Just two days after starting to climb the cave wall, Wolf reached the opening. The Red Eagle Prince couldn’t hide his astonishment.
“It’s not that hard, Your Highness. You just have to avoid imagining things like ‘If I fall from here, my head will smash like a watermelon.’”
“It’s hard even without imagining that. I couldn’t make it five steps before my whole body started aching.”
“That’s because Your Highness only ever does breathing exercises.”
Wolf brushed off his palms and checked the clock. The parts and casing of the clock were made from a worn boot someone had left in the cave (judging by the size, it had belonged to Black Weasel) and the broken mouth of a water bottle. The idea had started the night before when the Red Eagle Prince picked up the boot and remarked, “If we punch a hole in this and fill it with dirt, it could work like an hourglass.”
That one remark ignited a destructive engineering instinct from boyhood—the urge that could only be satisfied by dismantling things like a father’s pocket watch, a sister’s music box, or a schoolteacher’s telescope just to see the insides, then reassembling them badly.
‘That’s right! Let’s make a clock out of this, Your Highness.’
The problem was dirt. This was a stone cave, and even the floor had been plastered smooth, so there was no fine soil in sight. Wolf came up with a solution almost immediately.
‘Let’s use the ashes from the firewood instead of sand.’
They poked a hole through the toe of the boot with a fire poker, jammed the broken mouth of the bottle into it, and wrapped it tight with cord. After filling the boot with gray ash, they hung it upside down. Finished. For good measure, they even gave it a grand name: “The Foot of the Cursed Giant.”
A smashing success of invention(?).
Even as his master’s boot was turned into a clock, Silver simply watched without saying anything. Maybe Wolf had imagined it, but Silver’s fingers seemed to twitch once or twice.
“I need to climb it one more time.”
Wolf flipped the boot-clock over and turned to the Red Eagle Prince.
“Your Highness, do push-ups until the ash runs out of the clock. Even if it’s hard, don’t stop.”
“Okay.”
The Red Eagle Prince began doing push-ups without a single complaint.
On the second day after Black Weasel left the cave, Wolf and the Red Eagle Prince realized something. Survival itself had a grace period of about a month. The real problem pressing down on them right now was time.
How to kill time in a cave where the only toy was a single die.
It was a task more painful than solving advanced mathematics.
The day after making the boot-clock, the Red Eagle Prince climbed the cave wall with Wolf. They tried all sorts of things besides that. A contest to see who could spit the farthest. Catching two spiders and making them race. Competing to see who could hold their breath the longest.
In some ways the cave even felt like another world specially gifted to the boys by a fairy grandmother. No one nagged them about table manners. No one forced them to go to school every morning. No teacher rapped their knuckles with a ruler for unfinished homework.
Of course, there were no combs either.
But there were no girls looking at them.
After two days, Wolf and the Red Eagle Prince’s hair had transformed into something like the hair of beggars who had woken up after sleeping under a statue in the town square during a storm. At first it looked miserable, but after a few days their eyes adjusted and it somehow started to look rather impressive.
And it was practical too. No need to comb it every morning.
“Your Highness, standing like that you look wild and heroic. Aristocratic gazelles will be tripping over themselves to offer you their handkerchiefs.”
“You look good too, Wolf. That crow’s nest on your head is magnificent. I suppose true beauty comes from natural neglect rather than artificial grooming.”
They slept whenever they wanted and woke whenever they wanted. In the evenings they splashed around in the hot spring. In bed they argued about ridiculous things like, “What if the sky suddenly rained premium sausages?”
The prince and the attendant’s strategy worked.
“Hey. Let’s play together.”
After six days, Silver finally approached Wolf and the Red Eagle Prince. Even the assistant to an assassin couldn’t escape being a seventeen-year-old boy.
Wolf tried to hide his excitement. Silver spoke first.
“If we’re going to play, let’s do it properly. Not childish splashing or dumb chatter. A game that makes a man’s heart pound.”
The game Silver proposed was role-playing.
“There are three roles. ‘The Infamous Captain,’ ‘The Cunning Strategist,’ and ‘The Handsome Assault Commander.’ The captain is loud but stupid. The strategist is sly and always scheming to steal the treasure. The assault commander is a handsome brute who’s great with a sword. I’ll be the assault commander.”
“No way! The assault commander is the coolest role!”
After a long argument, they settled it with rock-paper-scissors. The stupid captain went to Wolf, the cunning strategist to the Red Eagle Prince, and the handsome assault commander to Silver. They even added the setting that all three pirates were cold-blooded genius warriors who had already killed one hundred thousand people by the age of sixteen.
Before the game began, Silver gave a warning.
“This isn’t a cave. It’s the deck of the Black Skull. That stream over there is a wild sea crawling with sharks. You have to believe everything is real. Can you do that?”
“Of course. Don’t be surprised when I show you how it’s done.”
True to his boast, Wolf performed like he was possessed. Growing up in the alley culture of commoner boys where the fastest way to be accepted as “one of the guys” was to do the dumbest things imaginable, acting like an idiot came naturally to him. He laughed constantly and swaggered around arrogantly. He caught a mouse gnawing on cheese and executed it for being “a spy from an Atanian warship.” He even promoted a captured donkey-cart driver to “second in command.”
The three boys competed to invent the most absurd stories. The foolish captain attacked an enemy fleet, fell in love with the enemy commander’s daughter, defected, and married her. The strategist who defected along with the captain ended up having an affair with that same daughter. The assault commander, drunk, charged alone into the enemy fleet and destroyed it—only to sober up and realize he had attacked his own side’s ships.
By the time they had barely managed to raid the treasure ship (in reality, conquer a pile of rocks) and finish their victory celebration (drinking from the stream), all three boys were exhausted. As if by agreement, they collapsed onto the straw and fell asleep like the dead.
The next day, Silver said something strange.
“Tonight we’ll summon a god.”
Wolf and the Red Eagle Prince looked at each other. On the prince’s face was written exactly what Wolf himself was thinking.
What did I just hear?
“Tonight is the full moon. When the moon hangs directly overhead, we’ll offer a sacrifice and circle it six times while chanting a spell. In Stol language: leri, niav, noire. It means, ‘O god, please come to us.’”
“St-Stol really is mysterious. But what are we summoning a god for?”
Wolf imagined prophecies of the future, curses, maybe even a séance.
The answer he got was—
“What do you mean what for? To make a wish. I’m asking it to remove my moles.”
“Moles…?”
“Yeah. Moles.”
Silver rolled up his sleeve and showed his arm. Several small moles dotted his elbow.
“See? My elbows are covered with them. I’ve already taken out seven thanks to calling gods, and this is what’s left. People from Stol get a lot of moles. And for some reason they always grow in disgusting clusters on specific parts of the body.”
Silver pulled his sleeve back down and added,
“The god we’re calling tonight is Lord Long-Snout Frog. It’s a lesser god, but very respected. I don’t know if Atania has it, but in Stol it’s famous as a frog that’s great at hunting insects. People from Stol believe Lord Long-Snout Frog flicks the moles off and swallows them.”
It didn’t sound like a joke.
Only then did Wolf suddenly remember something.
‘Stol people are primitive and superstitious. Their blind beliefs surpass even the ignorance of Atania’s Dark Age, when people thought the world was a rectangular box.’
It certainly surpassed it. Wolf had never imagined superstition ran so deep that there was even a god responsible for skin care.
“We’ll eat dinner after the ritual, so keep that in mind. If you want, you two can join. When we bathed earlier I noticed the attendant here has no moles at all, which is unusual. But Your Highness has quite a few on your hands and feet.”
As proper civilized people, the Red Eagle Prince and Wolf were rational materialists who believed in reason—but they decided to participate in the ritual for fun. Silver even lent them ceremonial robes (actually Black Weasel’s summer outing clothes). They were black robes lined with purple.
When they put them on, the hems dragged along the ground. The prince and his attendant raised their thumbs at each other in admiration.
“Your Highness, dressed like that you really look like a demon worshiper. You look extremely dangerous.”
“You look just as deadly, Wolf. Like a dark wizard who has destroyed several kingdoms. As the future royal consort of the Lebanese royal family, I’m already trembling at the thought of taking part in a foreign summoning ritual.”
“So this is the thrill of breaking a taboo.”
“…You bastards. Shut up right now.”
Silver’s face twisted as he reached for the sword at his waist.
Wolf and the Red Eagle Prince both gasped and stepped back.