It was such a standard phrase, but Vino and his wife smiled, pleased.
“The deer was butchered just this morning. You’re quite lucky.”
“It’s true, meat this good is hard to come by in towns.”
The key to being liked by villagers was to eat and drink well. Holo immediately asked for seconds, and Vino’s eyes went round as he laughed heartily.
“So, you’re here for the legend of the angel? You’d come all the way out here just for that?” Vino adjusted the logs in the hearth, causing sparks to go flying up toward the roof. The risk of fire made such actions unthinkable in a town, but here if the house burned, they could simply build another one, and there was little danger that the fire would spread to nearby buildings.
“Yes. Though we heard the broad strokes of it back in town.” Lawrence set his bowl down before wiping his mouth and gesturing to Fran. “Circumstances led to my becoming a guide for Miss Fran here, and she simply must learn more about the legend.”
“I see… But why would a nun wish to know such a thing?”
“While Miss Fran is a nun who’s pledged service to her holy order, she’s also an exceptional silversmith. The bishop has charged her to make a silver statue in the image of the angel.”
“I see…” Vino gave a hesitant smile as he regarded Fran. Fran averted her eyes as though used to this sort of treatment. In doing so, she did seem quite the godly nun.
By contrast, Holo opened her mouth wide, the better to accommodate a large piece of meat. Though she froze at a look from Lawrence, her devout smile was displayed only after she had filled her mouth with venison.
“Holo here is serving Miss Fran by the order of the bishop, and as the boy Col was born in the north, he’s acting as our guide. And my unworthy self is acting as our little group’s eyes and ears.” Lawrence cleared his throat and continued. “So, we’re hoping to hear more. And…” He leaned forward as though about to ask a favor. “If possible, we’d like to be taken to the place where the legend is said to have transpired.”
Vino stuck his knife into a slice of meat and ate it raw. Perhaps such eating habits were not rare in cold climes, for Col was unsurprised. Strangely it was Holo who seemed the most taken aback.
“Aye, I don’t mind doing that, but…”
Places of story and legend were often important to villagers. Lawrence had anticipated it being a point of contention even if he convinced them, but things were proceeding surprisingly smooth.
As he agreed, Vino’s face was, if anything, worried rather than unwilling. He continued, “I wonder if it will be all right, though. I saw your provisions when you arrived – do you plan on staying the night in the witch’s forest?”
“The witch’s… forest?”
“That’s the source of all the strange rumors about our village here. You’ve heard about the witch, haven’t you?”
Perhaps remembering Mueller’s warnings, Vino was only drinking small sips of the tart wine he had poured his guests, and he filled the cup in his hand with an irritated expression.
If there was a time to feign ignorance, this was it. “As far as that goes, we’d only heard that there were rumors…”
“Mm, is that so? Maybe the stories they tell in town are finally calming down. Anyway, it’s not a complicated tale. If you want to go to the witch’s forest, I can lead you right there. It’s not far.”
Lawrence met Fran’s eyes and saw her slight nod. “If it’s no trouble, then the sooner the better.”
“Ha-ha-ha, trouble? Thanks to you lot coming, I’ve gotten to eat venison and drink wine and call it work! I suppose merchants and nuns don’t do it often, but butchering a deer is hard work!” The meat, skin, bones, and organs had to be separated and dealt with, each in their own way.
Meat was preserved, skin was tanned before it rotted, and organs were boiled or made into sausage. Bones could become cooking implements, arrowheads, or trinkets while tendons could be made into tough, sturdy strings and ties.
But all of these parts would go bad if not tended to immediately, so it was difficult, hurried work.
Vino took a drink of wine. “Now, then. I suppose I’ll need to tell you the legend of the angel before we go. It’ll be no good if I wind up telling you the tale in the middle of the witch’s forest,” he said with a grin.
For all that the villagers avoided the witch’s forest, they did not seem to do so in a particularly exaggerated fashion. They seemed to simply acknowledge it as an unlucky place.
“So how much do you all know?”
“That by a forest lake near this village, a beast howled as a door to heaven opened; then an angel flew up into it… roughly.”
Vino was ladling more stew into his bowl as Lawrence spoke and wordlessly asked Holo and Col if they wanted another serving. Fran had quietly sipped the broth, leaving even the vegetables in her bowl untouched.
“That’s about the size of it. The ‘forest’ in this case runs along a river that flows from the lake. This happened back when the village elder was a boy, during a cold, cold winter.”
Vino filled Holo’s and Col’s bowls back up and gave a sort of downcast smile, as though embarrassed to be relating a story like this.
“On one windy day, it was so cold that people’s ears seemed about to freeze solid and be blown away. The village hunters had been trapped in the forest for three or four days, thanks to a sudden blizzard. Fortunately there was a small charcoal-making cottage beside the waterfall that flowed from the lake. The night the snow finally stopped falling, the skies cleared until there wasn’t a cloud to be seen, and the moon shined so brightly they say it was like the sun. The wind still blew fiercely, howling terribly through the forest, but the hunters had been up in the cottage for days, and they all wanted to breathe some of the outside air. They gathered their strength and went out, and just then–”
Everyone was listening intently. A log crackled faintly in the fire.
“–They heard a low, long howl. Ooooo… ooooo… it went, and they were all terribly afraid. There were spirits in the forests and mountains, they remembered, and so they decided to go back into the charcoal cottage. But the moment they tried to do so, the howl stopped. And then they looked toward the lake.”
Vino’s eyes glanced up at the ceiling, as though to evoke the hunters’ gazes at the waterfall.
“And then in that moment they saw a silver, shining angel of pure white, a pair of wings on its back. From the bottom of the waterfall, it beat those wings, flying up through golden doors that had opened in the heavens.”
His gaze finally fell, and he put his wine cup to his lips and seemed quite clearly embarrassed. No doubt he enjoyed this particular tale.
“Or so the story goes. It’s been passed down as the legend of the angel ever since.”
“I see…” Lawrence felt as though he could still see the angel flying up to the heavens on that moonlit night. Myths and superstitions were always extraordinary things. But because they still had a strange ring of reality to them, they were nonetheless passed down over the generations.
“But nobody’s seen an angel since. I hear the story once reached town and our village was quite lively for a while, but lately all it’s good for is making children happy.” Vino’s eyes narrowed in a self-deprecating smile.
“So, Mr. Vino, do you…”
“Hmm?”
“Do you think it’s just a legend, too?” It was an unfair question to ask, but Lawrence asked it anyway.
“Well… Who knows, eh?” Unsurprisingly, Vino looked down at his hands, smiling bashfully. It seemed as though he wanted to believe, but was unable to quite bring himself to do so.
“As for us, we’d like to believe it.”
“Ha-ha,” laughed Vino, as though he was wondering what sort of a village they would be if they failed to believe their own legends. “Sometimes I go along with Mueller into town and hear all sorts of tales of gods and devils from poor villages like this one, and most of them are nonsen
se. I heard one about glittering eyes that shone every night on a mountain, and it turned out to be a gold vein. So it was probably something like that for us, too. But…”
Vino stopped short, and for a moment he looked very tired. Lawrence had seen similar expressions many times before. It was the expression that came as the world’s dark places were lit one by one, casting doubt upon things once embraced and making the world very different from the fantastical one within which it would be vastly preferable to live.
When Lawrence had left his village as a child, he too had been shocked as he had learned these things. Col seemed pained as he watched Vino, probably because his experiences of this process were much more recent. The only one looking at Vino unmoved was Holo.
But Lawrence very much doubted that her heart was at ease.
“If our village’s angel legend is like that, too, well… that’s a bit sad. Nothing to do about it, though.” Vino shrugged and took a sip of wine. “The clever ones of the village say it must have been the snow, blowing up in the light to look like angels’ wings. And perhaps that’s really so.”
Holo and Huskins alike knew what it was to be forgotten and left behind and to have to accommodate themselves to the human world, enduring constant trouble, unable to stand by and watch as humans severed their ties with the old world.
Lawrence hesitated to ask Vino any further questions. Everyone had times when they wished to return to being a child.
“Oh, and now I’ve shared this strange story with you important Church types. And here you probably hoped it was true, eh? But please don’t think the good people of Taussig are unbelievers with no faith in angels, eh? Even I want to believe, after all!”
Lawrence smiled and nodded. If the villagers felt this way about the angel legend, it let them keep a bit of space between themselves and the story of the witch. If Vino had been a truly hard-headed believer, he might have frozen up like the village elder at the first mention of said witch.
“Although… I don’t know that I should ask you to believe in our angel legend.”
“Hmm?” said Lawrence, which made Fran direct her gaze at him, too.
Vino stood with a quiet “Hup,” then spoke in a practiced, careful tone. “The talk of the witch, you see. It’s not unrelated to the legend of the angel,” he said, not looking at a single one of them as he sheathed the knife with which he had eaten the venison at his belt. He scratched his nose and seemed to stare far away. Finally his attention returned, his face that of a hunter.
“Misfortune always comes from the outside. Mueller’s always saying it.”
Being the very definition of something that came from the outside, Lawrence could find nothing to say.
So he began preparing to take his leave, rushing Holo and Col – though not Fran, of course – through finishing their last bowls of stew.
After saying their regards to Mueller and the others who were busy tanning the deer hides in the square, Lawrence and company left the village led by Vino. Evidently there was a path that led from the village into the forest, but it wasn’t one that horses or wagons could use. Heading out of the village, they would detour around the forest, up a now-unused path that ran along the river that flowed out of the lake.
The road commanded a view of the too-close mountains as it ran alongside the forested foothills, and it gave Lawrence a none-too-good feeling. The road felt likely to be swallowed up at any moment by the green that seemed to melt out of the mountains.
The wagon wheels slid over the snow on the road, and Lawrence wondered how much progress they were actually making.
Finally they reached the place where the stream emerged from the forest.
“Just go north from here. The riverbed’s really wide, see? Used to be the river filled it up all the way, they say.”
It was plenty wide enough to accommodate the wagon. And because the riverbed did not just seem like nothing but rocks beneath the snow, it must have been many years since the river had flowed through it.
“Still, I’m impressed that you go out to hunt in this weather. I was surprised to hear you’d gotten deer.”
At Lawrence’s careful words, Vino’s face turned pleased and proud for the first time since they had left the village. “It’s because you can see their tracks so clearly. Of course, they know that, too, and they know there are only certain places we can go in the snow, so they avoid those spots. But we’re as clever as wolves, so we hide in snow; we become the air; and then, when the time comes, we strike!”
His boastful talk did not really suit the taciturn hunter image, but since there was one such hunter very close by, Lawrence smiled indulgently and left it at that. And anyway, even if it was not so, he was perfectly aware of just how dangerous it was to be disliked by the population of a snowy mountain village.
“But there’s a lake, isn’t there? Seems like animals would gather there.”
“So you might think, but the hunting itself has been strange around here for years.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s because of the witch. The forest around the lake is the witch’s forest, and nobody from the village will go near it.”
Lawrence found himself a bit taken aback at how readily Vino admitted to this.
Vino seemed to notice Lawrence’s surprise, and his expression turned awkward. “Ah, this is just the sort of thing that makes people misunderstand. It’s not that we really think there’s a witch. Truly.”
Lawrence glanced at Holo, but apparently Vino was not lying. It seemed the witch occupied a strange, ineffable position in the minds of the villagers of Taussig.
“So when you say ‘witch,’ you mean…”
“I hear originally it had to do with some important nun. Er…” Vino looked up at Fran on her horse.
Fran slowly looked back at him, then cocked her head curiously and smiled a gentle smile. “?”
“Ah, apologies. I can’t seem to remember her name… but anyway, she existed. From a town called Enos on the Woam River?”
“Perhaps you mean Lenos and the Roam River.”
“Ah, yes, that. Anyway, that’s where she was, and she was beautiful and clever. She gave such wonderful sermons that even God would be enchanted by them, they say.”
Holo looked over at Lawrence as she nodded. She could always be counted upon to react whenever talk of a beautiful woman came up.
Lawrence shrugged and then returned his attention to Vino.
“Her fervor reformed many a wicked heart. But because she preached every waking hour of every day, eventually she had run out of people in the town who needed to hear her message. So then she began to give her message to a different group.”
Lawrence found himself hanging on Vino’s words. He had done the same during the angel story – the man was a skilled storyteller. Perhaps this was one of the reasons why he had been put in charge of handling them.
“She began with birds and cats. Everyone in town praised her mercy and her charity. But then she began to preach to pigs and rats, and then the wind began to change. Eventually the stray dogs that wandered the city began to chase her, and yet still she preached like a woman possessed. The people of the town wanted her to stop, but she wouldn’t consider it. Then one day…”
Their footsteps crunched in the icy snow. Col was so taken in by the story that both of his hands were clenched into fists as he listened.
“… She vanished. Along with the dogs that had hounded her for her sermons.”
Vino blew into his hands as though scattering downy feathers.
Col followed their imaginary path up into the sky with his gaze before hastily bringing his attention back down to earth.
“Er – then what happened? She disappeared and what happened to her?”
“Now, now, don’t worry yourself so. This was a story Mueller heard in town. From here on out, it becomes the story as we saw it ourselves.”
Ah, Lawrence thought. He had wondered how the story was so detailed. Apparently M
ueller had been the village representative and had gone into town, hearing the tale while he was there. Then they had probably seen an eccentric nun passing through.
“It was the height of a hot summer. It was a terrible season. We were suffering out in the wheat fields, and insects swarmed everywhere. Maybe ten years ago, it was. That’s when the nun came, wearing robes too thick even for winter. We were all astonished to see her because behind her trailed countless stray dogs.”
Lawrence imagined a heavily dressed nun arriving with a procession of stray dogs behind her on a shimmering-hot summer day. It was a deeply eerie image.
Col grabbed on to Holo’s robe.
“The elder said it was a fallen angel here to herald the end of days, falling over himself in his desperation. Ever since, he sits out in front of the village, raising a great fuss whenever travelers come by.”
“I’m very sorry to hear that…”
“Ah, he was such a bother then; it’s a mercy he’s quieter now. Anyway, back to the nun outside of town. Mueller was brave enough to go out to ask her what her intentions were – who she was, and where she came from, what she wanted. And this is how she answered.”
She had heard that here was a path taken by an angel. It was as though they could hear her hoarse voice speaking.
“We realized she was talking about the legend of the angel that was connected to the forest and the lake. Even Mueller wanted to be rid of her, so we led her straight there. But–”
Lawrence was sure he could hear Col swallow nervously.
“–The moment we arrived at the forest, the nun ordered her dogs to attack. Here, here’s the scar I got.”
Vino bared his arm, showing it to Col, who, of all of them, was the most taken in by the tale.
Lawrence and Holo both peered over to get a look for themselves, and then their gazes met.
Neither of them said anything or betrayed any expression, but the scar was surely a strike from a club or stick. And it seemed quite old – undoubtedly from Vino’s childhood.
But his tale was so entertaining that neither Holo nor Lawrence threw cold water on it.
“After that, she took the forest with her dogs and let none enter, living there as though it belonged to her. They were our best hunting grounds, but we had no choice but to find new places to hunt. A terrible story, is it not? That’s why everyone calls her a witch. It’s out of spite, and that’s a fact.”
Spice & Wolf Omnibus Page 214