Wandering Mercenary (2)

“I’ll go and talk it over with them, so I’d ask you to wait a moment.”

He hadn’t spoken deferentially, but there was no edge to it either. Since he hadn’t driven me off on the spot, the lie was already half a success.

Though it isn’t so far off the mark, really.

A paladin formally invested by a church is treated much the same as a regular knight of the central army. For a man not born noble, paladinhood was the one road to knighthood, and I was a knight invested by the church of Eladin. I was the one who conferred the investiture and the one who received it, but that made me a knight all the same, did it not? However absurd a sight it had been, a man knighting himself, good for nothing but a hollow laugh.

‘How amusing. Roan, you have a talent for theater.’

‘…I am never doing this again. I only did it because you told me to.’

‘With this you are my knight. Which is to say I can properly aid you now, as your patron.’
‘I don’t think anyone calls the bond between a god and a paladin a patronage.’
‘What does it matter, if I choose to call it so? If it galls you, then you be the god.’

There was a time when I played bishop and paladin for an audience of exactly one. Her. Looking back on it now, it was a graceless thing to watch, but the sheer weight of the years had swept over it since, and even that remained nothing but a dazzling memory.

That mercenary had left me steeped in a sudden bout of nostalgia. While I stood there in it, the merchants were busy moving back and forth. A little while later the mercenary I’d seen earlier came back out.

“What sort of trade is it you want?”
“As you can see, my squire is ill. I want medicine that will bring a fever down.”

At that they went off to mutter amongst themselves again, and it was a long stretch before the mercenary came back.

“Come inside.”

The mercenary led me to a wagon further in. I followed him and found one of the merchants waiting, a bottle of yellowish-brown liquid in his hand.

“A medicine decocted from willow bark.”

Fortunately, it was a remedy that worked on a fever without fail. In a world this overrun with barbaric cures of every sort, I couldn’t set my mind at ease until I had checked the medicine myself.

“The price?”
“That’ll depend on how your purse is doing.”

Refined willow bark runs somewhere around two or three silver coins. I was the one in a hurry here, so naturally I expected the merchant to name a cutthroat price.

“Three silver coins.”
“Done.”

To my surprise, the merchant took nothing above the market rate and handed the medicine over without a fuss. What he said next made the reason clear.

“In exchange, I’d ask you to escort us as far as Pirberk.”

A free knight, in the end, is nearer a mercenary than a knight. He holds no land, wanders the continent, and makes his living settling whatever commission comes to hand. The merchant’s game was to put a first-rate mercenary to work for the cheap price of some willow bark.

I turned it over a moment, then took the bottle he held out. It was not a losing trade.

“Fine.”
“My thanks. This wagon is spices, that one over there is cloth. Both are mine, so I’ll leave them to you.”

Even by merchant standards he was a considerably wealthy man. The column, halted on my account, started moving again, and I climbed onto the back of the wagon.

I tilted Kalen’s head back and poured the liquid in, and out of his senses as he was, he drank the medicine down in earnest. Little of it ended up spilled, which I liked.

With Kalen laid out in the wagon, I walked alongside it. I was in the middle of ordering Pormel to follow at a slow pace, in case of any mishap, when someone came up beside me. One of the merchant’s mercenaries.

“Sir knight, you dote something fierce on that squire of yours.”

He wore leather armor with a sword at his belt, like any other mercenary. He had no helm on, and his brown hair stirred in the wind.

“If they’re within reach of my hand, I tend to save whoever it is.”
“Interesting sort, you are. Then you’d save the worst villain under heaven too?”
“If he needs saving, I save him. If he needs killing, I kill him.”

“…That’s a strange way to put it.”

I save, and I kill. Good and evil were not opposites in me; I was both.

“In the end it comes down to my whim.”
“I’ll wager you’re the most peculiar man I’ve laid eyes on in my life.”
“Every man is peculiar. There’s not one the same as another.”

The mercenary folded his arms and let out a short laugh.

“Is that so? My name’s Drick Roban.”
“Roan Belgard.”

By the time the sun had gone down and the campfires were lit, Kalen had recovered some of his strength. I brought him a portion of preserved rations and bit into my own share beneath my helm. The dried jerky was hard and salty.

“…”

I could feel Kalen’s gaze; he had already polished off his own share. In the end I handed over the jerky I’d taken a single bite of and got to my feet.

“Brother. Not resting?”
“No need.”

Drick had come over to strike up a word with me while I stood the night watch. We had hardly met, and already I’d been promoted to ‘brother.’

“We’ve got our own rotation for the night watch. You go on and turn in, brother.”
“There’s nowhere for me to rest even if I did.”

Once I’d taken a commission, I wasn’t the sort to do the work by halves.

“Tch. Well, if that’s how it is, work away.”

Drick smacked his lips a moment, then came and stood beside me. The night air was cool.

“And you? Why aren’t you turning in?”
“Because I’m the one on duty tonight.”

Before long people dropped off to sleep one by one, until nothing was left but the sound of the campfire eating its way through the wood, knocking at the quiet of the night. Then Drick started talking.

“You’re a curious one, brother. You don’t seem like a knight.”
“You don’t look much like a mercenary yourself.”

Free knight or not, a knight is a noble, and treating a noble so freely was plainly out of the ordinary. The merchant could drop the deference; ours was an employer-and-hired-man arrangement. A mercenary was another matter, though, was he not?

“You’ve read it right. I’m no man who came up rolling around in mercenary work.”
“I see.”
“Lower than that. I came out of the back alleys.”

The moon was unusually bright that night. Not a cloud in the sky, and no real dark to speak of.

“What’s a back-alley brat able to do? I lived off the food the brothel women threw me and scrubbed their floors.”

“That wasn’t half bad, in its way. Not happy, mind, but a man could get by.”

“But then — I’d have been about fifteen. Some drunk decided he’d have me without paying.”

Drick stopped short. Whether he was calling that time back up or only catching his breath, I couldn’t tell. The short silence bored me, so I prodded him on.

“And?”

“And what d’you think — I stabbed him. Kept sticking him until the bastard was dead.”

I heard him let out a long breath. For no reason at all he ground his foot into the weeds, crushing them flat.

“Thing is, I still don’t know what’s any different now from back then.”

“I got out of the brothel quarter and became a butcher of men, but in the end I’m living the same life I lived crawling around the whorehouses.”

“Brother knight, you said every man’s peculiar? I don’t think so. Do you know how many men in this world live the same life as me? Well — I’ve counted dozens with my own eyes.”

An orphan of the back alleys is unhappy. A mercenary who took up a sword to stay alive is unhappy too. Can anyone draw a line between the two kinds of unhappiness? Can anyone dare declare that the one weighs heavier than the other?

“I’ve an eye for people. Anyone without one got beaten to death in the back alleys long ago. The way I see it, brother, you’re living a life not so different from mine.”

Unhappiness may wear a different shape, hope may be trampled on a different road, but the essence does not change. One man is born an orphan in a brothel district and becomes unhappy; another is bound in fetters that go by the names of love and vengeance, lives out centuries, and becomes unhappy. Weighing which of them is unhappier is a meaningless thing.

This was a medieval age that held more unhappy lives than happy ones, and in the end we were all living one and the same life. Its name was unhappiness.

“Is that so.”

So, then. Can it be said that we are different? What is the difference between Roan Belgard and Drick Roban?

“I am living the same life as you.”

But.

“That doesn’t mean you have to live the same life as me.”

Being unhappy does not mean you cannot become happy. Living the same life does not mean that life can never change.

“Drick. When we reach Pirberk, come and find me.”

A life does not come with the measure of its unhappiness fixed from birth. Having been unhappy until now is no reason to go on being unhappy. The past, unhappy like everyone else’s, cannot be changed, but at the least one need not go on living the same life as everyone else.

“I’ll have you slotted in as a paladin of the Talios church.”

So, then. Can it be said that we are the same? Once he has cut away the unhappiness he has watched and lived, is he still the same being he was in his brothel-district days?

“…You mean that?”

“I do.”

I had that much authority, at least. There was no doubt how the Talios church would treat a man I brought to them myself.

“Brother, how would you even… No. Never mind.”

Drick swallowed the rest and gave a short laugh. He wasn’t grinding the weeds underfoot anymore.

“I’d like to know why.”

The jerky I’d given up to Kalen came suddenly to mind. It had been good, that. Nice and salty.

“Didn’t I tell you? Whoever comes within reach of my hand, if I can save them, I tend to.”

Drick scratched his head.

“So it comes down to a whim after all.”
“That’s right. A whim.”

The moonlight was bright. Bright enough that I could clearly see Drick hold out his hand. In it was a strip of jerky.

Several days had passed since we joined the merchant party. With numbers like ours no ordinary beast came anywhere near, and though we ran into bandits once, they were dealt with without trouble.

Kalen had recovered completely and was back in fine fettle. He was a sociable sort by nature, it seemed. In no time he had made friends with everyone and was coming back with all manner of food.

“Sir knight, this is herb butter, apparently.”
“…And what exactly do you plan to do with butter?”
“Well, I couldn’t say. But butter’s one of those things it’s better to have than not, isn’t it?”

I was watching Kalen eat, a lump of butter piled on a slice of sour bread, when someone came up to the back of the wagon. It was Drick.

“Brother. We’re nearly there.”
“Understood.”

His eyes kept flicking toward Kalen’s bread, heaped with butter. Kalen felt the look and held out the slice he had been eating.

“Go on, have it. Herb butter, they say.”
“Oh — herb butter, is it? Then I’ll have to.”

Drick took the bread and vanished on the spot. Kalen was left biting into the butter with no bread at all.

“…Doesn’t that turn your stomach?”
“It does.”

Kalen laughed foolishly and offered me some butter as well. I shook my head and declined.

“Still, once it’s given you’ve got to finish it.”

While he polished off the butter, I got down from the wagon and went to walk beside the merchant driving the horses.

Far in the distance, the outline of walls that not even Brus could match came into view.

“We’re here. Well done, sir knight.”
“Think nothing of it.”

Pirberk. A city of the Darbar domain, and of the Talios church.

A fortnight’s road behind us, and we had only just arrived.