The Lord of the Rust Mountains (Complete) Page 10

  “I...” He forced the words out. “I want to study under this man!” His voice carried surprisingly well, enough that all the other dwarves, taken aback by his sudden outburst, fell silent. “I want to know what makes a warrior, what bravery is! I want to grasp the answer for myself, with my own hands!” His words were filled with a heat like fire. “Without exposing myself to danger, without taking a step forward on my own, what of warriors can I learn?! What of bravery can I learn?!”

  Al pulled himself up straight, his braided black hair bouncing as he did. A scorching light dwelt in his wide-open hazel eyes. “I want to be one who feels no shame in who I am, not before the great spirits of our ancestors nor before the gods who created us! How can I claim to be a dwarf without knowing of battle, valor, and chivalry?! I have no intention of changing my mind!”

  Al’s lone shouting overwhelmed the burly mountain-folk. I was amazed. To be honest, I never expected him to be able to say it so clearly. He was more amazing than I thought.

  “Sir Will! I would like you to make me your squire here and now!” Al ran up to me, got down on one knee, clasped his hands together, and held them up to me. I heard Blood’s voice in the back of my mind.

  — In the way of the warrior, clasping both your hands together and presenting them to another is a symbol of offering your “sincerity.” If a warrior offers you his sincerity, you have two choices: you either reject it, or you accept it by wrapping both your hands around theirs. Don’t do it lightly. Accepting a warrior’s sincerity is serious business.

  It was night in the temple. Blue will-o’-the-wisps inhabited his vacant eye sockets. His skeletal jaw clacked audibly as he grinned.

  — What does it mean? Well...

  “The sincerity thou hast offered—” I took his fervent hands and wrapped mine around them. “I shall protect by mine own hands.”

  When we finished our atypical handshake and Al looked up at me, his expression, which had been stiff and anxious with tension and heady emotion, relaxed with relief.

  “That’s not the full ceremony, but all the same, I have accepted Al’s oath to become my squire. As his knight and master, I will now take your questions.” Clapping Al on the shoulder a couple times, I looked around at the dwarves. “I would also like to ask a question of all of you. Is my name insufficient to be his master, even if this is only temporary?”

  A squire was not that low a status to hold in this day and age. There were even some members of the royal family and sons of nobility who, in order to add to their own prestige, served as squires of knights noted for their military and moral excellence.

  In terms of the Kingdom, I was the feudal lord ruling over a faraway piece of land, and a retainer’s retainer. Specifically, I was a retainer of Ethelbald, Duke of Southmark, who was himself a retainer of King Owen. So, I wasn’t that high in the social order. But all the same, I had made names for myself and was well known as the Wyvern Killer, the Beast Killer, the Torchbearer, and the Faraway Paladin, among others. Whatever status Al had among the dwarves, I was confident that I had achieved enough that he shouldn’t feel ashamed to work for me.

  The dwarves answered my question with hums and murmurs, stuck for an answer. Then Ghelreis muttered solemnly, “It is not for us to argue.”

  “You accept this, Ghelreis?” another dwarf replied.

  “The young master wills it.”

  “But—”

  “The young master,” Ghelreis repeated, “who has been considerate to our hardships and never once insisted upon his own way since childhood wills it.”

  The dwarves who had been trying to argue back said nothing further.

  “Young master, I will find a way to tell Grendir.”

  “Th-Thank you, Ghelreis.”

  “However—” Ghelreis turned a hard stare on Al, who twitched. “I will think of you as having died this day.”

  “I...”

  “Now that you have placed your sincerity in the hands of a superior warrior, never treat your life as something too precious to lose. Serve him well and be prepared to die without hesitation if that is called for.” The dwarf with the scar spoke to Al with a stern expression. The tension in his words made Al’s expression tighten as well. “Are we agreed?”

  “I understand!”

  Ghelreis looked at me. “Grendir and I will pay you a visit in the near future. The young master is in your hands.”

  “I hear you loud and clear,” I answered, and the dwarf’s scar creased as he smiled gracelessly. It was the smile of a warrior, and it reminded me of Blood.

  The black-haired dwarf Al became my squire, and Grendir paid us a formal visit a few days later. Good to his word, Ghelreis seemed to have persuaded him.

  “Uhh, so, Al,” I said. “Squires are often asked to cover for their own expenses, but I will be providing your equipment and also paying you a wage.”

  “A-Are you sure you don’t mind?”

  “It’s not a question of minding. I can’t go taking money from the dwarves who moved here right now. They’d see me as a heartless monster.” Many of them still didn’t even have a reliable way of supporting themselves. There was no way I could take money from them. “So let’s talk about how much to pay you.”

  “Huh? Uhm... If I can serve you, that’s... enough for...”

  “No.”

  “O-Okay.”

  “One thing that a certain person I know always told me is that money is important. Hmm, let’s see. Taking on a squire isn’t quite like hiring a servant, for example, but—”

  “Right.”

  “If I don’t pay you or you don’t accept payment, that can be taken as your work, your ‘sincerity,’ not having any value.”

  He didn’t reply.

  “It might not be very classy to put a price on everything, but it’s what everyone looks at, so I want to make sure I don’t cut any corners where money is concerned.” I spoke with finality, thinking that Gus would probably say the exact same thing.

  “You’re so adult.”

  “I’m just trying hard to grow up.”

  We decided upon his pay and the other details of the arrangement. He would live in my mansion and work for me, and join in with my morning training. After that, I started to think about what I’d teach him first, which caused me some hesitation.

  “All right, once more around!”

  Al followed behind me, panting as we ran laps of the city.

  Now that I thought about it, I had never taken a pupil before and had no experience in teaching. I tried remembering what I’d been taught by Blood, but there were a lot of differences between me, who had begun learning as a child, and Al, who already had a grown body. In what way and in what order was I supposed to teach him things like how to fight and how to be a warrior, and how could I get them to stick?

  Very soon after beginning to consider these things, I felt a renewed appreciation for Blood, Mary, and Gus. They had taught me their own skills as if there was nothing to it, but now I wondered how much planning had gone on behind the scenes to get me to absorb so many things so efficiently. Which should be taught first, footwork or stance? Standing here in the shoes of a teacher, I realized that even seemingly insignificant decisions like these had logic and planning behind them.

  “Almost there! Push yourself!” I ran just ahead of him to encourage him. He was sprinting his heart out and almost collapsing from exhaustion, but he was still fighting to keep up.

  Teaching was making me realize just how far I still was from the place my parents had reached. But one day, I was sure, I’d catch up to them.

  “Good work! Walk around for a bit to get your breath back, and we’ll move on to muscle training!”

  “Y-Yes, sir!”

  “In a battle, muscular strength is the foundation upon which everything else rests. In the words of my mentor, ‘Get ripped, and you can solve pretty much everything by force!’”

  “Y-Yes, sir!”

  So I could stand shoulder to shoulder with thos
e three, so I could tell them with a smile how far I’d come, and so I could do justice to the sincerity Al had offered me, I vowed to do my utmost.

  ◆

  Now then. It bears repeating that what that was expected from me was the military might to guarantee the region’s safety and for me to use my title of paladin to stand in front of His Excellency and represent the area. So I was providing my squire Al with a warrior’s education as well, hoping first of all for him to become physically strong. The woodlands around here were dangerous, and I regularly set foot in the most perilous parts of them and fought against innumerable dangers. If he couldn’t protect himself, he would be useless.

  Al aside, however, you might ask if I wasn’t doing anything remotely resembling the activities of a feudal lord, which is a separate question worth answering.

  There was a little bit of a gathering that day.

  Because of the Fertile Kingdom’s Southmark expansion policy, people from many areas of the northern continent of Grassland were coming to settle here.

  For example, the cook in that mutton place in Whitesails was from Arid Climate in the northeast. Reystov, I suspected based on his external characteristics and his imposing yet quiet bearing, was probably born somewhere even further north on the northern continent, probably around the Ice Mountains. Ethel and Bishop Bagley, of course, had come from the original Fertile Kingdom and specifically its capital, Ilia’s Tear.

  Many others came from the Allied Kingdoms, a federation of small- and medium-sized kingdoms to the west of Fertile, or from the Hundred Warring Kingdoms in the southeast, which was still a conflict zone where warlords fought for power. Still more came from the islands dotted around Middle-sea, from large forests all over that were home to the elves, from the dwarven mountains, and from even farther away than that. There were also wanderers like Bee the troubadour, who had no singular home at all to speak of and traveled from place to place.

  Torch Port really was home to all kinds of people, and they tended to live in concentrated areas with others from the same country or cultural sphere, so every street and section of the city had its own personality.

  On the other hand, the fact that each individual part had its own personality was also a source of conflict. Gestures carried different meanings in different cultures, certain expressions could be taken as serious insults, disagreements could arise in contracts and payments as a result of the two sides having different business customs. And in some cases, things couldn’t even get that far because the groups couldn’t understand each other’s language to begin with.

  So yes, there was trouble, and all kinds of it. Early on had been the worst. There was even one time when an argument became magnified, people standing up for one side led to more standing up for the other, and the situation escalated into almost becoming a battle between multiple groups in the middle of town, their families and friends behind them. Menel, Reystov, and I settled things down by force before they got serious, but it just served to underline how scary differences in culture really were.

  If you let these kinds of things go, the turmoil would only get worse, so after consulting with the priests, I also created a variety of rules and penalties that would apply only within the city. I established rules to observe when selling, rules to observe when using the boats and port, and a rule for when problems arose; that one said to make your case with logic and reason to the feudal lord or one of the priests who worked for him and await instructions. They also laid out what kind of punishment you would receive if you ignored this process and started a disturbance or joined in with one and escalated it, among other things.

  The experience made me realize that the ancient laws of my past world that placed equal culpability on both parties in the case of a fight had been made for a good reason. It also made me think of the struggles faced by Ethel, who ruled over the larger city of Whitesails, and Bishop Bagley, who ran the main temple there.

  In any case, in addition to the firm-handed approach of rules and punishments, some softer touches were also required. One of these was to set up regular gatherings where representatives of each group would meet and talk. I had been trying to show up as much as possible, and that day, I left Al’s training to Menel so I could take part. I heard all kinds of different opinions and noted them down. We talked from late morning until the afternoon, with a break for lunch in the middle.

  After we broke up, I made my way to a certain tavern. It was the one where I had talked with Al. I just wanted to check that there hadn’t been any particular problems after the incident and that the owner’s illness hadn’t flared up again. It had only been a minor illness, so I didn’t expect a problem, but illnesses that had their roots in lifestyle or nutrition problems sometimes recurred easily, even after I cured them with benediction. Neither prayer nor miracles were all-powerful.

  “Okay, so...”

  The “feudal lord walking in during business hours incident” wasn’t something I was keen to repeat, so I made sure that the sign hanging on the door did read “Closed.” I could hear talking going on inside, so I went to knock on the door, but before I could—

  “I’m sorry to spring this on you. Thank you very much!”

  “Not at all. Consider it done.”

  The door swung open in front of me.

  “Oh!” My eyes opened wide in astonishment.

  “Oh my! It’s you, sir!” The tavern girl had her hand over her mouth and was looking at me in surprise from behind the dwarf who had opened the door.

  “Good afternoon,” he said.

  At the door to the tavern, I had run straight into the dwarf with the scar, Ghelreis.

  ◆

  The tavern owner’s illness seemed to have completely cleared up, and he showed no signs of another flare-up. They invited me to stay awhile, but I said I couldn’t inconvenience them while they were busy preparing to open for the evening, and I took my leave immediately, with Ghelreis walking down the street beside me. We were headed the same way.

  Neither of us was saying a word.

  Ghelreis, like most dwarves, didn’t speak much, and he had quite a harsh air about him that made it difficult to start up a conversation with him. But the silence was worse; I couldn’t bear it. I brought up a topic.

  “What brought you to the tavern today, Ghelreis?”

  “They have a reservation for a large party or something in about ten days. They hired me to procure a decent amount of beast flesh.”

  “So you hunt for a living?”

  “No. I’m a kind of mercenary, hired muscle. But I happen to have a little skill with crossbows and traps as well, you see—”

  “It’s something like a side job, then?”

  “That would be a fair description.”

  Once I actually tried talking to him, I found he was a surprisingly eloquent speaker. So he was a mercenary, a warrior for hire. That was the same job Blood had. The old scar on his face had clearly been made by a sword, so it made a lot of sense.

  We walked down the street in the glittering afternoon sunlight. The faint clanging of hammers reached us from some distant workshop. Different groups of people enjoying their own conversations passed us by. Every so often, one of them would notice me and acknowledge me with a nod or a bow.

  “It’s a good town,” Ghelreis said. “It’s almost unimaginable how quickly it’s developed, considering that it was only built a few years ago.”

  “Yes. It couldn’t have been done without all the help we received from all kinds of people.”

  Ghelreis nodded. Then silence fell again. This time, it wasn’t so suffocating.

  “Paladin,” Ghelreis started.

  “Yes?”

  “I was once a warrior who served the Iron Country.” He spoke quietly, wearing a calm expression as he walked beside me. “At the time, I was still inexperienced as a warrior and was not permitted to die with our lord. I held to his last wishes and protected the people who had been left behind. I earned my daily bread by taking up
my weapon and fighting for whoever would hire me.”

  I remained quiet and listened.

  “It isn’t easy to find a place to live in peace. We wandered across many lands to make it here.” Despite how quietly he was speaking, lots of different emotions showed in his voice. I thought I could sense them churning inside him.

  “Please, guide the young master well.”

  “I will.” I stopped walking, looked at him with a serious expression, and placed my fist against my heart. “By the flame.”

  ◆

  A line of sweat ran down my neck. Al and I were locked in a grapple on the grass in my yard. Menel was watching us from the sidelines.

  After a lot of thought, I’d decided that the next thing to teach Al after the fundamentals was grappling. Al had a naturally good physique, and appeared to have muscle strength, too, despite the fact that he hadn’t had any training. Maybe that was just the nature of dwarves. My idea had been to begin by teaching him grappling moves, where muscle power had an especially large influence, so that he could gain confidence in his own abilities.

  But I hadn’t been expecting this. I was somewhat stronger than him, but even though I was pulling him towards me with all my strength, he was starting to resist me. In a simple push-and-pull exercise, he was holding his ground to a certain extent. He was showing astonishing muscle strength and intuition considering that he hadn’t received any specialist training. There was no other way to say it: he had a natural talent for this.

  I understood the reason why he’d been hesitant to hit or grab anyone before. With this extraordinary level of natural muscle strength, it wasn’t surprising he’d developed an attitude like that. In fact, he might actually have injured someone unintentionally at some point in his past, or at least come close to doing so.

  “Al.” I spoke casually, deliberately not letting any strain or effort show in my expression. “Is this your full strength?”

  He grunted and pushed harder. My whole body groaned under his tremendous power, but I resisted and pushed back. The body Blood and I had forged together wasn’t so puny that it couldn’t handle this.