Spice & Wolf IV (10 page)

The sound stood out clearly in the quiet morning. Lawrence looked through a crack in the window. It was none other than Evan.

But he was not entering the church as before—he was
leaving
it.

From his hand dangled a bundle of some kind, perhaps a meal. As before, Evan looked around carefully, then trotted away from the church.

After he’d gone a slight distance, he turned and waved to Elsa. When Lawrence looked over at Elsa, he saw her smile and wave back in response—she couldn’t have looked more different from when she had dealt with Lawrence.

Lawrence found himself feeling a bit envious.

He watched Evan recede into the distance.

I see,
he thought to himself, finally realizing why Evan was angry over the dispute between the church Elsa managed and the one in Enberch.

But Lawrence was a merchant; his vision was hardly so narrow as to regard what he’d seen as nothing more than an amusing scene.

What his eyes captured was nothing less than an understanding of what people stood to gain.

“I know where we’re going today.”

“Mm?” Holo popped her head out from under the blankets, looking at Lawrence curiously.

“It’s
your
home we’re searching for, and yet why am I the one working so hard?”

Holo did not immediately answer, instead flicking her ears rapidly as she sneezed and then rubbing her nose. “ ’Tis because I am
that
important, nay?”

Lawrence could only sigh at her shameless answer. “Would it kill you to spare me such talk from time to time?”

“You’re such a merchant.”

“Large profit requires large purchases. Nothing comes of buying small.”

“Hmph. What about your small courage, eh?”

It was a good comeback; Lawrence had no response.

Lawrence closed his eyes, at which Holo chuckled and then continued. “It’s harder for you to move when I am with you, is it not? This is a small village, and eyes follow us wherever we go.”

Lawrence couldn’t manage so much as an “oh.”

“If I could take action, I would—but all I would do is go to that impudent girl at the church and tear her throat out. Please, go and find the location of the abbey, truly. I may seem lazy, but I want nothing more than to go there and hear what the monk has to say.”

“Understood,” said Lawrence to calm the flames of Holo’s emotions, which burned like a sheaf of straw set ablaze.

Though she was sometimes utterly transparent with her feelings, other times she concealed her passions beneath a veil of apathy.

She was a troublesome companion, but nonetheless, her words were right on the mark. It was because she was important to Lawrence that he did all this.

“I’ll be back by midday at the latest,” said Lawrence.

“Bring me a souvenir,” came Holo’s muffled voice from beneath the blankets. Lawrence’s only reply was his usual .rueful grin.

He descended the stairs and greeted the pale-faced innkeeper as he walked by the counter, then headed around to the stable, taking a sack of wheat from his wagon’s bed before going back outside.

Even without farmwork to do, people began to rise once the sun was up. Here and there were villagers tending to their vegetable patches or taking care of their pigs or chickens.

While yesterday he was greeted with only suspicion, a few people now looked at Lawrence with smiles. The night of revelry seemed to have had some effect.

A few others couldn’t manage a smile, owing to their hangovers.

But in any case, it seemed he had been more or less accepted as a traveler, which came as a relief.

The increased recognition would make it harder to move, though.

Holo’s impression had been correct. While Lawrence was impressed at her insight, he also felt a twinge of jealousy.

His destination, as he mulled such thoughts over, was naturally Evan’s water mill, where he planned to ask about Elsa.

Lawrence was not Holo. As such, he had no intention of trying to discover the nature of Evan and Elsa’s relationship.

But in order to win over the touchy, reclusive Elsa, it would be faster for Lawrence to speak with Evan, who seemed to have a better understanding of her circumstances.

As he walked down the path he had driven his wagon over the previous day, Lawrence nodded a greeting to a man who was plucking weeds from a field just outside the village.

Lawrence didn’t have any memory of the man, but apparently he had been in the bar last night as he smiled and returned the greeting.

“On foot, eh? Where’re you headed?” the man asked. It was
a
reasonable question.

“I was thinking of having some wheat ground.”

“Oh, the mill, eh? Careful you don’t get cheated!”

It was probably a common joke when going to the miller’s to have wheat ground. Lawrence smiled by way of reply and continued on to the mill.

A merchant was hardly ever trusted by anyone, save another merchant. Yet there were occupations that were still worse off.

While Lawrence himself had no questions about the God of the Church, who claimed that all trades and occupations were equal, he remembered that the people of Tereo had no love for the servants of that God.

The world simply didn’t go as one might wish. It was filled with hardship.

With the harvest over, the wheat fields he passed as he walked the path between the hill and the stream were rather desolate, but soon the millhouse came into view.

Evan seemed to hear the merchant’s footsteps as he approached and popped his head out of the entrance. “Ah, Master Lawrence! " He seemed cheerful as ever, though being called “master” after having met the lad only a day earlier irritated Lawrence.

Lawrence raised the sack of wheat and spoke. “Have you a mortar free at the moment?”

“Eh? I do, but...are you leaving already?”

Lawrence handed the sack over to Evan, shaking his head.

It was reasonable to assume that if a traveler was having his wheat ground, he was making preparations to leave.

“No, I’ll be in Tereo for a time yet,” said Lawrence.

“Ah, you must! Just wait a moment, then. I’ll grind this into Hour that will rise beautifully, you’ll see.”

It occurred to Lawrence that Evan might be trying to butter him up in order to win a chance at leaving the village. Evan seemed to give a short sigh of relief as he went back into the millhouse.

Lawrence followed him in and was immediately surprised.

Despite its dingy exterior, the inside of the mill was clean and well kept with three grand millstones.

“This is quite a mill,” said Lawrence.

"Isn’t it? It may not look like much on the outside, but I grind all the wheat in Tereo,” said Evan proudly as he connected the shaft that turned the mortar wheel to the shaft coming from the waterwheel.

He then extended a thin pole out the window, undoing the rope that prevented the waterwheel from turning.

Immediately the wheel creaked to life, moving the stone with a deep rumbling sound.

Checking that everything was moving as it should, Evan poured Lawrence’s wheat into a hole at the top of the mortar.

Now all they had to do was wait for the flour to collect at the plate underneath the stone.

"I haven’t seen wheat in quite some time. We’ll weigh it out later, but my guess is that the fee will be maybe three
ryut,”
said Evan.

“That’s quite cheap.”

In places with
heavy taxes, Lawrence wouldn’t have been surprised at Evan’s figure being tripled.

But perhaps three
ryut
seemed high to someone unfamiliar with the market.

“The villagers are a tightfisted lot when it comes to grinding. But if I don’t collect in full, I’m the one to bear the elder’s ire.”

Lawrence laughed. “That’s true no matter where you go.”

“Were you a miller, too, once?”

“No, but I once did work as a tax collector. It was for the butcher tax on meat. Things like how much tax they owed for slaughtering one pig, you see.”

“Huh, so that is how it’s done, eh?”

“Cleaning meat and bones taints the river and creates a lot of garbage, so it’s taxed in order to pay for the cleanup—but of course nobody wants to pay.”

Taxation rights were auctioned off to the highest bidder by town officials. The bid went directly into the town’s coffers, and the winner could then go collect taxes at will. The more tax one could collect, the greater the profit—but if the tax collector wasn’t successful, he risked great loss.

Lawrence had done this twice when he was starting out as a merchant.

The effort collecting took and the money it yielded were totally out of proportion, he found.

“In the end, I would have to cry and beg to get people to pay. It was awful,” he said.

Evan laughed. “I surely understand!”

Lawrence knew that this story of shared hardship would go far toward winning Evan’s trust.

Well, now,
he thought to himself as he laughed with Evan.

“Incidentally, you did say that all of Tereo’s grain is ground here, yes?”

“Yes, it’s true. There was a big harvest this year, so it’s hardly my fault it took so long to grind, yet they yell at me constantly!”

Lawrence couldn’t help but imagine Evan staying up all night, tending the mortar.

Hut Evan laughed at the memory of it, apparently happy, then continued. “What, then—have you changed your mind since yesterday? Are you planning to do wheat business in Tereo?”

“Hm? Oh well, depending on circumstances..

“I’d counsel you to give it up,” said Evan flatly.

“Merchants are particularly bad at giving up.”

“Ha, spoken like a true merchant! But you need only go to the elder to understand. It’s been decided that the village must sell all Its grain to Enberch.” As he spoke, Evan checked the progress of the mortar, carefully brushing the flour into the stone plate with a boar hair brush.

“Ah, is Tereo part of Enberch’s fief, then?” If that was true, it would make the leisurely lives of the villagers even harder to explain.

Unsurprisingly, Evan looked up and spoke proudly. “We’re their equals. They buy our wheat; we buy other things from them. What’s more, when we buy wine or clothing from Enberch, we pay no taxes. Impressive, isn’t it?”

When he passed through Enberch, Lawrence had seen that it was a town of some size.

The term
poor
might have been too harsh for Tereo, but the village certainly didn’t seem up to the task of confronting Enberch.