If anything is the mark of a prosperous city, it is the academy above all else. In an age of barbarity, education was capital's highest luxury.
Bahama Academy was an institution open to the citizenry without distinction of station. Attached to it was the Bahama City Library.
But even if there was no discrimination on the surface, once you accounted for tuition and the cost of living in a great city, there was no getting around the fact that it was a place where a certain class and above did their studying.
"Now, what am I to do about this."
The guard at Bahama Academy was at a loss. Standing before him was some man saying he wished to use the library.
Tangled hair and shabby clothes. Not a vagrant, though, by the look of him. He was somewhere between an ordinary man and a vagrant. In a word, he was ambiguous.
"Is the right reserved to residents of Bahama?"
"Ah, no, it isn't. If you have anything that might prove your ident......."
"Identity, is it......."
Hans rummaged in his pack and drew out a piece of faded parchment.
"I'm a discharged soldier. I would like you to take my measure by this."
The guard took the parchment with a stoop and then asked a passing student to read it for him. One young man read it out willingly enough.
"......(omitted)...... merit of the second class is hereby recognized in respect of Hans Zimmer...... a title is petitioned for. Berad Dior Offenhauts, Marquis, Commander of the North."
Having finished reading, the student spoke with respect in his eyes.
"It is an honor to meet a hero of the war. This is a petition for elevation, isn't it. The kind submitted to the Capital Administration Office......."
The guard was startled and began with an apology.
"I beg you to forgive my rudeness."
Hans waved a hand.
"I am not a noble yet, so there was no rudeness to begin with. You were faithful to your duty and did nothing wrong."
"Thank you for your generosity."
Hans asked the student.
"Which way do I go for the library?"
"Ah, as it happens I'm headed that way. Let me show you."
"My thanks."
A three-story building of red brick carried a plaque reading 'Library Attached to Bahama Academy.' The rows of trees around it, yellow leaves heaped thick beneath their black trunks, made a hushed and quiet scene.
At autumn's feeling come to its height, Hans's heart eased as well.
"Then I'll take my leave."
"Ah, thank you."
The student made a courteous bow and went on his way.
—Creeeak.
—Tromp, tromp.
"Welcome. Would you sign in first, please?"
Hans took the pen and signed the register the clerk held out.
"Let me help you. What book are you looking for?"
"I'm looking for a book that sets out the noble houses of the kingdom."
"《Peerage Almanac》 is on the third floor. Shelf one-one."
"My thanks."
As Hans nodded and turned away, the clerk added.
"A revised edition comes out every ten years, but this year's publication has been delayed, so the material is still ten years old. Will that be all right?"
"It doesn't matter."
The library was still. Now and then only the low sound of a student's footsteps, wandering the reading room in search of a book, carried across it.
Hans pulled a volume titled 《Peerage Almanac》 from the shelf. There were seven books under that same title. Volume 7-1 held the dukes, marquises and counts, volume 7-2 the viscounts, volumes three and five the barons, and volumes six and seven listed the knightly titles in brief.
Volumes six and seven made no mention of houses at all; they were little more than rolls of knights' names.
He sat down at a desk and opened 7-1. In order of duke, marquis and count it set out each house's history and arms, its fiefs, and the current standing of its direct line, its branches, and its officeholding nobles.
Hans found the section where the comital houses were written out.
"Pellone, Pellone, Pellone......."
The finger walking down the house names one by one came to a stop.
"Here it is. Count Pellone."
Hans read the passage through slowly.
"Arms: a shield device with an axe and a sword crossed. That's right."
—Nod, nod.
"In the year 35 of the common reckoning, merit in the founding of the kingdom was recognized and the rank of count conferred. The fief is the Pelloremean Plain in the south of the kingdom. A branch line serves as administering lord and runs the domain, while the direct line holds office in the capital."
Hans stopped at the passage he wanted and read it over and over. Once he had it committed to memory, he left the library.
***
"This is too much, surely."
"We cannot accept a division like this."
"Hmm. Then I shall report that Viscount Gunter and Baron Harrison refuse."
"No — w-we did not go so far as......."
—Murmur, murmur.
A tent on the Cronos Plain, where the clearing of the battlefield was in full swing, was loud with the raised voices of nobles.
"Next is the matter of dividing the prisoners. For reference, the captured provisions are distributed in proportion to the number of prisoners."
"First, of the nine thousand common prisoners, five hundred are allotted to each baronial title. One thousand are to be allotted to the viscount titles."
At the one-sided announcement the nobles pushed back from every side.
"And by what standard are the noble prisoners — the hundred-commanders and above, or of knightly rank — to be divided?"
"The particulars of that have not yet been decided, but His Excellency said it would be determined afterward with each party's merits taken into account."
There was no one present who did not understand that this meant 'take what you are given and shut your mouths.'
"Is this truly the commander's will?"
"Did we stake our lives to be treated like this?"
Murmur, murmur.
"We must convey our position to His Excellency."
"Hear, hear."
The nobles pushed back. But that was as far as it went. Not one of them could walk out of that tent and cover the ten paces to the marquis's quarters.
'The men who staked their lives are dead or gone home already. You people never staked anything at all to begin with.'
So said the adjutant of the commander, Marquis Offenhauts, inside himself.
'That desk-bound sorts like these, who cannot even protest an injustice, talked of war and drove soldiers to their deaths.'
It was like the clamoring of so much trash.
The young officer was tormented.
'Can I walk a soldier's road without rotting the way these men have? And is there truly a place of glory at the end of it?'
He knew, too. He knew perfectly well that a single lump of gold did more for his own future and his family's than some cause that would be forgotten soon enough.
That knowledge frustrated him all the more. But he could not let it show. For him as well, the commander's quarters ten paces away were far indeed.
'Will I end up tangled in it like this and come to resemble them in the end?'
***
After his visit to the library, there was nothing special about Hans's days.
He would rise late from a park bench and settle breakfast and lunch together at a stall. He would sit in his corner of the plaza taking the sun, and even when he crossed paths with Walter's crew out on their collection rounds, they passed one another the way an ox and a chicken regard each other.
"Have a taste of this."
The stallholders found it remarkable that a man dragged off by Walter's crew had come back in relatively one piece. Once a few facts got about — that he was a discharged soldier, that he would rest a few days and then move on — their wariness of Hans vanished.
"My thanks."
—Gulp, gulp.
The herb juice he drank down in one go by a stallholder's goodwill was refreshing.
"That's good. How much?"
"Eh, no. How could I take money from a discharged soldier?"
The stallholder laughed and waved it off as nothing.
It was still early afternoon and the plaza was quiet. The diligent stalls were opening up their boards one by one — a peaceful scene, nothing more.
Hans was watching people with his eyes narrowed against the warm afternoon light when his gaze went to the gap between the buildings at the edge of the plaza. It was the alley he had been dragged into by Walter's crew a few days earlier.
Men in irons were walking down it. From the worn-out uniforms of the Kingdom of Calemon they wore, they looked to be war slaves.
What caught Hans's eye was one small, sickly slave. He himself had enlisted as a boy soldier at sixteen, but that one looked far too young. The boy, who had been staggering along, went down, and in the end was dragged along by the chain linking him fore and aft.
The slaves disappeared into the alley, and Hans rose from his seat.
***
The alley off Fourth Street, dim even at midday.
—Murmur, murmur.
"Sit! Sit down, you sons of bitches."
"Hey! Are you going to sort that out over there? Line them up and sit them down straight!"
The same big men were setting some twenty slaves against the wall in a single line, seated in order.
"Oi, who are you? Who do you think you are, coming in here...... mm?"
"......."
—Falter, falter.
The big man faltered as he made out Hans's expressionless face. The rest of them stopped what they were doing too and sidled about, watching for a cue.
A beast of the battlefield returned to society. Having come late to the truth of it, they were afraid of Hans. The fact that the scratches they had put on him had posed him no threat at all made them shrink still further.
"What is it, idiot? What's wrong with you? Eh? Oh, you?"
Walter greeted him, rubbing his palms together in a cringe.
"Heh heh. I was very rude the other day. If you'd be generous enough to under......?"
Hans walked past them and went to the slaves.
—Tromp, tromp.
The boy was dried out like a mummy. Pale patches of scurf had risen on his face, and his lips had split and scabbed and festered underneath. His two lifeless eyes were full of despair. They were Hans's own eyes, the ones he had seen while his mind slipped out of his body on the battlefield.
"How much?"
Hans asked it without taking his gaze off the boy.
It somehow felt like being ignored and it angered him, but Walter was a professional. He kept calm and focused on the other party's intent.
"Sorry?"
"I'll buy this child."
"This one, sir?"
Walter looked down at the boy. He had been thinking of writing him off as dead, since treating him would cost more than selling him. A trader's smile spread across Walter's whole face, and he rubbed his palms together.
"I'll give you a special price."
***
Walter watched Hans go off with the boy on his back and muttered.
"Am I going to get beaten later for taking money for one who's already dead?"
Shake, shake.
Walter made himself shake his head.
"No. Fifty coins is the price of ten bowls of soup. I as good as gave him away."
He nodded inwardly, rationalizing it for himself.
"Please look this child's body over."
He requested a healing at the nearest temple. A priest with a bored expression glanced at him and dug at his ear.
—Clack.
A silver coin was set on the table.
"A donation."
"Quickly, quickly, lay him down here."
The wily old priest was devout before the power of capital. For all that he loved money, his divine power was evidently full to the brim, because a bright light gathered the boy up in its arms.
The priest said the boy was 'in a state where his life force had faded and his body weakened owing to a failure to take food.' In a word, the boy had been starving to death.
Hans moved the boy to an inn and called the serving boy.
"Bring a bowl of warm soup up to the room."
When he pressed a coin into his hand the serving boy's eyes lit up, and he delivered the bowl in short order.
He let the soup run into the boy's mouth a little at a time. The boy was still unconscious, but the soup went down well enough. Once he had fed him the whole bowl, Hans fell asleep. It was his first bed under a roof in a long while.
***
Toward dawn, Hans snapped his eyes open at a killing intent closing in on him, and saw the boy standing there with a dagger he had found.
Hans waited quietly until the boy came near and set the blade to his throat. The boy's hand shook, and the edge against his neck nicked the skin a little, and blood ran.
Hans spoke in a low voice.
"A great many of them died."
It was less a conversation than something sent ringing out into the air, as though he were not conscious of the boy at all.
"Out of the ten-man squad I was in, the one who lived is me."
Hans closed his eyes and went on.
"I want to live for those nine men's shares as well."
"Ah......."
What Hans said there may have been the very thing the boy's own insides wanted to say to him.
—Ting.
The boy dropped the knife. Hans rose slowly and patted him on the back.
"Khhhh — hhk."
The stifled weeping did not stop for a long while.
When it began to ease, Hans laid the boy down.
"Rest first. Recover your strength and think it over slowly, and won't the road ahead show itself then?"
Hans drew a blanket over him.
The boy's bloodshot eyes slowly closed.
At a dawn still far from morning, time ran slowly, slowly on.