But unlike times before, almost all the money he gambled away would come back to him, and there would be no enormous damages to their business in the future. The biggest loss would probably be how she would tease him when they placed orders.
And above all, he had made the bet for Holo’s sake.
He did not have to explain it in detail for Holo to understand that right away.
That was why she did not raise her brows, or bare her fangs, or call him a fool.
Holo only sat cross-legged on the bed, staring at Lawrence with a quiet gaze as he sat searching his conscience on the floor.
Lawrence could only hang his head.
It was practically the same as training a dog.
“Honestly…I feel like I am scolding Myuri right now.”
When Holo spoke with a sigh, Lawrence finally lifted his head.
“I always say how much she is like you.”
Both he and Holo always fought over who the mischievous Myuri most resembled, and he now renewed his understand of his own faults.
“I’m ashamed.”
Holo briefly glanced at Lawrence before giving another deep sigh.
She then slid off the bed and stood before him.
“You are the same as that restless, idiotic pup. Sniff-sniff, something smells good, better jump at it!”
Unable to deny it, Lawrence turned away in shame.
Holo then crept closer, so he had no choice but to look at her.
As her red eyes peered at him, he thoughtlessly marveled at how beautiful they were.
He would never want his daughter to see him like this.
Holo stood up and scratched her head. Her annoyed demeanor was not directed toward him but was entirely self-deprecating.
“Honestly, I cannot believe I fell for something like this.”
Holo tilted her head and gave one last big sigh.
Lawrence hung his head again, and she said, “But dogs have their own way of being useful.”
“Huh?”
He lifted his head, and she had extended a hand to him.
She was telling him to stand.
He gripped her hand and, with a puzzled look, stood.
“My work friends have been sighing over losing their jobs.”
“Work friends?”
When he asked, Holo’s ears flitted about, displeased.
“The mixing girls.”
“Oh, right…And?”
It might have had something to do with the herring egg exchange.
Holo folded her arms across her chest and said with an earnest look, “Some of us, like the dancing girl and me, have come to this town by chance, but most of them are poor girls from town. They are all good-natured and honest workers.”
“Right, okay.”
Holo did not often compliment others, so Lawrence was rather surprised.
“And…it seems we all have similar taste in males.”
When she said that, she looked away in disgust.
Now that she mentioned it, the old man who managed the girls’ work had said something similar. Most of the women had found themselves working as mixing girls because they had fallen in love with scoundrels.
“Anyway, I cannot ignore them. I was just thinking about talking to you about the place you mentioned.”
“…The…herring egg exchange?”
“Aye. The girls receive a good bit of work from them. They will find themselves in trouble if it was to shut down. It was chaos when we received the news.”
He looked at her to confirm, and she sighed and scratched the base of her ear.
“The cause is that whole commotion little Col and that fool Myuri started, no? If the girls lose their means of livelihood because of them, then I will be forced to give up the name of the wisewolf.”
Col had left on a journey to bring back correct faith into society, and Myuri left right behind him. Myuri looked like she was admirably supporting Col in the Church’s painting, but Lawrence doubted she would be okay with such a minor role, so he figured that she had a big responsibility for it, too.
In that case, it was their role as her parents to get rid of as many adverse effects as they could.
That was honest Holo’s way of thinking.
“But I do not know much about the human world. That sort is your territory.”
Holo was strict with Lawrence, calling him an idiot and whatnot, but she did trust in his core. A fire lit in his heart because that made him happy, and because it was a good chance for him to recover from disgrace.
“Can you tell me more?”
What Holo told him about were the stories of those who worked at the very bottom, something not a lot of people saw.
Those at the exchange likely had no intentions of ever learning how they were related to the mixing girls, and without a doubt, the people of the Church were the same. And so that meant they were also among the privileged, unable to see who was standing under them.
“What do you think? Could you be of help?”
When he looked at Holo, who had ended up connecting with people she had worked with for only such a short time and felt pain for, Lawrence’s heart hurt as well.
But he placed his hands on her slim shoulders.
He might now be a clumsy bathhouse owner, but he was still a notorious merchant who had once even captivated a wolf who was called the wisewolf.
“I can.”
Holo’s face immediately beamed. There originally used to be a dark light in Holo’s eyes, when she had spent her days without any thanks, forgotten in a village wheat field, thinking only of her home.
Lawrence had taken her hand and brought her on a big journey in order to bring light into her beautiful red eyes.
He remembered how young he had been over a decade ago and said, “I’m a merchant. I’ll earn my losses back.”
He would also recover from getting involved in a stupid deal that only annoyed Holo.
Holo smiled, exasperated at his enthusiasm.
“You are the male I fell for. I should be embarrassed if you fell and got up for free.”
Exactly.
And as long as he had what Holo had told him, it was entirely possible that they could deal with it.
“Well, then.”
“Yeah,” Lawrence said. “The one stupid thing I have to avoid is repentance in front of that picture of Myuri.”
Holo burst out in laughter, raised a single eyebrow in annoyance, and then patted Lawrence on the back.
The first part of their groundwork would be laid down at none other than the herring egg exchange.
Lawrence wanted the Church to withdraw their decision, but it might turn out to be that most merchants would not like the thought of stirring up trouble with the Church. It was sensible to think that it was fine to let sleeping dogs lie as long as they got their betting money back.
On top of that, it had been a while since Lawrence had negotiated with a merchant, so with out-of-character nervousness, he made his way to the exchange.
“Are you in charge of this exchange?”
There were only a few merchants in the now-empty exchange, and among them was the man who had written down Lawrence’s bet in the book.
“I have an idea regarding the Church’s high-handedness.”
The man’s eyes widened when Lawrence spoke, and he grinned.
“It’s nice to see someone with a backbone. Everyone else just shrugged and walked away…But in that case, the boss’s over there. We’re not an association or anything, so no one’s really taking control, but…if he says anything, most merchants will listen.”
The man was pointing to an aging merchant, the one who had dealt with the priests in a calm manner.
“He’s a former big shot of the Ruvik Alliance. He’s retired now, but he ran several long-distance transport ships at the height of his career, and people called him Governor-General.”
The Ruvik Alliance was the world’s largest trade association, and a dozen or so trading ci
ties were a part of it.
While Lawrence was surprised that someone so important was in a place like this, the man now sat alone at a table, listlessly sipping his drink. He was almost like a pouting child who had his toy taken away.
Lawrence felt an affinity for his state.
He was surely a merchant deep at his core, someone who could not separate himself from the charm of trade even after retirement.
“Pardon me. May I?”
Lawrence approached the table and spoke out to him, and the man looked at him with quiet eyes.
“Do you have an idea to deal with this situation?”
He had good ears, and he did not look down on Lawrence.
He was happy to hear the genuine merchantlike response, one that asked him to speak so long as he proved useful.
“I’ve already tried a gift.”
A former executive of a massive company would unsurprisingly suggest bribery right at the start.
“But the Church is right in the middle of enacting reform, so they cut me off. That young man seems to think of himself as the Twilight Archbishop.”
He had no idea how badly this man had been burned by the greedy Church, but it was inconvenient enough that the miracle potion of money did not work when it needed to.
“They even turned down the idea of paying a tax. It seems like they really marched in here only because they thought it was a problem of faith. They’re closing down this fun playground.”
The governor-general sighed and cracked his neck.
“We have no choice but to bow our heads like we’ve been told and take our betting money elsewhere.”
“But once you show submission, the next time something happens, you will be hit even harder and weakened even more. They might cut in even wherever you end up running to.”
There was a church no matter what town anyone went to in the world, and whether it was a relationship between people or between organizations, once one side started to show a habit for losing, the other would just drag them along. That was why the beginning was so critical.
“I’ve already tried all the old tricks now—do you have any ideas?”
The man’s light-blue eyes turned to him.
Lawrence readily greeted his gaze straight on and said, “Of course. At the end of the day, the people of the Church also live in a decorous world.”
“Hmm?”
“There are others we should be working with.”
There were some places that someone who had once been called Governor-General never saw, all because of his high point of view.
As Lawrence laid out the proposal that he and Holo had worked out, the great, aging merchant’s face immediately tensed, and when Lawrence was finished, he smacked himself on the forehead.
“They say the darkest area is right under the lighthouse! In all my forty years of trade, I’ve brought together the cargo handlers. But, right…there was still a gap between the company warehouse and the ship.”
Even Lawrence, who was of a much lower standing than him, did not know about such piecework systems.
That was because they had spent all their days out of the presence of women, so of course they would not know of territory belonging only to them.
“After getting the mixing girls together and on our side, I would like to go negotiate with the Church along with a few other suggestions. We should have a fair chance of success, but does everyone else here agree?”
If all that came back to him was his betting money, Lawrence would not particularly care for the longevity of the exchange, but when he thought about saving the mixing girls Holo worked with, then his only option was to keep the exchange running.
“Wait. Let me do some quick math in my head…Right, it would be cheaper than paying taxes to the Church. The best thing is that we won’t be bowing down to them. This is an excellent exchange, and not one begging for forgiveness. An exchange means talk of profit and loss, and talk of profit and loss means everyone will probably easily accept it, and I’ll keep that lot from going on and on. They won’t get to close down our playground!”
The governor-general stood and gallantly extended his hand like a man of the sea.
“I won’t stop making money until the day I die. Are you the same?”
Lawrence grasped his hand and said, “My wife always tells me to give it a rest.”
The governor-general grinned like a pirate, though his expression returned to a prim one just a moment later.
“But I think I want something to just give it a little more oomph. Whatever excuses we may have, it doesn’t look like a fancy place of prayer in here.”
Perhaps because of the strange excitement that came with betting exorbitant amounts of money, there were odd decorations all over the exchange.
The dried herring hanging from the ceiling was one of them, and there was the crest of the Church wrapped in fishing net hanging on the wall, and stylized wooden figurines of every patron saint they could think of—from the patron saint of sailors to the one of childbirth—were hammered into the wall.
And on the opposite wall was a black-and-white painting of a massive herring carrying eggs butting heads with a massive sardine. It looked like there was water splashing all around them, but on a closer look, it was obvious that it was silver coins. To put it modestly, it looked like a place to pray for victory in battle for a tribe.
But when Lawrence looked around at all of it, he had an idea.
It is all for the sake of the exchange.
“We might have to alter some things. For example…”
Merchants would not get up for free if they fell.
Once he was done filling in the various details with the governor-general, they called a meeting with all the forever-gambling merchants.
Lawrence immediately headed to the warehouses in the harbor, and they had a talk with the mixing girls who Holo had brought together. There was no way, of course, that they would turn down the idea. With an energy that put the cargo handlers to shame, they agreed.
But it would be dangerous if they proceeded without any recourses, so Lawrence devised another plan and made it the secret ingredient.
He would need Holo’s cooperation and the connections he had fostered at the bathhouse.
The following day, the merchants all made a line and headed for the church of Atiph.
The townspeople were busy getting ready for the special mass that would be happening the following day outside the church doors.
“Is the Father in?”
Leading the pack was the most dignified of all of them, the governor-general.
His beard and hair had been stiffened with egg whites, and he had changed into clothes of the highest quality, starched so much that touching them might cause them to crack. It would not be odd if he went straight to attend the royal court.
And it was the way he acted, too.
The worker the governor-general spoke to was shocked, almost dropping the gold plating with which he was decorating the church doors. “Inside,” was all he said and removed his hat, perhaps mistaking him for a noble.
But his eyes widened even more when he saw who followed after the swarm of merchants.
The inside of the church was also in the midst of preparations, with scaffolding built up here and there, artisans doing their work on it. They made their way straight through the busy scene, walking boldly into the nave.
Beneath the high ceiling, which seemed like it might suck them up into the air, right in the middle of a red carpet laid out on the aisle, stood the high-ranking priests, seemingly talking about where they would hang their new painting.
“Oh, it’s you…”
The one who turned around was the young priest who had been teased as the Twilight Archbishop.
He looked around at all the merchants, and his gaze turned into a stern one.
“If this is about yesterday, then everything is already settled. And we will not be misled by anything but the blessings of—”
He likely thought they had all come to bribe him again. As the young priest was about to ramble on, the governor-general raised a hand to stop him.
“No. We have been touched by your faith, Father, and we have opened our eyes. And so we have also decided that we would like to follow the scripture and act in accordance with God’s will.”
“…Which means?”
There came a clearing of the throat.
“Yes, God said that we must share what we have. And so we have decided that we will serve free meals at the exchange to all the more unfortunate who have a hand in the herring trade.”
The young priest raised his eyebrows and turned to look at the senior priests beside him.
“That is an admirable way of thinking, but…”
“Indeed, of course, I cannot ask you something so selfish as to keep the exchange open in this town for that alone. We will follow the holy decision that both you and the chapter have come to.”
But all the merchants had come silently to this meeting, so there was no way it could be nothing.
After the priests whispered to one another, the young priest spoke as their representative.
“Then why have you come?”
“We have come to lead the way for some lost lambs.”
“What?”
“These are the ones who have words for you.”
The merchants then stepped to either side, creating a path all the way to the entrance to the nave.
The priests looked down the path with quizzical expressions.
There stood the mixing girls in their short sleeves and with husks of wheat clinging to their arms.
“Father, do you ever wonder how the wheat from far away that ends up as your wafers gets to this town and goes into the oven?”
“Wheat…What?”
The priests, with their pale skin hardly ever touched by the sun and their thin, delicate fingers, as well as the well-dressed, intellectual young priest, of course, were all flustered. They had likely been learning Church law ever since they were children, so they had rarely ever come into contact with wider society.
“The grains are cut, stuffed into bags, carried by cart, packed into ships, and taken on a long, long road. But there are the unseen who fill in the gaps of that series of processes. Those are these girls. If these girls did not come diligently to mix the wheat every morning and night once it is stuffed into bags and put away in the warehouses, it would soon grow moldy, and disease would creep into the bread we eat every day.”
Spring Log IV Page 17