“It is indeed cruel,” said Holo, sipping the sour wine Lawrence was sure she did not like. “So that is why you were so upset upon seeing me, was it?”
Lawrence looked at Holo, and Col did likewise.
While birds and foxes had visited the sheep, perhaps a wolf never had. Wolves had fangs, claws, and the courage to use them. They would have been the first to turn to violence.
And they would have been the first to die.
Hugues looked evenly back at Holo and then slowly nodded. “Yes. Even so.”
“Heh. But ’tis well. I would have been sadder to learn of the opposite.”
It was because such courage suited her that Holo had earned the name Wisewolf. It was in this moment that Hugues ceased to seem fearful of her.
“…I envy such strength. For my part, I’ve often wondered if I’m to live so long, why I couldn’t have been born as a stone or tree instead.”
At the end of the conversation, Holo began to speak without any inhibition. “Heh. I cannot say I feel the same. Were I a stone or tree, I could hardly travel with these two.”
Hugues smiled. “Indeed. Life in the world of humans can be rather enjoyable.”
“Mm. They’re an amusing lot.”
Yet Lawrence could not help but feel that it surely had not been an accident that the wine they were offered was not very sweet.
Gold, silver, copper, iron, tin, lead, brass, stone.
The phrase gems hidden in the earth was a common one, but sometimes it could be hard to tell what was valuable and what was not.
As Lawrence and company waited for Fran to return from her wandering about town, Hugues showed them around his storeroom. It contained not just paintings but a wealth of fine crafts and ornaments that had been sold off to Hugues alongside those paintings.
“There are many fakes here, but…ah, here’s a bar meant for holding down scrolls. Mm, looks like it’s only gold plated, though. Ah yes, here! What do you make of this one, eh?”
Hafner Hugues, master of the storehouse, seemed not to know exactly what it contained, as he weighed the gold bar in his hand and made his pronouncement.
Hugues had told Holo about Fran because Holo was a being similar to himself, but he was still a sheep spirit and a merchant as well. He had to get some value from this transaction.
He led Holo and Col to the back of the storehouse, as they wanted to know whether he had any paintings of Holo’s homeland of Yoitsu, but as he did so, he kept a close eye on Lawrence. A traveling merchant who wandered from nation to nation did not have much purchasing power, but he made up for that in knowledge and fresh information. No doubt Hugues wanted to know if any of the dusty old pieces in his storeroom were unexpectedly valuable. Lawrence felt like a pig trained to sniff for truffles.
It was true that demand varied from town to town—in one town, anything with a wolf motif would sell, while in another, the color of gold would be so coveted that even gold-plated items would fly off the shelves. Given the occasion, Lawrence was only too happy to spill everything he had heard about towns whose conditions might be good.
Such a town might as well be drunk. Absurd items would sell on the spot, and given the amount of junk in Hugues’s storeroom, it was like a golden trash barrel.
“Well, that’s about the size of it.”
“I see, I see. I’m deeply grateful, yes. While I do hear stories from all over while I sit in my shop here, most of my visitors aren’t walking the path of trade, so I collect little information that’s useful in business.”
Even as he spoke, Hugues took notes with a quill pen in the margins of an old bill of receipt. Assuming his high spirits were not a ruse, he seemed to think they would lead him to a healthy profit.
Holo would scowl if Hugues had asked her, but Lawrence was a merchant.
As he considered such thoughts, his eyes were drawn by a single item in the piles of junk.
“…Is this…?”
“Oh, so this is where I left that old thing.”
Lawrence pulled the item out from between two wooden crates, and Hugues reached for it, smiling merrily.
Lawrence could not begin to imagine what the thing was for. He handed it to Hugues. It was a golden apple; Holo would surely laugh to see it.
“What in the world is this used for?”
“Oh, it’s one of those—you use it to warm your hands.”
“Your hands?”
In response, Hugues handed the apple back to Lawrence, who noticed that it was indeed a bit warmer than it had been a moment earlier.
“It’s for merchants who want to show off their wealth a bit. You can heat it by the fireplace or have your apprentice warm it with his skin, then use it to warm your hands as you do your writing. Though anybody who dares use it outside when traveling in the winter will find their hands sticking to it.”
Hugues was quite right. Still, Lawrence had no trouble imagining Holo curling her body around the trinket while riding in the wagon, like a hen protecting her egg. He found himself thinking it might be rather useful, but then quickly snapped out of it and shook his head.
This was no time to be distracted by such silly items.
Lawrence returned the apple to Hugues.
“Still, thank you ever so much for the information,” said a pleased Hugues, who had nearly blackened the margins of the bill of receipt with notes, careful not to leave as much as a single detail out.
“Not at all. Thank you.”
“By all means, when you’re finished, feel free to linger. You’re most welcome here.” Hugues sounded like an ordinary merchant now.
Lawrence smiled, nodded, and shook his hand.
“Though it seems Master Col and Miss Holo are still looking at the paintings.” Hugues had to exert himself to bring his round body to his feet, and he then peered farther into the back of the storeroom.
Holo was flipping through a stand of paintings one by one, chattering with Col about this and that.
Hugues fell suddenly silent as he watched her. Lawrence had a good guess at what he was thinking about.
“Might I ask how you’re all related?” It was a reasonable thing to wonder about.
Holo should have overheard, but she gave no evidence of it.
Lawrence decided that there was no reason to hide it, so he answered as he walked over. “My trading route generally covered lands farther south. I happened to meet Holo at one of my stops there.”
“I see.”
“Holo had been asked a favor by a friend long ago—that she would guarantee bountiful harvests of the wheat in a certain town. But over time the village forgot about her, and she decided to return home. My wagon happened to be passing by, and she simply hopped in and stowed away.”
Hugues smiled, amused, but there was a coolly calculating quality that showed through. Holo’s story was not irrelevant to his own experience.
“But it had been some several centuries since she’d left her homelands, and so she doesn’t know where they are. So we’ve been traveling here and there in search of them. We met Col on the way. He’s from a town in the north called Pinu.”
“Oh, Pinu?” Hugues’s eyes widened in surprise, and he looked over his shoulder at Holo and Col. “That’s quite far away. Ah…but I see now why old Huskins would have told you of Fran Vonely.”
Lawrence gave Huskins a deliberate smile. There was nothing amusing about the story, but if he failed to tell it with a smile, Holo seemed likely to be angry.
“The northlands are a place of invasion and conquest. The place-names are always changing. It might be that I do know this Yoitsu of yours; I simply know it by a different name.”
Lawrence nodded but was shocked at what Hugues said next.
“When you said you wanted a map of the north, I thought for sure you were involved with the conflict up there.” Hugues was speaking in jest, but seeing Lawrence’s reaction, he, too, was stunned. “Ah…er…you’re not, are you?”
“Are you referring to the events surrounding the De
bau Company? So the rumors are true, are they?”
No doubt Hugues collected information along with paintings. And this was the destination of the river that flowed right through the Debau Company’s front door.
“Er, no, I…if you want to know whether it’s true, the fact is that I have no good evidence. It’s a place constantly awash in unpleasant rumors.”
“What do you yourself believe, Mr. Hugues?”
Hugues’s troubled expression was that of a man whose joke had been taken seriously. He seemed to give up on trying to escape and reluctantly opened his mouth. “The simple truth is that…I have no interest in it.”
Lawrence thought he must have misheard. “You have no interest?”
“That’s right. More than a few of us are simply plugging our ears and closing our eyes to the tale, just as we did with the Moon-Hunting Bear. They’ll mine what they can mine, and when they’re done, they’ll leave. In any case, scenery is not eternal. Though the landscape might change completely, the land itself will not simply disappear from the earth, so…”
Even a placid sheep, who only occasionally looked up from its grass eating to regard the scenery around it with its black eyes, could see the way of the world.
It would be easy to curse Hugues for being a coward. But there was a certain truth to his thinking, and he could hardly be blamed for his realistic outlook.
One saw all sorts of things during travel.
Villages beset by mercenaries, towns suffering bitter feuds between landlords. There was nothing to be gained in opposition, and they were powerless to begin with. The only answer was to hold still and hope the storm would pass.
“That’s why I’ve never tried to learn anything more about it. I’m not strong like old Huskins, and if I knew more, it would only worry me. Just as it worries you and Miss Holo and young Col.”
Hugues smiled fractionally at this small joke, a signal that he was hoping to end the discussion of this particular topic.
It was true—the more one knew, the more one wanted to know, and the more detailed the knowledge, the stronger the urge to interfere. It was difficult to argue with the wisdom of someone who had endured cataclysms.
Lawrence had no right to disturb Hugues’s life, and Holo would surely feel the same way. “I apologize for asking.”
“Not at all. I’m sorry I couldn’t be of any help. So then, will you be returning to your room?” inquired Hugues.
Lawrence looked at Holo, who raised her head and shook it “no,” then pointed to Col. The boy was busily looking through a stack of paintings. Evidently they still had searching left to do.
“I’ll be returning on my own.”
“I see. Might I offer you something warm to drink in the parlor?”
As a merchant, Lawrence was surprised at these words. This storeroom contained a great many valuable paintings, as well as examples of gold- and silversmithing. To leave perfect strangers unattended in such a room was an act of significant courage, Lawrence reflexively thought. Hugues noticed this and smiled.
“If she wanted to steal from me, it would be faster for her to simply bite my head off. And anyway, we forest dwellers don’t lie.”
It would have sounded as if he was trying to flatter Holo, but perhaps that was reading too much into it.
Lawrence bowed his head politely. “Ah, my apologies.”
Hugues chatted with Lawrence for a while before retreating to the rear of his shop to work.
Lawrence sat in the room waiting for Fran, reading through the travel account of a merchant who claimed to have journeyed the world over and found a city of gold in the Far East. But just like the information that Lawrence had sought from Hugues, the knowledge that could be gathered in a trip around the world would be incredibly valuable if true, and therefore making it public would be the height of idiocy. In other words, the travel account was merely nonsense, but it was amusing nonsense.
Just as Lawrence found himself laughing at the absurdity of one of the more improbable details, a golden something flew through the space between his eye and the book and landed in his lap.
He looked up in surprise, and there was Holo, looking as though she had dropped something. His eyes were next drawn to the dropped object in his lap—it was the golden apple he had been so amused to discover in the storeroom.
“Was it not tasty?” He picked the apple up. It was warm.
Size-wise it seemed just about a fit for Holo’s hand, he thought, whereupon that same hand snatched it away from him.
“You humans do love your gold. Though ’twould be a bother if everything turned to gold.”
Too much of a good thing, went the old saying. But Lawrence was a merchant. “In that case, find something that’s not gold, and sell it high.”
Holo sniffed and then sat down beside him, looking displeased. She did not groom her tail; she simply toyed with the golden apple in her hands.
“Where’s Col?” Lawrence asked, which made Holo tilt her head.
Her ears were flattened, which did not suggest anything good about her mood. She had probably left him in the storeroom. It was a rare state of events, and Lawrence could not imagine many possibilities.
“Couldn’t find anything, eh?” Any paintings of Yoitsu, or its region, or any landscape that Holo remembered.
No doubt she had thought that with so many paintings, surely at least one of them would hold what she sought.
Her disappointment would not have been so great if she had thought from the beginning that nothing would turn up. What stung was having hopes dashed.
Worse, they had surely found many landscapes that Col recognized.
“Mm.” Holo held the golden apple in both hands and nodded faintly.
“That just means you’ve still something to look forward to, eh?” Lawrence knew he would rouse her anger by saying so, and indeed, her ears pricked up.
But that did not last long. The strength slowly slipped from her, and the words came tumbling out of her mouth like water from an uncorked bottle. “Is it…wrong of me?”
“Wrong?” Lawrence repeated, at which Holo nodded.
“Like those sheep, Hugues said. Most of them plugged their ears and shut their eyes…”
Lawrence looked away from Holo momentarily and closed the book. It was a delightful, beautifully bound volume. No doubt the name of the raconteur merchant responsible would be remembered for centuries.
“You mean about wanting to get involved after hearing the truth?” asked Lawrence, which Holo nodded at.
Holo seemed cold and calculating but was quite hot-blooded, and whenever she saw someone suffering or in trouble, she wanted to help. If humans were to assemble and march upon the forests and mounts, ravaging the land and killing the animals, she would want to help the resistance even if the land weren’t Yoitsu.
And while the outcome might well be recorded in legend and song, victory was surely impossible—because if it was possible, someone else would already have won it.
“I may say this or that, but the truth is that I think of myself as special,” said Holo, sounding faintly amused, perhaps to cover her embarrassment. “I can get through most things simply by showing my fangs. I can draw out the way of things. That’s what I thought. But…”
When Lawrence held out his arm, Holo glanced at him with a look of hollow amusement pasted onto her face and then took it, wrapping it around herself like a muffler and clinging to him.
“There were no paintings there of the land I knew. What does that mean?”
Each of the pieces had either been commissioned by a specific buyer or stored away in anticipation of someone from the region appearing and recognizing the landscape. It was not hard, therefore, to come to this conclusion: There were no paintings of Yoitsu because there was no one from Yoitsu to order them. It was easy to imagine her wolf comrades leaving on an eternal journey.
And what was the basis for this?
No doubt many of them, having confidence in their own teeth and cl
aws, chose to fight. And even if they had likely fled from the Moon-Hunting Bear, the world was abundant with absurdities. If they had been able to find weapons, they would have risen up and fought—somewhere.
The ones who ran away from everything, who instead of taking up arms simply fled, would have been called cowards at first. But it was those cowards whose roots still clung to the earth, even now.
“Plugging one’s ears and closing one’s eyes for fear of the truth? ’Tis all I can do to laugh at such foolishness. But who is the master of this shop? Who is it who still knows many of his old friends? Who is it who even now still works to offer comfort to his kind? Compared with that…” The nails of Holo’s small hand dug into Lawrence’s arm. “…What am I doing?”
She was not crying.
Holo was not sad. She was ashamed.
The raging river of time had changed the world, and she and her kind had stood on the shore, not only powerless, but their very existence suddenly in doubt.
It was more than enough reason for Holo to gnash her teeth.
Lawrence put more strength into his embrace, drawing Holo in.
“Nobody knows what the right thing to do is.” Holo’s head smelled faintly of dust, perhaps because of the time she had spent in the storeroom. “You yourself have been prepared to put your life at risk for the sake of your principles. Am I wrong?”
Holo did not move for several moments.
“Just think about when you were buried in the ground. You’re Holo the Wisewolf, aren’t you?”
No doubt her comrades would be very pleased to know that Holo was thinking of them. But what would they think of her standing in front of their gravestone forever? Regret could mean struggling to turn back time, or it could mean swearing not to let the same thing happen again. The two meanings were very different.
Holo nodded. She was neither a child, nor a fool. And yet she still could not contain these emotions on her own.
“And I do know one thing,” said Lawrence, which made Holo’s ears prick up. He smiled, but not to cheer her up. “When you worry, so do I.”
When he had traveled alone, there had been no one to whom he would have uttered such words, nor anyone who would say them to him. When he would get involved in a risky trade, he would make boastful jokes about dying by the side of the road.
Spice and Wolf, Vol. 12 Page 4
