༺ 𓆩 Chapter 41 — Growth 𓆪 ༻
「Translator — Creator」
᠃ ⚘᠂ ⚘ ˚ ⚘ ᠂ ⚘ ᠃
"Virfier lured the men of the village and turned them into hellwolves."
Günter relayed what he had heard from the old man.
The way their families and kin had been driven out into the Vinfeldt wastes. The hunger they had endured, the wretched lives they had lived. Virfier, the shaman of Baitur, laid the blame for all of it at Goethe's feet. He had planted vengeance in the hearts of the men, made them hunger for power. The men had followed Virfier the way moths follow flame. Through the rites he performed, they had been twisted into beasts.
What remained in the village now were only the elderly, the women, and the children. Their wariness toward outsiders had grown from the same root. They had no strength of their own. They had lived in fear of being devoured at any moment. With nowhere to stand, belonging to no one, they had passed their days holding their breath upon thin ice — caught between the hellwolves and Goethe's terrible name.
"They wish to ask forgiveness."
Hardly had Günter's words ended before some thirty old folk and women bowed low. The children stared blankly for a moment, watching their elders, and then imitated them.
"They say the firstborn son of Goethe has brought them hope. That they can now live in expectation of a tomorrow. They wish to help in any way they can. They wish to share in whatever miracle is to come over Vinfeldt."
The villagers who had already gathered at the encampment were utterly transfixed by the blue blossoms blooming all around. Every face among them was flushed with feeling.
"Ah, well."
Listening to Günter's translation, Isaac scratched at his cheek. It hadn't been done out of any grand intention. What Isaac sought was the resurgence of Goethe, nothing more. It had been a calculated act, and the benefit that fell upon the tribesfolk had been merely incidental.
'Still, an extra pair of hands never hurt.'
The encampment was short of labor. Rebuilding the camp, preserving the beast meat brought back from the Black Forest, drawing water, gathering firewood, tending to the wounded who had survived, mending the soldiers' gear — and so on and on. Even the tasks that demanded little strength still added up to a great deal of small busy work.
There was no doubting their goodwill. The baskets the old folk and women had set down were filled with herbs from the Black Forest and famine crops. They had scraped together what little they had to bring it. Without a word of common tongue between them, one could still see how gladly they welcomed this turn of fate.
"What will you do?"
Bessemer, who had been watching in silence, drew up beside Isaac. A faint anxiousness had settled into his face. He seemed to be fretting that Isaac might turn them away. And no wonder — to Bessemer, they were not strangers but distant kin. The warrior tribes of Vinfeldt had stood and fought against Goethe together. There had been no small intercourse between them. They were near enough to count as far-flung relations.
"What do you think?"
"Brother."
Bessemer pressed his words at Isaac's question.
"Günter, tell them this. Old, woman, child — none will be allowed to idle and eat their fill. If they're confident they can earn their keep, then let them in."
"Brother!"
Bessemer's face brightened.
***⚜***
After the village folk were taken in, the encampment came alive. It was the first such stir since the battle with the hellwolves. The old ones lent their wisdom; the women cared for the wounded and busied themselves with whatever small tasks they could find. The children studied swordsmanship under Günter, who was fluent in their tongue. The death and screams that had haunted the soldiers' minds were lifting, little by little. In place of clinging to the losses of the past, they were learning how to look at the future.
"Waaah—"
A child sparring with a clumsy stick of wood landed hard on his backside and burst into tears.
"Look at the little fellow weep."
The soldiers laughed kindly and moved to help him up. But Günter stepped in front of them.
"Let him stand on his own."
"Suit yourself."
The soldiers shrugged and went on their way. The child wailed louder, but when no one came, his tears began to ebb. He looked about for a moment, then rose to his feet on his own. Günter told him in the tribal tongue that anyone with something they wished to defend must learn first to stand up by himself.
"Next."
Günter drilled them through the basic stances of the sword again and again, taking each child in turn for sparring. After supper he gathered the tribesfolk and taught them the common tongue. Day by day he passed in this way, drilling and teaching alongside his own training, with scarcely a moment to spare.
"What's got you so intent?"
Carlson came up to Günter, who had taken a moment to rest astride a felled log. The logs for rebuilding the camp had been cut and hauled back from the Black Forest by Bessemer himself.
"Got me so what, sir?"
"Have you looked at your own face lately?"
"Where would there be a mirror in a place like this?"
"You look worse than the young master Goethe."
Carlson was right enough — Günter's face was a sorry sight. There were dark hollows beneath his eyes, and his skin had gone dry and rough. The long braid running down the crown of his head was unraveling in places, frayed and bristling.
The villagers were here on Bessemer's pleading, yet there was no one who took to championing them and looking after them more zealously than Günter.
"Take it easier, why don't you."
"It's because I'm glad of it, sir. Glad."
"Glad?"
"I came to be in this place because of my mother — she was the one who saw through Virfier's designs. My tribe was crushed by another even before the war with Goethe came. The women and children of a defeated tribe are treated as spoils. My mother had already lost everything. She wasn't going to let me be taken from her too."
"I see."
"And so to me, this is a new home. The lord made it so. A home must be tended to. Made into a place worth living in."
Günter drew a long breath in and let it out.
"Quite so. Care for a sip?"
Carlson held out the willow-wood cup in his hand to Günter. There was no flicker of pity or regret on his face. It was only the look of a man who had concluded that some lives simply went that way.
"Cough, cough cough."
Günter took it, thinking it ordinary ale, and drank without hesitation — only to break into coughing as it scorched its way down his throat.
“Not much of a drinker, are you?”
"What sort of brew is this, to be so fierce?"
"I abused the privileges of a captain and asked the steward for something properly distilled."
"I can't see what there is to enjoy in it."
"Ueah. A life that comes to know the taste of liquor like this isn't one I'd commend to anyone."
Carlson took back the cup and emptied it without a pause. The familiar warmth ran down into his belly.
"How did the captain come to follow our lord?"
Günter, who had been watching him quietly, asked.
"Follow?"
"He's a remarkable one, isn't he. So young, and yet step by step he's making real what no one in this place would have dared to imagine."
"You truly believe in that young master Goethe, don't you."
"Yes. I've lived more than ten years in this place, and I can't think of a master more fitted to this land than the lord we have now."
"Well. That may be."
"Are you not the same, captain — ?"
Carlson looked down into the empty cup. He was here because there was a thing he had to do. Because there was a thing he had to see done, he had taken upon himself the role of Isaac's shadow. Bessemer, Günter, the soldiers in this place — perhaps their hearts were full of hope, of fervor. But Carlson's was as empty as this cup. The darkness inside it looked like the deep, hollow bottom of him.
"I should sleep."
Carlson tipped the last of the drink onto the ground.
"Captain."
"What."
"Might I ask one thing of you?" Günter spoke carefully.
“The children need someone to look up to.”
“Someone to look up to?”
"Wasn't there always one when we were small? A man whose back you wanted to grow into. Whom one day you wanted to catch up to."
"…………"
Carlson regarded Günter through eyes flushed faintly with drink.
"No — never mind, sir. Forget I said anything. I overstepped."
“…If you say so.”
With that one line Carlson turned for his own tent.
"D-does that mean you'll do it?"
To Günter's call thrown after his back, Carlson only waved a vague hand.
“…That kind of pastime is fine. It won’t fill an empty cup, though.”
Carlson muttered words whose meaning he himself did not quite know.
***⚜***
Isaac was wrestling with the King of Wolves' mana stone.
Always holding to a steady warmth like the heat of a man's body, the stone was a riddle to him in itself. He had finished the carving with chisel and hammer of resorium and dimezitrium, and with the blood of beasts had completed it as a runestone. It resonated, plainly enough, with the violent currents of mana within him. Yet there was no change in it that the eye could mark.
Thanks to the frost runestone, he had been able to skip past the more troublesome procedures and wield ice magic at will. With long use, an independent current had formed within his vessel of mana, until the frost mana itself had become inwardly his own. By comparison, the King of Wolves' stone showed no such pronounced character. Measured against ordinary mana stones or runestones, it possessed without question a quality and density of the highest grade — but no further than that. Isaac had yet to discover anything that distinguished it.
In the meantime, the mana housed within the King of Wolves' runestone had been sending out tendrils through the channels of his own. Bit by bit, it circulated within his vessel and built out a domain of its own. It was the result of Isaac's research and meditation, repeated through nights without sleep as he sought to unravel the puzzle.
"Hh."
Isaac rose stiffly and stretched. So far as the knowledge he possessed went, his study of the King of Wolves's runestone could go no further. To press past this point, it would save time to lean on books or seek out an expert.
Even so, it had not been without yield. Perhaps the unique mana of the King of Wolves's runestone had given some stimulus to his channels — for a new circuit had been formed within his vessel of mana. With this, Isaac had built his sixth multiple circuit.
Bzzz— bzzzn—
While he had been deep in his work, Isaac had hardly eaten, and most of his needs he had handled in a chamber pot. Because of it, flies came and went through the tent at all hours. There was a foul smell on him, and on his blanket the same. It had been a long time since he had changed his clothes.
Today, at least, Isaac resolved to step outside the tent. He had been receiving reports from Carlson, Bessemer, and Günter, but it had been a while since he had walked out himself to see how the camp was faring. If need be, he would go into the Black Forest, or to some place a little farther off, and at least have a wash. He had come here calling himself the lord of this place — surely he ought to keep up at least the bare minimum of appearance.
"Hm?"
As he lifted the flap of the tent, Isaac felt a slight strangeness. Each time he had to roll the flap up and tie it, he had needed to step up onto his stool — yet today, somehow, going up on the balls of his feet was enough.
'Have I grown, just in these few days?'
Isaac tilted his head. He had been so long without moving his body that he assumed it was only fancy.
But it was not only fancy.
"You aren't — the lord, are you? Who are you?"
"Ugh, what a stink. A vagrant who's snuck in?"
Night had drawn down. The soldiers he came across did not easily place him. The features were the same, surely, but the lines were sharpened now, the face of a boy whose features had matured. The babyish softness was gone, and the slender line that had once been hard to tell from a girl's had thickened. More than anything, what struck them as strange was that Isaac, whose head had scarcely come up to most soldiers' chests, now reached the height of their shoulders. In the time they hadn't seen him, the twelve-year-old boy seemed to have grown into a youth of fifteen or so.
"M-my apologies, my lord. You've changed in a single night."
"Have I changed that much."
Isaac glanced down at himself and muttered. It was hard to tell on his own, but seeing the soldiers' reactions, perhaps it was so.
'Come to think of it, I didn't sleep a wink last night either. And yet I feel oddly fresh.'
For all that the marks of weariness were plain on him, Isaac himself felt full of vigor. Perhaps this was an effect of the King of Wolves' runestone. Once one began to handle mana, the temperament of mana and the body went on shaping each other without end.
"Where's Carlson?"
"Ah, the captain is on the open ground, demonstrating swordplay."
"Him?"
He could not help wondering at it. The captaincy itself had been a post forced upon Carlson only because there had been no other man for it. He was the sort who would bolt the moment the chance came. There was nothing in the man's head but vengeance. He had bound himself to Isaac only because he had judged, from what Isaac had shown himself capable of, that this was the shortest road to that revenge. A man who poured every spare hour outside of training duty into his own practice — giving sword demonstrations on his off-hours?
That was not the Carlson he knew.
"Ohhh—"
From the open ground at the center of the camp came a gasp of admiration and the sound of clapping. Those making the sound were, for the most part, not soldiers but the village folk. It was called sword practice, but in truth what was being shown was nearer to a feat of skill — striking arrows out of the air with a blade, or putting out a torch with no more than the wind raised by a sword stroke.
— Clap, clap, clap.
"Well done."
At the sound of his belated applause, eyes turned toward Isaac. But the village folk did not recognize him. It hadn't entered their heads that this was the small lord who had shut himself away in his tent. They simply stared blankly at the unfamiliar youth.
"Is the work you had finished, then? Just ten days, exactly. You've certainly grown taller. I hadn't noticed it inside the tent, since you were always sitting."
Carlson sheathed his blade and came across to him.
"Ten days? Has it been so long already."
Like in his past life when he had passed his days underground, scarcely sleeping at all, Isaac had been wholly given over to his work. It was no wonder he had no sense of how the time had gone.
"Something feels missing."
He glanced about. Carlson caught at once whom he was looking for.
"If you mean Bessemer and Hans, they haven't returned yet."
"Weren't they only out on patrol of the Black Forest?"
"Yes. It seems to be running long."
“…Hans didn’t cause trouble, did he?”
Some while ago Bessemer had told him he meant to take Hans and four other soldiers out on patrol. Isaac had judged that Hans was better left behind, but the boy had insisted he wanted to do the work of a man, and so Isaac had given way. By his own reckoning at least two days had passed. Bessemer was not the sort to fall to a few beasts, but no one could swear what might happen in the Black Forest.
"Is there anything you haven't reported to me?"
". . . There is."
Carlson gave that answer, and then turned his eyes toward the entrance of the camp.
"Well?"
"Speak of the devil, as they say. . . Hear it from him yourself."
From far off came the sound of hoofbeats. The sound drew nearer. At length five riders, Hans and Bessemer among them, drew rein only a stride from Isaac.
". . . Elder Brother."
Bessemer dismounted and spoke.
"The hellwolves have come back."
END σϝ CHAPTER