"The tide's starting to go out, milord," Thomas said, tugging at Dousen as he spoke to Liszt.
"Hand Dousen over to me. You, Tom, and Jesse should look for seafood the way I showed you." Liszt took Dousen's lead.
Dousen still wanted to run off and chase the waves.
Liszt immediately barked, "Quiet, Dousen!"
Dousen didn't listen.
Liszt swung down from his horse, reached out, and pressed Dousen firmly into the wet sand, pinning him in place. Then he shouted an order: "Dousen, quiet!"
"Whimper, whimper..." Dousen made a couple of confused noises. Unable to struggle free, he could only lie down obediently.
Then Liszt slowly let go.
Dousen tried to struggle free again and run off.
Liszt pinned him down again and repeated the order to be quiet. After several repetitions, Dousen finally stopped moving. At that point, Retainer Knight Karl hurried over with a strip of jerky, which Liszt gave Dousen as a reward. "Be quiet, and you get meat, Dousen. Understand?"
"Whimper." Dousen tore into the jerky, devouring it ravenously.
Before they set out, Liszt had specifically told Thomas not to feed him. Hunger helped animals remember more vividly, making it easier to form a conditioned response and train them to obey.
"Milord, you have a real gift for taming magical beasts. I can see that Dousen will become a proper domesticated magical beast someday."
"Of course he will. If he can't, I'll butcher him before long. The smoked Violent Earth Dog we had last night tasted excellent. Even at Long-Yam Castle, I rarely got to eat magical beast meat."
They hadn't sold the meat from the large Violent Earth Dog. They'd kept it all at the castle to salt and dry.
"It really was delicious. You could feel the magic nourishing your body as you ate it." Marcus had eaten at the castle last night, too.
After training Dousen for a while, Liszt handed him over to Karl. Then he rode to the shore, exposed by the receding tide, to see how the male servants were doing.
Thomas, Tom, and Jesse were busy at work, each wearing a pair of thick leather gloves and carrying a bucket, a hammer, and an iron shovel.
Thomas was in charge of turning over rocks and searching for seafood on and beneath them.
Jesse was in charge of digging through the wet sand to find seafood buried underneath.
Tom was in charge of gathering the various creatures that hadn't made it back to the sea and had been stranded by the tide.
"Teacher Marcus, do you know how the tides are connected to the moon at night?" In a good mood, Liszt posed a question.
Marcus shook his head. "I don't."
"The moon keeps moving, and it draws the seawater toward it, causing the tide to rise and fall. The sun does the same, of course, but it's much farther away, so its pull isn't as strong as the moon's."
"I can't understand any of that, milord."
Marcus had already put it politely.
The moon and the sun could pull the sea? If anyone else had said that, he would have spat in their face and told them not to talk nonsense. Then he would have argued, If the moon and sun can pull the sea, why don't they pull us humans up into the sky? Then everyone could fly and become Sky Knights. Don't try to fool me just because I didn't get much schooling.
Seeing Marcus's expression, Liszt felt bored. Ignorant natives.
After that thought, he mused to himself, If the moon here can cause tides, does that mean this world really is a planet? If I sailed across the Azure Sea long enough, could I circle the planet and return here? If that's true, maybe one day I can send out a fleet and sail around the world.
The idea seemed a little too far off, so Liszt didn't dwell on it.
He rode over to Tom.
Tom hurriedly bowed. "Milord."
"Carry on. I'm just watching." He immediately noticed that Tom's bucket held clams, sea snails, starfish, crabs, mussels, cockles, and seaweed, as well as a few bugs that looked like sea centipedes and sea roaches.
But the sea roaches and sea centipedes could run, and one careless moment was all it took for them to scramble out of the bucket.
So Tom had to fumble around and pick them up again.
"Those two kinds of bugs can run, and they aren't seafood. You can throw them away," Liszt reminded him.
"Oh, all right, all right, milord." Tom hurriedly tried to toss the bugs away. Perhaps because the lord was standing nearby, he kept reaching for them and missing, until he was sweating all over.
Not far away, Thomas was moving rocks. He glanced over at Tom's flustered state and turned away with a smug smile. Of the castle's three male servants, only he was good enough to be a suitable successor to the steward.
Meanwhile, Jesse was digging in the sand. After all that effort, he hadn't managed to catch a single Razor Clam or Mantis Shrimp, even though the lord had told him to look for them. He was digging haphazardly and had no idea he needed to follow the little holes where the seafood breathed.
What a pair of useless fools! he thought.
Cheerfully gripping his hammer, he tapped away beneath the rocks, knocking off one cockle, mussel, or oyster after another. Every so often, he also managed to find a small crab.
"You need to pry the meat out of the oysters, like this." Thomas used his hammer to crack an oyster shell and scoop out the soft meat inside.
Before they'd set out, the lord had said oyster meat was delicious.
Thomas didn't think the ugly, squishy things looked very appetizing, but he would carry out the lord's instructions to the letter.
It was no trouble at all.
The exposed rocks were covered in oysters, mussels, and the like.
In just two hours, Thomas had filled both buckets he'd brought. One of them was full of oyster meat.
Then he glanced at Tom. His bucket was full, but the lord had already told him several times not to pick up certain things, and he'd still gathered them.
They were clearly the same kind of bug, but Tom thought they were different.
What a fool.
As for Jesse, he could be ignored. He was sweating all over, yet the contents of his bucket barely covered the bottom. There were a few fat shrimp—the lord had called them Mantis Shrimp—and a few stick-like Razor Clams, apparently called Bamboo Razor Clams.
He set down the bucket full of oyster meat and puffed out his chest, waiting for the lord to inspect his work.
Liszt had spent most of his time on horseback, cooling off beneath a coconut tree. When he saw that it was almost noon and the sun was blazing overhead, he called a halt to the tidal-gathering experiment.
He rode over and examined each bucket.
"Tom, you need to work harder at telling pests apart from seafood. Not everything on the shore is edible. If something is poisonous, it could kill you."
Tom lowered his head in shame. "I'm sorry, milord. I'm too stupid to tell them apart."
"It's all right, Tom. It's your first time gathering seafood at low tide, so of course you don't have much experience. Don't feel bad about it." Liszt reassured him, then turned to Jesse's bucket. "Hmm, Jesse, I can see how hard you worked, but it's clear you haven't put what I taught you into practice."
"Milord, I dug as hard as I could, but whenever I dug, the hole disappeared," Jesse said anxiously.
"You need to dig in the direction the hole goes."
"I... I can stay here and keep digging, milord. I'm sure I can fill the bucket."
"If you stay here, there'll be no one to carry water at the castle. Jesse, I'm not blaming you. Digging up Mantis Shrimp and Bamboo Razor Clams is hard work."
Finally, Liszt stopped in front of Thomas's buckets. One was filled to the brim with oyster meat, and the other was packed with crabs, mussels, and other seafood.
"Excellent work, Thomas."
"Thank you for the praise, milord. It's only right. I give my all in serving you." Thomas beamed.
Liszt returned a smile full of noble grace, showing his approval of Thomas. He knew what Thomas was after. Steward Carter had already told him that Thomas was ambitious. But as the lord, he didn't mind. No matter how ambitious Thomas was, all he wanted was to become the castle's steward.
If he proved capable, then why not let Thomas become steward when old Carter could no longer do the job?
No servant could make trouble in front of him.