Chapter 103
Perhaps his temples were throbbing; Father could not smooth the furrow between his narrowed brows.
“Akenaus, that stupid, immature fool, sided with Davis just to save his own skin, and because of that I signed a document acknowledging his treason and officially expelling him from the family. In addition, Valdemaera has negotiated to take responsibility for this incident by paying the royal family three villas and reparations equal to ten years’ worth of our budget.”
It was quite unexpected. Though Akenaus had been expelled, the outcome was very mild for the price of a crime committed by one of Valdemaera’s own blood. If a family could be shaken by reparations of that scale, it could never have been Valdemaera in the first place.
“It would have been only fitting for the family to be annihilated, but because you rendered such great service, it is ending with this lenient punishment. That is how great Astrie’s expectations are for you. That wretch will never again set foot in Valdemaera. And not only Valdemaera. He has become a traitor to Astrie.”
Ezekail replied in a cold voice.
“What can be done about what he brought upon himself?”
“I am not asking what can be done. Valdemaera now rests on your shoulders. Ezekail, you are the only one Valdemaera has.”
That was why his father could not accept Rizan.
In order to arrange a splendid marriage for the sole heir left to Valdemaera, to show off the family’s continued strength, and to wash away the disgrace Akenaus had brought upon them.
Ezekail kept his lips pressed shut for a while, then slowly steadied his breath.
“When you married Mother, did you speak to her in this manner as well?”
At the sudden change of subject, Father frowned around the eyes.
“What do you mean?”
“As though sitting around a negotiation table discussing reparations, or as though bringing in a fine broodmare to breed foals. I had thought Mother a heartless person for enjoying a luxurious life on Valdemaera’s wealth while not caring what became of Valdemaera itself, but now I see that may not be entirely the case.”
His father was not a man who had no feelings whatsoever for his mother.
In those past days when Akenaus still firmly held his place in the main house, and when Ezekail could not be sure what would become of him if his sight did not return, he nevertheless found a house where he could live with Rizan. Even if he himself could be set aside, he had wanted at least Rizan to live somewhere safer and more comfortable than the cold, perilous North.
All the more, his father’s actions—renovating mansions throughout Astrie and even building a new castle for his wife—must surely have been founded on no small emotion. Whether it was interest, affection, fondness, compensation, or whatever else.
Since they had begun with a political marriage, it surely had not been love from the start. But if, while they shared a bed and bore and raised children, Father’s heart gradually changed, yet Mother’s heart never changed at all, there must have been a reason for it.
He remembered hearing that, on the rare occasions when Mother returned to the main house, his taciturn father would sometimes go down to the dining hall in time for her meals. Yet those meals, it was said, were stiflingly quiet, with scarcely a conversation to be heard between the two masters of the house.
“Were you truly all right living that way your entire life, Father?”
It was not a question he asked because he needed an answer. Ezekail already knew the answer for himself.
“I cannot live that way.”
Fern Valdemaera was a man with an extraordinary sense of responsibility as the head of Valdemaera, and unlike his mother, who was indifferent to her children, he had fulfilled the role of a parent in his own way. Yet he had not become a husband capable of holding back the footsteps of a wife who wandered outside. It was truly contradictory that, while he displayed excellent skill in maintaining the family and negotiating with the nation, he was awkward with his own wife to the point of distance, merely following her shadow from afar.
Ezekail imagined himself and Rizan in his father and mother’s relationship. Rizan, who would bear only the child to carry on the family line and then spend all the remaining decades of her life away from home, visiting the main house once every few years like a guest; and himself, waiting for her, guarding the mansion alone through all those years. The image of a husband and wife who did not even share a bedroom, and who remained silent even at the occasional meal together.
In the past, he might have thought such a scene was merely one ordinary facet of married life. Because the form of marriage he had observed from the closest distance all his life had been that bleak.
Had he not become a blind man, fallen in love with a woman whose appearance he did not know, and lived pressed against her body, he would still have gone on living as though knowing only half of human emotion was the entirety of the world.
“If my wife kept trying to leave me behind, I would ask her not to leave me alone in this vast mansion. I would sleep in the same bed as my wife every night, eat at the same table, and happily share trivial conversations. When my wife wished to travel somewhere, I would go with her.”
“You would abandon Valdemaera and follow a woman around? Have you no pride?”
“Why would I need pride? With my wife.”
If they became partners in life, then his life would be his wife’s life, and his wife’s life would be his. Rather, protecting her pride was the way to protect his own. He might sooner keep his pride before the nation, but he had no reason to do so with his wife.
“Only those who marry for profit would live while weighing pride.”
Because that was his view of marriage, that once-in-an-era piece of nonsense came out: that an official wife should be taken separately from a house of fitting status, while Rizan should remain as his mistress and merely bear children. If he had intended to treat Rizan that way, he would never have sent his men out to search for her in the first place.
“In any case, I will be the one guarding this country’s borders, so what does it matter if I do not parade around some paltry political marriage? I am not so incompetent that I must rely on my wife’s family.”
“Ezekail, you think you are the only clever one. Do you think everyone in the world enters political marriages because they are all incompetent? They take that path because it is comfortable and easy. Because it is a path already proven through those who chose it before them!”
At last, his father’s voice rose as well. After angrily snapping at his son, with whom conversation simply would not work, Father briefly caught his breath and opened his mouth again.
“It is the same principle as a farmer choosing rich, fertile soil over barren, parched land even when planting a single fruit tree. That way, he can reap a greater harvest than others with less effort. So why do you insist on barren, parched land?”
“Have you ever been to barren, parched land, Father?”
Ezekail replied in an unchanged tone.
“You are so busy with public and private affairs concerning Valdemaera that it is difficult for you to leave Cleris, and even when you happen to travel, you must have gone only to places with splendid scenery and mild climates. But I have led my men to many barren, parched regions where people rarely go. Places where the ground was full of gravel, where rain almost never fell, and the soil crumbled like dust. I thought not even a single blade of grass could grow in such land.”
The corner of his mouth slanted.
“Yet astonishingly, what I saw with my own eyes were fields of vivid green grapevines. Do you know? They say grapevines that grow in such regions send their roots deeper than ordinary trees. In search of water and nutrients hidden far beneath the earth. And trees that grow after overcoming harsh conditions are tenacious in their vitality as well; they live stubbornly, even for a long time.”
Even in the harsh conditions of a man who had lost his sight and become addicted to alcohol and opium, a woman named Rizan had put forth green shoots, so he had no choice. As fate dictated, he would love her tenaciously, stubbornly, for a long, long time.
“Though no matter how one looks at it, the land does not seem fit for plants to grow, the grapes borne by those vines that somehow take root there become the finest, most expensive wine—wine ordinary people will never once wet their lips with in their entire lives. You must know this already, since you sent an errand boy all the way to Derosa to spy on me, but I did live as a drunkard for a time. To my taste, barren and parched land is far more appealing.”
Facing his father’s face, on which utter disbelief was plainly written, Ezekail chewed out each word.
“Did you say Valdemaera rests on my shoulders? Yes. As you wish, Father, I will gladly bear that name. And I will bear Rizan as well. I am a greedy man, so I will not give up either one. Valdemaera and Rizan both—I will carry them all on these shoulders.”
Their gazes collided in midair, without a single inch of concession. Ezekail looked proudly into his father’s eyes and concluded the conversation.
“However, if I must, in the end, put one of them down, even I cannot guarantee that it will not be Valdemaera.”