Wolf & Parchment, Volume 3 Page 9

There was even a merchant who mentioned that. Myuri’s interest was rather piqued when she heard that information and seemed happy about that, but Col did not ask why.

  “She sounds like a trustworthy businesswoman.”

  While they walked, Col told Myuri the impression he had gotten. She was busy sniffing the scent of some soap infused with herbs that they had bought at the last store, and only her eyes moved to look at him.

  “I’d be suspicious if she was a fox, but I wonder if it’s because sheep don’t tell lies.”

  “Do you think that’s why?”

  “Just a hunch.”

  If her preconceptions were correct, then wolves, too, would have to be considered treacherous.

  He thought it over at first, but he sighed to himself—he was not wrong.

  The linen bag hanging from Myuri’s shoulders was stuffed with her spoils. He could not help but think that it was a cold and calculated move on her part. She knew that if she asked for things now, he would willingly open his wallet. In reality, after he had seen the danger inside her heart after hearing about the Moon-Hunting Bear, it would have been difficult for him to be strict with her even if she had asked for things meekly. Though there was plenty to consider when it came to her shrewdness, he also felt as though she was calming him down by acting as her usual self, making it even more difficult for him to refuse.

  The reason was that it reminded him that she was not only a cute pup but a wolf.

  “The sun is about to set, so why don’t we return to the trading house?”

  “Yeah. I’m hungry.”

  She placed the soap back in the bag, as if disappointed she could not eat the fragrant piece.

  “But I don’t really want lamb today…”

  He would not be able to stop thinking about that once he started, but she had her own way of considering things.

  No matter how Ilenia’s story turned out, he only had to make sure that Myuri came out unscathed.

  There was no doubt this concerned the very core of her nonhumanity.

  He had been totally reliant on her in the northern islands, so this time, he wanted to be the shield that protected her.

  “Oh, look, Brother, the first star!”

  He looked up, and on the clear field that faded from bright red to dark blue, a single point twinkled like ice in the sky.

  “Taxes on the Church?”

  Sligh tilted his head as he ate his beef shoulder steak, which had been boiled, fried, steamed, thinly cut, then covered in a mustard sauce.

  When they returned to the trading house, Sligh had already prepared food for them and waited, and as soon as Yosef arrived, they feasted. Myuri had lost out to sleepiness the night before, but today she was determined to eat it all.

  “Yes. Are the churches and monasteries throughout the kingdom taxed?”

  Col had to consider everything Ilenia talked about carefully, but what he could simply not overlook was the real reason the kingdom and the Church were in conflict.

  However, he could not suddenly ask Sligh if the kingdom was trying to separate from the Church as part of a bigger plan to head the new world, and he did not think he would receive an answer even if he did. So after careful consideration, that was how he broached the subject.

  If Ilenia’s thoughts were correct, then he should be able to catch a glimpse of the kingdom’s plans through these taxes.

  Finding taxes that were levied without just cause, something that was enacted simply to snatch up assets, would give her story credibility.

  On the other hand, if there was a proper reason, then it was possible she was reading too deeply into the kingdom’s policies.

  “Yes, absolutely. Because to call their actions tyranny would be an understatement, so of course we levied taxes.”

  Sligh’s answer stung him more than he imagined.

  “Which means they are punitive taxes, I suppose?”

  “Yes. As if to say, return the fortunes you have dishonestly amassed, and never commit evil like this again. Any sort of announcement of taxation is unpopular, but this was one of the very few that the people cheered for.”

  Sligh did not seem as though he was telling a joke.

  But after hearing about the Church’s wrongdoings, one thing immediately came to mind.

  The papers plastered all over the cathedral doors.

  “I saw the doors to the cathedral. Is that related to this?”

  Sligh nodded.

  “We could talk about that until the sun rose.”

  He spoke jokingly, but he did not smile.

  “They had been working as moneylenders.”

  That word reminded him of something he had read on the door.

  But surely the Church forbade collecting such interest. Had they been loaning money publicly, then surely the papal office would have carried out an investigation.

  “Of course, they cleverly kept it under wraps. To the public, it was all goodwill.”

  As Sligh spoke, Yosef reached out from beside him to pour alcohol into Col’s cup. It was a rather strong distilled liquor with a smoky taste. He let Myuri have a sip, since she was at an age where she was eager to grow up faster, but the moment it touched her tongue, she practically threw it back at him.

  He tensed; this must be the kind of conversation that called for a drink like this.

  Sligh gulped down the drink that Yosef had poured for him, then began to speak.

  “I don’t know about other countries, but the entire organization of the Church in the kingdom was extracting profits from the wool industry.”

  There were wool products all over the room Sligh had provided for them, too. The blankets and rugs went without saying, but the cloth on the wall to keep the room warm and drapes over the furniture were all mostly made from wool. Using wool was the same as breathing.

  And the kingdom was renowned throughout the world for its wool.

  “There are problems in the structure of the wool trade, so it takes a very long time to turn a profit for most people involved. Do you know how long it takes for wool to go from the sheep to clothes to money?”

  Col answered with what he believed to be a generous guess.

  “About a year?”

  “Three years on average.”

  As he sat surprised, Sligh took a piece of mutton and placed it on Myuri’s plate. He grinned at her, so she reluctantly accepted it, though she had decided not to eat lamb today. She thanked him awkwardly.

  While Myuri fretted over her internal struggle, Sligh compared the food on the table to wool and continued to explain.

  “Raise the sheep; shear the sheep; collect the wool; carry it elsewhere; wash it; separate it by quality; comb it; make it into thread; dye it; weave the fabric; make the clothes; sell the clothes, fabric, and thread; and then finally, wool and work become money. Of course, it does not always happen consecutively, and sometimes products sit in storage, or on the shelves in stores, unsold. Clothing, especially, will go unnoticed if the style isn’t popular. Then once that’s all done and the wool products become money, that money travels backward through the production process before it finally reaches the shepherds.”

  It was just one of the many complicated structures in the world, but Col could not tell where the problem was.

  As he wondered what it might be, Sligh took a piece of bread in his hands.

  “The problem is that they have to find a way to make ends meet until the money comes in.”

  He popped the bread into his mouth.

  “Speaking logically, no one, from the first shepherds to the last merchants, receives payment if the wool stays unsold as clothing or thread. The shepherds who start the process at the very beginning have to wait three years until they get paid for their work. Everyone has to live and work while they wait. But living costs money, and workers need to buy materials in order to keep working.”

  They needed the things they lacked.

  There were plenty of opportunities for moneylending in the wool industr
y.

  “But it would cause problems if the Church loaned out hard currency, so the cathedral here in Desarev and other churches loaned out the wool from sheep raised on their own land, bought back the semi-processed product, then loaned that out as well. That way, they received goods that were in the next step of the process. They would, for example, lend out a bunch of wool, then buy back the thread, lend out the thread, and buy back the dyed product. Logically, it wasn’t moneylending if they were simply lending things out and then taking other things in return. Rather, when they took something back, they would even give the artisans money. What benevolence!”

  But that could typically be considered wages, and it did not sound as though they were giving out lots of money.

  “But the money they gave to the artisans was very little.”

  Sligh nodded, then cut a thin piece of his steak as if to represent that.

  “When we merchants lend money, we charge an interest that won’t earn the anger of the Church. Say, ten to twenty percent in a year. If you calculate the Church’s hidden interest, taking into account the artisan’s wages, then it easily goes over fifty percent in a year, sometimes even up to a hundred.”

  “Th-that much…?”

  There was no word for that but usury.

  “The Church gained most of its donations from the land they owned, and since the majority of their land was for raising sheep, that made the Church the greatest shepherds in the kingdom. They had a strong grip on almost all of the source material. Not only that but they managed the artisans with coin, so us merchants could not even compete. They pushed the process that took the most time onto the commercial firms, the final step of vending the finished product, and the artisans had to put up with receiving little pay for their work processing the wool. That doesn’t encourage them to work. So for a long time, despite the low quality of work, the kingdom focused solely on exporting wool to get rich quick.”

  That must have been the state of the country Col saw when he was a child.

  “It was only the Church, who owned the land and raised the sheep, that amassed wealth from this process, while the artisans who worked on the rest of the wool-making process grew poorer and poorer.”

  The northern islands had been in awful shape, but the situation of the kingdom that Sligh talked about was much the same.

  But he did not feel any sense of despair as Sligh continued to talk about it in the past tense.

  “The kingdom was revolted by this and had apparently thought up various plots, but they did not reach a fundamental breakthrough. Instead…”

  Sligh closed his eyes, irritated, and sighed.

  “On a whim, they adjusted the policies on wool exports, so then the wool trade became something akin to gambling. It made a fool of so many merchants and nobles, and a great number of people went bankrupt.”

  Col was personally familiar with this story. Fallen nobles typically gave their daughters to affluent merchants, effectively exchanging their family name for money in order to preserve it. Then, after being bought out, a merchant husband failed in his enterprise and fell completely into poverty.

  The wolflike female merchant he had met when he was a child was a former noble who had gone through all those changes, and the cause of her bankruptcy was likely the wool trade. It was not that she was especially unlucky; she was just one of many who had been swallowed up by the Winfiel Kingdom’s policies.

  Eve Bolan was the name of this former noble, and after her husband went bankrupt she made up her mind to become a merchant. Now, despite being a woman, she was apparently a prominent dealer in the south.

  Perhaps because of how wolflike she was, she had managed to spring back from her hardships, but most people were not like her.

  It was possible that a pent-up resentment still lingered in the kingdom toward the Church; that because of them, the people’s destinies had been tossed about like toys.

  Even that was a well enough reason to levy taxes on them.

  “In any case, neither the kingdom nor the commercial firms could dominate the Church. They had to keep stride with the pope for the war with the pagans, after all. Once the war was over, however, the situation began to change, and when the kingdom stood up to the Church, their roles in the balance of power were reversed.”

  There was a gleeful expression on Sligh’s face as he stuck the knife into his steak.

  “Once the Church’s religious offices were closed, they lost their income, and their control over the artisans through their lending scheme slackened. The artisans began working harder, causing the quality as well as the amount of wool to shoot up, which attracted skilled workers from the mainland. Not only that, but since the Church had to use the kingdom’s resources in order to export, they had no choice but to exchange their wool, which no longer readily moved in the market, for dirt cheap prices. The whole kingdom was overflowing with wool. There was so much, in fact, that townspeople who didn’t used to have anything to do with the wool industry came to work in droves. Everyone earned more wages, and the whole country prospered.”

  The honest joy that Col initially assumed people got from their work now seemed more like happiness derived from being freed from the shackles that had bound them until then.

  “The reason we’ve taxed the Church is to remove their assets, and on the off chance the situation reverses, we want to make sure that they won’t be able to stand on their own for a while. There is also the part where we profit from their finances and gain popularity with the people.”

  According to Sligh, the kingdom’s countermeasures were perfectly reasonable. The Church was being taxed for good reasons, all justifiable.

  He felt like it was unrelated to the absurd plot of abandoning the Church to head to the new world.

  This meant that while Ilenia’s story had lost some of his persuasive power, the act of collecting taxes itself was not so far off from his own goals.

  The tyrannical Church should be punished and corrected.

  “Is the collection of taxes going well at all?”

  Sligh shook his head.

  “No. The Church’s authority is deeply rooted, and the town merchants won’t bid on collecting permits in fear of the consequences. It is not going well.”

  “I see…”

  “That’s the gist of it, but…Do you mind if I ask you one thing?”

  Col was pulled out of his thoughts and looked at Sligh.

  “Oh, I’m sorry. Yes, of course.”

  With a smile, Sligh then looked at him with a shrewd gaze.

  “Where did you hear about the taxes?”

  This was not the kind of thing one stumbled upon simply by wandering around town.

  It was only natural that Sligh took special notice of it.

  “We met a person when we paid a visit to the cathedral. We saw her just as she was being thrown out, and we heard her story.”

  When Col explained, Yosef, who had been listening quietly, interjected.

  “She was the one who had heard rumors about Sir Col and came to my ship to see him.”

  It seemed Sligh had grasped the general picture.

  But Col did not understand why he suddenly looked up to the ceiling and covered his eyes with his hands.

  As he watched him absently, Sligh’s posture returned to normal, and he spoke, as though confessing his sins.

  “That means that someone has made a request for you to help collect taxes.”

  “R-right.”

  “And while you feel the righteous need to reform the Church, you are first gathering information to decide whether you will cooperate or not.”

  “Ah, well, yes, that’s…”

  There were many missing elements, but he was generally correct.

  “Oh God.”

  Sligh groaned and gave him a puppy-eyed look.

  “I would have asked you straight away yesterday if I knew this were going to happen.”

  “What?”

  Col’s surprise was apparent, and S
ligh confessed sadly, “I am a merchant. With you around, Sir Col, collecting taxes from the Church would have been as easy as collecting candy from a baby. Anyone would think of that. Oh…if I asked you the same thing now, would you feel any sense of justice?”

  Sligh’s eyes were sharp and knew exactly what was going on. He knew well that the exact same circumstances could carry a completely different meaning with just a few differences.

  “…I’m sorry, but it only seems like a moneymaking venture…”

  “Right?”

  As though he had suddenly lost all his affectations, Sligh lethargically slumped in the chair, leaning against the back, and spoke sullenly. Col could tell by Yosef’s wry smile that he was not serious but purposefully putting on a show.

  “But had I broached the subject yesterday, it would have been obvious that I had ulterior motives to use you, and either way, my reputation would be hurt. Would you care to appreciate how prudent I was to wait for the right moment?”

  As Sligh readjusted himself in his chair, Col could not help but smile.

  He did not know if his host was a good person or not, but he was certainly an amiable merchant.

  “Of course. I was extremely tired yesterday. I must have been in a bad mood myself. I truly appreciate your consideration.”

  As Yosef chuckled, he filled Sligh’s cup with liquor. It was strong, distilled liquor that seemed extremely flammable. He picked up the cup, and his expression suddenly became serious.

  “This must be fate. The merchant who came to ask you to collect taxes must have good reason for doing so. I can only imagine it was God’s guidance that led you to happen upon her at the cathedral. Not to mention that she is an extremely reputable broker in the wool trade.”

  “Huh?”

  Col jumped in surprise, Myuri turned to look coolly at him, and Sligh smiled in delight.

  “I am the manager of the Debau Company Desarev trading house. You two stand out, so I hear everything if you go asking questions around town.”

  Now that he mentioned it, Col understood how easy it was for him to come by that information.

  “As a broker, she must have seen every detail of the Church’s oppression. I’m certain she got her hands on the collecting permit for reasons other than making money. I hear she is typically prudent in her trade, so there must be some things she has some strong convictions for.”