Reverse Life Turnaround (5)
"Bring me anything thin and sharp, and hurry! A rapier or a hairpin would be even better!"
Rewind the clock a little, to the moment Jian shouted those words.
The Northern Grand Duke. Rudiger's eyes narrowed slightly.
It was not that he felt any displeasure toward Jian. On the contrary, the emotion stirring in him was closer to intrigue.
What kind of life has that child lived to forge a look like that in his eyes?
The question rose unbidden in Rudiger's mind. The will burning in Jian's gaze was nothing a mere butler should have been able to display.
Those eyes…
"……."
They were the eyes one usually saw only in people who had ground their entire lives into a single craft. The eyes of a veteran knight riding into battle. Or the eyes of a blacksmith who had spent a lifetime beating iron before the forge—exactly that sort of look.
Yes. Eyes like those made the gamble worth taking, at least once.
While Jian struggled roughly against the imperial knights trying to drag him away by force, Rudiger drew a dagger from a nearby knight without the slightest hesitation. He then struck the blade smooth and true until it matched the thin, keen shape Jian had demanded, and handed it straight over.
When the lord of the North himself intervened and offered a weapon, the knights flinched and backed off, no longer daring to lay hands on the boy.
Jian paid the surrounding stares no mind whatsoever. He took the dagger, then began feeling carefully along the fallen knight commander's chest. At last he found the precise spot. Without a flicker of hesitation he adjusted his grip on the knife and drove it straight into the commander's breast.
In that instant Rudiger's pupils shook hard.
The man lying there was no ordinary knight of little consequence. He was the commander of the Imperial Knight Order that guarded the Empire's throne. For a Northern butler to plunge a blade into such a man's chest could easily be read not as treatment, but as open treason against the Empire itself.
I thought it would leave no more than a shallow cut…
Grasping the gravity of the situation, Rudiger decided he ought to stop Jian the way the other knights intended. Just as he started forward—
Swoosh—.
A hand lightly barred his path. Its owner was the Emperor of the Empire, a man who had lived a good fifteen years longer than Rudiger. The Emperor raised that hand and brought every knight—and Rudiger—to an immediate halt.
"Wait and watch."
Rudiger turned a startled look on him. The Emperor gave a slow, soft chuckle and spoke again.
"Duke Rudiger. You saw that boy's eyes just now as well, did you not?"
"……."
Rudiger kept his mouth shut, offering neither yes nor no.
"I have seen that same light in my own daughter's eyes."
The Imperial Princess. Within the Empire she was spoken of as an unmatched genius. She had poured forth bizarre knowledge no one had ever taught her and made immense contributions to the Empire's progress. That alone would have been a towering achievement, yet her deeds did not end there. She had uncovered foreign invasion plans no one else even suspected, and delivered the Empire an overwhelming victory in the continental war that had erupted seven years earlier. In short, the Princess was something close to a living religion in this Empire.
A faint smile touched the Emperor's lips as he continued, as though looking back on the past.
"At first even I could not bring myself to trust my own blood completely. A clueless infant was freely spouting knowledge she was hearing for the first time, after all."
His gaze settled on Jian's back.
"I believe the eyes that boy carries right now are identical to my daughter's."
"……."
Faced with the Emperor's absolute certainty, Rudiger could only fall silent and watch what unfolded before him.
"……."
Anxiety and fury from the imperial knights thickened across the entire training ground. As Jian steadily pushed the blade deeper into the knight commander's chest, several of them trembled and glared daggers at the boy. Even so, Jian's hands never stopped. When half the dagger had vanished into the commander's body—
Puhak—!
Jian frowned once and yanked the knife free. Dark crimson blood sprayed violently into the air. At that ghastly sight the imperial knights' fraying self-control finally snapped.
"This mad little bastard has finally done it to the Commander!"
Srrring—!
Eyes inverted with rage, the knights drew their swords as one and pressed the steel right against Jian's throat. In that desperate moment Rudiger whipped his head around to check the Emperor's face.
"……."
The Emperor was astonishingly serene. Even with blood gushing into the air he did not so much as twitch an eyebrow. The knights waited for his order; the Emperor maintained his silence. And the place where that silent gaze rested—
From the knight commander's mouth—
"……Keuheup!"
A harsh, ragged sound burst free. Moments earlier the man had been turning blue, his breath all but cut off. Now he expanded his chest like someone who had just broken the surface after drowning and began gulping down oxygen in a frenzy.
"Puhahaak! Hah… heok…!"
The veins that had stood out like cords along his neck subsided in an instant. Color flooded back into the face that had been as dull and lifeless as a corpse's.
"C-Commander…!"
The knights who had been poised to cut Jian down dropped the blades they had leveled at him and rushed to their commander's side. Chaos did not begin to describe the scene. Amid that pandemonium Jian pressed a hand to his own neck where blood was seeping out, stanching the wound, and spoke toward the healers who still stood frozen in place.
"I need the bleeding stopped, so hurry up and go cast some magic."
The joint training ended, and I returned to my room the same as always—corners of my mouth pulled high. I had finally succeeded at the thing I had wanted so badly: pulling off a big play right in front of the big shots.
"Lucky it was cardiac tamponade instead of some catastrophic external wound."
The people of this world naturally knew far less medicine than I did, yet the fact that everyone washed their hands with soap told me they possessed at least some concept of hygiene. And if they had hygiene, that meant a certain amount of medical knowledge already existed. In other words, if the problem had not been something like cardiac tamponade, shining the way I did might not have been so easy.
"I've wondered about this before too…"
How on earth did these people start washing their hands? On Earth the habit only really took root in the late nineteenth century…
"There must be people researching medicine here as well."
Right. No matter how wonderful magic was, they would not have abandoned medicine entirely. Somewhere along the line one of those great researchers must have insisted that hands needed washing.
"A truly great discovery."
The number of diseases prevented by nothing more than clean hands was not small.
Anyway. What mattered right now was the simple fact that I had performed in front of the highest people in the land.
"Have I finally turned my life around?"
The man I saved had not even been the Northern Knight Commander. He was the Imperial Knight Commander. That meant the Imperial Family itself might reward me for the feat. Or they might be so impressed by my skill that they decided to keep me in the palace as a physician.
"…Is this too much wishful thinking?"
No. It was not jumping the gun at all. If the Imperial Family had any sense, they would absolutely express their gratitude.
"I don't ask for much."
Just one thing would do.
"If they can simply get me out of the North… I don't need anything else."
I was painting that bright future in my head when—
Knock-knock—.
Someone rapped on my door. I rose and opened it to find none other than Yulian standing on the threshold.
"What the hell did you do?!"
He blurted the admiration first, face flushed with excitement as he launched into a torrent of words.
"It's complete chaos out there! The butlers have been gathered since earlier talking about nothing but you!"
"……."
I already knew. On the way back to my room the number of stares I felt had been completely different from usual.
"Thanks for the compliments. But what brings you here all of a sudden?"
"Ah, well… everyone wants to ask you a million things and get friendly. But the only person who's ever mixed private conversation with you is me."
Aha. Because I was the loner of the group.
"So they told me to come ask how you did it…"
No, but…
And what 'private conversation' are we talking about?
They only ever came looking for me when they themselves were sick. While I was still nursing that irritation, Yulian scratched the back of his head and then, unable to contain his curiosity any longer, eyes sparkling, asked me outright.
"So how the hell did you do it?"
.
.
.
I recited the medical knowledge to him without the slightest filter—cardiac tamponade this, pericardium that, blood-flow pressure the other. Yulian's face promptly crumpled as though his head hurt; he declared he had not understood a single word and left of his own exhausted accord.
Having successfully shaken him off, I found the night growing deep and bedtime approaching. I was just about to lie down and close my eyes when—
Knock-knock—.
Someone knocked on my door again.
…Who was it this time? Coming at this hour was a nuisance. A flicker of irritation rose as I yanked the door open.
"……."
I swallowed the complaint that had been about to spill out.
"…Chief Butler?"
Standing there was the Chief Butler, his expression far sterner than usual. He stated the reason for his late-night visit without preamble.
"His Majesty the Emperor and the Grand Duke are asking for you."
"……."
"Come with me to where the two of them wait."
"Yes, sir."
I answered at once. Wasn't it obvious? They meant to reward me for saving the knight commander. I closed my eyes for a moment and pulled up the memory of the days when I had sweet-talked the hospital director—who had been ranting that the critical-care budget was far too large and needed cutting—into giving me even more money instead.
If I handle this the same way I did back then…
I would be able to work the Emperor just as I had worked that director, and walk away with exactly what I wanted.