So he instead incited her easily roused anger. “It’s both good and bad being too clever.”
Surely Holo would say this, to which he would reply that – Lawrence constructed the exchange in his mind, but Holo said nothing at all.
When he thought it strange and looked at her, he saw her furrowed brow.
“Too clever?”
Lawrence immediately knew she was not angry.
By her expression, she simply did not understand.
Which was precisely why Lawrence could not fathom the meaning of that expression.
When he faltered and his words failed him, Holo made a small sound. “Ah–”
He felt as though that was the trigger.
Lawrence saw the source of the discrepancy.
Their gazes met.
They stopped walking simultaneously, and after a short silence, what appeared on both their faces were frowns meant to hide the awkwardness they felt.
“Don’t tell me you asked around about far-off places just because you were interested, and now you’ve gotten some strange misapprehension in your head,” said Holo.
Lawrence raised his eyebrows, at a loss for words.
Naturally, even as he hoped that his worst fears would prove baseless, he had confidence that they would be borne out.
“’Tis no wonder you made such a strange face back then. Well, you can keep your worries to yourself,” said Holo forcefully.
“I could say the same thing to you. The reason you’re trying to force Col off on me as my apprentice is exactly the same.”
This time it was Holo who drew her chin in, chastised.
It was just as he thought.
She might have saved Col out of kindness, but her strange fawning over him and her insistence that Lawrence take him on as an apprentice was for another reason entirely.
So what happened if he applied his new knowledge that when Holo did something, it was for his own sake?
Before long, he saw that his worries about Holo were the same as hers.
They glared at each other, both trying to look firm.
“You’re the weak one, and I’ve got to protect you,” they each insisted.
It was a foolish conversation – they were both thinking the same thing.
“Honestly… so what was it you wanted to say?” said Lawrence with a little sigh, giving up on the staring match. Holo sighed as well.
“When we’ve time to think of foolish things, it seems neither of us can think of anything good.”
“Unaware of our own faults.”
Holo smiled slightly and took Lawrence’s hand again. “One cannot help thinking such things, but it’s still quite difficult.”
“Not thinking about anything is another problem, I think… it is difficult.”
And all the more so when Lawrence realized that this was the height of that joy.
The future would be darker than this. Even if they were worried about each other, if they continued to talk of these things, no cheer would come of it.
“Come, let’s stop talking of this,” said Holo, apparently having come to the same conclusion.
Lawrence agreed.
“Well, we’ve gone to the trouble of waking up at this hour,” said Holo. “It’s cold, so let’s go talk to the lad and have some wine.”
“More drinking?” said Lawrence, flabbergasted, but Holo walked ahead of him, and her only reply was the twitching of her ears underneath her hood.
“Could these people not sleep in a more orderly fashion? They are in the way; ’tis frustrating.”
The sleeping figures were scattered here and there as though they had fallen at random out of the sky, and they made it hard to walk straight across the area.
Since it was still a wide riverbank, it was all right, but if it ever became a cheap lodging house, this would surely be one of the complaints.
If they had lined up nicely, they could have stretched out their legs and there would have been room for more people to sleep, but people seemed to prefer sleeping hither and thither, their arms and legs sprawled everywhere.
It was thanks to that that Lawrence didn’t know how many times he’d had an inn right before his very eyes, but spent the night under the cold sky.
Such travel memories came to Lawrence, but something nagged at him.
He looked behind him at the sleeping forms of the merchants and boatmen. Their posture. Their direction. Their number.
Glared at by Holo, Lawrence found the nagging in his mind had vanished.
“Col, m’boy,” said Holo.
Col seemed as attached to Holo as she was to him, and she appeared to have taken a shine to the boy.
Be it “vixen” or “bird” or “old man,” Holo essentially never called people by their names.
Lawrence found himself searching his memory for any time Holo had called him by name.
It had probably happened once or twice, but when he tried to imagine the scene, it made him feel a bit embarrassed.
“Hmm?” Holo said blankly. She had called Col’s name, but the boy did not seem to have taken notice.
Lawrence and Holo looked at each other, wondering if he was asleep, then approached the crouching Col.
He didn’t seem asleep – he was wrapped in Holo’s robe and holding a thin stick in his hand and moving.
He seemed to be totally absorbed in whatever it was he was doing.
Holo was about to call his name again, but just then, he seemed to notice their footfalls and looked over his shoulder in alarm.
“–Whoops,” said Lawrence; Holo’s face was blank.
Col, for his part, seemed to have been wholly absorbed in whatever he was doing. Turning to Holo and Lawrence with a look of surprise on his face, he hastily picked something up. It made a light metallic clink, so it was presumably coin. He also tried to hide something with his feet when he stood.
Holo wasn’t the only quick-witted one.
Lawrence looked at the boy, whose feet hid what looked to be like writing on the ground.
Just as Lawrence was wondering what it was, Col quickly scuffed and erased it, then spoke.
“Wh-what is wrong?”
Going by the feel of Holo’s hand in his, Lawrence got the feeling that Holo wanted to say, “That’s my line!” He was quite sure it wasn’t just his imagination.
It was obvious Col was hiding something.
“Mm. We woke up at this strange hour and thought you might drink with us.”
The unpleasant face Col made was certainly not a joke.
Not long ago, Ragusa had forced the boy to drink, and Col had passed out.
Holo chuckled. “’Tis a jest. Are you hungry?”
“Er… a, a little.”
Col had drawn a small circle.
It seemed he had drawn several such figures, but there was no way to know for sure.
“Mm. Come, you–” said Holo to Lawrence. “We have plenty of provisions, do we not?”
“Hmm? Oh, well, we have some, yes.”
“But?”
Lawrence shrugged and answered, “But if we eat it, we’ll have that much less.”
Holo lightly smacked Lawrence’s shoulder. “Well, that decides it, then. Now, ’twould be nicer to be near the fire…”
Between the dancing and the drunken staggering, Holo and Lawrence had forgotten where their blanket had been laid.
They both looked at Col, prompting him to ask, “Don’t you remember?” in a slightly worn-out voice.
If Col was to indeed join Lawrence and Holo’s travels as an apprentice, this sort of exchange seemed likely to happen every day.
Holo giggled. “We were both drunk, after all. I am sorry, but could you fetch it for us?”
“Understood,” said Col and trotted off.
Lawrence and Holo watched his figure recede together, and something about the scene was far from disagreeable to him.
Part of that was of course because Holo was right next to him, but she seemed to agree and
leaned lightly against him.
Lawrence knew one word to describe the scene.
But if he spoke it, he would lose.
“You–” Holo began.
“Mm?”
Holo did not immediately continue, instead shaking her head.
“Never mind.”
“All right, then.”
Lawrence, of course, knew what Holo was trying to say.
And yet he got the feeling he shouldn’t be thinking about it.
“By the way–” said Lawrence.
“Mm?”
“Col’s hometown, apparently it’s called Pinu. Have you heard of it?”
Col seemed to have accidentally stepped on one of the sleeping figures in his haste.
Lawrence smiled as he watched the boy apologize and squeezed Holo’s hand a bit.
“What did you just say?” Holo’s voice was not her ordinary one.
Or so Lawrence thought, but when she turned to look at him, her eyes seemed to be smiling.
“Just kidding,” she finished.
“… Hey.”
Holo giggled. “Am I supposed to know everything now?”
She had a point, but Holo did like to pretend ignorance of important matters and treat outrageous things as if they were nothing.
If he started doubting her, there would be no end to it, but the truth was they had come far enough on this journey that making such a joke at this point was rather dubious.
Lawrence watched Holo snicker at Col’s now-careful walking, and Holo sighed, not looking in Lawrence’s direction.
“I suppose I shall be more temperate next time.”
“… I would certainly appreciate that,” said Lawrence just as Col returned.
“Did something happen?” he asked.
“Hmm? No, not especially. We were just talking about your hometown.”
“I see…” came Col’s tired reply; he was probably thinking that such a place wasn’t interesting enough to make a good conversation topic.
Most people who had even a little bit of pride in their hometown would have jumped at the chance to talk about it.
“Pinu, was it? Does your village have any legends?”
“Legends?” Col asked as he handed over their things to Holo.
“Aye. Surely you have one or two.”
“Er, well…” Perhaps he hesitated because of the suddenness of the question. Even the most meager village had many legends and superstitions.
“When you talked to me,” Lawrence said, “you said it was a problem when the Church came in, didn’t you? Which means that region, Pinu included, had other gods.”
Hearing it explained thus, Col seemed to understand.
He nodded and spoke. “Ah, yes. Pinu is the name of a great frog god. The elder claims to have seen it with his own eyes.”
“Oh ho,” said Holo, her interest piqued.
The three of them sat down, with Lawrence and Holo taking the wine and giving bread and cheese to Col.
“The place the village is in now isn’t where it used to be – that land vanished long ago in a great landslide and wound up at the bottom of a lake that was created in a flood, it’s said. Right after that landslide, the elder – who was still a child then and helping to hunt fox in the mountains – apparently saw it. The great frog was blocking the floodwaters from flowing down the valley that led directly to the village.”
Stories of gods that protected villages from great disasters existed all over.
The Church was busily trying to rewrite them all to feature its own God, but looking at Col’s shining eyes, that task seemed as though it would hardly go well.
Stories of gods and spirits were not mere fairy tales.
If the stories were even now still trusted, the Church’s efforts were pointless.
“So Lord Pinu blocked the floodwaters, and as he held them back, the elders came down the mountain and ran to the village to warn everyone, who barely escaped with their lives.”
Once Col had finished the telling, he seemed to realize he had gotten a bit excited.
He looked around, wondering if his voice had been too loud.
“Hmm. So your god was a mere frog, then. What of, say, wolves?” Holo couldn’t help herself apparently.
Thus asked, Col’s answer was quick. “Oh yes, there are many.”
Holo nearly dropped the jerky she had taken out of the sack, but she managed to feign composure as she put it in her mouth.
Lawrence pretended not to notice her trembling hand.
“But there are more of those in Rupi. I told Master Lawrence of that place – it’s where the skilled fox and owl hunters are.”
“Ah, the village that the Church marched into, yes?”
Col nodded with a rueful grin, because it was that event that had been the cause of Col’s journey in the first place.
“There is a legend that says that the ancestor of Rupi’s people was a wolf.”
The part of the jerky that stuck out of Holo’s mouth twitched impressively.
Lawrence was impressed she hadn’t dropped it.
But then he thought back to the pagan town of Kumersun, where he’d talked to Diana the chronicler woman.
She had spoken of a human and a god becoming mates.
He had asked for Holo, who was terrified of loneliness, but now this all took on a slightly different meaning.
As Lawrence hoped he wouldn’t be teased too much by Holo for this, Col continued. “This is just talk I heard later, but apparently the Church men who came to Rupi originally had that wolf-god as their goal.”
“The… god?”
“Yes. But there are no gods in Rupi. According to the stories, they died.”
Lawrence didn’t understand.
If the legend held that the gods were dead, it was strange that the Church would come looking for them. It would have made more sense for the Church to have come because the gods were dead, as that would make the propagation of its teachings easier.
And the high priest that also served as the Church troop’s commander had pulled out of the area when his health failed.
It was a strangely halfhearted engagement.
It almost sounded like the Church had only come in search of something.
That was when Lawrence realized.
The men of the Church had come looking for something – they had, all the way out to a remote village, whose god had already died.
“Long ago, the story has it that the god of Rupi returned to the village after being terribly injured, then died there. As thanks, it left its right foreleg and its offspring there. Its offspring were accepted into the village, and it’s said that the right foreleg protected the whole area from plagues and disasters. And the Church men were looking for that foreleg or some such.”
Col’s relating of the story made it sound like a fairy tale; he did not seem to really believe it himself.
It was not uncommon for people to consider their home village’s legends rather banal after having traveled and seen some of the breadth of the world, even if they’d never doubted those stories before.
“That is what they say, but our village fell into a lake after a landslide, so it’s a bit doubtful whether the god of Pinu really left its leg there,” Col said with a smile.
Having been outside and gained some wisdom, it was natural that he would see the discrepancy between legends and what happened in reality.
Such experiences would serve only to shake his faith, the stories passed down in his village.
But Lawrence was the opposite.
Thanks to Holo, he now knew that such stories were no mere fairy tales.
And it was his nature as a merchant to try to incorporate this information with what he already knew.
It was enough to call up a vague and fuzzy memory.
Something he had heard from Ragusa, just before passing out drunk.
He knew full well that it was an arbitrary conclusion.
And yet, it fit perfectly.
>
“So, do you doubt the legends?”
Holo immediately sensed the strange atmosphere and looked dubiously out from beneath her hood.
The boy smiled slightly. “… If you mean do I not fully believe, then yes, I doubt them. But in school, I learned a lot about reconciling the existence of gods. So it’s simple. The foreleg of Rupi’s god would decades ago have been…”
Col had had many experiences in his school in the south, then thinking of returning home, had found himself in this area.
Without question, it would be normal to collect stories about one’s home.
Which meant that it would not be strange if Col had collected the same information as Lawrence.
The big difference between Col and Lawrence was whether or not they believed in the preposterous tales.
Lawrence did not venture to look at Holo, only taking her hand. “Treasure maps appear only once the treasure has already been stolen.”
Col’s eyes widened.
Then they narrowed as he smiled with faint embarrassment.
“I won’t be fooled again,” his face said. “Still, that can’t be, can it? Buying and selling the foreleg of a god, I mean.”
“–”
The sound of Holo breathing in.
It seemed Col did indeed have the same information as Lawrence.
Holo’s hand gripped his very tightly.
In place of speech, Holo gave him a look, but Lawrence did not return it.
“Yes. The world is full of frauds and fakes.”
Lesko, the town at the headwaters of the Roef River. The trading firm there had been looking for the fossilized foreleg of a wolf-god.
Based on the information Lawrence had gotten from Ragusa over drinks, it was certainly a rumor that was circulating among the boatmen.
And if Col, who’d been living on the road, had heard it, it was likely a topic of discussion at inns and taverns that attracted travelers.
The saying was “where there’s smoke, there’s fire,” but it made more sense to ascribe the rumor to the pagan culture that suffused the northlands.
In his seven years as a traveling merchant, Lawrence had heard such tales more than a few times.
The remains of saints, the wings of angels, miraculous chalices, even the robes of God.
And they were all laughably absurd fakes.
“Um, I really don’t believe any of this, you know.” Col seemed to think that Lawrence’s and especially Holo’s silence was due to their being shocked at his naivete. “I mean, of course I think I’d like to know for sure if it is true, but…”
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