Where will her path lead her in the end? Esalu shivered and rubbed her arms.
The dazzling specks began to descend. One at a time, Royal Beasts dropped to the ground. Some landed partway down the cliff, others on the snowy ground at the top. Keeping a fixed distance from each other, they formed a ring with Elin at the center. Although they looked like they were randomly scattered, Esalu, who was used to this sight, knew there was meaning in the order of their descent and in each landing spot.
Leelan alighted first, beside Elin, followed almost immediately by Eku. Next came their children, each landing some distance away and in order of their age. According to Elin, Leelan and her family, who had been living in the sanctuary the longest, had staked out a core territory within the pasture. The Royal Beasts that had been brought to the sanctuary later each made their own territory on the edge of that family circle. They maintained the same hierarchy and physical distance between them wherever they were. Even here in the ravine that served as their training ground, they still stayed the same distance apart when they landed. However, Elin had discovered through many years of observation that the size of each Beast’s territory was much smaller than that of wild Royal Beasts.
I suppose in the wild such enormous, meat-eating creatures would need quite a lot of space, Esalu thought. But in the sanctuary, where there’s no need to hunt for food, territory probably has a different meaning.
Elin had told Esalu that Royal Beasts were amazingly intelligent and adapted to new conditions very quickly. Through studying the behavior of Beasts newly introduced to the sanctuary, Elin had identified how they maintained an appropriate distance from one another. It seemed they had their own language, communicating with complex combinations of cries, wing movements, and sounds made with their teeth and joints.
Leelan lowered her head and nuzzled Elin in the back making a cooing noise like a cub—shashasha.
“Stop that, Leelan. You might push me off the cliff.” Smiling, Elin pressed her hands against the enormous Beast’s nose. On her breast, a Silent Whistle gleamed.
As Esalu walked toward Elin, she noticed footsteps in the snow. They led not from the direction of Kazalumu but from the edge of the forest to the training ground and back again. She sighed.
Elin turned at the sound. “Oh, I didn’t realize you were here.” With a worried frown, she strode quickly over to Esalu. “You shouldn’t have come all this way in such freezing weather.”
Esalu stretched and raised her brows. “I’m not the only one who came all this way in this weather. Did you notice?”
Elin looked to where Esalu was pointing, and her face clouded. The boy must have been hiding in the rock’s shadow for some time. The snow was much thinner there. Catching sight of something on the rock, Elin walked over and picked it up.
“What is it?” Esalu called out. Elin turned and waved what looked like a red scarf.
“It’s my old scarf,” she said as she drew near. She wrapped it around Esalu’s neck.
Esalu’s eyes widened as she felt its soft warmth. “It’s so warm,” she exclaimed. “Did he just leave it there now?”
Elin shook her head with a playful smile and placed a small pottery vessel in Esalu’s hands.
“Ah! A hot water bottle!” Esalu exclaimed. At this time of year, it was quite common for the elderly to fill a clay jug like this with hot water, wrap it in cloth, and stick it inside their robes. The boy had probably wrapped it in his scarf so the heat wouldn’t escape when he left it on the rock for his mother.
“Honestly! That little rascal. It’s hard to scold him when he does such sweet things.” Esalu sighed again. “I know he misses you, but it’s not good to let him sneak in here like this all the time. It’s not only the guards I’m thinking of. The forest is much deeper here than around the pastures; he could get into serious trouble along the way.”
“I know. I really need to make him stop, but…”
Jesse was lonely. His father was no longer here, and his mother spent most of the day with the Royal Beasts. They had gotten rid of their house in the city and moved into a house built for them inside the sanctuary, meaning Jesse couldn’t play with his old neighborhood friends anymore.
When school was in session, he could at least play with the students sometimes, which helped him forget his parents’ absence. But during the holidays, when the students went home to their families, there was only the housemother, Kalisa, and the custodians. Although they might spend some time with him, he must have been unbearably lonely.
The training grounds were heavily guarded, with many soldiers posted in the forest, and no one was allowed in except Elin and Esalu. But knowing Jesse was Elin’s son, the guards turned a blind eye when he snuck through. When Elin thought about how the Aluhan and others would react if they heard that Jesse was watching her train the Royal Beasts, she knew she couldn’t let him get away with it. But when she thought of how Jesse must have been feeling, she couldn’t bring herself to scold him either.
“Honestly, you and Jesse are hopeless. Your husband, too,” Esalu grumbled. She bit her glove and pulled it off, then took a letter wrapped in oiled paper from her cloak.
Elin’s heart raced at the sight. Just feeling the weight of the letter in her hands made her happy.
“Do you think he’ll come home this winter? Even once?”
Elin smiled and cocked her head. “I wonder.”
“He doesn’t come because you don’t put enough pressure on him,” Esalu said. “I bet he’d be happier if you begged him to come home instead of being so understanding.”
Elin replied with a vague smile, and Esalu threw up her hands with a snort of disgust.
With the sun sinking lower in the sky, the snow that had been blowing in soft little flurries began to fall thick and fast. “I guess it’s time to get back to the stable,” Elin said. She tucked Ialu’s letter into her cloak and raised her harp. With the first twang of the string, the Royal Beasts turned toward her. Listening to the notes she played, they rose as if drawn by a thread, flying up into the dusky heavens. Their wings beat noisily as they passed overhead and flew off toward the pasture.
“Not a Beast out of place,” Esalu whispered as she watched them disappear into the distance.
* * *
Esalu left when they reached the stable. Pushing open the door, Elin stepped inside. Having arrived home long before and been fed by Tomura and the senior students, Leelan was grooming her fur with a contented look.
It was warm inside the dimly lit stable. Although the stalls were cleaned daily, the distinctive scent of Beast never left. The smell might have disturbed someone who wasn’t used to it, but Elin felt herself relax whenever she entered the stable.
It was completely different in size and shape from the building that had been here when she was a young girl. Carpenters sent from the palace had replaced it with a far larger and grander structure. Now, plenty of fresh meat was delivered daily for the Royal Beasts, so the sanctuary no longer had to mix potatoes into the feed to make it stretch further.
Listening to the Beasts’ gentle rustling, Elin knelt in front of the fireplace and stirred the embers in the banked fire. When they began to glow, she added a few sticks of wood. The flames caught, and she sat down by the fire and pulled out the bundle Esalu had given her. Breaking the seal, she tore off the oiled-paper wrapping and unfolded the pages inside to reveal Ialu’s handwriting.
Breathlessly, she began to read the tightly packed script. Just like his character, Ialu’s words were plain and straightforward. He described different events in his life over the past month. As a former Se Zan who had once guarded the Yojeh, it couldn’t have been easy for him to fit in with the Toda Riders, who pledged allegiance to the Aluhan, yet his letter never even touched on this subject.
For the last two years, he had worked patiently and steadily to form a bridge between the Aluhan’s men and the Se Zan. With Kailu’s help, he had invited a Se Zan and a Toda Rider, both of whom were well liked by
their comrades but flexible in their thinking, to join him for a drink. He had started off with just the three of them meeting once or twice a month, but slowly his efforts had borne fruit, and twenty or thirty men now joined this regular gathering. Through their conversations, he identified what was needed and formulated proposals to meet those needs. He had also established a channel through which he could share these proposals with the Yojeh and the Aluhan. He approached this work with the same methodical patience he showed when building cabinets. At the same time, he was working to improve the Toda army and sent Elin detailed descriptions of the new Toda troop he’d helped establish under Yohalu.
Although not a talkative man, Ialu was a surprisingly good writer. When Elin had first begun living with him, she had stumbled upon a bundle of papers while cleaning. Ialu wasn’t home. She knew she shouldn’t look at them without permission, but she couldn’t help herself. Undoing the string that bound them, she began to read.
It was a diary of sorts. The mental anguish Ialu had experienced after quitting the Se Zan came through so vividly, she couldn’t put the pages down. It was only when she came to the place where he mentioned her that she finally stopped. Although she was dying to read further, she was afraid she couldn’t bring herself to look Ialu in the face if she did. With trembling fingers, she retied the string.
After agonizing over it all night, she’d finally confessed. She’d been terrified that it would mean the end of their relationship, but Ialu had seemed neither surprised nor angry. Taken aback by his indifference, she had asked him why he wasn’t mad, but he’d only looked puzzled and in the end had never answered her.
She still didn’t know why he hadn’t gotten mad. They’d been married a long time now, and there were quite a few things she still wondered about. Perhaps it was the same for him, too.
* * *
Elin pulled her rambling thoughts back to the present and started reading from where she’d left off. At a certain spot, her eyes widened.
“Yesterday,” Ialu wrote, “a secret envoy arrived bearing a letter from Sir Rolan. Lord Yohalu summoned me to his room and told me what it said. The contents were surprising. According to Sir Rolan, Lahza is not the name of a single nation.”
Rolan had traveled deep into the eastern plains, and the country he described was a far cry from what Elin had imagined Lahza to be. According to him, the word “Lahza” meant “we” in the language of a people who called themselves the Oolish. The correct name for their country was Lahza Oma Kaluda, meaning “we who worship Kaluda.” Kaluda was the god they worshipped in a shrine far to the east. Furthermore, the Oolish were divided into two large groups of people: the Oolish Oh and the Oolish Yah, meaning the Western Oolish and the Eastern Oolish. These two groups vied with each other to see who could bring the most prized offerings to their god.
Once every five years the god sent the Voice of Joy from the heavens to announce which group, the Western or the Eastern Oolish, had most pleased him. For the last fifteen years, the Eastern Oolish had received the most praise for their achievements, and the Western Oolish longed to offer up some dazzling exploit that would win the god’s approval.
According to Rolan, this was likely why attacks on the caravan cities, including Imeelu, had increased. He warned his father, however, not to dismiss the Lahza as mere fanatics. Although their lifestyle and their way of thinking was grounded in their belief in Kaluda, the glory of their cities and the prosperity of their trade were so indescribably great that one would have to see it to believe it.
Their style of government was also extremely efficient. They had succeeded in absorbing so many surrounding tribes and peoples because they treated everyone, even non-Oolish, as equals as long as they accepted the god Kaluda.
As she read, Elin recalled the guestroom in Yohalu’s hall; the beautiful woman Kuriu sitting in an arm chair by the window that opened onto the inner garden; the huge map that covered the wall. She remembered Rolan’s rich, gentle voice as he had pointed to the caravan city Imeelu on a distant plain, and his homeland, Asheh. From Ialu’s letter, she sensed once again the vastness of the world that she’d felt at that time.
She raised her face and gazed at the Royal Beasts. In the half-dark of this winter night their hulking shadows were hunched in sleep, and their muzzles were buried deep in the fur on their chests as they snored contentedly. Something boundless spread through her chest at the thought that in some faraway land, people who worshipped the god Kaluda were also passing this winter night.
How big the world was! And so filled with people of different perspectives.
A quiet thought dropped to the bottom of her chest and fanned outward. Wars will never cease. No matter how hard people might try to prevent conflict, no matter what clever scheme they devised, humans would continue to form packs that fought over territory.
Looking at Leelan’s sleeping form, Elin thought of Jeh, who had left this world long ago. Having led two thousand Royal Beasts through the skies to battle, she would have been painfully aware of human nature. Surely, Jeh, you must have felt the same way. Yet you didn’t let that stop you. You used the Royal Beasts to safeguard the stability of this country while trying your best to avert another catastrophe.
And now, one piece at a time, Elin was dismantling the clever devices Jeh had created to prevent people from flying or breeding the Beasts. The final outcome to which these actions could lead was always on Elin’s mind, yet she no longer felt like stopping.
The system Jeh had so carefully woven was truly masterful—as long as the sole object was to stabilize the country and maintain peace. But time passed. The country grew, its population swelled, and border disputes with other nations became frequent. When Yaman Hasalu was given the Toda as weapons, Jeh’s exquisitely woven cage had begun to unravel and had now reached the stage where it could no longer hold its shape.
While the kingdom of Lyoza had been flaunting the power of the Toda to other countries, it had also been sowing the seeds of its own downfall. Countries that lacked Toda and relied on men as weapons naturally wanted a Toda army of their own. As long as people were driven by the desire to win, to have a better life than someone else no matter how small the difference, they would keep looking for ways to conquer. One day, someone was bound to discover a weapon that could overwhelm the Toda forces.
Elin stared at the floor of the dark stable. In the end, it was I who found that weapon and showed it to those in power.
As the one who had opened the lid of that box, what should she do? Having thought this question through carefully, she was now walking the only path she’d found.
If we could rid the world of war …
This thought crossed her mind at times, and each time she would dismiss it as an impossible dream. Humans, who staked out territories in packs, seemed to have an incurable inclination to wage war. But at the bottom of this dark thought a faint light still gleamed. In her mind, she would see the shadow of a little fish flitting through a stream while the sun played on the water’s surface—a fish she had read about in a book long ago.
Known by the name of lya, the fish fed on algae that grew on rocks in the riverbed. Each lya claimed several rocks as their territory and would slam into other fish to stop them from eating their algae. The more they ate, the stronger these fish grew, and the better they could protect their territory. The strongest survived.
Strangely, when something in the river’s condition changed, they would begin to swim in schools and no longer stake out territory. The fish that swam in such schools weren’t particularly small. No longer bound by territories, they could forage in a broader area and had more algae to eat. Sometimes more lya survived this way than on their own. The passage Elin had read kept a clear light alive in her mind. Although faint, it glittered like the sun on the river’s surface.
Living things can change, she thought. We can never know people or the world to the point where we can write them off as hopeless. She felt that she could keep moving forward as long
as she could think this way. Even if dark and menacing clouds rose above the road that stretched ahead.
Elin bowed her head, the letter still grasped in her hands. Ialu had written in such detail about the Lahza to help her prepare. At the end of last year, Lahza horsemen had repeatedly attacked the kingdom’s protectorates, the caravan cities in the east. Ialu was warning her that if they had done so seeking good tidings from their god, they were likely to launch an even larger campaign in another four years.
Thanks to Ialu’s detailed reports on the Toda forces, Elin had a solid grasp of what was going on. His letters conveyed the inner thoughts and opinions of each officer and soldier he named, along with the subtleties of what was happening in the field. She suspected that he sent her these long and frequent messages so she would know the people alongside whom she fought when it was time to fly the Royal Beasts into battle.
She longed to be with him. To see his face, to hear his voice. This yearning burned through her chest like fire. She closed her eyes.
Esalu had said she was too understanding, but she was wrong. The night before Ialu left, Elin had wept furiously and berated him. In the end, however, she had been forced to give up because she realized he felt the same as she did.
Once it was clear that the transient peace in which they had lived had come to an end, the dams concealed in their hearts had burst. The walls behind which they had built their protected life crumbled and were swept away; in the wake, a single thought reared its head: Unless they faced their fate, there would be no future for them at all.
Elin had known all along that Ialu was stalked by ghosts. The shades of those he had killed weighed heavily on his mind even after he and Elin began living together as a family. No matter what he did, these memories never left him. She also had longed to find something that would help her confront her past and confirm that it was all right for her to go on living. Nothing anyone said could quench that desire.
The Beast Warrior Page 26