Merchant Head Dieta (6)
After the duel, the reception room filled with visitors seeking Najin. The line stretched down the corridor and out past the building itself—nobles and gawkers who had watched the fight, and knights as well.
"Truly a splendid duel!"
Najin exchanged a few brief words with each of them.
At first the nobles dominated the queue, but as it wore on, the knights outnumbered them. Men of at least thirty or forty years shook Najin's hand with the bright eyes of children.
Perhaps that was only natural.
To a knight, a Free Knight was a dream one had cherished at least once. When the figure you had idolized as a child stood before you, anyone would become a child again. As they clasped Najin's hand, the knights recalled an old saying.
A Free Knight is the one who makes a knight a knight.
Those who had watched today's duel understood the weight of that sentence at last. It had been a duel that set the blood racing, a duel that called back a forgotten first resolve.
"Baltar, commander of the Orleans Knights."
Najin looked at the knight who had asked for his hand.
Baltar, commander of Orleans. A knight Najin knew as well—one who had spent decades on the boundary between the Continent and the Outer Land, carving out major achievements. A little over a hundred this year? Najin shook his hand.
"A duel that set the heart ablaze. I could not stop marveling the entire time. Insult is washed away by duel—that is what it means to be a knight. I agree with you wholeheartedly, Sir Najin."
Baltar nodded deeply. His expression was one of genuine satisfaction.
"And that final strike of yours in particular… as a swordsman before I am a knight, I can only revere it. How does one so young swing a blade of such weight? If it is not an impertinence, may I ask?"
"Of course."
The "weight" Baltar meant was not mere physical force. It was the years, the conviction, the mindscape carried in the sword. Najin nodded.
"It is a sword I learned from a knight who wandered the Outer Land for a hundred and fifty years. It is my sword, and it is his."
"Ah. Indeed. That noble soul would rejoice to see you as you are now. A fine blade."
Baltar stroked his beard.
"In an age when the name of knight grows lighter by the day, it is a blessing that men like you still exist, Sir Najin. The young ones will learn something from watching you. People say a Free Knight is the one who makes a knight a knight—but I have always thought of them as lighthouses."
"Lighthouses?"
"Yes. What is a lighthouse? In darkness where you cannot see an inch ahead, it lights the path and shows you where to go. To knights, you are something like that."
For a moment the image of Eurypylos the Lighthouse Keeper rose in Najin's mind. He smiled.
"To think that a man past a hundred, already dying, would live to see a duel that made his heart race like this. I am grateful to have felt this old body still capable of beating so hard."
Baltar called himself an old shell. Outwardly he looked no more than a man of thirty or forty, but the age he spoke of was not of the flesh. It was of the spirit—and of the erosion that had begun, little by little, to find him.
"What are you saying?"
Najin understood perfectly well, yet he tilted his head.
"You, an old shell, Sir Baltar? You still look full of life."
"Ha! Kind of you, but I am quite old. For all I look, I turn a hundred and thirteen this year. Erosion is starting to settle in. Time I headed for the Outer Land, I think."
"You are far too modest. Only five years ago you were still putting down highest-class demons."
"Hm?"
Baltar blinked, as if he had not expected that.
"You know of the Iron Demon campaign?"
"How could I not? The campaign against Shurason, the Iron Demon. You led it—an operation of six knight orders united."
Najin laid out the details of the Shurason campaign: the use of terrain, the way Baltar had bound the demon's power with earth and soil and finished the hunt. He spoke with a smile.
It was not flattery. It was not empty praise.
Najin, who had once idolized knights, had sought out their exploits after leaving the underground city, and Baltar's stories had been among them. Only a few years earlier he had read those accounts and dreamed of becoming a knight himself; the words he spoke now carried nothing but sincerity.
"And that was hardly the only one. The hunt for Gehel the Demon Contractor. The defense of the trade city of Oshirim. The purge of the black-mage heretics…"
Baltar's eyes went wide. With every operation Najin named, the corner of his mouth twitched, as if joy were something he could barely contain.
What knight would not rejoice when a Free Knight—a knight among knights—acknowledged him?
"Erosion is not proof of old age. It is a signal that a new road of adventure is opening. So you are not dying, Sir Baltar. You are standing at the threshold of a new adventure, are you not?"
"Hahahaha!"
Baltar finally burst out laughing.
He was a serious knight who rarely laughed; for him to cast dignity aside and laugh like this was not merely rare—it was almost unheard of. Yet now he slapped his knee and roared.
"You even make an old man like me feel like a knight again. Aye, you are right. There are those who live as knights for centuries in the Outer Land—what is a little over a hundred years to call myself old? I was thinking the wrong way."
He saluted Najin—deeper, sharper, more precise than when they had first met.
"If we should meet someday in the Outer Land, I hope I may have the honor of fighting at your side."
"You will always be welcome."
They shook hands, and Baltar left.
A few more knights came and went after him. Only after a long while did the endless line finally end. Najin rose from his seat. The moment he stepped out of the building—
"A moment, if you would?"
Griffin stood outside.
Najin looked at him and smiled.
"I was wondering when you would come."
"I am Griffin."
That was how he began.
Najin did not spoil it with something graceless like I already know. The man who had always introduced himself as "Griffin, Knight Commander of Arvenia" now offered only his name.
It meant he had come to speak not as Arvenia's knight, but simply as Griffin.
"May I ask a question?"
"As many as you like."
"I would ask what a Free Knight such as yourself believes a knight to be."
What is a knight? There had been a time when Najin would have answered at once. Not now. He answered the question with a question.
"And what do you believe a knight to be, Sir Griffin?"
"…I."
Griffin let out a short breath.
"The knight I believe in is a sword that serves its master with total loyalty. A sword that neither questions the master's decisions, nor doubts them, nor dares to judge—only obeys."
That was not a knight's idea of a knight.
It was a noble's.
Griffin knew it as well as anyone.
"I do not claim it is wholly right. But that is how I was taught, and that is how I have lived. For more than eighty years."
From the day he became a squire at fourteen until now, at ninety-six.
That was how Griffin had lived.
"I served the previous Duke of Arvenia, and the one before him. Fine men, both. To them I swore my loyalty. I would protect Arvenia. I would repay the grace of those who took in a man who had been nothing."
"I see."
"Yes. Right or wrong did not enter into it. I simply decided that was how I would live."
He looked up at the sky.
"I know the Arvenia ducal house stands on the brink of ruin. I know it will not last much longer, and that there is nothing I can do about the catastrophe that is coming."
And yet, he said.
"I will remain a knight of Arvenia until the end."
Follow the master's will. Neither doubt nor judge. Then of course one does not resent or curse the master either. One simply stays until the last. That decision had not changed.
But.
But, he said.
"And yet a thought came to me of late."
He looked at Najin.
"Have I already drifted too far from what a knight is?"
Griffin smiled bitterly.
"At some point I stopped being a knight and became only a sword. A sword that swings where the master points. I do not think that is wrong, and I believe such beings are needed. But now… after eighty years of living that way, I find myself, late as it is, feeling a regret."
"A regret for what?"
"That I never became more than a sword."
Gazing down the street washed in sunset, Griffin drifted into memory. What he remembered, which past he was revisiting, Najin could not know. He only added a single line.
"It is not too late."
"Not too late—but I have come too far."
"Is that so."
"It is. Too late now to try something new. What I can still do is hold the line until the end. I mean to be faithful to that role."
But…
He murmured it and looked farther still—past the horizon, a little beyond the place where the sun was going down.
"If I take my punishment, discharge my duty, fulfill the role I was given, and become free of everything…"
He pointed toward the horizon.
"I would like to go there."
He was pointing at the Outer Land.
In Griffin's eyes as he looked toward the Outer Land there was, however faintly, a light. Years of dust and impurity had fouled it, yet the raw stone within could still shine.
"You do not need my answer, then."
"Do not need it?"
"You already know the answer, Sir. You have simply not acted on it."
Najin walked past him, then turned back. He tapped the hilt of his sword once and said:
"Knight Griffin."
The Free Knight looked at the knight who had grown old.
"I will be waiting."
At those words Griffin's eyes went wide; then he smiled that bitter smile again. He saluted Najin. There was nothing more he could say to him now.
But the next time they met—
Then, there would be words he could speak.
"About three months left."
"Until what?"
"Until I become a duke."
Najin blinked.
"A duke?"
"Explaining it is complicated. Summarizing it is simple."
Dieta swept her hair back and smiled.
"I did what I do best. I made the Duke an offer, and I arranged every circumstance and every thread of context so that he had no choice but to accept it."
She tapped the table once.
A contract lay spread across it.
"Najin. Do you know what the virtue of a merchant is?"
"Selling things for as much as possible?"
"That is one of them. But a merchant is not only someone who sells, is he?"
A merchant is someone who buys and sells.
"Buy something valuable cheap, then sell it for as much as you can. That is the foundation of being a merchant."
Just as Najin had shown the fundamentals of the sword in the arena, Dieta was simply demonstrating the most basic of basics.
"A fine piece of property went up for a bargain price. So I snapped it up. I have a feeling its value is about to soar."
She held out a card to him.
"It has been a long time since I introduced myself under this name."
Dieta Arvenia
Next Head of House Arvenia
The card did not bear the name "Dieta" alone.
"Dieta Arvenia."
The family name she had once struck out with her own hand.
But Dieta had engraved that name upon herself again—by a different method than before.
"Next head of the Arvenia ducal house."
The Dieta Merchant Group had extended the Arvenia ducal house a vast loan of gold. And as collateral, they had not demanded anything grand. They had asked only that Dieta, the head of the merchant group, be granted the right to enter the succession struggle.
Every circumstance had left the Duke no room to refuse.
The fangs of the Gold-Swallowing Snake were already at the throat of the ducal house.