9. Black and Gold (3)
9. Black and Gold (3)
The elderly gardener left the position he'd held for thirty years and made his way to the Bergson Trading Company headquarters in Vegas.
He requested a meeting with the chairwoman.
Anais Bergson was not someone you could simply walk in and see on a whim.
Even a former manager of the Tomato Greenhouse hardly had the standing to command an audience with the chairwoman of a major trading company.
Gaston, however, was certain she would see him.
He played the doddering old man who knew nothing but plants and dirt, but underneath he was sharp and cunning. Thirty years living in the Regent's Residence had honed his instincts and opportunism to a level that rivaled any veteran politician.
Anais read the letter he sent and tasted something bitter.
Its surface was filled with pleasantries that recalled their last meeting, but the real message was this:
'You received the gift I gave you quite nicely, didn't you? I'd like you to do me a small favor in return.'
Had the thing he gave her been an ordinary trinket, she would have paid him back with something pricier and washed her hands of the matter.
But she couldn't do that with a Golden Tomato.
The fruit came from the only tree of its kind in the world and yielded fewer than a hundred a year. The Regent of Charlotia presented them annually to royalty and dignitaries across the globe. If you lined up the powerful by rank, more than half the top hundred were on that list of recipients.
So the news that she'd been given one had briefly elevated her own reputation—even if it came not from the Regent but from a gardener.
Nothing in this world was free. You paid for what you got. That was the rule.
She admitted she'd been naïve.
The gardener's gruff, master-craftsman air had fooled her. It had never occurred to her that he would use an object offered as an apology as leverage to extract something from her.
'When you receive a "gift" in exchange for anything, leave proof of it.'
Her uncle's old saying came back to her.
He'd been too seasoned in the field to make this kind of mistake. He would have found some way to ensure the world knew it was a gardener's gesture of contrition.
But she had let the matter end with the words exchanged between the two of them. She had put too much trust in the official setting of the Regent's Residence and overlooked the danger of off-the-record conversations.
The cracks in her experience dealing with people showed.
With no real choice, she received the old man in the parlor.
"A pleasure to see you, Master Haliwooden. I was surprised to hear the news of your sudden retirement not long ago."
She said it as if she'd been following his affairs for ages, though she'd only learned the details from a document the secretarial office handed her five minutes earlier.
As far as Anais could tell, his motives were a complete mystery. Playing the Golden Tomato card gave him no obvious advantage in currying favor with her.
So when the pleasantries ended and he got to the point, she couldn't help but be caught off guard.
"You want me to arrange a meeting with Troupe Leader Wonderstein?"
She had not expected that name to come out of his mouth. Burying her confusion as best she could, she asked,
"May I ask why?"
"I want to take him as my apprentice."
He launched into an animated account of the astonishing skill he had witnessed from Wonderstein.
Anais felt both flustered and pleased.
A talent that could captivate the keeper of the Tomato Greenhouse—what kind of childhood had that man lived?
She was genuinely glad someone else had appeared who recognized his worth.
But the notion of making him an apprentice came out of nowhere. The Wonderstein she knew was a man who lived for the circus. Would he even entertain such an offer?
She told him she'd see what she could do and sent Gaston on his way.
For Anais as Chairwoman of Bergson, there was no reason to agonize over this. If a single letter of introduction could settle the debt of the Golden Tomato, it was a bargain.
For Anais as herself, however, she needed to think a little longer.
'Would he be happy to see that old man?'
She opened her drawer. Inside, months of letters between them lay stacked.
Hers mostly related the small stories of her days; his reported on the team's training progress and their use of funds.
Anyone else would find it incomprehensible that she kept them like love letters.
But to her they felt like something else.
A man and a woman, far apart, wholly absorbed in their separate work and dreams, exchanging news through letters alone. Encouraging each other from a distance until one dream finally came true—and then the confession.
It was romantic. A soft, dreamy smile slipped out.
While she was still mulling over how to handle Gaston's request, a letter from Wonderstein arrived from Yeterinpurk.
His deputy had suffered an accident, her memory had been damaged, and he needed help. Since using a mental mage carried risks, he asked her to look into other methods. It was his medical judgment, so Anais accepted it without argument.
Among the treatment paths he suggested, she chose the one that required borrowing power from the Alchemy Guild.
That allowed her to handle both immediate problems at once.
Gaston was one of the guild's masters.
That didn't mean "master" conferred sweeping authority. The Alchemy Guild was not the secretive, closed cabal it looked like from the outside. Craftsmen and experts traded techniques, intelligence, and materials through it; it functioned more like a commercial guild that controlled distribution and pricing.
Gaston's position as Master of Herbology, in modern terms, was roughly equivalent to the head of a farmers' cooperative.
He embraced her proposal eagerly. Being able to place Wonderstein in his debt would make it far easier to bring up his own request.
"Good to see you, Troupe Leader Wonderstein. We've met before. Remember?"
"...Aren't you the old gardener from the hotel?"
Gaston introduced his other identity.
"An alchemist... I see. Forgive me for calling you 'old man.'"
"Not at all, not at all. That 'old man' has a warm, friendly ring to it. Ha, please, keep calling me that."
He put on his most genial, grandfatherly smile—doing everything he could to leave a favorable impression.
"Have you performed this sort of treatment often?"
"Worry not. I used to administer moxibustion to the previous Regent's wife. The Regent himself, whenever his headaches grew severe during his official work, would have me burn incense for him."
For the first few days, Gaston devoted himself entirely to mapping out a treatment plan for Ella. He combined various herbs, adjusting the proportions bit by bit until her body accepted the mixture.
As time passed, however, more and more of his words strayed.
"Still no interest in gardening?"
"Cultivating plants isn't only about toiling away in a garden plot."
"I only say this because it pains me to see talent go to waste."
"I'm not telling you to carry on my legacy. You could become the steward of the Imperial Ginseng Fields in Kiev, or set foot in the Mandrake Garden the Alchemy Guild protects."
He'd summon Wonderstein on the pretext of discussing Ella's regimen, then spend most of the conversation pressing him to consider taking up plant cultivation.
Wonderstein's response never wavered.
"Is that so?"
"I see."
"You think so?"
Perfect, unbroken indifference.
He had used those gardening skills at the hotel in Rouge only to test the Skillbook's effects. The prospect of tending a garden held no interest for him. Above all, he had no time to glance away from the tasks that would serve his real goal.
That alone was enough of a headache, and recently another problem had added itself to the pile. It greeted him the moment he opened the door.
"What kind of treatment now? I'm telling you I'm fine! Every time this runs long, we lose practice time!"
"Do you think a wound from the Reaper's Scythe heals just because you slept it off? There are lingering effects, girl!"
"We've been treating it for days and there's no progress! Are you a quack, Grandpa?"
"A quack? You insolent brat! Those were the days we fine-tuned the herbal mixture—the real treatment begins today!"
"Insolent brat? This old geezer— Ah! Troupe Leader!"
"Old geezer... Hm? Ah, you've come."
The two twisted faces unknotted the instant they saw Wonderstein.
He regarded them with a pained smile.
Gaston and Ella.
Lately, their shouting matches accounted for half the noise in this rented villa.
It hadn't started that way. At first, seeing how respectfully Wonderstein treated the old man, she treated him with deference too.
The rift opened when she realized Gaston kept trying to lure Wonderstein down a different path. Ella turned hostile and began picking fights; Gaston, for his part, grew irked by the girl who filled the ears of the kid he'd mentally earmarked as his apprentice with nothing but training talk and competition strategy and circus nonsense.
"Look here, Troupe Leader. Talk some sense into this girl, will you?"
Wonderstein turned his gaze to the black-haired girl refusing treatment. She sat perched on the edge of the bed, her face set in a sulk.
"Miss Ella, wasn't it you who said this treatment is essential?"
At that, she pushed out her lower lip.
"When did I say I needed all this treatment? Did I go crazy or something?"
"That's not..."
"I don't want to put my body in that old man's hands! Aren't you worried about what he'll do while I'm asleep?"
"What?!"
Wonderstein caught Gaston's arm before the old man could burst forward.
"All right. What if I administer the treatment myself?"
The faces of both Ella and Gaston lit up at the same moment.
"Huh? Really?"
"Ha! Is that true?"
Ella was pleased she'd have his personal care. Gaston, finally, had a chance to teach him something.
Wonderstein registered the medicinal technique in his Skillbook.
Of course, that alone couldn't treat Ella. Past experience had taught him the Skillbook could only burn a purely one-dimensional technique into the body. The detailed procedure still had to be drilled into him by Gaston.
"Yes, yes. You place the moxa on those eight acupoints, and then...."
Gaston's smile stretched ear to ear as he passed on the method.
The boy who acted utterly indifferent to his craft now absorbed every lesson immediately and executed the movements with flawless precision.
'Wasting this kind of talent on mere tricks and entertainment—it's a shame! I must make him my apprentice!'
After spending an hour perfecting the method under Gaston's eye, Wonderstein went in to treat Ella.
She had gone to the adjoining room to change into sleepwear. Now she returned to find the bedroom hazy. Smoke from incense burners swirled thickly around the bed—four different herb blends pouring out four distinct scents.
She glanced around, searching for him.
"I-I'm supposed to lie down on the bed and burn something...?"
Just then, he appeared behind her, mask in place.
"Heh, there's no need. I'll lay you down myself."
"W-wait a... w-what?!"
He slipped one arm under her legs and the other under her waist and lifted her. Her small frame fit neatly into his arms.
"H-hey! P-put me down!"
Her face flushed scarlet; she thrashed to pull free, but it was pointless. He carried the squirming girl straight toward the bed.
The smoke pouring from the burners wrapped around her.
A gasp of breath. Her pupils went hazy, her gaze fixing vacantly on the ceiling. In a heartbeat she drifted into a semi-conscious trance.
"Ah... y-you sneak...."
"I heard you fooled the old man once by pretending you'd inhaled the smoke, heh. My apologies. Had to prevent that."
He laid her, giggling from the fumes, down on the mattress.
"Now, I'll place the moxa. Lift your right arm, please."
"Mnn...."
She obeyed him like a doll.
He pressed the crushed herbal paste onto the acupoints along her arm, her neck, her brow.
"Nnngh...."
Each application pulled a soft moan from her.
Finally, he placed the pill Gaston had prepared onto her tongue.
"Chew it up well and let it melt in your mouth."
"Got it...."
This was the medicine that would stimulate her memory centers. He watched her lips work around the pill, then drew the curtains around her bed and left the room.
Thud. The door clicked shut.
In that instant, the light returned to Ella's eyes—still staring emptily into space. She let out the breath she'd been holding, and the smoke scattered away from her nose.
The truth was, the smoke hadn't affected her.
The moment he appeared behind her, she'd grasped the situation, clamped her breath shut, and faked the reaction.
He'd kept talking to verify the smoke had taken hold, but she'd answered without inhaling—producing the voice through ventriloquism, a skill she'd long since perfected.
"Ugh... did he really have to carry me?"
Her face burned as she replayed what had happened. The struggle to keep her breathing steady while held in his arms had nearly killed her.
At the end, when his finger slipped briefly into her mouth to place the pill and then withdrew, she had almost lost the fight and breathed out.
"Honestly...."
She flicked out her tongue and spat the pill she'd concealed beneath its root into her palm.
The pill was intact, barely scuffed.
She had only mimed chewing; she'd kept it in place without biting. She'd dried the underside of her tongue beforehand, too, so the pill hadn't dissolved at all.
"I told them I don't need treatment."
She tucked the pill quietly into her pocket. Then she breathed in the smoke, let pleasant dreams wash over her, and fell asleep.
There wasn't a single bad memory to trouble her.