This is another one that comes after a cut-scene, as you'll see:

Vignette 19 - Give a Little Whistle

Eastern Mandalia Plains, early evening

Ramza called a slightly early halt that evening, knowing everyone was exhausted from having pushed themselves incredibly hard for the last couple of days. They were near to where they had made camp the very first night they had left Gariland for Eagrose - which now seemed a lifetime ago. The boys, falling back on the sense of routine, which allowed them to work without thought, had done their share of camp chores before Delita had suddenly stridden away, without a word, up to a small rise which overlooked the part of the plains that ran to the Magick City.

On top of the raised ground was the derelict remains of a shepherding hut, or perhaps it had been an isolated small-holding, though it was barely more than a couple of low limestone walls, now. With the increase in monstrous, fiend-like beasts that populated these plains, it seemed unlikely that sheep would ever be able to graze here again. Delita had sat on one of the rocks, one knee pulled up to his chest, looking absently at the sky.

Ramza had gone to join him after a minute or two and the four girls kept throwing glances in their direction, watching the two distant boys talking.

"For once, I wish we had run up against a bunch of panthers and goblins on the Plains today." Juliana said with a sigh, "I think it would have done Delita some good to have laid about himself with a sword rather than brooding – even if it just stopped him doing it for a few minutes. Ramza too, I imagine." The three other girls just nodded. Juliana was pacing back and forth next to the fire, clearly itching to go and try to give what comfort she could to Delita.

"I'd leave things to Ramza, Juli." To her surprise it was Sam and who had spoken – she was usually the quietest. "I have cousins who are identical twins and, as inseparable as they are, I swear that they aren't any closer than those two." Samantha gestured at the low hill where the boys were.

Suddenly, a slight breeze blew from the boys' direction and the girls all looked at one another, confused, as a raspy tuneless whistling noise reached their ears.

Ramza kept whistling on his piece of grass long after he had any desire to continue doing so, simply because he couldn't think of anything to say to Delita that would help. Whatever Delita might say, both boys knew only too well that Tietra, as a prisoner of the Corpse Brigade, would not be watching the sunset, like them. Prisoners, as a rule, were not allowed the freedom to stroll around, contemplating the beauties of nature.

If, when they reached her, the worst that had happened to her was that her hands had been kept bound and she had been drugged into insensibility, as the Marquis Elmdore had been, then both boys knew they would have a lot to be thankful about. Some of the things that might happen to a young female hostage did not bear to be thought about, at all.

Unfortunately, Delita was, apparently, thinking about them anyway. Ramza heard a hitch in the whistling coming from his friend and then it stopped altogether. Turning to look at him, Ramza saw Delita's brimming eyes overflowing and his shoulders beginning to shake. Delita had always cried silently. Ramza remembered the first time he had seen that, the day Delita and Tietra had come to live at Beoulve Manor.

In a way, it had been sheer fluke that his mother had been at home that summer, he remembered. She had been unwell herself, though certainly not with the Black Death, in the early part of the campaign season and had come back from the Ordalian border country where she and his father were serving officers – he the general, she content to remain a mere captain in the medical corps.

As the plague had swept the Beoulve lands, as it had with so much of Western Ivalice that summer, his mother had worked herself ragged trying to help where she could. However, she was sensible and would only treat those few who had survived the main illness and were thought to no longer be contagious – no-one knew of a way to treat the illness at its height and, besides that, a dead medic was no good to anyone.

Ramza and Alma had been confined to their country Manor House. It was a huge building, and one which they didn't know well, since the family mostly lived in the Mansion in Eagrose proper. Two children could spend weeks exploring the enormous house, but even so, they had longed for something new to divert their interest.

Though it was not exactly a "diversion", the change in their dull confined lives had come in the shape of Tietra and Delita. Their mother and Ramza and Alma's had grown up on neighbouring farms and had been friends when they were girls. Therefore, when Cyndra Heiral, her husband and their youngest child all died of the Black Death, Lady Merissa had felt she could not abandon the older children to the doubtful care of the already over-burdened parish. Hence, she decided to bring them home to the Manor, with the idea that they would be companions and playmates to her own children, who were much the same age.

When Lord and Lady Beoulve were away with the army, Ramza and Alma would spend a couple of months, over the summer, living on the Lugria farm with their grandparents, while their governess went home to see her family. Therefore, they had met Delita and Tietra before, when they two little dark-haired children had been visiting their own grandparents, a couple of summers before the Black Death had hit.

Alma and Tietra had played nicely together from the start - probably helped, in no small part, by the fact that five-year-old Alma had impulsively given the four-year-old Tietra one of her dolls, the first time they had met. That same day, Ramza and Delita, six- and almost-six-years-old, had ended up trying to beat each other black and blue, over something neither had ever been able to remember afterwards, and had come to loathe the very sight of each other, doing everything they could to avoid one another for the remainder of the Heirals' few days at their grandparents' farm.

By the autumn when he was eight, when Delita and Tietra had come to live at the Manor, Ramza's recollection of the other boy had faded from loathing to something between dislike and indifference. However, his mother had warned both of her own children, before she had left in the carriage to collect the little Heirals, that she expected them to be extremely nice to the other two, as their parents had died less than a week before and on top of that, everything at the Manor would be new and strange to them.

It had been later than expected when their mother had arrived back with the other two children. In fact, Ramza and Alma had already been put to bed by their nurse. Ramza, for the first time that he could recall, was not sharing a room with his sister – of course he was eight, that was really too old to share with a girl, even Alma. However, that didn't mean he wanted to share with that Delita boy!

He'd been half asleep when his nurse had ushered the other little boy into his room. She'd efficiently stripped him out of his clothes and dressed him in one of Ramza's nightshirts, then briskly tucked him into the bed that had been Alma's until so recently. When Ramza had begun to speak he'd been told firmly to hush and go back to sleep. Nurse was kindly in general but rather brusque and was a complete martinet when it came to bedtimes.

After she had left Ramza had lain still and quiet for a couple of minutes until he heard movement in the bed across from him. He looked over. Delita was sitting in the bed now with his knees pulled tightly to his chest, his face resting on them. Ramza saw his shoulders were shaking - he was crying silently.

Just as he had on that night eight years ago, Ramza went to sit next to Delita, this time on a rock rather than a bed, and laid a hand flat on the other boy's upper back. One of Delita's foibles was that he didn't like people – anyone but Tietra and sometimes Alma – to offer him too much comfort when he was crying, but from years of experience, growing up, Ramza knew that this simple touch would be acceptable.

"I just wish I knew that she was all right." Delita's voice was a choked whisper.

Since that was his own main wish right now, Ramza had no words of comfort that wouldn't be blatantly empty and trite, so instead he just gently patted the other boy's back a couple of times, staring up at the now darkening sky.

Eight years ago Delita's only words had been a choked whisper as well, though that had been a mournful "Ah want me mam!" Ramza hadn't known what to say then, either. Saying that they would go and find his own mother hadn't seemed quite the right thing, Delita barely knew her, so he had made the only suggestion that had presented itself to his mind.

"Shall we go and find your sister?" He'd asked tentatively.

The other boy had nodded, face still buried against his knees, so Ramza had taken one of his hands and drawn him from the bed and out of the room. Ramza had led him, still weeping softly, into the girls' bedroom.

Instead of the small beds that the boys' room had, the girls had one large bed. Ramza didn't know why they didn't each have their own, at the time, though now he knew that high-born girls would share a bed with another girl or woman until they were married, as it was supposed to guarantee their chastity for their future husband. It was even done that way at the Akademy. Even after they had moved out of the nurseries, the two girls had continued to share a suite of rooms and a bed. It was really little wonder that, even though they were so very different in personality, Alma and Tietra were so very close – they usually spent every minute of every day and every night together.

The following morning, Nurse had found the boys' beds empty and all four of them in the girls' big bed, piled together haphazardly, rather like a litter of sleeping kittens. She hadn't been too pleased with them. After Lady Merissa had spoken sternly to her, though, the four of them had been allowed to pile into the big bed this way any time that either Tietra or Delita had become particularly upset about their family around bedtime over the next few months, as it seemed to help.

Ramza remembered that in the weeks following the death of his own mother, a little over two years later, the four of them had taken to sometimes sleeping together in the big bed again. At that time, he finally understood why it had nearly always been when they were getting ready for bed that the other two had become so upset about their parents' deaths. When you were tired at the end of the day, but you weren't yet quite ready to sleep, that tended to be when you had time to think about things and the people you had lost. It was still often as he was lying in bed at night that his thoughts would stray to his parents, though the grief had subsided to a point where he seldom felt it as more than a dull ache.

Gods! He had to stop thinking about death and grief – that was not a good thing to do in these circumstances. Tietra was not dead, they were going to rescue her and everything was going to be fine! Since Delita had fallen to pieces this evening, he could not afford to. Somehow, that was how this sort of thing worked between them.

Author's Note:

A very brief note, just to ask if anyone reading this can see any special significance to the whistling on grass theme? I just don't get why they would have chosen that to tie various cut-scenes together. Since the game is Japanese, I wondered if there might be a symbolism I don't know about, since I'm not all that familiar with the minutiae of Japanese culture.

As an aside, I don't get how they all do it one-handed, when I was a kid we used to do that by sandwiching a piece of grass between our thumbs and blowing through them. Totally irrelevant, I know, but never mind...