Spice & Wolf II Page 8

  At the same time, the shepherdess’s wages could not be high. She was worked hard for meager pay—there would certainly not be enough to set any aside. Lawrence guessed that was the reason she offered her services as an escort.

  But Lawrence’s merchant sense told him not to get any more deeply involved in the issue.

  His curiosity was sated. Pursuing it any further would make him responsible for further developments.

  “I see,” he said. “I daresay you need not worry about finding a different employer.”

  “Do you think so?” asked Norah.

  “Yes—with the Church’s insistence on honorable poverty, your pay will always be a bit low, but so long as God doesn’t abandon us, the Church will always exist. You’ll not want for work. As long as you have work, you’ll eat. Isn’t that something to be thankful for?”

  Having roused her concerns and suggested changing employers, Lawrence knew that the hard fact was nobody would hire a shepherd who’d caught the eye of the Church. It wouldn’t do for his actions to rob a lone girl of her livelihood.

  Lawrence wasn’t lying, in any case, and Norah seemed to accept it. She nodded several times, slowly. “I suppose so,” she agreed.

  It was true that having a job—any job—was good, but hope was important, too. Lawrence cleared his throat and spoke as cheerfully as he could manage.

  “Anyway, I’ve many acquaintances in Ruvinheigen, so we’ll I ry asking there after any merchants that might need protection from wolves. After all,

  God never said anything about having a nice little sideline, eh?”

  “Truly? Oh, thank you!”

  Norah’s face lit up so brilliantly that Lawrence couldn’t help but be a bit smitten.

  At such times, he was unable to muster his usual disdain for Weiz, the womanizing money changer in the port town of Pazzio.

  But Norah was not a town girl nor was she an artisan girl or a shop girl. She had a unique freshness to her. Part of it was a serious demeanor likely inherited from nuns at the almshouse, who had a slightly negative way of thinking, as if trying to suppress their feelings.

  Norah seemed to have taken that unpleasant tendency and replaced it with something else.

  It didn’t take a womanizer to notice it. Lawrence was willing to bet that Enek, who even now wagged his tail at Norah, was a male.

  “Settling in a town is the dream of all who live by travel, after all.”

  These words were still true.

  Norah nodded and raised her staff high.

  Her bell rang out and Enek bolted, turning the sheep neatly along the road.

  They began to talk about food for traveling, becoming excited at the prospect.

  Stretching across the wide plain, the road ahead was clear and easy.

  Shepherds’ nights come early. They decide where to camp well before the sun sets and are already curled up and sleeping by the time its red disc is low in the sky and the peasants are heading home from the fields. They then rise once the sun is down and the roads free of traffic, and they pass the night with their dogs, watching over the flock.

  When dawn begins to break, shepherds sleep on alternate shifts with their dogs. There is little time for sleep in the life of a shepherd—one reason why the profession is such a hard one. The life of a merchant, who can count on a good night’s sleep, is easy by comparison.

  “Hard work, this,” Lawrence muttered to no one in particular us he lay in the wagon bed, holding a piece of dried meat in his mouth. It wasn’t yet cold enough to bother with a fire.

  He glanced frequently at Norah’s form, curled up like a stone by the roadside. He’d offered her the wagon bed, but she had begged off, saying this was how she always slept, before laying down in the meager padding afforded by the grass.

  When he looked away from her, his eyes landed on Holo, who was at his right. Finally free from the prying eyes of humans, she had her tail out and had begun grooming it.

  She never tires of that, thought Lawrence to himself as he looked at the busily grooming Holo, her profile the very image of seriousness. Suddenly she spoke, quietly.

  “Daily care of one’s tail is important.”

  For a moment Lawrence didn’t understand, but then he remembered what he’d just said a moment age to himself; she was merely responding. He chuckled soundlessly, and Holo glanced at him, a question in her eyes.

  “Oh, you meant the child,” she said.

  “Her name’s Norah Arendt,” explained Lawrence, amused at Holo’s derisive use of child to refer to the girl.

  Holo looked past Lawrence at Norah, then back. Just as Lawrence opened his mouth, she snatched the jerky from it. Lawrence was stunned into silence for a moment. When he came to his senses and tried to take the meat back, he received such an evil eye from Holo that he withdrew his hand.

  It wasn’t necessarily because of his teasing, but she was clearly in a foul temper.

  She had gone out of her way to sit next to Lawrence as she groomed her tail, so presumably the object of her anger wasn’t him.

  The source of her bad mood was obvious, really.

  “Look, I did ask you,” said Lawrence.

  It sounded like an excuse. Holo sniffed in irritation.

  “Can’t even groom my tail in peace.”

  “Why don’t you do it in the wagon bed?”

  “Hmph. If I do it there..

  “If you do it there, what?” Lawrence pressed the suddenly silent Holo, who sneered at him, the jerky still held between her teeth. Evidently she didn’t want to discuss the matter.

  Lawrence wanted to know what she was going to say, but if he pushed any further, she would become genuinely angry.

  He looked away from Holo, whose wounded-horse mood made her entirely too difficult to deal with, and put a leather flask filled with water to his lips.

  Lawrence had just managed to stop thinking of her, and as the sun set, he considered starting a fire when Holo snapped at him. “You certainly seemed to enjoy your little chat with her,” she said.

  “Hm? With Norah?”

  Holo still had the stolen jerky in her mouth as she looked down at her tail—but her proud tail was obviously not what was on her mind.

  “She wanted to talk. I didn’t have any reason to refuse, did I?”

  Apparently the indulgence of a wisewolf was not so broad as to forgive pleasant conversation with a hated shepherd.

  Holo had pretended to sleep the entire time. Norah had glanced at Holo and seemed inclined to engage the girl—who after all appeared to be roughly her age—in conversation bill had stopped at asking her name. If Holo had wanted to speak to Norah, there had been opportunities aplenty.

  “Also, I haven’t spoken to a normal girl in some time,” said Lawrence jokingly as he looked back to Holo—and faltered at what he saw.

  Holo’s expression had completely changed.

  But it was nothing like the tears of jealousy he’d hoped to see.

  She looked at him with nothing less than pity

  “You couldn’t even tell that she hated speaking with you?”

  “Huh...?” said Lawrence, casting a look back in Norah’s direction, but stopped himself after a moment. As a merchant, he couldn’t keep falling for the same trick twice.

  Pretending he hadn’t looked back at all, he calmed himself and remembered the words of a minstrel he’d once heard.

  “Well, if she fell in love with me at first sight, she’d miss the fun of falling for me over weeks and months, eh?” he said.

  Lawrence hadn’t been convinced by this statement when he’d first heard it, but saying it now lent it a kind of conviction. Perhaps it really was more fun to fall in love gradually, rather than all at once.

  But apparently, it was too much for Holo.

  Her mouth dropped open in shock, and the piece of jerky fell

  lo the floor.

  “I’ve some wit myself, eh?” said Lawrence.

  He’d said it to get a laugh out of Holo, but he
was also half-serious.

  As soon as she heard it, the wave that hit Holo became a tsunami on its way back, and she exploded with laughter.

  “Mmph...bu-ha-ha-ha! Oh, oh, that’s too good! Oh! Ha-ha-ha-ha!” Holo was doubled over, clutching her stomach, as she laughed, trying occasionally to stifle it only to dissolve into giggles yet again. Eventually her face turned red and she pitched forward into the pile of armor in the wagon bed, her pained laughter continuing.

  Lawrence joined in at first, but as he saw more of Holo’s reaction, his expression darkened.

  Her tail, fluffier than normal thanks to its recent grooming, slapped against the wagon bed, almost as if begging for help.

  “Okay, that’s too much laughing.”

  It was no longer funny.

  “...Ye gods,” Lawrence muttered, taking another drink from the water flask, as if to wash down both the irritation at being laughed at, as well as the embarrassment he now felt for quoting a minstrel of all things.

  “Haah. Whew. Oh...oh my. That was amusing.”

  “Are you quite done?” inquired Lawrence with a sigh, looking off to the sun that now sank into the horizon. He didn’t much feel like looking at Holo, mistake or not.

  “Mm. That was quite a trump card you had there.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Lawrence saw Holo nestled atop the pile of armor, her laughter-fatigued face angled toward him.

  It was as though she was exhausted after an all-out sprint.

  “Well, as long as you’re happy now.”

  No matter how much she hated shepherds, Holo’s foul temper had been a bit too foul, Lawrence felt. It was hard to imagine that she was actually jealous of the conversation he’d had with the girl, nor was it true that she’d had absolutely no opportunity to groom her tail.

  For a moment he wondered if it was simply shyness, but then he recalled their first meeting and decided that was entirely impossible.

  “Hm? Happy?”

  The wolf ears of the individual in question—which had become uncovered when she collapsed in laughter—now pricked up curiously as she regarded him with tear-blurred eyes, as though he had said something quite strange.

  “You were in a foul temper earlier—because you couldn’t tend to your tail, you said.”

  She seemed to remember something.

  “Oh, quite,” she said, her face calm.

  She hauled herself up off of the cargo, then plopped herself back down, wiping the tears from the corners of her eyes.

  Looking at her now, Lawrence thought she could not care less about whether or not she had sufficient opportunity for tail grooming. Had that just been an excuse to vent her irritation about something else entirely?

  “Can’t be helped,” she said.

  The tip of her tail slapped lightly against the floor of the wagon.

  “Anyway, your trump card made me laugh so hard I turned giddy,” said Holo, chuckling at the memory. She then looked outside the wagon. “Is the child not cold, I wonder?”

  Her observation brought Lawrence back to the present. The sun was mostly down, and the sky was a darkening blue. He had best build a fire.

  He had heard that shepherds didn’t generally build fires,

  I thought that was because they had to watch over and chase down their sheep, not out of any particular resistance to cold.

  Lawrence mused on this as he looked at Norah, curled up on the grass’s paltry cushion.

  He felt a sudden movement near his mouth and turned to find Holo thrusting a piece of jerky in his direction.

  “Payment for your services as a jester.”

  “Only one piece of jerky for such laugher?”

  “Oh, you don’t want it?” taunted Holo, amused. Despite his embarrassment, Lawrence decided to accept the offering.

  —but his teeth closed on air. Holo had drawn her hand back at the last moment.

  The wisewolf snickered; Lawrence realized that going up against her was a fool’s errand. If she decided to be so childish, he could only ignore her.

  If he didn’t build a fire soon, then they would all be eating dinner in the cold. Lawrence moved to get off the wagon, but Holo grabbed his sleeve and drew near.

  Lawrence’s heart skipped a beat.

  Her eyelashes still had traces of tears in them, which caught the red light of the setting sun.

  “I do think, from time to time, that some raw mutton would be nice—what say you?”

  With the mournful bleating of the sheep echoing through the twilight air, Holo’s words—spoken through her ever-keen fangs—could not have been entirely in jest.

  After all, she was a wolf.

  Lawrence patted Holo’s head as if chiding her for making a bail joke, then hopped off the wagon.

  Holo’s lip curled in a brief snarl, but she soon smiled slightly and passed Lawrence the bundle of straw, tinder, and firewood.

  Chapter 3

  Entering Ruvinheigen required passing through two separate checkpoints. One controlled passage through the city walls, and the other was situated out on the main road, which encircled the sprawl of greater Ruvinheigen.

  Owing to the heavy traffic in and out of a city this size, one had to obtain a passage document at the outer checkpoint in order t0 pass through the station at the city walls. Legitimate travelers would use the legal routes into the city, obtain proper documents, and pass through the walls—any who lacked the passage document would be turned away on the spot.

  The checkpoints also provided some degree of control over the inevitable smuggling and counterfeiting that large cities attracted.

  The road that Lawrence and his companions took was evidently less traveled as their checkpoint—while not exactly crude—was rather simpler than checkpoints on more common routes, and the guard there seemed to know Norah. Using some strange power, she guided her sheep through the purposefully narrow checkpoint gate, and Lawrence followed after having his wares inspected.

  The plain checkpoint stood in sharp contrast to the grand, august walls of Ruvinheigen.

  It would be completely impossible to breach Ruvinheigen’s walls without control of the surrounding areas. Walls of earth and timber were spoken of with pride in other areas, but here a barrier of stone surrounded the city with lookout towers positioned at regular intervals. Ruvinheigen was nearer a castle than a city, and Holo let out an involuntary gasp of wonder as they regarded it from a convenient hill just past the first inspection point.

  Just outside the walls were cultivated fields, and between the fields, roads stretched radially out from the city.

  Here a group of pigs was driven by a farmer; there a long merchant caravan was visible. Farther in the distance, a white carpel moved slowly over the ground—probably a flock of sheep sonic shepherd had brought to pasture. Shepherds with flocks numbering over one hundred were not rare, but this shepherd was likely biding his time before finally bringing his sheep into Ruvinheigen to support the city’s consumption of meat.

  Everything about the place was extraordinary.

  Lawrence and his companions descended the hill and took one of the roads that ran between the fields.

  The city was so large that from the hill it had seemed close, but traversing the distance took some time. Norah had to be care ful that her sheep didn’t eat the crops growing at either side of the road. At length, the group was close enough to make out the designs on the city walls.

  At this point, Lawrence carefully produced two silver coins and held them out to Norah.

  “Right, then, here’s your forty trie.”

  Trie were simple copper coins. However, that many coins would be unwieldy, and Lawrence reckoned that the two silver coins he gave her could be exchanged for forty-five trie.

  He had paid Norah extra because he felt indebted to her. He and Holo had been fortunate not to encounter any wolves, but Lawrence was still impressed by the girl’s skill. Even Holo would concede it, and it was easy for Lawrence to see Norah distinguishing herself in the
future. The extra money was just an investment to that end.

  “Er, but, if I exchange this, won’t it come to more than...?”

  “Call it an investment,” said Lawrence.

  “An...investment?”

  “Now that I know such a skilled shepherd, I might be able to turn a surprising profit on wool,” said Lawrence in a purposefully greedy tone. Norah laughed and grudgingly accepted the two silver coins.

  “We’ll be at the Rowan Trade Guild for a while. If you’ve plans to take your flock afield again, come by there first. I might be able to introduce you to a merchant in need of escort.”

  “I shall.”

  “Oh, one last thing. The area where you can provide escort—is it just the route we took?”

  “Er, I can go as far as Kaslata and Poroson. Oh, and also to Lamtra.”

  Kaslata was a remote town with little to recommend it, and Lawrence was surprised to hear Norah mention Lamtra. Lamtra was one of the few places in the area not under the influence of Ruvinheigen, which controlled the rest of the region. It was not so very far north from the great city—Lawrence and his party could have gotten there by heading north from the midpoint of the road they had just taken. However, reaching Lamtra required passing through a dark and eerie forest, which even knights blanched at, so it had long resisted invasion from Ruvinheigen and was the only city where significant numbers of pagans still lived.

  All the legitimate routes to Lamtra were incredibly roundabout, so Norah must not be suggesting she could provide escort along them. She clearly had confidence in her ability to navigate the forest.

  If that was true, there were many merchants who would want to go with her.

  “Lamtra, eh? I daresay you’ll have some business,” said Lawrence.

  Norah’s face lit up. “Thank you very much!” she said, bowing low as if she was still living in an almshouse.

  “My pleasure. Well, then, I’ll be entering from the southeast gate, so here’s where we part ways.”

  “Certainly. I hope we meet again,” said Norah.

  Lawrence nodded and reined his horse to the left as Norah rang her bell. Ruvinheigen was large enough to have no less than seventeen great gates. Between those were smaller gates used for large groups of sheep and other livestock, which Norah would have to use.