Chapter 25
I'm finally outside!
It's dusk, which may be why the air has a bite to it. There's nothing around but rock and sand, so the temperature must swing hard between day and night.
And I've confirmed it. The cold of the outdoors and the chill that bores into me are not the same thing at all.
If ordinary cold is what you feel at the fingertips after stretching your arms out long, then what I feel, day after day, is a cold that drives into the very center of the heart. I'd vaguely suspected they might be different. Feeling it like this, though, leaves me strangely unsettled.
Wanting to wipe that feeling away, I look up at the sky.
It is steeped in sunset. The west is heaped with afterglow, and beneath it weathered stone pillars stand at intervals, still thrust up out of the ground. Lower my gaze a little more and a wide rocky desert spreads out, littered at random with boulders far larger than I am and stones much smaller, and between them, here and there, stand trees that look a little like cacti.
It's less a desert of the Middle East than the kind of wilderness you see in American films.
Watching the world through a human memory and actually feeling it are not the same. Set beside what I remember from when I was human, the colors are so changed it might as well be another world entirely. Or perhaps what I see is simply different.
I set my feet on the ground. And I hop.
A little more than a handspan into the air.
I haven't grown any stronger. I really will have to exercise, if only to keep this body in working order. Calling up videos I watched back when I was human, I loosen my limbs. Stretching, you could call it.
Someone is staring at me with a thoroughly peculiar expression. None other than Hyungkesuni.
Perhaps because the air is chilly, he sits where the afterglow falls across him, watching me with a face full of questions.
"Don't you exercise, Hyungkesuni?"
Joanna goes up to him and asks.
"Hm? Oh, I'm fine. This body doesn't change no matter how much I train it."
He answers her very easily. We seem to have spent a similar stretch of time together, and yet the way he treats me is different.
Well—I understand that I look dangerous. But looking dangerous isn't the same as having actually done anything bad, is it?
He did call me an outer god, though. Shall I try something worthy of an outer god, then?
Only as a thought, of course.
Once I've properly loosened up, I run at a moderate pace. The ground around the village is flat enough that it's pleasant to circle.
At first Hyungkesuni watches me run with his staff clenched tight. Before long he sets it down, because Joanna, running beside me, is simply that fast. How is she moving like that?
I'd say I'm running at about an adolescent's pace, and Joanna is absurdly quicker. Her body must have changed a great deal after it was remade.
Not that I didn't know. I've been watching Joanna through Joanna's own eyes all along, haven't I? When night comes she goes where the warriors train, and she trains. Judging by her stamina then, and by the way she moves, she sits at the very top among those who have received my blessing.
It's strange that none of it applies to my body. But ordinary fantasy stories have this, don't they? Someone is possessed, and every talent is being used up by whatever dwells inside. Perhaps it's that sort of thing. I seem to be rather heavy. I'll simply have to accept it.
So I think about something else instead.
I need to decide what to do about extending the harvest from here on. The main objective has been achieved splendidly, and things are moving toward an even better point. Every day I bestow my blessing on three people, and those who receive it, after a little training, go out to the battlefield.
And because of that, something has come into view.
The country Hieronymus bears a grudge against is most likely the Kingdom of Anselus, to the southeast. At a glance he seems to be sending people evenly among the three largest kingdoms in the region, but far more of them leave carrying a particular mission than simply go to liberate tyrannized lands or convert the people. Among those who come back successful, too, the ones granted a blessing in return for their devotion to the Church of Future Hope are, more often than not, people who went to Anselus, carried out their task, and returned.
He is certainly no ordinary man. He is gathering information with meticulous care and preparing something. But he has told me nothing. Knowing full well that I am not the god called Ksaksibal, he maintains the contract all the same. Then I will move exactly as far as I am used, and no further.
If I were clever, I could uncover Hieronymus's purpose now and strike a bargain. If I were better still, I could move him however I wished. Unfortunately, I don't have the ability to go that far. Try it rashly, and I would more likely die on the spot.
So I live with my head bowed, eating what I'm given. I don't want to cross him and be sent back to that cold place. He is quite capable of choosing someone to replace me.
Hm? Wait. Something just brushed past my mind.
Replace?
No—yes. He summoned me. It may have been something like fishing, but he has a technique that can call me into this world. It seems he originally meant to call something other than me. Put the other way around, if he specifies me, he can summon me.
A means of calling me even after the Church of Future Hope falls. A means by which I can come here.
This is it.
Hehe.
Yes. I've found my next objective.
Until now, scattering seeds while I handed out blessings has been, quite literally, the same as tossing seed down and praying it will grow however it likes. That's less farming than a method worse than an ant's—scatter the seeds and come back for them later. Some ants actually do farm. They cultivate fungus and eat it.
This, by comparison, is foraging. A harvest season is, quite literally, a season for harvesting.
So what if I sow, and nothing grows, and it all fails?
Then first I need a way to prepare for that. A method that can call me into this world.
I can guess who might know. Hyungkesuni and Hieronymus. Those two. But both of them are wary of me to a severe degree. So how do I get them to make a contract with me?
I'll have to think it over slowly.
And I couldn't think any further than that, because I went straight down onto the ground. There's the sensation of a foot set wrong.
Whoops.
Thud.
"Lady Rebecca!"
The moment I hit the ground, Joanna, who had been running ahead, comes rushing back. Hyungkesuni, seated far off, takes up his staff and approaches as well.
"Are you all right?"
"Yes. I lost my balance."
I put a hand to my chest. The heart is spinning hard. It doesn't beat. When I first entered this body it was so loud that I changed it. I'm used to the sounds of the body now, and since I'd already changed it, there was no need to change it again. Could it be a problem with the heart?
Looking myself over, aside from the scrapes on my knees and hands from the fall, nothing is hurt. The heart, and the vessels too, are working without any strange sound.
Joanna makes a terrible fuss, and Hyungkesuni, who has come right up to us, sets a hand at her waist.
"Calm down, Joanna."
Then he steps in front of me.
"Hands and knees, both scraped. So you get hurt like a person does."
"I don't know if you've forgotten, but this body is human?"
I am contained inside the body of Rebecca Rolf.
"I know. No—I thought I knew. I just didn't think someone like you would make a mistake like this."
Hmm?
Hyungkesuni examines my hand with a strangely careful touch. Then he turns at the waist and rummages at his belt. A glance shows a small pouch between the folds of cloth. From it he draws a bandage, and a blue bottle besides.
He opens the blue bottle and sprinkles it over the wound.
It stings. So the flesh tells me.
He sprinkles my palms and my knees and wraps them in bandages. Watching his face as he binds them—half the look of a man studying something, half the look of a man who pities it.
Heh.
Well, well. Now that I'm hurt, do I look more like a person? Does he have some function that can feel for someone else's wound?
How dull.
Joanna, beside us, watches him treat me and presses a hand to her chest in relief. Where a child is concerned, a scrape like this is better shaken off and forgotten; that's the sounder lesson. But that isn't something to say to Joanna, who lost her child before she ever held it in her arms. And I am not Joanna's child.
Of course, it might simply be that someone she has grown fond of was hurt, and she's worried!
I lift my palms and inspect the faintly yellow bandages. They aren't dirty. They just seem to be this color. Or do bandages usually pass through bleaching first? Is it the difference between flax and jute? I only know this dimly, so I can't tell them apart. In the first place, they likely aren't even the same species.
Still, there seems to be at least a notion of disinfection, so I probably needn't worry about infection. Or perhaps I don't even know whether I can be infected at all.
"There. All done. Does it hurt?"
"It stings."
"Right. It would. What I put on is that sort of medicine. But it'll heal just as quickly, so don't worry about getting hurt."
At that, I nod. The feeling with which he looks at me has turned almost entirely to pity. Then, as if something has occurred to him, his expression hardens.
"You're hurt. Are you going to keep up this exercise anyway?"
He asks it like that. Something seems to be catching at him.
I nod.
"I am. Next time I'll be careful not to get hurt."
And how does Hyungkesuni respond?
"All right. Be careful, then. Will you be coming out around this hour every day?"
He looks faintly relieved. Which is to say, he means for me to keep coming outside. Does he want to watch me make contact with someone? Or does he want to find whoever tries to make contact with me?
Either way, it ought to be interesting.
Right now, though, it's a little too dark. I should move the hour earlier, so it's easier for paths to miss one another.
"I'll do it after I've carried out my contract with Hieronymus."
"Carried out? Ah—you mean the blessing. All right. Understood."
That means he'll pass the word along to Hieronymus.
The moment my exchange with Hyungkesuni ends, Joanna simply gathers me up and starts toward the room. I have no idea what she, for her part, is thinking. Held in her arms, studying her face, that is what I think.