WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Ceaseless
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◈ The Medieval Heretic King is Too Good at Developing ◈
Chapter 102: The Duty of the Living
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Rain was falling.
Too damp to be winter rain, too bone-chilling to be spring rain. It was rain somewhere in between.
Rain poured over the Swabian Plain beneath low, gray clouds. It washed the color from the world and mixed earth with blood.
Joseph Fritz walked.
Trudge, trudge.
He dragged one leg behind him. The arrowhead that had pierced his thigh had been removed, but the wound wrapped in blood-caked cloth throbbed every time he took a step.
“...”
Wherever he walked, there were only corpses.
Bodies face down, bodies turned over, bodies clutching broken sickles, bodies with their entrails spilling out.
Thin red streams flowed with the rainwater and gathered into pools. Raindrops formed ripples across their dark crimson surfaces.
Splash, splash.
Joseph's eyes were dull.
Not sorrow, not anger, but something far beneath either. Beyond his eyes lay a kind of emptiness born from emotions worn down until nothing could be felt anymore.
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.
He counted the bodies. Not consciously. His eyes simply followed them, as though that was the only way his walk across this field could have any meaning.
They had all been Joseph's comrades.
No. Only months ago, they had been neighbors who plowed their fields.
They had gone to war wearing layers of thick linen shirts instead of armor, carrying rusted sickles and axes instead of swords.
Some had held smooth steel swords smuggled from Bohemia, or matchlock guns.
But those weapons of slaughter must have felt far too unfamiliar and heavy in the rough hands accustomed to farm tools.
No matter how abundant the Gunpowder and firearms from Bohemia were, no matter how superior their firepower.
Those handling them were still peasants.
When three hundred cavalrymen of the Swabian lords' coalition drove into their flank in wedge formation, the peasants' ranks collapsed like a sandcastle.
A wall of shields formed by well-trained infantry pressed them from the front, while knights' lances pierced flesh and bone from behind.
Farmers who had spent their entire lives digging in the earth had never learned to hold their formation and retreat in orderly obedience to commands.
‘Still, they did not run.’
At the very end, when they realized there was nowhere left to flee, they fought back with animal cries.
Better to die facing forward than flee only to be cut down from behind.
They cut horses' legs with sickles, struck knights' shins with axes, and tore at enemy hands with their teeth.
That blind resistance delayed the lords' advance for a full hour.
Because of that, Joseph survived.
When one side of the encirclement briefly loosened, Joseph and a handful of survivors escaped.
But Joseph alone had returned to this field.
“...”
Rainwater ran over the fallen faces.
The water gathered in the dead men's eyes looked like tears, but Joseph knew.
The dead did not cry.
Tears were the privilege of the living.
Then, beyond the gray curtain of rain, something stirred atop a heap of corpses some ten paces ahead.
Joseph stopped abruptly.
A surviving comrade? Or a soldier from the lords' army, here to finish off the wounded?
Holding his breath, Joseph narrowed his eyes.
It was a thin man in ash-gray rags. He looked too shabby to be a knight, or even a soldier.
The man was busily searching the body at his feet.
He rinsed a few coins taken from a pouch in the rain, bit them with his teeth, then grinned in satisfaction and shoved them into his clothes.
When a ring on the corpse's finger would not come off easily, the man clicked his tongue in irritation and drew a rusty dagger from his waist. He meant to cut off the finger entirely.
A corpse thief.
Human refuse that descended like hyenas after a battle.
Just before the dagger touched the corpse's finger, a branch snapped beneath Joseph's foot.
Crack.
“Eek!”
The man jolted and leaped back. With frightened eyes, he turned toward the sound.
But the instant he looked Joseph over in the rain, his expression changed.
A bloodstained shirt, trousers reduced to rags, a wounded man limping on one leg.
Not a knight or a regular soldier. Just a lone straggler from the defeated side.
Then the man's eyes settled on Joseph's waist.
A steel sword.
Its distinctly clear, silver gleam marked it as Bohemian steel. Even on this dark battlefield, it caught the rainwater and shone like frost.
“Hey, friend.”
Greed began to glimmer in the man's eyes.
“That is a fine piece you've got there. Bohemian steel, isn't it? You'd need to pay two cows to get something like that around here.”
All fear had vanished from his voice.
He had judged the lone, exhausted, limping man to be weak.
“Hand it over.”
The man raised his dagger and crept closer.
“Leave everything you've got and get lost. The sword, your pouch, your boots. Ah, I'll let you keep your underwear. I'm a generous man.”
He bared his teeth in a grin.
A foul stench came from between his rotten yellow front teeth.
Joseph watched him in silence.
He did not even feel anger. Only a deep exhaustion, along with a strange sense of absurdity.
In the middle of a field of corpses.
Telling a man with a sword to hand over his sword.
Shing.
Joseph's hand moved.
The sound of the sword leaving its scabbard was clear and sharp enough to cut through the rain.
The steel blade, which had lost none of its shine beneath the ash-gray sky, reflected Joseph's expressionless face like a mirror.
“Ooh...!”
The man's eyes widened. Blinded by greed, he seemed incapable of grasping the situation.
“Yes, that! Hurry up and hand it over! Don't get cocky just because you've got one fancy sword...”
At that moment, Joseph moved.
He had never properly learned swordsmanship.
He had merely cut people down on the battlefield.
Not once, but many times.
He had knocked aside spears thrust at him, sliced the ankles of soldiers hiding behind shields, and beheaded knights begging for their lives.
Not a pattern remembered by his mind, but one his body remembered solely to survive.
Slice.
The blade passed across the man's neck.
His body crumpled as though falling to its knees. Half a beat later, his head rolled into a muddy pool.
Splash.
Blood mixed with rainwater spattered Joseph's boots.
Still gripping his sword, Joseph looked down at the severed head.
The grotesque expression, a mixture of greed and shock at the final moment, was being washed away by the rain.
“...Why in the world?”
A dry murmur escaped Joseph's lips.
“Would you pick a fight with someone carrying a sword... I don't understand.”
There was no answer.
The dead did not answer.
Joseph wiped the blood from his blade on the corpse thief's rags, then slowly sheathed it.
Then he turned his head.
The corpse the man had been searching.
He had not known who it was from a distance, but as he came closer, the face became clear.
“...Frederick.”
The blue eyes had already clouded like glass marbles.
The final battle. When the cavalry of the lords' army had circled around the flank and driven in like a wedge.
Frederick had pushed Joseph away.
Then he had shouted:
‘Your family is waiting for you, Joseph! Live! Go back alive! I'll be fine!’
Those had been his final words.
“...You idiot.”
Joseph bit his lip. He tasted iron.
“You're not fine, you foolish bastard.”
Something hot, whether rain or tears, ran down his cheek. With a trembling hand, Joseph closed Frederick's wide-open eyes.
And right beside him.
Less than half a step away, another body lay curled up.
Mikhail.
Joseph's adjutant, from the same village. A man who was always quiet, who only sat in a corner and nodded during meetings. No one could ever tell what he was thinking.
But at the end, he had been completely different. The man who had always said nothing had shouted louder than anyone at the moment of his death.
‘God! Lead me into heaven! Amen!’
Then he brought down a knight with a single matchlock shot, only to be surrounded and stabbed to death by that knight's retainers.
Joseph sat between the two bodies for a long time.
“...”
Thousands of peasants had gathered beneath the banner of the Bundschuh.
At first, they had won victory after victory with the power of Gunpowder. But the lords had not been such easy opponents.
The Swabian League, the Elector Palatine, the Archbishop of Trier, and even the Count of Württemberg. Lords who normally snarled at one another had swiftly joined hands in the face of a peasant uprising.
The coalition army outnumbered the Bundschuh by more than four to one, and its commanders were all professional soldiers hardened by battle.
The situation had steadily worsened. Supplies were cut off, ammunition ran low, and desertions came almost every day.
In the end, Joseph had been driven onto an unnamed hill in the Swabian Plain, where he faced six thousand coalition troops with twelve hundred peasants.
This was the result.
The peasant uprising in Germany had ended in failure.
Joseph's lips trembled.
‘I wanted to bring the Lord's kingdom with these hands.’
A world where peasants were not persecuted.
A world where they did not have to bow beneath the tyranny of lords.
A world where they could eat according to the work they had done.
He had risked his life for that simple and rightful cause.
Prepared to die, he had taken up a sword.
But the result was devastating.
The cause had been trampled underfoot, and all who had dreamed of it were dead.
Only the one who had urged them toward that dream remained alive.
“Sorry...”
Joseph's shoulders shook uncontrollably in the rain.
“I'm sorry. I truly... I'm sorry.”
He sobbed for a long time.
Rain fell from the sky, blood flowed across the ground, and Joseph's crying was quieter than either.
The urge to die clawed through his mind.
If he drew his sword and cut his throat now, would he be freed from this terrible guilt?
Could he meet Frederick and Mikhail in the next world, fall to his knees, and beg forgiveness?
His right hand moved to the sword hilt.
His fingers closed around the cold steel.
At that very moment, beloved faces rose in his mind.
‘...Elsa. Emma... Sophie.’
His wife and daughters.
‘Did they arrive safely in Bohemia?’
Were they alive?
Were they well?
Were they going hungry?
If his family was waiting for him to return.
Even if they were not, should he not at least live long enough to see their faces?
The strength slowly left the hand gripping his sword hilt.
He wanted to die.
But he could not die.
To end with his own hands the life Frederick had saved by sacrificing himself would make even Frederick's death meaningless.
‘I have to go.’
Joseph gritted his teeth and forced his unsteady body upright. His knees trembled, but he forced strength into his legs and held himself up.
One last time, he looked down at the bodies of his two comrades.
“Wait for me.”
His voice was hoarse, but his eyes shone brightly.
“When it is all over... I will come back and bury you.”
It was a promise he might not be able to keep.
He was not even certain that he could return.
Still, he had to say it.
Even if the promises of the living could not reach the dead.
It was the only respect the living could offer them.
Joseph turned away.
East.
Toward Bohemia.
Toward the land where his family, and perhaps a new hope, might be waiting.
Dragging his limping leg, he walked into the rain.
Footnotes:
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