The man wrapped a rope around the iron rod Hans thrust out and cinched it tight.
Hans did not panic; he pulled the rod. At that, the man putting his strength into the arm with the rope around it staggered.
—JAB!
"Kuk."
The end of the rod, driven out after it, struck his throat and put him out of the fight.
'One!'
—SMACK.
Hans struck the fire with the rod. Sparks flew in every direction, and through the scattering embers the rod met something with a heavy, solid feel.
—THUMP.
"Krraak!"
'Two!'
"Everyone scatter!"
'Wrong. You should have massed up and pressed me down instead.'
Hans swung the rod with a knowing smile.
—CRACK!
'Three!'
In that instant a club swung by one of the men caught him in the face, but Hans pushed his head into it and brought the point of impact forward, so the damage was not great.
—THWACK!
'Four!'
—HYAH!
The last of it was the boy bursting out of the tent, and Hans stopping him from planting a dagger in the robber's side.
Then he finished it by cracking the back of the head of the man who had turned to take the boy hostage.
—CRACK.
"Ungh."
—SLUMP.
'......?'
The boy frowned up at him as if he could not understand why Hans would go out of his way to block his attack.
The fire burned up strongly. The boy wiped Hans's bruised forehead with a water-soaked cloth. Beside them the robbers sprawled on the ground and let their groans out.
Having cleaned the injury roughly, the boy fetched the rope and tied the robbers up in a line. He asked with a curious look.
"Why do you let them live, every single time, even when it costs you injuries?"
"This is not a battlefield, and we are not murderers."
"......."
"I have no intention of letting my money be taken, but there's no need to kill them either. We hand them to the watch and let the law judge them."
"You let those mercenary trash go, didn't you?"
Hans glanced once at the boy, who kept pressing, with a puzzled eye, then turned his gaze back to the fire and answered.
"I had already made half cripples of them. Call the price paid."
They had been men who would ignore something like a mercenary's discipline for the sake of their own appetites, men who could not stand to have strength and not use it, men who had never grown past an infant's way of thinking.
If a life was going to go on doing harm to everyone around it, then crippling it outright so that it could not use its strength seemed fine to him.
—Nod, nod.
The boy nodded and accepted that.
With sleep gone from both of them, the two warmed themselves in front of the fire and waited for morning.
The robbers were dragged along through several attempts at resistance and escape, and as many beatings as there were attempts. When their rations were cut the resistance tapered off, and by the time they reached Belborn they were meek as lambs.
Over the rest of the journey, groups of travelers joined them by ones and twos, then met a fork in the road and parted, over and over. It was rather like life, Hans thought.
Naturally, Hans's party, dragging five beaten men along, drew attention. Some guessed at the story on their own and some wanted to ask and be sure. But nobody suspected Hans and nobody pitied the men.
As though accepting the reality that strength is justice, they gathered around Hans instead and tried to lean on him. It was an age of barbarity, and for ordinary people travel was that dangerous.
"Have some of this."
"My thanks. Would you try a little of this here?"
People gathered in twos and threes to eat, and through the talking they checked one another's routes and sometimes asked about traveling together.
"How far are you going, then?"
"To the Osle region."
When the man who had asked kept looking at him, he added.
"My cousin is opening up a farm and says he needs hands, so I'm moving out there with my family."
—Nod, nod.
"Then you'll have to cross the western range. I wish you luck."
Having traded nods, the man pulled his child in beside him and sat him close to the fire. Then he ladled out warm soup for him. He tucked the blanket around the child as he ate, saw to his wife's and his old mother's meals, and finished his own by scraping the pot clean of what was left.
At every burning fire there was a group with its own story. They needed a safe place to sleep, and one warm meal was precious to them.
Company like this, with no clear center to it, could guarantee nothing at all, but even so it was enough. How many people in this world get to enjoy a guaranteed life?
In an age when half of those born died before they turned ten, and half of the rest died before they turned twenty, life itself was a war.
Beside the moving travelers, four bodies could be seen left to rot half away. It looked to have been robbers. A woman carrying a child raised a hand and covered its eyes.
Hans went closer and looked the bodies over, and muttered.
"No signs of a fight. They butchered people who weren't resisting."
The bodies lay face down in a neat row in a crouched posture, hands tied behind them, their necks cleanly cut. This was the scene barely a day's distance from a great city.
If civilization is the thing that makes a human life worth something, then it seemed it had not begun yet.
Hans took a hard grip on the rope that bound the men in their line.
And so the next day they arrived in Belborn.
In the process of handing them to the city watch, the robbers made one last attempt at resistance.
"He's the robber! He beat us and took our goods!"
A man and a young boy dragging in five people who looked beaten and starved and calling them highwaymen; and the men themselves crying injustice and insisting they were merchants whose goods had been seized...... The intake desk at the watch was at a loss. A look through the wanted notices turned up nothing on them either, so perhaps they really had been wronged.
"This is awkward."
"Mason. Let's start with confirming identities."
"Yes. This has turned into a headache."
With two accounts directly opposed, you cannot listen to only one side.
"A discharged soldier, I see."
"I'm returning to my home domain."
"And the boy beside you?"
Hans lifted the boy's hat and set it back.
"Ah."
There was no particular explanation offered, but the officer wrote down 'discharged soldier returning to his home domain, having traded for a slave.' And at that moment a woman came into the watch house.
"Mister Hans!"
"......."
***
With the clearing finished, the plain was desolate. The marks where human flesh had come away and blood had run in streams were still there, but time would take care of that. The crows would stop gathering in flocks, and the stink that came off the swarming flies would be erased along with the summer.
"Viscount Dawson has just withdrawn."
"Was he the last?"
"Viscount Gunter's side is in its final tidying and looks to withdraw as of tomorrow morning."
—Nod, nod.
The marquis looked out at the plain with the war's marks still on it.
The war fought over the past four years had been, for a local conflict, of considerable scale — a cumulative two hundred and fifty thousand men on both sides combined, with more than thirty thousand facing off at any given time. As margrave he had held the line coldly to the end, and in the end he had won.
There was talk that it was a victory won by leaving countless friendly losses to happen, that he was a devil without blood or tears, but Berad Dior Offenhauts, Marquis, did not care. Whatever the desk-bound men of the capital, steeped in parties and pleasure, chose to prattle, the fact that it was a victory achieved by his own hand did not change.
There had been a brief discord over the division of spoils as well, but so what? In the end were they not all submitting to the marquis's strength and pulling out?
Three viscounts, standing proxy for the counts who held office in the capital, had held out to the last. They had seemed to be combining to resist him, and in the end they were withdrawing like this.
"Your Excellency, I beg leave to risk a discourtesy and speak. This matter......."
"Enough."
The marquis turned his head and cut his adjutant off.
"I know what you mean to say. And I acknowledge that loyalty of yours."
He turned his gaze and looked at some point on the plain that was now certain to become his own territory.
"The time has come at last for our house, which has sacrificed so long to hold the border, to make its leap. There is a cause and there is strength. Clinging to some half-hearted consideration would be foolishness."
'Did you not always say that excessive greed brings disaster?'
But the adjutant, Baron Bitzmari, did not put those words outside his mouth. His master did not permit replies.
"Is there any trouble managing the newly filled domain troops?"
"None. They are picked men chosen from a generous pool, and I have high expectations of them."
"Good."
Baron Bitzmari added carefully.
"When I consider the territory we are to take in, I am left with the regret that we should perhaps have raised more."
"No. The war is over. There are no enemies left around us."
The marquis turned, clasped his hands behind his back, and fixed the baron with a stare.
"From now on every usable asset goes into developing the domain. Sell off all the spoils first, and use the prisoners to open the roads before anything else."
"Sir."
"It is somewhat late, but I shall give you your chance as well. Go and look over a suitable region yourself. I shall grant it to your house as a fief."
"Ah — th-thank you."
"I am always grateful for your devotion."
The baron went down on one knee and bowed his head in respect.
"I shall give you my full loyalty."
The marquis's eyes, looking down at him, were cold as a snake's.
***
When a representative of the Albert Caravan appeared and vouched for Hans's identity, the rest of the formalities were dispensed with and they were able to walk out of the watch house.
"How shall we handle the follow-up?"
"As soon as the courier arrives from Bahama, we'll check whether that...... Forest whatever-it-was was taken, and deal with it then."
It would be confirmed tomorrow, but the result could be taken as already settled. A caravan that puts profit first does not vouch for anything it is not sure of.
Unlike Hans's party, who walked out of the watch house with their heads high, the self-proclaimed 'victims' sat dejected in a corner behind bars.
"We got a report that you'd gone into the watch house, Mister Hans."
"Did you?"
Hans said it in a tone that suggested he did not much mind. Reading his face, Emily quickly added.
"Er...... one of our caravan hands recognized you going in, you see. So I came by just in case."
"Either way, my thanks."
"Hehehe. It was nothing."
The Albert Caravan's Belborn branch was a two-story building with a warehouse and a stable for the carts and horses — a proper estate.
'A bigger caravan than I thought.'
Given quarters inside it by the good offices of Emily, the caravan master's niece, Hans unpacked and laid his tired body down.
'Comfortable. I suppose this counts as having connections, of a sort.'
For all the excessive consideration the caravan showed him, he did not find it particularly burdensome. His contribution to their journey had been clear enough, and he carried himself accordingly.
Waking late the next day, Hans presented himself at the watch house.
"Your account is accepted and the Belborn watch takes custody of the five men. Here is your certificate. And......."
Having cross-checked the information that arrived from Bahama, the watch acknowledged Hans's account and moved the five men to the prison.
"We've been wronged!"
"We're honest merchants. That man is the robber!"
The protests of the men being dragged away had none of yesterday's strength in them.
Collecting a small compensation and returning to the caravan branch, Hans saw the boy struggling under Emily's attentions and laughed under his breath. And then, all at once, he was startled.
'How long has it been since I laughed?'
Not a laugh twisted out of him by an extreme situation, not a self-mocking laugh at his own expense, but a laugh that was simply a laugh.
The moment the boy saw Hans, his face turned into that of a lost child finding his parents, and he shoved past Emily and fled to him. His expression was saying, 'That lady is a pest.'
Hans took the boy and went to a smithy to pick up whatever was serviceable. And when the boy was fingering a plate mail, he tapped his arm and held out a breastplate that covered the chest and belly.
"You can have an arm or a leg cut off and you won't die, so long as you get through the pain. But if your innards are damaged, you should assume there's no chance of surviving."
And he asked Emily's help in acquiring a serviceable packhorse.
***
The sense that home was near came first through the food. What they ate in the army was no more than fodder meant to put strength in a man. The heavily seasoned dish he had eaten in the first village he stopped at after his discharge had produced a catastrophe of running to the privy all dawn, and after that he had made a habit of eating as slowly as he could.
His picking way of eating looked, at a glance, rather cultured. It went so far that Emily later told her uncle, 'The way Mister Hans eats is like a noble.'
Food takes its character from each region's own ingredients, methods of keeping, and ways of cooking. Hans put a spoonful of potato soup in his mouth, savored it as though he were chewing it, and murmured.
"That's the taste."
The breastplate must have been uncomfortable, because the boy kept twisting his upper body all through the meal to correct his posture. Emily watched him doing it and smiled. An elderly caravan hand who saw the scene from beside her thought to himself.
'Well, I never. A maiden not yet married, and wearing a mother's smile.'