Parenting (4)
As was only natural, once Rex grew and his teeth came in, he graduated from bug juice and began eating ordinary meat, fruit, and vegetables.
And as was also only natural, once children get a little older, they start getting picky—insisting on eating only what they like.
Thanks to that, mealtimes with Rex had lately become a war of a completely different kind from the old days of struggling to catch bugs.
“You have to eat your vegetables too!”
“……!”
“You little—! What good does it do to keep your mouth shut!”
“……!”
“Ah! Don’t dodge!”
“……!”
While Monia chased Rex as he clung and scrambled all over the house trying to escape, Chester read his movements.
Following the lines of light, he tracked Rex’s path and moved his body faster than his brain could even register the motion, snatching the boy up.
“?!”
In the instant Rex froze in surprise, the bundle of vegetables in Chester’s other hand went straight into his mouth.
“Kyaaaah!”
As Rex shrieked at being force-fed vegetables, Chester—who had caught him and fed him—and Monia—who had pretended to chase him so Chester could grab him more easily—high-fived.
“Whew. Finally got him to eat.”
“Tell me about it. Good work.”
“Not at all. I can’t catch Rex myself, so this is the only way.”
Monia wiped away the sweat running down her face and looked at Rex, who was grimacing yet still chewing the vegetables thoroughly.
He absolutely refused to eat vegetables of his own free will—but once they were in his mouth, he would grit his teeth through the dislike and eat them properly.
“So it would’ve been nicer if you’d just eaten them in the first place.”
When Monia said that, Rex flapped both hands furiously in silent protest.
“You don’t do that to Mama.”
Chester scolded him lightly and this time brought over a well-roasted bone.
“Mm! Mm!”
If vegetables were the food Rex hated most in the world, a perfectly roasted bone was the food he loved most.
On a day when Black Wind had come to visit, he had taught Rex how to eat bones. Rex had followed Black Wind’s example, and the taste had stuck with him ever since.
Rex eyed the roasted bone Chester held out, licked his lips, then popped it into his mouth and crunched it as if it were a snack.
“He’s really going at it…….”
“Yeah.”
It wasn’t that the two of them never ate bones. Chester could manage soft cartilage and the marrow inside, and Monia knew of fish dishes where you chewed the bones for the flavor. Both of them had often roasted small creatures whole and eaten them bones and all. But simply roasting raw bones and eating them as-is still didn’t quite make sense to them.
Even so, because Rex loved them, whenever they found bones that looked suitable they would roast them for him.
“Mm! Mm!”
Rex expressed pure joy as he ate. Maybe the reason the bone tasted even better than usual was because he had hunted it himself this time, instead of Chester and Monia bringing it home for him.
Monia, too, found fruit she grew herself in the yard tastier than fruit picked wild in nature.
Watching Rex beam with happiness, Monia brought one of the dumplings she had made for dinner to her mouth.
The dough, made with nothing but grain flour and water—no eggs—was dry and lacking in elasticity. Yet the moment the meat juices and vegetable juices trapped inside the wrapper burst out and flooded her mouth with flavor, it was more than enough to make the dumpling delicious.
“I want to try making the dough with eggs.”
“Shall we go look for some? The birds should have come back by now. They’ve probably built nests.”
“Eggs……. What kind of dishes can you even make with eggs? Other than putting them in dough, I don’t really know. Boiled eggs?”
“So even nobles cook eggs pretty much the same way we do.”
“Is there anything special about eggs?”
“True enough.”
Perhaps other countries had more varied recipes, but in the kingdom where the two of them had lived, eggs were boiled, fried, or scrambled—and that was about it.
The reason cooking methods were so limited was that chickens, along with potatoes, were a staple of commoners’ meals. Nobles barely touched them, so recipes never developed; commoners, for their part, weren’t about to waste precious ingredients experimenting, so the methods stayed few.
“Then tomorrow let’s go look for eggs.”
“Mm. Will the birds be all right?”
“Even if we don’t take them, snakes and other birds will. We’re just joining in a little.”
Chester told her about brood parasitism. Some birds lay eggs that look like those of other species, hide them in another bird’s nest, and the chick that hatches first throws all the other eggs out of the nest so it can monopolize the food.
“Hmm. Cases like that do exist, I suppose.”
“What?”
“Why? Stories about thinking a child was yours until the hair grew in and it turned out to be a color that could never come from your family’s bloodline—those are common enough, aren’t they?”
“Haa.”
Hearing Monia’s remark, Chester sighed.
“Nobles.”
Beside him, Rex imitated Chester’s gesture.
“Don’t commoners have stories like that?”
At Monia’s question, Chester closed his mouth for a moment.
“Well…… stories about a soldier coming back from the battlefield only to find his wife already pregnant, that sort of thing…….”
“So it’s the same on that side too.”
“Whether it’s the noble world or the commoner world, filthy people are filthy wherever you go. Royalty’s probably no different.”
“Hmm. With royalty, every generation they do political marriages with other countries and all sorts of noble houses, so the blood gets mixed every which way.”
“But royals are betrothed to ducal houses from birth, aren’t they?”
Monia shrugged.
“Have you ever heard of a king having only one wife?”
“……No. You’re right. The principal consort is from a ducal line, but concubines are another matter.”
“Exactly. Sometimes the next king even comes from among the concubines. Jordy was probably one of those cases.”
“Then couldn’t he have just married you, waited a bit, and taken that commoner woman as a concubine?”
Chester and Monia looked at each other for a moment, then sighed in unison.
“If he had that much sense, he wouldn’t have done something so stupid.”
“I don’t mind.”
At Chester’s lament, Monia said that and clung to him.
“Thanks to him, I ended up with you like this, didn’t I?”
“Haha. True. There is that.”
Chester carefully stroked Monia’s hair as she wrapped her arms around his waist and nuzzled her face against his thigh.
After letting him stroke her hair for a while, Monia flipped over, stared blankly up at the ceiling of the house, and spoke.
“You know what? If Jordy becomes king, the country will definitely fall. Castles and land will burn, bandits will swarm, blood will form rivers and corpses will form mountains.”
“…….”
“If he just quietly listened to his competent ministers it wouldn’t get that bad, so I’m only saying it—but with Jordy’s head, I don’t think he’d listen to them either.”
At Monia’s scathing assessment, Chester chuckled under his breath.
“Ah, this talk is boring. Don’t you have any interesting stories?”
“Interesting stories?”
“Even the old tales mothers and fathers tell their children would be fine. Mm?”
“Old tales, huh. All right then. How about the story of the tribal hero born from an egg. Rex, want to come listen too?”
When Chester beckoned, Rex also nestled into his arms and settled down comfortably.
With his wife and child in his embrace, Chester began, in a naturally low voice that invited sleep, to tell the story he had once heard from his father.
“Kyaaaaah!”
“Get back here, you bitch! Give that back!”
The fleeing woman’s hair was seized by a bandit. Looking every bit the wretched remnant of some lost battlefield, the bandit ground his teeth, yanked her by the hair, and flung her to the ground.
“No, no!”
“Give it here!”
Eyes wild, the bandit wrenched away the thing she had been clutching so carefully to her chest—then confirmed what it was and ground his teeth again.
Inside the cloth she had been holding there was nothing the bandit wanted—only a crying baby.
“Uwaaaaah! You worthless bitch! I told you to hand over food! Food! I can’t eat a damn brat like this!”
The bandit hurled the cloth-wrapped baby straight at the ground. The woman threw herself forward and caught the child.
“Please! Please stop! We don’t have any food! We really have nothing! Just let us go!”
“Why! Is there! Nothing!”
The spear in the bandit’s hands—its blade clotted dark and lumpy with dried blood and scraps of flesh—came crashing down toward the woman.
Such tragedies were not confined to any single place.
Chaos in the kingdom’s capital from the revolutionary army’s uprising. The neighboring countries’ intervention that followed. The situation had already spun beyond anyone’s control.
Neither the duke who had started this war nor the kingdom itself could stop it now. It had reached a point where the will of any single nation or faction was meaningless.
From the eternally frozen northern wastes, the barbarians had come down seeking warm, fertile land.
From the endlessly hot and arid deserts, the desert warriors—every scattered force across the sands united as one—had surged up into the kingdom.
Not only the nations ringing the kingdom, but even the minor states caught between greater powers had risen.
The battlefield was no longer limited to the kingdom’s soil.
To neighboring countries, neighboring lands, neighboring people—like a single spark falling onto a dry plain of withered grass under a moistureless sun and spreading without end—the flames of war raced beyond anyone’s grasp.
By now, the reason the war had begun no longer mattered.
What any nation hoped to achieve by joining the war no longer mattered.
What mattered was simply that they were at war.
Like a cat brought by sailors to a small island that, for idle amusement, began killing the birds that lived only there—and, finding them so easy to catch because they had never known predators, never stopped until it had slaughtered every last one into extinction—
no one cared about the purpose of the act. Only the act itself, born of that disregarded purpose, repeated without end.
Flames roared. Blood flowed like rivers. Corpses piled into mountains. And the screams of humans reached both the high heavens and the endless hells below.
“Waaaaah! Waaaaah!”
“Shut up, you damn brat! Stop crying! It’s driving me crazy! Go die over there! Just die!”
“Aaaaaaaah!”
“Damn it! Somebody! Please! I’m hungry! I haven’t eaten a thing in a week! Please give me something to eat! Is anyone there?!”