Episode 16
It was a steady pace. Matching that pace, he slowly regulated his breathing, and he felt considerably better.
“……Are you in great pain?”
Dr. Briman’s voice brushed his ears. Ejekail tapped his own forehead with Rose’s hand.
“It feels as if everything in here has turned to mush and melted. It’s filthy.”
Her fingers flinched. But she did not run away.
“The diagnosis?”
He pressed him for an answer. A brief silence followed. At the all-too-predictable result, Ejekail clenched his teeth. Every doctor who came to examine him fell silent, as if they had conspired to do so, before giving their answer. He was thoroughly sick of that silence now.
“There is good news and bad news.”
“The good news first.”
“The pain you are feeling right now, Major. I do not necessarily believe it to be the worst possible sign.”
“Why not?”
“A body part that is completely dead does not feel pain.”
Through his long experience rolling through battlefields, he understood it instinctively. When soldiers wounded in combat were carried in, the army surgeons cut away the parts that had become useless and saved the body that remained. Once the cut surfaces healed, those severed pieces of flesh no longer inflicted pain upon their owners. There were a very rare few who claimed they still felt pain in limbs that had vanished, but after watching, wide awake, as their own arms and legs were cut off, it was only natural for their minds to come loose.
“The fact that there is pain means it is responding to stimulation, and that means it is alive.”
“My eyes are still alive?”
“That is my judgment.”
It was an unexpected hope.
“And the bad news?”
“I do not know how to treat it, or whether it can be treated.”
But that torturous hope lasted only an instant.
“Major, do you happen to know how many kinds of poisons exist in this world?”
He had never studied medicine, so there was no way he would know such a thing. When Ejekail waited in silence for him to continue, Dr. Briman let out a deep sigh.
“They cannot be counted. Besides mercury, arsenic, and sulfuric acid, poisonous mushrooms such as belladonna and digitalis, animal venoms from snakes, scorpions, and tree frogs, and plant poisons such as monkshood, hemlock, and jimsonweed are all used for poisoning as needed. Moreover, several types of poison are usually mixed together to heighten the effect. Seeing as it seeped through the eyes and paralyzed your sight, I suspect a neurotoxin was included, but that will not be all. To be honest, with my medical knowledge and ability, it is difficult for me to guarantee the outcome. If I attempt something clumsily, I fear there is a possibility it may worsen your condition.”
In the end, it was the same. It was a refusal, merely expressed more gently than the doctors who had declared, “I cannot do it,” and withdrawn.
A sneer soon hung at the corners of his lips, which had been twitching of their own accord. Yet even that was only a cold, brief smile.
“Then try. Clumsily.”
“Pardon?”
“I said it doesn’t matter, so try.”
There was a chilling resonance in Ejekail’s demand that could not be heard as a mere suggestion or urging.
Dr. Briman looked at the man. Of course, there was no way any reaction would come back.
“I believe you have misunderstood what I said.”
“No, I understood it perfectly. But is there anything left here that can get worse?”
“…….”
“If my eyes just die completely, at least there won’t be any pain!”
No matter how many doctors were brought in, the diagnosis never changed, and he was sick of it. The moment the surging irritation crossed its limit in the blink of an eye, he shouted at the despair that kept repeating itself.
Had hope ever been so far away?
Even when he had been trapped in a fortress surrounded on all sides by enemies, desperately fighting back and holding out, he had not felt this powerless.
Yes. Powerlessness. This powerlessness was the problem. Ejekail had never once in his life been in a state where he could do nothing. He was a soldier who completed any operation or responsibility given to him, no matter how impossible it seemed. In a position where he led his subordinates, he had never uttered defeatist answers such as “It is hard,” “I am not confident,” or “I cannot do it,” and he never should have. He was a born soldier who had fought battles by taking even the tiniest shred of hope as a weapon and raising his men’s morale.
If it had been a matter that depended on his own strength, he would have gladly faced it.
But medicine was not Ejekail’s domain. Worse, the doctors so easily spoke of impossibility, a thing he had lived his whole life never knowing. Again and again, they broke his spirit and robbed him of hope. This kind of frustration was what truly drove him mad.
He spat out impulsively.
“If it was going to be like this, you should have just let me gouge out my eyes.”
The drawing room became terrifyingly silent. No one could carelessly open their mouth.
Ejekail closed his eyes. Whether his eyes were closed or open, the world remained a darkness like midnight. He was truly sickened by that unchanging reality.
Losing one’s sight came with many losses beyond the simple objective symptom of being unable to see.
At first, reality and dreams became confused. He could not trust himself as to whether he was awake or asleep. Only after suffering through confusion for quite some time did he establish one standard. If he could see, it was a dream; if he could not see, it was reality. Even that was not perfect. On some days, even in his dreams, he wandered through pitch-black night.
After that, he became unable to trust others. Aside from Akenaus, who had plotted this atrocity, and the unidentified woman, everyone seemed suspicious.
Even if they obeyed in front of him, pretending to be distressed and kind, there was no telling what they were truly like. Even if they mocked him before his very eyes with their expressions and gazes, he could not notice it.
In the past, he had felt as though he could see a person’s face just by hearing their voice, but now nothing came to mind. So there was no way a conversation with someone could properly continue. It was closer to a one-sided flow than a mutual exchange.
At times, because there was nothing he could see, he wondered if the other person was a mirage. When he thought he might be getting angry or shouting at a mirage, all of this would suddenly become futile. He would become endlessly lonely and forlorn.
At least he could trust people he had known for many years, like Mrs. Serva, or the subordinates who had risked their lives and rolled through war with him. But in the long time he had not seen her, Mrs. Serva had become an old woman who walked with a cane and struggled even to take care of herself, while his subordinates were busy roaming every corner of Astrie under his orders.
While the presence of others grew fainter by the day, only his own emotions, pooled in one place like muddy water, became clearer and clearer.
In the end, he was as good as alone.
“Did they know and plan it? ……Those bastards who blinded me, I mean.”
His heavily sunken voice scraped out of his throat.
It was a question he had held in his heart for a long time.
“Akenaus shouldn’t be clever enough for that. If anything, he would have wanted to kill me in one stroke. Then was it that woman’s doing?”
Whenever he was examined by a doctor, the same question always filled his mind. As he sank into thought and asked and answered himself, the question would turn into words and slip out unconsciously. Even though there was no way the person listening, whether a doctor or a maid, would know a clear answer. He did not know what faces they wore as they listened, but perhaps because he could not see their flustered or awkward expressions, the words came even more easily.
The drawing room was still as quiet as death.
“If they had simply cut off my breath in one go, I would not hate them this much. At least in my final moments, I would have been mourned as an honorable soldier. I would have thought they showed me some small measure of respect. But thanks to that woman making a man into a cripple, a living corpse, and mocking him for it, I have become neither alive nor dead.”
A laugh of derision escaped him of its own accord.
Let them try going blind themselves. Would they last even a day? That Akenaus, with his short patience.
And what about that woman?
As the price for plunging him into solitude and despair, was she living well and eating well with Akenaus by now?
“Damn it, someone say something! Am I here alone?”
Confusion suddenly arose in the stillness where even breathing had vanished.
Could he possibly have been left alone in this drawing room? Had he been speaking with ghosts until now? Had his mind gone along with his sight?
It was all because of these eyes. These eyes kept throwing his senses into confusion.
He abruptly brought his hand toward his eyes.
It was then.
“Don’t do that!”
There was a force that hurriedly intervened and pushed his hand away. It was Rose. Perhaps judging that her meager strength would not be enough to block the strength in Ejekail’s arm, she quickly pulled his head deep into her chest and shielded him so he could no longer touch his eyes.
“Don’t do something like this. This isn’t right, Major.”
They were words he had heard over and over, like a parrot.
This would not do. That would not do either.
Treatment was impossible, but removing them was also forbidden. In any case, his eyes were neither alive nor dead. Even if they remained, they only caused pain and served no use, yet whenever he tried to get rid of them, everyone around him was horrified and rushed in to stop him.
It was an absurd contradiction.
He was sick of a situation in which nothing at all changed. There was a limit even to blindly enduring and bearing it. Especially when there was no hope whatsoever to look toward.
In an instant, something inside him twisted.
Ejekail answered coldly.
“What do you know? Have you ever suffered this horrible pain?”
It was a rebuke that struck her speechless. Without knowing the truth of the matter at all, he struck directly at her conscience.
Rose pressed her lips together.
“……Even if I haven’t suffered it, I know.”
“Spare me the empty words.”
Ejekail replied coldly.
“No, go on, tell me. What exactly am I enduring right now? How long must I endure it? I have met dozens of doctors so far. Every last one of them was an idiot. Once they make a diagnosis, instead of offering a treatment, they are only busy running away. Will this tedious back-and-forth ever end?”