A pleasure to meet you, my lady. I am Santa Rihan."
"…??"
A very gentle voice reached her, and Louise's eyes flew open before she knew it.
And what the child saw was—
"…Wow. Pretty."
The face of a very pretty man.
"Pardon?"
The impression had slipped out of her on its own, and at those words—
"Ah…!"
Louise clapped a hand over her mouth without meaning to. It had come out almost by instinct, and she realized at once that it had been a mistake.
But he—
"Haha, I'm grateful to hear it. Pretty, you say. That's the first compliment I've ever heard in my life."
He only smiled as if thankful, and Louise flushed at once.
"R-really the first time?"
"Yes. The first time in my life anyone has said such a thing."
"But you're not—you really are pretty…"
However grown she tried to be, a child was a child, and Louise was unskilled at hiding what she honestly felt. Ordinarily the maid would certainly have been right to grow angry.
"Ho ho, she's not wrong. I've never seen a man as pretty as you, either."
"I-I'll take that as a compliment."
"It is a compliment. Pretty as a picture. If you were only a little shorter, I might have taken you on as a maid."
"…Then I'm fortunate to be tall."
"Ohoho!"
The old maid laughed with a hand over her mouth, and Louise blinked. She had never seen the old maid—meaner than any witch in a fairy tale—laugh like that.
So she ended up asking.
"W-who are you?"
It was a question carrying several meanings, and to it Santa Rihan answered, still wearing that refreshing smile.
"Please don't speak so carefully to me, my lady. As of today I am nothing but a servant—a proud laborer of Mordred, and no more than that."
Louise was silent.
His words were confident and clear, and for a moment she thought—
He doesn't look like a servant. He looks like a knight.
A knight far finer than any of the knights of her own house.
"Pretty knight…"
"My lady?"
"Hup?!"
Louise shut her mouth in a hurry.
…And he, having heard that assessment—
All I did was compress the muscle and the frame a little…. This feels strange.
At the continuing remarks that he was pretty, he felt nothing but awkward.