Spice & Wolf Omnibus

by Isuna Hasekura

  Had they not gotten whatever sign from Huskins they needed in order to obtain Hugues’s cooperation? Or was he just not a very duty-bound person?

  Or – was Fran Vonely a silversmith of such ability?

  It was not beyond Lawrence’s ability to reason this out. Neither was it difficult for an art seller of Hugues’s ability to guess at what Lawrence was thinking during his short silence.

  If Hugues displeased Vonely, then he would be facing something even more dangerous than Holo.

  In a pleadingly serious tone, Hugues began to speak.

  “The reason I’m so loathe to displease her is related to my trade. But it’s not about money.”

  Trade was always carried out to seek money. Lawrence’s curious gaze fell upon Hugues, who seemed to gather his resolve. He stood and walked over to one of the paintings on the way.

  “The place in this painting was once called Dira long ago.”

  It was one of the largest paintings in the room and depicted a jagged, craggy landscape. Standing before a bare cliff was a single hermit, both hands raised to the heavens as though in prayer. It seemed to be a depiction of the legend of Dira’s patron saint.

  Such paintings were common. But as far as Lawrence knew, pieces where the setting was more of a focus than the subject were unusual.

  As the thought occurred to him, Hugues said something unexpected. “This is my homeland.”

  “–!” Lawrence felt Holo stiffen beside him.

  “But long ago it was a fertile, productive place. Without any of these rocks. That cliff… is a claw mark.”

  Holo’s voice was a hoarse whisper. “Of the Moon-Hunting Bear?”

  “Yes. It is something that my kind will never forget. These paintings were created with the help of individuals like Miss Vonely. It has been decades now. For the sake of my kind and those similar to me, I collect and deal in such pieces, pieces that show the homes we were forced to abandon or the disaster that made returning home impossible. It would be a lie to suggest that I have not profited in doing so, but that is a secondary concern.”

  Hugues gazed into the scene of the painting as though through a great window.

  “And even the landscape of this painting is now no more. I hear that veins of gold were discovered there… It’s ironic, actually. The guide I hired in order to have this piece made found the gold. And even if that hadn’t happened, wind and water would wear the land away until it’s entirely different. The paintings in the other room and the paintings hanging in churches and manors, too, mostly show landscapes that have disappeared or are in the process of disappearing. And the paintings themselves will not last forever.” Hugues touched the frame of one of the pieces, gazing at it for a while after he had finished speaking.

  This was a place where tiny pieces of vanishing worlds were stored for safekeeping. The passage of time might seem slow to humans, but to his kind it was surely too fast. Their memories of the past were all that remained, and the gap between it and the present grew ever larger.

  Hugues suddenly looked back at Lawrence with a troubled smile. His gaze was probably directed at Holo, but Lawrence did not turn to check. He knew that doing so would surely hurt Holo’s feelings.

  The only one who could speak to Holo of this was Hugues, who had lived as long as she had.

  “If possible, I would like very much to help you. This place does not exist only for we sheep. My customers have included deer and hares, foxes and fowl as well.”

  Lawrence heard the sound of rustling cloth as Holo shifted. He would not ask what she had done.

  “However, Fran Vonely’s knowledge and skill are irreplaceable. She has a perfect memory, never forgetting anything she’s seen even once, and a sense of purpose she holds more dear than her own life. She is utterly dedicated to capturing the landscape in her art, and I cannot afford to lose her cooperation. There is no time.”

  The energy in Hugues’s eyes was not something that one would see in someone who worked solely for his own profit. The evidence of the life that he and his kind had lived was inexorably disappearing, and he was engaged in the work of trying to preserve a record.

  Lawrence dwelled on Hugues’s last words. “There is no time” – did he mean that the landscape was vanishing too quickly?

  “There’s no time?”

  “Yes. We must hurry. There are a multitude of places I hope Miss Vonely will paint, but her lifetime is limited. I think about it often – if only she could live as long as we.”

  Lawrence doubted he was the only one to make a surprised sound at this revelation. He had assumed that Fran Vonely was a special being, like Holo and Hugues. That led him to consider the obvious next question: If time was such a concern, why didn’t he and his kind simply do the paintings themselves?

  “Like you, I’m meant to be a merchant,” said Hugues.

  Lawrence realized that he had been scratching his head in confusion, and Hugues had likely guessed at what he was thinking.

  Hugues looked down, then sighed, smiling. He looked at the paintings on the walls and narrowed his eyes. “I understand what you want to say. And in all honestly, we did once take up the brush… and those comrades of mine who went north and east and captured the old landscapes in the south, landscapes that are now long gone… those comrades of mine were not immortal.”

  Holo was the wolf spirit who lived in the wheat, and Lawrence remembered her words – that if the wheat in which she lived disappeared, she too would be gone. And she herself had a natural life span.

  But Lawrence could not imagine that Hugues was talking about natural life spans.

  Hugues’s quiet eyes regarded him. They were the deep, placid eyes of a wise and ancient man.

  “They took up their brushes and traveled abroad, carefully observing the state of the world out of a deep sense of duty. And what they found were forests cleared, rivers dammed and changed, and mountains dug up and scarred. Eventually they could stand it no longer and traded their brushes for swords.”

  Lawrence had heard this story before. He glanced at Col, who listened raptly to Hugues’s tale.

  “But they were outnumbered. One was burned by the Church, another crushed by an army. One was so mortified by his own powerlessness that he… well. Few remain even as memories, having vanished like so much sea-foam. Humans, they… ah, apologies.”

  “Not at all,” Lawrence answered, at which Hugues displayed a sad smile.

  “Humans have amassed great power. Control of the world has been theirs for a long time now, and our age has passed. Those unwilling to admit that have one by one fallen in battle and now exist only as legends on parchment. And even those parchments are crumbling, mice nibbled and moth eaten. We are what remains: sheep, in the human sense of sheep. None of us, myself included, have the courage to hold a brush. The bravest of us were the first to fall… It was a terrible cruelty.”

  Lawrence understood all too well why Hugues was more concerned with Fran Vonely, a human, over his fellow sheep Huskins or Holo the wolf. Hugues and his fellows had surely not revealed their true nature to her.

  If so, there were not many ways they could keep her close. To have her create paintings for them, they would bow down before her, avoid any offense, and hear any demand, no matter how unreasonable.

  Even admitting her existence to Lawrence was clearly a great compromise on Hugues’s part.

  “It is indeed cruel,” said Holo, sipping the sour wine Lawrence was sure she did not like. “So that is why you were so upset upon seeing me, was it?”

  Lawrence looked at Holo, and Col did likewise.

  While birds and foxes had visited the sheep, perhaps a wolf never had. Wolves had fangs, claws, and the courage to use them. They would have been the first to turn to violence.

  And they would have been the first to die.

  Hugues looked evenly back at Holo and then slowly nodded. “Yes. Even so.”

  “Heh. But ’tis well. I would have been sadder to learn of the opposite.”
/>
  It was because such courage suited her that Holo had earned the name Wisewolf. It was in this moment that Hugues ceased to seem fearful of her.

  “… I envy such strength. For my part, I’ve often wondered if I’m to live so long, why I couldn’t have been born as a stone or tree instead.”

  At the end of the conversation, Holo began to speak without any inhibition. “Heh. I cannot say I feel the same. Were I a stone or tree, I could hardly travel with these two.”

  Hugues smiled. “Indeed. Life in the world of humans can be rather enjoyable.”

  “Mm. They’re an amusing lot.”

  Yet Lawrence could not help but feel that it surely had not been an accident that the wine they were offered was not very sweet.

  Gold, silver, copper, iron, tin, lead, brass, stone.

  The phrase gems hidden in the earth was a common one, but sometimes it could be hard to tell what was valuable and what was not.

  As Lawrence and company waited for Fran to return from her wandering about town, Hugues showed them around his storeroom. It contained not just paintings but a wealth of fine crafts and ornaments that had been sold off to Hugues alongside those paintings.

  “There are many fakes here, but… ah, here’s a bar meant for holding down scrolls. Mm, looks like it’s only gold plated, though. Ah yes, here! What do you make of this one, eh?”

  Hafner Hugues, master of the storehouse, seemed not to know exactly what it contained, as he weighed the gold bar in his hand and made his pronouncement.

  Hugues had told Holo about Fran because Holo was a being similar to himself, but he was still a sheep spirit and a merchant as well. He had to get some value from this transaction.

  He led Holo and Col to the back of the storehouse, as they wanted to know whether he had any paintings of Holo’s homeland of Yoitsu, but as he did so, he kept a close eye on Lawrence. A traveling merchant who wandered from nation to nation did not have much purchasing power, but he made up for that in knowledge and fresh information. No doubt Hugues wanted to know if any of the dusty old pieces in his storeroom were unexpectedly valuable. Lawrence felt like a pig trained to sniff for truffles.

  It was true that demand varied from town to town – in one town, anything with a wolf motif would sell, while in another, the color of gold would be so coveted that even gold-plated items would fly off the shelves. Given the occasion, Lawrence was only too happy to spill everything he had heard about towns whose conditions might be good.

  Such a town might as well be drunk. Absurd items would sell on the spot, and given the amount of junk in Hugues’s storeroom, it was like a golden trash barrel.

  “Well, that’s about the size of it.”

  “I see, I see. I’m deeply grateful, yes. While I do hear stories from all over while I sit in my shop here, most of my visitors aren’t walking the path of trade, so I collect little information that’s useful in business.”

  Even as he spoke, Hugues took notes with a quill pen in the margins of an old bill of receipt. Assuming his high spirits were not a ruse, he seemed to think they would lead him to a healthy profit.

  Holo would scowl if Hugues had asked her, but Lawrence was a merchant.

  As he considered such thoughts, his eyes were drawn by a single item in the piles of junk.

  “… Is this…?”

  “Oh, so this is where I left that old thing.”

  Lawrence pulled the item out from between two wooden crates, and Hugues reached for it, smiling merrily.

  Lawrence could not begin to imagine what the thing was for. He handed it to Hugues. It was a golden apple; Holo would surely laugh to see it.

  “What in the world is this used for?”

  “Oh, it’s one of those – you use it to warm your hands.”

  “Your hands?”

  In response, Hugues handed the apple back to Lawrence, who noticed that it was indeed a bit warmer than it had been a moment earlier.

  “It’s for merchants who want to show off their wealth a bit. You can heat it by the fireplace or have your apprentice warm it with his skin, then use it to warm your hands as you do your writing. Though anybody who dares use it outside when traveling in the winter will find their hands sticking to it.”

  Hugues was quite right. Still, Lawrence had no trouble imagining Holo curling her body around the trinket while riding in the wagon, like a hen protecting her egg. He found himself thinking it might be rather useful, but then quickly snapped out of it and shook his head.

  This was no time to be distracted by such silly items.

  Lawrence returned the apple to Hugues.

  “Still, thank you ever so much for the information,” said a pleased Hugues, who had nearly blackened the margins of the bill of receipt with notes, careful not to leave as much as a single detail out.

  “Not at all. Thank you.”

  “By all means, when you’re finished, feel free to linger. You’re most welcome here.” Hugues sounded like an ordinary merchant now.

  Lawrence smiled, nodded, and shook his hand.

  “Though it seems Master Col and Miss Holo are still looking at the paintings.” Hugues had to exert himself to bring his round body to his feet, and he then peered farther into the back of the storeroom.

  Holo was flipping through a stand of paintings one by one, chattering with Col about this and that.

  Hugues fell suddenly silent as he watched her. Lawrence had a good guess at what he was thinking about.

  “Might I ask how you’re all related?” It was a reasonable thing to wonder about.

  Holo should have overheard, but she gave no evidence of it.

  Lawrence decided that there was no reason to hide it, so he answered as he walked over. “My trading route generally covered lands farther south. I happened to meet Holo at one of my stops there.”

  “I see.”

  “Holo had been asked a favor by a friend long ago – that she would guarantee bountiful harvests of the wheat in a certain town. But over time the village forgot about her, and she decided to return home. My wagon happened to be passing by, and she simply hopped in and stowed away.”

  Hugues smiled, amused, but there was a coolly calculating quality that showed through. Holo’s story was not irrelevant to his own experience.

  “But it had been some several centuries since she’d left her homelands, and so she doesn’t know where they are. So we’ve been traveling here and there in search of them. We met Col on the way. He’s from a town in the north called Pinu.”

  “Oh, Pinu?” Hugues’s eyes widened in surprise, and he looked over his shoulder at Holo and Col. “That’s quite far away. Ah… but I see now why old Huskins would have told you of Fran Vonely.”

  Lawrence gave Hugues a deliberate smile. There was nothing amusing about the story, but if he failed to tell it with a smile, Holo seemed likely to be angry.

  “The northlands are a place of invasion and conquest. The place-names are always changing. It might be that I do know this Yoitsu of yours; I simply know it by a different name.”

  Lawrence nodded but was shocked at what Hugues said next.

  “When you said you wanted a map of the north, I thought for sure you were involved with the conflict up there.” Hugues was speaking in jest, but seeing Lawrence’s reaction, he, too, was stunned. “Ah… er… you’re not, are you?”

  “Are you referring to the events surrounding the Debau Company? So the rumors are true, are they?”

  No doubt Hugues collected information along with paintings. And this was the destination of the river that flowed right through the Debau Company’s front door.

  “Er, no, I… if you want to know whether it’s true, the fact is that I have no good evidence. It’s a place constantly awash in unpleasant rumors.”

  “What do you yourself believe, Mr. Hugues?”

  Hugues’s troubled expression was that of a man whose joke had been taken seriously. He seemed to give up on trying to escape and reluctantly opened his mouth. “The simple tr
uth is that… I have no interest in it.”

  Lawrence thought he must have misheard. “You have no interest?”

  “That’s right. More than a few of us are simply plugging our ears and closing our eyes to the tale, just as we did with the Moon-Hunting Bear. They’ll mine what they can mine, and when they’re done, they’ll leave. In any case, scenery is not eternal. Though the landscape might change completely, the land itself will not simply disappear from the earth, so…”

  Even a placid sheep, who only occasionally looked up from its grass eating to regard the scenery around it with its black eyes, could see the way of the world.

  It would be easy to curse Hugues for being a coward. But there was a certain truth to his thinking, and he could hardly be blamed for his realistic outlook.

  One saw all sorts of things during travel.

  Villages beset by mercenaries, towns suffering bitter feuds between landlords. There was nothing to be gained in opposition, and they were powerless to begin with. The only answer was to hold still and hope the storm would pass.

  “That’s why I’ve never tried to learn anything more about it. I’m not strong like old Huskins, and if I knew more, it would only worry me. Just as it worries you and Miss Holo and young Col.”

  Hugues smiled fractionally at this small joke, a signal that he was hoping to end the discussion of this particular topic.

  It was true – the more one knew, the more one wanted to know, and the more detailed the knowledge, the stronger the urge to interfere. It was difficult to argue with the wisdom of someone who had endured cataclysms.

  Lawrence had no right to disturb Hugues’s life, and Holo would surely feel the same way. “I apologize for asking.”

  “Not at all. I’m sorry I couldn’t be of any help. So then, will you be returning to your room?” inquired Hugues.

  Lawrence looked at Holo, who raised her head and shook it “no,” then pointed to Col. The boy was busily looking through a stack of paintings. Evidently they still had searching left to do.

  “I’ll be returning on my own.”

  “I see. Might I offer you something warm to drink in the parlor?”