Happiness
A formality, he calls it. I had suspected as much, but I never thought they would bare the bottom of the barrel quite like this.
The elf Marcella stroked the green hair gathered into her ponytail and let out a thin, incredulous laugh. For some reason, her scalp was burning.
“Still. They do make a decent cup of tea.”
She had taken a few sips of the lemon tea out of sheer boredom. Tart and sweet—exactly suited to her taste. This was no hour for savoring it, though, so she drank only half and set the cup down.
She was the foremost warrior of the Udriana clan. Udriana: one of the five noble clans granted the right to live nearest Mother World Tree. And Marcella was the finest warrior not merely of that clan, but of the entire Great Forest. From childhood she had honed her martial skill day and night with unflagging diligence—not the leisurely polishing of a genteel accomplishment, but training pursued as if her life depended on it.
For that, her own people had once treated her as a peculiar elf. Even her family.
“Marcella. Today I heard something unpleasant from the Elder. He said your conduct resembles a human’s. To be honest, I think so myself. Panting from morning until night, obsessed with training—is that not the sort of thing only a short-lived race would do?”
Advice she had once received from her father. Elves of her own age had gone further still, spreading a disgusting rumor that Marcella’s maternal grandmother had been a half-elf tainted with human blood. She had made an example of them, and earned nothing for it but a worse reputation. Even her violence, they said, resembled a human’s.
Back then, even I thought there was something wrong with me.
Noble, and yet always on the outside. That was Marcella.
Those years of humiliation ended with the humans—more precisely, when the conflict with the Britannia Empire began. In the struggle against an empire that had dared push into the Great Forest with its eye on the forest’s resources, Marcella became the linchpin, her exploits unmatched. Had she not led the younger elves and held the imperial army in check, the Empire might by now have reached for the World Tree itself. On the surface they claimed to want minerals and timber, but what the Empire truly desired was surely the World Tree. Probably.
She was the heart of the Great Forest now. The elders still kept her at a wary distance, but those old fossils would all be dead or retired in a hundred years—two hundred, at the outside. And the imperial army’s withdrawal this time was, without question, Marcella’s achievement.
By rights she ought to have been glad. The feeling was strange.
Humans would never pull back this easily.
The retreat was nothing but a bluff. There was certainly some scheme beneath it. And yet she still could not catch even the shape of what they intended.
What was it. What, exactly.
“Lady Marcella. There’s still half the lemon tea left?”
A subordinate’s voice, cutting in on her brooding. Marcella managed only an empty laugh.
Is the tea what matters right now?
Allan Madoff. Before anything else, she had to read the mind of the human who had so impudently talked the elves down.
“You’re not drinking it? It’s terribly bitter, so it’s terribly good.”
“Be quiet for a moment.”
“But it’s really good. Why don’t you see that? No… why don’t you see this? There’s still half left. Half left means it’s that much of a good thing, doesn’t it?”
“……?”
What is wrong with that way of speaking. Sensing the wrongness, Marcella raised her head and slowly looked over her subordinates.
Ten elites, chosen with exacting care against any eventuality. Warriors she had brought prepared, if it came to that, to fight. There was no chance they would lower their guard. If anything, they ought to have been warier than usual, watching every corner of the room.
They ought to have been.
And yet, somehow, the lot of them had gone thoroughly slack.
“Mother World Tree embraced me…!”
A she-elf, swaying and grinning, her face rapturous. She clutched the little cup that had held the lemon tea as if it were precious beyond measure, murmuring World Tree, World Tree in a melted little voice.
And one had come even further undone.
“Lady Marcella. The truth is, I didn’t want to come here…? If the humans blow their gunpowder to kill us, you might survive somehow, but the rest of us die or get hurt. But now that I’ve come and had the lemon tea, and even eaten the lemon bits, I think it was good that I followed you. Actually… even back when we were smearing poison on the traps, I didn’t really want to, but looking at it now, we did the right thing. …That aside, Lady Marcella. The truth is, I didn’t want to come here…?”
There was an elf spilling, without a care, sensitive information that should never have been spoken in front of Allan—hands stuffed in pockets, back leaned against the wall.
At least those two could still hold a conversation.
“Heh…”
The other eight were strewn about however they had fallen. Pupils pinched to an unnatural smallness. Faces gone vacant beneath faint smiles. One of them even trailed a clear string of snot.
All this, from a single cup of lemon tea. Was it not astonishing? How potent must it be, to make them this happy—
No. That wasn’t what I meant to praise.
Feeling the wrongness fill her, Marcella looked at the cup, still about half full. Lemon tea, they had said, steeped from dried lemon and honey. A slice of lemon rested demurely at the bottom. Perhaps because the lemon was so pretty, her body kept growing lighter, and her worry over Allan Madoff began, little by little, to fade.
It’s nothing, isn’t it…?
In truth, whatever schemes humans of that caliber might hatch, they amounted to nothing. She was magnificent and strong, and could overcome anything at all. The humans must have known it, which was why they were offering this precious lemon tea to win her favor. Otherwise they would have given her some other, trivial tea, wouldn’t they?
“That’s right. I’m fine.”
Even so, she had no wish to drink what remained. If she drank this too, she felt she might become happy past the point of bearing.
“You’re not going to drink it? I went to the trouble of preparing it.”
She declined even this urging from Allan Madoff. But the patience she had managed to summon did not last long. In the end she failed to hold out even ten minutes, and drank the lemon tea down—not because she wanted to be happy, but simply because her throat was a little dry.
Quenching one’s thirst is important.
Allan Madoff watched her, unblinking.
Before me, eleven elves lay sprawled in the most blissful disorder. One rolled about on the carpet. One stared blankly at me through tears. And one, wearing a look of regret, lapped at the rim of a teacup. The last was faintly shocking, but there was nothing strange about it. By now they would be tasting the greatest happiness of their lives. Having seen with my own eyes that the mechanism of action was the same as in humans, I could be entirely certain.
A pleasure they could never feel merely gazing at the World Tree. Probably.
I hadn’t loaded the heroin for nothing. Morphine, of course, brings a kind of euphoria along with its relief of pain, but that pleasure amounts to roughly twice an ordinary happiness—not a bliss so vast and far-off that a single dose leaves you giggling in a stupor. Endure the withdrawal, and one need not fall into morphine addiction.
Heroin, though, is difficult to resist.
I waited calmly, and gave the elves time to flounder in their happiness.
“Human…!”
An hour later, Marcella looked at me through somewhat clouded eyes. Moisture clung at the corners, but otherwise she was in better shape than the rest.
“This isn’t just tea. Why is it this good?”
A reasonably sensible question, all things considered. If I meant to spread heroin through the elves as a whole, everything from this moment mattered. I held Marcella’s gaze, then nodded.
“It could hardly be otherwise. I put heroin in it. The name is one I gave it.”
“Hero… in…?”
“I am a knight, and at the same time an apothecary. And heroin, to speak plainly, is a medicine I made because of your race. I wanted to present it to the soldiers who distinguished themselves on the day the imperial army finally subdued you elves and returned in triumph to the Imperial Capital.”
“……”
“You’ve tasted it, so you understand. Where would one find a medicine better suited to veterans? The scars of the battlefield vanish, and happiness and relief fill their place. But… a decision from above ordered a sudden withdrawal, and it lost its use.”
“Scars.”
From her expression, she seemed to be following. Judging that I ought to show a little more sincerity, I let out a sigh.
“To offer a medicine like that… a medicine I made with such care… to a breed it wouldn’t even satisfy me to beat to death with a mace. Could anything be more hollow.”
“Human…! What did you just say.”
“I heard what you were saying among yourselves just now. You smeared poison on the traps, did you? Is that something to boast of with an envoy sitting in front of you?”
“……”
“The truth is, one of my friends lost a leg to those traps. He underwent an amputation, and he lives in despair even now. …Wounded men are common enough in battle, but I shouldn’t need to explain how it feels to offer the finest hospitality to the very people responsible.”
Having said as much, I sighed, putting on a show of emptiness—lamenting a reality in which medicine made for heroes had to be served to the enemy as refreshment, a reality in which I had to honor, lavishly, the ones who had harmed my friend. Of course I had no friend who had lost a leg. They had no way of knowing that.
By this point the elves’ side of the room had grown somewhat solemn as well. Even the one who had been licking the teacup stopped, as if abashed.
“Human. I never asked you for courtesy of this kind. If anything, you gave it without any consultation at all.”
“Yes. A gift I offered on my own, hoping to win a little of your favor. Had I known you were a hard-line clan, I would not have gone this far—but I won’t demand that you spit back up the heroin you’ve already taken. I was simply a damned fool.”
“……”
“I will ask only this one thing.”
“A request?”
Instead of answering, I motioned to an official of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to bring the gift I had prepared. The box was rather splendid. Inside, arranged with exacting neatness, were a small porcelain bottle holding thirty grams of heroin, a set of measuring tools, and ten pipes made expressly for its use. A courteous, simple guide to taking it, of course.
“This is heroin. I would like you to deliver it to your elders as a gift. You yourselves, however, are not to touch it. This is not a gift I prepared for those who humiliated, to his face, a man who came as an envoy.”
“……”
“Enough. Return to the Great Forest. And… I say it again: if you have any sense of shame, do not lay a hand on the heroin. It is something I made with the effort of a lifetime.”
With that, I asked Marcella and the other elves to leave. Whether from the drug or not, they drifted slowly out of the negotiation chamber. The gift box that held the heroin, though—that, they did not forget to take.
It didn’t matter whether they helped themselves to the heroin or presented it to the elders. What mattered was that I had given it to elves who had already tasted the drug. I had even thrown in the pipes for good measure—better absorption, and easier to spread.
The spread was only a matter of time.