She’d seen through my moment’s hesitation...
Then, she smiled. “I’m not senile yet.”
The light of wit certainly dwelled in her eyes.
◆
“Good to hear. Looks like you still had some unfinished business and got left behind. Don’t worry, though. Look, this guy’s a genuine, principled high priest. Met him by chance.” Menel started talking to the old woman’s ghost. He was being awfully chatty. “He can send lost souls like you back to be reincarnated, heal the wounded—he’s a whiz at all that stuff. So us two’ll do something about the village. Go on, thank him and get going already.”
I was a principled high priest? He was really playing me up.
“Or is there something else? Some message you wanted to give someone? I’ll tell them for you, so you—”
“Menel.” With a single word, the old woman ended his verbal barrage. Then, she sighed. “You’ve been misbehaving again.”
I didn’t miss the twitch in Menel’s shoulders. “N-Not really... Where’s this coming from? You sure you aren’t going dotty?”
“I can read you like a book.”
“Oh yeah? How?” Menel feigned ignorance, but it wasn’t working. Marple continued with conviction.
“You’re a terrible liar, dear. And a difficult child. But deep down, you’re a scrupulously honest person with integrity.”
Menel looked like he was trying to say something back, but the words wouldn’t come out. The old woman simply smiled. They kind of looked like family. One living, and one undead. The days I’d spent in a family of four floated back into my mind.
“Killing and stealing... Someone like you isn’t cut out for all that nasty business.”
Menel had no reply.
“And it’s high time you admitted it. Stop living through clout. Give up this way of life of always fighting with others.” Her words showed no restraint, cutting Menel’s lifestyle to the ground and discarding it as casually as a butcher tossing unwanted parts.
“Shut up...” Menel’s voice, by contrast, was shaking. “Shut up! Stop talking to me like you’ve got all the answers! What was I supposed to do then?!” He was yelling, on the verge of tears. “You died, the rest of the village was starving and freezing! What the hell else could I have done?! My strength is the only thing I can count on! Or are you saying I should have prayed to God?! When has God, when has any fig god ever helped me?!”
Menel tried to grab the old woman’s ghost, but his hand swiped the air.
“Pig shit... This is... Pig shit!” Menel dropped to his knees and buried his head in them.
All I could do was watch.
“I’ve had enough... Let me go with you...” As fog swirled about the devastated village, the sorrowful tones of the half-elf’s beautiful voice echoed around. “The life of a half’s too long for me...”
Those who inherited elven blood lived several hundred years. His life wouldn’t end so easily. Even after losing the people and places important to him, he would continue to exist. What words did I possibly have to offer him? I had no idea.
“Listen to me, Menel. Meneldor.” Marple raised her voice, her tone serious. Menel looked up. “God has given you one more chance.” She smiled slowly. “One last time. Wash your hands of this wretched way of life.”
Her smile was full of love. I was even reminded of the Echo of the Earth-Mother Mater I had once seen. She may not be able to swing a sword or use magic, but I was sure that this person had something far more amazing and precious than anything I possessed—such was the power of that smile.
“You may hate God, but God will always love you. Whether you realize it or not, God is always shining on you, unremitting, untiring.” Through the silence of the perished village, the voice of the perished woman carried clearly, whispered like a young child telling her friend where she’d hidden away her treasures. “Now, it’s all down to you. All you need to do is see the light.” She smiled. “Give it a go, and I promise you it’ll all work out.”
Menel was covering his face and weeping silently, his shoulders shaking.
Then... the woman turned to me.
◆
“Now, Father, may I have a word?”
“Of course.”
“Could I ask you to take care of this silly boy? He isn’t a bad person at his core. Would you... well... get along with him?”
It was the last wish of a person departing this world. I nodded firmly. Marple gave a satisfied nod of her own.
“Oh, yes... About the demons with beasts who attacked the village—it seems it wasn’t a case of lone demons wandering here by chance. They have a leader and a base where he lives deep in the woods, and he sends out underlings to various places from there. I don’t know the exact details, but it sounded like they had some truly evil things planned involving taming beasts and attacking people.”
“Don’t tell me you can speak demonjabber?” Not even Gus knew much about that language. Maybe some research had been done on it sometime in the past two hundred years?
“Well... That’s a long story from long ago.”
What kind of past did this woman have?
“Judging by the direction they were sending out their familiars and so on, I’d suspect their base is in the direction of the Rust Mountains, the fallen capital of the dwarves.”
I looked west. Beyond the fog, I could faintly see a reddish-brown mountain range in the distance. That had to be it.
“Did you not want the burden?”
“On the contrary, you’ve been very helpful.”
“Good,” Marple said with a smile. “I was feeling guilty that I couldn’t thank you in some way. If it helped you, Father, then I’m glad.”
“Um, your unfinished business, might it have been...”
The old woman roared with laughter. “Of course it was! As if I could take that to the grave! Someone had to know!” She laughed for a while. “So, that’s all. I hope you don’t mind, but I won’t be needing your guidance. God, you see, is already waiting for me.”
I saw a faint flame beside the old woman. Ah... You’re here, I thought.
“With that said, I’ll be on my way,” Marple said, and smiled.
The situation in the outside world wasn’t good, just as my parents had feared. But there were people here. It wasn’t all bad.
“Menel, keep your chin up. This world is full of things that can’t be undone. You mustn’t brood over them and let them hold you back. Stand up, face forward, and do what needs to be done.”
“Fig. So you’re just gonna say your piece and go,” Menel said bitterly.
Marple laughed. “Look in a mirror, dear. We both like to do things our own way. Gracious, what a boy.” She smiled, crow’s feet forming at the corners of her eyes, and put her incorporeal arms around Menel, rubbing his back with hands that couldn’t touch.
“All right,” she said calmly. “The rest, I trust to you.”
“Okay.” I placed my hand over the left side of my chest, and returned a vow. “You can leave it to me.”
She smiled.
And another soul returned to samsara.
◆
After Marple went back to the cycle of reincarnation, Menel was in a daze for a while.
Once he regained his composure, we had a discussion and decided to begin dealing with the bodies of the villagers.
I repurified the remains of the temple with magic and blessings, and made it into a sacred area that creatures and beasts couldn’t approach. For each of the villagers’ bodies, I put my hands together and prayed for them, cleansed them with magic, lifted them onto my back, and lined them up at the ruined temple. Pray, cleanse, lift, carry. Pray, cleanse, lift, carry. Pray, cleanse, lift, carry.
I repeated this over and over. No matter how grotesque the body, I gave them all equal treatment.
As I worked, I thought about the state of the outside world. It was looking pretty bleak right now. How many battles had I gotten into already in the small numb
er of days since I had left the city of the dead? Dangerous beings like demons and beasts were widespread and hadn’t even been driven out of areas where people were still living their lives.
And when people suffered from these attacks, the result, either due to extreme poverty or the failure to organize a buffer of emergency supplies in advance, was the continual creation of starving bandits. Because of the cold rationality created from everyone having nothing to spare, there was no mercy or allowance made for others, nor was there any semblance of law or order.
Violence was rampant, and survival of the strongest ruled above all. This was the case for at least the entire region known as Beast Woods, if not an even wider area. Even just the brief glimpse I’d had of it was pretty darn awful.
Of course, I could have shamelessly said, “That is their culture, their society, and their choice. It’s not my place as an outsider to interfere,” and passed through while assuming the attitude of a neutral observer.
My hometown was the city of the dead, not these woods. I was only a passerby, and had no obligation to do anything with regard to this area. The societal problems of an entire region weren’t going to be fixed overnight by the efforts of just one person, so I had the option of just dealing with the immediate problem in front of me and only getting as involved as my oath required.
From the look of things so far, I seemed to qualify as a pretty strong warrior even in the outside world, and I also had my powers of magic, my god’s protection, and a good amount of wealth. If I wanted to live in peace somewhere inconspicuous, I could probably accomplish that surprisingly easily. I just had to find some city that wouldn’t make too much of a fuss about my origin, blend in, and I was sure it would work out.
However...
“As you travel—”
“Prithee, bring light to the faraway darkness.”
If that was my god’s wish, then I had to lend her an ear. I owed her a debt too great to ever repay.
That said—
“What should I do...?”
The heart of the problem wasn’t the demons or beasts. It was the compounded societal issues of poverty and disorder that surrounded them. I could defeat the demons and beasts with a sword or a spear, but societal problems couldn’t be cut down with a demonblade. As I thought about what to do, I prayed, purified, lifted, and carried, over and over.
◆
A few days later, the villagers returned to the besieged village. It was scorched all over, and many of the buildings had collapsed. When they saw the state of it with fresh eyes, they looked to be in shock.
Together, we scraped together the remaining farm tools, dug some holes, and held a simple funeral service to mourn the dead.
Everyone took turns piling a little bit of earth on top of the bodies lying in the graves. To make it feel like a legitimate funeral, I spoke some passages from scripture I had once been taught by Gus and Mary as I watched the villagers work. However, I wasn’t following any prescribed form; I was really only borrowing from what others had told me to make it “sound right.” It looked like I’d need to make contact with a priest belonging to a proper organization somewhere and learn from them.
After the funeral had started to wrap up, I decided to raise a question.
“So, umm... What are you all going to do now?”
There looked to be enough surviving houses that if the survivors all lived together it would work out; however, many of the fields had been rendered useless. If they couldn’t eat, if the only route available to them was going to be pillaging, then in the worst case, I was thinking I might be forced to give them money and have them spread out to neighboring villages...
“Hahaha! Well, you just watch.” The villagers laughed off my serious expression. They beckoned me over to a barn, where they started digging up the dirt. Straw bags and pots filled with grain came out one after the other.
“Ohh...” I said.
“You see, robberies and burnings ain’t anything special around these parts.”
“Yes,” another villager said. “If you can get back, you can get by. That’s if, mind you.”
“You’re very generous, but we ain’t planning on taking advantage of you, Father. We can cope, don’t you worry.”
Some people who had disappeared into the woods surrounding the village also started to come back with food and other supplies. God knows where they’d hidden those. It looked like these people had no intention of allowing themselves to be beaten so easily. Maybe the people here were cursed to become desperate muggers time and time again, but it was that very aspect that had also fostered the villagers’ toughness and strength of character.
“Well, this is a great relief.” At the very least, it looked like I’d been more than a bit of a busybody to think I needed to watch over the whole affair from beginning to end. It was just that the demons and the beasts together had been a little too much for just one settlement to handle on this one occasion. They could handle themselves without me, in their own way.
In which case, what I should have been thinking about wasn’t how to completely take care of them throughout the whole process, but merely how to contribute. And that was a good question...
Fires were being stoked, and I heard the lively voices of the women starting their cooking. Evidently there was going to be a bit of a feast tonight, to celebrate their homecoming and to mourn those who had died.
“Father, we owe you a debt of gratitude for giving us back our village.”
“We’d be more than happy for you to join us.”
“I’d be glad to,” I said, nodding—and then suddenly, I noticed. “Huh?”
At some point, Menel had disappeared.
◆
I told the people preparing for the feast where I was going, and went to search for Menel. He seemed to have left his stuff here, so it was unlikely that he’d gone far.
I couldn’t see fairies, but sorcerer’s theory stated that all things in the world were made from the Words. Reading the difficult-to-interpret Words and Signs that represented the trees and soil, I walked through the woods, somehow managing to follow his trail.
I took in the smell of the dry winter forest. Some of the trees around me were bare like weather-beaten skeletons, while others were deep verdant evergreens. The sky was glowing red in the west; the sun was well on its way to setting. Cold wind was whistling through the trees. It was beginning to get pretty dark.
“Lumen.” I made Pale Moon’s blade glow softly.
It wasn’t a good idea to act carelessly. There had only just been an attack by demons and beasts. They could jump at me from anywhere. I had no intention of dropping my guard.
Remaining alert to my surroundings, I walked step by step through the woods, and as I did so, I thought about Menel.
Was he okay? I wondered. Parting with Marple must have hit him pretty hard. Putting myself in his position, I thought it was probably like if I had lost Blood or Mary in a sudden incident.
Expressing it that way gave me a new appreciation for how hard this had to be for him. I couldn’t imagine that someone like me, who Menel had only met a few days ago, would be able to do anything for him in a time like that. Perhaps what he really needed was some time alone to think things over, and what I was doing was just unwanted meddling. But even so...
— Could I ask you to take care of this silly boy?
I had certainly been asked, so I probably had a duty to at least keep an eye on him. If he said I wasn’t wanted, then I would just have to turn around and leave dejected. After all, until just a few days ago, I’d been a sheltered boy who had never seen another living human in his life. I had zero experience points in social interaction, so when I’d set out into the world, I’d been prepared from the beginning for everything to go south.
As I walked along confidently thinking that if I made a fool of myself I could simply cringe about it later, I arrived at a bit of an upwards slope. I could see what was left of perhaps a stone wall running across it.
A phosphorescent fairy danced lightly across my vision. I followed the momentary blinking with my eyes, and when I looked up I saw, almost entirely hidden by trees, the remains of a small and time-worn building that might have been an ancient watchtower.
Built on a small hill which could be used as a vantage point, the structure had since collapsed, leaving only the base behind, around which fairies were blinking like fireflies. As if they were concerned about someone, they were whispering to each other while stealing glances inside.
There was no doubt in my mind—he had to be there.
I carefully made my way up the slope, paying extra attention to my feet and the loose, mossy stones. Once I reached the top, I circled around the partially collapsed stone wall, and my field of vision widened.
“Ah.”
As I looked down from the hill, I saw the city built from stone below me. The countless houses along the streets spreading outward from the river had aged, crumbled, and been taken over by forest, and now stood only as a reminder of the city’s former prosperity. The color of the sunset, changing every moment, gently illuminated them all.
“Hey, Will.”
There he was, sitting with one knee up, against the base of an evergreen tree that had spread its roots between the stones of the broken watchtower. A sorrowful look in his jade eyes, his fair skin was lit by the sunset, and his slightly pointed ears peeked out from his flowing, silver hair. The fairies’ phosphorescence occasionally danced around him.
“Menel.”
Even when he was feeling down, he was picture-perfect. Attractive people have it good, I randomly thought.
◆
“Can I sit here?”
“Knock yourself out.”
I sat down beside him. “This is a nice view.”
“Yeah, from the outside.”
I gave him a puzzled look.
“That ruin’s a den of undead. It’s devoured countless adventurers. No one’s ever come back from there alive.”
Is that so. “Then I’d better go in there later and return them all to the cycle of rebirth.”
“What? Were you even listening?”
“Yeah, you said it’s a dangerous place. So I have to do something about it.”
The Archer of Beast Woods Page 6