Hans spread both arms.
An assistant measured the arms and the tailor wrote the figures down.
While Hans struck one pose after another at the tailor's direction, the boy nodded off to one side.
"Thank you for your patience, my lord."
"How long will it take?"
"With no particular options, a day will be enough."
Nod.
"I shall deliver it to your lodgings by tomorrow."
"Do that."
He had a new tunic made in fine material. He needed an awareness of himself as a noble, and dress was where that began. The aim was to look like a frugal noble with the minimum of clothing.
Clothes are the surest way of showing one's station. And having to look like a noble was, seen a certain way, a consideration toward others. It forestalls the crime of offending a noble before it can happen.
He meant to have clothes made for the boy as well, but the boy refused.
"Why?"
"It seems the time has come for us to part."
"......!"
Hans checked, but at the same time he thought that what was coming had come.
"The noble dispatched on the postwar negotiation schedule is my own house."
"Ah!"
When they had watched the delegation in the plaza, the boy's eyes had shaken visibly. Hans turned his gaze on him. Upright posture and clear eyes, glossy brown hair and cheeks pink with returning life. He looked like a young gentleman.
—Nod, nod.
Hans accepted it. He had come to know the boy's station naturally, at some point along the way.
Boy soldiers on a battlefield can be seen in two aspects. Commoners or slaves conscripted by force. Or nobles who went to war in the spirit of noblesse oblige.
"In place of my elder brother, the house's firstborn and heir, I led the domain's soldiers as second son."
"So that was it."
"It was decided that only the soldiers would be sent, but the domain's young men could not be sent off with no one to lead them, so I volunteered myself."
The questions of all that time were answered. And his own guess had been right.
On a battlefield a noble with sufficient escort is almost never in danger of his life. Even taken prisoner in defeat, custom is to release him if a sufficient ransom is paid, and covering the costs of war that way is profitable besides.
'He was a boy who had everything.'
For a moment the thought came that perhaps that was why those two eyes full of despair had looked the sadder for it, but he shook his head.
"Hoo."
What he had confirmed in the horrors of war was that noble or commoner, a blade in the gut hurts them the same.
Restrained bearing and speech, dignified table manners — that the boy was a noble was not the least bit strange. What remained a question was why he had been mixed in with the common prisoners.
"On the battlefield I actually arrived at, a greenhorn noble was no object of consideration. The domain's soldiers I had brought were folded into the various forces, and I was attached to the staff. That was the last I saw of the soldiers who had followed me and of the adjutant who had looked after every one of them."
The boy still looked young, but his gaze was a great deal more serious as he went on.
"Even a house holding power in the capital cannot exert it under the special conditions of a battlefield."
"Death is flying about the place, after all."
Had Hans himself been the commander, he would not have given a thought to accommodating a high noble. Lose today and you die today; there is no leisure for politics. 'Politics begins only when the war ends.'
War is the end of diplomacy, the last stage of politics, and yet the ironic historical precedent is that where politics intervened during a war, nine times out of ten the result was defeat.
"Once I understood that what I did at headquarters was simply drive soldiers to their deaths, I found it hard to bear."
"It was hard on everyone."
Hans agreed in a tone that said there was no need to say it.
"Soldiers being ground away without stopping, and more recruits than the dead coming in to be formed into reserves — those days were like hell."
Hans shut his eyes, and the battlefield's nightmares rose up, and he opened them again.
"I thought that if there were a devil, the devil was me, driving them out there."
Hans looked down at the boy with sad eyes. The boy hung his head and spoke on the edge of tears, as though making a confession.
"Talk of keeping one's honor as a noble was a scarlet lie. Soldiers were tools for the nobles' profit, and trash wearing the mask of chivalry embezzled supplies to line their own pockets."
"There is trash everywhere. There were men who robbed villages to fill their purses while the officers were slack."
The dark appetites inside a human being do not care about age or station. When discipline and control break down, human malice eats goodwill and turns the world into hell.
"In the last battle......."
At the words 'the last battle' Hans's memory rose. When he came to himself after collapsing from exhaustion, he had been lying half submerged in a pool of blood among the bodies. Had the soldier he saved not been beside him keeping guard, he might well have drowned in it.
Returning to the present, Hans let out a deep breath.
"It was not your fault."
This young boy's shoulders were far too small and slight to carry the responsibility of a war. The boy set his teeth and spoke. He said it clearly, one word at a time, as though he held it a duty to say it.
"Even as defeat closed in, the nobles kept driving soldiers to their deaths. When I saw them hold out every remaining man as a shield for their own safe retreat at the end, I tore off my rank insignia and ran out onto the field."
Hearing that a boy of sixteen had meant to die alongside the soldiers, the hundred-commander's desperate death came back to him again.
"But the smell of death and the killing intent I met in the middle of that field were more than a greenhorn like me could stand. I shrank from it, could not put up a decent resistance, and was taken."
The boy in the slave market of Bahama's back alleys rose in his mind too.
'Both eyes full of despair and remorse.'
The aftereffects of a discharged soldier come down to this: sight, hearing and touch that have confirmed the horrific nature of human beings begin refusing other people. The instant your eyes meet and you recall something of the battlefield, the other person becomes an enemy. Hans, too, had been unable to meet people's eyes. Only children's.
"On one of those days of walking and walking, I heard what you said. Do not go looking for a place to die; find what there is for a noble to do. Was that it?"
The boy lifted his head and looked Hans full in the face.
"Those words saved me."
Hans's expression said this was truly unexpected.
"I thought that you saved me. And so it seems we saved each other."
The boy held Hans's eyes and spoke as though binding himself to it.
"I will find what I can do as a noble. And......."
The blue eyes shone clearer than the ideal he had just declared.
"I will have the strength to sweep aside everything that gets in the way."
"......."
"I, Sehezara hu Pamir, will not forget today's resolve until the day my life ends, but will remember it and live a life of my utmost."
The boy swore it before the benefactor who had saved him.
Hans's eyes met the boy's. A gaze full of one man's will and a gaze warmly cheering that will on wound together. People tend to call that friendship.
"I'll walk you there."
Because of the slave brand on his forehead the boy refused, just in case, but Hans took hold of him anyway and walked him to the front of the delegation's lodgings.
The return of a count's son they had thought dead threw the place into an uproar. Even in that commotion the boy was still. He was like a sage who had come to some understanding, and in another light like a capable knight who had cut his way out of a war.
The boy gave Hans his last thanks.
"I will not forget."
—Nod.
With that short farewell, Hans and the boy parted.
The postwar peace negotiations concluded. They were negotiations that thoroughly split the difference between two states' interests. His meeting with the boy, on the other hand, had been a reconciliation between one person and another. It was only a gesture between two men, but they were the parties who had lived the war through their own bodies.
***
"He sold the title?"
"It appears he exchanged the barony for a knighthood and pocketed the money."
"Hmm."
"I think the question is whether he stops his appetite for money here, or gets greedier still."
"Just so."
"From the impression I had of him, he did not look like a man who chases money that way."
"How would you know that from seeing him once?"
"That is true enough."
The desk man scratched his head. At the same time he wondered whether he was being excessively well disposed toward the man.
"I have never seen a human being in this world who dislikes money. The more money the better. Is that not so?"
"There are people who restrain their appetites and live giving to others."
"Who says otherwise? But nine in ten live by appetite, don't they."
"We refused him without so much as a conversation. And we are judging what kind of man he is from a few pieces of investigation."
"Are you saying your investigation was inadequate?"
"Investigation is only prior knowledge. I do not think the content of an investigation should itself become the conclusion."
"Nnngh."
The mercenary commander's head throbbed. He held that most problems in human society begin with money. The reason this matter had swollen so far was that he believed the compensation the other party wanted meant, in the end, money. It was thoroughly self-centered reasoning: because he wanted it, the other man must want it too.
'Was my thinking wrong? Is this present thinking, that it gets settled by force, wrong as well?'
After sitting in thought for a while the commander clenched his fist.
"Hold on — if he's a knight, that lightens the burden on our side, doesn't it?"
"Th-that is true, but......."
A knight. The beginning of nobility, or its lowest rung. Unless he raises his house to something, he cannot escape being the hired man of a higher noble. A free knight with no faction is not something to be afraid of running into.
"Hm...... is that so."
"Commander!"
"Yes. Speak."
"Knight or not, as you know he is a decorated man of the war. Unconfirmed information has it that he cut down an enemy thousand-commander and ended the war. He is, in the plainest terms, a beast come back from a battlefield. Even an S-rank going at him is no guarantee."
"Right. Turning the sneak attack of two B-rank mercenaries around and putting them down alive is harder work than killing them."
"It is. At the least......."
"At the least it has to be an S-rank, and the outcome is not guaranteed."
"Yes."
"And if two S-ranks made a surprise attack?"
"Commander......."
The desk man's expression darkened.
"Do you truly mean to see this through to the end?"
There are two S-ranks in the company. The captain of the Vigilance Corps, which might be called the company's banner, and the commander himself — which is to say, it would be no exaggeration to call them the whole of the company's strength.
"Commander, this is by no means a matter worth staking the whole company on. The development plan will be delayed a little, but that is better than putting up the risk as collateral."
"Nnngh."
The mood in the company office was sinking lower and lower.
***
—Gulp, gulp.
Having parted from the boy, he drank beer at the pub on the inn's ground floor and soothed the emptiness. A month or so; he had traveled a whole autumn with the boy. The two of them had been blunt and silent, but in that time they had shared their pain and been a comfort to each other.
"To the fulfilling of your dream."
Thinking of the grand aim in life the boy had sworn to in front of him, he raised a toast into the air.
—Gulp, gulp. Khaa.
As he drained a mug of beer, a server came over.
"My lord, there is a message here for you."
"Mm? Ah, my thanks."
Hans took the message from him.
"Parchment? I have been seeing a good deal of this precious stuff lately."
A roll of parchment the size of a palm opened out.
"An invitation."
In one part of the city his life and death were under discussion, but he was tense in a different sense.
'Why would he want me? And unofficially, at that?'
It was a puzzling invitation, but he decided not to trouble himself over it. As he began to fit himself back into society, his old thick nerve was coming back to life as well.
"The questions will be answered when we meet."
The punk of former days melted, trudging, into the city's night streets.
"Come to think of it, I liked the night quite a lot, didn't I? Hoo hoo hoo."
The night streets felt nothing out of place at all.