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 confused. 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.