Oskalt (4)

…No.

Come to think of it, I might not need to kill the ghoul at all. It was still down where it had fallen, smashing everything within reach of its hands. Killing it meant accepting a certain amount of risk, and there was no way around that, yet the gain from killing it was next to nothing. Its ankle was already broken, wasn’t it? It couldn’t follow us any further.

So I decided we’d move on at once, just as we were. I climbed onto Pormel and rode over to Kalen, who was some distance off. He heard me out and nodded.

“Understood. But do you remember which way Oskalt is, sir knight?”

“…For now, we keep straight on the way we came. Getting out of the forest comes first.”

There were almost no stars to be seen, because the great leaves of the old trees blanketed the sky. Maybe the species was simply like that, or maybe even these old trees had turned into ghouls, but the roots were dead and the leaves still grew thick.

We soon set off again from a spot well clear of where the troll ghoul lay. Pormel ran at a moderate pace, yawning as though tired and smacking its lips.

“Shame about the baggage we left behind.”
“If you think you can cut through that wave of them on your own, I won’t stop you.”
“I’m just saying. That was the best stuff I squeezed out of the church.”

Everything around us showed only dimly in the dark, yet Pormel somehow kept running, weaving this way and that around the lie of the land.

How much time had passed? Long enough that the outlines of the old trees, streaming past like wind, had begun to bore me.

Then the strength slowly drained out of Kalen’s arms where they gripped my waist. I looked back with a start and saw his face, mouth hanging open, fast asleep. So I used his robe to lash him firmly to my waist, and through the thin sound of the wind I could hear him snoring.

“…”

Pormel cut a sidelong glance at Kalen, as if in protest. I could feel how sleepy it was; it came right through to me. It was going to run the whole night without a moment’s rest, so I could hardly say a word against any protest it cared to make.

“We’ll rest properly once we’re out.”

— Krk.

Pormel muttered something. Sadly, I couldn’t make it out.

Half a day had passed since we came out of the primeval forest.

From one gentle hill onward the ground climbed steadily, until before I knew it we were high enough that a look back showed the road we’d travelled far below. Proof that we were on the right road, since Oskalt was a city built on fairly high ground.

“It’s a bit chilly.”
“Then put on more layers.”
“What clothes have I got to put… ah.”

Kalen fished out the robe he’d lashed in among the baggage. In the end he threw a second robe on over the thick one and looked thoroughly pleased with himself. The result was something like a ghoul grown plump on a long feed.

“We’ve only come a few days north and the air’s completely different.”
“The height has a hand in it too. Oskalt is a city on a plateau as well.”
“How big is Oskalt? If it’s anything like Pirberk, I don’t think we’ll find him easily this time either.”
“As I remember it, not so large a place. It was built from the start as a fortress city, to withstand a siege.”
“A fortress city? It’s right in the middle of the domain — when would there ever be a siege?”

I looked at Kalen for a moment, and the moment we’d met in the manor at Brus came back to me. Just as I’d changed, a great deal about him had changed too. But when you call to mind what has changed, what hasn’t comes to mind along with it, and the clear gaze of a man meeting the world for the first time was still there in him.

“Man’s enemies aren’t only men. How large do you suppose Erbern is?”
“No idea. How large?”
“About half of Slonhar.”
“That small?”
“It could hardly be otherwise. The whole of Erbern’s plateau is as good as a battlefield, so there’s no room to widen the domain.”
“A war… with beasts? What kind of beasts?”
“Undead.”

Erbern’s plateau was one of the great homes of the undead. Whether they flocked in from all over the empire or arose on the plateau of their own accord, nobody knows. All anyone knew was that every part of Erbern that could be called plateau was packed thick with them.

“Around Oskalt, at least, they seem to have cleared them out. It’s the one city in Erbern with an open trade road.”

“…It’s that bad? Won’t we run into them on the way, then?”

“I can’t speak for the other cities, but Oskalt will be safe. Otherwise, how would the coachman who carried Pindel have got there so early?”

Erbern’s plateau was damp in every season. I drew a deep breath and filled my lungs with the heavy, wet air. It smelled of dank water and iron mixed together.

“Undead… that’s a bit unsettling.”
“They’re no different from any other beast. A ghoul is a kind of undead, for one.”
“Those ghouls were unsettling, though, weren’t they?”

“…I can’t say they weren’t.”

Undead. Those who die and yet cannot die.

For an ordinary man like Kalen, finding them unsettling was only natural. But I felt it a little differently.

What is death? The end point of a life, and its full stop. The undead wander forever through an endless story with no destination, and how tedious is a story that never ends? Death is the only key that can strike off the shackle called life. So death is a blessing.

And undeath is a curse.

“Strictly speaking, I must be undead myself. I come back to life when I ought to die.”

The difference between me and the undead isn’t so great. The undead are corpses raised once, and I am a corpse raised again and again. A corpse whose shackle will never be struck off, however many times it tries to die.

“…Do you hate that?”

I’d got my hands on eternal life, the wish of all mankind. To say I hated it would be a lie, but to say I liked it would be a lie as well.

“Well. What’s there to like about it?”

Kalen bit his lower lip as though thinking it over. Then he smiled faintly.

“Sir knight, I’m happy right now. I’m glad to be alive, glad I get to have this moment. Are you unhappy right now, sir knight?”

Happiness is relative. There are countless people in the world, and each of them holds a standard of happiness all their own, so defining it is impossible. Am I unhappy right now? Does this moment fall short of the measure of happiness I hold?

This much, at least, was clear.

“…No. I’m not unhappy.”

“Then you could say you’re happy right now, sir knight.”
“Perhaps I am.”

“If you’d died long ago, sir knight, you’d never have been able to feel this happiness. Not now, not afterward, and not beyond that either.”

Kalen bored into the weak points of what I said with terrible persistence. He dug me up, and with a few words brought down centuries of contemplation.

“You feel pain because you’re alive. That’s no different from being able to be happy because you’re alive. Pain and happiness are both just other names for the process of taking in the world.”

Happiness is relative. Then are life and death absolute?

Kalen was saying they weren’t, that undeath was no curse.

Not dying is agony. But because I don’t die, I can laugh, and weep, and remember. Undeath is a curse and a blessing both.

“Perhaps there’s no need to pity the undead just because they’re undead.”

I laughed, and hearing me, Kalen laughed as well. All of them things the dead cannot do.

Oskalt, the fortress city where the living and the dead coexist.

Unlike other cities, its gates were shut tight.

“…Something feels off here.”

Men were posted permanently on the walls of dressed stone and on the timber watchtowers, keeping watch on the land around them. There was none of the ease and idleness ordinary guards show.

“A fortress city is like this by nature. It was built as a base of war, and it really is at war.”

A war not with men but with the undead. A war that will never end short of ploughing Erbern under. Guards in a war like that can’t help pouring out a great deal of nervous energy, so they tire all the more easily, and deep fatigue had built up in the faces of the soldiers standing watch.

“What do we do?”

The shut gate didn’t look to have a gap wide enough for an ant. But in fact the answer was simple.

“Follow me.”

Sometimes going at a thing head-on is the right answer, and this was one of those times.

As the two of us came in close to the wall, the soldier on watch hurriedly levelled a crossbow down at us. I looked steadily at the glinting bolt-head.

“State who you are and what you want!”
“Roan Belgard, free knight. I’ve come looking for gold coins with no owner.”

The soldier disappeared behind the wall, and Kalen took the chance to whisper.

“What was all that gold-coin stuff about?”
“Free knights’ cant. It means: is there any work worth settling while I stay a few days in the city?”

That added line wasn’t just me striking a pose. It made me more credible, because using the free knights’ cant backed up who I was to a certain degree.

“They didn’t throw us straight out, at least. How did you know it would go like this?”
“You can tell by looking.”

Most cities welcome free knights, and Oskalt would be no different. A free knight takes on the ‘bothersome’ work, the sort that’s awkward to dispose of and that nobody wants to dirty their own hands with. That kind of work piles up the less leisure a city has to deal with its own problems, so Oskalt, locked in a life-and-death struggle with the undead all day long, was bound to have plenty of it waiting for a free knight to settle. A free knight is generally a problem by his absence, and never once by his presence.

While Kalen and I were passing the time with idle talk, the soldier who’d vanished leaned back out.

“Do you have anything solid to prove you’re a free knight?”

Oskalt evidently ranked among the more thorough cities. There’s no shortage of riff-raff who put on a passable suit of armor and pass themselves off as free knights, so it was no wonder.

“A paladin’s token from an imperially recognized church. I don’t belong to the church, but it vouches for who I am.”
“A church… Talios, then. Very well. We’ll open the gate, so stand back.”

What I’d drawn out was the paladin’s token I’d been given on leaving Pirberk. Unlike the apostle’s token I’d received fifty years ago, this was something the church issues to every knight whose standing it vouches for. So in the soldier’s eyes I’d look like some lunatic who had turned down a full paladin’s place in the church to call himself a free knight, the trade of fallen nobles. Broadly speaking, that wasn’t wrong either.

There came the sound of pulleys turning, and soon the gates of Oskalt swung slowly open with a heavy, ponderous sound. Kalen and I passed through the small opening at a pace neither slow nor fast.

“Sir free knight of the Talios church, welcome to Oskalt.”

Once they’d let us inside the wall, they had no reason to shut us out, so the soldiers treated us in a friendly way. While Kalen exchanged greetings with them, I quickened my steps all the more.

Pindel Morein. At the end of a pursuit, long or short depending on how you counted it, the heart of the whole thing was right under my nose.