“I–Is it too late to correct it?” I asked.
“Probably? Everyone thinks you’re Souma, and I think all your external correspondence has been under the name Souma Kazuya.”
“Augh! To think I was making such an awful mistake…” I moaned.
“Well, maybe it’s not so bad?” Aisha asked. “Why not use one name in public and the other in private? So, on private occasions like today, I’ll call you ‘Sir Kazuya.’”
With Aisha finding ways to cover for my mistake, I just got more depressed about it. “Now I have Aisha, of all people, having to cover for me…”
“Just what do you think of me as, Sir Kazuya?!”
“What are you, you ask…? A disappointing dark elf?”
“That’s just mean!” she exclaimed.
“Honestly, cut the stupid banter, you two, and let’s get going,” Liscia urged while I was still dealing with the teary-eyed Aisha.
Yeah… It’s fine to say let’s get going, but we haven’t chosen a particular destination, I thought. “Is there somewhere you girls want to go?”
“No,” Liscia said.
“Wherever you go, I will follow, Sir Kazuya,” Aisha added.
“Yeah. At least pretend to think about it, you two.”
If they pushed the decision off on me, I wouldn’t know what to do. Now that I thought about it, this was my first time walking around the castle town. The last time I had come here, we had just galloped straight through on horseback, after all.
Hmm… In that case, maybe that’s all the more reason why I should take a good look around. Even if we just meander around, it’ll still be new to me.
“Well, let’s just take it easy,” I said.
Parnam Central Park.
A large park in the center of the royal capital, Parnam.
Though it was called a park, there wasn’t a playground or anything like that. There were just trees, shrubs and flowers that had been planted there, but the grounds were three times the size of Tokyo Dome. In the center of the park was an impressively large fountain with a Jewel Voice Broadcast receiver. When there was a broadcast happening, it could project a massive image that was large enough to be seen from 100 meters away. There was amphitheater-style seating around the fountain, and during the last Jewel Voice Broadcast, a crowd numbering in the tens of thousands had apparently gathered there.
You know, it might be interesting to hold a live concert there, I thought. As soon as Juna’s broadcast program using the Jewel Voice Broadcast gets up and going, I’d really like to plan something like that. Someday, this fountain plaza might become a stage singers from across Elfrieden aspire to stand on, like the Budokan or Hibiya Outdoor Theater.
…Well, that’s enough of my idle fantasizing. Anyway, we had come to Central Park.
“This is a lovely place full of natural beauty,” Aisha said.
“Even though it’s in the middle of the city, the air is so clear,” Liscia commented. “Mmm.”
Aisha looked around full of curiosity while Liscia stretched widely.
“Huh? But I don’t remember the air being this clear before…” she murmured.
“Well, yeah, I worked hard to arrange that,” I said.
“You arranged it? Did you do something to this park?”
Liscia seemed puzzled, so I puffed out my chest and explained. “Not just to the park. I prepared infrastructure all over the underground of Parnam, and I could go further and say I made preparations in regards to the laws, as well. If you compare things to a few months ago, I think you’ll find environmental hygiene has improved considerably.”
To be blunt, before my preparations, the environmental hygiene in this country had been on the same level as Middle Ages Europe. Which is to say: it’d been disgusting.
Horse dung had been left lying out in the streets as if that were perfectly normal, and people had just poured their domestic sewage into ditches along the roadside. I’d heard it had smelled absolutely foul in summertime.
Because the concept of hygiene hadn’t existed, these problems had just been left alone. But when horse dung dries out, it turns into dust which is lifted into the air. When that gets into people’s lungs, it causes a variety of respiratory diseases.
That was why the first thing I had done was set up an aqueduct and sewer system.
“An aqueduct and sewer system,” Liscia gasped. “When did you have the time to make those?!”
“Actually, there wasn’t that much effort involved,” I shrugged. “There were underground passages running all over Parnam to begin with, you see. All I had to do was run water from the river through them.”
“Wait, those were escape tunnels for the royal family!” she cried in outrage.
As Liscia had said, in the event that the capital came under attack, and the fall of the royal family became unavoidable, those tunnels had been meant for the royal family to escape through. Even if the enemy discovered them, they had been built like a maze in order to hinder pursuit, and they covered the entirety of Parnam. What was more, they had been built in three layers. All of that had been very convenient for repurposing them as an aqueduct and sewer system.
First, water from the river that ran near Parnam had been drawn into the first layer, which served as an underground aqueduct. That water was now being used in wells and public bath houses that once relied on underground water. The third layer was used as a sewer, ultimately emptying out into sedimentation ponds outside the capital where the sewage would be filtered before being returned to the river once more. The system had been designed so that the water that made the full trip around the city in the first layer would ultimately drain into the third layer. We had filled in the second layer and set things up in a way that bad smells from the third layer wouldn’t rise up into the first.
“If you’ve turned them into an aqueduct and sewer system, what do you plan to do if there’s an emergency?!” Liscia demanded.
“If we get to the point where the royal family needs to flee the capital, the country’s already finished, isn’t it?” I asked. “If it were up to me, I’d probably surrender at the point when the enemy was closing in on the capital.”
“That easily?” she exclaimed.
“Liscia, so long as a king has the people on his side, he’s safe.”
This was another lesson from Machiavelli. According to him, The best possible fortress is not to be hated by the people.
A prince has two types of enemies. Traitors within, and foreign enemies without.
If you have the support of the people, traitors can’t gather supporters or incite the people into rebellion, so they’ll just have to give up. On the other hand, if you’re hated by the people, there will be no shortage of foreigners willing to assist them in your eventual downfall. So Machiavelli says.
“Even if I lose my title, so long as the people are still there, there’s a chance for revival,” I said. “On the other hand, if the king is the only one to survive, without any people left to support him, he’ll just be eaten up by another foe himself.”
“…It’s a hard world, huh,” Liscia murmured.
“That’s reality. Well, anyway, the aqueduct and sewer systems were easy enough to make, but when it came to the sedimentation ponds… Ah, let’s go sit over in the shade.”
There wasn’t much point standing around while we talked, so we went over to sit in the shade provided by some trees in the park.