by Bora Chung
The young man sighed. “All right. We’ll get rid of him.” He grabbed the youth by the neck and brought him to his feet. Then, he dragged the youth outside.
The youth kept looking back at the woman. With a worried expression, she faced the impenetrable space before her, staring with her gray eyes.
The young man dragged the youth out of the house and all the way to the forest path. There, he released his bonds and kicked him, making him stumble onto the ground. As the youth tried to find his balance, the young man kicked him in the stomach.
“Tell that monster,” said the young man as he watched the youth writhe in pain on the ground, “that my sister is off limits. I don’t know what is going on, but my sister will never be a part of that!”
And the young man turned to go back to his house.
The youth grabbed his ankle.
Turning, the young man kicked the youth in the face. Coughing, the youth collapsed once more and spat out the blood that pooled in his mouth. But when the young man turned toward home again, the youth grabbed his ankle once more.
In truth the man was frightened, but he didn’t kick the youth this time. Instead, he stared down as if there was something he hadn’t noticed before.
“What is wrong with you?”
The youth carefully looked up at the young man. He gestured putting food in his mouth.
“You want food?”
The youth nodded.
Nonplussed, the young man gave a snort of laughter. And he lifted his foot to trample the youth again.
The youth covered his head with his hands but didn’t make to escape. He lay there before the young man in the most self-denigrating pose possible, beseeching him.
“Are you a fool? You come to our house looking for a sacrifice and now you want to be fed?”
Looking up, the youth vigorously shook his head. He made eating gestures with his hands again.
The young man looked down at him for a long time. “Maybe you really are a fool.”
The only answer the youth could give him was to keep miming eating.
The young man roughly brought the youth to his feet. “We’re only doing this once,” he said as he dragged him along. “Just once. When you’ve eaten, leave. Go far away and never come back.”
XV
The youth never strayed far from the house the gray-eyed woman and her brother lived in.
When the woman brought him food, he gobbled it up quickly. Her brother took him to the shed after his meal. Without any explanation, as if there was no need for any, the brother attached a chain to the youth's right cuff and fastened it tightly to a rafter of the shed using a heavy lock.
“Don’t think you can do whatever you like with us.”
The brother left.
In the morning, the brother came back and released him, but the youth sat lingering in the shed.
Only when the brother tried to shoo him away did he mime with his hands and feet that he had nowhere else to go. When the brother became angry and used his fists, the youth didn’t try to avoid the blows. He fell to the ground and acted as pitifully as possible, begging to stay with them.
“Tell me the truth. Where are you from?”
At this question, all the youth could do was shake his head as hard as he could.
“Why are you here? What do you plan to do to my sister?” He was struck with blows along with each question, but all the youth did was shake his head. The brother became convinced he was at least partially a fool.
At first, the youth mostly sat in the shed. Then one day, the brother dragged him out of it. Instead of his thin, outlandish trousers he was given a thick, practical pair along with a tunic, and taken to the forest. Of his elaborate costume or the cuff on his right wrist, the brother never asked a thing.
He followed the brother around gathering mushrooms and fruit. The brother hunted small animals as well. The youth knew nothing about hunting or anything else that was the slightest bit useful in putting food on the table. And because he was bad at everything, he was regularly beaten by the brother. Even as he was beaten and insulted, he never tried to avoid the blows or escape.
He did know one thing, and that was which greens were edible; he presented whatever fragrant herb he found to the woman along with the mushrooms and fruit. The woman avoided him and generally tried to keep her distance, but when he offered these gifts, she seemed at least a little pleased.
On the rare occasions the brother was in a good mood while they foraged, he talked to the youth or even hummed a song. The youth nodded along or shook his head to communicate his understanding. In the evenings, after dinner, the brother would take him back to the shed and chain him up as a matter of course, locking the shed behind him. The youth obediently did as he was told by the brother.
The brother hadn’t noticed this, but there was a gap at the end of the rafter he was chained to, which meant the youth could jiggle his chain off the end of it. Even after the youth had slipped the chain out and released his right-hand cuff, he never left the shed. Instead, he wandered around, looking at the stack of hay, the ropes, planks, and various farming implements he hadn’t an inkling how to use. One evening, he overheard from outside the shed’s window the woman and her brother talking about him.
“We can’t keep him forever in that shed like some beast,” said the woman.
“He escaped from the monster,” said the man in an ominous voice. “He must never be sheltered inside the house. And we can’t keep him in the shed for too long, either.”
“He escaped from the monster? How do you know?”
“Look at his scars. What else engraves such scars on its sacrifices?”
The youth felt his breath knocked out of him. But he tried not to utter a sound as he continued to eavesdrop.
“He’s either here to bring back a sacrifice to replace himself or he’s out for revenge. Either way, it doesn’t bode well for us.”
“Then what are we to do?” asked the woman in a trembling voice.
“Don’t worry. Even animals like that have their use in this world. I know someone who will take him somewhere far away.”
“Who is that? Where would he take him?” the woman asked in a worried voice.
“That’s for me to know. You don’t have to trouble yourself with that knowledge. It’s late, we should go back inside.”
That was the end of the conversation.
The youth finally realized why the brother seemed so familiar to him. When he had escaped from the cave and arrived at the first village he had found and the bald man had come to get him, the brother was the young man who had been talking to the bald one.
He could not return to fighting in the arenas. He would not last long.
But he had to know. What was this monster? And why did it need sacrifices?
And why had he been selected for that sacrifice?
While he was mulling these questions over, the door of the shed creaked open.
Wordlessly, the gray-eyed woman entered.
XVI
The youth was so surprised that he stood there without making a sound.
Then he realized he had released the chain her brother had tied to him without permission. Quickly, he dashed back to where he was supposed to be and tried to sling the chain back on the rafter. It made a loud sound as it fell to the ground instead. He was picking it up when he remembered that the woman was blind.
“Are you there?”
The woman smiled. He nodded but then realized she could not see and chastised himself inwardly. Instead, he moved the chain so it made a sound.
“Did you really escape from the monster?”
He pulled at the chain again. It reverberated loudly in the shed.
“Are you here to exact your revenge on me, then?”
He couldn’t understand her. All he could do was stare into her gray, pupil-less eyes.
“You were sacrificed to the monster in my stead, weren’t you?”
He was becoming more and more c
onfused. Understanding nothing, he continued to look into her white face.
The woman took a step toward him. Before he could move away, she gently placed a hand on his wrist.
Her fingers were long and slender and soft. He remembered how her hand had felt as it caressed his face when he first came here, how she had mistaken him for her brother.
“Please sit,” she said. “I will tell you everything.”
XVII
Once upon a time. All legends start this way.
Once upon a time, there was a place plagued by a disease every few years. The disease was thought to be from a monster that lived in the highest cave of the highest mountain in that region, a monster resembling a large crow, which flew down once every few years when it was hungry to devour the crops and trees. The villagers believed it exhaled poison whenever it opened its mouth, which meant any person or animal in its vicinity would get sick and die.
They decided to prevent the monster from getting hungry and coming out of its cave by giving it a sacrifice. According to a sorcerer, the best sacrifice was a prepubescent child. Whenever the air became tepid and the people and beasts of the village began to fall ill, the people left a child in the cave on the mountain. This practice persisted, and even when there was no plague, when someone was sick, the villagers sometimes took a child that had no family to the cave and prayed for the afflicted to get better.
“It was not a plague year, but I was born with a sickness,” the woman said in a soft voice. “I became blind from it. If nothing had been done for me, the disease would’ve spread all over my body—I would’ve become deaf and mute, unable to move on my own, unable to breathe, and ended up having to die a torturous death. At least, according to the sorcerer.”
Her voice became even softer. “So my father and brother found and kidnapped an orphan child from outside the village and sacrificed him to the cave.”
She whispered, “Was that you?”
He had no answer.
The woman waited. Because he said nothing, she asked, “Are you still there?”
He barely managed to give the chain a shake.
The woman said, “I did not know such things had been done. I only learned later, when I heard others talking. I was a child myself, but to learn that another child had been killed to save me … That has always been a great source of sadness.”
He made no sound.
Softly, the woman spoke again. “After sacrificing the child, my father died in an accident a short while later. I thought that was the revenge the sacrificed child had taken on our family. But the real person who deserved to die was me.”
The youth stroked the chain and could only gaze at the woman silently.
“So … if you want revenge, do whatever you want.”
She stopped talking.
They sat in silence. The woman spoke again. “Are you still there?”
He threw the chain to the ground, wrapped the woman’s white face in his hands, and kissed her lips.
XVIII
The next morning, the woman’s brother opened the door to the shed to find her sitting alone, in tears.
“He’s gone to kill the monster,” she said through her sobs. “He said it wasn’t my fault, that I did nothing wrong. That what made the people sick in both body and soul, that what made them harm the children of others was the monster, that he must therefore kill the monster, that he would kill the monster …”
The brother took his sister in his arms and consoled her before taking her back to the house. Of the news he just heard, he didn’t know whether to be joyful or dread what was coming to the village.
XIX
Relying on old memories, the youth made his way up the mountain. The words he had heard from the woman echoed endlessly inside his head.
“An orphan child from the outside the village.” He was a little crestfallen with those words. But if the woman’s brother had been there when he had been kidnapped, he could at least learn where he’d been found, and under what circumstances. From that scrap of knowledge, he might be able to find his home, his parents, maybe even his name.
But that didn’t help him think of a way to kill It. He hadn’t set out with a clear plan. But then again, never in his life had he made a plan or had an inkling as to what to do.
To not be caught and consumed by It. To survive somehow and return.
Just like when he was trapped in the cave before, survival was his objective and plan.
And that was what he vowed when he stood at the mouth of the cave.
He entered.
XX
Because he was used to the light of the sun outside, the complete darkness of the cave briefly disoriented him. He slowly began feeling his way forward.
How strange a person’s fate was. When she was little, the woman had had an older brother and a father. A family that worried over her health, a home, a life. All that had been granted to the youth was this damp, moldy cave and its hard rocks, the handcuffs and manacles on a chain, and a stake attached to that chain. Every person has only one childhood, and instead of being full of hopes or dreams, his had been crushed by the fight for survival. He never once imagined in all his years spent in the cave that a different childhood from the one that had been accorded to him might have been possible.
And now that he was back inside the cave, senses that had been long dormant revived inside him. The cave was his world, and whether he liked to or not, he remembered every wrinkle in the rock and rise or depression in the floor.
If he was this used to it, perhaps he himself was a part of this cave …
Just as he was thinking this, his hand touched the iron stake.
From the woman’s shed, the youth had brought the chain that the woman’s brother had linked to his right cuff. Now that he had arrived in the prison of his childhood, he crouched down next to the stake like he used to. This was his place, and it had been kept empty for him. If he were lucky, no one would ever have to take his place.
The distant white spot that was the cave’s entrance was blocked by a huge black form.
The youth lifted his chin and stared into the dark.
Never while he lived in the cave did he manage to see what It looked like. Back then, It would appear suddenly, blocking the entrance of the cave, and in the next moment It would be on the youth’s back, crushing his limbs with its wings and talons, piercing him between his bones with its sharp beak.
Like previous times, It tried to climb on his back. Realizing that the youth was not a child and was wearing clothes, It, as if mocking him, ripped away at his tunic. The talons slicing through his flesh as well as his garments made him want to scream, but he held his silence.
It never pierced him in the same place twice. There were scars along his back, limbs, and ribs where It had violated him before, and if It wanted to find an unspoiled spot, it would have to spend some time looking. The youth was counting on that moment.
It finished ripping off his tunic, pressed down on his neck, and positioned its beak. The youth, tense with the fear of what might happen next, briefly closed his eyes.
As expected, It saw the scars on his neck and drew back its beak. As it followed the scars down his back and along his arms and ribs, It tried to rip his trousers. The youth twisted his upper body and swung the chain connected to his right handcuff.
In the dark, the chain made a heavy, threatening sound as it whipped through the damp air and smashed against an unseen object. The youth couldn’t tell what it had hit, but he heard a hard and clear shattering sound and a scream that shook the interior of the cave, followed by a hideous smell. Aiming right below the source of the odor, he swung his chain once more.
The resulting scream almost deafened him as it shook the walls. And in the very next moment, his chain was wrapped around a talon, and he was flying through the air.
It was beautiful. He couldn’t help thinking so when, for the first time, he could clearly see It by the light of the sun. It was truly, monstrously be
autiful.
In the sunlight, It was not black but dark gray. Its ashen feathers gleamed like well-forged iron, a cold and lifeless sheen. Its talons and beak were silver, and in the middle of that silver beak was a short but deep, red gash. The youth surmised this was where his chain had hit.
Beside the beak was an icy blue eye staring down at him. That shade of blue, to someone seeing it for the first time, was shockingly deep and clear, and cruel.
He wound his chain tighter around its feet and tried to hoist himself up. But one of the links of the chain he dangled from came into contact with the sharp talons and was sliced into two. Even if he survived the fall like the time he escaped from It, there would be no point in having come all this way if he let It fly off to somewhere far away. He desperately clung onto the silver claws of It and tried to climb up on the monster without getting scratched.
Just then, It lowered its head and bit down on him.
When he felt the steely beak close down from his ribcage to his legs, he was certain he was about to die. But It did not swallow him or shake him off into the air. As painful as it was, he wasn’t being bitten down on strong enough for his bones to break—this could only mean It was trying to take him somewhere.
The minute he thought this, It tossed him in the air and caught him again in its beak. Now the youth lay on his back facing the sky and staring straight into the blue eye of It.
If beasts could show emotions in their eyes, the emotion that the youth would have discerned at that moment would have been clearly one of satisfaction. But being different from people, beasts do not derive satisfaction from scaring or torturing others. The question they ask of any other animal is whether it will kill it or be killed by it. As long as they can prevent themselves from being killed while having prey in their grasp, animals don’t need to concern themselves with the feelings of their prey; simply the fact of having prey in their grasp is enough satisfaction.
It made a wide arc in the air. It was flying back to the cave.
Without hesitation, the youth swung his right arm, hard. The chain connected to his right cuff smashed directly into the icy blue eye of It, and the half-sliced link gave way, leaving a fragment of the chain lodged in the eye.