14. Red Flag

Kretzman.

Poets and jesters must have existed in your bygone era as well. However, I had not realized. That blatant obscenity was their true talent. Those who sang of glorious splendor or imitated foolish servants with a semblance of nobility under the boot of noble knights and ignorant ladies, were completely different people before the lowly freemen. They were lewd in places where I was not present.

“Oh, my love!”

The fair-faced poet spoke of love so easily with an exalted voice. Receiving the wine poured by a woman with his impure lips, he extensively praised her benevolent nature and luscious breasts. The stocky jester alternately acted out a stallion and mare in heat. Ugly and heated, reveling and staggering, they seemed enveloped not by alcohol, but by love, lust, and spiritual corruption.

The freewoman teased by the poet glared. Clutching her skirt like the wind and acting as if she would turn away at any moment, she promptly sat on the poet’s lap, scratching his cheek while offering sweet flirtation. Some woman laughed heartily while repeatedly slapping the jester’s buttocks. On the squalid muddy street of the late-night market, they looked just like a group of blind people hopelessly enchanted by vulgar magic. And there…

I was absolutely beside myself.

“Ah…! What should be done about those unsightly sights!”

It was so funny.

“How can they be like that when they’re wearing even shabby human skins?”

It was too funny.

As I pointed at the group of jesters with my hand holding a wooden cup and cackled, the already sloshing wine spilled over, thoroughly wetting between my fingers. At the time, I didn’t mind the liquid that scattered and even soaked my sleeve as I laughed and my hand shook.

No, I hadn’t even realized. I just laughed until I was completely drained and leaned my whole body on my companion’s shoulder. That night, I was carelessly sitting on a barrel that encircled a corner of the market’s performance area. If someone had seen me then, would they have thought I was a maiden from a respectable family?

“Wait, let go of me! Just a moment!”

When I leaned on her, my companion who was laughing holding her stomach on the barrel next to me hastily pushed me away. However, I still remember that her brow, lit by the bonfire, was also stained with long laughter. Even at that moment when the barrel was tipping, she couldn’t stop laughing, just like me.

I grabbed her body as if embracing her and buried my face in her neck. Her dirty and slender neck, which was said to “sell her lower half in the brothels downstream,” was thoroughly imbued with the stench of foul sewage, cheap opium, and the scent of murky wildflowers.

“Now, Miss Prostitute of the rabble. I told you those fellows were funny, didn’t I? Did I or didn’t I?”

“That’s right. You have quite an eye for it.”

I rested my chin on the shoulder of the boasting woman and laughed. After laughing like that for a while longer, unable to resist the effects of alcohol, I laid my head down completely. Then, I seemed to have muttered for a long time, wiggling my index finger along with the jester’s movements.

“Dangle, dangle. Dangle, dangle, dangle…”

The woman supporting my head with one shoulder twisted her head and gestured somewhere. It was probably a signal that she needed more alcohol. One of the men from the performance troupe approached and placed a new cup in her hand. As she downed the strong rice wine in one gulp, she suddenly looked below the barrel and giggled.

“I thought some well-bred young lady had been caught wandering around wearing just a silk undergarment…”

“Hmm?”

“Young lady, my foot. She’s completely mad.”

I glanced down to where her smile was falling. There were my bare feet, covered up to the ankles in black mud and unidentifiable filth.

“Hey. Even the beggars on the lower street wear shoes.”

At her joking reproach, I opened my eyes wide. But soon I burst into laughter again.

“What should I do about it?”

“What indeed…. That’s just how it is. Ah, stop clinging to me.”

“Whyyy.”

“I can’t move, can I?”

“You quite like me though.”

“Oh my. My lady…. Don’t talk nonsense.”

“Hmm? Nonsense?”

“I said get lost.”

“I don’t want to? I don’t want tooo…?”

I wrapped both arms around the neck of the woman pushing me away and clung to her like a leech. The vibrations of her whole body shaking with laughter were passing into my chest.

That night.

I thoroughly enjoyed watching the freemen dance riotously around the fire. I fully indulged in their vulgar and cheap love. It was a night where red sparks scattered in the darkness like shining ashes, and the high-pitched accompaniment swelled like hot steam. It was a night of willing vulgarity and willing promiscuity.

***

Kretzman.

That day was the fifteenth day since we left the inn in Alona, which had been reduced to near ruins by Johannes’s hand, and entrusted ourselves to the lord of Pessoa.

Whether due to some kind of deal, or simply knightly friendship as Johannes claimed. The lord of that place, who had been strangely favorable to my brother from before, truly welcomed the unexpected guests, and thanks to that, I was able to lead a more comfortable life than ever during that period.

Johannes was with me the whole time. Embracing me like a blind person, like a child who had come back from the dead. He hardly knew how to let go, and the contact that subtly rubbed and pressed against my entire body knew no distinction between day and night. The lavish quarters given to him were nothing more than a storage room for his belongings. My bedroom was his bedroom, and I never stopped him either.

Unless the young lord of Pessoa sought out Johannes, we spent most of our days behind tightly locked doors. We didn’t let in even a single maid except when meals were brought. If it was about attending to me, from trivial things like eating snacks to dressing, bathing, and even just supporting my body, everything, from beginning to end, was Johannes’s role. All of it was what he had insisted upon, almost begging.

“Leave everything to me.”

He whispered softly to me, both of us with closed eyes.

I graciously allowed his interference. I didn’t know how to hide my joy. Neither the overflowing affection towards my brother, nor even the physical pleasure we dared to share. Even if I had tried to hide it, no one would have been unaware of our relationship anyway. I constantly moaned in sickness due to my lover who knew neither time nor fatigue.

“I love you.”

After whispering that to me once at the inn in Alona, Johannes was just like a child who had newly learned to speak. His urgent confessions poured down like a waterfall dozens, hundreds of times a day. Over my head. Over the bridge of my nose. On my lips and neck. On my knees. On my toes. The dark blue water he poured out filled my deep valleys with a force that seemed to break the earth. It was so endless.

I love you.

I love you.

I love you.

A roar that seemed to drive me insane.

I soon stood still with my mouth open under the waterfall that made my eardrums ring pitch black. Receiving the fierce baptism of water, I raised my head high and opened my narrow eyes.

With arms spread wide, drenching my entire being from head to toe with his confessions, I drank deeply of his water that rushed into my mouth. I gasped repeatedly, feeling as if I was melting in the rough current. I love you, Johannes. I love you too, Johannes. Ah, Johannes. The only person who cherishes me, empty and insubstantial with nothing but a voice, as if I were his own body.

You are mine.

…….

It had been exactly fifteen days of such abandon. That day, Johannes went out for the first time in a very long while. It was to compensate the innkeeper and his wife for the value of the building. As the couple and the siblings of Alona, who had lost their entire livelihood in a single morning, were like thorns in my heart as well, I saw him off very happily. And that night….

I wrote a letter.

Johannes. I am leaving this place.

After carefully writing this short line relying only on the dim candlelight in the middle of the night, I read it over and over again, pondering for a long time. Perhaps this was too cruel a measure? I seem to have put down the ink-stained quill and chewed on my nails for a moment.

After long deliberation, I drew two horizontal lines above “I am leaving this place,” but to tell the truth, the alternative was far from satisfactory. “Try to catch me.” It seemed like nothing but a joke and didn’t seem like it would have much impact, so in the end, I spread out a new parchment and wrote again.

Johannes. I am leaving this place.

I blankly imagined my lover’s face in my mind. Even the expression that would surely search for me like a madman. My heart fluttered at his delicate despair. I may have even lightly blushed my secretly lowered cheeks. Will you perhaps shout at me and vent your anger? Will you lower your head and cry silently?

Whatever form it takes, I hope you won’t leave me be.

I folded the letter moderately and went to Johannes’s quarters. I carefully placed it in the inside pocket of Johannes’s coat that was neatly hung over the clothes chest. I expected it would take quite some time for him to find this letter. After all, he never used his own bed. And then I left the castle immediately.

Kretzman.

I couldn’t forget that night when I left Pessoa Castle without a destination. It’s still vivid in my eyes at this moment, like the texture of the parchment pressed under my hand. That night was surprisingly deep, easily eluding the voices of the shocked guards searching for me.

Crossing the drawbridge, I threw my head back and looked up at the early winter sky, where scattered starlight formed a great river. Although I could feel quite a chill from the air touching my cheeks, I never picked up the outer garments I had shed layer by layer while walking. After undoing even my belt, I finally became dressed only in a thin underskirt in the cool outdoors. I even took off my leather shoes. Thus, I was able to completely leave the solid fortress.

The moment I stepped on the edge of the moat alone for the first time in my life. I can’t describe how thrilling it was. The feeling of pushing my entire body through the pale light beyond the narrow mountain path in the darkness. That marvelous sense of suffocation. The first breath of my life that soon followed.

…Haa.

At that time, I cried and laughed like a child. In my hand, which had stepped out aimlessly using the distant village lights as a guide, dangled only the purse of gold coins I had received from Johannes. I ran lightly, unable to contain my excitement.

Without looking back.