Guardians of the Prince - CH 2.2

Mr Lahzt led the prince and I upstairs, to a guest room on the second floor where we would both stay. Mr Kahzam followed, too.

“This is my family’s villa,” Mr Lahzt said, as he opened a heavy-looking wooden door. I figured that was the case. After all, the way there was nothing but the minimum necessary furnishings matched his personality.

“Normally there’s a groundskeeper, but at the moment, it’s just you, me, and Kahzam. I know it’s not much, and I do apologize, but I hope you’ll be able to rest here for today. Feel free to go wherever you’d like within the building, except for the room with the Shu-ii.”

“I know your clothes and things are still in the Garden of Stars,” Mr Kahzam said, hanging back, but finally opening his mouth. “I’ll go get them immediately, please don’t worry.”

I nodded. “Thank you. If you could, uh… bring the bouquet too. It’s important to me…”

Mr Kahzam responded with a nod, as if to say he understood.

As soon as we got to the bedroom, I was overcome with exhaustion. The instant the door shut, the prince and I both collapsed onto the simple bed and tried to get to sleep. My body was plenty tired, and somehow so was my mouth. Maybe suddenly switching languages was using different muscles than I was used to.

There was a familiar color on top of the side table. My lavender dress had been folded and set down there, with my accessories on top of it. I shifted in bed and caught sight of my favorite bordeaux ankle-strap pumps too. All the things I’d been wearing the day of the wedding.

One of my earrings was missing, it must have flown off from the impact of crossing space and time. After all, that impact had knocked me unconscious. I’d been holding a clutch too, but that was gone as well.

What had happened after the bouquet and I disappeared? The wedding reception was an important celebration, did they manage to still have it? Or maybe the flow of time was different here, and only a few seconds had passed on the other side.

I hoped it was true. Otherwise, I’d been missing for six months. I wondered if anybody had shed any tears for me, and my chest started to hurt.

My time at the treehouse had been such a balm to me, and my heart hadn’t been nearly this conflicted. I quickly turned my thoughts to that giant, mysterious tree, hoping to calm myself. I had known as soon as I’d seen that transparent trunk that I was no longer in my own world.

A different world, huh… Indeed, I was in a different world. Whatever was going to happen next, I had to get a grip on what was going on right now. It had been six months, any period when I might have been able to lie to myself that this was all a dream was long since past.

I had read stories where someone wandered into another world, but they always had young girls or boys as the protagonist, kids who grew up during their various experiences in those worlds, kids who had a mission they had to complete in that other world, and who then completed it.

But I wasn’t young any more. At twenty five, I was clearly an adult. Well, I was less confident that I could claim to be mentally mature, but still.

If I had any mission here… it was one I’d already completed. My coming here had been an accident, but perhaps raising a child I’d found in a forest was a mission only I could complete.

Today, the day I’d learned what was really going on, was also the day my mission ended. That really is true, isn’t it.

I wondered if what they’d told me was really the truth. Like, were they just trying to get rid of me?

Now that I knew their secret, they couldn’t let me live, kind of thing? If that was true, maybe they were going to kill me. After all, they’d declared the prince stillborn and ran off with him. This was playing out like some kind of historical drama.

But the Crown Prince’s faction had seemed the only bloodthirsty one. Mr Lahzt seemed sincere in his sense of responsibility, and Mr Kahzam… Well, he was Morio.

But it was Lady Solamire’s letter more than anything that had warmed my heart. Those pictograms really worked their magic,  they transmitted her feelings directly.

I wanted to introduce the prince to Lady Solamire as quick as we could. My problems could come after that. I would consider my options after the prince’s troubles were taken care of.

I kissed his forehead gently as he slept there beside me.

Letting go of him… I was going to be very lonesome…

The following morning, I woke up early, still following our treehouse routine. The morning air here was a bit cooler than it had been there.

I got up quietly and changed my clothes, but the prince must have noticed anyway, because he woke up too. “Goo moo,” he said, rubbing his eyes.

“Good morning, little prince. Shall we wash our faces?”

The prince curled himself around me, and we headed over to the sink that was hidden behind a screen in one corner of the room.

“Wow, that Garden of Stars really is something…”

I peered at myself in the mirror. I’d caught my first glance at myself in a mirror in a long while last night when I’d borrowed their bath, but there really was something a little different about my face after all.

My hair was glossy, my skin was bright – the energy of the Garden of Stars had apparently had some effect on me. The prince had met his milestones early, but since I’d already met all mine as an adult, I selfishly imagined that the power must have worked in other ways. Of course my lifestyle in that treehouse had been pretty healthy, too.

After that nap yesterday, I’d taken my first bath in six months (in a claw foot tub!), and then they’d delivered a stew that Mr Kahzam had apparently made to our room, and the prince and I had our fill of it. They’d supplied a fruit wine too, but I only drank about half of it. It had been a long time since I had any alcohol, and I got a little tipsy, and before I knew it, I’d woken up in bed next to the prince in the morning.

Thank god I hadn’t let the two men in the building see me like that, but I did seem to have let an infant see me like that.

A very chipper prince and I took our dinner dishes downstairs. Making my way from my memories of yesterday, we headed for the interior hallway, and found the kitchen.

I hadn’t been able to look closely yesterday with all the chaos, so I took another look around. A wooden countertop with a tiled water basin, a portable gas hotplate– Wait, was that an electric hotplate? With this retro atmosphere, the whole place definitely felt more ‘field galley’ than ‘kitchen’ though.

As we were washing our dishes, I heard quiet footsteps, and Mr Kahzam came in. He was quite dapper in a simple unbleached shirt, and pants of what looked like un-dyed denim.

“Oh, good morning.”

“Good morning.”

The corner’s of Mr Kahzam’s mouth turned up ever so slightly in a smile, and he pointed to a spot next to me.

“I put your things from the treehouse over there.”

“Wow, that was fast! Thank you very much.”

He’d put a cloth bag apparently packed with our things on the table in the room with the fireplace, which was connected through the galley. And on top of that was my dried bouquet.

I put my hand gently on the bouquet, and breathed a sigh of relief. I felt like as long as I had it, I still had some connection to my sisters.

When I looked back over, Mr Kahzam had taken some vegetables from a wooden box in one corner of the galley, and the prince was standing beside him and peering over at him. I left the bouquet and went back to the galley too.

“If you’re making breakfast, I can help. I’m assuming I need to wash that and peel it?”

I stuck my hand out, and after a moment’s hesitation, Mr Kahzam set the vegetable in my hand.

“Thank you.”

I stood next to him and we started cooking. I suddenly realized what an incredibly long time it had been since I made a meal with anyone.

“”

As I’d gathered yesterday, Mr Kahzam didn’t seem to be the type to strike up conversations on his own. But he did ask a few things, like what the prince liked to eat, and whenever I asked him something, he answered easily.

Breakfast had a simple soup-and-bread, ham-and-cheese feel. Mr Kahzam put some kind of brown beans in the pan, and boiled them with something that looked like milk. I wondered what it might be, and when I tried it, it was sort of like coffee with milk. Drinking this bean broth seemed to be part of the morning routine here. It smelled great.

“Mr Lahzt isn’t joining us?” I asked, when breakfast was complete.

“I did call for him. Dr Lahzt isn’t very good with mornings,” he said, heading out of the kitchen.

So Mr Lahzt wasn’t a morning person, huh, that was kind of cute… And Mr Kahzam seemed to know him pretty well. They must be close, huh.

That morning, making breakfast with Mr Kahzam, seeing Mr Lahzt’s sleepy face, was the first time I’d felt close to any adults in this world.

We chatted about various things while we ate breakfast.

After yesterday’s conversation, I wondered if Mr Lahzt and Mr Kahzam were close to the king’s second wife, and it turned out that was indeed the case. Mr Lahzt was one of her attending physicians, and Mr Kahzam was one of her personal guards. They were both also apparently distantly related to her. Each of them gained the trust of the King through their previous work and so he’d asked them to protect his second wife and their children.

Watching Mr Lahzt and Mr Kahzam talk, they did indeed seem to be close. They didn’t talk a lot, in fact they really didn’t say many words at all, but a certain familiarity between the two of them came through nonetheless. Mr Lahzt seemed to be the higher ranking person, indeed Mr Kahzam called him Dr Lahzt, but maybe because they were cousins, they seemed to be at ease with one another in a way that went beyond the framework of their titles or the task at hand.

The only other people who knew of this matter were the midwife, the prince’s older sister, and the second queen’s younger brother. Oh, and me of course.

“Her Highness’s younger brother is called Lord Fatido. He’s a private citizen, and president of a trading firm,” Mr Lahzt told me. Queen Solamire’s younger brother Fatido… Their names sounded like a musical scale.

“Lady Solamire has to stay put, thanks to the situation, so Lord Fatido will be visiting us in her stead. When he arrives, we’ll discuss prince’s future and yours. 1 Except…”

Mr Lahzt and Mr Kahzam exchanged a glance.

“I don’t think you need to meet with him, Mami,” Mr Kahzam said. “If there’s anything you’d like, let me know, and I’ll do whatever I can to arrange it. You’ve lost so much being brought here, and you did such a fantastic job. You have the right to expect to be rewarded.”

“Okay…”

Could I really accept a reward though? The idea didn’t please me so much as make me sad. It felt like I was being told that my job was over and the matter didn’t have anything further to do with me, that I shouldn’t concern myself with it any longer.

I was starting to get depressed, and when Mr Lahzt made a point of reiterating the idea, “At any rate, we’ll let you know when Lord Fatido arrives, so you should stay in your room,” I only gave a perfunctory answer. “Understood.”

Alright, I thought, it’s time to change the subject, so let’s ask.

So, as I was wiping food off the prince’s mouth, I asked them.

“So… That letter yesterday, that’s the first time I’ve seen letters like that. How was it I could read them?”

Mr Lahzt got a surprised expression on his face. “Oh that’s right, in your world, you can’t read the characters unless you learn them, right?”

Uh, yes? What was he talking about?

He told me that those characters were ideographs that could transmit detailed images when looked at, that even children could easily read them. I guess when I’d thought they looked like hieroglyphics, my impression hadn’t been too far from the truth. He said they were called Shin.

Mr Lahzt wrote down the word Shin for me, using the Shin themselves. From the image I got, they might be called something like ‘Star Heart Seals’ in my world. He wrote down the name of that globe of water too, the Shu-ii, and the image I got there was ‘water shrine.’

When I asked how something so convenient could exist, he told me that they weren’t invented by man, but rather handed down from God.

He told me this world was called Gaduelyon, and that the name of the god who’d handed down these letters was called Gaduos. I had heard of the idea that words had a power when they came out of your mouth. In Japan we called it kotodama, the soul of language, but here it seemed, the actual power of their god resided in the characters.

Except that in this case, it was extremely difficult for humans to write these Shin seals, and so the royal family had that skill drilled into them from a young age, and there were even some scholars who did nothing but research them their whole lives. That was the impression I got, at least.

And some strange things that had happened since I’d come here turned out to be things Mr Lahzt had done, using a technique he called the art of Shiino, where he pulled power from those Shin seals. Apparently, anyone who could use these techniques was called a Shiinoce, and there weren’t very many of them. Mr Kahzam said he couldn’t do it. Mr Lahzt was both a Shiinoce and a physician, which they told me was even more unusual.

Mr Kahzam’s transformation into an animal, and his coming and going in the Garden of Stars, turned out to be thanks to Mr Lahzt’s Shiino skills.

My own transfer into this world was also thanks to Shiino, of course, and the pale green letters that remained on my hand were especially rare Shin used in those arts.

“The fact that the seals were projected onto your hand was outside of my calculations, Mami… I chalk it up to the special circumstances of the event, I guess,” Mr Lahzt said, almost as if he was talking to himself. He seemed to have a lot of things running around in his head.

Besides the Shin, there was also a phonetic script called Ren, Human Connection Seals, which sort of looked like kanji too, and apparently those were what the general population used to read and write. Mr Lahzt wrote some of those down for me too, but it was all Greek to me, and I couldn’t read a word of it.

They seemed to be a fairly simple collection of vowels and consonants, so I figured I could learn it somehow. I hadn’t studied anything in a long while, but…

Nope, I’d just have to learn them! For right now at least, I had to be able to live as a member of the general population of this world!

“Can you write names in Shin, too?” I asked, and Mr Kahzam kindly wrote his name down for me in large letters. So it seemed that anyone could at least be taught their own names in Shin. So what was the prince’s name in Shin? I asked the question, a bit nervous, but they said small children didn’t have them. Apparently, people were given Shin names by God when they got to a certain age. I would have to wait until then to see it, huh… It was disappointing somehow.

The two characters of Mr Kahzam’s name, by the way, gave me an image of gazing out across a wide swath of land from somewhere high up, like a bird flying in the sky, and then the feeling of blowing wind. So this is what the name Kahzam meant then, huh?

“”

“What a wonderful name… Ah, sorry, I’ve just been calling you Morio this whole time.”

Mr Kahzam’s eyes narrowed with a smile. “There’s nothing to apologize for. I’m sorry I couldn’t introduce myself.”

Mr Kahzam seemed a generous, modest person. I got the impression he was casually trying to put me at ease.

Just then, Mr Lahzt suddenly asked me, “What does ‘Mami’ mean?”

Ah.

” ‘Ma’ means… like, truth, or something true, and ‘mi’ means beautiful,” I answered, haltingly.

I’d been calling myself that this whole time, but it’d been a total lie. It was hard to come clean now though, like, Oops, sorry, my real name isn’t Mami at all. But honestly, it was fine to have a different name for this world, right? I wasn’t inconveniencing anyone, after all.

Mr Lahzt wrote some Shin seals on his paper. “Like this… maybe?” he said, showing it to me. The characters transmitted an extravagant kind of beauty, not only in form but in substance too.

“That’s the general feeling, yeah.” I nodded firmly.

Mr Lahzt looked back and forth between the characters and me, and said, idly, “It’s totally different from the impression you give, huh.”

For a moment, I was flustered. But wait a minute. Didn’t he just say something kind of rude?

“Exactly how am I not beautiful?”

I got irritated and made out like I was trying not to quake with anger, and Mr Lahzt quickly backtracked. “Uh, no, that’s not–”

Mr Kahzam covered his mouth and laughed.

After breakfast, Mr Lahzt had work to do, so he retreated into the room where the Shu-ii was located.

I didn’t have anything special to do, so after tidying up breakfast, the prince and I went outside.

Just outside the hearth room was a garden. It seemed to have been formed by removing grass and trees from among what had already been growing there, rather than planting entirely new trees or flowers, and it continued at one end into a comfortable little grove. I couldn’t see any other houses nearby. I did occasionally see birds or small animals around.

Looking at the villa from the outside, the outer walls were made of stone, but I could see a sort of repeating pattern of deliberately exposed log pillars, and it looked like a TV version of a European country house. There were even exposed wooden roof beams on the interior. Just looking at them made me feel a little better somehow.

One side of the building was two stories, but because the land was sloped, the other side was three stories.

The land opened up on that end, and the third floor wall had a large windmill attached to it, which was slowly turning in the breeze. Wind power seemed to be the main source of energy around here, I could see a few of them built in the area. How eco-friendly.

Mr Kahzam was primarily a bodyguard, so he was usually by our side. He seemed to pay close attention to our needs. He occasionally would tell us he was going to have a look around the grounds, and let us wander wherever we’d like, but when he showed up again, I was always relieved somehow. He was Morio, after all.

As I was playing with the prince, I asked Mr Kahzam what kind of place Vio Rizonna was.

Apparently it was an island nation, just like Japan. And ruled by a king, like England. He said it was a constitutional monarchy, where the king’s duties were relatively formal.

He said originally, this land had belonged to another kingdom that was located across the sea. It had been a little while since they’d gained independence, but as a still-emerging nation, they still followed many of the traditions of their original country, which said that only sons could inherit the throne.

But now that the battle over the succession was dragging on, nobody knew what was going to happen. I was relieved to hear that there weren’t any customs where women were second-class citizens or anything like that.

The land had yet to recover, and vegetables and things didn’t grow in much abundance, so they had to import them. They were trying to expand their livestock and dairy farming instead. Speaking of, the food that Mr Kahzam had brought us in the treehouse, as well as all the meals we’d had since we came here, and been meat and dairy heavy. And since it was an island nation, they apparently had a thriving fishing industry too.

The whole thing with Shino arts had surprised me, but I felt like the culture and food habits here weren’t too different from my world. Only a few details were odd, like the calendar. And there wasn’t a digital item to be found. In that way, it felt a little old-fashioned.

It was like these two worlds were identical twins raised in different places. They were exactly alike in appearance and on certain fundamental points, but because they’d been raised differently, their personalities were entirely different.

Mr Kahzam had questions for me too.

“Mami, can I ask you something? What does the name Morio mean?”

“Oh, um, mori means ‘the woods,’ like a place where a lot of trees grow. The o part is a masculine ending, it just means ‘a man.’ A fair number of men in my country have an o at the end of their names. So, like, a male animal who appeared from the woods…”

Ah. Crap. Now he knew not only that I’d thought of him as an animal, but that I’d confirmed he was a male animal as well.

I got a bit flustered, and looked over at Mr Kahzam like I was peering in on him through a keyhole.

The gentle expression he’d had until a minute ago had been replaced by an entirely blank look.

“It– it is a strange kind of name… I’m sorry.”

I apologized quietly, but Mr Kahzam’s expression softened again, like he’d only been surprised.

“Ah, no, I was just thinking… I apologize. I think the name suits me quite well. Since my eyes are the color of trees.”

I nodded in relief. “That’s true! That is true, actually, they’re a very striking color, leaves a strong impression.”

Mr Kahzam’s eyes narrowed a bit as he looked at me. “Thank you very much. Your color is very pretty, Mami… Black, that’s rare.”

“Is it? Oh wait, people could tell just from that, that I’m not from this world?”

“It’s okay, there are a few races from other countries where you occasionally find black hair and eyes. Certainly to find both in the same person is unusual, but not overly so.”

Okay, good. A foreigner with unusual eye and hair color was at least somewhere to start in this country.

Even though I’d learned the language of this country in my sleep, I wasn’t very familiar with actually uttering the sounds, so I was worried I was far more garbled and clumsy with it than Mr Kahzam or Mr Lahzt, but that might sound natural for a foreigner.

Wait. I hadn’t met any women since I’d come here, but what were their fashions like, like hairstyles and stuff?

My hair currently stretched to below my shoulders, but maybe that wasn’t that long around here…? What was I going to do if I was outrageously different from everybody else!

“Hey– uh, Mr Kahzam, what kind of feeling do you get, when you look at me?”

I hung a step back, and twirled around for Mr Kahzam.

“Uh… What, kind of feeling?”

Mr Kahzam’s eyes opened wide in surprise for some reason, and then he hid his mouth with that big right hand of his. Was he turning red a little, around the eyes maybe?

“Yeah, like… Mm, it makes you feel a little better to look at me?”

“What?”

Makes him feel better?

“Mm, like, you don’t feel like anything’s particularly weird about me? Compared to the women of this world.”

“Oh, ah.” Mr Kahzam nodded multiple times like he was in a panic. “Compared to the women of this world, right. Yeah. No, you’re fine, yes.”

“Okay, good. I don’t want to stand out too much…”

“Ah, no, of course. I understand. Um, I should go get lunch ready.”

Mr Kahzam headed off towards the villa apparently in kind of a hurry, so I called the prince and followed after, saying, “Oh, we’ll help,” but… Why was he in such a panic? That was weird.

Mr Kahzam and I made these kind of sandwich things for lunch. Mr Lahzt flew in, gulped them down, and flew back to his room again.

Things might get busy with the prince from here on out, he said, and he wanted to complete his trial medication while we were still here – using the bouquet of roses, the whole reason I’d ended up here in the first place. Well, we pretty much had to let him finish it, given all that.

After lunch, Mr Kahzam took us to a stable that was on the grounds.

The animal housed in the weathered but sturdy-looking wooden building was called an anpy. It looked a bit like an impala from my world, with a big long neck like a horse, and it had two slightly curved horns. People here used to ride these as transportation all the time, any time they wanted to go out, he said, until not too long ago.

I wondered if there weren’t any cars, and he told me there were, but not many people in the general population owned one yet, and the cost of maintenance on the electric automatic ones was still too much for the average person.

Hearing him talk about it, I thought this world really did take a different route for its cultural expansion.

It felt like, the world I had lived in had expanded at a good clip, and had to find solutions to problems that arose along the way – how to resurrect lost nature, for instance – but people in this place had taken it slowly, expanding, but being careful not to create problems in the first place.

It didn’t seem like they’d had any major world wars so far, and maybe that was thanks to the fact that they lived side by side with nature.

As I was mulling it over, Mr Kahzam was showing the prince the finer points of caring for the anpy. The prince was extremely excited, and watching him feed the anpy some grass was so cute it made me want to scream.

Speaking of, what was the animal Mr Kahzam had turned into? I asked him, and he said it was a rare animal called a ponga.

He’d been so cute like that, I wish I could have admired him more. No no, I mean, it was still Mr Kahzam though.

“Dr Lahzt transformed me into the ponga. I had to be something big so I could still carry the bags, but we didn’t want to frighten you, so we thought the ponga would be cute enough,” Mr Kahzam told me, and I laughed without meaning to.

Mr Lahzt had a bit of a chilly air about him, but inside he was really nice, huh.