“—!”
All Elsa could hear were Holo’s fevered breaths. Words were failing her.
Holo likely stood perfectly still, her eyes wide, fangs bared, ready to leap forward at any moment.
But Elsa was in the same state of mind. She had completely forgotten about feeling like a young girl trying to eavesdrop on a love confession, and instead strained her ears to hear Lawrence’s explanation.
“That isn’t the great serpent, though.”
“What?!”
“Wh-whoa, hey! Don’t push me! I’ll fall!”
Elsa could hear Lawrence panic as Holo rushed Lawrence, finally out of patience.
“It is not the serpent…? Dear… Dear, are you bli—oh. Hmm?”
It finally dawned on Holo as she held Lawrence in her grip.
Elsa could picture it so easily, as though she were there with them. Lawrence had been holding that old map in his hands.
She was astonished.
“Exactly. It’s what’s left of a river.” His voice was gentle, as though he was carefully guiding her through his thought process. “There was an old topographical map of the area along with some other old maps. And this is an exact match with what we see here.”
Tanya fidgeted, wanting to look out the window again, so Elsa moved over to give her room; she watched as Tanya scooted past her down the stairs, and she concentrated on the voices above her at the same time.
“This old river flows across the Salonia plain from the eastern mountain range to the southwest. And see, if you follow the snake tracks the entire way, you’d get to the mountains in the east, right? Then, you’ll start getting very close to the river that we crossed if you go farther upstream.”
Elsa could picture Holo turning to look where Lawrence was pointing, then turning back to look at him in disappointment.
There came a loud rustling of clothes and irritable footsteps.
“According to this map, there used to be two rivers cutting across the plain. The remains in the field are of the ones that dried up.”
“B-but…”
Holo fell silent, and Elsa empathized with her bewilderment.
Holo had stood before that wheat field not long ago, after all.
Would she not have noticed if the flow of the old river left a physical mark on the land, an indent in the very ground? And most importantly, anyone who knew anything about minding wheat fields would question if it would remain unchanged, even after months and years of tilling.
And yet it was strange that an old river had left such a clear mark on the ground, like a carpet for the wheat. It was as though only the wheat itself knew how the land changed… When that thought crossed Elsa’s mind, she almost exclaimed, but stopped herself.
Then wisewolf Holo arrived at the same answer.
“Drainage!”
“Very perceptive. I asked the villagers, and they said that the dirt was deepest only where the river used to be, which meant the plants there grew in a slightly different manner.”
The ground where the river once was would have been filled with stones and pebbles. It was not realistic to manually remove all of that, so they made their fields by filling the depressions with soil. That would not affect the area in general, but it could never have the same sort of earth as its surroundings.
“It isn’t enough to change the wheat harvest for better or worse, but the heights and stalks were slightly, but surely different. And so the only time you can see this is when the wheat is ripe and from high spots. We were lucky,” Lawrence, very likely looking out over the fields, said, his tone relaxed.
“In which case…what of the snake?”
Elsa understood Holo’s confusion, too. Because if the great serpent of myth was indeed the remains of this old river, then she would have to readjust her thought process in order to comprehend what this all meant.
What of the tale of the Hero Voragine, then? It was unlikely that his only achievement had been to notice the slight color difference in the wheat fields, hurriedly construct a tower, then claim a serpent once roamed there. Would such a thing even earn him tariff-levying privileges, or any titles at all?
Lawrence, of course, could explain it all, which was why he had brought Holo here with that big smile of his.
“The serpent that hampered trade did actually exist.”
“…”
Lawrence had just told her that the mark on the field was not from the snake. Elsa could clearly sense Holo’s bewilderment through her silence. Lawrence enjoyed leading her by the nose, especially since she typically had the upper hand between them, but he knew clear well what would happen if he got carried away.
He spoke to soothe her, but his voice still had a chuckle in it.
“It’s pretty complicated.”
“…Hmph.”
Elsa could practically see Lawrence grimacing as Holo pouted.
“First, the Hero Voragine didn’t actually kill a serpent. But he did take down something a lot like it.”
It was wholly a riddle, and Holo the Wisewolf was cross enough to have absolutely no intention of waiting for an answer. Elsa could hear a gentle smile in Lawrence’s voice, like he thought it was funny, as he continued talking.
“He killed the serpent not with a sword, but with a spade. He dried up the river.”
Elsa took a step down the stairs, listening to Lawrence as she joined Tanya in looking out the window over the fields.
“But it’d be strange if anyone could become a noble by drying up a river, wouldn’t it?”
Holo’s tone in response was reluctant; perhaps she felt guilty for ignoring him any further. “Those who grew the wheat would only come to loathe him.”
“Exactly. And you can’t just make the snake a metaphor for the river. You remember how we crossed the pontoon bridge, right?”
“Aye, I do. What of it?”
“You asked why they didn’t just build a big bridge over the river, remember?”
Elsa was a few moments away from answering the riddle herself, but the wisewolf let her wisdom be known.
“Because of all the lumber that comes down from the mounta—Oh!”
“Exactly. They float all the logs down the river. Imagine what it’d look like if you stood next to the river and watched them go by.”
It would look like a massive snake.
“B-but, ah…”
“That’s only half the story, though.”
Even Elsa could picture Lawrence’s exaggerated movements as he became more absorbed in the story.
“The river used to have two branches, remember? One of them never went to Salonia; it came this way. There are no towns out on these plains, and it’s far out of sight.”
Though Holo was a spirit from a bygone era, she had been traveling with this former merchant for a while now, and she had learned how to view the world the way he did.
“Smuggling.”
As kind as Lawrence seemed, he was still a merchant at heart. Their journey together had not been entirely wholesome, and Holo had been exposed to much of the darkness of the mercantile world.
“There were plenty of people who decided to use this river for their lumber in order to avoid tariffs. Now, they couldn’t do this out in the open, so they floated the lumber down the river at night. But just setting lumber free down the river meant the wood could get caught on tight corners. And so, they tied the thin pieces of lumber together to form what looked like rafts, and then people would stand at the front to guide it. And what do you need if you’re doing this at nighttime?”
The moonlight could only provide so much light.
Using torches at the front of this dark procession could only make it look like one thing.
“It would look like…snake eyes in the dark.”
“And it was the Hero Voragine who vanquished the serpent.”
All by drying up the river.
“I had a rough idea of what happened when I saw the map in the village. I also thought it was very odd that the lumber merchants and the Church couldn’t settle this ongoing dispute of theirs. I think everyone knows about this.”
A keen-eyed passerby noticing a flaw in a long-held belief, especially one that had avoided scrutiny by locals for generations, was something that happened often in adventure tales, but not so much so in real life. The truth was so obvious that they could not put it into simple words.
The Church, at the time, had been busy fighting the pagans, so it had been much more convenient to dress it up as the story of a great serpent being killed; the lumber merchants were beholden to the immoral acts with which their predecessors sullied their hands.
Neither of them could say anything decisive, however, and remained in silent deadlocked stares when a traveler with a lot of sway but ignorance in local affairs came to town.
And so, they had called on Lawrence, hoping he would give them the advantage without him ever noticing the truth.
“But I’m not going to let them pull my strings like that.”