Side Colors III Page 17

  It was just a single sheet, but was so fine that seeing it unrolled like this made it strangely easy to imagine how imposing a priest clad in such robes would be.

  “Originally it was a tablecloth in Lord Careca’s manor.” My master was a bit surprised by this, and it was true—when I sniffed at it I caught a faint whiff of fish and mustard seed. “We don’t have much time to make your clothes, so we’ve got to get your measurements today.”

  Ars neatly folded the cloth with practiced ease; then from within the bag she’d brought, she produced a thin cord with measuring marks running all along it.

  It seemed she was going to use it to take my master’s measurements. It was very clever of her.

  “If there were more time, I’d do a proper job of it. But time is short, so…of course, when you become a real deacon, I’ll make you proper clothes and not out of Mr. Careca’s tablecloth,” said Ars as she had my master stand and briskly made note of her arms’ and legs’ measurements. Then she smiled a sly smile.

  My master was quite ticklish, so that was part of why she was giggling. But she also must have found it amusing to think that a few days earlier, she would never have imagined she’d be wearing priestly vestments made out of a nobleman’s tablecloth.

  Such mysterious fates the world had in store for us.

  Some moments later, Ars suddenly spoke up. “Why did you want to become a seamstress?”

  It was an eminently honest question, and my master answered as honestly as she’d been asked. “It seemed like I would never be able to wear pretty things, so I thought I’d at least like to make them.”

  Ars spun my master around as she continued to measure her, but at these words she stopped to face her. Chuckling, she spoke with a certain amount of mischief in her voice. “It’s quite difficult to make pretty things, too, you know. At first you never get to make anything besides raggedy work clothes for old men.”

  My master was dutifully surprised by Ars’s resentful-sounding words.

  “Far from it; apprentices don’t even get to touch a needle. In our trade guild, a clothier apprenticeship lasts six years. The first year you do nothing but clean the workshop. The next year, you repair tools. Starting in your third year, they let you hold a needle and scissors for the first time, but you still don’t get to use cloth. All you get to use are scraps. In your fourth year, you finally start to make something that resembles clothing, but it’s not until your fifth year that you’re making clothes from scratch. And of course, even if you pass your journeyman’s test in your sixth year, you’ve still a long way to go. My master…the previous master, that is, said he didn’t sew a wedding gown until twelve years after he’d started as an apprentice.”

  Finally Ars snugged the cord around my master’s chest, which she was so sensitive about. I quite distinctly saw her loosen the cord a bit before counting the measuring marks, though I wasn’t sure whether that was standard practice—if she was accounting for future growth or if she was simply being kind to my master.

  “Twelve years…,” whispered my master, counting on her fingers.

  That was much longer than I’d known her. I would surely not still be alive in twelve years.

  “Though it didn’t take that long before I was making priests’ clothes. I must be lucky.”

  But that luck hadn’t extended to my master, and so she had given up on becoming a seamstress in this town.

  Ars looked up from the old, well-used paper she was writing on and smiled a sympathetic smile. “I know this is temporary, but since you’re becoming a deacon, I think God’s blessings will always be with you.”

  If she’d been the sort of person to leave out such consolations, she would’ve long since become a shrewd, cunning clothier.

  My master nodded. “All right,” she answered with a smile.

  “If you’ve time, you should come by the workshop. I’ll teach you a little.”

  “Huh?”

  “You’ve been mending those clothes yourself, right? They’re terrible,” said Ars, pointing to my master’s clothing.

  There was no hiding the many patches and seams from all the mending she’d done, but my master hastily tried to cover them up anyway, her face red. Her ability with a needle and thread was one of the few things she took pride in, but such is the way of the world.

  “I can teach you the basics, anyhow. Although there are a lot of things I still wanted to learn from my predecessor.”

  Ars seemed a fine clothier as she wrote on the paper with her quill pen. It was probably because she hadn’t been eating well, but her slim form spoke of an ascetic virtue, and her unwavering, critical eye on the fabric had a special quality to it.

  She was every inch the skilled young seamstress.

  “…If you would, then.”

  At my master’s words, Ars narrowed her eyes bashfully. “I will,” she answered. “Oh, I can also teach you something else.”

  “Something else?”

  “Yes,” said Ars as she began to pack up her things.

  It was getting quite late. Unable to hold back my sleepiness, I yawned, and it felt like the words that came next had been tossed right into my open mouth.

  “I heard from the innkeeper that you were singing the clothiers’ song a bit wrong.”

  A strange guffaw escaped from my throat. If I’d been human, I would’ve been holding my sides and laughing, I’m quite certain.

  Ars grinned, but my master froze, blushing so red that it was obvious even in the dim tallow candlelight.

  “Uh, um, er, that was…!”

  “Ha-ha! Well, it’s a bit late for it tonight, but I’ll make sure to teach it to you properly. All the first-year apprentices have to learn it whether they like it or not. They even made me sing it in the town square,” Ars said nostalgically as she gathered her things.

  My master was so embarrassed there were tears at the corners of her eyes, but there was a bit of happiness in her expression, too.

  “So in exchange,” said Ars, poking me playfully in the side with the tip of her toe, “teach me some shepherds’ songs.”

  I turned my gaze to my master as I hurried to my feet. Her face was frozen, and then her eyes went to the wall, where her distinctive shepherd’s staff rested.

  She could have claimed she needed it for travel. And yet my master looked back at Ars, trying to unstick her quivering lips.

  But it was Ars who spoke first, a faint smile on her face. “I heard from Johan. He comes from a long line of hated moneylenders. He was really worried. Aw, you don’t have to make such a face.”

  Ars took two, then three steps toward my master, drawing close to whisper something in her ear. “It would make me think I ought to take a moneylender as a husband.”

  “—!”

  I must admit that I was impressed with how many facial expressions my master assumed in such a short amount of time. “Well, I’ll be off.” Ars’s eyes narrowed in amusement, and she turned to leave. “Sorry about yesterday, pup.”

  My name was Enek.

  I gave a bark to make my point and watched her leave.

  Once Ars left the room, the only sound left was the burning of the candle. I looked back at my master. She stood there with her hands on her cheeks, her expression complicated and speechless.

  She would need more training before she could become a properly stoic deacon.

  I curled up at my master’s feet, and she looked down at me, her hands still on her cheeks. “Did she say ‘husband’?”

  So that was what had tripped her up, eh? I yawned and supposed it was a healthy reaction for a human girl.

  The innkeeper woman brought a tattered old scripture book along with breakfast.

  Evidently Giuseppe had awoken the previous night and left a message. He was not feeling well, and, planning to rise in the afternoon, he’d written prayers for my master to practice on a small, cramped scrap of cloth.

  If the grand breakfast we’d enjoyed before had been thanks for our rescue of Giu
seppe, the fact that today’s breakfast included wheat bread again must have been the whole town’s thanks for my master’s decision to come to its aid.

  I received my share, but I endured some teasing from my master in the process. And it was true, I didn’t have to memorize anything, but I still felt some confidence in how much I’d supported her. The work of a knight was so frequently thought of as easy.

  “…So be it. God is…”

  My master murmured as she practiced. She’d removed one of her sandals and stroked my back with her bare foot.

  When she made a mistake she would grab my fur with her toes and pull, only moving on to another spot when she finally remembered the passage, poking me in the ribs with her foot and sighing.

  A lake’s water will only become clean if it’s deep enough for the silt to fall to the bottom. If it makes my master happy, I’ll happily take as much silt as I have to, but it would have been nice for my selfless sacrifice beneath the table to earn me some praise from someone.

  Or at the very least, if she would have just stopped poking my ears with her toes. Those were the only times I raised my head and put my cold nose to her feet.

  “…Illuminated by…His glory. For…for…ugh…!” My master’s voice was strained as she tried to remember, and it reminded me of the way she sounded when she watched the sheep giving birth.

  When she finally remembered, I couldn’t be certain whether there was a sound or not, but she stood up suddenly and spoke. “For thus is the will of God!”

  She recited the rest easily, and it seemed she had finally managed to memorize the passage.

  My master stroked my back roughly with her foot. I was well aware of her ability to concentrate, so any worry on my part would’ve been wasted effort. We couldn’t talk to each other, but I remembered how quickly she’d become such an excellent shepherd. Compared with that, the simple memorization of a written passage was nothing.

  “Ugh…I was worried about memorizing the first part, but…yes. It wasn’t that hard to remember, really. Hey, Enek, are you listening?”

  My master peered under the table at me, and I begrudgingly crawled out from under it.

  She petted my head with a rare, self-satisfied smile. “Do you think you could learn a word or two yourself, Enek?”

  I was a knight, and knights had no need for words. I turned away, and my master laughed through her nose like a proud child, rubbing my head as though making some small sport of me.

  I wondered if I ought to be angry, but it had been so long since I’d seen her so carefree. Being as generous as I was, I bore the indignity without complaint.

  “Oh, that’s right, what time is it now?”

  Though the window was open, in this unfamiliar room it was hard to tell the hour from the light coming through it. My master stood from the table, stuck her head out the window, and considered the sky.

  It was refreshing to see her like this. Previously, when she looked at the sky in town, she would have been doing so from within a sheep pen strewn with hay and surrounded by rats and chickens, lying among them like someone stricken with a fever.

  And then she would look up at the one tiny window high in the barn that was there only to let in a tiny amount of daylight and from that try to guess the hour. Her face would be resigned, despairing, and it would pain me to see it.

  How much happier it was, then, to see her like this.

  Someone she knew must have been passing by because I saw my master wave her hand out the window.

  “We’d better hurry, Enek!”

  I gave a bark and stood ready by the door.

  My master hastily prepared herself, then mostly out of reflex, she turned her eyes to a certain place.

  For a moment, her profile was sad, lonely, and even guilty.

  Because of that staff, my master had suffered terrible things. And yet that same staff had seen her through to this place.

  Worried, I started to back away from the door—but then I stopped because my master looked back at me with a slightly bashful smile.

  We had to move on. And to do that, some things would have to be left behind.

  When such times come, we need not feel sad, nor guilty, nor cling to old things.

  All we need to do is feel grateful.

  My master’s hand stroked my head, and I gave another bark.

  She opened the inn’s door, and we took a single step out into the wide, unknown world.

  End.

  AFTERWORD

  Long time no see. Isuna Hasekura here. This is Volume 13. It’s a collection of short stories. To everyone waiting for the continuation of the main story, my sincere apologies. However, to the Norah fans: Here you go, a brand-new story about Norah. It covers the days following her parting with Lawrence. Enek was inexcusable! Inexcusable, I say!

  I was writing Norah, and her character is so simple, so hapless, that I just couldn’t get excited about the story somehow…so as a last resort, I turned to Enek. Outrageous!

  The other short stories are business as usual. The only exception is the one written from Holo’s perspective. That one ran in a special insert in Dengeki Maoh, and I very much hope you’ll enjoy it.

  By the way, I had a lot of fun this summer. Every year at the end of summer, I find myself regretting it and thinking, “Gosh, I really didn’t get to do anything fun,” so this year I went a little overboard and packed it full of plans. First, around the end of July, I got my diving license in Izu; in the beginning of August, I did a signing in Hong Kong, and fortunately, managed to extend my stay to five nights. In the middle of the month, I went to Comiket; then toward the end of the month, I stayed three nights in Furano, Hokkaido. And just a week before I wrote this afterword, I did a one-night trip and went diving. Also, after fooling around on the guitar for a month and a half, I finally got so I can play one song.

  Now that I write it all out, it looks like I really did have a lot of fun.

  I’m sorry! I’ll get back to work!

  Speaking of work, the books and second season of the anime are both coming to an end, and we’re getting into the endgame. Short stories aside, when I think about how few volumes are left, I get very emotional. But I can’t just keep writing it forever, and I’ve already started preparation for my next project.

  The contents are still a secret, but I hope to really surprise people.

  On that note, we’ll return to the main story in the next volume! If all goes as planned, it’ll be out around the beginning of next year, I think. A single year isn’t much time.

  Let us meet again in the next volume.

  Isuna Hasekura