༺ 𓆩 Chapter 40 — The Flower Blooms 𓆪 ༻
「Translator — Creator」
᠃ ⚘᠂ ⚘ ˚ ⚘ ᠂ ⚘ ᠃
At that time, there was no other course.
In the previous life, in that fading span of years, Jonas had spoken to Isaac through the iron door of the underground vault.
If Goethe is not to be dragged about amid the snarling contentions of one faction or another, it must become a city-state that can feed itself from its own hand.
Though a blade had been driven into his belly, there was yet warmth and purpose in Jonas' voice.
The strength of the nobility comes, in the end, from the land. From a fertile earth. From what the earth gives forth.
The root of a nobleman's strength, as Jonas had spoken of it.
A land to be one's strength.
That land lay now before his eyes.
A land that held a quarter of the fief and bore within it rich black soil. And yet, a land that bordered upon the Black Forest, where battle with Hellwolves came unbidden at any hour. A land fouled with the blood of magic-beasts, where no crop could take root.
Every learned man the Margrave of Goethe had sought out had set his mind to the riddle, and none had found an answer.
The one who, through twists and turns, had at last found the way was the last person anyone would have guessed.
Lady Goethe. Adele.
Isaac's mother.
A blue flower she had brought back from the Demon realm, in her care for the condition of a son afflicted with a strange constitution. A flower that fed upon mana to grow. That flower had cleansed the soil of Vinfeldt.
"Madness…"
"Damn it all. Did I drink too much last night, perhaps? Am I not yet free of the cups?"
The soldiers, their faces still heavy with sleep, could not tell dream from waking.
Three days. Three days only, since the manure had been laid.
The sight that unfurled before them about the camp was, in truth, beyond belief. Green grasses, wet with dew, caught the dim grey light of the coming dawn. Here and there, sprouts had broken through the earth.
"What are you all doing? Fall into line, do not…"
Carlson, rubbing at the stiffness in the back of his neck as though he had slept ill, lost his words. It was a sight to rob a man of them.
That upon the wasteland that was Vinfeldt, upon its bare and lifeless earth, numberless sprouts should have risen. The thing was absurd.
And what made the thing more absurd yet was the giant dancing in the midst of them, with all the abandon of a child. Bellowing a song in the tribal tongue that none but a man of tribal stock might have known, and flinging his limbs about in a wild dance, he was a spectacle.
"Gentlemen."
At Carlson's word, the soldiers turned their attention.
"Has your chief, by any chance, taken drink the moment he opened his eyes?"
The soldiers shook their heads.
"Or has that lump of muscle, at long last, lost his mind?"
The soldiers nodded quietly.
"Look upon this! It works, it works, I tell you!"
To this another madman had come running. It was Hans. Two days before he had picked a quarrel with a veteran soldier and now wore a purple-blue bruise around one eye. And yet, grinning and grinning as though there were no greater joy, he danced alongside Bessemer, rocking and bobbing in time.
"A sprout has come up, a sprout has come up, you sons of bitches!"
"I told you, I told you! If my lord says a thing, the thing is done!"
Dancing without shape or rule went on.
"Gentlemen. Those fools yonder are a sight most unseemly. Clear them away. They hinder the training."
Carlson said it, his brow furrowed.
The dawn run was, thanks to the dancing of Hans and Bessemer, somewhat delayed.
***⚜***
Crack—!!!
"What is this? A sprout has only just come up and you mean to plow the whole of it under?"
"You shall break the desk. Hhhaaamn."
Isaac scrubbed at the tangle of his hair and yawned fit to split his jaw.
His bearing of a noble child remained as it had ever been, but dirt clung to him and a scent came off him. Not as much as the soldiers, by any measure, but the matter of not having washed was the same. It had been more than a month, now, since he had washed himself properly.
Every day the duty soldiers took a wagon out and drew back a wagon-load of water from some distance, but beyond drinking water and the cooking of food, to use water was a luxury. And he had scarcely slept, so absorbed had he been in studying the Mana Stone of the King of Wolves night and day.
He might have gone lighter at it, but an old hunger for the study of magic had been stirred in him for the first time in a long while. Just as he had made good use of the Ice Mana Stone he had obtained from the Winter Queen Spider, there was surely something to be had from the King fo Wolves' as well. But its use remained to him, even yet, a fog with no end.
That peculiar stone, which held a warmth within it, had told Isaac nothing at all.
"The sprouts came up as Elder Brother intended. Is that not proof that something can be grown upon this earth? Why, then, do you mean to overturn all that has grown?"
"Those are not, by rights, mere grasses."
"?"
"They are flowers of the kind that grow in the Demon realm."
"What manner of talk is this?"
"Precisely what I said. They take the mana in the earth as nourishment and grow upon it."
What Schiller had, through no end of twists, brought to him was no mere manure. Seeds, mixed in with the manure. The seeds of a plant brought back from the Demon realm.
"Those sprouts will grow, they will flower, and they will drink up every trace of mana that has seeped into this soil. After that, we shall use them as green manure."
"…Green manure?"
"Once they have finished their growth, those flowers will be no different from any other ordinary plant. Plow the earth, let the grass rot into it, and it shall become new nourishment for the land."
"…How long have you been turning this over in your head?"
Bessemer asked it, blinking.
"Who can say."
Isaac shrugged.
"Then why, until now, have the tribes of this land, or Goethe, not even attempted it?"
"The King of Wolves. The Hellwolves. Birpi. The sorceries. And the long-held understanding that nothing can grow in Vinfeldt."
"……!"
"That is the heart of it."
When Lady Adele of Goethe had once put forward her plan to cleanse Vinfeldt by means of the blue flower, she too had met with no end of opposition. The troops are short as they are, the argument had run. Are we to spend men in the clearing of Vinfeldt's magic-beasts? The King of Wolves, the Hellwolves, and all the rest. The rumor that men were turned into wolves. It is absurd, the skeptics had said; it cannot be done.
In the end, had Adele not staked her life upon leading the clearing herself, it would never have been attempted at all.
By her doing, Goethe had been able to hold on a while longer.
And by that very doing, Adele had taken her wounds and her body had grown frail. Her weakened body had not been able to fight off the hill-fever she had caught in the clearing of monsters in the White Serpent Mountains.
The priests of the New Faith had extolled her as a just one, as blessed, as a martyr, as a servant of god; they had said that her tender love for her son had delivered the brothers of Goethe. That such titles should be laid upon the daughter of a Great Chieftain was a strange thing in itself, and the Margrave of Goethe had never cared for the praise of Adele. It had saved Goethe, yes, but it had taken her life.
"Then when shall we plow?"
"Heh. For now, let us watch it. They have not yet fully grown."
Isaac answered as he shook off the painful memory.
Never shall I allow such a tragedy again.
May your long night one day come to its end.
May you find peace.
That last letter which she, his mother, had sent him, he would see to it that no such letter was ever written, nor ever read, again.
"I miss Mother."
The words rose to him all at once, and Isaac muttered them under his breath.
"A child is, for all that, still a child."
"Well. You miss your father too, do you not?"
"…That I do."
Bessemer scratched at his bald head as he said it. The look upon his face, ill-suited to so large a frame, was a dispirited one.
"They shall be watching from Balaka. Let us do our part with spirit."
Isaac rose and clapped Bessemer upon the arm.
"Need you say so? Of course I shall. Only say the word. If need be, I shall tear up even the old trees of the Black Forest by the roots."
Sparks all but struck in Bessemer's eyes.
"Calm yourself. There is no need for such a thing."
Isaac waved his hand.
Three days passed. As Isaac had foretold, the flowers bloomed.
Only then did the soldiers understand that the flowers that had risen upon the manure were no mere wild blooms. The grasses grew tall enough to come to the waists of the men. They could not stretch as far as the ridges of the horizon, but at the least, about the encampment a strange vitality had settled in, carried by the soft green grasses and blue flowers.
The soldiers made a great fuss of it, calling it a sorcery or a miracle on that account alone. But to Isaac's eye, this was only the beginning.
"Bessemer. Plow it under."
"I shall do as you command."
By Isaac's order, for the time being the training hours were given over to labor hours. Apart from those on duty, every man was conscripted to the turning of the earth.
"Hhhaaah!"
Crack! Crack! Crack!
Bessemer, with an axe in each hand, drove them into the earth without mercy. In every direction flew clods of earth and the blue flowers with their roots laid bare.
"Oh, damn it, man!"
The soldiers nearby, drenched in soil and manure, cursed, but Bessemer paid them no heed. He worked his body without pause, bathing in his own sweat.
Yet for most of the soldiers, the will to work had deserted them.
"Hnn, hnn, hnn. Damn. This is no different from hammering an ingot."
A frozen earth had not been called that for nothing.
Not far beneath the surface the earth lay frozen as it had been for long years. Spade or blade or axe, whatever a man set to it, quickly dulled.
"Oh, damn it all. What is a man to do."
Tempers flared. The soldiers looked as though they might fling down the iron in their hands at any moment. But they could not bring themselves to do it. Carlson's glare was one reason. The other was that the sight before their eyes had begun to strike them with a strange new feeling.
So it was, the longer a man had been at this post.
For thirteen years past, not once had they seen such a living green.
It was not the empty waiting before a future without shape. It was the sense of a step set forward. The sense of something in the making.
Palms that stung, wrists that ached, shoulders that burned, bones that felt they might come apart, and yet no man among them dared to speak of not being able, of the hardness of it. For it was a hope such as they had never before laid eyes upon.
"Hand it here."
Carlson stepped up to one of the soldiers wrestling with a spade that would not bite the earth.
"Ah, yes?"
"Your spade. Give it to me."
The soldier, caught off guard, handed his spade over to Carlson.
"Watch, and watch well."
Carlson simply set to plain spade-work.
"…Huh?"
A heap of earth that had, plainly, been frozen stiff and would scarce take a scratch from any blow was being turned up clean in thick, easy forkfuls.
The soldiers watched Carlson's work with the slack-faced look of fools.
It had taken every scrap of their strength to so much as mark the earth. What they had been doing was less a plowing than a scraping. And Carlson was simply scooping up the frozen earth, just so. The soldiers watched the captain's labor with empty, dumbstruck faces.
"A monster, no less."
"By what devilry is he doing that?"
An hour went by, perhaps, of the work continuing.
Then, all at once, Carlson cast the spade down.
"Not a thing to be endured."
He narrowed his eyes and looked off in the direction of Bessemer.
"Hrraaaah!"
Set beside Carlson, who had turned up a stretch of earth some pyong across in a neat and even depth, Bessemer's corner of the work was a mess.
"Hhh, hhh."
Even a man of Bessemer's stuff, it seemed, had his limits of endurance. His breathing grew steadily rougher, and his axe-strokes slower.
After an hour of it, Carlson had grasped that this was a thing that could not be done.
He strode, long-paced, back into the camp.
The soldiers watched his receding back with faces blank as lost children.
"My lord. May I enter? My lord?"
Carlson called for Isaac from beyond the canvas of the tent, but there was no answer.
"I shall enter."
Carlson drew aside the flap and stepped within. Had the relation between them been that of noble and guard in the common way of it, this would have been an overstep of no small measure. But Carlson did not trouble himself over it. Theirs, from the very beginning, had never been the vertical bond of master and servant but something closer to an equal contract between traders.
"Mn."
"Ugh."
Carlson, upon entering the tent, clapped his hand over his nose at once. A vivid stink of piss and worse rode heavy in the air of the tent. He quickly placed the source of it: a chamber pot set off to one side.
Hans, being caught up in training and labor, had not had the spare strength to tend to Isaac, and so Isaac, left to himself, had not emptied it. No, more likely, Isaac had not even considered doing such a thing at all.
"You have scarcely come out of your tent of late, my lord. What is it that you are doing?"
"It plainly resonates with my mana. And yet."
Instead of answering Carlson's question, Isaac only muttered words whose meaning was beyond him.
"At this rate, my lord, the plowing of the field is not to be done. The earth is frozen through. Apart from myself and Bessemer, there is no progress to be made."
The depth Isaac had set as his standard was two meters. Only then could they use sand and gravel to compose an artificial soil into which wheat or barley might set its roots deeply enough to thrive. Yet, for the present, the only men who could do the work in any real measure were Bessemer and Carlson. For all the formidable strength of those two, to turn up, to a depth of two meters, several hundred pyong of manure-strewn earth was a labor demanding an enormous span of time. And supposing several months of such labor did see it through, what Isaac sought was not some few hundred pyong of tilled ground, but tens of thousands.
A way around this had to be found beforehand.
"And Schiller?"
"No word yet, my lord. But as I said before, you had best not lean upon hope here."
Isaac had given Schiller the task of acquiring beasts of burden capable of plowing fields. Horse, ox, or donkey, the kind had not mattered. But, as Carlson said, he held no great hopes of it.
Oxen and donkeys could not well endure the cold climate of Goethe. Frostbite, the chill-sickness, trouble of the breathing. One way or another, they fell quickly to illness. Horses, of all of them, endured the cold best, but the royal court set a limit upon the number of horses Goethe was permitted to keep. For fear that they should be turned to war-mounts.
"Neither the one way nor the other, then."
Isaac sighed and set the King of Wolves' Mana Stone down upon the desk.
"My lord, may I enter?"
While Isaac was sunk in his thoughts, Günter's voice came from beyond the tent.
"Come."
At Isaac's leave, Günter stepped in and gave a small bow.
"You ought to come out, my lord. I think you had best see it."
"What is the matter?"
"People from the tribe village have come. Thirty, at a guess, if not more."
At Günter's word, Isaac and Carlson traded looks of puzzlement.
END σϝ CHAPTER