A Night at Sea (3)
Wherever war breaks out, a vast current of money moves with it toward the battlefield.
Some rush to sell weapons at inflated prices. Others hawk food and supplies. Prices lurch and thrash; goods once treated as treasures crash to the floor, and traders gather to scoop them up cheap and sell them dear somewhere far away.
War makes ordinary lives harder, yet the money that can be made from it only quickens the flow of goods. That livelier trade simply never reaches the common folk.
And among those goods is one particular commodity.
Slaves.
Foreign slaves are brought in and sold cheap as slave-soldiers. Deserters, refugees from villages burned in the fighting—anyone who can vanish without anyone raising a fuss—are rounded up in bulk and sold abroad as slaves.
To slave traders, war is a bumper harvest. The longer the fighting drags on, the more of them gather near the kingdom, eyes rolling with greed.
Someone once seized a defeated commander who had been a noble and sold him to another country. That nation, hungry for palace intelligence, paid a fortune for the commander-slave.
Slave-soldiers themselves never fetch high prices, but now and then an exceptionally skilled fighter—someone with a name abroad and the drive to reverse his fortunes—turns into a jackpot.
War consumes weapons, munitions, supplies, and above all people. Trained soldiers and even high-grade knights die in droves on the field.
How many of the kingdom’s knights and soldiers had been crushed under the Sky Knights? How many more of the ducal army’s knights and soldiers had died in Jordy’s vicious, inhuman operations?
Even while the kingdom reeled in chaos and every faction tore at it, foreign soldiers and knights were taking daily losses as well.
So the nation bought time with money—by buying slaves.
It chose to purchase, with coin, the “usable resources” that would otherwise take a boy years to grow into a sturdy youth and still more years of training to become serviceable.
They might not be ideal, but they could be worked without hesitation—serviceable enough substitutes, prepared and ready.
And as the case of that commander showed, among the slaves being sold there were always rare ones who could not be obtained by ordinary means, and those rare ones always found value somewhere.
A handsome man or a beautiful woman alone was enough for nobles to pay dearly.
A strong warrior sold at a fair price, whether for simple labor or for work that needed steel. Capturing such men was difficult, though, so traders rarely hunted them.
Slaves with unusual pasts could also command high prices.
A terrifying serial killer who had murdered more than ten people; a little girl raised by wolves; a slave whose skin was a different color from everyone else’s; a slave born deformed—all of them had their buyers.
In that sense, Jordy was perfect.
A madman who made people fight by burning them alive, a devil with no scrap of humanity left. A face that, even after the beatings, was still clearly handsome. Noble birth. Every single trait was popular.
The broken humanity would sell high to nobles who liked taming dangerous playthings. The good looks would appeal to lonely ladies—or gentlemen—looking for a man hot enough to melt the moon on a solitary night. And noble blood itself was a selling point. Lesser nobles would pay handsomely for the cheap thrill of dominating someone of higher rank.
A prize like this, already thoroughly subdued so no extra effort was needed to secure him—slave traders were never going to leave him alone.
They simply avoided the terrifying mercenary, spirited the merchandise away, and escaped by night in a carriage. By morning the mercenary would be raging, hunting for goods that had left no trace.
“Would you look at the state of this one. Handling merchandise so roughly. Mercenaries, I tell you—they never know the value of money, do they?”
“They figure if a job fails or they lose the cash or the goods, they can just start over somewhere else, so they gobble everything up.”
“No honor, none at all! Look at us—we fix the damaged goods and deliver them nicely for sale. Something that sells high deserves to be treated like something expensive!”
“That inn back there was awful, though. Next time we pass through, let’s find somewhere else. Better write it down.”
While one of them jotted a review of the village inn into his travel journal, another pulled out a thick, phlegm-like salve and smeared it liberally over Jordy’s face.
They forced the broken nose back into place, rubbed the swollen eyes, stripped him bare to check every inch of his body for damage, and examined him with meticulous care.
Of course Jordy tried to resist the moment they untied him to remove his clothes, but the traders had already forced some strange drug down his throat. His senses dulled; his limbs refused to obey. He strained and groaned, but nothing answered.
“Good. Nothing serious!”
They dressed him again and bound him once more—far more skillfully than the mercenary had. The ropes did not cut off circulation the way the mercenary’s brutal knots had, yet moving was somehow even harder.
Damn them all!
Jordy was determined to escape the slave traders somehow.
To break free of these bonds and take his revenge.
But if that had been easy, the slave trade itself would never have existed. Did they think captured slaves never tried to run?
Novice traders rely on violence and fear, accepting a certain amount of damage to the goods. With experience they learn technique. With still more time they learn to use their heads.
A slave becomes merchandise and is sold precisely because escape is impossible.
No matter what schemes Jordy tried, no matter what tricks he pulled, the traders blocked every one of them with care and steadily moved him along.
“So where are we taking this one to sell?”
“If we sell him in a nearby country, who knows what happens. They might buy him quietly—or they might just send troops and take him. That’s a loss.”
“……Let’s take a ship.”
“What?”
“Sell him somewhere farther off. Merchandise this good will still fetch a price even at a distance.”
“……Shame that anyone who might recognize his face will be gone, so we can’t prove he’s a noble anymore.”
Better to sell safely than risk the army snatching him.
The slave traders decided to put Jordy on a ship.
Every one of his struggles was crushed without mercy. Time flowed on, and before long Jordy found himself aboard a vessel bound for a distant foreign land.
In the hold among the cargo, where rats scurried, Jordy stared at other slaves in the same wretched state and ground his teeth until his jaw felt ready to shatter.
Yet no matter how many times he closed his eyes and opened them again, reality never changed.
Reality still thrust its cruel maw straight at him.
All Jordy could do was shut his eyes and endure one night in that reeking place among low, filthy livestock.
“We’ve arrived!”
While Jordy sailed the night sea, Chester and Monia set foot on the long island’s soil, bathed in the light of a sun that hung only slightly tilted from the highest point of the sky.
“Land!”
The moment they touched solid ground, Monia flung herself flat and hugged the earth with all her strength. Chester flinched in surprise—only for Rex and Ant to start rubbing themselves against the dirt as well.
“The ground isn’t shaking! It isn’t rolling! No more seasickness! Waaaaah! Land is the best!”
“……We’ll have to leave here eventually, so we’ll be on a ship again anyway.”
“How can you say something so cruel?!”
Monia came at him in tears; Chester carefully pushed her away.
She let herself be pushed, gently wiped the tears of pure joy at standing on unmoving ground, and looked around.
“……How should I put it.”
She spoke carefully.
“It’s so different from the Floating Island.”
“Isn’t it?”
The Floating Island had overflowed with life. Under the Grace of the Summit, life poured out everywhere; even dull Monia had been able to feel the sheer abundance of living presence.
The sounds of insects. Of birds. Of animals. Of grass and leaves.
Here, all of that was scarce.
It was quiet enough to feel like an island where nothing lived at all.
“This is normal. The Floating Island was the strange one.”
“Normal…”
Listening to Chester, Monia turned her head and gazed at the Floating Island slowly approaching from far away.
Then she looked again at the island spread before her.
We’ve really left the island.
It was still an island, yet they had unmistakably left.
Without thinking, Monia took a step back. Chester finished arranging their packs, took her hand, and drew her forward.
“Well then—shall we go?”
He smiled as he led her. After a moment’s hesitation, Monia smiled too and took a step.