The youth had no idea what the bald man was saying. He did not have the energy for comprehension or concentration. Whenever the carriage shook, his guts felt like they did a flip, and every beat of his heart gave him a pain that felt like something was swelling inside his head.
That night, the youth stared at his right wrist, which was chained to the carriage’s luggage compartment, and thought that he needed to escape once more.
XI
It wasn’t easy waiting for an opportunity.
From morning until evening, the youth was surrounded by the bald man and his gang, and in the night they all slept together in the carriage. On days when he earned a lot of money, he was left alone in the carriage while the others went drinking, but his right wrist remained chained to the luggage compartment.
More than anything else, however, he was getting weaker and weaker. He no longer had to drink the suspicious liquid in order to feel nauseous; whenever he stood up after sitting for some time or emerged from a dark place into an even slightly brighter one, the world would spin around him. During fights, he had now reached a point where he simply teetered for a while as his opponent landed blow after blow, before he fainted dead away to the boos of the crowd. This prompted the bald man to stop giving him the medicine. But his body had already been damaged, and even as he struggled and tried to choke down his vomit, he was continuously sent out to fight.
It was when the youth could no longer stand up properly on his own that the bald man was finally finished with him. No matter how much the man hit or kicked him or pressed down on his neck, the youth could no longer rise. The bald man spat on him and had one of his underlings carry him over his shoulder into the hills. Once the underling had hacked through quite a bit of forest, he abandoned the youth under a tree and disappeared.
The youth lay on the ground and stared up at the sky. A fragment of blue peeping through the dense covering of the trees.
As he lay there and stared up at the unmoving blue fragment, inhaling the scent of fallen leaves, his endlessly rumbling nausea seemed to ease. A dreamy, relaxed feeling overcame him where he lay completely still.
The blue above him started to gray. It then turned ashen and rain began to fall. The leaves that covered the ground and his body were mercilessly pelted with fat raindrops.
The rainwater was chilly against his skin. With the rain thickening and the smell of damp earth and leaves growing stronger, he was starting to feel nauseous again. He trembled and almost bounced off the ground as he suddenly sat up and violently vomited what felt like his entire insides. Mustering what little strength that was left in his battered body, he vomited for a long time until there was nothing inside him anymore.
When he was done, he lifted his head and stared up at the sky where the rain was falling from. The raindrops hit his face and slid into his mouth. He drank them in; they were sweet and refreshing.
He got to his feet. It was cold. But the shivers and the pain that had been strangling his guts were dissipating, and were soon gone entirely.
Heading in the opposite direction of where the underling who had brought him here disappeared to, he started to walk.
XII
The youth wandered the mountain forest for four days. Aside from rainwater and some grasses, he ate nothing and continued to walk for a long time.
When he emerged from the forest on the evening of the fourth day and discovered a village, the first thought in his mind was not joy that he had survived but that the village was somehow familiar to him. A rock near the village’s entrance, the green-brown earth and gray-barked trees, and the row of houses all came together in an uncanny sense that he had been here before.
But why the village scene was so familiar or where he had seen it before was something that he didn’t have the where-withal to ponder. For four days straight, he had not eaten or slept properly. The things he needed most right now were food and warmth.
He walked into the strangely familiar village.
He still wore the clothes he had worn in the arena. The only thing on his body were the ornate, loose trousers they had given him, and he had no shoes or tunic, just the many scars marking his back and arms, bare to the world.
The sun was melting into different shades of red above the clouds on the horizon, and smoke was rising from the village houses as their inhabitants prepared their evening meals. The smell of cooking made his stomach jump and skip. He walked into the alley between the houses.
Villagers returning from their work stopped in their tracks and stared at him. In the tense silence of their fearful gazes, the youth remembered the day he had escaped It and the cave and come upon the world of people. But unlike back then, there was no grinning man coming up to run and grab his hand.