The Crimson Beetle (5) — Finale
Thinking like this, I find you drifting into my mind.
Vesta. Or should I be calling you Baatar? I cannot say. Did you even truly take to the name I gave you, in the beginning?
"If the whole steppe knew I was tying myself in knots over something like this, they would laugh until they cried. Do you have any idea..."
You probably don't, do you? That rather puts me in a sulk.
You called me Ashti, didn't you?
"Ashti, is it."
You—that is, you gave me the nickname Ashti. I did think it a little thin on effort, if I am honest, but that frankness of yours is one of your virtues.
Whenever you call me by that name, I will answer you with a smile. I will.
"Khan. It's Aruk. I've come with Altaia."
"Very well. Come in."
I was still sorting through my thoughts when Aruk and Altaira opened the door of the Ordo and stepped inside.
"So. You're here."
The moment the two of them entered, Arin's long horse-ears pricked up. She opened her eyes a beat later and stretched, slow and unhurried.
"Hm?"
A smile gathered in her round eyes. She simply seemed pleased that there were more people to talk to.
I drank the tea Altaira had poured and passed along a few instructions. The business was finished in no time, and a brief conversation opened in its place.
Perhaps because it was a gathering of women who had been of marrying age for some time now, even a serious topic would, before anyone quite noticed, slide toward talk of men.
Now they'll start in on me. Arin will be the one to ask, I expect.
It was prying into the Khan's private life, but knowing the centaur people as I did, I did not take it amiss. On a steppe that was a society of many races, that kind of generosity was necessary. We had not merely lived differently. We had been born differently.
Without generosity, how could one ever understand those born unlike oneself?
"Khan, what was your first meeting with Lord Vesta like?"
Even from the clumsy honorifics alone, I knew it was Arin. Lately this friend of mine had taken to asking about Vesta rather a lot.
"Our first meeting..."
"Lady Bia said she was standing outside, so she didn't hear a thing."
That day I had gone to the slaver's tent with no one in attendance. Just as Arin said, I had left Bia waiting outside.
Of course they would all be curious.
I had never thought of it that way, but it must have looked like some tightly wrapped secret—or a clandestine tryst.
"You're not the only ones wondering."
Aruk put in, lending her weight to Arin's words.
"Even when Asmur caused that stir, people weren't this curious."
When Asmur caused a stir—that would be the story of when she had picked up that boy, Rahan.
"I was a little surprised myself, then."
The woman reputed to be the most taciturn in the tribe had suddenly brought a man home and declared him her bridegroom. I had understood something of her inner nature, but I remembered the rest of the tribe being considerably taken aback.
"Well. It ended well enough, didn't it?"
Rahan had melted the frost that had lain over her heart, and thanks to him Asmur had been able to soften, just a little. What it meant for her as a hunter, I could not say—but for her as a person, and as a friend, it had been a good change.
Change. It was a word I had been turning over often, of late.
And I—how will I change?
It already felt as though I had changed a great deal. Well. I would leave that for later, as a pleasure still to come.
"Will you tell us?"
"Hmm. I'd rather not."
"Ehh?"
That memory felt as immediate as something that had happened only last night. I had followed the fussing slaver, and the child had been there.
That child, then...
"That is as far as this story goes."
Arin whined. I stroked her mane as I spoke.
Would he not ask me someday? When that day came, I wanted the answer to come from my own lips—not something he had heard from someone else.
How grown will you be, by then?
"Wait. I am waiting, too."
It may be sooner than I think. Every time I look away, you seem to have shot up again.
Vesta. I am almost there. Where are you now?
At this rate I will be the one traveling backward—back to the desert where you are. Back to that summer.
What a fortunate creature you are.
What Khan in this world would go in person to see her warrior off?
Two men approached the wreckage of the beetle.
"Good lord. This thing's been smashed to pieces."
The men clicked their tongues. Even by their look, they were not men who belonged to any caravan—though asking a desert wanderer his trade was a foolish business in any case. To live drifting across the sands was to be a traveler and an astronomer at once, and an antlion hunter and a sandworm exterminator besides.
"Whew. Looks like they stomped the dead thing and then stomped it again."
"Nothing left to salvage."
That they sometimes turned bandit was not a point worth omitting, either. The way they treated the beetle's corpse as if it were already theirs was almost funny, when one thought about it. They had not earned any glory. They had been hiding well out of the way.
"It's too torn up."
"Shame. A specimen this size doesn't come along often."
A single intact leg would have been enough to stop every passerby in their tracks. And then they would have ground the carapace to powder and sold it dear as medicine. That was the trade. There was no need to worry about whether it would sell. Anything that had lived a long time could be peddled as a remedy, whatever it was. Efficacy did not matter. It only had to look plausible.
If you're that sorry about the shell, fill half of it with sand or bone dust. No—make it two-thirds of whatever you've got lying around...
But that was a scheme for a carcass with its parts still properly attached. In its present state, there was nowhere this thing could be shown. The money-hungry caravan, or the Khan's army, would already have stripped away whatever pieces were still worth taking.
Even so, the hunters felt it was going too far.
"Come on, now. You people with power—you never spare a thought for the starving little rats, do you?"
There was no stretching a complaint quite like that one. His companion snorted.
"The problem is they really do think of us as rats. We're lucky they don't just step on us."
Having said so, the man took out his irritation on the beetle with a kick.
A dull bang. The thing was so hard it did not even scratch.
"Ah, damn it. My foot hurts worse. How the hell did anyone kill this?"
They made their living at rough work, and they were proud enough of themselves as men—but fighting a thing like this had never even entered their calculations.
"You didn't see it?"
The other man grinned, looking genuinely sorry to have missed a chance.
"You mean you didn't see the Master fight?"
"...Damn."
"And the kid fighting, too?"
"Kid?"
"Ha. Forget it. Tch."
"Hey, you bastard, don't trail off like that. Why?"
"How do you miss something like that? Honestly."
He waved the matter off, and their voices began to rise.
A thin, shrill trill cut through the air.
"...What was that."
The men, still in the middle of their squabble, stopped at the strange sound.
Kiiik. Kiiik.
"Something's off."
"Hey. That sound."
As wanderers of the desert, they had faced sandworms more times than they cared to count. The adults of that breed were more common than people thought. It was only the truly enormous ones—the ones large enough to threaten a merchant train—that were rare.
Perhaps this sound was...
"Let's go."
"Yeah. This isn't right."
Sensing danger, the men hurried away from the place.
Kirrik. Kirrik.
The sound did not stop. It went on, and on.
"I'm telling you, Ekharkhide looked at me and lowered its eyes."
"Oh, sister. That is genuine bluster."
"I knew you'd say that. Which is why I brought a witness this time."
She meant Vesta, of course. The elves' gazes swung toward the little Prince Consort.
To their senses he was a very peculiar child. Unsettling, perhaps—or simply impossible to pin down.
"Is it true, Prince Consort?"
"Well, that..."
"What? Is it really? Reaaally?"
The elves laughed and closed in around him, a bright ring of voices, and Vesta felt himself go light-headed.
"Well? Prince Consort. Please tell us."
He could not answer. He simply folded, limp as a dropped cloth.
He was a child of fortune born in the arena, that supposed pinnacle of imperial manhood, and until quite recently he had eaten, slept, and learned everything he knew inside those walls. Which was also to say that he had no immunity whatsoever to femininity.
A man coming at him with a blade he could snap aside with ease. That, if anything, was his specialty. But there was no answering a sweet, giggling, nasal voice as it came smiling toward him. If anything, Vesta had always been weak to softness.
It was precisely this that made the elves find him so curious. The same fearless boy who would charge a giant monster without flinching went distinctly soft around women. And he was rather cute besides.
Well then, of course we have to tease him.
The elves took the privileges of older sisters in generous handfuls, and felt something in themselves being satisfied as they did. There were almost no children in the tribe who would put up with being teased.
Rahan? Don't even think it. Behind that boy stood Asmur.
Whenever they felt her gaze resting on them, still and unblinking, their very knees went weak.
"Baaataaar?"
"W-well, it's true that Uushun stepped forward bravely, and also..."
A low whoom passed over his head. A shadow flicked across them and was gone.
A bird? Hardly. A cloud? No—clouds did not travel that fast.
The hair on the back of his neck stood straight up.
A grinding shriek of chitin.
"Ah. We're fucked."
That, of course, was Uushun. And this time, Vesta agreed with her completely.