A Blossom Caught on a Twig (4)
Quite some time had passed since the People of the Summit had run wild, and the animals were returning to something close to their former numbers.
Yet things were not entirely the same.
Just as the creatures and plants had changed with the shift from sweltering heat, so too did the weather change again, and here and there animals simply stopped appearing.
“Chester, look at this.”
While they walked the forest setting traps, Monia suddenly noticed the pure white breath curling from her own lips. Fascinated, she began puffing little clouds into the air.
Until now she had always spent winter shut away in a warm manor; she had never even known that cold made your breath visible.
After laying traps throughout the woods and taking a look around, Chester and Monia headed for the beach.
There, every last scrap of wreckage had been cleared away, and a villa was just beginning to rise again.
Cannon fire from the ship and the stones the People of the Summit had hurled so carelessly had shattered plenty of trees; those broken trunks were now being used as timber for a sturdier villa.
In short, the villa Chester and Monia were building was a log cabin.
The villa had only ever been meant as a place to while away the hours watching for ships on the sea, so walling it in completely as a log house might have seemed pointless.
The real reason for this new villa was to create a storehouse for things they wanted to keep but did not need right away—things too valuable to leave scattered about.
After the recent incident, such objects had piled up all over the courtyard of their home, and something had to be done with them.
“Shall we start by looking through the wreckage again today?”
“Yeah. There’s so much of it we still haven’t finished sorting.”
The ship had been right up against the island. On top of that, the stones thrown by the People of the Summit had churned the sea so violently that a truly astonishing amount of cargo had washed ashore instead of sinking.
Of course some things had vanished into the depths, but there was no need to mourn what was gone. Better to rejoice in the luck that had fallen into their hands.
“Oh, this is a fishing rod.”
“Does that mean we can catch fish too?”
Chester nodded at Monia, who was speaking more casually these days than she once had.
“Fishing, huh. I learned a little, once.”
“Really?”
“Kids go down to the river to play and fish. The fish they catch while fooling around become that day’s food.”
Monia nodded, intrigued, and examined the rod until she found the sharp hook.
“Ah, so you shape the end like this so the fish can’t pull free easily…”
While she studied the hook, Chester searched for oil.
The best way to store things was oil. Once you submerged something in oil, it would last a long time with almost no further care.
In some regions they even preserved meat for months by packing it in animal fat—oil was that useful as a storage medium.
“There’s a preserved food like that?”
“Yeah. I think it’s called confit? They say the meat tastes good when it’s been sitting in oil, but I’ve only heard of it. I don’t know how to make it.”
“Why not?”
“Oil’s heavy.”
It might work as a preserve left behind in a village, but for a hunter like Chester who had to travel light, or for anyone covering long distances, it was a poor fit.
“Ah—and even if we find oil here, don’t use it for cooking.”
“Huh? Why not?”
“It’s not the kind you can eat.”
“Heh. So there are different kinds of oil.”
“This wasn’t a whaler, so there won’t be any whale oil.”
“Oh, whales! I know those. They’re used for perfume, right?”
Chester paused for a moment at Monia’s words.
They make perfume from whales? Noble life really is beyond me.
All Chester knew about whales was that people hunted them for meat, sold the bones for charms, medicine, or ornaments, and used the oil for lamps or lubricant. He could not begin to imagine which part of a whale went into perfume.
In truth, he had never even seen one.
The whale in Chester’s mind was a ruler of the sea larger than an island, with eyes like great orbs the size of a man’s head and a maw that could swallow a person whole.
Because of that, the image of a whale inside him looked more like a dragon from a fairy tale.
There is a noble house in the kingdom that uses a whale as its crest, but they slap so many extra flourishes on the design that you can barely tell what the original creature is supposed to look like.
“Ah, you thought that was strange just now, didn’t you.”
Monia read the expression on Chester’s face and laughed.
“I’ve only used it once myself, you know? The kingdom has no whaling ships, so to bring in anything related to whales you have to cross several countries, mountains, and seas.”
She shrugged.
“The Duke obtained some, used it, and then decided it wasn’t worth spending that much money to get more. He never bought it again.”
Another change in Monia was that she no longer called the Duke “Father.”
She had still used the word, once. Perhaps it had been the last scrap of hope left inside her.
The hope that her father had not abandoned her, or that she might one day return to the kingdom and live as a noble again. That fragile heart anyone clings to in despair, the habit of looking at a situation too gently and refusing to see it coldly.
But after the terror and anxiety of those who had come to seize her and drag her back to the kingdom, and after Chester had nearly died twice because of anything connected to that place, Monia had finally cast away even that last shred of hope toward the kingdom.
Perhaps because that feeling had vanished, she had thrown away the jeweled necklace she had still worn around her neck even after discarding the ring. In its place now hung a new necklace made of a seashell she had picked up on the beach and a length of cord.
“This is all the jewelry I need!”
What she showed him as she said it was the wedding ring Chester had given her. Rotin had prepared it for Monia; Chester had stolen it and kept it, and after Rotin’s death, when he truly decided to share his life with her, he had placed it on her finger.
Put that way, the object carried a rather complicated history—but neither Chester nor Monia paid that any mind.
They searched through the wreckage while moving timber. Chester hauled the heavy logs; Monia measured them by eye and cut them to the right lengths for building.
As Chester carried and Monia cut, the logs piled up, and from them they built the house.
“Huh?”
While moving wood for the cabin, Chester noticed that a tree he had marked the day before for hauling was gone. He paused and scanned the area.
“What’s wrong?”
“…Nothing.”
Even as he continued carrying logs, Chester kept an eye on the spot where the tree had been, and he spotted the drag marks left nearby.
Survivors, maybe.
He had already considered the possibility that survivors might exist.
Just as Rotin and Urgo had climbed out of the sinking ship onto land, other sailors could easily have escaped death with the vessel and fled.
And those survivors might well be living somewhere on this island.
I don’t know why they dragged the wood off, but I’d better look into it.
Chester brought the timber over near Monia, then called Ant, who had been playing nearby, and gave him an order.
While Ant sniffed the air and headed off somewhere at Chester’s command, Monia hummed a little tune as she sawed wood.
In her hand was a saw they had picked up from the ship’s wreckage.
“I don’t know why a saw was on the ship, but I’m glad we have it! It’s so much easier to cut things to the right length!”
“It must have been useful for something, or it wouldn’t have been there.”
“That’s true! Ah, those logs I cut over there.”
“Oh, quite a pile already.”
Chester carried the cut timber over to the villa site and began construction.
The sailors who had survived the sinking ship were building themselves a nest in a corner of the island.
Their materials were whatever they had managed to carry off the ship—odds and ends and crates stacked high into walls that blocked the wind. That was where they lived.
But human life still needed fire. Surviving on dried fish alone was fine for a day or two; once they could stand it no longer, they decided to gather fuel for a fire.
Finding it was not easy. The island overflowed with plants, yet the sailors dared not touch a single one.
“The island’s demon is touchy—if we mess with a healthy tree he’ll notice!”
“Right, we have to move without the demon knowing.”
“Did you hear? Someone was cutting through the brush while walking and the demon showed up!”
Sailors were a superstitious lot. They naively believed the boastful, lie-filled adventure tales of the comrades who had survived Chester’s attacks and returned.
Perhaps their faith had only grown after watching Chester, bloodied and battered, fight Urgo and Rotin, kill Rotin in the end, and then return the very next day after being shot as if nothing had happened.
In any case, those baseless rumors had left them struggling to find firewood—until their eyes fell on the trees already ruined by the People of the Summit and the ship’s cannon fire.
These trees were already broken! If they used them, even the demon would never notice!
With that thought they hauled over a few logs, lit a campfire, and for the first time in ages roasted dried fish over the flames.
It was not only dried fish.
“Chicken. Let’s eat chicken too!”
“Oh, right! We’ve got enough of them.”
To endure long months at sea, dried fish and whatever they could catch were never enough.
So some ships brought animals that were easy to raise in tight spaces—chickens, for example—and kept them for slaughter during the voyage.
Slaughtering the animals at the start of the journey would have been absurd, so they had not touched so much as a feather on the way to the Floating Island. But now there was no captain left to stop them.
“Let’s see… this nice plump one.”
From the cover of nearby brush, Ant quietly watched the sailors catch a chicken and roast it with relish.