And Then, What Followed (2)
The peasants of Crow's Head Valley had gone through an extraordinary number of changes of heart over the past few years.
The previous lord had been a vicious piece of work by every measure. He knew exactly how to strip a man bare while leaving him just barely enough to keep from starving to death.
Perhaps that was why, when food poisoning carried him off for good, the estate had briefly stirred with something like life. Everyone prayed the next lord would be a proper man, at the very least better than that.
The lord who arrived next, Reus, was a boy of perhaps fifteen or sixteen. At that point, the villagers more or less gave up on hoping for anything at all.
And yet the truly strange events only began after Reus took office.
"Hey, folks. Anything troubling you these days? Nothing odd been happening around here lately, has it?"
For a lord, he took an almost excessive interest in village affairs — so much so that it bordered on strange. And on top of that, he kept promising to solve any problem they brought him.
From Reus's own point of view, he was simply going around making sure the monsters hadn't caused any damage or injured anyone. But through the villagers' eyes, it must have looked remarkably peculiar.
At first everyone assumed he'd keep it up for a while and then stop, and paid him no mind — but Reus persistently sought out contact with his people.
As the days passed, the resentment they'd all been quietly harboring began to fade. The old conviction that the lord doesn't care a fig about us started to wobble.
One by one, people began to open their hearts — slowly, haltingly — pouring out their grievances to him directly or filing complaints through Laura.
And so Crow's Head Valley began to change, little by little.
Reus lowered the fees for the communal mill and the oil-press to a bowl or two of grain, and he never once forced the serfs working the fields to labor beyond what was necessary.
"L-Lord Reus, the harvest failed this year, and I can't pay the milling fee no matter how I try."
"Is that so? Then how about fixing my chair for me? It's too big for me, I think — it squeaks every time I move, and it's hard to concentrate on my work. Let's call it even."
At times he looked like a fool with no greed in him whatsoever, yet he was surprisingly shrewd about claiming what was his.
He simply made sure everyone else got their share as well, and never reached for more than he needed.
What's more, whenever one of those "strange incidents" occurred, he would step forward himself — and every single time, the incident would be resolved, neat and clean. The case of the wolves stealing livestock was one such affair.
Just when everyone was completely at a loss as to whether Reus was a good man or a bad one, that happened.
Who knew what he'd discussed with the merchant who visited the estate — all anyone could see was that Reus had bought up piles upon piles of garbage, heaped it in the barn, and kept shuttling in and out of there like a madman.
People wondered if he had some grand plan in mind, but whenever the stench of rotting garbage wafted out of the barn and into their noses, no kind words came to mind.
He kept the charade up for years, and the villagers eventually shrugged and gave up on him. Figures. They had dared to hope, and the disappointment ran just as deep — so the gossip flowed freely too.
Then one day, Reus abruptly stopped his strange ritual and reappeared before them all carrying something that looked like a heap of pitch-black soil.
"What is that?"
"Something that will make your lives a little richer."
His attitude was so unshakably confident that it bordered on eerie, and the villagers regarded him with open suspicion. After they watched him spread the black muck across the fallow fields and till the soil himself, they grew only more doubtful.
"What in tarnation be that thing?"
"What's he plannin', plantin' crops in the fallow field? That ground needs its rest, don't it."
"How should I know. Must not be done with his fool notions yet."
They prayed to every god that whatever he was doing wouldn't come back to bite them — but before long, they began to notice a change.
"Hey, look yonder. Why's the barley growin' so fine in that there field?"
"Now that you mention it...?"
Watching the crops shoot up impossibly well wherever Reus's hand had touched, no one could help but be astonished. The man responsible, for his part, was the very picture of calm.
"Care to give it a try yourselves?"
He could hardly have been ignorant of all the cursing they'd done behind his back, yet Reus showed not the slightest sign of caring.
When they scattered the dark soil — the compost — he'd given them across their own fields, a similar effect began to appear there too, slowly but surely.
"C-come over here and look at these barley grains! Just look how fat they've gotten!"
"Good heavens — you'd have struggled to see crops this fine even in the last great harvest, seven years back...!!"
To a farmer, thriving crops are happiness itself, pure and simple joy. And it wasn't just one or two of them — every soul who worked the land felt the very same benefit, so of course they were beside themselves.
"Well? Pretty useful stuff, isn't it?"
The image of Reus grinning as he surveyed the fields on one of his inspections was still vivid in everyone's memory.
And that year's harvest was, quite literally, a bumper crop. The farmers stared dumbfounded at the golden waves rippling across the fields so many times that the count passed into three digits.
For a moment they grew uneasy — the previous lord had a track record of skimming extra grain for himself in good years — but then,
"Hmm? Why would I do that? Just do things the way we always do. Anyone with circumstances can explain them."
Reus's answer was crisp and clear. If a person had a reasonable cause, he was understanding to a degree that went more than far enough.
"The way I see it... our lord's a mage, I tell ye. A mage."
"A mage?"
"Aye. Ye spread that stuff he spent so long makin', and the fields burst with harvest. Any odd thing happens, and it's fixed in a blink. If that ain't a mage, what else could it possibly be?"
"True enough — he must be a mage! Just like in the wandering bards' tales!"
With leftover barley enough to brew ale and enjoy it among themselves, the farmers had grown comfortable — and from their lips, praise for their lord slowly began to pour forth.
From the year after the great harvest, a new custom took root among the people of Crow's Head Valley.
Whenever they crossed paths with Reus on his tours of the estate or his inspections of the farmland, they bowed their heads respectfully in greeting. If they wore a hat, they removed it — young and old alike, everyone did the same.
Not because anyone ordered it, but because it happened naturally. What Reus gained by making his compost was more than mere material profit.
Respect.
An invisible but undeniably real power. The most precious thing of all — something that could never be wrung out through oppression or domination — Reus had obtained it before he'd even turned twenty.
"Pardon me. Is this Crow's Head Valley?"
"It is... and who might you be?"
"A traveling merchant. I heard tales of the lord here and came to see for myself."
Just as the old saying goes — words have no feet, yet they travel a thousand leagues — the story of the lord who ruled Crow's Head Valley was spreading, slowly but surely.
Skin black with grime, a stench that drew flies on its own, a beard grown wild and filthy. The word "beggar" could not have fit anyone better than the figure who woke in the stable — Louis.
Having lost everything in the storm and escaped with nothing but his life, he'd fled with no idea what else to do, and now he was living the life of a fugitive.
No — could this even be called a life?
He hadn't entered with permission but had sneaked in to snatch a bit of sleep, so when it came time to leave, he tried to slip out through the hole in the stable wall as quietly as he'd come.
"You rotten thieving scum! I knew you'd try this, and I've been waiting!"
"W-wait! I'm Louis, a merchant of the Reyuda Merchant Guild—!"
"What a joke! What merchant anywhere in this whole world looks like you?"
Of all the rotten luck, the stablehand had been waiting right in front of the hole. Louis took a thorough beating and was thrown out.
Beaten until his eyes and lips had swollen puffy, Louis was dumped carelessly onto the roadside. And because he happened to be discarded in front of an oncoming wagon, he very nearly got trampled for good measure.
"Hey! Get out of the middle of the road! Unless you want to be walked on!"
"Yeah, yeah, I heard— damn you all..."
Crawling on all fours, Louis finally hauled himself upright — and without meaning to, his eyes fell on the cargo loaded high in the wagon.
Perhaps it was a merchant's instinct, that urge to sniff out anything of value. The moment he read the lettering on the surface of the large sack, his swollen eyes flew wide open.
"Wh... wha— why... why is that lord's name on here...?"
As if under a spell, Louis followed behind, staring with unfocused eyes at the scene where the wagon had stopped and people were hauling away the sacks.
"H-hey! That — what is that thing? Why's everyone carrying it off like that?"
"Ugh, for crying out— it's a—"
"What is it, I said! What's inside!"
"It's compost, compost! Hard-won! Premium grade, bought at a steep price! Now get lost, you wretch!"
The man Louis had grabbed gave him that curt, unfriendly answer and shoved him aside with a shoulder. Louis scrambled up at once, ran to the wagon, and hailed the driver.
"Hey! Th-this... toby? Combost? Whatever it is — who's distributing it, huh? Tell me! Please!"
"Why on earth should I tell you that?"
"I'm a merchant! Look, see? I've got my certificate!"
It was supposed to be a guild certificate proving his membership — but with the writing all smeared away, it was nothing more than a worthless scrap of paper. When Louis thrust it out, the driver looked at him with a pitying eye and gave a half-hearted answer.
"There's a merchant who made a name for himself over in the Free City — Nerga. He's the one running distribution. Word is he's preparing some big trade venture these days. Anyway, he's riding high, riding very high."
Nerga. The instant those three syllables reached his ears, Louis's mind simply stopped.
"Ne... rga."
"That's the one. Word has it he received investment from some rural lord and developed the compost. What was the name again... Reu, Reusa?"
"Reu... sus."
"Right, Reus. It's printed on the sacks, so you'll see it often enough. That all? I need to get moving. Hyaah!!"
As the wagon rolled away and Louis was left standing alone, he began to laugh. A laugh thick with hollowness swelled into outright hysteria.
"Ha, huh-hah, ahahahaha, kheheheh—!"
At the sight of him cackling like a madman, people steered clear of him on their own.
The fellow guild members who had sneered at him as a has-been. And the lord he had mocked to his face, calling him a fool with no eye for value.
The two of them had joined hands and achieved a success without equal.
And Louis? What on earth had Louis seen, back then?
So absurd was his own position that laughter boiled up in his throat like phlegm — and as he laughed, he took the merchant's certificate clutched in his hand and tore it to shreds, ripping it apart again and again.
AUUGHH! AUUGHHH─!!
Wailing like a beast, he slammed his head against the wall over and over.
The young merchant destined to lead the guild.
From that day on, Louis vanished to somewhere no one knew.
Some said he was dead. Some said he'd founded a criminal organization. But no one ever went looking for him.