Spice and Wolf, Vol. 5 Read online

  “Two orders of fish tail. Wrapped, please.”

  A momentary look of worry passed over the girl’s face, probably because of the sounds of clattering pots that issued from the kitchen.

  They were most likely preparing the lunches to serve the rush of workers that would soon be coming from the docks.

  “I’m not in a hurry,” said Lawrence.

  “Perhaps some wine, then?”

  In other words, was he willing to wait?

  Lawrence smiled at the girl’s business acumen, then nodded.

  “We’ve barley and grape wine, as well as pear.”

  “Pear wine at this time of year?”

  Fruit wine spoiled quickly.

  “For some reason, it never went bad in storage. Oops—,” said the girl, covering her mouth in an exaggerated fashion.

  The tavern had always been jam-packed when Lawrence had visited before, so he’d never had a proper conversation with this girl, but now it was easy to see that the tavern owed the comely lass much of its success.

  “Pear, then.”

  “Coming right up! Just a moment if you please.” She disappeared into the back of the tavern, her skirt—which was a dark, ashen red that made it impossible to know its original color—fluttering behind her.

  A clever, cheerful barmaid like her in a port town such as this might wind up the wife of the second son of a successful merchant with many ships to his name.

  Or she might turn a cold shoulder to any rich man or pretty lad that came courting, instead falling for a completely normal merchant that happened into the tavern.

  When it came to knowing where a purchased commodity should be taken, Lawrence had some idea, but this sort of thing was outside his area of expertise. If he asked Holo, she probably could have told him the truth, but that was somehow frustrating.

  “Here you are. The rest will take a bit of time, but that will give you a chance to ask any questions you might have.”

  She really was a clever girl.

  If he could get her to talk to Holo, it would be a magnificent display.

  “Merchants coming in here at this time of day really only have one thing on their minds. If it is something I can answer, I’ll be more than happy to,” said the girl.

  “I’ll pay first.”

  Lawrence put two dark copper coins down before taking the cup of pear wine.

  In this tavern, one copper was enough for two or three cups.

  The girl’s face was now the very image of a tavern barmaid. “And?”

  “Ah, yes, well, it’s nothing serious. The town seems a bit different from usual. Suppose I was to ask about the encampment of merchants just outside the walls.”

  Given the generosity of the tip, the girl probably expected to be asked for inside information on one of the trading companies. She seemed relieved to hear Lawrence’s actual question.

  “Oh, them. They all deal in furs or fur-related products.”

  “Furs?”

  “Quite. About half of them have come from afar to buy up furs. The other half deal in the materials needed for tanning and treating furs and skins. Let’s see…”

  “Lime and alum?”

  They were the most common materials needed for tanning work. Pigeon droppings strangely were also used. If the skins were to be dyed, many more goods would be needed.

  “That sounds right, yes.”

  Lawrence thought back to Arold’s words.

  There was no question that the Council of Fifty’s meeting had something to do with the fur trade.

  “And you wanted to know why all those merchants are camped out there, right? Well, right now, all the leaders of the town are meeting to decide whether or not to sell furs to them. In the meantime, buying and selling furs is forbidden. So naturally, the craftsmen don’t know whether there’s any point in buying any of the supplies they need for tanning, so—that’s where we are right now.”

  Having been asked about it over and over again, the girl was probably used to explaining the matter. But if it was true, the situation was serious.

  “So what caused this?” asked Lawrence, forgetting about his pear wine entirely.

  “That thing, you know—where lots of people come through in the wintertime.”

  “The northern campaign.”

  “Right, that. It was canceled, so they say none of the usual people are coming through to buy leather clothes. Usually there would be a lot more people in this city this time of year.”

  When people came, so, too, came coin. Furs from the north were especially popular in the south, so they made excellent souvenirs.

  But why then was there a meeting discussing whether to prohibit fur trade entirely?

  Were the merchants camped in front of the town not there to purchase furs? Even without the normal boom in leather clothing sales that came with the northern campaign, shouldn’t they sell to what buyers had come?

  He needed more information.

  “I understand that the usual people that come through to buy leather clothing aren’t around this year, but shouldn’t they still sell to the merchants outside of town?” Lawrence asked.

  The girl looked at the untouched cup of pear wine in Lawrence’s hand and with a smile gestured for him to drink.

  She had an instinctual understanding of how to incite a man.

  If he tried to resist, she would either become irritated or flirt emptily with him.

  He meekly put the cup to his lips, at which point the girl smiled as if to say, Good answer. “Knights and mercenaries, they’re free with their coin. But the merchants that come to town are as miserly as they come.” She played idly with the two copper coins that Lawrence had set down. “I’ve been given things, overly frilly dresses like some nobleman’s daughter would wear, really expensive ones. But…”

  “Oh,” Lawrence mouthed. When he was out drinking with Holo, his head had been dulled by the wine. “I see now. Before it’s made into clothing, skins are surprisingly cheap. But once they’re made into clothing, they won’t sell—the money coming into the town will drop,” he said.

  The girl smiled beatifically like a saint with a humble supplicant before her, as if to say, “Well done.”

  With this, Lawrence could see the basic situation.

  However, before he could take a step back and confirm all the details, the girl suddenly leaned forward across the table.

  Softly clutching one of the copper coins to her breast, her expression shifted. “So far, you could hear this from any floozy in any tavern in town,” she said, her words turning a bit vulgar as she looked at him through upturned eyes, chin tucked down. Lawrence tried to look at her, but her posture naturally drew his gaze to her slender, shapely collarbones.

  The lass certainly understood how to press an intoxicated patron.

  Lawrence reminded himself that this was about business.

  “One must treat generous customers properly, after all,” said the girl. “Let’s keep what I’m about to tell you between the two of us, shall we?”

  Lawrence nodded, pretending to be entirely taken in by the girl’s actions.

  “There’s an eight- or nine-tenths chance that the merchants outside town will be banned from buying furs, though I’m sure the craftsmen and fur brokers will be angry.”

  “How do you know this?” Lawrence asked.

  The girl only closed her mouth enticingly.

  Lawrence’s intuition told him that the girl’s source of information was solid. It was likely that a member of the Council of Fifty was also a patron of the tavern, but she, of course, could not say so.

  She did not even explain this fact since her statement had been nothing more than her talking to herself, and its veracity was impossible to gauge.

  In a way, she might have been testing Lawrence, as otherwise she would hardly be letting slip such vital information.

  “I’m a simple barmaid, so I care little for the price of furs, but merchants like you enjoy such things with your ale, do you n
ot?”

  “Aye, enough that we sometimes drink too much,” said Lawrence with his best merchant’s smile.

  The girl smiled slightly, her eyes closing. “A good tavern sends all its patrons home drunk. I’d be pleased if you were among them.”

  “Well, I’ve drunk my wine, so I’m sure I’ll feel it soon.”

  The girl opened her eyes.

  The smile was on her lips, but it did not reach her eyes.

  Lawrence was about to open his mouth to speak, but a voice from the kitchen called for the girl.

  “Ah, it seems your food is ready,” she said, standing from the chair and returning to the barmaid she’d been when Lawrence had first entered the tavern. “By the way, sir—,” she said, looking over her shoulder before leaving the table.

  “Yes?”

  “Do you have a wife?”

  Lawrence was taken momentarily aback at the unexpected question, but perhaps thanks to Holo constantly springing traps upon him, he was able to recover and reply. “My coin purse’s strings are not tied. However…my reins are firmly held,” he answered.

  The girl grinned widely as though she were talking to a friend. “My but that’s frustrating. I’m sure she’s a fine person, too.”

  She seemed to have some pride in her ability to cajole her drunken male customers.

  And even Lawrence might well have been drawn in easily had he not met Holo—or had he been a bit drunker.

  But if he was to say so, it would be like rubbing salt in the poor girl’s wounded pride.

  “If you’ve the chance, do bring her by the tavern,” she said.

  “Aye,” said Lawrence, and he mostly meant it.

  A conversation between this girl and Holo would be a thing to see, though as a bystander, he might get sucked into something terrible.

  “Wait just a moment, then. I’ll go get your food.”

  “My thanks.”

  The girl headed back into the kitchen, her skirt fluttering again behind her.

  Lawrence watched her go as he brought the cup of pear wine to his lips.

  Even other people could tell, he realized, that Holo was very important to him.

  Holding the hot, cloth-wrapped package of tail meat, Lawrence headed down the broad avenue that ran along the docks to take another look at the boats moored there.

  With the new information from the barmaid, the scows did indeed seem a bit different.

  Looking closely, Lawrence could see how straw or hempen cloth had been used to cover the goods piled high on the boats’ decks, and many of the boats themselves were tied fast to the wharves, as though they did not expect to leave anytime soon. Some of them, of course, were merely passing the winter in town, but the number seemed a bit high for that to be the only explanation. At a wild guess, those were the boats that were carrying either furs or the materials needed to process furs.

  The volume of fur transactions in Lenos was large enough that it was called the city of lumber and fur.

  Being a mere traveling merchant, Lawrence could not easily estimate the total amount of fur traded in the town, but if a fur merchant were to buy up a single chest-high barrel of squirrel pelts, that could easily come to 3,500, even 4,000 furs. The fact that such barrels were constantly rolling through the city made him feel practically faint.

  What kind of profound impact would freezing the fur trade have on the town?

  But he could understand Lenos’s efforts to try to collect as much tax as they could, and the fact was that foreign merchants who bought only raw furs instead of clothing left many town craftsmen by the wayside. It was common knowledge that in any business, crafted, processed items made from raw materials had much better profit margins.

  Nevertheless, with the northern campaigns canceled, the lack of travelers from the south meant there was absolutely no guarantee that there would be any way to turn such goods into coin.

  Setting aside the quality of the furs and the quality of the tanning, there was any number of towns whose clothing craftsmanship was superior to Lenos’s. To take the clothing that would normally have flown off the shelves as souvenirs and instead pay the shipping costs involved in exporting it to some other town would involve significant difficulty.

  Lawrence felt that from the town’s perspective, it would be better for them to decide to go ahead and sell fur to the waiting merchants, even if they had to overcome the craftsmen’s resistance to do so.

  At least that way they’d be able to get some coin for the furs. The reason so many merchants gathered in Lenos was because of the high quality furs that came through the town. Such furs would command a fair price.

  But the barmaid had said that the Council of Fifty was going to prohibit fur purchasing.

  Which left only a few possibilities.

  To begin with, it was odd that the merchants were camped outside of the town.

  Merchants would happily drive someone else to ruin if they had decided that it would bring a profit, so it was unimaginable that a large group of them would simply assemble and wait patiently.

  There was clearly some other authority at work here.

  But whether it was the giant tailor’s guild headquartered in a town famous for its sartorial products far across the western sea or some dizzyingly massive company trying to monopolize the fur trade, Lawrence did not know.

  Whatever the thing was, it wielded tremendous power.

  And the minds that ran Lenos knew it, Lawrence determined, as he passed through the entrance of the docks and into the hustle and bustle.

  The merchants outside the town were no doubt making their case.

  “You’ll be in a tough spot if you don’t sell your furs,” they would say. “Shall we buy them up for you? Though that alone will not avail you forever. Shall we come next year and the year after that?”

  If Lenos swallowed this, it would become nothing more than a place where furs were gathered, then passed along. And once that happened, the consolidation of fur itself would eventually be taken over by some outsider and removed from the town.

  However, the reason the townspeople didn’t simply turn the merchants away wasn’t just because of the craftsmen’s opposition.

  This problem didn’t stop with the town; it would engulf the landed nobility to which the town was connected as well. When an economic problem turned political, the amount of money it took to solve it would jump by three, sometimes four digits.

  This was a battle between titans, where the expectations of individual merchants were utterly meaningless.

  Lawrence scratched his beard.

  “The coin involved must be incredible,” he said to himself. He hadn’t talked to himself in quite some time, and it felt good, like taking off shoes that had been worn for a week straight.

  The bigger the amount of money in play, the bigger the leftovers might be.

  And a merchant’s alchemy allowed him to turn the complicated relationships between goods and people into a spring from which money would gush forth.

  He pictured a sheet of yellowed parchment in his mind.

  On it he drew sketch after sketch of the fur situation, and gradually the page became a treasure map.

  So where was the treasure?

  When he put the question to himself, licking his lips, his left hand reached the door of the inn room and opened it.

  “…”

  He had almost no memory of when he’d come all the way back to the inn, but that was not why he fell silent.

  Holo, perhaps refreshed after a nap, had been grooming her tail, but she now hid it behind her back as she regarded him.

  “…What’s the matter?” asked Lawrence suddenly, after weathering a purposefully cautious look from an evidently now-sober Holo.

  “I shan’t abide it,” she said.

  “Huh?”

  “I shan’t abide my tail being sold,” said Holo, letting a bit of her tail show from behind her, like a shy maiden peeking out from behind a tree, before she concealed it again.

>   Lawrence naturally understood.

  His face had been consumed by his merchant self.

  “I’m no hunter,” he with a smile and a shrug as he entered the room, closing the door behind him and walking over to the desk.

  “Oh no? You looked as though you were ready to sell anything you possibly could.” Holo’s glance fell but once upon the package Lawrence held, then came back to his face.

  “Yes, well, I’m a merchant. I buy from one person to sell to another. It’s a basic principle.”

  All merchants desired money, but when they forgot exactly what kind of merchant they were, that desire for money would run wild. When that happened, things like “trust” and “ethics” were nowhere to be found.

  In their place was only avarice.

  “So no, I will not be taking your tail from you. Though when summer comes, should you decide to shear some of your fur off, I’ll happily collect and sell that,” said Lawrence as he leaned against the desk.

  Still sitting on the bed, Holo childishly stuck her tongue out at him before taking her tail in her hands again.

  For Lawrence’s part, he had no interest in seeing Holo’s tail sans fur.

  “Hmph. So what is that?” asked Holo, looking at the package Lawrence held in one hand as she nibbled at her tail.

  “This? This is…indeed. If you can guess from scent alone what part of what animal this is from, I’ll buy you as much of your favorite foods for dinner as you want.”

  “Oh ho.” Holo’s eyes flashed.

  “I think there’s some garlic in there…but you should be fine.”

  Lawrence came away from the desk and gave Holo the package, whereupon her expression turned immediately serious, and she sniffed the wrapped food carefully, looking for all the world like a wolf. This was nothing so rare in and of itself, but her manner was so charming that Lawrence couldn’t help but stare.

  Holo seemed to notice his gaze. She suddenly looked up at him, scowling.

  She was comfortable being nude in front of him, but apparently this was a stare she could not abide.

  Lawrence supposed that everyone had his or her idiosyncrasies. He obediently began to turn around but then stopped short.

  “I’m sure no proud wisewolf would be thinking of sneaking a look inside the package while my back is turned,” he said.