The Margrave's 10th-Class Ne'er-do-well Chapter 37 : Chapter 37 — La Tu Balaka (2)

༺ 𓆩 Chapter 37 — La Tu Balaka (2) 𓆪 ༻

「Translator — Creator」

᠃ ⚘᠂ ⚘ ˚ ⚘ ᠂ ⚘ ᠃

"Raaaah!"

The soldiers who had witnessed the King of Wolves's death with their own eyes roared in triumph.

The battle had not yet ended, and countless Hellwolves yet remained upon the field, but that was no longer of any account to the n. Their spirits rekindled, they hurled themselves upon the beasts without the slightest hesitation.

With the King of Wolves dead, the Hellwolves found themselves without a head, and the chain of command that had bound them together was broken. They who had, but monts before, moved as a single disciplined army were now nothing more than stray beasts scattered from the pack. Pierced through by spear and blade, the Hellwolves no longer bared their teeth. They fled the camp and scattered to the winds, each one to his own way.

"Besser!"

"Besser!"

"Besser!"

The surviving soldiers chanted his na.

It was a victory. By any man's reckoning, the one who had led them to it was Besser.

But the joy of the victory did not last long.

The tents of the camp had burned and collapsed and were near ruin. The corpses of Hellwolves and of n alike lay strewn about in every direction. The state of the n's bodies in particular was beyond wretchedness. Limbs torn off. Heads wrenched away, and nothing else. Upper halves cleaved from lower, entrails spilled across the earth. To look upon it was in itself a pain.

"Move the dead! You may drink on your victory when all has been set in order, and not before!"

Carlson drove the soldiers on. To leave corpses lying long was to invite plague as surely as the sun follows the dawn. Vermin, stench, and the scent of rotting at that would draw yet more magic-beasts out of the wilderness. To forestall all of that, to set the camp to rights, was the more urgent task by far.

"They burn well."

"Aye, that they do."

Isaac answered Carlson in kind.

Beyond the palisade they had dug a great pit, and there they had gathered the corpses of the Hellwolves apart to burn them. Unlike the flas that consud the bodies of the n, these flas drew on mana as they burned and bore a pale blue tint. The fires themselves were fiercer by far.

Without their noticing, night had passed and the grey of dawn was creeping into the east. Black smoke rose in ragged plus into the sky. Four or five of the soldiers bearing bodies stopped in their tracks and stood with dulled eyes upon the blue-burning fire.

“Move, you lot...!”

Carlson made to bark at them, but Isaac caught his arm and shook his head.

"Let them have their mont of mourning."

"……"

Carlson did not care for it, but he bowed to Isaac's word.

In Winterband, if the man who slept at the next pallet in the tent was dead by the next dawn, there was not one man who grieved him. It was not that they were not grieved, nor that it did not hurt, nor that they had not co to love him. It was that if they did not so harden themselves, they would not be able to fight the next battle.

For the n of this place, by contrast, this was no doubt the first battle in which they had seen casualties on such a scale.

"There is a first ti for every man."

Isaac spoke it with an even voice. It was too old a manner of speaking for words that had co from the lips of a boy whose voice had yet to settle.

"Are you unshaken by it, my lord?"

"That I would not claim. But there is no other course. I must grow used to it."

So Isaac answered Carlson's question. Leaning upon a longsword that ca nearly to his chest, the boy cut a deeply awkward figure. Had it not been for the battle just past, one might have taken him for a child who had co wandering back from playing at war, knowing nothing.

But Carlson had seen with his own eyes how Isaac had fought, had seen how the boy had steered the very mood of the battlefield. Out of weariness and despair, a will rising up sharp and clear.

Is that, then, what Goethe looks like.

The thought ca to Carlson, unbidden.

"Co to think of it. Where is Besser?"

"Yes, where. I saw him to the slaying of the King of Wolves, but past that, I know not."

Neither Isaac nor Carlson, their minds full of the setting of the camp to rights, had spared any thought for Besser.

"Now that I consider it, the King of Wolves's body is nowhere to be seen."

"So it is."

At Carlson's word, Isaac marked it as well.

"Besser, my lord? When the last of the Hellwolves were driven off, he went sowhere."

"Sowhere where?"

"That, I would not know."

Isaac went from soldier to soldier, asking after Besser's course.

"He shouldered the King of Wolves's corpse and set off. That such strength was yet left in him, I could scarce believe. The chief is the chief indeed, I tell you. Ah, my lord, the word 'chief' is but a na the n use. Pay it no mind. Whatever any may say, the commander of this place is the young lord. The Lord of Goethe, I an."

By the soldiers' telling, Besser had hoisted the King of Wolves, whose bulk was ten and more tis his own, onto his shoulders and had left the camp.

"Here. These look to be Besser's tracks."

"So they are."

Sharp-eyed Carlson had found the signs of Besser's passage. In that dry, hard earth of the wasteland, the prints had sunk with an unusual depth. As though a trendous weight bore down upon them. The trail ran on and on along the ridgelines of the hills.

"Carlson. I leave the camp to you."

"What do you an to do?"

"Nothing in particular. I thought I would take so air."

"If you are going out, my lord, go on horseback. I will send for Hans."

"No. I think it better I go alone. There is sothing I would like to turn over in my mind as I walk."

Isaac gathered up the soundest shovel he could find within the camp and set off alone on Besser's trail.

There was no great purpose to it. Only that old thoughts had risen up within him.

The self who had been able to do nothing as Goethe fell.

The self who had borne Jonas' feather-light body back up to the surface.

The self who had subsisted, day by day, through the winter of the ruined manse of Goethe.

They had co back to him.

And he had thought: perhaps Besser is the sa. Perhaps he, too, for ten and more years, has been floundering in a helplessness that is like a bog from which there is no escape.

It was that thought that had sent him on.

The tracks of a giant bearing a great wolf upon his back lay clear and plain, and they guided Isaac on. Walk as he would, Besser did not co into view.

The sun climbed to the middle of the sky, and then fell away to the west. Before he knew it, Isaac had entered deep into the Black Forest. Yet still the trail the giant had left was unmistakable; grasses broken, brush trampled flat, making a plain road. Isaac had only to follow it.

The cool air of the forest. The occasional cry of a bird. The voices of insects in the grass. The feel of so presence whose shape he could not make out.

Having been up the whole of a night and then having walked a whole of a day, Isaac was weary enough to have slept upon his feet. And yet, step by dogged step, he drove himself on.

The place where Isaac ca at last to a halt was a place deep in the Black Forest where a great thick-trunked old tree stood, larger by far than any other.

Thud—!!!

Thud—!!!

While the red glow of the evening sun left its faint tracery through the underbrush, Besser, again and again, was striking his axe into the earth.

Beside the old tree lay the King of Wolves's corpse.

"……"

"……"

Besser had seen Isaac, but he said nothing.

Isaac, too, said nothing. He only took up the shovel he had carried with him and began to heave out the earth from the pit Besser had begun.

The giant and the boy, in their silence, dug a pit deeper and wider. To bury a loss, a grief, a longing, one needed a deeper pit still. A wider pit. A greater pit.

The sun set, and true darkness descended upon the forest. Besser built up a fire. The two of them only watched the flickering of it.

The pit was yet too shallow to bury the King of Wolves within.

It needed to be deeper.

It needed to be wider.

To bury the aged feelings of so many years, it was still, still not enough.

The giant and the boy did not speak.

Yet they each of them knew what it was they were doing.

It was a parting with the past.

Thud—!!!

Thud—!!!

When Isaac, who had been nodding off, opened his eyes again, Besser had returned to his wrestling with the earth. About Besser's mouth the blood had dried in black sars. He had eaten of the King of Wolves's flesh.

The spirit dwells in the flesh, and by the eating of the flesh one takes the spirit into oneself. So taught the faith of the Baitur tribe.

Though the King of Wolves was dead, so part of his soul would, for all the days Besser yet lived, walk at his side.

Isaac took up his shovel. His head rang and there was no strength left in him. He had not eaten a thing since the battle in which life and death had passed before him. Yet still Isaac braced himself upon the shovel and lifted his body once more.

One shovelful, and another.

He heaved the earth out.

By Besser's asure, it was hardly a help worth the na. But Isaac did not stop.

This was a courtesy. A courtesy to Besser, who had earned his honor in the defense of Vinfeldt. As one in whom ran half the blood of Goethe, and half the blood of a great chieftain. A courtesy to the chieftain of the Baitur who had fought and died in the defense of his tribe. A courtesy to a great warrior.

Blisters rose on his hands, and his palms split and tore. Still he went on.

The bloody history between Goethe and the tribes of Vinfeldt could not be undone. But one could make the effort. One could hold out a hand.

A bird sang.

A grass insect sang.

A Hellwolf cried far off in the dark.

The sun rose.

The sun leaned.

The sun set.

Thud—!!!

Besser drove the haft of his axe deep into the mound of earth that had risen up. The burial of the King of Wolves, which had seed as though it would never reach its end, had ended.

Isaac gazed, lost in thought, upon the great old tree. The body of the King of Wolves would rot in this earth. It would feed the insects. It would break down and beco the nourishnt of that tree.

How tall would that tree grow, in the end?

When the dark rolled back in, Besser built the fire again.

"……"

The silence ran on.

Long into the deep of the night.

Crack–!!!

Crack-tch!

The sound of the sap bursting within the logs as the flas took them was clear and sharp in the stillness. Through the branches of the great old tree, a piece of the night sky could be seen. The stars seed to shine with an uncommon brightness.

"A star will have fallen."

"……?"

At the words that had left his mouth all at once, Besser shifted the eyes that had been fixed upon the fire.

"In the kingdom, it is believed that when a great man dies, a star falls."

"……?"

"Your father was a man who gave all that he had for the sake of his tribe. A great warrior. Among those countless stars, one of them will have fallen."

"……!"

Besser's eyes, which had turned to Isaac, went back to the fire.

The silence fell again.

Isaac did not press him. He only held his place.

When the dawn had passed, and nothing but the embers were left.

"I had not thought it."

Isaac, who had been nodding off again, opened his eyes at Besser's voice. The cracked, worn voice was level and dry.

"That it should be by my own hand my father was slain. I had not so much as dread of it."

"……"

Isaac did not answer Besser's murmuring. He only watched the grey of the coming dawn at a distance.

"That, having killed my father, I myself should yet be alive. That, still less."

"……"

The dark blue of the sky was thinning by degrees.

"From this mont on, my life is a life lived as sothing added."

"……"

"Young master. From now on, I shall call you Elder Brother."

"Eh? Of a sudden?"

Isaac, who had been listening in silence, let out a thin, rising note.

"The Margrave is the eldest brother to . The Chamberlain I call second elder brother. So what reason is there you should not beco my third elder brother, young master?"

"No. I am far younger than you."

"Such a trifling matter as that is of no consequence."

At the firmness of Besser's words, Isaac blinked.

In truth, Isaac was far the older of the two. He had lived thrice Besser's years, at the least. And yet, to hear it put this way, he could not help but find it absurd.

"From this day, I shall follow Elder Brother and none other."

"That is unsettling. I decline."

"There is no such choice left to Elder Brother."

Besser grinned broadly. Isaac, put at a loss, grinned with him.

And he thought.

That the new history of Vinfeldt was to begin from this mont on.

With the new lord, Isaac von Goethe.

END σϝ CHAPTER