The Intrigues of Haruhi Suzumiya (19 page)

I hefted the shovel and caught back up to the brigade. Aside from Haruhi, who was acting like a rabbit suddenly returning to the forest, there was Asahina, who seemed just like an elementary school student on a hiking field trip; Nagato, who was exactly the same as she always was; and Koizumi, wearing a vaguely chagrined smile. I had major doubts as to how many of these individuals were actually serious about finding treasure. I knew for a fact
I
wasn’t serious, which explained my lack of energy. The fact that we’d dig and find nothing was already written in the personalized future schedule I’d gotten from (Michiru) Asahina. Under normal circumstances, since this
was
Haruhi we were talking about, there was every possibility we’d actually dig up treasure, but Asahina would never tell a stupid lie about the past, so it was certain that we weren’t going to find the secret treasure of Tsuruya’s ancestor.

“Whatever is the matter?” Koizumi walked alongside me, forcing a pleasant smile. “You look as though you believe that everything we’re doing is a complete waste of time.”

I stayed silent. I had nothing to say to this guy.

Koizumi looked like he believed exactly the same thing—like he knew that this was his job, whether we actually dug something up or not.

He also seemed like he knew there was another Asahina in this
time period, in which case I wanted him to come out and say it. Was he waiting for me to come and ask him for advice? If so, he was just gonna have to keep waiting. Now that I had Tsuruya for an accomplice, I didn’t need his help. And I didn’t feel like giving him any information either. People won’t move the way you want them to if you just wait around. If you’re not straight with them, they’ll just get sick of you.

Whatever he thought of my lack of an answer, Koizumi hefted his shovel and looked ahead. His kept his smile, out of either tolerance or stoicism—either way, he was the same old Koizumi. I found myself relieved for some reason, but in any case I had to focus on mountain climbing now.

Haruhi pushed through a thicket and pointed to the summit. “First we’ll head to the peak. If I were going to bury treasure, I’d dig at the easiest spot to find. Tsuruya’s ancestor was a human too, after all—he’d obviously bury it somewhere easy to spot.”

If he’d wanted it to be easy to spot, why bury it at all? But Haruhi wanted to head to the top. That’s why she was the SOS Brigade chief. She was the master and commander of aliens, time travelers, and espers, and she wanted to go to the top.

Asahina was bent over and panting as she climbed; I wanted to give her a push from behind, but with Haruhi in the lead there was no chance for me to do so. After about half an hour of that, we arrived at the peak. That seemed like longer than it should’ve taken, but the path seemed to have been made to require a minimum of effort on the part of its climbers, and without being conscious of any particularly steep slopes, we’d managed to conquer this small mountain.

I wasn’t especially tired, since the mountain itself wasn’t more than a glorified hill. My walking endurance had been naturally
increased from trudging up the hill to school every day. Unfortunately, what we were about to do would definitely tire me out.

In other words, it was time to dig for treasure. Haruhi was now in her element.

“It should be somewhere around here, right?”

We started digging in the vague area Haruhi’d gestured at. It seemed too obvious a spot to be hiding gold or treasure, even given that I knew there was nothing there. After digging about two meters down, no shovel had impacted wood or stone or anything hard.

And thanks to the discriminatory practice of delegating all excavation duties to males, the only ones digging were Koizumi and me. The three girls simply enjoyed a picnic, with Asahina being the only one who could be relied upon to cheer us on.

Haruhi simply ordered us around—“Next, over there!”—and Nagato had the same Buddha face she always had. It seemed likely that if I prayed to her, she’d tell me where treasure could actually be found, but it would be very strange to strike gold on the first try, so I refrained from Nagato-directed entreaties. And anyway, it wouldn’t be good if we actually found something. Plus, no matter how incredible Haruhi’s ability to ignore reality was, even she would have to find it a bit strange to dig up hidden treasure without any hard work at all. The problem was that only Koizumi and I were actually doing the hard work, and because Koizumi’s pleasant expression seemed permanently carved on his face, I was the only one actually suffering.

It was enough to make me want to try and talk Taniguchi and Kunikida into helping, but Haruhi put the kibosh on that.

“Listen, we’re looking for buried treasure. Everybody has to get a share. I’m a fair brigade chief, so I’m going to divide it up evenly. If we brought those jokers in, we’d have to split the treasure seven ways. I am
not
gonna let it go to waste like that, got it?”

If we were actually going to find Genroku-era gold coins, I would’ve agreed. But this map had come out of the depths of Tsuruya’s
family’s storehouse. The Tsuruya clan had thrived for hundreds of years, so it had definitely weathered some tough times. If an ancestor had buried treasure here, wouldn’t their descendants have dug it up and used it at some point? This so-called treasure map had to be the scribbling left behind by one of the clan’s heads, or else a grand prank at the expense of his descendants. My guess was that if we dug up anything at all, it’d be a piece of paper containing only the words “Thou hast lost.” For some reason, I got the feeling that Tsuruya’s ancestor had a lot of free time on his hands. Tsuruya herself had said as much. That’s why she’d been happy to give Haruhi the map. I bet Tsuruya would have done the same thing herself, if she were in her ancestor’s position, cackling all the while as she imagined people in the future going to all this trouble because of her joke. She was definitely the type to get people all excited at first, then laugh at how exhausted they were.

I wanted to warn them off, but I managed to restrain my own desire, instead silently plunging my shovel into the earth.

Our mountain wasn’t a large one, so there wasn’t much space at the peak. As we kept digging, the area became full of holes. Koizumi and I labored mightily at Haruhi’s urging, and unlike Koizumi (who was happy to play at being a mole man), I began to feel more and more oppressed. It was dangerous to just leave the holes we dug, so we also had the doubly pointless work of shoveling the dug-up earth back into the holes. I started to feel as though I’d been thrown into some kind of inhuman labor camp.

“Stop complaining and focus on the treasure!”

Haruhi sat cross-legged on a rolled-out mat, giving directions with a triumphant smile, like some grand general addressing her army. To her right side knelt Nagato, looking like a faithful page as she read her paperback, while to Haruhi’s right sat Asahina, who huddled close to Haruhi as though trying to stay warm.

“Kyon, you’re working up enough of a sweat that you might think it’s warm, but as you can see it’s pretty cold up here. If you don’t hurry up and find something, we’re gonna freeze. Are you sure you’re digging right?”

I was just digging where she told me to. If she wanted to move around, she could do some digging of her own, I told her.

Her arms around Haruhi, Asahina spoke in a tremulous voice. “Um… should I help?”

“No, don’t bother,” interrupted Haruhi before I could reply. “This is for Kyon’s sake too. It’s good practice for construction work. If he doesn’t get experience now, he’s gonna have a hard time later.”

I wasn’t exactly grateful to receive career counseling from someone my own age, I said.

“The day’s gonna come when you’ll be glad you did this. That’s how the world works. People should do everything they can.”

You
do it, then.

“Hey, Haruhi,” I said, wiping sweat off my forehead. “We’re not gonna find anything just digging random holes. I assume you’re not planning to try to level the entire mountain. For one thing, we’re not even sure if the treasure exists.”

“Yeah, and how do you know it
doesn’t
? We might just not have found it yet.”

“Yeah, we haven’t found it yet because it’s not here. Let’s first prove it exists, then start digging.”

Haruhi pursed her lips, though her eyes were smiling. “This
is
that proof.” In her hand she held Tsuruya’s ancestral treasure map. “It says it’s buried somewhere on this mountain, so it’s got to be here. I trust Tsuruya’s ancestor that much. It’s
got
to be here!”

Haruhi’s face brimmed with eccentric confidence as she explained her strange reasoning. Her certainty made it sound like she’d seen the spot old Fusauemon Tsuruya had buried his treasure.

“But you’ve got a point,” she said, putting a finger to her chin. “It was hasty to assume it was buried on the peak. It would’ve been a pain to climb all the way to the top, so maybe it’s on a lower spot. Yeah, I definitely want it to be buried in a more interesting spot than this.” Haruhi extracted herself from Asahina’s arms and stood, putting her shoes back on. “We need to look for a likelier spot. Until then, Kyon—dig over there.”

Upon issuing my new orders, Haruhi headed off into the brush, making a rustling sound as she proceeded in roughly the opposite direction from which we’d climbed.

Silently, I watched her go. Assuming my sense of direction wasn’t mistaken, if she kept going, she’d come across the flat spot halfway down the mountainside, where she’d find the gourd-shaped stone—a marker that practically shouted, “Dig here!”

It was all well and good to do as I was told and dig, but eventually I got sick of it and tossed the shovel aside, leaving Koizumi to fill the hole back up as I sat down on the mat.

“Here,” said Asahina, offering me a paper cup of hot tea. It was the most nutritious thing I could imagine. It was sweet, a sweetness that suited Asahina herself perfectly.

Asahina held her silver thermos carefully and smiled as she watched me tentatively sip at the brown liquid. “It’s lovely weather today, isn’t it? And such a nice view.”

Her eyes looked far off into the distance—to the south, where the world spread out before us. Our far-off city was hazy with distance, and beyond that was the sea.

The mountain wind whistled fiercely, and Asahina shivered. “It would’ve been nicer to come in the springtime. February’s so cold,” she said in a lonely voice, even as she kept her soft smile, looking down on the dreary view. “This would be a nicer place if the flowers were blooming.”

“We’ll come then,” I told her. “To see the blossoms. Give it a couple more months, and this cold air mass will have warmed right up.”

“Oh, that would be lovely. Blossom watching! I’d love to try that.” Asahina held her knees. “That would be in April… I’ll be a senior by then.”

That was true. In all likelihood, I’d be a junior, and Asahina would be a senior if she advanced—she wasn’t going to repeat a year, right? I asked her.

“No, I’ll be fine,” she said with a sigh. “But… sometimes I think it would be nice to just do my junior year over, because then I’d be the same year as Kyon and everybody else. Right now I’m the only one who’s ahead, but I don’t feel like an upperclassman at all…”

She had absolutely no reason to worry about that. It had been Haruhi who said we needed a baby-faced, petite, sexy mascot and forced her into the club, and Haruhi who’d brook no complaint on the matter. If she’d wanted Asahina to be in the same year, she would’ve totally ignored any protest from Asahina and forced her to repeat a year or fail a class or something. For my part, I told her, I was satisfied if she just kept being the SOS Brigade’s maid.

Asahina giggled. “Thank you.” Possibly taking notice of Nagato reading nearby, she lowered her voice. “I hope I can be a little more worthwhile this year…”

Just as I was experiencing a spastic desire to run my mouth about the other Asahina, the sound of rustling underbrush announced Haruhi’s return.

“What, you’re taking a break already?”

I didn’t want to hear any complaints, I said—I’d already been working for nearly two hours.

“Heh, fine. I’m getting pretty hungry myself.” Haruhi seemed happy about something as she trotted over. “C’mon, Mikuru, let’s have lunch.”

“Uh, okay.”

The sight of Asahina opening the picnic basket was a fine one indeed. The handmade sandwiches, rice balls, and side dishes she took out were the
real
treasure, as far as I was concerned. It wasn’t an overstatement to say this was the reason I’d come along.

“…”

Nagato silently closed the book she was reading and looked intently at Asahina’s handiwork. Koizumi stuck the shovel into the soft earth of the hole he’d just filled and walked over.

“That looks truly delicious,” he said by way of his initial impression.

“Of course it looks delicious. You’ve been exercising,” Haruhi butted in, filling her own paper cup from the thermos, then raising the cup into the air. “Well, then, here’s to our hopes for successful treasure hunting!”

Now
our trip seemed like a real picnic—if you ignored Koizumi’s and my dirty clothes, that was.

I looked sideways as I stuffed my face with a seaweed rice ball. From what I could tell, Haruhi was enjoying her lunch with such gusto that it seemed like she’d forgotten all about the treasure hunt. I would’ve expected her to have gotten frustrated with Koizumi’s and my failure to dig up anything interesting, grabbed a shovel, and started digging around herself, but she had been strangely happy all day. Almost as if going on a hike and eating lunch under the blue sky had been her goal all along.

Haruhi’s actions lately had been just as incomprehensible as Asahina the Elder’s future transmissions. She’d turned suddenly melancholy, then decided it was time for bean-tossing, then just when I thought she’d calmed down again, here we were on a treasure hunt…

It was fine, though. Compared with getting sucked into some stupid dimension filled with Celestials, or having cherry blossoms bloom in autumn, it was like the difference between taking
a trip to the moon or the Andromeda nebula. Give me the moon any day of the week. One was a heavenly body on which humans had actually walked, and the other was an undiscovered frontier you’d have to use the galactic railroad to get to—there was a huge difference. Of course, I’d already experienced both closed space
and
unidentified falling blossoms…