A Knight Cheers the Young On (5)
Whump. Whoom.
Look at me, coming up in the world. I'm even making plans with women.
Whoom. Whooom.
Well, half those plans are mostly just talk about work, and the only serious one among them is Little Bear.
Lee Han was no fool, and he was no moron playing at being thick. He had known how Little Bear felt for a long time already. But as he himself had said only the day before, those feelings seemed nothing but complicated to him.
Looked at one way, they might just be what comes of gratitude and trust...
A pure feeling, the kind that showed itself because she was still young. At an age when romantic love and admiration were hard to tell apart, he couldn't bring himself to take those feelings for love without question. If anything, they seemed closer to admiration. So he refused to judge them rashly, and he refused to accept them. He had no wish to wound something that delicate by taking it in carelessly.
Once she's older, maybe. Not yet.
Only when that precious disciple of his had matured, stepped out of her admiration for other people, and grown an independence of her own would he probably be able to know the real answer. Knowing her feelings, he still neither let on that he knew nor treated them as serious. Noticing was not the same as taking them lightly.
The kid's too decent. Too admirable.
It wasn't that he was brushing her off for being young and not yet grown. She was a woman so fine he felt unworthy of her, and because of that Lee Han had thought it through in earnest and come to his decision. Thanks to that, having plans with women didn't stir him up much. All he did was swear to meet every matter seriously.
Kra-aang!
"Hoo..."
Maybe because fretting had kept him from putting his mind on the exercise, his body had loosened in a way that left him faintly unsatisfied, and he let the breath out heavy.
"Doesn't even count as a warm-up."
"Ho ho. Our brother is as diligent as ever. Hard at the thinning, are you?"
"...Just exercise, and a little pocket money on the side. But why is the Pope-King out here? A man of your station, I mean."
"Oh, come now! Speak to me as familiarly as you always have, brother. Address me like that and I suddenly feel we've grown distant."
"Aigo. How's one plain knight supposed to run his mouth at someone that high?"
"Ho ho. Dear me..."
It was Lee Han being difficult on purpose, and Raphael, the newly seated Pope-King, answered him with a broad, easy laugh.
The eastern forest of the vast Royal Capital was famous for how thick its trees stood, and it went by another name as well: the Black Forest. So many of the trees were outrageously huge and tall that the place stayed dark even at noon, and the nickname had stuck because of it. The land's vigor was absurdly strong, so the trees grew at a tremendous pace. Left alone, they might crowd and strike one another until the friction started a fire, or the earth itself might spend too much of its strength, and so the thinning never stopped. Even then, new trees grew back faster than people could pull them out.
And yet here were Lee Han and Raphael, standing in the Black Forest and talking in surroundings that were not dark at all, but bright.
The reason was simple enough.
Still a monster.
Judia Pierre, the secretary and escort priest who had come along to attend Raphael, was expressionless to a fault on any ordinary day. Even he could not help a breath of admiration at the sight before him now.
Twelve hundred, at the least.
The trees had been torn out of the ground. Most were rotten or dead for want of sun, and yet even dead their weight and hardness were overwhelming, their roots driven deep into the earth. Thinning a single one of them was no ordinary labor, and every last tree here was of that kind. Now some twelve hundred of them lay uprooted, roots and all.
He had pulled up that many and was nowhere near exhausted, only a little sweat on him, and the first thing the sight stirred was a weary disgust. Trees that averaged four hundred and fifty kilograms, yanked like tufts of grass. The man who had done it, meanwhile, brushed the whole thing off as nothing and carried the conversation on in a flat voice.
"You been all right?"
"I have not. Work piled up all at once at my age, and I cannot keep up with it. In my heart of hearts I am desperate to retire this very moment. Ho ho."
"Couldn't you? You retire, old man, and all that happens is the temple falls apart."
"Ho ho! That would be a disaster. Isn't that why I am playing a Pope-King I don't suit? Should the temple collapse, that would be a great trouble in its own right."
"So you're suffering because you asked for it."
"That is the truth of it."
Crack!
Even as they talked, Lee Han casually broke a tree apart with his bare hands and, on the spot, made a chair for Raphael. It was rough work, but it was unmistakably the kindness of a man honoring his elder, and Raphael dipped his head in thanks.
He sat.
"Hoh. Skilled hands, brother. It looks roughly made, and yet it is this comfortable."
"I did some carpentry, a while back. Once I retire I'll make a light living off— no, that's not it. Old man, why are you really here?"
Lee Han asked it from a chair he had knocked together just as quickly. Coming all the way to this eastern forest was one thing. Why a newly seated Pope-King, who by his own account was spending his days in a frenzy, would come this far was another.
"Bit of a hike for a stroll."
He didn't believe the walk, of course. Nobody came this far for nothing. There was a purpose. Sure enough—
"I thought it only proper to begin with an apology."
"...Can we not? This is really uncomfortable."
Raphael bent deep and lowered his head. His body was already worn with age, and bent like that it trembled. Lee Han went to him and tried to raise him, but the old man stayed firm. He could have forced him up. That would have been the same as turning his face from the man's sincerity, and he couldn't bring himself to do it.
"I know your heart's young, old man, but your body isn't still in its spring. So let's not do this. You'll hurt yourself."
"I simply wanted to apologize, even in this fashion. No—perhaps I wanted my own heart to rest easier. The temple... no, we have sinned greatly..."
"...What happened to the honored maid isn't your sin."
Lee Han put his finger on the reason at once and shook his head. In the past—through the last fifty years—the honored maid had asked the temple for help, and the temple had ignored her. They had written it off as nothing, and ignored the matter because she was a low-ranking nun. Well, from the temple's side there would have been excuses. They couldn't draw near a misfortune laid by a high demon's curse, or else it had been difficult to send people on the strength of her word alone—
"All of it is a shabby excuse. We could have verified it easily enough, and the temple has no shortage of means to slip a curse."
"......"
Yes. He was right. The temple had no excuse. They had simply not checked. Neglect. The temple had done something no different from denying its own reason to exist.
"You didn't know either, old man. Don't take it so hard."
"Not knowing is no excuse. A high demon. A high demon. And we left a demon of that order alone for fifty years—no, for three hundred. It is so wretched I am ashamed even to lift my head..."
"Hm."
"Our sin is too deep. Far too deep..."
Raphael poured it out like a sinner at confession, and Lee Han understood why he was like that. Even so—
"Look, I get all of it, but why me of all people? I'm not some priest who sits and hears confessions."
He shrugged and said it lightly. It wasn't a line for air this heavy, but Lee Han didn't care. And for good reason.
"The more you stew in how sorry you are, the more the honored maid's going to hate it. So let's quit the gloomy talk, you and I."
"......"
"Way I hear it, you found the honored maid's name, and you were the one who worked hardest to have her raised up as a Saint. Thank you. From the temple's side, dragging it out would've been the profitable move, and you pushed it through over everybody else's objections."
"...I only did what ought to be done. To be praised for it shames me."
"I told you to quit that. I know how hard you're working, old man, and that criminal brat knows it too. So stop apologizing. The bastards who actually owed an apology went off to Hell without giving one. What good does it do for a man with no guilt to do it?"
"......"
"Learning her real name is enough for me. It was a pretty name, at that."
"...Ha ha. Brother Lee Han is always teaching me."
"I'm not teaching you. I'm just saying what I mean."
"...And that is what is remarkable."
Raphael smiled and bowed his head deeply once more, and Lee Han told him not to and tried again to raise him.
......Lee Han realized it afresh. Sincerity, carried past a certain point, could sometimes be stronger than anything else.
Lee Han and Raphael talked of this and that for a while. Neither of them would have another chance to speak, so they used this one to set down everything that had piled up. Thanks to that, Lee Han learned all sorts of odds and ends: the overhaul of the temple's very makeup, the establishment of a new system of education, even the opening of a faculty of theology at the Academy.
And besides that—
"Why'd you bring that criminal? No—the redheaded cuckoo."
"...That is an odd form of address."
"You are a criminal. Betraying old man Raphael and hopping from nest to nest—that's a cuckoo, isn't it."
"......"
Pierre the redheaded cuckoo had started over, dropping from Inquisitor to a low-ranking priest.
"For the temple to return fully to what it should be will likely take ten years. And that, of course, is only the minimum. If the old disasters are never to happen again, we shall have to lay down still more laws and principles."
"If you're settling all of that, won't it take fifty years, not ten? So when's the retirement?"
"Ho ho. Even so, I must. I will be sure to live a long life and see it done. Not fifty years. Even should it take a hundred, I will see it done."
"...Right."
"In that spirit, I do think the temple would be well served by a righteous and valiant Holy Knight. How about it, Brother Lee Han? No interest...?"
"Pass."
"Dear me, a shame. Still, come find me whenever the thought strikes you. I shall keep the Holy Knight captain's seat empty."
"Captain, now..."
He was scouted, too.
"Ah, and the statue."
"......"
"The temple will take it under its own care. So that it may become a Sacred Relic, priests will pour Holy Power into it every day from now on. Once that is done, it will be designated a national treasure that neither the temple nor the royal house will be able to touch. Ho ho."
"Ahem. Th-that's a fine thing. But why tell me? It's got nothing to do with me."
"Who can say? I simply wished to say it. I thought it would be good for you to know, brother."
"......Ahem."
Even the plans for what would become of the Saint's statue.
It was a reasonably meaningful stretch of talk, and before they knew it the time had leapt ahead, as if to prove as much: the light was gone, and darkness was coming on. Not a night made by the dense trees, but a darkness that arrived because the sun was truly setting, foretelling that it was about time they parted. Looking up at that sky—
"......So. What did you actually want to say?"
"Whatever do you mean?"
"Did becoming Pope-King turn you into a sly old snake? You've got a favor you want to ask. That's why you came all the way out here."
"......"
"You wanted to apologize, I'm sure. Wanting to talk was sincere too. But there's something else, isn't there? The real purpose."
"...Before you, brother, there is nothing I can hide."
"It's just that my ears are sharp and my nose works."
The moment Lee Han finished, Raphael let out a low, embarrassed laugh, the broad kind. As if it had been a long while since anyone saw straight through him. As if he were a little ashamed.
...But the shame lasted only a moment. Once the hesitation was gone, he set courtesy aside and asked for help, from the most trustworthy man he knew.
"Brother, would you help me?"
"With what?"
"I have come into a piece of information."
Lee Han's brow creased.
"Do you know of the Brass Knight Order?"
"...Down to the details."
"Ho ho!"
Just as he'd thought.
Coming to this brother was the right answer.
The eyes of the knight, answering with nothing but steadiness, blazed fierce enough to pierce the dark. Like a furnace that could melt all things.