༺ 𓆩 Chapter 47 — The Eldest Son of House Goethe 𓆪 ༻
「Translator — Creator」
᠃ ⚘᠂ ⚘ ˚ ⚘ ᠂ ⚘ ᠃
Isaac was running.
Whether the soldiers of the estate wished to train alongside him or did not.
Even after his return to the manse, he had not let his conditioning slacken.
It was for the hiding of his magical gifts and the showing of his swordsmanship to the wider world. But it was not only for that. It was, also, for the holding fast to his identity as a mage.
Magic was without limit.
The deeper one studied, the stranger the concepts one had thought one knew became, and at every step toward what came next, one was urged on past the limit one had set for oneself. The height that a mage sought was always a far-off, distant point of blue light. A single point, blue without end. It lay always in a place that could not be reached.
For this reason, the end most mages who had spent their lives bound to magic came to was not a fortunate one. Their memories grew uncertain, or they were taken by a heaviness of spirit and put an end to themselves with their own hands. Set against the boundless world of magic, the existence of the magician, of the man, was endlessly frail, finite, and small.
The fledgling mages might carry themselves as though they had become some great sage, but the more a man came to know of magic, the more surely an emptiness took hold of him.
Thus.
Isaac was running, that he might not lose his mind, that he might not fall into nothingness, that he might keep his feet planted upon the ground.
In the end, it came to the body. To shape the body and so to keep the spirit firm.
Cling—!!! Cling—!!!
In the basket strapped to his back, the lumps of iron and the iron sword clattered without pause. The basket had been packed not only with stones but with iron weights chosen out for the purpose.
For all that, Isaac was running at the very front, and the distance between him and the soldiers of the manse was widening even further.
In truth, setting all reasons aside, Isaac took pleasure in the running itself. The freedom and release that came of a sound body had come to him, who had spent a lifetime confined underground, as a great joy. To run with that heavy iron weight upon his back and not to be tired. The air filling his lungs was no longer the stale, heavy air of an underground chamber but the fresh air of an early summer. Beyond the path lay not the ruined manse of Goethe but the manse of Goethe sound and standing.
The cries of the soldiers behind rose from this quarter and that, but Isaac did not hear them.
"That mad…"
The soldiers all but cursed the small Goethe aloud. In truth, they had heaped every foul name there was upon him in the privacy of their own thoughts.
That Isaac alone went tearing along, with no thought for the pace of the rest of the men, served only to drain their will to train. While their strength yet held, they could at the least curse, and a stubborn pride could yet rise in them.
But that, too, did not last.
By the time their breath caught at the back of their throats, and their hearts felt as though they would burst, and their thoughts went thin and dim, the soldiers had no thought left in them at all. They wished only that this training, more hellish now than before, would soon come to its end.
The party in question, Isaac, had no thought for the soldiers of the manse. Or rather, he could not. Indulging in the new gifts that had been laid upon him, gifts beyond the imagining of his past life, the history of that past life rose to him of itself. And the things still to come hovered before his eye.
Without his realizing, his head had been filled with the city of Bern.
Following the fragments of the history of Goethe that Jonas had told him, the records of the forebears that his father had once placed into his hands in the past life. A book he had read in search of a way to overcome his strange constitution, in search of knowledge of Zeke von Goethe. The book had laid down the inner history of the house from the time Goethe had been pushed out into the marches.
Isaac had read the records. He had read them again and again. They had been a book his father, sensing the coming ruin and his own death drawing near, had passed into his hands. A father who had once come to his son, pitying the life lived shut away forever, in order to put an end to the misery. That father, in giving him the book, had been saying that he honored the path his son had chosen.
By the records, this very year was a season of great changes for the city of Bern.
A century before, by the deeds of Zeke von Goethe, who had set the royal city aflame, two prohibitions had been laid upon the house of Goethe. One was the prohibition of commerce. The other was the prohibition of the swelling of arms. Goethe could neither levy duties of trade nor of passage upon merchants, nor could it increase the number of its soldiers. The funds Goethe could call upon were the shield-tax granted by the royal court alone.
This had brought about an unlooked-for result. Merchants gathered in. The clear gain from each transaction had grown. Around them, a city had taken shape. Refugees and vagrants of every kind had thronged in as well. There was work to be had in plenty, in labor or in the trade of flesh. A great city, ill-suited to the harshness of the north, had come into being. As the city grew in scale, so the underground economy swelled in measure. A black market had taken root.
The Marquis Dietrich, raised to the post of inspector of the north upon the back of the Second Prince. He had threatened the margrave over the weapons, the drugs, the slaves, the counterfeit coin traded in the black market. Yet the margrave took no part in that market and drew no profit from it. He had, on the contrary, kept the black market in check. None of which mattered to the Marquis Dietrich.
The trade in arms and counterfeit coin, as treason against the royal court. The trade in slaves, as a seed that would shatter the harmony with the tribesfolk. The margrave could not turn a deaf ear to the threat.
In the end, by the demand of the Marquis Dietrich, the city of Bern was given its self-rule. The Marquis joined hands with the city's mayor and threw open a great free market. Mana stones, magical wares, and weapons, drugs, slaves, counterfeit coin besides, were sold to commoner or noble or royal or rebel alike, so long as the coin was good.
Their aim was to make of it the greatest free-trade city in the realm and, serving as the strongholds of the continent's coffers, to seize a power of money that none could afford to ignore. The Second Prince watched their backs. The mayor held the underworld in his grip. A rising power that called itself Weissmann lent the strength of arms.
The ring that Bill now had charge of, the remnants of Nias, had also been driven aside by Weissmann. By report, more than five among them were swordsmen who could wield mana, which placed them on a wholly different course from the common gangs and bands of mercenaries.
So the City of Bern enjoyed an age of high prosperity for a span. In a single year, it took in revenues greater than ten years of Goethe's allowance.
It did not last.
Powerful magnates began to cast covetous eyes upon the City of Bern, while the Second Prince’s political standing grew increasingly precarious.
The Royal Family and the nobility came to view the ungovernable city as a thorn in their side; meanwhile, as the stakes, and the profits, soared to astronomical heights, the rift between the Marquis and the Mayor widened into open hostility.
In the end, civil strife came.
Merchants fled the City of Bern in droves, and the streets ran so thick with the blood of mercenaries that they never had a chance to dry.
Engulfed in a sea of flames, the city of Bern would never again reclaim its former glory.
Much like House Goethe itself.
The setting in order of the City of Bern, then, would also lay the foundation by which Goethe might rise again.
‘To break the chain of disasters, where ought one to lay one's hand, and how?’
Returning to the training yard ahead of the others, Isaac drew patterns in the dirt with a twig and bent his thought to the saving of the city of Bern.
The Marquis Dietrich, the inspector who would soon come to the manse. Baris, the city's mayor and a merchant of standing. Weissmann, who held swordsmen wielding mana. The first task was the breaking of the triangle these three corners had drawn.
The Marquis Dietrich had the Second Prince at his back. The merchant Baris held the strength to move the city's other merchants. Weissmann had the arms to sweep aside every gang of the wastewater quarter and to take that quarter for himself. To stand against all three at once was beyond Goethe's reach.
Then it was a fissure that had to be made. Was the alliance among the three firm? Or were they only accomplices of convenience, drawn together as suited them?
"My lord."
While Isaac was sunk in his thoughts, the captain of the guard, his face set, came up to him. Was there some grievance?
"Hm?"
"If it is well with you, might we beg of you another bout today?"
It had not been grievance, but tension. The captain of the guard was reading Isaac's reaction.
"I should think I would only get in your way."
"No, my lord. It was but a single day yesterday, but there was much to be learned from it. Sparring only among ourselves had made fish of us, swimming in a pond. If only for the time you remain here, my lord, I would beg the gift of your instruction."
"In earnest?"
Isaac looked steadily upon the captain. Then he ran his eyes over the soldiers behind him. There was no malice in their bearing.
"We, we beg of you, my lord!"
"We beg you, my lord!"
"Mn."
Isaac brushed aside the tracery he had drawn with the toe of his boot. There was no harm in it. Set beside Lucas of his past life, or beside Carlson, the swordsmanship of these men was a small matter. And yet, it would help to keep what Lucas had taught him from going to rust. It would also be of use in lifting what the King of Wolves' runestone had granted him in experience to a true sense of the field.
"Very well."
"We thank you, my lord!"
When Isaac nodded, the soldiers' faces brightened.
‘Are they so very glad of it?’
Isaac let out a quiet chuckle.
This was Goethe, plain to see.
In the realm, the house was counted among the most renowned of magical lines, but the true Goethe held the heart of a warrior more readily than the curiosity of a mage. A part of it was the blood that had been mingled with that of the tribesfolk beyond the marches. But, from the very forebears, the line of those who had borne the head of the house had been so. Even Helmut von Goethe, Isaac's father, the present head of the house, spent more of his time at Winterband, holding the fief, than he did in the study of magic. Within those walls he gave the more of his hours to patrol, to training, to fighting. The magical house of Goethe was, in its bone, a house of just such a making.
"Come."
Isaac stepped to the center of the training yard with the wooden blade. The hot eyes of the soldiers were drawn upon him. The air today was very different from the day before. Yesterday, the soldiers had taken him for a sheltered young master, returned from Vinfeldt and giving himself airs. But once a dozen and more of them had been laid out one after another in their bouts with Isaac, they had been forced to feel it in their own flesh. That in the body of this young master, returned to them grown, the blood of Goethe ran thickly. That his heart of a magician might be broken in him, but that his heart of a warrior was alive and quickening.
"I shall begin, my lord."
A soldier stepped before Isaac. The veteran whose wrist had been bent and his blade taken from him. The rims under his eyes were dark, as though the shame of yesterday had kept him from his sleep. Yet his eyes burned brightly.
"I was careless yesterday, my lord. It will not be so easy today."
"I shall hold you to it. Come."
"Hahh!"
The soldier launched a thrust with a shouted breath. A thrust without an ounce of waste. Tap. Isaac swept aside the thrust that came for his throat. The soldier stepped back, recovered his balance, and came again with a thrust. Tap. When that, too, was struck aside, he stepped diagonally and slashed at Isaac's arm. Tap. Isaac caught the blade and held it with both ends of his own.
‘A fine performance.’
Isaac gave his small admiration. The soldier, who had given his distance away too freely yesterday and been undone by the sword-wrestling, was today holding his distance and watching for a gap. The will not to be caught, not to be drawn into a contest of strength, came across plainly. He would not fight a fight that was set against him.
‘But he has bent his attention too much to one quarter.’
Holding distance and watching how Isaac's hands moved was well done. But he was not seeing how Isaac took his steps, how his feet were moving.
Tap-tap.
Isaac swung the blade twice through, vertical and horizontal, closing the distance. The soldier gave back a step and let the strokes pass him. In that moment, Isaac stepped in half a beat earlier than the soldier had braced for, and swept the soldier's leading leg with the top of his foot.
"Hk!"
The soldier, all his thought given to the matter of distance, lost his balance at once and pitched forward. He had not so much as begun to think how to answer it. In the blink of an eye, Isaac's wooden blade was set against his throat.
"Cleverly done. The cleverness was your own undoing."
Isaac extended his hand. The soldier let out a hollow laugh, took the hand, and rose.
"Tomorrow shall not be easier still, my lord."
"Just so."
"I am next!"
Before the first challenger had stepped fully aside, the next had called out. The second, his breath drawn full, had eyes alight as well.
"…I yield, my lord."
"Not poorly done. Strengthen your lower body a little more."
It was a strange enough scene.
On a battlefield, no one stepped aside for another, and the one who fought well was the one who lived. Yet for veteran soldiers to be sitting at the feet of a small Goethe of twelve, taking instruction, ran against the way a man knew the world to go. But these were veterans, and so they had grasped the height of Isaac's craft at once.
How much they could learn by sparring with him, how fine were his movements and his techniques.
The soldiers of the manse were men who had seen the world, and they knew well how often the world ran outside of common sense. They knew that there were worlds beyond the worlds they had seen. So they had set down their years and their pride, and, gladly paying respect to Isaac's strength, they sought to learn what could be learned.
"Hah, an impossible movement, my lord."
The last to face him was the captain of the guard.
From a single day of watching the bouts, it seemed he had thought hard upon the matter, and had come prepared with his own measures against Isaac. He held not a single wooden blade but a wooden blade and a wooden shield, and he answered with the counterstroke rather than the leading attack.
One steeped in chivalric ideals would have sneered that to spar so was a small-spirited thing.
Yet the captain's eyes, showing above the rim of the shield, were enough to send a slight chill through Isaac, if only for a moment. The man seemed to hold the bout not as sparring but as a true fight. For that reason, of the day's challengers, it was the captain who exchanged the longest run of blows with him. As befit the captain of the manse's guards, no man took the bout more in earnest than he.
The result, of course, was the same. Defeat. In bending so much of his thought toward the seizing of his counter, he had given too much weight to Isaac's movements. Set fast upon the regular rhythm of Isaac's strokes, a single break in that rhythm had opened a gap in him.
"Was that feint your aim from the beginning, my lord?"
"As your shield made you difficult to take, I bent my thought to how I might bring you to lower it of your own accord."
"…That is a remarkable thing, my lord."
The captain's admiration was sincere. How was it that a young master of such tender years, who had never been formally taught the blade, who had had still less of true field experience, had taken into himself the way of fighting while thinking? Even the soldiers of the manse, more often than not, fell wholly to the matter of attack and defense the moment they entered a bout. The biting jolt of the blades meeting, the cool sense of the gap opening in the opponent's guard, the pain when an attack slipped through, the keen pleasure of a strike landing. Overborne by the senses of combat, they forgot to think. For that reason, day after day they trained, until their bodies could move without thought. For when the senses of combat overbore a man, his thinking stopped of itself.
How was it, then, that Isaac, set at a disadvantage in frame and in experience, was able to fight while thinking?
If yesterday they had been startled by his strength of arm beyond his frame, and by the manner of the warrior tribes in his fighting, today they were startled by the way he met combat itself.
"There is nothing remarkable in it. To me, magic and the blade, when it comes to fighting, are the same. Evade, block, strike, deceive. So one wins."
"Hah. Is that so, my lord."
The captain let out a quiet laugh at Isaac's words. Yet that laugh soon turned into a smile of true pleasure.
"It seems I had taken you wrongly, my lord."
"Wrongly, how?"
"I had thought you altogether unlike his lordship the margrave. But you are, perhaps more than any other, like him."
"…Is that so?"
"Aye, my lord. I am sure of it. The blood of Goethe runs in you."
"It would suit Jonas more."
Isaac shook his head.
"No, my lord. We had only failed to see it. You are, as we now know, the eldest son of Goethe."
"Just so!"
The soldiers, the heat of the bouts not yet fallen from them, said it together with a single voice. Their faces showed plainly their hopes for what was to come of Isaac.
But Isaac's face did not match theirs.
On the contrary, a dark shadow had drawn itself across his features.
END σϝ CHAPTER