Spring Log III

by Isuna Hasekura

  Holo would live for centuries, and the years and decades could pass as she dozed. And so the span of a human life must be like a fleeting dream, and even Lawrence dwelled on this sometimes. He wondered if his blissful days were just a reverie and his real self was napping alone in the back of a wagon.

  On top of that, the body they found in the cave was unmistakably that of a traveler. He gripped in his hands parchment filled with pictures of wolves.

  It was entirely possible that Holo, who always overthought the strangest things, considered it some sort of sign.

  If that were the case, then he could understand why she wore the expression she did when she came to call on him in the bathhouse.

  “We never change.”

  Lawrence spoke with a smile, and Holo looked up to glare at him with sharp eyes. Her cheeks were still damp with tears, and her lips twisted in an odd shape.

  “The answer is simple. The biggest reason you got so scared is that embosser, isn’t it?”

  Holo’s eyes widened, and Lawrence smiled wryly.

  “Come on, trust me a little.”

  Even if she called him a blockhead, being with Holo for so long let him generally understand her thoughts.

  However, her expression suddenly turned sour and she whispered, “Fool.”

  “It’s okay. We ran around the northlands while carrying an embosser with a sun on it, but it all turned out okay in the end. We definitely did not escape into a cave after a failure and end up dead in there.”

  Tears welled up again in Holo’s eyes, and she looked down.

  But the possibility had certainly been there. That was how dangerous that adventure had been.

  It was entirely possible that had they failed in their quest of issuing the Debau Company silver, he would have ended up like that traveler.

  Without any place to go, nowhere to get help, he would have lived in a cave with Holo and slowly passed away. Holo would surely have stayed by his dead body, long enough that she would forget why she was there. In the end, the boundary of the dreams she saw as she dozed would slowly disappear, and she would mistakenly believe the world of her dreams was reality.

  It was all entirely possible.

  “That never happened. We came out fine.”

  It was thanks to luck and Holo.

  He pressed his lips against her temple and inhaled her scent.

  It was a nostalgic scent of dried wheat, undoubtedly her own.

  “You went to go see the commotion at the meeting room to make sure the name of the dead traveler wasn’t Kraft Lawrence, didn’t you?”

  Holo hesitated for a few moments, then with her head still down, she nodded.

  “…”

  That’s silly, Lawrence almost said, but his words faltered.

  Holo was shivering slightly in his arms.

  The time they would live was different, which meant the worlds they lived in differed more fundamentally than he could ever imagine.

  Holo knew this and tried to pull back many times.

  Since he was the one who held on to her hand and never let go, he had the responsibility to make her happy.

  Lawrence reconsidered this and looked off into the distance. He wondered what he could do now. He could embrace her, kiss her, and drink warm mead before the fire with her at any time. He needed something that would convince himself that he could make Holo happy because it was him.

  As he gazed out on the village from the thicket, he thought. If only he could enter her dreams and erase all her nightmares from corner to corner. Just as he thought about that, it dawned on him.

  “Oh, I guess we could do that.”

  Holo flinched in his arms.

  Lawrence roughly mussed her hair.

  “Hey, Holo?”

  He spoke as though he was going to ask her on a stroll, so of course she looked up.

  “I can’t guarantee this isn’t a dream, but…”

  Holo’s brow drooped nervously when he said that, but he wrapped his arm around her shoulder and swept one hand under her knees, sweeping her up like a new bride.

  Holo’s eyes were wide in surprise.

  “If this is a dream, then let’s make it a good one.”

  She either sniffed, or she held her breath. Holo moved her throat and spoke in a hoarse voice.

  “What are you…?”

  “It’s simple.”

  He kissed the corner of her eye and spoke.

  “Let’s bury the bad stuff.”

  Though it was summer, the temperatures at night plummeted due to the moisture coming from the trees, and exhaling produced a white haze.

  “You…truly are a fool…”

  Holo was in her wolf form, looking unusually meek as she spoke.

  Lawrence rustled the fur at the base of her neck and readjusted the spade on his shoulder.

  “Recklessness like this isn’t too bad once in a while, no?”

  “…”

  It seemed she could make an annoyed half smile even as a wolf.

  “Hmph. You fool.”

  As she jabbed his head with her nose, Lawrence smiled when he saw how happily her tail was wagging.

  “Well, take care of the house while we’re gone.”

  Aram, who was currently staying in Lawrence’s bathhouse due to the commotion in town, and his little sister, Selim, could not help but notice when Holo turned into her wolf form. As the two of them peeked out from the bathhouse to see what she and Lawrence were up to, he called out to them. They both seemed to shrink back and nod in acknowledgment.

  “Let’s go, then.”

  “Mm.”

  Holo and Lawrence were headed to the cave.

  Holo was plagued by anxiety because that traveler, who gripped a piece of parchment filled with pictures of wolves and held an embosser engraved with a wolf, was in that cave.

  So with their own hands, they would just fill the hole. Even if this was a dream, all they had to do was look away from whatever it was that was trying to wake her from something so pleasant.

  The old Holo might have despised such a groundless argument. In searching for conviction, she might not have wanted to accept such simple methods. But the months and days had passed, and their relationship had changed.

  Lawrence chased Holo’s tail like a child as she walked a step ahead of him and led the way. The woods at night never typically felt like the place for the living, but he was not frightened when he was with Holo.

  He walked along in such high spirits that he was unable to stop himself when her tail grew closer, and his head became buried in fur.

  “Bwuh, hey, Hol—”

  His words, along with his head, were completely smothered by her tail.

  “Someone is here.”

  Holo’s whisper was like a growl in the back of her throat.

  Lawrence kept silent, slipped out from the fur of her tail, and strained his eyes.

  It was rather far away, but beyond the trees, he could see a small light.

  “It seems…we were not the only foolish ones.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Lawrence asked, and Holo sneered, revealing a fang.

  “Perhaps a clash of those who have decided to use force when the dispute did not come to a settlement.”

  Lawrence had nothing else to say and only smiled, exasperated.

  “What shall we do? Jump out and announce the arrival of an emissary of the forest?”

  Holo lowered her head, rubbing the spot above her eyes against Lawrence’s body, fawning on him.

  She was telling him to be as foolish as he wished.

  Lawrence stroked her fuzzy face as he groaned in thought.

  “That would be funny, but…if we did that, it might become another miracle site.”

  “So no?”

  “Those guys yelling over there would definitely say that since they saw the miracle with their own eyes, they deserve to manage it. Absolutely. There would be more problems.”

  “Mmh…”

&nbs
p; Holo waved her tail discontentedly.

  “But I never thought there would be so many people who wanted to carry the body away in the middle of the night…Sheesh, it’ll take time before we can bury him.”

  Holo’s large eyes blinked slowly, then narrowed.

  “If he has a soul or whatnot, then why not ask it directly?”

  “Sure, that would make things much faster,” Lawrence agreed with a laugh but suddenly stopped. “Directly…to his soul?”

  “…What, are you saying your ears are better than mine?”

  Holo mischievously tilted her head to try and cover Lawrence with her large ears, which were big enough to shelter a child from the rain. He felt as if he had been turned into a mouse and dodged her prank, his thoughts turning over in his mind.

  “No…Do we not totally understand the traveler’s wishes?”

  “Hmm?”

  “In that case…Umm…”

  Perhaps it was his age, but his brain was not working as well as it should. It stopped just as everything was about to come together.

  Holo watched him intently, then after glancing at the cave, she turned back to face him.

  “What, will you hammer out coin or something of the sort?”

  That was what the traveler dreamed of. Minting coin was a symbol of a territorial lord’s authority.

  “Sure, but why do you think we worried so much over the coin problem?”

  Holo pulled back slightly and narrowed her eyes like a wolf watching her prey.

  “…I am Holo the Wisewolf. Do not hold me cheap. If we were simply to produce our own coin, things would grow complicated in a question of territory, would it not?”

  “Exactly. Not only that, but we have no source material.”

  “Then melt down other coin.”

  “Huh. You sure know a lot.”

  “…”

  Holo jabbed him with her nose.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry!”

  Lawrence apologized, and Holo sniffed.

  “What a fool. And there is yet another problem.”

  “Hmm?”

  “You were told this often, no?”

  Lawrence looked up at Holo, looming over him. He spread his arms wide as if seeking an oracle and shrugged.

  “No one may bring money into the next world. How would we tell that pitiful traveler that his dreams came true? Shall we copy the customs of the war, like that old bald one said? Shall we bury the coins—?”

  It was at that moment when Lawrence clearly saw the light in the dark forest.

  “That’s it!”

  Then the second he found himself shouting, something giant pushed him down.

  It was Holo’s palm, and Holo herself crouched down as she looked toward the light.

  “You fool!”

  “…Sorry…”

  They remained stock-still for a few moments, but luckily, they did not seem to have been noticed.

  “And? What is it you have thought of?”

  Holo lay on her belly and looked at Lawrence with exasperated eyes.

  Those were the eyes of a tired spouse who had dealt with her stupid partner the countless times they got into trouble whenever he thought of a way to make money.

  And the half smile on her lips was excitement to see what sort of stupid idea he had in mind this time.

  Lawrence told her his plan, and Holo wagged her tail happily.

  What he came up with was, of course, bread drawn by himself, so he needed the appropriate skill to bring it to life. Lawrence finished laying the groundwork for this and that and wrapped up his preparations.

  The next morning, he headed to the ever-chaotic meeting room.

  “That is why, like I said before—”

  “If you do not recognize this, then we—”

  “If you keep waving those empty arguments around, your faith—”

  As arguments flew about tirelessly, Lawrence and the others parted the crowd and continued farther into the room.

  The spectators and the lords and their servants all looked at Lawrence and the others with odd gazes.

  But no one tried to stop their march as the old lord stood at the front of their procession.

  “What we really should be looking for now is salvation for the lamb’s soul—”

  As a priest spoke, froth spewing from his mouth, the old lord raised his longsword up high, then slammed it down along with the sheath onto the long table. The red-faced men, like honking geese in a swamp, craned their necks and fell silent.

  “Indeed, what we should be looking for is salvation for his soul.”

  When the lord spoke, one priest, who looked as if he had swallowed a rock, boldly opened his mouth.

  “…That is why that method…”

  “That method?”

  The priest who would call himself a servant from God clammed up when glared at by a veteran from an ancient battlefield.

  The landlord was old enough that to him, even the white-bearded ones looked like his sons or grandsons.

  “We know that.”

  The elderly landlord announced, and silence fell over the crowded meeting room.

  “That man lived in his dreams and died in them. Then what else is there besides the reality of his dreams?”

  He then took out the coin embosser from his pocket.

  “N-no, that’s bad!”

  A middle-aged lord, sitting on a crimson-cushioned chair, cried in surprise.

  “Hold your temper! That’s what would be bad!”

  A different lord hurriedly stopped him. While they had not minded the clergy exchanging blows with one another, they went pale at the sight of the embosser.

  Everyone understood that the problem grew even bigger once the old landlord had pulled out the embosser.

  “Hmm? And what are you so afraid of? What do you think I would do with this?”

  The battle-seasoned old lord smiled slyly like a fox. The flustered lords and priests seemed to then finally notice Lawrence and the others by his side.

  “What, do you…? Wait, are those the bathhouse owners? Are you all trying to bring disaster to this village?”

  “Nonsense.”

  The one who answered was the assembly chair, who had agreed with Lawrence’s plan and lent a hand for the sake of the village’s peace. He owned and ran one of the older bathhouses.

  “We wish nothing more from our esteemed guests than to enjoy their time in Nyohhira. For that, we wish to help the traveler in question.”

  “And that is the problem. You want to make coins because of the recent coin situation, don’t you? It’s stupid to think you’re killing two birds with one stone. Don’t think you can so easily print money like the Debau Company.”

  The answer was flustered, as though implying just thinking about it was a sin, but the old lord responded.

  He waved the embosser about in his hand, as though swatting away a fly.

  “Who said we would be making coins? We are earnest servants of God. And so by his teachings, we will be making true the dreams of the departed.”

  “Wait, but…‘The dreams of the departed’? That’s…”

  The old lord responded clearly to the faltering priest.

  “Of course—using this embosser and branding iron, we will spread things engraved with his house’s seal. There is no doubt he would be happy if everyone used things made with these tools.”

  The youngest generation of landlords were visibly angry when they heard the old lord’s response. They, too, had earned achievements as full-fledged lords, after all.

  “And that is what we’re saying the problem is. What would you use a coin embosser for if not for coin? Are you planning to use it as a stick to knead bread?”

  Several indignant voices rose up in agreement.

  “Well, you’re not too far off.”

  The erupting landlords’ spirits were dampened as the old lord grinned.

  On the veteran’s signal, Lawrence and the others pulled back the coverings on
the baskets they held.

  “Wh-what’s—?”

  The sweet smell of butter suddenly wafted through the meeting room.

  “I do not know much about food, but according to Sir Lawrence here, who has traveled throughout the world, he said it is hard tack, a specialty of smaller villages. We created these with that in mind.”

  Lawrence walked before the lords with basket in hand and passed out the contents one by one.

  “This is…unleavened bread?”

  “No, this is not just unleavened bread. Is it a cookie?”

  “Hmm…It’s different from the cookies in the south…”

  The rich lords of course were knowledgeable when it came to food. It was lightly baked bread dough made with plenty of eggs and butter.

  And they realized immediately what the design on the bread meant.

  “Oh! It’s a bread coin, made in the form of the embosser!

  “No lord will complain about this, will they?”

  “We do not have a bakers’ association in our village, after all.”

  The chair added a few more words of his own.

  “And this is also one of the few dreams of former merchant Sir Lawrence, and I’m sure everyone has thought of it once.”

  After the mischievous addendum, Lawrence continued along the same line of thought.

  “I always think about eating my fill of coins.”

  Those who were here had distinguished and significant amounts of wealth. Dark, troubled grins slipped from their lips, though not from anger.

  Then the old lord spoke.

  “I once walked upon the stage of war, and once chased after those who lived in dreams. We lacked food and drink on the battlefield, and God’s protection was nowhere to be seen. Many years prior, the war priest lost the ability to walk in the mountains and never recovered. We never had the luxury of asking for the bodies of our friends to be buried with prayer. All we could do was dig a hole and bury him, sprinkle alcohol on him, or place a piece of jerky in the stead of a grave marker.”

  When they heard his words, those who looked to be reputed for their battle stories listened with stern expressions, because this was none other than a battle story.

  “As one who lived through that era, I believe that making the departed’s last wish come true would be an offering for his new journey.”