Cooking with Wild Game (LN) - Volume 27 - Chapter 3.1

Chapter 3: Yun Sudra’s Melancholy

1

It was currently the twenty-first of the vermilion month, the day after Gazraan Rutim had recounted the events at the northern settlement to us. Aside from the sudden visit from Dan Rutim, nothing out of the ordinary had happened yet. After we finished gathering firewood and herbs, the women who lived nearby came to help out, and we set about handling the prep work for our business in the Fa house’s kitchen.

However, there was something off about that morning. Everyone seemed to be talking less than usual. The atmosphere wasn’t extremely quiet, but only a few people were speaking to one another. No one seemed to be slacking off on their work, though. They were clearly all putting in an effort, so I tried not to let it bother me as I handled my own work. But eventually, a woman with the same concerns as me whispered in my ear.

“Asuta, things seem different today. Did something happen around here?” She was a member of the Matua, who fell under the Gaaz, and had been working at the stalls for two and a half months now. She was only thirteen years old.

“No, not that I know of. There was that huge meeting at the northern settlement the day before last, but I don’t think this is about that.”

“Oh yeah, that thing with the Dom and Rutim. That certainly was a surprise. But every single clan will have heard about that by now. I don’t see why only the women around here would be so untalkative because of it.”

“It’s only the women from around here?”

“Yes. They’re the only ones who are like this.”

I observed the other women a little more carefully, and it soon became clear that she was absolutely right. I had women from lots of different clans helping out with our morning preparations, but mornings were so busy that we always had a core group made up of women who lived nearby and could just walk over to join us. The Matua, Beim, and Ravitz had each sent one of their people who would continue to work with us at the stalls for the remainder of the business day, but everyone else came from nearby.

“Fei Beim and Lili Ravitz are being quiet too, but they’re always like that. With our neighbors not talking much either, the air around here is starting to feel a little heavy.”

“Heavy?”

“Not to the point that it feels awkward. But it’s still a bit of a worry. I wonder if there was some sort of fight.”

Looking carefully, I saw that it was women from the Fou, Ran, and Sudra who had gone quiet. That combination caught my attention.

Naturally, Yun Sudra belonged to the Sudra clan. As her clan had continued to hold meetings and banquets in the hopes of pairing people up for marriage, she had been getting more and more down. And the clans the Sudra were trying to get closer to were none other than the Fou and Ran. It was definitely a bit concerning for the members of those three clans in particular to become so quiet all at once.

“Hey, Toor Deen...everyone else seems a bit down. Do you know anything?” I asked the young chef from the Deen clan.

However, she just sadly shook her head. “No. But you’re right that things are a bit different around here today. I’m kind of worried about it too.”

“Yeah. I hope there hasn’t been some sort of quarrel between the Sudra and the Fou, but...I’ll ask them about it later.”

“Okay. Thank you for taking the time to look into this.”

With that decided, I returned my full focus to my work without rocking the boat, and after two hours of prep, we were ready to head out to the Ruu settlement.

“Yun Sudra, why don’t you leave driving the totos to someone else and ride in our wagon this time?”

Today, the Fa clan was sending out two wagons, and Yun Sudra had been taking the reins quite often lately, so I had to go out of my way to ask her to join us in order to make sure we’d have a chance to talk.

Yun Sudra fidgeted and looked a little troubled.

However, the rather perceptive Matua girl then energetically called out, “I’ll handle Fafa’s reins! I haven’t had a chance to drive lately, so I’d be happy to take over for you!”

Then she called out to Fei Beim and Lili Ravitz to come join her. That just left me, Yun Sudra, and Toor Deen in Gilulu’s wagon. That meant the passengers in the two wagons were now separated into those who lived near us and those who didn’t.

“Okay, then we’re off to the Ruu settlement. Be careful on the road.”

After saying farewell to the Matua girl, I got Gilulu moving. When we made it to the Ruu settlement, a number of other women would be joining us, so I had about fifteen minutes to talk.

“Yun Sudra, you seem really down today. Is everything okay?”

“Yes. I don’t believe it will negatively impact my work.”

“I’m sure it won’t, but the Fou and Ran women weren’t talking much either, so I’m a bit concerned. I know it isn’t exactly proper to pry into other clans’ business like this, but would you mind telling me about it?”

“Mmm... Well, I suppose I should tell you what happened. You do pay me to work for you, after all,” Yun Sudra said, sighing heavily. I couldn’t see them, but I was sure Toor Deen was sitting very close to her, looking terribly concerned. “You see...the talks of marriage between the Fou, Ran, and Sudra are finally starting to bear fruit.”

“Ah, is that so? You’ve been having banquets to deepen your bonds for some time now, haven’t you?”

The first one had been delayed when I had fallen ill, but two months or so had already passed since then. That was how much time those clans had spent getting to know one another.

“It’s been decided that Cheem Sudra will take a bride from the Fou. A woman from the Ran is going to marry into our clan as well. In return, the Sudra are going to send the Fou and Ran clans one woman each.”

“I see. And you got mixed up in all that, didn’t you?”

“Yes. There are only two unmarried women in the Sudra to begin with,” Yun Sudra replied, sighing again. “So it was decided that I would marry into the Ran. But then...”

“Yeah? Did something happen between you and them?”

“Yes... Last night, I... I slapped my intended with all my might.”

“Huh?!” Toor Deen loudly exclaimed. “Y-You hit a man? But he’s a member of another clan, and he could become your husband, right?”

“Yes,” Yun Sudra replied, her voice almost getting lost in the breeze.

“Wh-What in the world happened? It must have been serious for you to hit someone from another clan,” I said.

“Please don’t ask me that. Thankfully, we were able to settle things, and the man has acknowledged that he was the one at fault.”

“All right, I’ll drop it. But did you at least explain everything to the rest of the Fou and Ran clans?”

The people of the forest’s edge greatly valued etiquette. Violence against a member of another clan would never be excused unless there was a seriously good reason for it. The only people I knew of who would act like that were...well, the Lea clan head, Rau Lea.

However, Yun Sudra replied, “No. That man and I haven’t said anything about why it happened, and because of that, the Fou and Ran women are completely dissatisfied with the situation. I’m so sorry for causing you trouble.”

“This isn’t really a problem for us, but are you okay, Yun Sudra? I mean, this is the man you were supposed to marry, right?”

“Yes. I gathered my resolve to do my duty for the sake of the Sudra. However, now that this has happened, I may not be able to marry into their clan at all. Besides, that man had no interest in taking me as his bride in the first place.”

“Who exactly is he, anyway?” Toor Deen asked, and Yun Sudra sighed once more before answering.

“The eldest son of the head of a Ran branch house, Jou Ran. The man who won the pole tugging event at the festival of the hunt.”

We met up with the members of the Ruu not long after that, so we weren’t able to talk any further about what had happened. However, Yun Sudra’s situation was the only thing on my mind for the rest of the trip. I did know who Jou Ran was. He was the one who had told Ai Fa on the night of the festival of the hunt that he’d like her to eventually be his bride. Of course, she had immediately turned him down flat, but that wasn’t something I could simply overlook.

On top of that, Yun Sudra had long ago fallen for me of all people but had been forced to suppress her feelings. Now she was supposed to marry Jou Ran, but for some reason she had ended up slapping him. I couldn’t overlook that either.

What in the world happened? I remember having trouble figuring out what kind of guy Jou Ran was, but he seemed friendly and polite enough. But whatever he did, he admitted he was at fault. Just how rude was he to Yun Sudra, exactly?

It was hard to imagine a man of the forest’s edge being rude to a woman. As I mentioned before, they greatly valued etiquette as a people—especially when it came to relationships between men and women. Their customs were so stringent that it was even frowned upon to praise someone’s appearance without a good reason.

Now that I thought about it, that was another way Rau Lea was outside the norm. He casually praised both Ai Fa and Yamiru Lea for their looks all the time, even though both of them disliked it. But Rau Lea was atypical in many ways. I couldn’t imagine Jou Ran acting as carelessly as he did. That went for Yun Sudra too, so I had no idea why such an unfortunate incident had occurred between them.

And it’s an even bigger deal if it’s making things awkward between the Sudra and the Fou and Ran. The Fou and Sudra are planning to become blood relatives soon, but now I really don’t know if this is going to turn out okay.

I was still working at my stall as I kept agonizing over that thought, until eventually Dora and Tara showed up to buy something.

“Hey there, Asuta. What sort of dish do you have today?”

“Ah, welcome. Today, I have a stew with tarapa, tino, and pula.”

We had been able to start getting our hands on those vegetables again as of yesterday, so I was selling an Italian-style stew using tomato-like tarapa, cabbage-like tino, and bell pepper-like pula. The Ruu clan had also gone back to making giba burgers with tarapa sauce, so to make this feel different, I had prepared it with lots of myamuu and chitt seeds to make it spicier. I had also added zucchini-like chan and potato-like chatchi, and had used shoulders and ribs for the cuts of meat.

“Sounds great. Your dishes with traip and reggi were delicious too, but smelling tarapa again for the first time in a while is really making me smile.”

“It looks tasty! I want this one!” Tara chimed in.

“Ah, but our other stalls have overhauled their dishes quite a bit, so think carefully before making a decision, okay?” I said.

In addition to getting all of our old vegetables back, poitan was also readily available once more, so Toor Deen’s stall was selling carbonara pasta for the first time in a while.

On top of that, Yamiru Lea’s stall was finally selling the revised version of myamuu giba. It had been a long wait, but at last we had access to shredded tino again so we could make it the way we wanted to. On top of that, I had used the opportunity to revise the name to keru giba. After all, we used more of the ginger-like keru root than the garlic-like myamuu in it now, so it was now a dish more similar to ginger pork. Changing the name just made sense at this point.

Meanwhile, the Ruu clan had started using tarapa sauce instead of nenon sauce again with the giba burgers. Apparently, they would be alternating between the two sauces daily from now on. And once their giba burgers sold out each day, they would start selling the herb grilled giba they had introduced during the rainy season. They were keeping the number of giba burgers they brought to town on the lower side, since the patties took a fair amount of effort to prepare, which meant the burgers would always sell out before the sun hit its peak.

As for the other soup dish, since we couldn’t use traip anymore, we had switched to a regular cream stew. That one would be alternated with the giba offal stew and the teriyaki stew.

Myme’s stall was the only one that hadn’t changed its menu, but that didn’t stop her from doing as well as she always had. A lot of her customers seemed happy to see her still serving the same dishes as before. It looked like she had a pretty good collection of solid regulars at this point.

“Hmm, this is a tough one! Thanks to you guys, we can have cream stew at home whenever we want now. But giba and kimyuus are delicious in totally different ways,” Dora said.

“I like dishes I’ve never had! I’ll go with that keru giba you have, Asuta!” Tara declared.

“Then should I have the cream stew and giba burger? Ah, but I’d also like to have pasta again since it’s been a while!”

“Jeez, hurry up and pick something! I’m starving!”

Seeing Dora struggle like that kinda made me happy. Despite how worried I had been all morning, I couldn’t help but feel soothed now.

“Okay! In that case, I’ll get the cream stew and giba burger! Asuta, could you serve us enough of this stuff for Tara?”

“Thanks for your continued business! It’ll just be a moment.”

I had been frying up some fresh keru giba, so I needed to finish that first. In the meantime, Dora smiled and continued speaking to me.

“By the way, thanks so much for ordering the onda. It must have taken a lot of coordination with all those inns, right?”

“It wasn’t too bad. At least a couple of us visit the inns daily regardless, and the inn owners were really happy to have a chance to keep using onda.”

“My uncle was overjoyed too. Not that you could tell by looking at him—his face was as gloomy as always—but it’s his job to grow onda, so now he won’t be bored for the next several months.”

Apparently, Dora’s uncle had chronic injuries in his lower back and knees after many long years as a farmer, so he couldn’t work out in the fields for long periods of time. But it didn’t take much strength to grow and harvest the bean sprout-like onda, so he could handle that without issue. Though he was nearly seventy, it brought the folks who lived in Daleim great joy to work for the sake of their family.

“They hold a gathering of inn owners at the start of each month. I’m planning to attend the meeting in the yellow month, so I could ask if any of the other inns want to keep using onda as well. Would that be helpful to you?”

“My uncle would be thrilled. We can grow as much of it now as we did during the rainy season, so we would definitely appreciate any new orders you could get us.”

In that case, I’d be sure to use plenty of onda in the food I’d be making for the big meeting. It would be such a waste for a versatile vegetable like that to only be available during the rainy season.

“By the way, Yumi’s been saying she’d like to visit the forest’s edge again,” Dora mentioned.

“Oh. Yeah. So she talked to you about it too, Dora?”

“Indeed. But all of us old folks are gonna be busy back at home. If it’s okay with all of you, I’d like to just have Tara go along. So long as there are hunters of the forest’s edge around, I’m sure she won’t be in any danger.”

“I wish all of you could come too,” Tara said.

“I do as well. But I guess we’ll have to wait in anticipation until the next new year comes around.”

With that, the father-daughter pair headed over to the restaurant space with their food.

Not long after, Marth arrived to take their place. He had become a reliable regular over the past month or so.

“You’ve really changed things up again today.”

“Sure have. I’d gladly recommend any of our dishes to you.”

Marth was a platoon commander for the guards, but he was on leave because he had fractured his left arm. Thanks to the nature of his job, he wouldn’t be allowed to return until he was fully healed. I felt bad for him, but I was incredibly grateful that he was now stopping by daily to buy food.

“That dish there has an awfully strange appearance. Is it truly okay to eat?”

“Yes. It’s called pasta, and it’s made by mixing fuwano and poitan together. To eat it, you wrap it around this spoon with the split end.”

“Hmm... Setting aside how it looks, its aroma is decent enough. Did you use karon milk?”

“Yes. That cream stew dish over there also uses karon milk. Oh, and on my other side, the giba burgers use tarapa as their core flavor, so please consider which two dishes you’d like carefully.”

Without his helmet on, Marth just looked like an ordinary westerner. I had always known him to be a straightforward and honest person. Sure, he could be a bit overbearing at times, but that was probably necessary for a guard who helped manage the post town.

As Marth pondered his decision, we had lots of other customers pouring in to order as well. It had been half a month now since the rainy season had ended, and the post town was back to being around eighty percent as busy as its old maximum. And we had increased the number of servings we prepared to about eighty percent of our maximum as well. Including the stuff that Myme brought, that added up to around seven hundred meals, and we were still consistently getting enough customers to sell it all in a timely manner.

There were a lot more people on the main street too. Once again, travelers from Sym, Jagar, and elsewhere in Selva were coming to Genos in droves. This was, after all, the second most prosperous domain in the entirety of the vast western kingdom, falling only behind the capital region. Things had slowed down a bit during the rainy season, certainly, but now every last corner of the post town was bustling with renewed activity.

Eventually, however, something happened that caused quite a stir on the road: A large totos carriage was approaching us from the north. It came to a stop at the entrance to town, and some well-dressed individuals then stepped out of it. Two of them were older men, and the rest were officers from the house of Genos who were acting as their guards. They started walking directly toward us, making Marth’s eyes go wide. However, we were already well accustomed to these people visiting us, considering they had been doing so regularly for the past month.

“Pardon us. We have come to accept today’s goods, Lady Toor Deen.”

“O-Of course. Thank you for always coming all this way.”

Toor Deen left her stall to Fei Beim and hurried over to Gilulu’s wagon, then quickly returned holding a box wrapped in a pretty cloth. Inside were the day’s sweets to be delivered to Lady Odifia.

“Thank you. Here is the packaging for next time, as well as the payment for today.”

“O-Okay. And thank you too.”

“Also...the lady instructed us to hand this to you,” one of the older men stated, holding out a small bundle. Like the boxes of sweets, the outer wrapping was made of stylishly embroidered silk, and when the man pulled it open, a silver hair accessory was revealed inside.

“U-Um, you’ve given me a gift each time you’ve come. Last time, it was a bouquet of flowers...”

“Yes. The lady instructed us to do so.”

“Th-The payment we agreed on is already plenty. Could you ask Lady Odifia to not worry about sending anything more in the future?”

“Very well,” the man replied, still holding the accessory out. It seemed it would be a problem if she didn’t at least accept this gift, so Toor Deen took the accessory from him, looking quite embarrassed.

“Thank you. Well then, we shall see you again three days from now.”

“Oh, we’ll be taking that day off from the stalls, so could you make it four days?”

“Very well. In that case, it will be the twenty-fifth of the vermilion month, correct? You may expect us to return four days from now.”

With guards surrounding them on all sides, the men returned to the totos carriage.

It was then that Marth leaned in with a look of astonishment and said, “Hey. Th-Those were retainers and knights of the house of Genos, weren’t they? How in the world did you lot end up having dealings with the duke’s house?”

“Well, you should try not to spread this around too much, but that box was a delivery of sweets that Toor Deen sends to Lady Odifia once every three days.”

“By Lady Odifia, you mean the daughter of the duke’s first son?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

Marth brought a hand to his forehead and breathed a deep sigh. “I swear, everything you people do is completely absurd. So the lady has been sending retainers all the way out here to get them?”

“Yep. We can’t really visit the castle town that often, because there’s all these hurdles we have to clear every time we do.”

“Those ‘hurdles’ are problematic enough for you to be able to summon members of the duke’s household out here instead? Unbelievable.”

Well, as I recalled, the nobles had actually been the ones to propose this solution. They had said that they wanted to avoid troubling Toor Deen, though they probably had other reasons for it as well, like concerns about what people would think if people of the forest’s edge kept visiting the castle town so frequently.

On top of that, Melfried and the others still hadn’t attempted to have passes issued to any people of the forest’s edge. When the leading clan heads had urgent business to discuss, they needed to head to the gates to pass along a message and wait for a carriage to come get them. The only person of the forest’s edge able to enter and leave the castle town freely was Shumiral, as he was a member of the merchant group known as Silver Vase.

And apparently, even Shumiral isn’t allowed to spend the night in the castle town. It seems you need to be very well trusted and have a high social status in order to stay there for a long period of time like Diel.

None of the nobles I had encountered so far seemed to look down on the people of the forest’s edge, at the very least. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have summoned us again and again to prepare food. Even so, they still had to be mindful of social rules and public order in their dealings with us.

“Well, there’s no point in griping about it to you, I suppose. Just try not to make any elites angry with you, okay?” Marth finished. Then he finally got around to placing his order, getting one serving of my dish and one of the cream stew before taking a seat in the restaurant space to eat.

Business was going incredibly smoothly. However, I soon found my thoughts returning to my worries about Yun Sudra, who was currently working in the restaurant space. I considered the Sudra, Fou, and Ran to all be equally important friends of mine, so the tension between them was weighing on me heavily. And I got the feeling that the Fa were much more involved in this particular issue than we had been in the incidents Sufira Zaza and Morun Rutim had caused.