Guardian of the God - God's Appearance Part 1 Chapter 1 - The Herb Market

  Guardian of the God

-

God's Appearance

(Book 5 of the Guardian of the Spirit Series)

 

Author: Uehashi Nahoko

Translator: Ainikki the Archivist

 

  Part 1 - Child of Disaster

Chapter 1 - The Herb Market

    Balsa’s first step into the dim herbalist's store blocked out the noise and bright autumn light of the world outside. She  felt like she'd suddenly been dropped inside a medicine jar. She followed close on Tanda's heels as he walked through the store. Shelves boxed them in to either side, piled high from floor to ceiling with a huge supply of herbs and medicinal ingredients. The air was thick with the smell of dried herbs. Balsa wrinkled her nose.

    There was a large table inside the shop. Behind it stood the proprietor, a middle-aged man; men and women lined up in front of him to make orders.

    The Herb Market was held once a year in autumn; it lasted only three days. Despite this limitation, many people from foreign nations gathered together to make purchases from the market. Most of the people Balsa saw in the shop looked like travelers. She identified many people from New Yogo, but some were obviously from Rota or Sangal. Tanda bent to remove his carryall sack from his back, then joined the other people in line.

    Many other stores were lined up on the western road outside the herbalist's shop, packed closely together from here to Rota's border with New Yogo. For the most part, all these shops sold effective ingredients for medicines: rare mushrooms, precious herbs, and fruits and other foods known for their immune-boosting effects. The sound of flutes and the rhythmic beating of drums came from outside the shop. People clapped to the beat and laughed as they listened to the music. The song was vaguely familiar to Balsa. She adjusted her grip on her spear and shifted a little toward the direction of the sound.

    Tanda had said to her some weeks ago, "I want to go to the Herb Market. Want to come with me?" That's why she was here now. He'd been severely injured at the beginning of summer, and she'd decided to stay with him until he'd completely recovered. For the first time in a long while, Balsa had spent most of the summer and autumn with Tanda and his master, the magic weaver Torogai, in safety and relative peace. Their home was in the heart of the Misty Blue Mountains of New Yogo, about a day's walk from Kosenkyo, the country's capital city.

    Balsa was a bodyguard by profession, but the year she'd turned thirty, she'd considered turning to another line of work. But as the days and months had passed and her ideas remained only ideas, she'd realized that she didn't really want to live any other way.

    At the beginning of this year's autumn, when the mountains had been adorned in bright gold, she'd started feeling the restless urge to travel somewhere. Tanda must have sensed that and invited her to come on a ten-day journey to this makeshift town on the Rota border for the Herb Market. He'd attended every year for at least a decade without fail. He gathered the best herbs from the mountains in New Yogo, dried them, then brought them to this market to exchange for others that were more difficult for him to procure himself. He also sold his own medicines and bought others before returning home.

    Balsa couldn't stand the cloying atmosphere of the shop any longer and retreated toward the door. She preferred the smells of horses, dust and sweat from outside. She stood in the doorway and listened to the conversations of customers as they came and went. Their voices washed over her like a wave. She identified speakers of Yogoese, Rotan and Sangalese, though the latter nation was quite far to the south.

    Balsa had traveled widely; she could usually tell where a person came from based on how they spoke. The main language of Rota was very similar to her native Kanbalese, so she could speak it without much effort.

    Among the aimless rush of people coming and going, two merchants from Sangal passed her by. They walked with a boy of perhaps thirteen or fourteen and a girl that looked like his younger sister sandwiched between them. The boy and the girl were striking enough to attract many eyes, but they were clearly malnourished and far too thin. The girl was especially pale. The light in her eyes was distant and unfocused, like the flame of a candle about to be blown out .

    The girl stumbled as if she'd slipped on a small stone. The merchant standing next to her scolded her harshly. "Watch where you're going, shattoi." Shattoi meant "stray dog" in the local Rota dialect.

    Balsa frowned. She had negative associations with the word shattoi. When she was ten years old , her foster father Jiguro had taken work as a bodyguard for a merchant in Rota. The son of his employer had called Balsa that to tease and humiliate her.

    People in Rota were much like the people of Kanbal when it came to prizing blood ties and kinship. Wanderers with no family or home to speak of were generally looked down upon with contempt. Looking back on that experience now, Balsa supposed that she had been objectively contemptible —not just in the eyes of the merchant's son.

    Jiguro had always taken great pains to ensure that Balsa would not starve, but he'd cared considerably less about other matters, such as clothing or hairstyle. Growing up, Balsa only had two outfits at any given time; they were always secondhand in faded colors. Sometimes her clothes had holes in them , usually small ones. The holes were usually the signal to Jiguro to buy her a new outfit.

    If she'd bothered Jiguro  more about clothes, she was certain he would have bought them for her, but Balsa hadn't really viewed herself as a little girl in those days. All she'd wanted was to be as strong as Jiguro so that she could destroy his enemies. Rage had boiled constantly within her. When she heard the word shattoi again, she remembered surrendering to that rage.

    The Rotan merchant's son was probably around fourteen years old at the time , but he'd been as tall as most adults. She had no idea why he'd chosen her as a target, but he'd bullied her mercilessly from the first. She knew even when she was young that it was a bad idea to fight with the son of Jiguro's employer, so she'd done her best to avoid him when possible and ignore him whenever they had to be in the same place.

    But one day, one of their pursuers caught up to Jiguro and Balsa. Balsa's father Karuna had been the physician of Kanbal's king, but the king's younger brother Rogsam had coerced him into poisoning the king so that Rogsam could seize power. If Karuna had refused Rogsam's orders, both he and the six-year-old Balsa would have been killed.

    In this crisis, Karuna had begged his best friend Jiguro to take Balsa and run in order to save her life. Jiguro had been  an esteemed member of an elite group of nine men that guarded the King known as the King's Spears. He'd also been well-regarded inside the royal palace. When he’ d seen his friend's utter desperation, he had thrown away everything in his life to flee Kanbal and protect Balsa.

    But no matter where they ran, they'd been followed. Jiguro was strong, but his pursuers were King's Spears like himself. They were also his friends. Being forced to kill them was indescribably painful for Jiguro. Even when she'd been very young, Balsa had always been able to feel the aura of pain and despair radiating from him every time he killed a friend.

    The day their pursuer had found them in Rota, the fierce battle between Jiguro and his opponent had lasted all day until the evening. When it was finally over, Jiguro had gone to bury his friend in the open meadow surrounding the merchant's camp. She didn't remember him saying anything during the burial.

    Balsa had witnessed the entire terrible struggle to the death. The stench of blood had hung heavy in the air until well into that night. She'd stood a little ways away from Jiguro and the grave and shook until she'd felt like she would fly apart. Jiguro hadn't so much as glanced at her. Balsa remembered feeling like she'd turned to smoke and disappeared, she'd been so lonely.

    After the funeral was over, Jiguro had removed his blood-spattered coat, rolled it into a ball in his hands, and walked morosely away from her without saying a word. He'd walked all the way to a small hut behind the lodging house they were staying at with the merchant, entered in, and shut the door firmly behind him.

    Balsa had remained outside the hut all alone, staring at the closed door. She remembered the shadows of the many shala trees growing in the garden near the hut with perfect clarity. While looking at the shifting shadows of the thin branches, she'd felt Jiguro's despair as well as  her own at being ignored in such a heartless way.

    It was at that moment that the merchant's son had approached her. He'd seemed agitated, but she never found out why. He'd stood in Balsa's shadow and insulted her as he always did, then spat in her hair.

    "Shattoi, you stink! You're stinking up the garden. Get in that hut so I don't have to smell you anymore."

    It was the first time she'd ever wanted to hit someone. She'd wanted to hit him so hard that he'd never get up again. It was a good thing she hadn't been carrying her short spear then, or she was certain she would have killed him.

    Giving into her rage had felt glorious. She'd kicked the boy in the knee; h e'd collapsed to the ground, hard. She'd straddled him and kept hitting him until his face was drenched with blood. Her fist had made contact with his teeth and she'd felt her knuckles split open but she hadn't cared: she'd been too caught up in her emotions to notice something like that. She'd howled like a stray dog and continued to beat the boy bloody.

    Balsa swallowed as she remembered the sensation of Jiguro seizing her collar from behind. She'd twisted in his grip like a wild animal, kicking and thrashing until she was thrown to the ground with a loud thud. When she was down, Jiguro had grabbed her by the throat and pinned her.

    "Did he bully you so badly you intend to kill him?"

    The rage in his voice had frightened her so much that she hadn't been able to look at him. She'd felt her anger cool instantly, changing immediately into pure terror. While teaching her the spear, Jiguro had often knocked her down and hit her without holding back, but aside from those times he'd never harmed her. That's why she'd been so scared: she'd never attacked another person before. She'd looked up at Jiguro reluctantly, shaking with genuine fear.

    She couldn't stand thinking about Jiguro as he'd been then. He'd been cruel. She'd been a young girl drunk on rage and covered in blood with her own fists bleeding—and he had completely terrified her. Why was she remembering all this now?

    Balsa watched the merchants and the children pass by the shop. The girl that had been called shattoi leaned backwards toward the boy, who seemed to be supporting her as they walked. The dim unsteady light in the girl's eyes made Balsa's chest ache with remembered pain.

    As she watched the children vanish in the crowd, someone tapped her on the shoulder. Tanda stood next to her. "What's wrong? Your face is terrifying."

    When Balsa glanced over at the kind face of her oldest friend, the ossified feelings of rage and pain from her memories loosened their grip on her. "Nothing's wrong. Did you sell everything already?"

    "Yeah, sure did. For a good price, too."

    Balsa smiled. "I'm glad."

 

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