I Want Ink
There was nobody to watch over me when Tuuli went to work, so I went to the gate to study. I was having lots of fun now that I was learning words more relevant to my life.
There were three new apprentices this season, all whom had been baptized along with Tuuli. Otto was pretty busy since he had to go back to square one with them, teaching the letters and numbers themselves. Especially since he had to finish up his normal work after teaching them.
While practicing words and doing calculations, I kept an eye out for a good opportunity to talk. Once Otto found a good place to stop in his paperwork and started putting up his ink, I struck.
“Mr. Otto, do you mind if I ask a question?”
“Go ahead.”
“How do you become a traveling merchant?”
“Wha?! Myne, do you want to become a traveling merchant?! Wha?! Hold on! Did I inspire you by accident? The captain’s gonna kill me!” yelled Otto, leaning forward across the desk with his eyes opened wide. He was so surprised even I kinda panicked a little.
I hurriedly waved my hands and corrected him. “Not me, my friend.”
“Oh, whew. Tell them they should give it up.”
“I knew it.”
Otto’s reply confirmed to me that people did not approve of becoming a traveling merchant.
“What do you mean, you knew it?” Otto narrowed his eyes.
I replied, thinking about how best to explain my perspective. “Ummm, my friend is also really quiet and stealthy whenever talking about this, so I figured he expected people to shoot him down if he mentioned it.”
“Yeah, his parents would get super pissed.”
“Plus, traveling merchants live on the road, right? They have to travel the world while thinking about what to buy and sell when and where. Normal parents couldn’t give their kids the tools and experience you would need to survive that lifestyle, not to mention them not having any important connections with merchants, so an average kid wanting to become one would probably have a really hard time...”
I could understand why children of commoners stuck in one city would find themselves attracted to the idea of a nomad lifestyle. But the lifestyle is so different that their own life experience wouldn’t prove very useful, which would make the work harder than they might think. It’d be day after day of doing what you thought was right and being punished for it without understanding why. You might think it best to do nothing at one point, but then you might get punished for doing nothing.
There was no manual for the unspoken rules one picked up through their daily life. I knew very well how large the walls of common sense could be given my experience of being suddenly transported to another world where I didn’t know right from wrong. But I couldn’t just lock myself up inside my room without books, so I was forced to go outside, where I was probably doing a lot of really weird, noticeably wrong things. I knew that.
“If you’ve figured that much out yourself, why don’t you take care of this?”
“Mmm, I think he’ll listen to you more than me, since I live in the same city as him. Plus, I heard this from Dad, but don’t you have connections to the Merchant’s Guild? Becoming a traveling merchant might be out of the question, but maybe he could become an apprentice merchant and leave the city to buy goods elsewhere.” His family probably wouldn’t protest as much if he was leaving the city as part of his stable job, rather than him leaving on a directionless adventure into the unknown.
“I see your point. Judging from your tone, I’m guessing you like this boy, Myne?” Otto grinned, amused at the prospect of having sniffed out some romance, but I just shrugged.
“It’s not that I like him, it’s just that he helps me out a lot. Nothing good will come from letting favors pile up.”
“A boy who helps you a lot, huh? Must be that gold-haired kid, I guess.” Dad was paying Lutz to keep track of my walking pace and report back to him when we passed through the gate, so Otto had probably seen him before.
“That’s right. But you’re so busy training new recruits, Mr. Otto, that I guess you might be too busy...”
“I’ve more spare time this season than any other, so sure, no problem. How about we meet up on my next day off?”
“Thank you, Mr. Otto!” But if this season was the least busy for him despite all the work he had, I could only imagine how busy he was when I helped him with the budget reports and whatnot. I didn’t really want to think about it, considering how I was now his assistant.
“Ah! Right, there’s something else I wanted to ask. Would you be okay with sharing some ink with me?”
“You mean this stuff?” Otto, with furrowed brows, tapped the top of the shut ink jar. I nodded hard, seeing the ink swash behind the clear glass.
“Could you pay me in ink from now on, not slate pens?”
“Three years of working for free. No getting paid up front.” His reply was so brisk I just blinked it surprise, not understanding what he had said. I briefly hoped I had just misheard him, but Otto began counting on his fingers with a serious look in his eyes.
“Your pay will go up if you become an official apprentice, but at the rate you’re helping me now, it’ll take about three years to afford a jar of ink, even including the bonus pay for budget season.”
“Three years?! Ink’s expensive!”
Otto, seeing my surprise, gave a wry grin. “Looks like I need to start teaching you the words we use in budgets. Think about it. Ink’s only used for paperwork involving nobles, right? It’s way too expensive for kids to play around with.”
In short, ink was simply out of my reach. Okay. I get it.
Although I had finally finished the mokkan, I could only weep in despair, as I had nothing to write on them with. “Ngggh! The second I solve my paper problem, I realize I have an ink problem! What’s with this!”
Naturally, there were no ball point pens, mechanical pencils, or even ink sold anywhere near me. I could use a pointed stick to write with if I just had ink, but that ink was too expensive for me to buy. I roughly knew the market value of a slate pencil, but since I didn’t know how much the bonus pay for budget season was, I couldn’t calculate how much ink was worth.
...How much money would working for three years straight even be? With buying, finding, asking, stealing, and making being my methods of obtaining ink, I could only consider making as a legitimate possibility. Nothing good would come from me trying to steal ink from the work room...
It seemed that I would have to start from scratch making both books and ink. But how do you make ink, anyway? I knew about mixing pigment with drying oil, but where could I find pigment and drying oil in this world?
“Am I going to have to catch a (squid) or an (octopus)? Where’s the (ocean)?!” I let out a yell with a half-finished mokkan in hand, causing Lutz to jerk in surprise and spin around.
“What’s with that?!”
“Lutz, what do you think this place’s ink is made from?! How can I make some myself?!” Naturally, I knew that it wouldn’t be realistic to try and capture a squid or octopus. But I had no idea what around me could be used to make ink.
“Y’know, what even is ink?”
“Mmm, a black liquid that you use to write letters on stuff, and...” It was hard to explain ink to someone who wasn’t used to seeing it. I just said what came to mind, and eventually Lutz replied while rubbing his chin.
“Black stuff? If you just wanna get stuff dirty like that, why not use soot or ashes or something?”
“That’s a great idea! Let’s try it!” Burnt firewood left behind plenty of soot and ashes, so I could get what I needed at home. We would even be burning wood today. There was no doubt I could get my hands on ashes immediately.
Upon getting home, I immediately asked Mom for permission.
“Mom, can I use these ashes?”
“No, dear. We use ashes to make soap, melt snow, dye things, and so on. They’re very useful, and we can even earn money selling them to farmers. Don’t take any without permission.”
Speaking of which, I did remember helping my parents spread ash. I had just thrown it everywhere like a granny feeding birds. Who knew that was actually intended to help the snow melt. That’s news to me.
...Mmmm, we used a lot of it when making soap, too, so ashes really are valuable. It seemed unlikely I would receive permission to use ashes when they could sell the leftovers, but there was one option still left open to me.
“Well, Mom. What about the soot?” I listed my secondary choice, and after furrowing her brows for a second, Mom smiled for some reason and said okay.
“I don’t know what you intend to use it for, but consider all the soot yours. This means you’ll clean the hearth for me, right? And just saying, you’ll get more if you clean the chimney too.”
“Bwuh?! Aww... Okay. I guess that makes sense...” Pushed on by my smiling mom, I ended up cleaning the hearth and chimney. This hadn’t been my intention, but I had to do what I had to do. I took some cleaning tools in hand and pumped myself up to clean some soot... when suddenly my mom stopped me in a panic.
“Hold it, Myne! Are you planning to clean in those clothes?!”
“...Wha? Should I not?” My clothes were already filthy and in tatters, so I didn’t see the problem with cleaning in them. Mom grabbed her sewing box and a basket of rags while I watched on with confusion.
“Wait one moment, I’ll be done in no time.” Mom sewed some rags together and made me a new outfit, looking pleased when she finished. I changed into it, putting my hair up in an adult fashion to minimize contact between it and the dirty rags, though I wore another rag on my head as a bandanna. Wooow. This would suck really bad if I weren’t fooling myself into thinking I’m cosplaying Cinderella.
First, I scraped out soot from the hearth. I then stuck my head inside of it and scraped off the soot stuck to the sides. It was perhaps the first time the tiny size of my body had been useful.
Unable to resist my mother’s smile, I cleaned the chimney while I was at it and got soot from it as well. Black stuff fell out in clumps as I cleaned, steadily giving me more of the soot I wanted.
It honestly got kind of fun once I started, but that led to too much excitement. I got a fever and collapsed.
I had worked so hard that I ended up filthy and unconscious, but I had somehow gotten the soot I needed. And now I was healthy again. I just had to somehow turn the soot into something I could write with.
“Myne, what are you gonna do with this stuff?”
“Mix it with water, I guess?”
The first thought that came to mind was dissolving the soot in water. I got the feeling that would make something like ink. Somehow. I put some river water in a wooden bowl and used a stick to mix it with soot. The soot just floated in the water without dissolving.
“Maybe that’s enough?”
“Try writing something with it.”
I took a stick with a shaved-down tip and stuck it into the water, then tried writing the number “1” on the mokkan. But most of the soot just stuck to the stick instead of the mokkan, and the resulting number was too blurry to read.
“Nooope. This one’s a bust.”
“What’ll you try next?”
“Mmm, ink making is built around the idea of mixing stuff with oil, but...”
I couldn’t ask Mom for oil here. The reason being, our household was always short on oil since we used it for eating and for making my simple all-in-one shampoo. On top of that, we used animal oil for candles and soap, so it would be a hard battle to get any of that. They would probably shoot me down as easily as Mom shot me down over the ashes.
“Needing oil’s rough. I’m guessing they don’t give you any?”
“Nope, none. I wish there was something...” I searched my memories for a hint and plenty of writing utensils used in Japan came to mind. “Mmm, I think the (paint) in (Japanese art) used (glue), but that’s out of the question for me, since fire’s too dangerous. It really sucks being so small and weak.” Getting glue might be more feasible in the future, but not now. That was unfortunate, because I would have been able to make something like paint with natural materials. I had no choice but to wait for my own growth.
“Helloooo, Myne, you alive in there? Come back to me.” I could see Lutz waving his hands in front of my eyes, but I was too busy thinking to stop.
“Mmmm, I guess it doesn’t have to be a liquid. (Crayons), (chalk), (pencils)... oh, that’s it! Clay! I’ll mix it with clay!”
“Wha?”
“I feel like (pencil lead) was made from mixing (graphite) with clay. Wait, or maybe that was for (conté sticks)? Well, whatever. I’m using soot instead of (graphite), but it just might work!” I could mix clay and soot, squish it all into thin cylinders, then dry them. Once they hardened, I might have some solid writing utensils. “Lutz, this is where you dug out the clay for the tablets, right?”
“Yeah, but you may as well just use the leftovers from back then. They should be around that rock over there.”
Lutz was right, there was a small mountain of clay over there. I took some of it and mixed in the soot. I was imagining a colored pencil where the whole thing was color, or a pencil made entirely of lead. It wouldn’t turn into a usable color if I didn’t knead it myself, so both the rock I was using as a base and my two hands turned pitch black as I molded the stuff into the shape of a soot pencil. I then split it into chunks about as long as a pencil each. If these dry and harden, it’ll be my win.
I washed my hands and feet in the river, but they didn’t get much cleaner. But filth this persistent would definitely be good for writing. Definitely.
“How long do you think I should dry them?”
“Meh?”
“Maybe I should try cooking them.”
“Don’t bother. They’ll explode again.”
“Awww...”
I followed Lutz’s advice and quietly let the soot pencils dry on their own.
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