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Chapter 6
Envoys from Her Mother’s Country (3)
“How strange that such a vulgar lot could have been born in a country as refined as Ausis.”
Just then, Count Menios stared intently at Count Molina.
Seeing the questioning look in his eyes, Molina explained.
“He says that Ausis is a refined country, but today he has witnessed something rather interesting.”
The words were similar, but the meaning was completely different.
The Emperor, who spoke Ausian fluently, snorted.
“How did swindlers like these ever manage to enter the Great Mun imperial court? Like master, like servant.”
The chief eunuch merely smiled faintly at the Emperor’s words without replying.
The “swindlers” the Emperor referred to were, after all, one of his own Empresses and one an envoy from a foreign country. A palace eunuch was in no position to presume to comment on either of them.
From Count Menios’s perspective, however, it looked as though the Emperor was laughing while speaking and the chief eunuch was silently agreeing with him, both mocking Menios.
Realizing that the Emperor was displeased with him, Menios grew desperate.
If he was to accomplish the purpose for which he had come to this country, he needed the Emperor’s goodwill.
“Y-Your Majesty. I beg your pardon. I merely wished to see Her Highness the Princess again after so long…”
Bang!
The Emperor suddenly slammed his hand down on the table.
The man who had been laughing only moments before had erupted into fury.
Everyone dropped to their knees once more.
Ana Rosa was no exception. She quickly slipped down from her chair and knelt on the floor.
Count Molina did not kneel.
After all, he was a citizen of Ausis. He could not kneel before the Emperor of another country.
Instead, he brought both hands together in front of his stomach and bowed his head as deeply and respectfully as possible.
Count Casella awkwardly imitated him.
Once again, Count Menios alone was left standing before the Emperor like a fool, his head held stiffly upright.
“Princess? Whose princess are you talking about?”
“……”
“She became my Empress. And yet you still call her your ‘princess’? How dare you!”
At the Emperor’s thunderous roar, Count Menios swallowed dryly.
He looked back and forth between Molina and Casella as though begging them to take his side.
Both men ignored him.
Calling her the Princess of Ausis instead of acknowledging her position as the Empress of Great Mun was itself a diplomatic insult—and an affront to the Emperor.
Count Menios began to tremble.
He had never imagined that things would turn so disastrous on the very first day he entered the imperial palace.
The Emperor growled.
“Be grateful that you are a man of the King of Ausis. But if you commit such insolence one more time, I will send your severed head back to Ausis and demand that your country answer for it.”
Count Menios could barely breathe.
“I-I am deeply grateful for Your Majesty’s mercy,” he stammered.
The Emperor immediately spat out a command.
“Get out.”
Menios did not dare resist.
He was practically dragged away, disappearing from the room.
Then, as though he had never raised his voice at all, the Emperor broke into a broad smile.
“Get up.”
With the assistance of a court lady, Ana Rosa gracefully rose and returned to her seat with a smile.
“You needn’t have gone so far to help me, Your Majesty.”
“Whom did I help?”
“Why, of course…”
Ana Rosa cast a fleeting glance toward the door of the guest hall through which Count Menios had hurriedly disappeared.
“A certain fool who came from a distant land.”
The Emperor snorted.
“Even if he’s a fool, he’s still a foreigner. I couldn’t very well stand by and watch him get torn to pieces by my Empress.”
“But that is his only use.”
“You were quite a cute little thing when you first came to this country. Who on earth raised you into this?”
“Why, none other than the great Emperor of the Great Mun Empire, of course.”
That can’t be right.
I am a perfect man in every respect, the very embodiment of a capable gentleman. There is no way I could have failed this badly at raising a child.
Watching the Emperor suffer, Ana Rosa burst into laughter.
For that one moment, her smile was unmistakably that of a nineteen-year-old young woman.
Count Casella, who had been watching the situation with only his eyes raised while keeping his head bowed, saw her smile and his eyes gleamed like those of an eagle that had spotted its prey.
And the eyes of his daughter, Blanca, who was watching him, were as relentless as those of a hunter who had spotted an eagle and drawn back his bowstring.
“One fool is gone. Why is the other fool staring at you like that?”
The Emperor’s gaze remained fixed on Ana Rosa, but naturally, he had noticed what Count Casella was doing.
Ana Rosa had noticed as well.
“They still believe that I am foolish enough to be manipulated by them.”
“Anyone with such poor judgment of people deserves to suffer. As though someone like you, who could wrap a three-inch tongue around anyone and eat them for dinner, would ever be manipulated by those idiots.”
“It is all, all thanks to Your Majesty’s great benevolence. Long live Your Majesty. Long live, long live!”
“If only you could stop talking.”
While the Emperor and Ana Rosa continued their banter, Molina and Casella were made to sit in separate seats farther to either side.
The court ladies brought Molina fine tea and rice cakes personally made by the ladies of the palace.
For Casella, they brought ordinary tea and ordinary refreshments.
Molina could clearly tell that he was being favored.
Casella, however, was too stunned by the situation to notice.
He had naturally assumed that Menios would dominate this meeting while the supposedly uncivilized people of Mun merely nodded along.
But the reality was completely different.
Count Casella subtly glanced at his daughter.
She was wearing clothing in the Mun style, her hair twisted up like a Mun woman’s and secured with a hairpin.
The ornament decorating her hair was an artificial flower made of wool.
It should have looked strange on a foreign woman like his daughter.
And yet, somehow, it suited her perfectly.
Come to think of it, yesterday was rather strange too.
The daughter he had met yesterday was very different from the child she had been seven years ago.
She was no longer the girl who had thrown herself at his feet, begging him not to send her to the palace because she had already become a priestess.
Her neck had been stiff, her voice cold.
Her arrogance had irritated him.
And yet, at the same time, compared with seven years ago, she possessed a certain dignity and seemed far more useful.
Could it be that one’s position makes the person?
Back in Ausis, she had been nothing more than a doll-like, adorable princess with a pretty face.
But here, didn’t she possess such an overwhelming presence?
On top of that, her beauty had fully blossomed over the past seven years.
It was easy to understand why people called the Empress an unparalleled beauty.
Her face was so radiant that simply looking at her seemed to brighten one’s vision.
It was, without a doubt, a beauty Count Casella had never seen before in his life.
But would that princess have been this beautiful even if she had remained in Ausis?
The elegance and confidence she now possessed certainly played a part in that beauty.
The Queen and Duke Valiona had spoken of the Princess as though she were barely worth a single bite.
Yet to Casella, she already seemed like someone thoroughly accustomed to power.
Meanwhile, Molina, Ana Rosa, and the Emperor continued speaking in the language of Mun—a language Count Casella could not understand.
“I assume their purpose must be different, considering the delegation itself has changed. What did they say the matter was?”
“I asked them several times, Your Majesty, but they did not answer. I suspect they may have come bearing secret instructions from Her Majesty the Queen and Duke Valiona.”
“Not an order from the King?”
“He is bedridden, so perhaps it was a secret order issued by Her Majesty the Queen.”
“Hmph.”
Ana Rosa snorted softly and lifted her teacup.
Her expression suggested that she had some idea what was going on, so the Emperor asked her,
“Do you have a guess?”
“If the King is bedridden, perhaps they have come to obtain medicine or a physician.”
One of the many things Ana Rosa had learned after coming to Mun was that there was a considerable difference in the level of medicine between the two countries.
In Ausis, people were always fond of making sarcastic remarks about how backward Mun was.
Medicine, however, was different.
In Ausis, when one fell ill, there were two things to fear:
Dying from the illness—or dying because of the doctor.
Illness itself was frightening, but so was a doctor’s treatment.
Money disappeared, pain accumulated, and how many people ended up dying miserably despite all of it?
When stories began circulating in Ausis that things such as Mun’s medicinal decoctions and ginseng could cure illnesses without cutting into the body with a knife or drawing blood, everyone began clamoring to try something called a “medicinal decoction.”
Even though they had no idea how it was actually prepared.
Ana Rosa thought of her father, the King.
He had felt no hesitation whatsoever about selling his twelve-year-old daughter as a substitute for the bedclothes of a man nearing seventy.
And yet, when it came to his own suffering, he was remarkably sensitive.
Her father would take opium and other substances without hesitation whenever he felt even slightly unwell.
He was the sort of man who would demand opium even for something as trivial as a headache.
If such a father was suffering from an illness serious enough for people to describe him as “bedridden,” he would probably do anything to find a cure.
“A physician, you say… Well, if someone is willing to go, I won’t stop them.”
At the Emperor’s words, Ana Rosa gave a small laugh.
Count Molina laughed as well.
He had made the month-long sea journey to Mun every year, and as a result, he understood this country’s character rather well.
Filial piety was extremely important in Mun.
How many physicians would willingly leave their parents and ancestors behind to travel to the distant land of barbarians?
There wasn’t even any guarantee that they would find a ship to take them home.
Besides, the people of Mun believed that Mun was the greatest country in the world.
So they would never go.
