“Any dignity I can only maintain by acting self-important is dignity I don’t need. Besides, all of the people in this room I think of not as retainers or citizens, but as comrades.”
“You’re too kind, Your Majesty.” Juna gave a slight bow. Those little gestures of hers always made for such a pretty picture.
Tomoe, on the other hand, was so nervous she was stiff. Her clothes last time had been falling apart, but now she wore what looked like a miko outfit with a miniskirt, which was apparently a traditional outfit for mystic wolves. “A-Am I your comrade as well, my king?”
“No, no, Tomoe, you’re my sister-in-law, remember?”
“Oh, right.”
“Yep. So don’t call me your king, call me ‘Big Brother Souma.’”
“Ah, no fair! Call me ‘Big Sister,’ too, then!” Liscia cried.
“Um… Big Brother Souma. Big Sister Liscia,” Tomoe said with upturned eyes.
““Nice!”” Liscia and I both gave Tomoe’s cute reaction an enthusiastic thumbs up.
Thwack! Thwack!
We got whacked upside the head with a paper fan. It was Hakuya who did it.
“You two, it’s taking us forever to get on with things, so please cut that out.”
““We’re sorry…”” we both earnestly apologized.
By the way, that paper fan was something I had given to Hakuya when he had taken the position of prime minister, saying, “If I act too far out of line, don’t hesitate to slap me upside the head with this.” It had been a joke to try to get the too-serious Hakuya to lighten up, but as you would expect from a man who was the greatest genius in the history of Elfrieden (or so Marx claimed), he was putting the paper fan to brilliant use.
“So how does a retainer slapping his king with a paper fan factor into the royal dignity?” I asked.
“It pains me to do it, sire, but this is a royal order, you see,” Hakuya said with a cool look on his face. “That aside, sire, you’ll have to explain to everyone why they’ve been called here.”
“Oh, yeah, that’s right… Poncho.”
“Y-Yessss!”
With the conversation suddenly turning to him, paunchy Poncho stood up so vigorously he almost knocked his chair over. He was as rotund as ever, but he was more suntanned than he had been during the royal audience the other day.
“Have you prepared what I asked you for?” I asked.
“Y-Yes! With your cooperation, sire, I was able to visit all the places it took me eight years to go around to before in a matter of two weeks.”
“Cooperation… What did you do for him?” Liscia looked at me dubiously.
“Oh, he means how I cleared things with the countries involved and let him use one of the royal family’s royal visit wyverns to get around.”
Royal visit wyverns were used by the king when he traveled abroad. The Forbidden Army had only a handful of them. Poncho’s task had required speedy transportation, so I had loaned him one. Most wyverns belonged to the air force, but with their admiral, Castor, being uncooperative, asking him to loan us one of theirs probably wouldn’t have worked…It was such a headache.
“Well then, Poncho, show us what you’ve gathered,” I said.
“Y-Yes! In here, sire, I have the ‘ingredients there is no custom of eating in this country’ that you requested, yes!” With those words, Poncho pulled out a big sack.
When Liscia saw it, her eyes went wide. “Hey, that’s the Hero’s Sack!”
“Yeah. It fits a lot more than it looks like it should, and, on top of that, food put inside it doesn’t rot as easily. I thought it’d be perfect for gathering ingredients, so I lent it to him.”
“Even so, you shouldn’t… Oh, whatever.” Liscia slumped her shoulders in resignation. “So, what was it? Ingredients there’s no custom of eating in this country?”
“More precisely, it was ‘Ingredients eaten in foreign countries and select regions of our own country, but which there is no general custom of eating in this country,’” I said.
Different places have different foods, and different people have different tastes. You often hear of things that are thrown away as inedible in one place being appreciated as a delicacy in another. Even in Japan, in some regions you could find things that would make you say, “Huh? You eat that?” To the point that there have been programs like Ken**n Show that have focused on the subject.
“Right now, our country grows things like cotton, tea, and tobacco, so we’re replacing them with food crops,” I explained. “However, we won’t see the effects of that until autumn, at least. So in order to keep the people from starving until then, a plan with immediate effects is needed.”
In order to resolve the food crisis, serious reforms over a long period of time would be necessary. However, during that time there would be people starving, and there was the worry some might starve to death at this rate. What was more, the first to die would be babies of nursing age, with their weak constitutions and high need for nutrition.
Children were a national treasure. I couldn’t let them starve to death.
That said, even if I wanted to deliver food to all the starving people of the country, there were limits to how much support the country could offer. That was why, alongside longer-term strategies, short-term countermeasures with immediate effects would be necessary.
“And that’s these ingredients we don’t have a custom of eating?” Liscia asked.
“They’re eaten in other countries, but we don’t have a custom of eating them here,” I said. “If we develop those customs, it will make it harder to starve. It simply increases the food supply, after all.”
“Is there going to be anything so convenient?” she asked doubtfully.
“That’s what we’re checking…Now then, let’s change locations.”
“Change locations? Where to?” Seeing Liscia tilt her head to the side quizzically, I responded with a laugh.
“We’re deciding whether we can use these ingredients or not. We’re off to the cafeteria, obviously.”
“Hey, Souma. I understand why you want to use the cafeteria, but… don’t we have too many people?” Liscia asked.
As she had pointed out, the cafeteria was noisy, but in a different way than usual.
In this cafeteria which was used by the guards and maids (and recently, even the king), there were usually more than thirty long tables set up in order to accommodate a large number of people eating at the same time. However, at present, all but one of the long tables had been taken away to make a wide open space. Despite this, the cafeteria was full of people and equipment, and there was only a little free space around the long table.
The massive jewel floating in the room was eating up a particularly large amount of space.
“Another Jewel Voice Broadcast?” Liscia asked.
“It’s a horrible waste that they only used a handy thing like this to read out declarations of war,” I said. “I’ve got to put it to better use.”
This Jewel Voice Broadcast was kind of like television. It could relay information to the people immediately, so airing some entertainment programs was bound to help win the support of the people. I supposed it did have a couple of faults in that the lack of recording technology meant all broadcasts had to be live, and that the video was only available in larger towns and cities (though apparently sound-only broadcasts were available in even the smallest of rural villages). That was just one thing where I would have to wait for the technology (magic?) to advance.
I had been thinking of starting with Nodo Jiman, the amateur singing contest, as our first entertainment program. Through the singing cafe where Juna worked, I had been calling out to the people who had come to show off their “gift of singing” during my gathering of gifted people, and we were making preparations to have them debut as singers and idols.