The Song of the Betrayed — 11
I walk the night road with Beatrice.
We go a long while, and just as the house shows itself far ahead, she stops short. Slowly she lets a breath out, then draws it back in.
Nervous, is she?
Beatrice lets go of my hand by degrees and turns to look at me, wearing the face of someone who has only just realized that what followed at her back was not her own child, but something whose nature she cannot name. She is, quite simply, terrified.
"Bell," she calls, her voice low.
"Yes."
"If we make a contract with you, what happens to us?"
She asks that now, of all moments? She has always been someone who carries more questions than most, but wasn't what she saw today Morris coming back to life?
"You fill me full."
And so, as I always do, I tell her only the truth.
"I've heard that. I've heard it any number of times. But you call the people who contract with you unhappy. You say it — you, who refuse to lie to the point of obsession. Like a demon in a story who never tells a lie, and yet never tells the whole truth either."
Heh. She has been watching closely, hasn't she.
Yes. This is my mistake.
It is also true that I think, obsessively, that a single lie would bring down the tower I have built until now. Still, I will offer my excuse. This cannot be helped. I cannot die, and one mistake remains forever. I cannot cut my own life short and flee responsibility the way living things do. I am not like them — creatures for whom it is enough, when an unbearable reality arrives, simply to die. One false step can open onto eternal despair.
So what am I to do with the human standing before me?
"And so?"
I prompt Beatrice to go on.
She clenches her fists and looks straight at me.
"I've learned a thing or two, making contracts with all sorts of people. If they throw in, as a free extra, something that isn't written into the contract, then the contract itself is a trap."
Beatrice was a branch manager at a large company. That would explain it. To climb to a seat like that, she must have handled every kind of company business, and learned a few things along the way.
"A free extra?"
"Nowhere in that contract wording you always recite is there a word about healing a body. It only says that you give yourself. And it ends in some incomprehensible line about taking everything once the finish is made."
Now that she says it, that is how it stands.
Most of the harvesters I meet in person are people who already know I have healed others. Those I meet beneath the surface are another matter. They are desperate enough to seize even a rotting rope — not looking to have their wounds treated, only begging blindly for help. Or else the air of their society treats a contract as a matter of course.
The first world was like that. How good it would have been, if I could have spread widely there. I could have obtained a steady warmth without running experiment after experiment inside a single world.
Which makes her one of the very few who have ever doubted the contract itself.
"You can't tell what it means?"
"When is the finish?"
"When you die."
In that case the finish is imposed from outside. Even so.
"What do you take from us after we're dead? How is that any different from demanding money of someone who's already bankrupt?"
Aha. Yes. It could look that way.
Taking the warmth at the moment of death might well feel like that. The account is already overdrawn — how could anyone physically take a thing from it?
"Do you think there is nothing after death?"
At the question, Beatrice starts to say that there isn't, and then she looks at me.
Ordinarily, one would think there is nothing. But it is not ordinary to have a monster standing in front of you who can deny that, and prove the denial.
"You mean that after death, our souls are held by you in pledge?"
Hehe. Beatrice has asked me a very good question.
"No. Beatrice. Souls don't interest me. All I need is the warmth you possess. I contract with you in order to obtain it. The harder you strive to make your dreams come true, the greater that warmth grows."
And when the dream is achieved, or when the dream is lost, the warmth dies down. Said this way, though, it is heard as something else. It can be mistaken for the notion that they must keep striving to fulfill their dreams, or I cannot get what I need. Hoping she will make that mistake, I drive the wedge in once more.
"That is why I came after Victoria. She ran from reality, didn't she?"
I look at Beatrice and say nothing.
Will she misunderstand, the way I want? Or will she see through the feint and the truth of me, and ask a question that reaches the essence?
If it is a question that reaches the essence — hehe. I wait for what she will say.
And a moment later:
"You want my daughter to get back up."
"Not Victoria alone. Beatrice. Morris as well. But both of them have already been through too much. And she isn't the only one I want to see stand again. You too, Beatrice."
At that, Beatrice lets out a small sigh.
"Somewhere in it, I feel a malice. The kind that deceives a person."
"Do you?"
Her nose for it really is good. The scales are tipping, little by little, to one side, and in that very instant Beatrice speaks.
"Let's make the contract. Bell."
Forcing down, hard, the urge to recite the contract wording then and there, I put a question to her.
"Are you truly all right with it?"
"If anything happens to my husband and my daughter, I'll make you pay the price, no matter what it takes. But..."
She breaks off. She looks at the house a little way off, then looks at me again.
"Because it is true that you saved my husband's life, and my daughter's."
Truly, and foolishly.
"I'll contract too, the same as the two of them."
Hehe. Very good. I step in close to Beatrice and take her hand.
There is a warm heat there. But it is nothing more than a sensation of the flesh. In truth I am not warm in the slightest. A cold more dreadful than anything that cuts to the bone is growing worse and worse, and so I bring them to their end without a shred of guilt.
"A foolish choice, Beatrice. Then let us go inside and make the contract."
"Inside?"
"Have you forgotten how Morris looked when he contracted earlier? You'll need to change your clothes."
"Ah... Right. That's true. Let's go in."
Beatrice takes my hand and walks into the house as she is.
Yes. Her life is spared. If she had asked a question that cut too deep, I would have made a tool of her on the spot and left this place, crossed the forest, and made for the capital. Then, even with Beatrice gone, they would think she had come looking for me and met with harm.
Catching the one who can ask a question capable of reaching the truth matters more than avoiding the suspicion that follows. Of course, if she vanished all at once, suspicion would arise. Victoria, a powerful harvester, might even come looking to kill me. Then I would only have to die. This body is of no great importance.
I have already sown seed enough, and I have seen that the sprouts are up. The time left from here is only the wait for those sprouts to grow into trees. And on the day the fruit falls, I will take it, and eat.
When Beatrice and I go inside, Rebecca comes to receive us.
The owner of the body I entered in the first world was Rebecca. She seems to have looked even through my memories, but honestly, there is little where we touch. Joanna ran deeper, if anything. Calling up that distant past, I follow her guidance farther in.
Come to think of it, the one who had me summoned earlier was Rebecca.
"Why did you call for me?"
"How could I coldly turn away the benefactor who saved the lives of my son and my granddaughter?"
Strictly speaking, I am their enemy. And I mean to take one more. No — they were not on good terms, so is it a good thing, Beatrice becoming a harvester?
Morris and Victoria are not here. Morris is holding Victoria, who weeps and pours out how hard it has been. And just a moment ago, Gain came out of the room — which is to say, he has come into the living room where we stand.
Coming in, he falters at the sight of me. Then he steps up and offers his greeting.
"Thank you for saving my son and my granddaughter."
"There is one more person left to make a contract."
A fine moment, as it happens. I have been wanting to do a little advertising before humans, if I could. I go to Beatrice, who has turned her head toward me at the word contract.
Beatrice answers yes at once. Soon the skin that had been a map of scars turns a sickly, flawless white, and the blonde that had lost its light and gone dull changes to purple. Even the years that had settled over her face vanish completely, so that now plenty of people would believe she and Victoria were sisters.
With this, one family has become harvesters in full.
I look around at the humans who are not harvesters yet. Then, watching Beatrice's face again, I say it.
"Don't forget that this can be done only once."
"And you — lay a hand on my family, and I'll take my revenge, no matter what I have to do."
Mm. Of course.
I smile at Beatrice as she lays down her threat, and add, inwardly, It's already too late.
She smiles back, then claps once, sharp.
"Father-in-law. Mother-in-law. Let's see properly to our guest now. I fought with Victoria earlier, so I'll have to make peace with her as well."
And a little later, set in among this family, I share their supper.