A short distance away, Blood was recovering his own bird. It must have died on impact, because I never saw him finish it off.
My quail’s big, round eyes had now lost their light completely. As Blood made his way over to me, I put my hands together as Mary had taught me, and prayed for the bird to rest in peace.
“Used to killing yet?”
“Not really.”
Hunting and killing animals—this, too, was part of Blood’s lessons. But killing weighed heavily on me. I couldn’t get used to it. I couldn’t kill without emotion, without hesitation. I wondered if my memories from my previous life were holding me back.
“I don’t want to kill.” Was I just being a baby?
“Hm? You think I do?”
“Huh?”
Blood gave a light shrug. “Look, if I let myself think about it too long, I don’t wanna kill, either. Of course I resist the idea of killing, whether it’s a person or a bird. But you’ve gotta understand—”
Blood paused there, and poked my chest with a fingertip. “If I need to, I can put that aside and kill by reflex. That’s the way of a warrior, and that’s what I’m trying to teach you. ’Cause on the field of battle, that’s a matter of life and death.”
Then, he took the quail’s dead body out of my hands. He tied its legs together with the other’s, and hung them over his shoulder.
“Okay. Let’s bring down a few more.”
“Yeah.”
I could feel so much care in Blood’s words and actions. Once again, I thought, What an amazing person he is.
◆
The birds we killed were, of course, destined for the dinner table. I came back after being worked into the ground by Blood and Gus to find Mary already done with setting out the food.
The quail, feathers plucked and innards removed, had been rubbed with salt and herbs from the garden beside the temple. Then they were roasted and set onto a plate. They were still steaming hot, and fat was dripping off them. My mouth watered as the delicious smell of cooked meat permeated the room. In addition, there was a soup with all kinds of vegetables in it, and thick, beautifully colored multigrain bread. I couldn’t wait.
Mary laughed softly. “Don’t worry, the food isn’t going anywhere. Say grace before you eat.”
“Okay!” It was Mary’s policy that I should always sit down properly and pray before eating. I put my hands together as I always did, and spoke the words that I had been taught. “Mater our Earth-Mother, gods of good virtue, bless this food, which by thy merciful love we are about to receive, and let it sustain us in body and mind.”
I was living on a regular schedule in my new life, waking up in the morning, working out with Blood, learning from Gus, and eating the food Mary made for me. It was a great departure from my past life, in which I woke up whenever, ate whatever, and sat in my room forever in front of my monitor. My biological clock became disrupted, and my messed-up lifestyle sent my health into a slow decline.
Only now, having been reborn, did I finally understand how great a mistake that was. A weakened body led to a weakened mind. I wasn’t about to let it happen again.
“For the grace of the gods, we are truly thankful.”
The quail we had captured were rich in flavor and just chewy enough. The fat made them truly delicious. There was a lot of bone and not much meat, but it was so good, I didn’t care. Too engrossed to talk, I endlessly picked the meat off the bones.
Every so often, I went for the bread, whose simple taste perfectly cleansed my palate of the meat’s strong flavor. Sometimes I mopped up the juices from the meat on my plate with it, which tasted great as well. The soup, too, was salted just enough, and felt like it warmed every part of my exhausted body. It truly was a blissful dinner.
“This is really delicious, Mary.”
Another little laugh. “I’m glad you’re enjoying it.”
A mystery remained, however. A big mystery.
Mary, Gus, and Blood were all undead. They didn’t eat. Couldn’t eat. Therefore, there was neither a need for them to produce food, nor to keep any in storage. In fact, I hadn’t seen any sign that they’d cultivated any large fields. Even the small garden had apparently been restored after my arrival, and while it contained vegetables and herbs, no grains were growing there.
The ruins of the city to which this temple belonged were clearly cut off from human society, so there wasn’t anywhere you could buy things. Other than things like salt and honey, which didn’t spoil in the first place, any food that had been in the ruins wouldn’t have just rotted by now, but would have become nothing more than a dry powder or stain on the floor.
All of which raised the question: Where had this bread come from? Where did they get the grains? The kiln?
Of course, I thought of the possibility that they could have made the food with magic. I’d already proven that grease could be made, so if you said “bread” or “pork” in the Words of Creation, perhaps the mana would assume that form?
After some investigation, the answer was “no.” You could, Gus told me, make something resembling food, and it would make you feel full if you ate it, but it was beyond human ability to create nutritious food with magic.
I found Gus’s quote about it, “No man can fill his stomach by swallowing his own Words,” to be pretty amusing. But I felt the real heart of the issue was we didn’t fully understand the Words of Creation, and didn’t have enough information about the creatures of this world. Proteins, vitamins, and the other details of what constituted nutritional value were still undiscovered here, so there hadn’t been any progress on analyzing the Words relating to those things. As a result, attempting to create bread would only give birth to the ultimate diet product, which looked like bread, but contained zero calories.
This explanation seemed to make a lot of sense to me, anyway. I’d heard that putting the ancient language of magecraft to medical use, which of course involved fiddling with the complicated human body, was a difficult field in which little progress had been made. That seemed to support my theory.
Getting back on topic, my point was this. The fact that there was enough food for me to have something to eat every day was, by itself, abnormal. And yet, the fact of the matter was that some kind of food was always here, every single day. Which meant that there must be some other factor I hadn’t considered.
“Hey, Mary. This bread... Where do you get it from?”
“That’s a secret.”
So many mysteries.
◆
It was simply baffling. No matter how I thought about it, I could reach no other conclusion.
Their three histories were baffling, the origin of the food was baffling, and above all, I myself was an enigma. I’d once made the simplistic guess that I might have been an abandoned child, but even that was now looking suspicious, and for one reason. I never saw any smoke.
The thought had come to me recently that at this level of civilization, wherever there was a human settlement, there should also be smoke from cooking fires. So I’d been paying extra attention to my surroundings looking for some, but no matter what time of day it was, and no matter what direction I looked in, I couldn’t see any such thing.
Of course, I didn’t actually know how visible smoke from a cooking fire would be at a distance, but I was able to recall the rough knowledge that there was a method for calculating the distance to the horizon. You were meant to make a right triangle with one side equal to the radius of the Earth, and another equal to the radius of the Earth plus the height of your eyes, and apply Pythagoras’s theorem. If I remembered correctly, it came out at four to five kilometers or thereabouts. Of course, whether I could apply that directly to this world or not seemed iffy, but it would be good enough for reference.
Those four or five kilometers would be even longer with a higher viewpoint, which was why ships in search of land had a lookout with good eyesight stand at the top of a mast. Similarly, things higher than the ground beyond the horizon could be se
en beyond it. Mountains, for instance—and smoke.
So if a child whose eyesight wasn’t bad were to look for a tall column of smoke from the top of a hill, he should be able to see at least a few dozen kilometers. But there was no smoke to be seen. In other words, I couldn’t find any signs whatsoever of human habitation.
As for how all of this was related to the “abandoned child” theory, it was quite simple. If I was an abandoned child, then there must have been a biological parent or someone else who couldn’t continue to raise me. Someone had to be responsible for abandoning me.
I hadn’t even been one year old when I became aware of my memories of my past life, and babies’ bodies were fragile. If you were going to abandon a baby, you probably wouldn’t take them a terribly long way before doing it. There was certainly no need to bother journeying all the way here, to this ruined city inhabited by the undead, clearly dozens of kilometers away from any human society.
A normal adult male could walk an average of about thirty kilometers per day on a reasonably maintained road. Include the return trip, and that meant that to drop a baby off fifteen kilometers away would take an entire day. Any further than that would require camping out somewhere remote.
This made no sense. If I really had been abandoned, I would have to ask: what the heck kind of parents would waste more than an entire day, even camping out overnight, just to get their baby as far away from them as possible?!
Given this, I was forced to think that maybe the likelihood of me being abandoned was lower than I thought. But then where had I come from? I spent some time contemplating other likely possibilities, but I couldn’t come up with any good ideas. I surely hadn’t simply sprouted from a cabbage patch, so my real parents had to exist somewhere, and must have had some history with this ruined city.
I couldn’t be the kid Mary and Blood had before they became undead? Nah, no way. Those three most likely became undead around the same time the city fell into ruin. I was virtually certain of this, because of the occasional mentions they’d drop in daily conversation about what the city was like before.
The city showed signs of deterioration over a considerable stretch of time. It wasn’t something that could have happened in just ten or twenty years. The time periods didn’t match up. If they became undead fifty or a hundred years ago, it was impossible that their child could have been born just eight years ago.
The only other scenario, that Mary could have had intercourse with Blood and gotten pregnant while both of them were undead, felt... even less plausible. Which meant that any of the three of them were definitely not my real parents, leading me all the way back to my original conclusion: that I had no clue about my own background.
Maybe it made the most sense to think that an irresponsible couple living on the road left me here? But no, that too felt wrong. After all, not a single human traveler had passed through this place for the past seven years. I thought and thought, but no answer came.
Who was I?
“Will?”
“Wagh!” I almost jumped. I’d gotten lost in thought.
“Is something the matter? You stopped.”
“Sorry, Mary. I was doing some thinking.”
Mary didn’t scold me. She just smiled gently. I’m sure she would have looked beautiful if she’d still been alive, but now... I couldn’t help but feel a modicum of fear from an expression like that. I’d mostly gotten used to the feeling by now, though.
“Some thinking? But don’t you think it’s hot today? Why don’t we get this finished, and then you can think inside, where it’s cool.”
“Okay.” I nodded and swung the grub hoe upward again.
I’d discovered that soil tended to be pretty heavy and hard. Tilling was hard work for a child like me. At first, I couldn’t get the hang of the hoe at all, and could only get the blade to penetrate a short distance into the ground. Now, though, it was going in quite deep, given my size.
We were in the temple’s vegetable garden. It was summer, so brightly colored tomatoes and eggplants were growing there. The garden had apparently been neglected for a long time, but they had gathered up some wild vegetables and the like, and started maintaining the garden once more for me. Herbs such as thyme, lemon balm, mint, and lavender had been planted at the garden’s edges, where they also served as a bug repellent. Their individual strong aromas mixed with the smell of the soil.
An area of the garden had been left unused up until now, and it was this that I was currently helping Mary to plow. She wanted to use it for carrots, which needed to be sown during the summer, and also for autumn’s potatoes and onions.
The names, appearances, and planting seasons of all these vegetables and herbs, as well as how to harvest them, were all things I had learned from Mary.
I was receiving my scholarly education from Gus, and learning how to fight from Blood, but I had the feeling that Mary was the person I had learned the most from. How to dress appropriately, how to use the toilet, proper etiquette, classic children’s fairy tales, stories from the past, how to grow vegetables, how to maintain farming tools, how to fold cloth, how to wash it, and how to clean a room. And when I hung around Mary, she would explain everything patiently, politely, and properly, from the beginning.
In my past life of conveniences, I led a failure of a lifestyle, and therefore, I had almost no proper knowledge about life, as embarrassing as it was to admit. In that respect, Mary had a firm grasp on things. She was clearly more suited to make it in the world, more so even than Gus and Blood, who were out of touch and a bit too savage (respectively).
She went to bed and got up at regular times, and every day, she would weed the garden, air out the blankets, clean around the temple, and perform a litany of other tasks. And she was educating me to be able to do them, too. If Mary hadn’t been here in this temple, I may have turned out to be good-for-nothing again.
However, even Mary had a mystery about her. A few times a day, she isolated herself in the temple’s main hall. I’d been told not to go in there during that time. She told me she was praying. While that was going on, Gus and Blood would not-so-subtly hang around me, and make sure not to let me into the hall.
Maybe she really was just praying in silence, and wanted to be able to concentrate. But there were so many mysteries piling on top of each other, part of me couldn’t help but think this had to be related to one of them.
While turning up the ground with my hoe, I decided: I was going to check. There was a chance that I could find a clue toward solving all of these mysteries.
And finding a way to solve the mysteries was the only thing inside my head.
◆
I decided to pretend to be ill.
During my training with Blood, I acted like I wasn’t feeling well, and said I wanted to rest for a bit. Perhaps because of how diligently I’d been training before then, Blood believed this without any signs of suspicion, and told me to go rest in my bed.
For a while, he watched over me as I lay there, but before long, he muttered something about going to catch something invigorating, and disappeared in the direction of the forest. I’d figured that Blood’s personality wouldn’t allow him to loiter beside the bed for long.
I tiptoed out of the room, taking care not to be found by anyone, and secretly headed toward the hall. Trying not to make any sound, I opened the door as slowly as I could, and peered inside. The instant I did, I caught my breath.
Mary was engulfed in flames.
With a silver tray on the floor in front of her, she was kneeling there, in the middle of a band of faint light streaming from the skylight, facing a sculpture of one of the gods, her hands together in a posture of fervent prayer.
She was oblivious to the white flames covering her body and the thick cloud of smoke surrounding her.
My mind went blank.
I ran inside screaming, but Mary didn’t show any signs of having noticed me. Her posture absolutely unbroken, as if she had become a stone statue herself, Mary
continued praying.
Panic shorted out my brain. Sweat was beading on my face. My ears were pounding. My throat hurt, and only then did I realize how loudly I was shouting. But even from right beside her, it elicited no reaction.
Desperate to do anything, I extended a hand towards her. She was still blanketed in flames. Her body was horribly burned, and had the appearance of red-hot charcoal. I touched her with my palm. It sizzled and burned.
Intense pain almost pulled my hand back by reflex. I suppressed it, internally screaming at my body that I didn’t care. I didn’t care if I hurt myself. Mary was in danger. She was in danger!
The panic frying my brain paralyzed every other sensation. I shrieked as I shook her over and over. “Blood! Gus! Help! Mary, Maryyyy!”
◆
“How many times did I tell you...” Gus said, scowling at Blood and Mary.
“My fault. I was careless,” Blood said, his head lowered in apology to the other two.
“No... I’m the one to blame for keeping it a secret from him for so long.” Mary was hanging her head dejectedly. Her body, which had been so badly burned, was now, somehow, completely back to normal.
I was in my room, lying on the simple but functional bed, surrounded by stonework walls. My head was spinning, and my hands hurt. Really hurt. I groaned, hugged the blanket, and tried as hard as I could to put up with the pain.
My memories of the event were a little vague, but I gathered that Gus had heard my screams and come flying in through the wall. Apparently, I’d been shaking Mary as she refused to move, and screaming frantically, not even caring about my burning arms. Gus had torn me away from her immediately, and given me some magically augmented first aid, but as you’d expect, I ended up with burns on the palms of my hands and all up my arms.
I’d heard that full-blown burns hurt a lot, and whoever had said that wasn’t kidding. Both my arms were throbbing and intensely painful. Sometimes, people receiving medical treatment for serious burns all over their body beg the people around them just to kill them. I felt like I could understand those people now. I felt like saying it myself.
The Boy in the City of the Dead Page 6