Kingsland, Into the Royal Territory (4)
In Europa, where monsters roam the wilds and magic users fling sword aura and spells, every city and village shares one common feature.
They are all surrounded by walls.
Earth, wood, stone, monster materials—the form and materials vary wildly depending on the conditions at the time of construction and the scale of the place. At least every city and village he had seen and stayed in so far had been, without a single exception, enclosed by walls.
Even the backwater of Moston Village was no exception. The same went for the kingdom’s capital, Pen Draig.
The red outer walls encircling a city that looked, even at a glance, larger than Coldon appeared haphazard and irregular compared to Coldon’s angular, orderly ones. Moreover, though he had expected a little more from a capital, the way the buildings were crammed and piled any which way onto red stone foundations made it obvious the population had swollen far past capacity. Being on flat ground, the inner castle was nowhere in sight.
Still, his expectations dimmed a little.
“How should I put it? Compared to Coldon, there’s not much to look at.”
“You could call it the sorrow of a city with deep history,” Catherine replied without much interest as she listened to his impressions while reading. Her slender fingers slowly turned the corner of a page.
“Have you ever heard any word similar to Pen Draig, the capital’s name?”
“Hmm. Never have.”
“That’s because it isn’t Seophon.”
“Is that so? But Seophon sounds pretty similar, doesn’t it?”
Though he had grown used to the Seophon tongue, for Karem—who had lived longer in his previous life—Korean and modern English still felt far more familiar.
“Long before the current Yeats royal family founded the Seophon Kingdom, when many kingdoms still dotted Seophon Island, before invaders came and drove out the natives to seize the place, it was already called Pen Draig—from the days of the barbarian tribes.”
“There would have been rebellions, wars, assassinations and the like in between, but you’ve summarized it rather neatly.”
So it was roughly a city in the vein of Rome in Italy, then. In his previous life he had heard that even in Europe there were cities thousands of years old where you simply couldn’t throw up new construction at will.
Because the city itself is a cultural heritage site, or something like that.
Just as Karem was thinking of closing the window and heading inside, something snagged his gaze.
Outside the outer castle gate, people had poured out in throngs—exactly as if they were waiting to welcome someone.
“There’s a whole crowd of people gathered outside the city.”
“Hmm? Ah. Perhaps because the Seophon king is on close terms with my lord. It might be repayment for the welcome given to Sir Ianbert last year.”
“Inside the walls too.”
“Hmm?”
“A whole lot.”
At the double emphasis, Catherine closed her book with a look that said that many? and, when Karem stepped aside, peered out the window.
Near the gate, a group in gleaming armor, luxurious attire, and stylish everyday clothes stood in neat ranks before the large, wide gate—clearly visible even from a distance. And beyond the broad entrance where the gate ought to have been (though it was nowhere in sight), people were packed densely, plain as day. Along both sides of the open outer-castle road, at windows, on rooftops—as the distance closed, the throngs of outer-castle residents who had come out in force became unmistakable.
And the moment they entered the city, cheers rose together with a rain of flowers.
Why?
People who first come up from the countryside to the city often stand gazing at it in open admiration. A space of culture and history, a cauldron of the latest fashions, a bastion of civilization protected by magic-reinforced walls and raw force—and the last chance for second sons and younger siblings who are soon to strike out on their own.
But Rof, a pauper of Pen Draig—the capital and largest city of the Seophon Kingdom—thought that was the talk of people whose bellies were so full they were about to burst.
Without money you could be driven into the streets in a heartbeat, and even on those streets the thugs who fleeced day-to-day beggars were everywhere. What happened to the naïve farm boys and girls who came up to the city with every last coin they had, only to fall among such beggars and thugs, needed no explanation.
If anything, Rof wanted to leave the city and settle in a village. Yet even villages needed money, if not as much as the city did. Naturally a common day-to-day pauper of Pen Draig like Rof had nowhere near enough to leave.
One stroke of luck remained: after a turf war in the outer-castle back alleys changed the managing gang, the protection money had dropped. Thanks to that, Rof had gone from barely scraping together one meal a day to two, and he could even add a small piece of smoked fish. It was still only hard bread, stolen vegetables, and one scrap of smoked fish—but meat was meat, and the fuller belly put him in a better mood than he had felt in a long while.
That is, until his homeless neighbor Fishburn started spouting nonsense on an otherwise fine day and dragged home a rusty iron pot from somewhere.
“Rof. I’m going to be the best cook in the back alleys!”
“Fishburn. What the hell are you talking about?”
What the city’s poor mainly ate was tough, coarse bread. Depending on the district and one’s skill a few extras might appear, but the staple never changed. And now he wanted to cook?
As already said, without money you could do nothing in the city. Where would he get a place to cook? Firewood wasn’t free either, and most important of all—where would the ingredients come from? So it was hardly strange that Rof took Fishburn’s behavior for idle amusement. In the city, anything you wanted to enjoy besides people-watching cost money.
Yet Fishburn seemed serious. He bargained with the new, somewhat milder back-alley gang, started by renting a small vacant lot where someone had supposedly killed himself, and steadily prepared to cook. Firewood from half-rotted timber in the dump. Stone knives made by beating and grinding scavenged rocks. Ladles carved from scraps of wood…
“What? How much for the spice? Fifty pence? That can’t be right…”
“They say it used to be famous as a poisonous herb. Thanks to some famous chef uptown, that whole neighborhood is crazy for it.”
“Okay, fine—but it’s still a spice. Why is it that expensive?”
Fifty pence. For paupers like them it was no small sum. After a full day of hard labor from morning to evening in the outer castle, and after paying the protection cut, ten pence remained—enough for two full meals of coarse bread and smoked fish.
Even back-alley beggars knew that most spices traded a small pouch for a pouch of silver. Someone claimed wild herbs weren’t that dear, but Rof, born and raised in Pen Draig’s outer castle, had never seen such a thing. And now a fifty-pence spice out of nowhere? The reason made it even more absurd.
A duke—an aristocrat of royal rank—had ordered that it be sold as cheaply as possible because he wanted the people living on his lands to eat something tasty? And even that fifty-pence price was said to have been jacked up considerably by the merchants who brought it in. Hard to believe.
When Fishburn actually brought the spice, the neighbors who shared the same street began to take interest. Each of them, cutting back on work or meals, started bringing small scraps of ingredients. Only bone fragments sucked clean to the marrow, discarded vegetable trimmings, hard bread, and suspicious cheese—yet when the back-alley neighbors pooled them over several days, the pile grew substantial.
“You can really make a dish out of this junk?”
“Just watch!”
And under the gang’s watch, the oddball neighbor called Fishburn truly began to cook—using a broken roof tile as a cutting board and a stone knife. Nothing fancy. The ingredients were all wretched, and he smashed several stones just grinding the hard bread into powder; all he did was chop, mince, stir-fry, and boil.
Yet to people who had never in their lives eaten anything but raw ingredients or long-shelf-life preserved food, it was special. Charity meals for the poor? Festival food? In Pen Draig even those were restricted by district. Paupers among paupers like them never got a turn. So the simple act of cooking—watching discarded trash and the usual belly-fillers transform—was spectacle enough.
“Cooking’s more complicated than I thought.”
“Of course it is. Even bread—there’s soft bread only the high and mighty eat. Making that has to be complicated, right?”
“Is it done yet? The smell’s getting like the stuff I only ever catch a whiff of on the street in the evenings.”
While Rof and the neighbors watched, Fishburn worked, and as time passed the pot’s contents changed; a scent they had never known—one that made the nose tingle—rose into the air. At last he sliced every scrap of cheese with the stone knife, dropped it in to melt, and it was finished.
“All right, let’s each have a bowl.”
“It’s done?”
“Yeah. It’ll taste a lot better than just eating the stuff plain. There’s leftover bread bits if anyone wants them.”
“Mmm. Bread bits in stew, huh.”
Fishburn’s suggestion felt strange to them. People who had spent their whole lives on coarse bread, never once a proper bowl of stew. Lately things had improved a little—though the height of luxury was still smoked fish. Precisely because of that, there was no resistance.
A smell utterly different from everything they had ever eaten. The rich, oily, thick aroma rising from the stew—the kind they had only ever sniffed from afar—stabbed into their nostrils through wide-open noses. Just smelling it made their mouths water.
Slurp—
“Cough! Hack!”
“Ugh! What is this?! My tongue’s on fire!”
“Gah-hah-hah! Ahem! Hrk!”
They all coughed at once. Pain seared mouth and tongue. The dried Red Witch’s Finger powder in the dish was only a tiny pinch relative to the pot’s size, yet to Rof and the paupers it was ferociously hot.
Once the coughing subsided and they recovered their wits, they kept scooping up broth and solids despite the lingering burn, crunching the bread bits that had softened with moisture.
After one proper cooked meal, Rof could no longer stand the food he normally ate just to stay alive. The neighbors felt the same. To people who had spent their entire lives on survival rations that were poverty itself given form, the deep bone broth and the spicy heat and aroma held an irresistible charm.
Before long they were pooling food money and handing it over to the street cook Fishburn. When the volume grew and hands ran short, Rof volunteered to learn the cooking himself.
And then—
“You. If you can make something this good out of garbage, you’ve got decent talent. A new inn just opened and the kitchen’s empty. Want to try?”
“An inn kitchen?”
“Yeah. Fairly large place. Heard another guy’s been learning a bit of cooking too. That trash stew of yours tasted pretty good.”
An officer of the now more lenient gang came with an offer too good to believe.
“You know how big a chance this is for the likes of you who’ve got nowhere else to live even if you refuse, right?”
To a pauper who scraped by day-labor in the back alleys and slept on the alley floor, it was an unbelievable proposal.
“Rof! This is our chance! We can cook in a proper place!”
“No, look—I get that it’s a chance, but we should check it out a little more carefully—”
“What are you hesitating for? Even if only half of what he said is true, it’s a jackpot for us!”
Fortunately Rof’s worries proved groundless. When he reluctantly followed Fishburn, what he saw was the largest inn in the outer castle. Of course bloodstains still marked places where violence had occurred while the gang took control, but the shortage of hands meant they formally hired the back-alley neighbors who had been sharing the cooking all along.
Everything had begun with the spice Fishburn—usually so listless—had suddenly brought in: Red Witch’s Finger. Without it he would never have started cooking, Rof would never have learned, and neither of them would ever have gotten the chance to work in this huge inn.
Then the kingdom’s dukes began arriving one by one in Pen Draig to congratulate the king. And word came that the Duke of Iceland was coming too. They even heard that the king himself was leaving Pen Draig to greet the Duke of Iceland in person—but to them the king was not the important one.
The man who had ordered Red Witch’s Finger sold cheap, the man who had given them the chance to settle in the largest inn in Pen Draig’s outer castle—that man mattered far more.
Rof and his fellows sincerely welcomed the duke’s arrival. They even prepared to scatter flower petals and cheer of their own free will the moment the duke’s procession entered the castle. When they started getting ready, they found quite a few others sharing the same thought.
And once they thought about it, of course there would be. Not only was the price low, but a spice that could overcome the cold of night and winter had been spread so that even people like them could eat it. Red Witch’s Finger was worth every bit of that.