༺ 𓆩 Chapter 38 — The Master of Vinfeldt 𓆪 ༻
「Translator — Creator」
᠃ ⚘᠂ ⚘ ˚ ⚘ ᠂ ⚘ ᠃
Five riders mounted on swift horses tore across the wasteland, scattering ashes on the wind as they went.
"..............."
The soldiers drawn up at the gate of the encampment watched in silence. The remains of their fallen comrades were carried away upon the wind, and scattered.
Every man of them would have wished to perform the funeral rites as the customs of his birthplace demanded, but circumstances would not allow it. To see to each of dozens of corpses one by one would have taken more days than a month held. The point of compromise they had reached was the pyre.
Some closed their eyes in silent prayer. Some would not look away, that they might not miss the last sight of their fellows.
Hoooooooooooom—!!!
One man raised a horn to his lips and blew. It was believed that the voice of such a horn drove off evil spirits and guided the souls of the dead into the sky.
Before long, the horsemen scattering the ashes had broken apart one from another and passed out of sight beyond the ridgelines.
"Be free."
Günter murmured it. The faces of comrades he would never see again flickered in and out of his mind. There had been those he had loved, and those he had not loved. They were all, all of them, faces he would not see again.
That was the whole of the funeral.
"On your feet, all of you! It is training-hour!"
Carlson barked at them like some dread spirit.
"You may grieve as your bodies roll!"
"................"
Günter and the soldiers with him glared at Carlson, but soon enough each of them cast his eyes down.
"What then? Let any man with a complaint step forward. Prove it by arms. I for one have had my fill of this hateful post of a captain and would gladly see it off my hands."
The soldiers avoided the glare of Carlson's fierce eyes. It was not that they simply feared his martial prowess. These were men who had thrown their lives before the Hellwolves and lived. They knew, each of them, that Carlson was right.
Grief in heaping measure, and work in heaping measure. Grief did not settle anything. That much they knew. Yet for all that knowing, the unfairness of it pressed upon them.
"If no one has a word, then move! Do not whimper on like women!"
"Agh, damn it."
The soldier beside Günter grumbled under his breath and obeyed Carlson. The others, one after another, moved to their tasks with sour faces.
The roughly fifty men were parted in half. One half set to the restoring of the camp; the other half went to the training yard. Bessemer had charge of the restoring. Carlson had charge of the training.
As he had for weeks before, Carlson hectored them with shouted oaths and a readiness for violence, driving them. They began their running at the grey hour of dawn and trained in arms until the time for the noon meal. After the hour for afternoon regrouping came bouts of sparring.
He worked them thoroughly.
So it was that once supper had passed, the men began to drop off to sleep one and two at a time. With the tents not yet fully restored, most of them lay themselves down upon the hard ground, with nothing but a blanket beneath them and the night sky for a ceiling.
Krrrnnnn…
Krrrnnnn…
"The chief sleeps well. In a situation like this, the man can still find sleep."
The soldier lying beside Günter grumbled it at the sound of Bessemer's snoring.
"He has been sleeping like a drunk lately, has he not?"
Their bodies were weary, but their minds were still bright and wakeful, and the soldiers murmured to one another in hushed tones. When the tents had yet been sound, a man could at the least have woven himself a mattress of straw, but now with only the hard earth beneath them and its cold creeping up into the bones, sleep was no easy thing to come by.
"He has his life's wish at last."
Another of them spoke it.
Bessemer had been stationed at this encampment for so long that there was not a man among the soldiers who did not know his private history.
The madman giant who had defied the orders of his superiors and combed the Black Forest for no reason but to bring down the King of Wolves. A man touchy enough to stake his life on the slightest scrap of a scuffle. A strange one who could not find sleep at night and so volunteered for every watch. A stubborn creature who, across ten and more years of blood-feuding with Hellwolves and other beasts, had seen every one of his commanders fall, and who had walked back alone, alive, every time.
He was not yet five and twenty, and yet he bore the face of a man who had served a lifetime in arms. Plagued every night by his dreams, he never went deep into sleep. And so he looked far older than his years. Deep furrows at the corners of his eyes and his mouth. Dark hollows beneath his eyes. A shaven head, and a beard unkempt.
He looked a man who might seize and break any beast that came at him. Yet the soldiers knew. What he feared most was the night. That he passed his nights gripping his axe and staring into the darkness, enduring them.
And that very man was sleeping now, dead to the world.
"Fuck me, the things you live long enough to see."
One of the soldiers let out a thin, rueful laugh.
For men who had long served in the encampment, battles with Hellwolves had been an ordinary matter. By contrast, the sound of Bessemer snoring was a sight and sound entirely strange.
"Aye, is it not so."
Günter murmured and turned over again.
Sleep, again, would not come to him.
The night sky was thick with stars. Günter blinked. As always, the moon was there. The moon of that night. The faces of the comrades who had turned into wolves. The shouts and the screams. The clashing of spear and blade. The roar of the flames that had swallowed the tents. It all passed across his mind, one after another.
With no help for it, he had to rise again in the middle of the night.
He was not the only one who could not sleep. Here and there throughout the camp, men dug through barrels of drink already near drained, or swung their swords at nothing, or ran the rounds of the camp even at that hour. Carlson did not forbid them so much.
In this encampment, the last to sleep after the night watches were the two men Carlson and Isaac themselves.
"Günter, will you not have a cup?"
"No. I would rather not be made to see again what I have eaten during tomorrow's training."
Günter waved off the man offering him drink.
It was a strange thing.
The soldier who had offered him drink was a man of the Goethe farmsteads. He had lost his parents to raiding by the warrior tribes once, and had shown a bitter enmity toward all soldiers of tribal stock. The sort of man from whom, far from sharing drink, one was fortunate not to receive a drawn blade. And yet, since the battle with the King of Wolves, he had taken on a surprising warmth. Not only to Günter, but to the other tribesmen among them also.
They had shed blood together. They had lost comrades together. At the same place, at the same hour, they had staked their lives in the fight.
"A dull man. Had your forebears seen it, they would have told you to hand over your manhood."
"That is prejudice against the tribes, you farm-country hick."
"Hah. Should you ever want a drink later, you tell me. The supply store is burned to the stones, and outside what I have tucked away, you will find it hard to come by."
"Aye."
Günter and the soldier exchanged a look.
Something thick and binding, which had not been between them before, passed in that look.
It was a bond.
They were now looking upon one another as brothers.
They had, in a manner of speaking, been born again in Vinfeldt.
It was not simply because of a battle in which life and death had passed before them. There was what they had together held, and there was what they had together gained.
What had brought all this change about?
Any soldier of Vinfeldt could have answered that question, and quickly.
"There he is again."
Günter, in his wandering, had caught sight of flames that burned still beyond the camp.
Five days already, and yet unquenched, the blue fire roared on. It had come from the pit where the corpses of the Hellwolves had been burned.
And before that fire, keeping watch like some ghost, stood a boy.
What he was thinking, Günter could not begin to guess. Yet only the sight of the boy made him feel a kind of ease.
When first he had seen him, Günter had taken him for nothing more than a brat, and had thought he would not last. He had wanted to see him dressed down by Bessemer and left sobbing.
When the boy had frozen the village of the Baitur tribe entire, he had been afraid. It had been the first time he had feared a man more than a Hellwolf.
And then, in the desperate struggle with the Hellwolves, Günter had borne witness to a sight that had staggered him.
When despair and terror had swept through the whole of the camp, the boy had been shining.
Whether the boy had been cast about with some true halo of light, Günter could not say for certain. But to his eyes, without question, the boy had been shining. Brighter even than the yellow eye of the King of Wolves, brighter than the swollen light of the full moon. Shining down upon the soldiers.
Pulled along by that light, Günter had taken up his blade again. His comrades had found their courage.
The soldiers had not been borne down without a fight. If they were to die, they could die fighting. If they were to live, they would not live by having fled, but by having resisted, fiercely, and survived.
That was graven upon the hearts of Günter and all the soldiers as a pride.
Vinfeldt was no longer the terminus at which the cast-off and the homeless came to rest. It was the place they had kept by the blood of their comrades and by the blood they themselves had shed.
What had made it possible?
As the soldiers of this place all knew, Günter knew as well.
He looked upon the back of the boy.
The night felt peaceful. That was a rare thing. The cry of a wolf came from somewhere far off, but it felt as distant as the business of some other world.
Günter knew. That this boy rose earlier than any man and slept later than any. That he was awake the longest of them all. That Bessemer could sleep at ease now was by this boy's doing.
Günter knew. That the lord of Vinfeldt was this boy, this Isaac. That this boy was the one to whom he should offer his sword.
Günter knew. And the soldiers of this place knew.
***⚜***
The next day.
Twelve wagons arrived at the encampment. The foremost bore the device of a shield.
"I pressed to come as swiftly as I could, my lord, but the hour is much later than I had hoped."
Schiller looked as though he had aged some years in the span of a month. Without need for words, one could see how hard he had been worked.
"No. You have come at the right hour."
"In a single month, my lord, what in heaven's name has passed here? It looks to me as though more than half the men are gone."
"Something has indeed passed."
Isaac set about explaining what had befallen them in Schiller's absence.
"…What were you thinking, my lord, to do such a thing? Why did you not report it to his lordship? Why did you not call for aid? Had you done so, you would not have taken so many casualties."
Schiller's voice rose by degrees. There was a heat of anger upon his face.
He was a chamberlain now, but in his younger years he had been a veteran who had walked every battlefield at the Margrave's right hand, a very shadow of him. To such a man, Isaac's choice was reckless and foolish.
"If you would have his lordship's recognition, my young lord, this is not the way."
Goethe, for reasons both historical and political, had trouble enough expanding its forces as it was. And by Isaac's choice, near seventy able-bodied men had been cut down in a single night. He had even put his own life in peril.
"There was need of it."
Against the chamberlain, who seemed ready to break into a shout at any moment, Isaac's voice carried no feeling. It was the tone of a man who had done only what needed to be done. Unhurried.
"Need of what, my lord?"
Deep furrows had drawn themselves between Schiller's brows.
"Independence."
For Isaac as he stood now, it would be faster to provide for a revenue in place of the shield-tax by way of reviving Vinfeldt itself than to win the Count's trust and pursue the matter through him. More certain to show him results than to persuade him with a hundred spoken words.
"And for that, Vinfeldt must first stand upon its own feet."
"His lordship gave you this land. As for independence…"
"There must be those who have shed blood for this land of theirs, and who will yet shed it. My own men, of my own."
Isaac did not allow Schiller's doubt to stand.
"Schiller. As you say, had I leaned upon my father's army, it would have been an easier thing. But the soldiers of this place would have formed no attachment to this wasteland. Nothing would have changed."
The soldiers of Goethe and of various tribes. To them, this place had been neither home nor paradise. A temporary residence, at which they lingered because they had nowhere else to go.
They had needed a reason.
A reason to remain here. A reason to keep this place. A reason to see it prosper.
That reason must have its beginning in the blood of comrades, and in the blood one has shed oneself.
"..............."
As Isaac spoke, Schiller's mouth opened and closed several times over. Yet in the end, no voice of refutation passed the chamberlain's lips.
Cold as it was, Isaac was right.
"These are words fitting for a Goethe."
He could do no other but nod.
"I shall be the master of Vinfeldt. And Vinfeldt shall be the richest city in all Goethe. It must be so."
"And do you think it can be done, my lord?"
Schiller asked it, at a loss.
"There is no reason it cannot."
Yet watching this small Goethe, so full of confidence, the chamberlain could not help but break into a quiet smile.
This young master, who once could not carry his own body, looked for all the world as though he might truly do it.
END σϝ CHAPTER