“But, my Lord—”
“Don’t worry about it. Consider that a divine command.”
Yukinari wasn’t sure whether to be further annoyed that Berta accepted this almost immediately. “Y-Yes, sir. I won’t... I won’t worry about it.”
If only it were as easy as that. If words were all it took to change our feelings, there wouldn’t have been any problem. But if he left her to her own devices, Berta was likely to grow more and more depressed under a self-inflicted sense of guilt.
Yukinari seated Berta on the bench in the sanctuary, determined to listen once more to what she had to say. If kowtowing and apologizing would make her feel better, maybe he should let her. But...
“I believe what... what Master Luman said has... some merit to it,” she said.
“You think there’s merit in letting young girls be eaten in exchange for a god’s blessing?” Yukinari’s voice grew harsh before he knew what happened—when he saw Berta flinch and cower, he quickly apologized. As she herself had said, be he kind or evil, Yukinari was the god she now worshipped. She had begged for his forgiveness simply because Luman and the priests had upset him. If she herself were to be the cause of his anger, there was no telling what she might do.
“I... I was raised in that orphanage,” Berta said after she had calmed down. “Hannah, the other girls—they’re like sisters to me, and the priests are like my father...”
To Berta, who had no family of her own, the priests and other orphans were as priceless as blood kin, even if her life had been the product of a system under which she would be a sacrifice.
“We have no parents. If we hadn’t been chosen as shrine maidens, we would have just died in the streets or the wilderness somewhere...”
“I mean... Yeah, I guess you’re right.”
In his time here, Yukinari had already come to understand that Friedland was not a rich town. Certainly not rich enough for the townspeople to support an orphanage full of girls simply out of the goodness of their hearts. None of the villagers were in immediate danger of starvation, but neither did they have the spare resources to take care of anyone who didn’t contribute. Poor nutrition meant illness was more likely, and recovery more difficult. In other words, there would be only a slow, wasting death in store.
“Now that we don’t need shrine maidens, there won’t be any donations... And without donations, the orphanage can’t go on. Hannah and the others will end up on the streets...”
As the priests’ authority declined, so had donations to the orphanage. Chances were, the first thing the priests would do as they tried to save themselves would be to cut the orphanage loose.
“For the time being, the girls are surviving on stored-up rations... But I don’t think the orphanage will last for much longer...”
And then the children would have nowhere to go. Just as Berta, when she hadn’t been sacrificed, had had nowhere to go.
“What you’re saying is, you want me to take those priests up on their offer.”
Berta said nothing further. She couldn’t say it.
Yukinari looked back in the direction of Friedland and muttered, “Who knew being a god could be such a pain in the ass?”
●
Arlen Lansdowne was exhausted.
“Pathetic,” he muttered. He had made this complaint so many times he had lost count. “How utterly... pathetic...”
It was not physical, but spiritual fatigue that afflicted him. Despite his fallen state, he was a member of the Civilizing Expedition of the Missionary Order. The training he had received in the year immediately after he joined the Order left his body relatively fit. The Order traveled by horse, but they had to be capable of fighting in full plate mail, so they couldn’t afford to be scrawny.
“...To think that I—even I—!”
What he felt now was altogether different from that wonderful tiredness that had followed each day of training in the capital. Fatigue of the body could be remedied with a night’s sleep, but that of the spirit was much more difficult to escape; it was like being mired in clinging mud.
“I, a knight of the proud Missionary Order of the True Church of Harris!”
Now here he was on the frontier, in Friedland, constantly covered in dirt and grime, set to one menial task after another, used as carelessly as an old rag. And when the day was done, where did he go to sleep? A pitiful hovel of a “church.”
Arlen and his men had ostensibly converted Friedland to the True Church and were now staying here in order to instruct the people—but the truth was that, though the knights wore no chains, they were treated like slaves. For Arlen, the son of nobility, this was such a dizzying decline in station as to drive him mad. The other knights felt much the same.
“Curse him... Damn that ‘Blue Angel’!”
The missionaries had come all the way to Friedland to spread the true and proper teachings from the interior among the ignorant populace. This had been their mission, and it was glorious. So he believed, or had. But when they had finally arrived at the site of their mission, they were shocked to find their work disrupted by the “Blue Angel,” who even destroyed their greatest tool, the statue of the guardian saint.
Then Fiona Schillings, once Arlen’s classmate at the capital and now deputy mayor of Friedland, had blackmailed them, trapping them here. Even if they had been able to escape and get back to the capital, they would certainly be the scapegoats for the loss of the statue. At best, they would spend the rest of their lives as laughingstocks; at worst, they would be tried and found guilty.
“Just you... remember this. I swear... I swear, one day I will...”
Repeating those words like a curse, Arlen dragged his weary body back toward the shanty—no, the church. Five other knights, in various states of exhaustion, accompanied him.
“Excuse me—you there.”
A voice spoke to them out of the night, and they stopped. The summons had come from a narrow alleyway between two buildings—from several priests of Friedland’s native cult.
The knights raised their collective eyebrows, giving the priests a long, questioning look. The local religion was in direct competition with the True Church of Harris; they shared what amounted to a professional rivalry. So what did they want with Arlen and the others? And why were they taking such care to avoid being seen?
The man who appeared to be the oldest of the priests gave Arlen’s group a reverent bow. He looked around, making sure there was no one else there, then took a step out of the alleyway. Finally, he spoke:
“We earnestly wish to speak to all you knights of the Missionary Order of the True Church of Harris.”
The six knights looked at each other silently. They had no idea what the priests could want. Did they seek revenge for how the missionaries had treated the people of Friedland like slaves when they first arrived? But there was no hint of anger or even derision on the priests’ faces.
What, then?
The man who had been Arlen’s superior was no longer there. He had supposedly been put to work somewhere else, and Arlen ranked highest among those who remained.
Arlen spent a moment in anguished reflection. Then he said, “We will hear what you have to say.”
Whatever was going on, their treatment could hardly get any worse. Arlen guessed he had nothing to lose by accepting.
●
There was an exhalation in the dimness.
“Mn...”
Yukinari ran his finger over Dasa’s tightly shut eyelid. Again and again. Carefully, gently, as if tickling the spot where her eyebrows started.
When Dasa got nervous, it became impossible to inspect her eyes—even if he forced her eyelid open, he would find the eye itself rolling wildly. Instead, he gently massaged the area around her eyes to warm them. After a while he could look at them up close, the blue of them filling his vision.
Her glasses were off to one side. Slowly, with great care, he lifted the eyelid of her right eye. Nothing stood between her eye and his. He looked care
fully at it, but saw no clouding. No sign of inflammation. The eye seemed to have fully accepted the artificial lens he had produced and then inserted to treat her cataracts.
“Yu... ki...” Dasa fidgeted from the neck down. Yukinari held her head in his hands, so she couldn’t move it freely. She shifted her bottom several times, as if trying to find a comfortable way to sit.
“...This... is embarrassing...”
“What is?” He let go of the right eyelid, placing his thumb over the left instead. Again he began to rub it gently with the pad of his finger.
“My glasses...”
Her right hand reached out for where the spectacles lay beside her. Apparently, she found it awkward for someone to look directly into her eyes. That piece of transparent glass didn’t seem like much to Yukinari, but to Dasa it mattered.
Come to think of it, Hatsune didn’t like to be seen without her glasses, either...
If you were used to wearing glasses all the time, it made sense that you might find it embarrassing for someone to look directly into your naked eye, or even touch your eyelid or breathe on it. Having said that, this wasn’t the first time he’d inspected Dasa’s eyes like this. Yukinari found himself wishing she would just accept it.
“You know they have to be off. Just be patient.”
Their faces were so close they could feel each other’s breath. If Dasa put on her glasses, Yukinari’s breathing would fog them. They would only get in the way.
He pulled the left eyelid open with a certain amount of force. Another clear, blue eye stared back at him. No problems that he could see.
“You’re in good shape.” He took his hands off Dasa’s slightly crimson face. “No changes to speak of. Everything feel all right?”
“...Yes, I think. I’m fine.” She grabbed her glasses and put them on. She blinked twice, three times. It was enough to return her moist eyes to their usual, cool look. “But Yuki, you’re... not fine, are you?”
The question came very suddenly.
“Who, me?”
“The talk... with Berta this... afternoon,” she said, glancing at the wall.
On the other side of that wall was Berta’s room. She was already asleep in there—perhaps exhausted by everything that had happened since that morning.
“Are you... worried about her?”
Just as Yukinari was the only one who could read Dasa’s expressions, Dasa was capable of intuiting a great many things from Yukinari’s subtle looks and gestures. As the person who had known him longer than anyone in this world, it only made sense.
“I... You know how much I hate religion. Not any specific religion, just in general.”
“...I know.” Behind her glasses once again, Dasa’s blue eyes looked at the ground.
“My mom got sucked into religion, put all kinds of money into it. She tried to force me and my sister to join her. She even wanted my sister to be the founder’s lover—can you believe it? It will be good for you, too, she told her. It’ll be wonderful. You were put on this earth to be his lover. My own mother said shit like that with a straight face.”
He was, of course, talking about his previous world. But this wasn’t the only reason Yukinari detested religion.
“And then I came here... and the Church took Jirina from me.”
“...Yeah,” Dasa said with a small nod. As sisters, they had been very close. They didn’t look much like each other—but even if they hadn’t shared a blood connection, they were unmistakably family. But Jirina was killed as a traitor to the Church, and Yukinari had been torn away from his older sister by death when the two of them perished in a fire.
His older sister had been more important to him than anyone in the world. In that respect, he and Dasa were the same.
“I don’t care about anyone’s personal faith,” he said with the beginnings of a rueful smile. “Believe, don’t believe, it’s everyone’s choice. Lots of people seem to find real inner peace by believing in God. But when people try to force their beliefs on others—I despise that. And when it’s to get power, or money, or to control others? I can already feel the bile rising in my throat.”
“...Yeah.”
“That’s why I turned them down. Because of a little personal history. To think—” he gave a shrug and a sudden ironic smile. “—I’d do something like that, when I’m the one being worshipped as a god. The world can be a pretty twisted place sometimes, huh?”
“...Yuki...” Dasa reached out and touched his cheek.
“...Dasa?”
Touching the other person was Dasa’s way of making sure they were really there. She did it often, even in the middle of boring, everyday conversations. But this...
Wordlessly, she put a finger to his lips, as if to tell him there was no need to force a smile.
“If we can set up the waterworks, improve the farmland, they’ll need more workers. When the harvests get better—when Friedland is richer—then they might have the spare resources to take care of the orphans.”
But it wasn’t a simple question of amounts and numbers. People needed a certain level of comfort in their own lives before they could think about protecting the needy, helping them, caring for them. If they didn’t reach that level, the only alternative was to somehow force them to help. With religion, for example. Make such help for the needy something that was good by definition, because it would store up virtue—as the Buddhists believed with almsgiving.
In this place, Yukinari was a god. If he ordered it, people might help support the children at the orphanage, even if it impinged on their own lives. But he knew that wouldn’t solve anything in the long run.
“I’ll think of something eventually. But...”
“...It will take... time,” Dasa said. And she was right. Yukinari might be taking the wisest path, but it would demand a great deal of time. And without an erdgod who could guarantee at least a decent harvest, the crops might fail the next year. That would mean starting over from less than zero. The process couldn’t not take time.
“Yuki,” Dasa said as if something had just occurred to her. “What if you use your... powers of physical reconstitution?”
“Yeah, I thought of that,” Yukinari said with a frown. “But I don’t think I could keep making grain, or anything edible, for very long.”
Yukinari’s powers were limited in several ways. He could only reconstitute a certain amount of material at once, and to do so he had to first reduce something else to dust, storing up the information inside it.
His abilities consumed information. For him to continually produce food, even if he himself could endure it, he would have to reduce the area around the village to a wasteland.
“It’s a... question of efficiency,” Dasa said. “What... if you were to produce something... valuable? Like a precious... metal?”
This must have seemed a perfectly obvious idea to Dasa, as an alchemist’s apprentice. Yukinari himself was a sort of living alchemical device. He could produce gold or silver, if he wanted to. He could become a rich man overnight.
“A whole mountain of gold and silver wouldn’t do Friedland much good right now.”
Gold was used for currency because it was relatively durable and easy to produce. Put another way, it hadn’t become prized for any dramatic, direct connection to human needs for clothing, food, or shelter. You couldn’t eat it; it wouldn’t slake your thirst. You certainly couldn’t grow crops with it. All the gold in the world would do little for one of these remote provincial cities.
Dasa had grown up in a big city, in the capital. She had been shut away with her older sister, true, but material goods were plentiful, and she was familiar with the use of gold and silver as money. Unconsciously, she believed that money could buy close to anything.
“Those Church bastards have angels, too,” he added, “but they aren’t making precious metals left and right. It’s because money is so closely connected to the social system—make a whole bunch of it, and you’ll screw up more things than you realize.”
If he put all his effort into making gold, for example, its value would plummet—it would no longer be rare enough to act as a representative currency. The economy would be thrown into chaos.
And more than anything else, using his powers that way would be as good as telling the Church that either an angel or a powerful alchemist was in the area. That would bring the missionaries down on them, in numbers vastly greater than Arlen had had with him. Yukinari was perfectly happy to fight them, as revenge for Jirina, but he also had to protect Dasa, and Friedland... It would be more than he could handle alone.
“From a broad perspective, markets and exchanges are a kind of network of information...”
Then he stopped, something pricking at the edges of his consciousness. Currency. Exchange. A broad perspective. The production and control of value. Take a step back, look at the big picture...
He and Dasa spoke at almost the same moment:
“Yuki. What about trade?”
“I get it! Trade is the answer!”
They looked at each other in surprise, their eyes wide.
“We don’t have to limit this to Friedland—and we don’t have to think exclusively in terms of the capital’s trade routes.”
Suddenly, he hugged Dasa with a smile.
“Y-Yuki...?”
“Dasa, you’re brilliant! Thank you! Now we have something we can at least try!”
Her glasses slightly askew, Dasa made an uncharacteristic expression of confusion, her face a faint red. But whether this was happiness or unhappiness, Yukinari, embracing her, couldn’t see.
“Was I... helpful...?” Dasa asked, moving her hand in a hesitant circle on Yukinari’s back.
“Helpful? You were perfect! Thank you so much!”
Yukinari was an angel, and he was Friedland’s god, but his spirit was still that of a human—indeed, a teenage boy. It was all too easy for him to become fixated on what was right in front of him, and forget to take a step back. He had been completely set on trying to make Friedland prosperous all by himself.
“We’ve still got the map we took with us when we ran away from the Church, right? That’s a huge scale and not very detailed, but it should help us look for a trading partner.”
Bluesteel Blasphemer Volume 2 Page 5
