"Anna, will you come here?"
—Toddle, toddle.
"You'll only get hungrier if you move about. We have to walk until evening, so sit on Mama's lap and rest a while."
—Nod, nod.
The child sat on her lap, glanced up at her mother, and nodded without a word. They say a child is a mirror that reflects its parents. The faces of a father and mother living hard day after day had made a child who looked at nothing but them grow up early.
Stroking the hair of the child who had fallen asleep, breathing softly, in her arms, the wife asked her husband.
"Do you think we'll find a good place to settle?"
"Of course. There is certainly somewhere better than a city slum. Don't worry so much."
"You think so? I can't let our child grow up any longer in a dangerous, filthy place."
"I will see that Anna grows up safe in a peaceful place."
Her husband stroked the sleeping child's forehead and made a small promise.
'I will find it. Without fail.'
It is true that a capital where a million people carry on their economic life has that many jobs, but with labor left over in relative surplus, wages were low. The slums on the city's outskirts tell that situation well.
Where the Roa River, curving through the city's center, ran out beyond the walls, a shantytown had gone up illegally, and the stench of sewage carried down on the river hung heavy over it. Vagrants driven out of the city, the sick, and people who commuted in for day labor all lived there together.
The couple tried by any means to earn money and escape poverty, but no hope showed itself. People talk, as in a city legend, of watching for a chance and dreaming of wealth, but to this couple that felt like a distant story.
Then the child was born, and unable to remain any longer in so dangerous and unclean a place, they had left Rojas. It was not, of course, a story confined to this couple alone.
How should anyone live and have no story? Probably every traveler on that road carried one.
Carefully stroking the sleeping child, the wife looked at her husband with worry in her face.
"There's only half the potatoes left. We'll have to go carefully."
"We'll have to buy more food at the next village."
What the couple had not anticipated was that walking all day brings hunger on easily. Their portions had grown larger than usual because of it.
"At this rate we'll spend everything we saved in no time."
"There's nothing for it. Cut the portions further and we'll fall ill."
"We'll have to find a good place before the money runs out......."
"......."
***
"Move out."
"Mooove out!"
When the caravan set off, the people hurried to follow.
The couple gathered their things and the husband shouldered the packs. Anna, awake now, was carried on her mother's back.
"Halt!"
"We camp here tonight."
"Yes, Master."
A great moon rose and slowly stained the world blue.
There was a small spring in a waste scattered with rock stumps large and small, and camp was made there.
A meal on the road was, as always, thin soup and nothing more. The bowl Hans received had dried vegetables and bits of meat in it and looked quite respectable.
But the rank smell peculiar to dried meat took his appetite away.
'I find myself thinking of pepper.'
He remembered the spice he had tasted briefly once. Looking into it in the capital, he had been startled to find it priced at its own weight in gold. A curse had come out of him all over again for that marquis's son and his party, who scattered it over every meal.
'A meal with no hunger in it. What a luxury that is.'
A bitter smile came at a palate that had grown refined without his noticing.
—Toddle, toddle.
Seeing a small child wandering about in a grubby state, Hans beckoned.
"Come here."
Children, as ever, were not afraid of Hans. A child understands what it sees exactly as it sees it and accepts it. It does not count up the possibilities, so it does not form pointless misunderstandings.
"Sit beside me."
Hans sat her down and spooned out some soup for her.
"I can eat by myself."
From how clearly she spoke, she seemed to be a child whose growth lagged behind her age. The shabbily dressed couple came running in alarm, but once they understood the kindness in what Hans was doing they bowed their thanks and settled nearby.
The child was not hurried. She held the dish with one hand and spooned the soup up slowly.
'With thanks for a childhood in which, at least, I never starved.'
Hans muttered it inwardly and took a mouthful of drink.
'With thanks to the parents who never gave up on a good-for-nothing son and waited.'
He held another mouthful.
—Gulp, gulp.
He remembered a line from a poem called 'Night on the Battlefield,' about drinking two cups while looking at the moon.
He had thought he had come back from the battlefield, but that was a mistake. Life itself was a war.
However loudly discharged soldiers shouted that they had fought and paid in blood for this country and for all of you, people worrying about the day's meal only returned a look that said 'and what of it.'
A war for what? Is the state the king, the nobles, the citizens, the farmers? Or all of them? The world has no answer to that question yet.
For people, settling today's one meal is everything.
The proportion of infants who live past their first year is atrocious. The reality is that living past ten out of that atrocious number is atrocious again. The reality is that a man can only hope a meal handed over for want of appetite saves a child from death.
"Thank you."
Standing side by side, the child and her parents made their greeting to Hans.
—Nod.
One meal keeps a person alive.
Powerless lives wander without direction in search of a place where that one meal can be got, and some of them die on the way. A man who offers himself up as a serf is not worth half a serviceable packhorse.
The reality Hans felt after growing up was pitiless. Even those with power were equal in the cruelty of living. So long as a man is human he cannot live outside the structure of disease and conflict.
Fear of a life that cannot be predicted made men humble, and made them lean on an absolute being.
'Come to that, religion did save people.'
The camp in the deepening night was quiet. Only the Necro priests were busy, threading this way and that among the people and looking after the sick.
—Bow.
He returned the silent bow of a priest passing by. When the priest checked at the unexpected courtesy, Hans said.
"I was much indebted to your order in the last war."
"Is that so. I hope your journey is a good one."
The priest nodded, gave him a kind word, and went on.
Those who had finished eating gathered around fires here and there to bed down in the open, or pitched tents and went to their own rest.
***
"Please take me as your squire."
"......?"
At the young man's out-of-nowhere approach, Hans blinked.
"I want to be a knight. Please take me in."
He had finished his meal and come into the tent meaning to rest, and now some young man was telling him out of nothing that he wanted to be a knight.
"Hm......."
Now that he thought of it, this was the caravan hand who had lately stuck close to him, looking after the horse and seeing to his comfort on the road.
"I understand your will. But I should like to hear your parents' view as well......."
"Ah......."
Hans, who only a short while before had idly thought 'if only I had a squire,' now thought that this was not it.
'Me, with a squire in tow?'
He was going to idle in his home village. He was not going to work the capital's society, lobby high nobles for a fief and take office. He was ignorant of noble form. Above all, his own skill was infantry ten-commander grappling learned on a battlefield — a dogfighter, as they call it.
'What am I supposed to teach this young man?'
"My life is mine. It is not my father's thinking."
"And how is that different from running away from your parents?"
Hans felt a sting inside as he said it. Had he not been the village's headache himself, eaten at his parents' insides, driven nails into their hearts and left for the army as good as running away?
'This pretense of mine is genuinely shameful.'
"I will bring my father."
"......?"
'Blast. He was a caravan man's son.'
Trades passing down through a family was the common thing in this age, so he was probably the son of a caravan officer.
"I apologize for disturbing you at an hour when you should be resting."
"So he was the Chason caravan master's son."
"Yes. He ate away at me endlessly as a boy, but I never thought he would commit a rudeness against a knight like this today."
The young man had the look of someone holding back a retort. Meanwhile Hans, the other man present who had 'eaten away at his parents endlessly as a boy,' worked to keep his face calm.
"Your son said he wished to become my squire, and I said I needed his parents' mind on it."
The caravan master sighed.
"I apologize again for the discourtesy."
"No. I understand."
The caravan master's eyes said he had not expected that. Hans went on. There was no particular distinction as to whom he was addressing.
"The first corpse I saw on a battlefield was a knight's. The plate was caved in and the right lung had burst."
"......!"
"The head was gone. It turned up later, inside the helmet."
One of them wore a shocked expression; the other had closed his eyes and was nodding faintly.
"I enlisted as a common soldier, fought three years and survived. And as you see, I became a knight. And......."
Hans let a pause run and went on without feeling in it.
"There is not one knight among my comrades. They all died. When a fight starts, the knight is the first to run out."
The young man's eyes shook.
"You said you want to be a knight? Go to a battlefield. Earn merit and the commander on the ground grants you a knighthood. Then you die in the next day's fighting and a knight's place falls vacant again, and so a knighthood is granted to someone else who earned merit, and the next day......."
"......."
"I saw a knights' duel once. It was entertaining. Though the victory in that duel was in fact one knight's consideration for a friend who loved the lady. That is the romance you want, is it not?"
"N-no, sir."
The young man's voice had no strength in it.
"Now, I will ask. What do you think a knight's duty is?"
"Ah, that is."
"What is your purpose in trying to become a knight?"
"......."
"Find that answer and come to me. I am Hans Gale Zimmer. Gale Village in the Viscounty of Bern is my home. Come there."
The young man bowed and left the tent, and then the caravan master bent deeply at the waist.
"Thank you for speaking well to him."
"Not at all......."
"Ah...... this is a small token, partly for what happened during the day."
The caravan master set ten silver coins on the table and left the tent.
'He must have liked my advice a good deal.'
It was a moment when the saying that nothing in this world is free came home to him.
The next morning, when Hans woke, the little one came toddling over and held out a wet cloth. She was probably paying for the one meal she had been given. If her parents had told her to, then the strictness of the upbringing, commoners though they were, was remarkable.
"Thank you."
When Hans had wiped his face and handed the cloth back, the child took it and toddled off to the spring.
'Is she going to wash it?'
At that age Hans had been in the thick of throwing tantrums at everyone around him.
"My lord, are you awake?"
—Nod.
The couple handed him water in a wooden bowl that looked clean.
Gulp, gulp.
Accepting another's repayment is itself a consideration.
"That's refreshing."
—Bow.
—Nod.
He took a few spoonfuls of the vegetable soup he was served and handed it to the couple.
"I have no appetite."
"Ah, thank you very much."
Hans genuinely had no appetite. The couple, in their mid-twenties, thanked the young noble sincerely for his consideration and took the soup.
When they had finished their breakfast, Hans asked the couple.
"Where are you bound?"
"We have not settled on a destination yet, but we mean to settle wherever hands are needed."
"I see."
Hans thought for a moment, then made the man an offer.
"As you see, I am a war noble. I received a title and am on my way home. I have no domain, but I mean to run a small farm, and I need laborers."
"Ah......."
"Even on a busy, punishing journey the two of you expressed your gratitude and kept your manners. I think that says something about your natures. I should like to take you with me."
At the unexpected offer the man blinked.