The Errand Boy (2)
See one thing, and you know the other nine.
It felt as though the Supply Officer's daily life was being drawn right before my eyes.
When food went cold, he found fire. When his body got dirty, he found water. When rain fell, he found a bed beneath a roof. The ideal existence.
Seek, and it is there. Ask, and it is given.
And precisely because of that, every last bit of it was what I yearned for so bitterly. A tomorrow I could stare at for a lifetime and never reach.
"…How does a person get to do something like that?"
The old man answered by drawing his sword partway from its sheath. He tilted the blade this way and that, examining it, and only belatedly turned his eyes on me.
"What kind of work, you little wretch?"
"The kind you do, sitting over there."
"What, eating?"
"Well… that included, yes."
The old man gave a short laugh through his nose.
"Wanting to be a Supply Officer, are you?"
A Supply Officer. I had a rough idea what the job entailed.
An army, in the end, was a body that only ran because someone fed it, clothed it, and looked after it. The world had changed, but that fact surely hadn't.
In my past life, too, I'd seen enough to know that supply work was never easy.
But I was someone who had gone through the pockets of corpses.
Hardship could be compared, and trades had their ranks of high and low.
That side of the fence, at least, got to eat its food warm.
Alternating my gaze between the old man and the tent, I asked a little more carefully.
"What exactly do you do?"
"Count the grain as it comes in, decide where it goes and how much. Keep an eye on the ledgers, too."
Apparently his duties weren't so different after all.
"Ledgers…."
"You've got to write down who took what and how much. Otherwise ten men eat, and it goes down as twenty."
It seemed that in any world, there were people who took payment for meals they never ate.
Civilization's conveniences had vanished, yet the concept of embezzlement survived intact. Surely inheritance should come with a priority list.
"I can do sums, you know."
"Aye. You know the value of your own goods down to the copper, like a demon."
"Not that. Adding and subtracting. I can multiply, too."
The old man slid the sword back into its sheath.
"Letters?"
"I can read."
"Hah. You?"
When a person says something, shouldn't you at least pretend to half-believe them?
It stung a little.
Granted, with the state I was in, no one would expect an air of scholarship from me—but judging people purely by their appearance was not a commendable habit.
I pointed at the sack sitting beside the old man's knee.
"Barley. Six sacks. East Gate warehouse."
That was what the wooden tag tied at the sack's mouth said.
The old man looked where I pointed, then flipped the tag over.
"Wasn't that already told to you?"
This old man and I had been working in smooth tandem for a week now.
A battlefield greeting. This bout of suspicion was pure WWE.
"You want to die for real? Who are you calling a liar?"
"No… if not, then fine. No need to get worked up…."
"Oh."
Apparently not, then.
When I scratched the back of my head sheepishly, the old man leaned his body forward.
Whatever his blunder a moment ago, he seemed to have developed a mind to listen.
"Who taught you?"
"A priest who was with the army, sir."
It had started with a single sheet of prayer I'd picked out of a pile of kindling.
I'd brought it to him because I wanted to learn letters, but the priest assumed I'd come to learn prayer.
There was no particular need to correct that misunderstanding, so I asked for his instruction wearing a suitably pious expression.
After that, whenever I drew water for him or ran an errand, I could ask him a few characters at a time.
Learn the sounds, and the letters remained. Learn the letters, and the meaning remained.
At first I could read nothing but prayers—but there was hunger in prayers, too.
After all, the bread written of in the prayer sheet and the bread written on the grain sacks did not use different words for it.
"What a clever child you are."
It was a verse about seeking today's daily bread.
In it, the priest read grace, and I read bread.
We each wanted something a little different, but there had been no difficulty in bowing our heads before the same verse.
And so the words I could read grew, little by little.
The priest rejoiced that I was bright, and I rejoiced that tomorrow I would have new characters to ask about.
We each looked forward to a slightly different future, but it didn't interfere with the lessons, so all was well.
Learning a new language to a working level hadn't taken all that long.
Which is to say, the results of being taught by a native speaker were tremendous.
Anyway—back to the present.
The old man rubbed his jaw for a moment, then spread out his fingers.
"Seven carts, twelve sacks to a cart. If nineteen get unloaded, how many are left?"
"Sixty-five."
It was simple arithmetic, but the old man said nothing even after hearing the answer.
"Hold on a moment."
His head bowed, and his fingers twitched a few times over his knee. Before long, a different light had entered his eyes as he looked up at me.
I straightened my back.
The interview atmosphere was better than I'd expected.
"You write, too?"
"As much as I can read."
"Not just barely scrawl your own name?"
"I can write the names of goods, and numbers."
The old man twisted his lips once.
It might have been a smile… or he might have just realized, too late, that he'd gotten the short end of some deal.
"If you had talents like that, you should have said so from the start."
So he'd only now realized that scheming to sell me off to some farm or pleasure house had been a waste of a good thing.
"Wait here a moment."
Inside the tent at the center of the camp, the Supply Officer was dabbing his mouth with a handkerchief.
Before long, the old man was scurrying off in the direction of my gaze.
At first, the Supply Officer took the old man's report lightly.
It was a story about some child trailing the army who could do sums.
The children who scavenged goods to sell all knew their coin counts, and children who knew their coin counts knew the price of their daily bread. Survival knowledge—the kind you picked up simply by staying alive.
"She reads, too."
At that, the hand turning over his documents stopped.
Plenty of hands could carry loads, but few could write a ledger.
Carts kept arriving while the records fell further behind, and every night the records slipped, the clerk's nights grew longer.
"Who?"
The old man pointed outside the tent.
There stood a girl in sun-faded clothes. Hair black as crow's feathers, worn loose and untidy.
On a face too pale to be hidden even by all that grime smudged the marks of a half-finished washing.
'Blood of the Evergreen Folk, mixed in?'
Her ears weren't pointed, but that fair skin and those ever-beautiful features were practically the emblem of their kind.
"You've verified it?"
"Yes. Says she writes, as well."
Reading, writing, and sums on top.
If it was true, that was a talent that gave her no business hauling scrap metal at her age.
Anyone who recognized that value wouldn't have left her out there like that.
He beckoned, and the girl came closer.
"Come here."
The girl stepped into the tent and stood before the table. Her eyes lingered for a moment on his food bowl before moving on to the paper in his hand.
The Supply Officer turned the handover list around.
"Read from here."
"Twenty-six sacks of barley. Thirty-eight sacks of flour. Seven sacks of salt."
Her voice followed the letters his finger pointed to.
Then he touched another line.
"And this?"
"Lamp oil… I don't know the word after it."
"Jars."
The girl nodded.
The Supply Officer covered the quantities she'd just read with his hand.
"Adding up all those sacks?"
"Seventy-one."
The answer came back without a flicker of hesitation.
"And if… we give out nine sacks of flour?"
"Twenty-nine flour, sixty-two in total."
The clerk, who had been whittling a pen at the side, lifted his head.
It wasn't difficult arithmetic. In the capital, those who couldn't do it would be rarer, if anything.
But here, on a battlefield like this.
Where blood was more common than ink and corpses more common than books, it was an extraordinary gift for a child who had never had so much as a day of schooling.
The Supply Officer slid the paper a little closer to the girl.
"Will you try writing?"
The girl took the pen.
The strokes tilted; the ink bled. Some characters were gaunt, others had put on far too much flesh—but there was nothing there he couldn't read.
"Where did you learn this… no. It doesn't matter."
The Supply Officer gathered himself and looked at the old man.
"What has this child been doing until now?"
"Scavenging goods, sir. Swords, boots, things of that sort."
"And selling them to you?"
The old man nodded, and the clerk standing guard at the back let out a long, long sigh.
"We've no one to do the copying, so every night—"
The rest of the sentence was carried by a look.
The clerk was staring at the Supply Officer. The meaning—don't let this one slip away—needed no words.
The Supply Officer collected the paper laid before the girl.
"Would you be willing to work under the supply division's clerk? In other words—I'm asking whether you'll enlist."
"Yes please, absolutely."
The girl accepted on the spot.
As if he'd been waiting, the clerk produced a fresh sheet of paper.
A vacancy had gained a person; now came the turn to fill the blank space with a name.
But the moment his pen dipped into the ink, it was the clerk's hand that stopped.
"My lord. A minor who wishes to enlist requires a guarantor."
The Supply Officer turned to the girl.
"Do you have family, or a guardian?"
"Of course I don't!"
It was the expected answer, and no question worth agonizing over.
The person was useful, and blanks existed to be filled.
"Then write that the army stands as guarantor."
The clerk's pen began to move again.
And so the muster rolls of the Kingdom's army grew by one.
It seemed military-style procedure didn't much care about era or nation.
When it can't be done, the regulations come first. When it can, the superior officer comes first.
Hang it on your ear and it's an earring; hang it on your nose and it's a nose ring—such are customs.
This time, I was the one it worked out for, so there was no need to quibble about institutional consistency.
"Oh, this is wonderful…."
After all, wasn't there a loaf of bread sitting in front of me right now?
I drew a slow, careful breath before it. Then I pressed down gently with my fingertips, and the thin crust crumbled—the soft crumb beneath giving way, slowly sinking.
When I tore off a piece, steam still warm rose from the fissure splitting along the grain.
"Haah…."
I put it in my mouth and chewed. At first it was savory, and as I chewed, it turned sweet.
The scent of fire clinging to the crust and the grain's sweetness soaked into the crumb dissolved gently into my saliva. It chewed without my having to clench my teeth, and went down without asking anything of water.
Now this is what living like a human being tastes like.
What I'd have to do from here on was simple. Just write down the words they dictated to me, and occasionally help out with a bit of arithmetic.
Who knew the world held a honeypot like this?
Even if the workload was light, this was still the middle of a war, so it would be a lie to say I wasn't in any danger.
But no matter where I went in my circumstances, it would be the same. If anything, this was a supply unit stationed in the rear—so it would be more accurate to say I'd actually gotten safer than before.
"AHAHAHAHAHA!!"
As if anything dangerous could ever happen to me.
Just for today, I would allow myself that comfortable little thought.