13. Not a Word, Nothing at All
Chapter 95
It was truly a magnificent feat of arms.
The men of the 37th Regiment, led by Major Ezekiel Valdemaera, had annihilated the Davith spies who had crossed the border undetected and returned in proud triumph.
The citizens cheered in celebration of the king’s army. Ezekiel Valdemaera once again established himself as the war god who protected Astrie. Though he had been away from the capital for a long time, there was no trace of confusion in his deeds from that absence. As though he had always been there, as though he were merely doing what he had always done, he displayed his presence as a matter of course.
The king’s army was complete only when Ezekiel Valdemaera was with it. Wherever people gathered, there was nowhere the name of the young and beautiful major could not be heard.
Yet the Valdemaera estate, which should have been raising the happiest of toasts, was instead wrapped in a silence as still as death.
It was because of Ezekiel, who had returned carrying in his arms a condemned prisoner who should have been hanging from the gallows in the square.
A single shot.
It had been only a single shot.
When a bullet fired from somewhere severed the rope of the gallows where the condemned woman was being hanged, the people could not grasp the situation for some time.
Together with the severed noose, the condemned prisoner fell to the ground. The woman, so emaciated that whenever the wind blew, one could doubt whether there was truly a human body beneath those clothes, made hardly any sound as she fell.
For an instant, everyone went silent. They were too dumbfounded to speak. Only the crowd in the very front had seen the bullet fly in and cut the noose; to those in the back, it looked no different from the rope snapping and falling all on its own.
“What…… what was that?”
“Did they make the noose out of flour dough? How did it fall apart so easily?”
The spectacle had been at its height, only to be abruptly cut off, and all the excitement drained away. Dissatisfied murmuring was just beginning to swell into an uproar.
A man who had leapt down from his horse forced his way through the crowd that had gathered to watch the execution. The people shoved aside at random shouted in protest, but the man paid them no heed. The throng was packed so tightly that it was difficult even to turn one’s head, and so no one could see this rude intruder’s face.
By sheer strength alone, the man drove in a straight line from the edge of the crowd to the gallows. Behind his back, a long gap was carved through the people like a path cut through the sea.
At last, reaching his destination, the man planted one arm on the platform of the gallows and vaulted up.
For a moment, the people in the front row stared at him with their mouths hanging open. His height, a full head taller than others, and his imposing build were astonishing enough, but seeing that large body fling itself so nimbly was nothing short of marvelous.
“Rose!”
The man rushed to the unconscious woman and pulled away the black cloth covering her face. No matter how loudly he called, the unconscious woman could not hold up her head. Her face fell limply to the side, paler than wax.
The man laid the woman across his knees and pressed the carotid artery at the side of her neck to check her pulse. He seemed utterly unconcerned by the jeers of the crowd, whose entertainment had been interrupted.
“Who the hell are you?”
In any case, this event was under the executioner’s jurisdiction. The executioner shouted at the man who had suddenly barged onto the gallows and stopped the execution.
“What do you think you’re doing? Do you want to be hanged with her?”
Only then did the man slowly lift his head.
Even in this cold season, the man was drenched all over in sweat. Droplets fell from the ends of his hair.
Wait. Was that really sweat?
The executioner narrowed his eyes and looked the man over. For something that was merely sweat, a strangely fishy smell lingered near him. Only after seeing the round stain of blood that dripped from the end of the man’s sleeve to the floor did the executioner realize the source of the smell. It was blood.
Sweat and blood soaking his entire body, sharply carved contours without a single indistinct line, a chilling keenness like a finely honed blade……
“……Good heavens.”
The executioner gasped as he realized the identity of the man who had saved the condemned prisoner.
Ezekiel Valdemaera. It was unmistakably him. Leaving aside his appearance, who else possessed the marksmanship to fire a single bullet from the edge of such a vast crowd and sever the middle of a noose that was barely visible, without so much as grazing the woman?
It was a miraculous skill that none but the major, famed as a master marksman, could display.
“I wondered who it was—M-Major Valdemaera, isn’t it?”
The executioner immediately backed down. Though he had acted without recognizing him, cold sweat broke out over him for having dared stand in the way of a man of House Valdemaera. He was terrified for a moment that his own neck might end up hanging from these gallows for lèse-majesté.
But on the other hand, he also felt wronged.
After all, who could possibly have imagined that Ezekiel Valdemaera would suddenly appear in the middle of an execution and interfere?
“P-Perhaps you have mistaken her for someone else? That woman is an utterly vicious felon.”
The executioner searched his memory and recalled the woman’s crime. This condemned prisoner was a woman whom House Valdemaera itself had sentenced to hanging. That meant she had committed a grave offense so terrible that even after death, her corpse was to be disgraced before the citizens.
There was no one in this country who did not know what that crime was.
Ezekiel Valdemaera, who had gone missing for a long time after falling prey to a treacherous scheme sent by his siblings, was that very victim.
Thinking through the circumstances only made it more impossible to understand. If he had shot her dead instead, one could at least accept it as him intending to see the end with his own hands.
What meaning was there in saving with his own hands the woman he had sent to the gallows with those same hands?
“……In the name of Ezekiel Valdemaera.”
The man opened his mouth. His voice scraped out of his throat. It was a parched, cracked metallic sound. Yet its meaning was conveyed with perfect clarity.
“I pardon her crimes. From this moment on, she is no longer a criminal.”
He gave no explanation. He simply carried the woman, limp as a corpse, down from the platform and strode back along the path he had carved through the crowd, disappearing the way he had come.
It was an ending no one understood.
There were no cheers. There were no condemnations. All that remained there was the bewildered murmur of the crowd, wondering if it had merely been the caprice of some great personage.
And Ezekiel Valdemaera’s eccentric public act before the citizens faded away as though it had never happened, buried beneath the news of victory brought by the king’s army after they had slain the Davith spies.
Looking back, it was not as if there had been no clues at all by which to recognize Rose’s identity. Once, Rose had woken from sleep as if seized by a fit, startling him.
“What is it? Did you have a nightmare?”
“……I dreamed that everything returned to its rightful place.”
“Everything?”
“Yes. You to your place, Major, and I to the place where I belong.”
“Did I, after returning to Valdemaera, abandon you? In the dream?”
At the time, he had dismissed Rose’s dream as nonsense.
“There’s no chance of that happening. Unless you betray me first, I will never abandon you.”
But if he traced his memory back just a little further, the reason Rose had suffered that nightmare was clear.
“Rose, when my sight returns, the first thing I will look at is your face.”
Rose must have foreseen the future in which Ezekiel, after returning to Valdemaera, would come to kill her.
She must have been afraid and anxious. So much so that a single word from him had left her on edge the entire time and immediately tormented by nightmares, as though she had lived each day with the feeling of walking over thin ice.
Though she had been so frightened, when the moment of reunion finally came, she drank the poison without a single excuse, without showing a single sign.
All day long, Ezekiel stroked the face of the woman who still had not regained consciousness.
The gallows had left marks on her neck. Though she had hung there for only a very brief time, the ligature marks on her throat had turned into dark red bruises. The doctor said that for someone who had stood on the gallows, she was relatively unharmed. In any case, her life had been saved, and the bruises would disappear naturally with time.
But he could not be certain whether he should believe the doctor’s words.
Rose, would you think it fortunate too? Would you think that?
He closed his eyes.
Relying on senses other than sight, he touched her carefully. During her life in the detention camp, she had grown terribly thin. There was hardly any flesh to be found on her.
Yet there were parts that had not changed.
Ezekiel touched her round forehead, the straight line of her slanted nose, the curve of her full lips, the fine hairs at the nape of her neck, her orderly ribs, her sunken waist, and her round pelvic bones, one by one with his own hands, comparing them against his memory.
Lastly, he buried his nose against her skin. From her cleanly washed body came the faint scent of skin. At last, he admitted it.
It was you.
You were the one.
It was a truth he could no longer avoid, nor turn back from.