XI. The Coming of the North Wind (5)
XI. The Coming of the North Wind (5)
Faint dawn broke, driving back the darkness that had covered the land.
The snowfield shone white again, revealing utter chaos. Keldric slowly guided Boreas through the churned slush.
"This is..."
Alisa drew alongside him and looked around in bewilderment.
Most of the bodies sprawled across the bloodstained snow belonged to Baron Gofrit's soldiers.
Keldric's nighttime torch deception had worked almost too well. Gofrit's men had panicked without putting up a proper fight and scattered in every direction.
But there was nowhere to escape on a vast snowfield where every step sank deep.
The cavalrymen and soldiers carrying five or six torches apiece simply closed in and finished them off.
The result was the massacre spread before Keldric and Alisa.
At least forty corpses lay scattered across the snow. Alisa's expression tightened with discomfort.
"...We won."
"So we did."
Keldric did not know it, but Alisa was deeply shaken.
Deceiving an enemy with torches at night was not especially unusual by itself.
No, even that was a rather unusual ruse... but something else had surprised her.
'He handled it so skillfully...'
Keldric's orders had been detailed and easy to follow: carry four or five torches each, shake them like a bustling army, and move constantly back and forth.
Thinking of the plan was one thing. Executing it was another.
More importantly, the tactic had preserved the lives and property of innocent villagers. That was a greater achievement than it might appear.
Even if Keldric had somehow captured Baron Gofrit alive, Lothar—who had come expecting an achievement—would have looked as though he had bitten into shit if Rundt had burned to ashes.
Keldric had moved like a seasoned knight, as though he had done this many times before.
The wandering knight who once asked Alisa question after question because he knew so little had vanished.
Could one battle truly change someone so much?
Something shifted in Alisa's gaze. It was the look of a scholar studying a new mystery.
The enormous knight before her had become a little more interesting.
'Wow. It actually worked.'
Keldric, utterly unaware of the way she was watching him, marveled to himself.
He had only imitated one of the deception tactics that appeared constantly in books like Romance of the Three Kingdoms, yet it had worked far better than expected.
An indescribable thrill surged up his spine.
His own plan had worked perfectly and produced an excellent result.
But it was time to set aside personal satisfaction. Keldric ordered the soldiers to recover the bodies buried in the snow.
The cold would freeze any corpses left outside, so disease was unlikely to spread.
Wolves and other animals were the real concern. Abandoned bodies would inevitably draw them.
"Collect the ones you can see. Do not wear yourselves out over it."
The recovered corpses were soon stacked in a broad clearing where the snow had been removed.
When the soldiers counted them, there were more than fifty.
"More than forty?"
"They gathered a large force for men fleeing a rout. If we'd fought them directly, things could have gone badly."
Sir Henri clicked his tongue and muttered.
If they had killed this many during the night, Gofrit's force must have numbered at least eighty.
In other words, Gofrit had managed to gather a fair number of scattered soldiers during his retreat.
Keldric raised his assessment of Gofrit's resourcefulness slightly.
The army had collapsed completely here, but in Keldric's view, making it this far had been about the best Gofrit could have done.
Sympathizing with the enemy was dangerous, but it was still necessary to consider matters from more than one perspective.
"Bring fire!"
Several soldiers brought dry straw and firewood from the village and stacked it beneath the bodies.
Some of it grew damp where it touched the snow, but there was enough dry straw to light the pyre easily.
Whoosh—!
Acrid smoke rose with a deeply unpleasant stench: burning hair and rancid flesh.
Keldric backed away with a grimace. Alisa followed, looking ready to vomit.
Keldric narrowed his eyes as he watched her.
'Now that I think about it...'
Alisa had been sensitive to smells since they first met.
Even Keldric grimaced at the sour reek of mercenaries, but Alisa reacted far more strongly.
The smell of burning things affected her most. At times, nausea had made her skip meals.
Could it be connected to her past? Keldric slowly considered a question he could not answer.
"Alisa, are you all right?"
"...Yes. I am fine."
Alisa pretended it was nothing, but she could not hide her pallor.
Keldric decided not to pursue the thought any further.
It would be ridiculous to invent an explanation while she said nothing. He trusted that Alisa would tell him when the time came.
"Sir Keldric, do you intend to remain here?"
"That..."
At Henri's question, Keldric looked far to the south.
The vast snowfield seemed endless. Its tangled footprints and churned snow made individual trails difficult to follow.
Which of those confused tracks belonged to Gofrit?
For now, there was no need to distinguish them. They could simply follow the tracks heading south, but...
"How long until Lothar's army arrives?"
"Let me see... I'd say three or four days at the earliest."
"Then we will head west."
"W-west?"
"We can move ahead to block the route or scout the surrounding area."
Henri reluctantly accepted the idea. Keldric's gaze shifted aside.
West, along the dirt road running through Rundt.
That was also the direction in which the sun set.
It was not meant as a metaphor, yet Keldric found himself imagining Gofrit's territory in the west.
In every sense, they were the setting sun.
The rising sun was on Keldric's side, and he had no intention of sharing its warmth with everyone.
'Yakov.'
Yakov's bloodless, deathly pale face still appeared in Keldric's dreams from time to time.
On those nights, he tossed and turned, unable to sleep.
"We'll remain in Rundt for one more day and leave at dawn."
"We will do as you say."
Leaving the smell of burning flesh and acrid smoke behind him, Keldric stared west.
If an opportunity came to avenge everything, should he seize it by any means necessary?
Keldric could not answer that question yet.
☩ ☩ ☩ ☩ ☩ ☩ ☩
After another day in Rundt, Keldric had the unit ready to depart the moment dawn broke.
The soldiers suffered as the freezing air shocked their half-asleep minds awake. Keldric was not much better off.
He still fared better than Alisa and Henri. The colder dawn wind left the two of them barely able to speak.
As preparations neared completion, the village chief and several villagers came to see Keldric and Henri.
"Sir Knight, thank you. Truly."
"If you had not been here, I do not know what would have happened to our village..."
They had long known that Gofrit's army was little more than a vast band of robbers.
No one knew the fate of neighboring Einhorn better than they did, especially since several survivors had taken refuge in Rundt.
Keldric was the man who had driven Gofrit's soldiers away.
Any other knight might have used that fact to demand a reward, but Keldric asked for nothing.
That earned him the villagers' deep goodwill. They had expected the soldiers to abuse them at the very least, but Keldric strictly restrained his men.
"Does this road lead directly to Einhorn?"
"Ah, yes, sir. That's right. It's about half a day from here."
"Please be careful, Sir Knight. Bandits are probably coming and going through Einhorn as though they own it."
A villager who had fled Einhorn gave the warning anxiously.
Keldric did not intend to stay in Einhorn, but he could not simply pass by if bandits were there.
"I'll keep it in mind."
"Sir Keldric, we should get moving."
That ended the conversation. The chief and villagers saw Keldric and the detached force off.
They followed all the way to the edge of the village, leaving many soldiers with an unfamiliar sense of pride.
"Maybe I'll settle in Rundt once this territorial war is over..."
"Men who say things like that always die."
It was an unfamiliar experience for them.
They were used to clearing bandits from around Bogenberg and maintaining order, but not to receiving heartfelt thanks from strangers.
"Doesn't feel bad."
"...No, it doesn't."
The mood warmed. The bitter north wind still blew without pause from beyond the mountains, but the soldiers hurried onward with smiles on their flushed faces.
They walked for hours. The sun reached its peak and then slowly began to descend.
Keldric had no intention of forcing another brutal march, so he allowed them proper rest this time.
Thanks to that, the soldiers' morale was quite high.
After winning two battles beside Keldric despite being outnumbered, the soldiers could hardly help feeling confident.
They continued until late afternoon, a time that could almost have been called early evening.
The seemingly endless dirt road grew increasingly neglected and difficult to traverse beneath the snow.
The signs that no one used the road anymore left a bitter taste in Keldric's mouth.
"Is that it?"
After an uncertain distance, Henri pointed ahead, and Keldric followed his gaze.
Far along the snow-blurred road stood the entrance to a half-ruined village.
Keldric's expression hardened. Henri scratched his cheek with an uncomfortable look.
"Let's go."
"Ah... yes. All right."
Einhorn was even more devastated up close than Keldric had expected.
The village entrance itself had been ravaged by fire.
Two or three unrecovered corpses hung from the half-burned palisade, which was now almost useless.
The deeper they went, the more misery appeared. Keldric's expression grew increasingly grave.
By custom, a lord who raided a rival's lands did not usually massacre the peasants in large numbers.
If he later gained rights to the territory, he would need those same people to pay taxes. Necessity encouraged restraint.
But that applied to ordinary plunder. Einhorn had been reduced to ashes.
If the residents had not been massacred, the survivors had only two likely fates.
They had either been sold into slavery or fled to nearby villages.
There were relatively few bodies in the burned-out village.
The survivors would have gone to Rundt. Anyone absent from there had probably been dragged away as a slave.
In this condition, Einhorn would take an extremely long time to rebuild.
Rebuilding the village, gathering lively people there again, and forgetting what had happened would all take years.
But some would never forget. Perhaps a survivor would carve 'Baron Gofrit, thieving noble and fucking bastard' onto some nameless stone.
"Fuck, this is awful."
"Those fucking bastards... Good thing we sent them to hell."
The soldiers were just as grim.
They had met the innocent country folk of Rundt only half a day earlier. Seeing this atrocity in contrast made their stomachs turn.
"Sir Keldric, what should we do?"
A mounted soldier approached. Keldric hesitated before answering.
"...Could anyone have survived?"
"We'll search."
It was probably a futile hope. No one could survive this cold in a place where everything had collapsed or burned.
As the soldiers spread out, Keldric noticed Alisa crouched on the ground after dismounting and walked over.
The flames were gone and the smell of burning had faded, but Alisa looked ill.
She covered her nose and mouth, repeatedly dry-heaving as she tried to settle her stomach.
"Urgh..."
"Alisa, are you all right?"
"...Yes, I'm fine."
Tears glimmered faintly in her blue eyes.
When their eyes met, Keldric caught the anger and hatred burning within them.
'Wise, but consumed by hatred.'
The demon's words returned to him. Keldric surveyed the ruins with a heavy heart.
Would anyone not burn with hatred after witnessing a scene like this?
'...Baron Gofrit.'
Baron Gofrit and the wizard bearing the flame emblem who had marched with him.
Perhaps the wizard Alisa pursued was connected to them.
A piece of wood with embers still glowing rolled nearby. Keldric silently looked down at it.
The drifting sparks had an oddly pale, viscous quality.
This was no ordinary fire. Embers like it remained throughout the village.
But even they would fade in time. Keldric stared toward the white clouds descending beyond the northern mountains.
The cold north wind would soon sweep in and extinguish every hot ember.
The embers kindled in the heart, however, were not so easily put out.
Not even by the north wind.