Chapter 248

And that was OK… to think that Giovanni Di Santi, a great man in history who was a renowned inventor, was a woman… hee hee hee. What a shocking backstory!

Honestly, it was delectable information for me, a woman who likes history! The truth buried in the shadows of history. I rather liked the theory that Kenshin Uesugi was a woman in my previous life.

“Were you surprised?”

Fufu, Aurora giggled, and Ekaterina came back to herself and nodded.

“Yes, of course.”

But, if someone were to be associated with Di Santi, why the Forest People, when a knight or a ranger would be more appropriate? I had wondered, but if the inventor had had such a secret, it made sense.

With no contact with the public and a great debt of interest to the Duke’s family, the Forest People were the perfect match who could help the inventor while also keeping her secret.

Di Santi’s accomplishments began when he, or rather she, was still in her native country, re-establishing the technology to repair and build water and sewage systems that had been lost during the centuries of warfare that followed the fall of the Astra Empire.

She accomplished this when she was still very young and came to Yurinova territory at the enthusiastic invitation of the fifth generation Vassily, who learned of her fame.

When did she start pretending to be a man, and when did Lord Vassily find out? Mystery after mystery!

But then Aurora handed me an old notebook.

“It is a journal written by the chief of the Forest at that time. The chief was a woman named Luciola, who was a close friend of the inventor. It is only a fragment, but if you read it, you will understand what the circumstances were.”

“My, thank you very much.”

Wow, a first class historical document of unknown history! I was so excited.

When I read it, it suddenly began with this exchange.

[I asked her why she was pretending to be a man, why she had risked her life to flee her own country. She replied, “I pretended to be a man in order to save my father’s life. But in my country, if they knew I was really a woman, they would have burned me at stake.”]

Execution by fire!

And then, she risked her life to escape? And dressed as a man to save her father’s life? That was a lot of information!

Oh, but there was someone like that in my previous life. There was a girl who was burned at the stake for the crime of dressing as a man.

Jeanne d’Arc, the Maiden of Orleans.

I wondered if the inventor’s homeland was as oppressive to women as the medieval Catholic Church was at least three hundred years ago.

The scraps of information in the memoir, supplemented by Aurora and Forli, provided a more or less complete picture of the inventor’s situation.

Giovanna Di Santi was the daughter of a master stonemason, born in one of the surrounding cities around Astra.

She was not raised as a man from the beginning, but as a girl, though she wasn’t feminine at all, but rather a tomboyish girl who ran around the neighborhood with all the boys as her minions.

She was intelligent even back then, and she learned to read and write by observing her older brother Giovanni, who was always one step behind her. She learned to read and write from her father, and she was despised by her brother for this.

The city-state of Astra was once the center of the Astra Empire.

Just as Rome was the center of the Roman Empire. Rome later became the capital of Italy, but it was one of the city-states for a long time, too.

But as a result, the warfare after the fall of the empire was so intense that books were burned, ruins were destroyed, and even then – or even now, three hundred years later – the main cities were still engaged in battles among themselves. The cultural civilization that once flourished had fallen far behind.

It was a common belief in this world that warfare had caused the cultural civilization to recede.