Clown or Knight? (1)
Who am I? Who was I?
I cannot remember my name.
In truth, the loss of my name had not come all at once. I had forgotten it decades ago already; the fact itself no longer felt new.
It did not feel new… and yet.
It was not only the name that escaped me now. Where I had belonged, what weapon I had wielded, what convictions I had carried, how I had chosen to act—how I had lived my life.
All of it was hazy, clouded as if by fog. The eyes behind the helmet went hollow.
The self itself grew indistinct. The inside of the helm itched. From the body sealed in armor came a wet, grinding sound—crick-crack. The Helmeted Knight clawed desperately at the fog that choked his mind. No matter how much he tore away, more fog pressed in; and within that swirling white he found a single helmet, left alone.
He seized it.
A Hornhelm. Proof that he had been commander of the Golden Horn Knights. The glorious horned helm. Ah—yes. He remembered. He remembered. Clutching the helmet in both hands, the Helmeted Knight groaned.
“Ah….”
With memory came the knowledge of the situation he had just occupied. It was easy—far too easy—to guess what would have become of him had the memory never returned. One wrong step, and the end waiting for him rose before his eyes. His body trembled.
Fear. He felt fear.
Hero of the Empire, Transcendent, Constellation, Sword Master—those grand titles were worthless now. What remained here was a single human being. A shabby, pitiful, wretched human.
That one human shook with terror. He wrapped both hands around his own helmet; the metal creaked under his fingers.
“Pull yourself together.”
A rattle of armor.
The Helmeted Knight’s body rocked; someone had seized him by the collar and shaken him. He lifted his head. There stood a shining star. A truly luscious star—the star that could keep him alive a little longer.
Star. Starlight. Life.
He reached for it as if entranced—then sucked in a sharp breath. His fist clenched hard around the war-banner draped across his armor. Pull yourself together. How far do you mean to fall?
“I was… thinking of something else for a moment.”
“······.”
“Why that look? I remember everything. I’ve got it all back. At my age the memory gets fuzzy—nothing to make a fuss over.”
He tried to joke, but Najin’s expression did not change. Najin’s teeth were clenched. Watching him, the Helmeted Knight thought: Sharp boy. He must have noticed long ago. And still he pretended not to see.
Fine. No more excuses.
He let out a long breath and spoke.
“Today is the twenty-seventh day, is it?”
“…Yes.”
“I promised you thirty, yet I never thought you would absorb everything this quickly. Learn the last technique and there will be nothing left for me to teach. Well? Do you have the feel of it yet?”
“…I will try.”
“Good. I’ll watch.”
Najin swung his sword. One after another he unfolded the forms the Helmeted Knight had taught him. The stance was perfect; the arcs the blade described were beautiful. Even to the eyes of a former Sword Master, Najin’s movements deserved a passing mark.
Except one.
Only that single technique could not be given a pass. The blade wavered. The posture wavered. A slash delivered with a trembling point was, of course, miserable.
Najin himself knew it. His face had gone rigid while he swung—guilt written plain across it. But the Helmeted Knight believed the boy had no reason to feel guilt at all.
That was not the boy’s fault.
Najin was an excellent disciple. He learned anything swiftly; his understanding was keen. Teach him one thing and he grasped ten—the kind of squire any knight would covet.
That so gifted a student still could not find even the first foothold of a single technique after more than a month… that was not the disciple’s failure. It was the master’s. The Helmeted Knight knew it.
He gave a bitter little laugh.
Of course it was hard to learn. He could have excused it by saying it was a Sword Master’s technique, that the very essence of a Sword Master’s life was steeped into it—but he did not want to.
“Enough.”
He stopped Najin’s sword.
“Stop. There will be no progress this way.”
“No—if I just keep at it a little longer—”
“Do not grow impatient. And this is not something that can be learned that way. From the start it was only natural that you could not imitate it.”
The Helmeted Knight looked up at the sky.
Stars were strewn across it. He murmured toward them.
“How could you swing a sword that even I can no longer swing? I have been trying to teach you something I myself have lost the ability to perform. When the example itself is broken, how could anyone learn from it?”
He exhaled slowly.
“I cannot remember. How I used to unfold that technique. How I drew out the sword-qi. All I retain are the sensations. I cannot paint the precise form, so I have been explaining by clinging to those sensations alone.”
“······.”
“So of course you cannot copy it. When the answer key is wrong, what good is mimicking the wrong answer?”
Najin’s grip tightened on his sword.
The Helmeted Knight lowered his gaze from the heavens. Looking down at his own rusted armor, he muttered,
“Memory… memory, is it.”
The technique that had been his very emblem.
The technique that had brought him glorious victories and made him a Sword Master.
Recalling it was not easy. That technique was the Helmeted Knight’s symbol—in other words, it was the Helmeted Knight himself. The memory he had lost the very moment he lost himself and was stripped of transcendence.
To recall it now… would be the same as ascending to transcendence once more.
A human who had forgotten even his own name.
A wraith wandering in milky fog.
One who could no longer believe in his own self—how could such a man rise to transcendence?
Impossible.
The Helmeted Knight looked at Najin.
Impossible… and yet.
In the days when he had been called a hero, he had accomplished impossible feats more than once. His gaze drifted far away, tracing the glory of the past.
“Ah… yes. That place still exists.”
He murmured.
“If I go there, it might come back. Yes—there, perhaps…”
A fallen star thrashes.
So that it may shine one last time.
The Outer Land resembled the subterranean city of Atman.
The thought came to Najin unbidden.
Of course, if one examined them point by point the comparison might not hold. This Outer Land was not a city into which worthless criminals were cast down; it was a place where the strong and the heroes who had reached certain heights gathered. To say the two resembled each other would be an insult to those heroes.
Yet still Najin felt that the Outer Land and the underground city were alike—because their atmosphere, their very nature, were similar.
Whatever the reason, the Outer Land was where those pushed out of the world piled up and settled; it was a landfill into which such things were buried. And it was full of people who had been robbed of their dreams and were slowly dying under the weight of reality. Even that, the two places shared.
“······.”
Perhaps that was why the Helmeted Knight’s back reminded him of Ivan.
“Where are we going?”
“To the place where I won my glorious victory.”
The Helmeted Knight answered Najin’s question. He pointed somewhere ahead and walked on without pause. Najin followed in silence.
“If I go there, I think I may be able to remember. The traces of my sword will still remain; if I look at them… somehow it should come back, don’t you think?”
“Is it far from here?”
“Not so far. A day or two of walking and we should arrive.”
The Helmeted Knight’s voice was light when he said it. Day by day his voice had grown lighter. His stride, too.
“Did you know, Najin? When I said I put a hole through the Revelry Emperor’s heart, that was no mere figure of speech. I truly pierced that heart and brought her star down.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes. Against a Constellation who held fully ten stars, I achieved that much. Guess how many stars I knocked down that day.”
“Well… two or three, perhaps?”
“If it had been only that many I would not be bragging.”
The Helmeted Knight laughed heartily and spread his hand wide.
“Five. I brought down five.”
Even Najin was startled.
“Five out of ten means she lost half. Is that not enough to turn someone into a wraith?”
“It is. Ordinarily, losing more than half one’s stars at once would make a person a wraith. But that woman’s stars are a little special, so it did not work that way.”
“What?”
“The Revelry Emperor wears masks and plays countless beings. A kind of multiple personality, if you will. When she loses a star, she simply discards the personality that corresponds to it—like a lizard shedding its tail.”
“What kind of—”
“The moment I dropped five stars, five new ones tried to rise in their place. The Revelry Emperor possesses dozens, hundreds of masks. She simply cannot handle more than ten at once.”
Do you know what those masks are? The Helmeted Knight did not wait for an answer. He answered his own question.
“They are the stars of the Constellations she has devoured.”
“······.”
“She dyes those stars in her own color and treats them as her own. She can wield only ten at a time, yet the stars she has collected number more than a hundred. Among them, no doubt, are the ones that once belonged to me.”
“Then how on earth… are we supposed to fight her?”
“Right? Looks hopeless, doesn’t it?”
The Helmeted Knight shrugged.
“Kill her again and again until she dies. That is the simplest method, but it is not easy. To make it work you would have to drag even the stars of the Round Table into it. So the remaining way… is to deny the existence of the Revelry Emperor herself.”
“Deny?”
“Yes. In the end the one who wields the stars is the Revelry Emperor. Cut through the stage she has laid, deny the very concept of revelry, and pierce the true body hidden behind the masks. I tried it once. I was able to inflict meaningful damage.”
He touched the sword bound at his hip.
“The moment she lost a star to me, she screamed—unlike when the other masks were shattered. She vomited blood and glared at me. She quickly put on a new mask, but I clearly saw the crack that had opened in her soul. The constellation that linked the five newly risen stars was unstable as well.”
“Then truly…”
“Yes. If I had not lost every last one of my own stars there, I could have finished it.”
Najin stopped walking.
The Helmeted Knight seemed to realize he had said too much; he smiled bitterly.
“Anyway, the place we are heading is exactly that spot. The place where I brought down five of the Revelry Emperor’s stars.”
He added,
“And the place where I last performed that sword technique.”
Originally it had been the Revelry Emperor’s domain, but the Helmeted Knight and the Golden Horn Knights had clawed it back. Now they were walking toward it, he said.
“It is also where the Golden Horn Knights are buried. I ought to bury Kruenbel’s horn trumpet there with them. Leaving only him out would be unkind, wouldn’t it? It took a while, but I should lay him to rest with the others at last. And…”
The Helmeted Knight let the sentence trail away.
He did not finish it, yet Najin knew what he had meant to say.
You mean to be buried there yourself as well.
You hope that place will be your final destination.
Najin noticed, but he did not point it out. From the moment the Helmeted Knight had set the thirty-day limit—or even earlier—he had roughly guessed as much.
“······.”
Even so, knowing did not stop his steps from growing heavier. The lighter the Helmeted Knight’s stride became, the heavier Najin’s own became—as though the weight had simply transferred to him.
Najin walked while remembering the past.
Ivan. Lately Ivan’s end kept flickering before his eyes. The back that had turned toward him, the voice that had shouted, “Go!” still rang in his ears.
Those who sense their own end often display certain traits. Najin, who had long worked as both tax collector and executioner in the underground city, knew those traits well.
They put their affairs in order. They begin to hand over or dispose of what they own to those close to them. Some thrash about, denying or fleeing the situation… but once every attempt is blocked by Najin, they resign themselves and break into laughter.
Truly light laughter.
Najin had seen that laughter many times. Heard it. That was why he could tell the Helmeted Knight’s laughter was the same—the peculiar, detached laughter of a man arranging the end of his life.
Yet the Helmeted Knight was not completely light yet. Something still clung to him. Was it because I have not fully mastered the sword technique? No—that alone did not seem to be it. Najin could not name the attachment precisely…
But he could guess that the moment they reached their destination, that attachment would be resolved. That knowledge made his steps even heavier.
“······.”
I want to stop him. I hope he will not do this.
The journey with the Helmeted Knight had been enjoyable; while they traveled together Najin had felt as though he were walking with Ivan again.
A master and a senior, and at the same time a friend with whom conversation flowed easily.
When he bantered with the Helmeted Knight, Najin laughed naturally and chattered without weight—exactly as he had once done with Ivan, without reserve. He could not deny that those hours had been joyful, that they had been precious.
Najin’s fist clenched tight.
Looking at a master preparing for his end, Najin felt tangled emotions. Yet he could not stop the Helmeted Knight. The Helmeted Knight wished to be a knight. Najin could not halt a man preparing a knight’s end. That would violate his own convictions.
Reason and feeling chose differently.
Najin’s convictions said this was right, yet his feelings wished the Helmeted Knight would not do it. Wished he would live a little longer.
“You look like a man with too many thoughts.”
Watching him, the Helmeted Knight smiled. Still that light smile—as if it might scatter at any moment.
“Do not pity me. Do not feel sorry for me either. I do not want my last moments wrapped in cheap sentiment like that.”
“I know.”
“Yes—a clever boy like you would. But knowing something and being able to control it are different things, aren’t they?”
“······.”
“That is how life works. Judging what is right is easy. But one cannot always choose only the correct answer as one lives.”
He spoke on.
“A life that can be lived and ended according to romance is beautiful. But for reality to be beautiful is difficult. Filthy, sticky, with nothing going the way one hopes—and even when one tries to remain beautiful, life smears mud on you from every side.”
Still, he said.
“Still—precisely because of that—is not the flower that finally blooms at the end beautiful?”
He wished his own end to be beautiful.
As so many heroes do, as the conclusions of countless heroic tales go, he wished his final moment to mean something.
Heh-heh.
But as he himself had said—
Heh-heh-heh, wahaha, hrrk—ahahahahahaha!
In reality a beautiful life is impossible. That is the nature of the world. The world is not a work of fiction, and heroic tales least of all. Nothing goes according to plan; far more people meet wretched, worthless ends than beautiful ones.
Laughter rose from somewhere.
The laughter grew louder.
Mad laughter, scornful laughter, hollow laughter, roaring laughter—every kind of laugh echoed. Music made of laughter rolled across the empty wasteland where nothing stood.
And then—
“Applause!”
Thunderous clapping rang out. Cheers and applause loud enough to shake the ground echoed together.
At the center of that roar stood a man. He wore armor that called to mind a ridiculous clown—red, blue, yellow, green, gaudy colors plastered over every plate. Mounted, he raised a lance.
No—that was no warhorse. Not a horse at all. A shabby, pitiful, even grotesque beast. Astride a donkey-like monstrosity, he lifted his lance high.
“Applause for the actor who has taken the stage! Cheers! Frenzy! And something greater still—”
The one-eyed knight.
The human from whom every emotion but laughter had been castrated.
The clown who could express himself only through laughter.
“—mockery.”
A seven-star Constellation.
The star that mocks knights—the Star of Contempt.
Quixote, Knight of Revelry, charged.