The Guest Who Came in Secret (3)
I'd caught an elf stealing in the middle of the night, and instead of throwing her out I'd fed her first. The words that came flying back at me were about racism.
She was an elf so drunk on her own superiority she couldn't see how high the sky was, and the shock of being called a racist by her hit me hard.
"A mere human!!! How did you make food like this? It's too delicious!"
"Huh."
Then she pulled a drift so clean it could have filled a kart racer's boost gauge.
Curious what she was actually driving at, I asked.
"What are you talking about?"
"Exactly what I said, you stupid human. How did you make a perfect elven meal?"
"Elven?"
"Yes, elven. The ingredients are first-rate, and you didn't use a single thing from an animal, yet the savor is on another level entirely."
Her manners were still appalling, but I caught the gist. She wanted to know how a human had produced a flawless vegan table that even elves themselves had never managed.
From a Korean point of view, it wasn't anything worth gasping over. Still, once I compared it to the way vegan Westerners stare at a Korean vegetable spread, her astonishment made sense.
"I'm glad it tasted good, but answer my question. Who are you, and why did you break into my house?"
I'd been too rattled earlier to look at her properly. Now that I did, the elf was a wreck. Dust and some unidentifiable green sap had soaked into her tunic and trousers until they were stiff with grime, and the platinum hair bound in twin tails was dry as straw, with scraps of greens stuck through it here and there, as if she'd been living in the woods for days. A pretty face, and the rest of her pure beggar.
Everything about the situation only grew more suspicious.
She hemmed and hawed at the question, then finally opened her mouth.
"My name is Iseria. I'm an elf of Nuardel. This place... the smell was so good, I just... couldn't help it..."
The elf who had named herself Iseria gave me the short version. The country of the elves had been so dull she'd slipped away in secret, only to find the world outside the greenhouse harsher than she'd imagined. She'd spent days half-starved, like someone lost in the wild, and when that extraordinary scent reached her, her head simply emptied.
I listened in silence, then said the word that surfaced.
"So you're just a runaway kid."
"I am not!!! I'm a proper adult!"
Iseria raised her voice as if I'd struck the nerve dead center.
She was tiny, and not particularly substantial besides — and she was calling herself grown? Elves lived far longer than humans. Maybe their metabolism and the pace of their growth were simply different. Well. So be it.
Past that point, it wasn't my concern. She was an adult, which meant she had to look after her own hide...
"Hmm... is that right?"
"Yes! Don't treat me like a child. You're a human, and younger than I am!"
"Then leave."
"Huh?"
If she'd truly been a child, I might have helped her. She'd claimed to be an adult, and she'd walked out of her own house by choice. She could answer for that.
I rose from the chair, caught Iseria by the arm, and pulled. She thrashed, and still she was dragged along.
"Let go!! How am I supposed to live if you throw me out now!!"
"Then just today! Let me stay one day, just one!"
"Kindly grow into an adult who can take responsibility for her own actions."
She tried, in her own stubborn fashion, to dig her heels in. It did her no good. I pushed Iseria out past the gate.
"Ngh...!"
Bang!
I didn't wait for an answer. I shut the door and locked it without mercy.
Duke Kailan and Arthur dropped by whenever they grew bored. If something actually went wrong, I would tell them.
Locking every door and window of the restaurant, I glanced through the glass. Iseria stood there in a daze, the look of a cat that had been betrayed, and then she turned her feet toward the forest.
The slump of her retreating back stirred a little pity in me. I steadied myself anyway.
If she had asked for a meal and a bed with even a scrap of manners, I would have allowed it. I'd already let Ishilla stay once, and a second guest would not have been difficult. There was no particular reason to refuse.
But Iseria had shown no courtesy at all. She had broken into the house on a whim, stolen food, and then, with a perfectly straight face, hit me with racism on top of it. For a man who had been marched through the full Confucian course of the Eastern Land of Propriety, it was a rudeness I could not swallow...
Just sleep.
The night had been nothing but nonsense. Sleep rushed in all at once, and I gave myself over to it.
Three days later, Duke Kailan — who had come without fail, as he always did, to eat a bowl of banquet noodles — spoke up.
"You haven't taken to keeping a cat, have you?"
"Ah... no?"
"Hmm. Then have you been feeding some wild animal? Every time I arrive, I find fruit, or some small beast that's been hunted, left near the restaurant. Whatever creature it is, it certainly knows how to repay a kindness."
"Ahaha... Last time I made far too much for one person, so I left it in the woods for whoever wanted it. Maybe something ate that."
Of course I had not been feeding strays or beasts. Near the palisade and across the yard, little handfuls of wild fruit kept appearing, and sometimes a small animal — a rabbit, or something like one — left already hunted. And I knew exactly who was behind this beastly show of gratitude.
It was the one hiding even now in the brush at the edge of the backyard woods, ears pricked: the elf herself. Iseria.
I cracked the back door and looked. The ear sticking out of the leaves had gone bright red. With that inhuman elven hearing of hers, she had clearly caught a conversation in which she was being discussed as livestock.
At first I'd wondered if birds were stockpiling food. Then a dead rabbit showed up, and the trail became obvious. Late one night I had deliberately killed every light in the restaurant and watched.
A rustle came from the direction of the forest, and a platinum twin tail swayed into view. Iseria crept toward the restaurant with a shuffling, awkward gait, glancing all around her. I'd wondered why she walked like that, until I saw the reason: she had no pockets, and she'd stuffed the front overlap of her tunic full of fruit. With every step the hem lifted, and a flash of pale stomach showed through.
When she reached the palisade of the backyard, she carefully undid the makeshift pouch she'd made of that front panel. Wild raspberries, kiwi berries, and wild grapes spilled out. Once she'd shaken every last one free, Iseria slipped cautiously back into the woods.
That was the whole of it. I did not tell Duke Kailan. Elves were a people I was seeing for the first time in this world, and I had no idea whether it was wise to speak of them lightly. If I announced, Your Grace, that isn't a beast, it's an elf! would he even believe me? And if I did say it, Iseria might die of shame.
Her rudeness had disappointed me at first. Looking at it now, it seemed more like the clumsiness of someone who simply didn't know how to deal with people. Leaving fruit like that was, I suspected, an apology in her own fashion.
"Haa. Another fine meal. Come to the city before long. I'll order them to receive you with every courtesy."
"Yes, thank you, Your Grace. Travel safely."
After Duke Kailan had gone, I went to check the thing I had set to soak the day before. I'd started preparing it the moment I realized Iseria was sorry, but it was a fussy food, and it had eaten up a great deal of time.
A full day of drinking its fill of water had left it swollen fat. It was nothing other than soybeans.
Yes. What I meant to make was the very essence of vegetarian cooking. The finest protein that could be drawn from nothing but plants: tofu.
She had lost her mind over something as ordinary as bibimbap. If she tasted tofu for the first time, wouldn't she pass out mid-bite? I worried, only a little and not entirely as a joke, about what I would do if she actually collapsed. Fresh handmade tofu, still warm and nutty, had that kind of power.
These days factory tofu was the common thing, but if you were willing to walk a little, there were still places that served it handmade, or made that very morning. And everyone who tasted such tofu for the first time said the same thing: that everything they had called tofu until then had not been tofu at all.
Getting to that soft, enveloping flavor took a rather involved process. First I put the well-soaked beans into the millstone and ground them. I'd used the same stone to grind sesame for oil, and doing it alone had nearly killed me then. Today was no different. Groaning through the work, I ground every last bean, then strained the resulting pulp through cotton cloth.
Once I had the soy milk, clear of the solids, I poured it into the pot and brought it to a boil. Heat drove off the raw beany smell and helped the protein set. The trick was to keep stirring so the bottom never caught. After about fifteen minutes of careful boiling I killed the fire, set the lid on, and let the milk rest and cool. Not boiling anymore, but not merely warm either — when it sat at a proper heat, I strained it through the cloth once more.
Set the pulp aside.
The clumps caught at this stage were the soybean pulp. Tastes split on it, but that dry, crumbly, nutty flavor had its devotees. Later, boiled into a cool, clean pulp stew, it would put away a bowl of rice in moments.
I lined a large square frame I'd prepared with cloth and poured in the pure soy milk, separated now from the pulp. Then I stirred in a vinegar brine, a little at a time. It would have been better if I'd had nigari, but I hadn't planned on making tofu, so I hadn't laid any in. In its place, a mixture of salt, vinegar, and water would serve as the coagulant.
As I let the brine trickle in and worked it with a paddle, the soy milk gradually set into the form called fresh curd, or sundubu. I portioned off enough of that curd for two. Firm block tofu was wonderful in its own right, but anyone who had eaten the sundubu of Chodang in Gangwon would understand. This was not a flavor you could dismiss by merely calling it soft tofu. You needed no other side dish. A scatter of seasoned soy sauce, and eating it felt as warm as if you held the whole world.
The fresh curd could wait a little. The block tofu came first. While it was still soft curd, I set the lid on the frame and weighted it with a heavy stone. Twenty or thirty minutes like that, and the firm tofu would be finished as well.
All that remained was the waiting. I glanced through the window at the backyard.
Sure enough, one twin tail had been drawn in by the nutty fragrance of tofu filling the air. Head insisting she restrain herself, body insisting she could not, Iseria stood before the backyard palisade, unable to come or go, and only stared at the restaurant.
This much, I could forgive.
Before I opened the back door, I fixed my expression.
Forgiveness is forgiveness. Discipline still has to be clear.
Practice complete, I opened the door and called out.
"Iseria. Come here."
"Uh... huh? Really?"
"Quickly."
My appearance startled her, and she nearly bolted, but at the call she climbed the palisade and came.
"Nothing you want to say to me?"
"I... sorry."
"Sorry?"
"I mean—"
Standing in front of me, Iseria couldn't meet my eyes. She only fidgeted with her hands. Pressed like that, a sorry finally came out of her.
In truth, whatever ill feeling I'd held toward her was already gone. Whatever her age, she looked about the size of a younger cousin, and there was something rather cute about a kid like that offering up, by way of apology, the things she herself thought precious. Which was probably why a mean little impulse took hold of me, and I leaned on her.
"I'm sorry..."
The moment the polite form of an apology left Iseria's mouth, the laugh rising in me became impossible to hold.
"Kkh— pfft!"
"Wh-why are you laughing?!"
"Hahaha! All right. You're forgiven. Come in."
At the laugh that had burst out of me, Iseria stared, flustered. The reaction was exactly what a small child would give, and that only made it funnier. I brought her into the restaurant as I spoke.
"You've been smelling this for a while, haven't you?"
Gulp.
She answered my question by swallowing her own drool. I sat her at the table and set down the fresh curd I'd already portioned, along with the seasoned soy sauce.
"A gift to mark the truce. Fresh tofu curd."
"Haaah...!"
Was she even hearing me? The curd in front of her had taken Iseria completely.
"To your taste — spoon a little of that black sauce beside it and eat them together."
Just as I'd said, she lifted a touch of soy sauce and scattered it over the curd. So she was listening. Then, with a badly trembling hand, she took up the spoon and scooped a bite.
Soft. Impossibly soft.
Clouds, or the sea. Perhaps both. Snow-white curds, billowing and weightless, rose together with the warm broth.
Iseria brought the spoon to her mouth as carefully as if she were gathering a newborn into her arms. She ate.
And then the entire way she had ever understood food came crashing down.