Dreams Lost — 9
After the rain let up, a wind grown a shade colder threaded between the terraces.
Round ears marked with spots of pure white gave a single sharp flick. They were what one would call a tiger beastkin's ears — but were they truly meant to look like that? The flick may only have been an unconscious habit before speech, for Canna, looking at me, opened her mouth.
"I knew you were remarkable. I never imagined you would show yourself even at a gathering like this."
"Is that so?"
Canna said it with a glance toward the outside.
"You healed even a heaven-sent affliction. That means you can treat any sickness, any wound, without picking and choosing, doesn't it? Someone who can do that ought to be kept hidden."
A heaven-sent affliction. It means a deformity one is born with. Canna had come into the world with one leg twisted out of shape.
She had been unfortunate in her way, and in her way she had overcome it and gone on living. At the end of all that, she failed at everything.
Of all people, she contracted with me. Once it is done, it is finished, and there is no taking it back. I am already brimming full inside the Light, and I have no intention of ever letting go of the Warmth.
You find that pitiable?
The more pitiable one is me.
The more unfortunate one is me.
Stranded in a snowfield of pure white, starving, with nothing left to eat, I would set my mouth to the corpse in front of me. That is the kind of story this is.
Even so, I have no thought of sneering at the one who refuses food and chooses to starve, and calling him a fool. If anything, he reached a nobler decision than that gluttony, and I respect it. Even if he condemned me, I would accept it.
And so, if he and I were the same kind of being, I would laugh at him inwardly. Ah — he missed his chance to eat. The hunger will only grow worse, and I have already eaten everything there was.
That is what it means, that I cannot die.
That is what it means, that there is no end.
What is truly dreadful is that I am the only one who does not die.
Heh.
So there is no need for it to grow any more dreadful. I will simply hold the Warmth. I pay no mind to anything else, and I do my utmost, desperately, not to lose the single thing that matters most. Lose even that, and I will fall to the very bottom and suffer there, reduced to an insect that only now and then is fed whatever Warmth happens to drop.
"It isn't so great an ability as all that."
"There is no magic in this world that can cure a heaven-sent affliction. Even if you return someone to the most perfect state, what is twisted is the normal, because that is the original form…… Force the leg into place, and it turns back."
A memory of Canna's rises. They drove iron rods into the leg, set the twisted limb at an angle that would let her walk, and used healing magic. The magic was only meant to close the holes, but the leg they had wrenched into shape returned to what it had been. So she deliberately took an incomplete healing, and the scars remained where the rods had been driven in and drawn back out. They operated so that Canna, who could not walk at all, might at least walk a little. Even if there had been magic to erase the scars, using it would have turned the leg back again, and so they stopped there.
I cannot understand going that far for the sake of a single leg.
She sold away her human rights for a piece of candy.
But I was not the one who made that known. I deceived her and took it, so I have no right to laugh at Canna. At the very least, then, it is right to treat her seriously.
"But you made it as though it had never been. More than that, the condition of the body became far better than before. I am not speaking merely of walking and running. The whole of the body grew stronger."
She lays particular stress on that word, body. Well — she lived so long in an uncomfortable one that she must have felt, all the more keenly, exactly what had changed.
"That wasn't my intention. When I am given, it simply turns out that way."
"Then... are you all right?"
Oh?
Aha. Of course. No — I hadn't expected the question to come out like that.
It's the way I phrase things, isn't it? Look only at the sentence, and it sounds as though I am giving myself away. This is a world where, if someone gains something, someone else must lose something. Heard plain, it sounds as if I am dividing myself up and handing the pieces out.
In truth, all I did was sink a cup called Light into the sea that is me. That must be why I can look at the world through a Harvester's eyes.
There are any number of ways I could answer Canna now. I could disguise myself as something good, the way a religion does, or I could tell her there is no need to worry. But as I always have, I speak only the facts.
Only some of the facts.
"I'm all right, Canna. If anything, I only gave of myself, and I don't know why the people who contract with me grow well."
I do have a few guesses. They belong to the Great Kun and to Yuanshi Tianzun, beings who hold tremendous knowledge. But I have no intention of speaking of them.
That Light is the soul, and Warmth appears to be the possibility held inside it.
That a shrunken Light will drift through the world for an eternity of years as some insect-like scrap of a thing.
At that, Canna looks at me and asks, carefully.
"Then... is it all right to go on healing people like this?"
"Yes. If someone wishes it, I will share myself with them."
I have no prejudices. I do not care, in the least, what they are. So long as, in the course of living, they will share their Warmth with me.
"So you mean it isn't something you're forced into."
"That's right, Canna."
Ah. Yes.
Here, I ought to act a little as though I am not a person.
I say it while pointing at her, and Canna's face goes scarlet.
"What are you saying!"
"With the body you have now, there aren't many men who wouldn't come to you, are there? This country keeps one lawful wife and any number of concubines, so if you're going to do it, I recommend a seat from which you can extend your own authority. Females set in the lower ranks are mostly exploited."
Canna stares blankly at me, then lifts her head. From the line of her gaze, she is not looking at anything on the ceiling.
"No, you... that......"
She stammers, lowers her head again, and, face still red, carefully opens her mouth.
"Aren't you being far too blunt?"
"I'm not discussing sexual taste. I'm speaking of the flourishing of a living creature, am I not? Is it so shameful a subject?"
"Ah. Yes. You're right."
Her face goes scarlet all over again. Something in what I said must have caught. As if overheated, she fans her own cheek with one hand.
"You... you really aren't a person."
"That's right. I am no longer a person."
A very long time ago, I was.
Once, I wondered whether I might be the sea beneath the surface, only mistaking myself for the man in a faded memory. But that is impossible. I have no memory of some blank age in which nobody's memories existed. The one who felt the cold was me — I, who stand on the far end of that man in the faded memory. There is no gap in the memory, and there is no memory of a time before the man's memories were there.
From before light ever rose into the sky, I was me.
I was a person.
"I'm only saying it because of the place we're in, but do get married soon."
Canna turns her head with an awkward look. The talk has drifted this way at just the right moment, so I mean to drive it in deep enough that she will not want to recall it.
I press the chase.
"I know that once people graduate from the Royal Academy, many of them marry the one they're betrothed to. But, Canna. You aren't even betrothed yet."
"No — how did we even end up talking about this!"
She asks that.
This is a matter of my desire. And a matter of Canna's sense of debt. It means she is not so shameless a person that she could be healed and then waved off with a well, take care.
Which is why I say it like this.
"I want the people who contract with me to flourish far and wide. That is why I make contracts with people. The age may advance beyond this, for all I know, but the way one extends oneself is by bearing children, is it not? Humankind."
At that, Canna seems to have trouble taking in what I've said, and she buffers for a moment.
Enough time passes for several blinks, and then she asks me, carefully.
"Bell is almost like a god."
"No. Nothing of the sort."
I am speaking so that it will sound that way on purpose. But hearing it said outright leaves a bad taste.
Perhaps I put it too sharply. Canna flinches.
"Bell... do you dislike gods?"
Mmm. A difficult question.
I dislike gods. But saying so here is not advisable. However faint the religious color of this world has grown, the culture that religion made is still plainly here. The opposite of a god is a demon, and that concept exists in this world: a monster that drives the world into evil. It is a word that points squarely at me, but announcing oneself a villain in the open is a poor method. A good person who knows they are a villain exists only inside fiction.
"If I put it exactly, it is something that made me."
Something that shoved me down beneath the deep sea and left me shivering in a cold that grows stronger forever.
"Ah. Yes. I think I understand that."
Hm? Canna nods with a strangely sympathetic look.
Ah — now that I think of it, Canna was on bad terms with her mother as well. No. Not even bad terms. They were simply strangers. Her mother was all but driven out of House Theodore for having borne a disabled child, and Canna was abandoned by her. House Theodore keeps several wives, under the motto that the strongest child among them inherits, so of course it was bound for ruin.
It is a harsh way to put it, but the child they had gone to the trouble of bearing was a dud. And so Canna sympathized when I said I dislike gods.
"In that sense, I dislike gods. I also dislike being called something like a god."
Hypion seems to have noticed as much. So long as no one touches the sensitive places, I am perfectly content. However much one is supposed to have no self, what one dislikes, one dislikes.
But Canna tilts her head.
"But why do you think the thing that made you is a god?"
Why do I think it is a god?
"Because I was made before there was light."
When I first shivered in the cold, there was no sky. Nowhere was there a light that could be set apart and called a sky. I had been shivering for a long while when, one day, light suddenly shone, and I knew that it was the sky. Only then did I understand that I could not rise, as if caught hold of by gravity.
"If there is anyone who made me, it can be nothing but a god."
But Canna's face has gone pale.
"Is it... all right for me to be hearing this?"
"Yes. It isn't a story that needs hiding. Whoever comes to know it, it is nothing more than a story without any meaning. This."
It cannot be proved in the first place, so they will hear it as nonsense. And if it were the truth, what would change? It isn't as if I made the world. Nothing changes.
No. One thing does.
That I am old.
"Older than I look, aren't I?"
"That is hardly the level of merely older......"
"If it's a burden, then hurry and catch yourself a good man."
"The leaps in this conversation are so wide I'm getting dizzy, so would you leave it there?"
Very well.
And so the brief rest upon the terrace came to an end.