The checkpoint was the symbol of whoever held power.
Any successful fraud there would undo that authority.
If things went poorly, the boy could easily be thrown into the river to drown.
Yet those light blue eyes were fixed evenly on Lawrence.
Lawrence found himself momentarily transfixed by the imploring gaze—“If I fail here I’ll surely die,” the boy seemed to say—when he was jolted from his reverie by a sharp elbow to the ribs from Holo. Holo was looking neither at Lawrence nor at the boy but rather off in a random direction. However, her profile spoke very clearly: “Don’t forget what you just said.”
The boy had stood up on his own and called for help.
“You’ve got some nerve, sullying the name of Duke Diejin!” yelled the guard.
The line of boats waiting to get through this checkpoint and on to the next one grew longer.
As the guards were the ones who had to take the blame for any hindrances in traffic, their store of patience with the boy—who was doing nothing but causing trouble for them—had surely reached its end.
Holding the boy against the ground with his pike, the guard pulled back his foot as if to aim a kick to the boy’s rib cage, but in that moment—
“Wait, please!” cried Lawrence, just as the foot came up.
The impact could not be stopped. “Ungh,” croaked the boy, froglike.
“It’s true—I do know the boy!”
The guard looked up at Lawrence and hastily moved his foot away from the boy but soon seemed to grasp Lawrence’s true motive. Annoyed, he looked back and forth from Lawrence to the boy, then eventually sighed and withdrew his pike handle from the boy’s back.
It was obvious that the boy had been acting.
“Quite softhearted of you,” said the guard’s silent look.
The boy’s eyes bulged, as though he couldn’t believe his desperate gamble had actually worked, but as soon as he was able to grasp the situation, he got to his feet and awkwardly scrambled into Ragusa’s boat.
Ragusa was retying his coin purse closed after having paid the toll but had momentarily stopped as he watched the proceedings on the dock. When the boy jumped aboard, he came back to himself.
Yet it wasn’t until he met Lawrence’s gaze that Ragusa managed to close his gaping mouth.
“Hey, you’re holding up the line! Move your boat out!”
The guard may have only wanted to rid himself of a nuisance, but ships were in fact lining up behind them.
Ragusa turned to Lawrence and gave a little shrug, then boarded the boat himself and took his pole in hand. So long as Lawrence paid the fare, he had no cause for complaint.
Once the boy reached the boat’s bow where Lawrence and Holo were, he collapsed, either out of exhaustion or sheer shock.
Holo finally looked at Lawrence.
Her face still evidenced some irritation.
“We’ve come this far, so I guess it can’t be helped,” said Lawrence, at which Holo smiled faintly, putting her hand to the boy who had collapsed at her feet, which stuck out from underneath the blanket.
While she normally appeared fond of teasing and ridiculing others, seeing her kneel and speak quietly to the lad made Holo look every bit the kindhearted nun that her clothes marked her as.
It may very well have looked nice, but Lawrence did not find it the least bit amusing.
It wasn’t that he had no confidence in his own code of conduct, but now compared with Holo, he appeared quite heartless.
Having determined that the boy was uninjured, Holo helped him sit up and brought him to the edge of the boat.
Lawrence took some water out and handed it over.
The boy was in Holo’s shadow, and Lawrence could see that his hand still held tight to the certificate.
Lawrence had to admire his spirit.
“Here, water,” said Holo, passing it to the boy with a nudge at his shoulder.
The boy’s eyes had been closed, as though he was unconscious, but they slowly opened, and his gaze flicked back and forth between Holo directly in front of him and Lawrence, who was behind her.
The moment he saw the boy’s sheepish smile, Lawrence looked aside in spite of himself, remembering how a moment ago he’d been ready to abandon the boy.
“Thank…you.”
It was unclear whether the boy was giving thanks for the water or for their kindness in having played along with his desperate act.
Either way, Lawrence felt a bit self-conscious, unaccustomed as he was to being thanked in a situation free from cold profit and loss calculations.
The boy must have been thirsty, for he gulped the water down rapidly despite the chilly weather, then cleared his throat and sighed, apparently satisfied.
From the look of him, it didn’t seem like he’d come from Lenos. There were any number of roads with paths across the river, so the boy was probably from a town north or south along one such road.
What sort of travel had brought him here?
From the tattered sandals the boy had on, one thing was clear—it had not been an easy journey.
“When you’ve calmed yourself, you should sleep. Will this blanket be enough, I wonder?” asked Holo.
Aside from the blanket she and Lawrence used, they had one extra.
Holo handed it over, and the boy’s eyes widened in pleasure at this unanticipated kindness. He nodded. “The blessings of God be upon both of…you…”
The boy wrapped himself in the blanket and fell asleep so rapidly one could nearly hear the thud.
Given his clothing, it would have been impossible for him to make camp and sleep outside. If things went badly, he could very well have frozen to death.
Holo watched him worriedly for a while but seemed to relax upon hearing the boy’s slow, regular breathing. Her face was gentle as Lawrence had never seen it, and she softly brushed the boy’s hair from his face before standing.
“Should I now do the same for you?” she asked, half-teasing, half-embarrassed.
“It’s the privilege of children to be cared for so,” answered Lawrence with a shrug.
Holo smiled. “From where I stand, you’re still a child.”
As she spoke, the boat, which until a moment ago had been picking up speed as it floated down the river, slowed. They had largely caught up with the boats ahead of them, and Ragusa had taken an interest in their new passenger. He put his pole down and called out from across the cargo.
“Quite a handful! Is he all right at least?” Ragusa asked about the boy.
Holo nodded, and Ragusa stroked his chin thoughtfully, exhaling white breath.
“I wonder who cheated him. It didn’t happen this year, but come the cold season, a great number of people come from the south, and among them are swindlers aplenty. The year before last, there was a forger so skilled that not just children, but even sharp merchants were being taken in by him. Maybe people became wise to it, because since then, you hardly ever see them. The boy must have run into one of the very last ones.”
Lawrence carefully removed the document from the boy’s hand, which stuck out from underneath the blanket, then unrolled and read it.
It was a declaration of right to collect taxes from vessels on the Roam River, issued by Duke Herman Di Diejin.
In a perfunctorily flowing script that was mostly just hard to read were written directives to that effect, but anyone who had seen the genuine article would know this was a fake.
And of course, there was the matter of the duke’s signature and seal.
“Mr. Ragusa, how do you spell Duke Diejin’s name?”
“Mm, like so…”
Comparing Ragusa’s answer to the signature, Lawrence found that one of the silent lowercase letters was mistaken.
“Also the seal is a fake,” added Ragusa. “Copying the true seal is punishable by hanging.”
Now that was interesting.
Copying the real seal meant death, but making a similar seal was no crime.
Ragusa shrugged wearily, and Lawrence carefully refolded the document and slipped it back underneath the blanket.
“You’ll be paying the extra fare, though, don’t forget,” said Ragusa.
“Ah, er…yes. Of course.”
Holo might not like it, but in the end, it was money that shaped the world.
CHAPTER TWO
The boy’s name was evidently Tote Col.
After the boy had taken a short nap, Holo’s stomach started growling, so Lawrence handed out some bread, which Col ate guardedly, like a wild dog.
But his features weren’t especially disheveled, which made him seem more like an abandoned dog than a strictly wild one.
“So, how much did you pay for these papers?”
Col hadn’t bought just one or two forgeries from the merchant on his travels; in his tattered bag, he had a whole book’s worth.
Eating the fist-sized piece of rye bread in two bites, Col answered shortly, “One trenni…and eight lute.”
The fact that he mumbled the words so reluctantly had nothing to do with the bread in his mouth.
Given his appearance, the memory of paying out a full trenni and more must have been desperately frustrating.
“That’s quite an investment…Was the traveling peddler you bought them from so impressive-looking?”
It was Ragusa who answered Lawrence’s question. “Hardly. Dressed in rags, he was, and with no right arm.”
Col looked up and nodded, surprised.
“He’s famous around here,” said Ragusa. “Walks around selling his papers. I bet he said something like this to you, aye? ‘Look at this stump of mine—I’ve risked this much danger to come by these, but I’m not long for this world. I’m thinking of returning home, so I’ll turn these deeds over to you.’”
Col’s eyes were glazed over—it must have matched what he’d been told nearly word for word.
Swindlers generally had an apprentice with them, and such lines were passed on from master to apprentice.
As to the matter of the man’s missing right arm, it suggested he had once been caught by a constable somewhere, and his arm was taken as punishment.
A thief who stole money forfeited a finger, but a swindler who stole trust—that was an arm. A murderer who took life lost his head. If the crime were especially heinous, hanging was evidently worse than decapitation.
In any case, the boy slumped and looked down, the ignominy of having been fooled by a swindler whose untrustworthiness was well-known adding insult to injury.
“Can you read, though?” Lawrence asked as he flipped through the forgeries.
“A little…” came the uncertain reply.
“More than half of these aren’t even forgeries.”
“…Wh-what do you mean, sir?”
Lawrence found himself a bit impressed at Col’s politeness. Perhaps he had indeed worked for a respectable master once. Lawrence and Col’s meeting having been what it was, that was a bit surprising.
Col’s expression was one of total defeat; he could hardly have looked any more depressed than he did.
Perhaps feeling sorry for him, Holo—who was sitting next to the boy—offered him some more bread.
“Most of these are documents stolen from some trading firm somewhere. Look here, there are even notices of payment sent,” said Lawrence, handing the sheets to Holo—but although Holo could read, she didn’t know anything about notices of payment.
She cocked her head, but when she tried to show them to Col, he shook his head.
Perhaps it felt too much like looking upon his own failure.
“If this is the kind of thing you bought, I see them all the time. These papers themselves aren’t good for drawing any money, but they’re good for getting a laugh among merchants. They were stolen from some trading firm somewhere and have been passed around from one merchant to another since then,” said Lawrence.
“One of my customers got tricked by them, too,” added Ragusa as he nudged the boat’s prow away from a rock in the river.
“Who would steal this?” asked Holo.
“Usually an apprentice at the firm who’s gotten tired of being worked too hard—they’ll grab them on their way out as a final piece of pay. Rival firms will pay a decent price for the information they contain, and of course, there are swindlers who will buy them up as well. It’s advice that gets passed along from one young apprentice to another. If you take money, the company will come after you in earnest. But with something like this, the firm has its reputation to consider, so it’s harder for them to pursue.”
“Huh?”
“Consider how it would look for a firm to madly chase down a missing copy of its ledger—people would think there was something extraordinary on that ledger, wouldn’t they? And that’s bad for business.”
Holo nodded, impressed by this angle she hadn’t considered.
Lawrence flipped through page after page as he talked but seemed to be finding them genuinely interesting.
It wasn’t every day that one could easily see which firms had ordered which goods from which shops in which towns.
Col’s situation was a sad one, though.
“You know what they say, ‘Ignorance is a sin.’ What do you say, lad—you’ve no money anyway, so what say I buy these in exchange for your food and fare?”
The boy’s eyebrows twitched in surprise, but he didn’t look up, instead staring intently at the inside wall of the boat.
No doubt he was making some calculations in his mind.
There might be something genuine hidden somewhere in that sheaf of paper, or the pages might all be useless, but if he let this opportunity pass he’d never again meet someone willing to trade for them. And yet—he’d paid more than a trenni for the lot of them…
Just as Holo often bragged of her ability to see through Lawrence’s intentions, Lawrence himself was confident in his ability to figure profit-loss calculations.
Yet unlike Holo, that did not come from an ability to discern people’s subtlest shifts in expression, but rather from his long experience as a merchant.
“F-for how much?” asked Col.
As though bearing some grudge, he looked carefully up at Lawrence—perhaps because he felt that if he betrayed any lack of confidence, the price would be beaten down.
His effort was quite charming, and Lawrence had to force himself not to smile at it; he coughed and calmed himself. “Ten lute.”
“…” Col’s face twitched, and he took a deep breath before answering. “Th-that’s too low.”
“I see. Keep them, then,” replied Lawrence immediately, thrusting the sheaf back at Col.
What little vitality Col had mustered drained immediately from his face.
His disappointment showing so clearly made him look more tattered and worn than if he hadn’t tried to put on a brave face in the first place.
Col bit his lip as he looked back and forth from the sheaf of papers to Lawrence.
His stubbornness in trying to sell the papers for a bit more had dropped his profits to zero. That same stubborn mask would now be an obstacle if he wanted to ask for anything more.
That was surely what he was thinking.
When he calmed himself a bit, he saw Holo and Ragusa’s indulgent smiles and must have realized that it was showing his weakness that would allow him a means of escape.
A merchant will throw away all of his pride if it brings profit.
Of course, Col was not a merchant, and he was yet young.
Lawrence withdrew the sheaf of papers, scratching his chin with the corner of the stack. “Twenty lute, then. I can go no higher.”
Col’s eyes widened, as though his face had just broken through the surface of the water, but he then immediately looked down.
His relief was obvious, and obvious was his desire to hide it.
Lawrence looked at Holo, who bared her fangs at him, as if to say, “Don’t tease the boy overmuch.”
“I accept your off
er…,” said Col.
“That’s not quite enough to make it all the way to Kerube, though. We’ll have to let you off on the way, or else…” Lawrence looked askance at the good-natured boatman who had been enjoying the proceedings thus far.
“Ah, I suppose it’s all right,” said Ragusa with a laugh, taking Lawrence’s meaning. “There’ll be odd jobs on along the way. Lend a hand, and I’m sure I can make it worth your time.”
Col looked about like a lost puppy, then gave a hesitant nod.
Toll checkpoints along the river were so common they were a nuisance.
All you needed to collect some money was the ability to stop boat traffic, so it was understandable—but without them, the journey would have been twice as fast.
Even worse, the more affluent landlords could afford to build checkpoints that connected overland roads on either side of the river, which would then become places where boats could load and unload cargo.
Soon people would gather to sell food and drink to the boatmen, and the checkpoint would take on aspects of a roadside inn, and many of them had come to be miniature towns in their own right.
All this slowed river traffic, and there were even times when walking would have been faster.
Ragusa would try to hurry his boat through, but he had nothing on those who were hauling furs.
The fur traders needed to reach Kerube as soon as they possibly could and would throw so much money at the toll collectors that the collectors could hardly complain, and despite the narrow river and Ragusa’s skill, his boat was passed by.
“We’ll never catch the vixen like this…”
They were stopped at the latest of who knew how many checkpoints, where Ragusa evidently had some appointment he had to keep.
He immediately started talking with a merchant who approached, and calling out to Col, he began moving cargo.
Thus it was that one boat passed them and then another; Holo was leaning against Lawrence as she napped, but her eyes opened, and she watched the boats vaguely and muttered.
Ever since boarding the boat, Holo had been exceedingly sleepy, so Lawrence wondered if she was feeling poorly, but then he remembered how she had cried when he had gone to pick her up from being held as collateral by the Delink Company.
Spice and Wolf, Vol. 6 Page 5