The one other point of note was, unsurprisingly, dinner. While Tia was staying at the Fa house, I decided to take full advantage of the peifei meat by using it to make her meals for the time being.
“This is meat I gave you, so you should be the one to eat it, Asuta,” Tia had said on the first night. However, after a bit of wheedling, I was able to get her to agree to eat it.
“I was the one who was gifted the meat, so I’m free to use it however I want, aren’t I? Besides, a single peifei worth of meat will be gone within a few days regardless. You’ll have to eat giba meat until you’re fully healed after that, so you should enjoy it now while you still can.”
“Uh, but—”
“You eating peifei meat would make me happy, Tia. And making me happy is a way that you can repay me, right?”
Tia was skilled with words and very clever for her age, but she was extremely straightforward too, and that meant that she was unable to refute my somewhat shaky logic.
“Okay... If that’s what you want, Asuta, then that’s what I’ll do.”
“Thanks. So, what sort of food do you prefer, Tia? You clearly didn’t like the tau oil soup we had before.”
“On Morga, we eat meat layered with herbs. It’s prepared by boiling the meat together with herbs and tree nuts.”
I decided to have Tia do a taste test to see what sort of spices she liked, and the ones that she selected were an herb like lemongrass, a cumin-esque nut, and ira leaves and chitt seeds. Those last two were pretty similar to each other, both being a lot like chili peppers. All in all, it was a pretty stimulating collection of ingredients.
“I’m surprised. I wouldn’t have thought that there would be herbs with such intense flavors up on Mount Morga... That explains why making something so mild backfired on me,” I noted.
For Tia’s dinner, I prepared the herb-grilled meat recipe that Reina and Sheera Ruu had taught me and the arabiatta-style dish served at The Sledgehammer. It wouldn’t feel right to have her eat all of the peifei meat herself, though, so I prepared a small portion of the same dishes for myself and Ai Fa as well. When I tried them, it quickly became apparent to me that Tia preferred dishes with much stronger flavoring than Ai Fa did.
“I think I could call this delicious, certainly. It seems you aren’t that bad of a cook after all, Asuta,” Tia remarked with a satisfied smile.
Unsurprisingly, that made Ai Fa frown in displeasure again, but she remained silent. She was able to recognize that their tastes were very different, so the young girl’s complaints from before weren’t entirely unreasonable.
“Peifei meat tastes great if you just grill it by itself, but it pairs really well with these herbs too,” I said.
“Actually, it’s delicious even if you don’t cook it at all,” Tia replied. “My favorite way to have it is between two raya leaves before it dries out.”
As she was saying that, a certain question hit me. “By the way, the red people use fire regularly, don’t they? But I don’t think anyone’s ever seen smoke rising from Mount Morga or the light from your fires at night.”
“Of course you don’t. We hide the light and smoke from our fires so they aren’t visible from a distance. It would be dangerous if people from the outside world learned where our villages are, after all,” Tia said while enjoying the peifei meat I had prepared. “For the last several centuries, we haven’t had any big conflicts with people from the outside world. But if wicked outsiders were to come for us before the great god awakens, the people of Morga would surely be wiped out. That’s why we work so hard—to protect our bloodlines.”
“Ah, I see... Still, why did the red people and the people of the outside world decide to separate so completely? Since we speak the same language, it seems to me that the two groups must have lived together at some point.”
“I don’t know. All I know is that we revere different gods.”
Tia was still perfectly calm and composed, but I was getting rather interested in this topic. “It’s not just our language either. We share specific terms. For Mount Morga itself, and the creatures that live there... So there must have been some interaction in the past, right?”
“I couldn’t say. If so, it must have been hundreds of years ago.”
It didn’t seem like there was much of a chance that we’d be able to solve this grand mystery.
After that, the next few days were peaceful, yet lively for us as we got used to living with Tia. And all the while, the festival of the hunt for the six clans in our area was getting closer and closer.
“What’s a festival of the hunt?” Tia asked on the day of, standing in a corner of the kitchen. However, this wasn’t the Fa house’s kitchen, but rather one at the Fou settlement. Though the Liddo clan were the organizers for this event, the Fou had the only settlement that could easily accommodate all six clans, so that was where we were preparing the meal for the banquet once again.
“I’ve explained that to you before, haven’t I? It’s an important celebration here at the forest’s edge, to give thanks to the forest for the blessings it grants us.”
“Hmm. So you’re preparing a more complicated meal than usual for the event? I don’t really get it, but it sounds like a birth celebration.”
“Oh, so the red people celebrate birthdays too?”
“Yeah, whenever a new child is born to our people, and for every ten years that our leader lives.”
Saris Ran Fou, who was currently next to me, watching a pot on the stove, then smiled at Tia and asked, “So you track days and months on Mount Morga too? Our ancestors learned that stuff from the townsfolk, from what I understand.”
“Huh? On Morga, the only important day is the one where the great god’s eye blinks over the mountain. On that day, the red people become one year older.”
“Ah, so you all get a year older on the same day? The western people follow the same custom.”
It was now the fourth day since Tia had ended up at the forest’s edge, and she was able to interact normally with most members of the clans that neighbored us at this point. However, everyone was aware that getting too friendly with her would be going against the will of Genos, so they all seemed to be trying to maintain a proper distance. But even so, Tia was incredibly charming. Her earnestness and pure nature made her fit in with the people of the forest’s edge very well. That might have been part of the reason that everyone was being so careful to not get too friendly with her, actually, so they wouldn’t become attached.