The Old Man of the Mountain (2)
The smile resembled a snow-covered plain. A generosity that blanketed the earth, and a resignation that expected no warmth in return.
Irie. That is the child’s name.
That cannot be allowed, Maia. It is too cruel a request.
His lips moved beneath the mask, trapped inside the nightmare of the day he had lost her. He could not burden the boy with that final gift.
“What are you saying?”
Yordi coughed violently as he pushed himself upright. The young Nodin man wheezed with every word. Shards of brittle ice flew from his mouth along with his voice.
“What do you mean you won’t give it to him?”
Orkos, who had opened his eyes, mulled over what he must have muttered in his sleep. Then he spat out the same frozen powder and answered.
“Are you still alive?”
“This place might actually be the afterlife, for all I know.”
Yordi glanced back at the cave entrance with a shudder. Had they failed to keep the fire alive, they would all have been embraced by the gods by now. The Agyuibbal Mountains had stubbornly poured down a blizzard the previous night, intent on burying them. The cave entrance at the cliff’s edge, which they had blocked with backpacks and branches, had been shattered by the fierce gale and collapsed. Successive heavy snowfall had then piled up in place of their barricade, sealing the opening completely. It was a spectacular act of nature’s tyranny, but such things were common enough on frozen ground that none of the Nodins seemed particularly surprised. The snowdrift, hardened like stone, did not budge even when kicked. The vicious mountain range seemed determined to display every murderous tactic it possessed.
Because of that, Yordi had no choice but to misunderstand when he saw the Federation man lying motionless in sleep. Until just moments ago, he had believed Orkos was dead and had been shouting his name.
“You really intend to leave like this? After forming such a precious bond.”
Now that his mind was at ease, Yordi tore into a skewer of grilled sparrow threaded with tangled grass roots and added, “If you die here, no one will come to clean up your corpse.”
“That is a truly chilling thing to say.”
It was not a joke. Nor was it mere spite. In a land where blizzards raged year-round, it was impossible to retrieve those who had frozen to death. While “kindness” and “Nodin” were not words that paired naturally, the statement carried concern and consideration, however gruff the tone. At least by their own standards.
“It seems a little late to return to the Federation. I have too much to do, so I couldn’t go back even if I wanted to.”
“Reckless foreigners who freeze to death on the road are often used as signposts in these mountains.”
“Thank you for the warning, but this is not my first time here.”
Orkos rose to his feet, brushing off his clothes, and immediately drew his longsword. He began striking and shattering the snow piled at the cave entrance with practiced movements. When the tireless Federation man quickly cleared away a chunk of white mass large enough to fit a torso, Yordi—who had been groaning from the cold—watched him with a mixture of horror and admiration.
“If you’re not careful, the snow will collapse inward and crush us all.”
“I’ll be careful, so rest easy.”
From what Yordi had heard, some southerners competed over how high they could climb the mountain range. It wasn’t as though there were no paths at all through these rugged lands. Yet even those people could only travel as far as the mid-slopes before they began cutting off their blackened fingers and toes. Anything higher killed with cold alone. That was the nature of these mountains.
“My father taught me that southerners were all weaklings. Well, I’ll be.”
“Here stands living proof that it depends on the person. Your father would be disappointed.”
“He might be disappointed to learn that a capable fighter like you isn’t even a Nodin.”
“Actually, I am a man of this place.”
“Truly?” Yordi let out a short laugh, but Orkos answered in a perfectly serious tone.
“Of course, no matter how long I live in the north, Nodin blood will never flow in my veins. Still, I have lived here long enough to claim the identity of a resident. I have a home deep within the polar region of these mountains. I only travel to the Federation because there are matters I must attend to. Now I am simply returning to where I belong.”
“You’ve been living here? Exactly where?”
“It’s difficult to name a specific place. In truth, it doesn’t matter much.”
Yordi immediately closed his mouth and averted his gaze. Whether it was consideration or sulking, Orkos could not tell. The silence continued. They broke through the accumulated snow to escape the cave, stripped the clothes from two old men who had frozen to death during the night and carried them somewhere, then walked along the treacherous cliffside path outside the cave—until Yordi slipped toward the abyss.
The first sound to break the quiet was a scream: “Uwaaaak!”
The cry continued for several seconds even after Orkos seized his arm and pulled him back.
“Where do you think you’re going? Aren’t you supposed to be guiding the way?”
The companions who had been walking behind Yordi and Orkos looked down at him with concern. The children peering out from the packs slung on their backs had sparkling eyes. Something flashed across Yordi’s mind. His pregnant wife. And the child who would soon be born. Realizing he could not die here, Yordi pulled on the hand Orkos had clasped with all his strength. Of course, he did not succeed in hurling Orkos over the cliff. A few among the tribespeople might still have been hoping for that, though.
Pulled up with the same stability as the difference in their strength, Yordi leaned against the wall, gasping for breath. Then, as if the thought had just occurred to him, he asked Orkos,
“By the way, where exactly do you live? We aren’t making you take a long detour because of us, are we?”
Orkos turned to look at him. This young Nodin had a persistent streak.
“Why are you so curious about where I live?”
The Nodin youth scratched roughly at his grown beard as he stared at Orkos, wearing an expression that seemed to ask if he truly did not understand.
“What wouldn’t I be curious about? You slaughter eight-span crows like rabbits, move through snowstorms as if they were nothing, and keep finding food from somewhere. Come to think of it, where on earth did you catch those sparrows in a place like this?”
Orkos glanced behind him. At some point the tribespeople had grown familiar with him; they were now looking at him with bright eyes. The strange Federation man shrugged.
“Even if you say you don’t want to hear it later, I won’t take responsibility.”
The Nodin youth seemed satisfied with that.
“I didn’t catch the sparrows. I bought them. From a village in the Federation, south of the mountain range.”
“Now that I know the secret, it feels rather dull.”
“The fewer grand mysteries in the world, the better. Especially in an age when such things are gradually losing their place.”
Orkos spoke as they walked. Yordi listened as they walked. His tone was no different from an old man’s grumbling. The stories Orkos told were nothing more than the everyday life of a wanderer one could find anywhere. The pitiful rumbling of an empty stomach, the beauty of the sunrise faced each morning. The conversation that flowed slowly eventually reached personal, trivial details of family life.
“Becoming a father is a difficult thing, isn’t it?”
Yordi flinched.
“How did you know?”
“Among the Nodins, it’s not strange for a man of twenty to already have two or three children. At thirty you become an elder, and at forty a respected senior, don’t you?”
Yordi was indeed twenty. He had never told him. With a grave expression, Yordi began walking again and spat out only one short reply.
“Yes. It is difficult.”
Yordi’s curtness sounded like the complaint of a grown man. Had this been a few days earlier, Orkos might have let out a kindly laugh. But perhaps the arduous mountain trek had stolen his leisure; Orkos merely nodded.
“If you had no such plans, things would become far more complicated.”
“What about you? Do you have children?”
“I do, but it would be hard to say I was a good father. What child could treat a man who drove an awl into his four-year-old son’s limbs as a person?”
Yordi doubted his ears. Even by the rough and cruel standards of the Nodins, that was clearly not a normal statement.
“What?”
“It was a horrific thing. But it was less horrific than letting him die by my own hand, which would have rendered my wife’s plea meaningless. So I had no other choice.”
The child’s name was Nathan. It was not among the most common names, yet it could be found anywhere; it was one of those that priests often gave to orphans. He had chosen it on purpose. Because he could not bear to pass on the name Maia had given the child.
“Wait, hold on. Forget the name—what exactly did you do?”
Orkos calmly confessed what he had done. It had not been merely stabbing. He had stuffed the boy’s mouth with pebbles and performed exorcisms. He had imprisoned him, cast crude spells on him, and sprinkled consecrated salt. He had tied him behind the choir during three full days of liturgical chants and forced him to listen to the hymns of the Human Church from beginning to end. Of course, whenever the child fell asleep, he mercilessly poured ice water over him.
Yordi coughed without realizing it. He hadn’t asked for a confession of sins.
“If you are wondering whether it was truly necessary, then yes, I will say it was. It was truly an impossible task, one no one in the past had ever attempted, and therefore even the greatest effort would not have been enough. The greatest sin I committed against that child was not the torture, but the foolishness of never finding a better solution.”
Orkos’s voice grew hoarse.
“To suppress the Mark of the Beast and prevent it from stealing his fate. In truth, it was an absurd thing to attempt. Yet I succeeded to some degree.”
“Succeeded?”
“There was no abnormality until he turned fourteen. The Heresy Inquisitors were bewildered, saying the traces of the Abyss demon had vanished from his soul. There were two possibilities. Either the demon was deceiving me, or it had truly been extinguished from the world.”
At the word “extinguished,” Yordi showed clear agitation. It was a very small flinch, but Orkos’s eyes did not miss it.
“I don’t understand what you’re saying.”
“No. You understand. Both you and I know it. Is the village around here?”
When the enormous rock used as a signpost appeared, Yordi stopped short. They had crossed a path that should have taken at least fifteen days in only nine. The tribespeople who stepped onto the plains of the lowlands quietly immersed themselves in emotion, stroking the sparse grass with hands and feet that had nearly frozen and fallen off. Yet a few among them stood silently, almost eerily so. Mostly the children. Yordi fell into thought for a moment. It was a thought he had repeated countless times throughout the journey. They had crossed the mountain range far too quickly. Thanks to Orkos knowing every shelter and hidden path in the mountains—most of which even Yordi, a guide from a family of mountain pathfinders for generations, had not known. How could he have known them? The range was so perilous that climbing it was considered madness, and more than half of it remained shrouded in mystery. Yordi found it deeply unsettling.
“We still need to go a little further. This way—”
“No.”
As Yordi raised his hand to point left, Orkos’s hand came over it like a ghost and rested there. Orkos gently twisted Yordi’s wrist so that it pointed right. Orkos lowered his head and stared at the side of Yordi’s face.
“Isn’t that right?”
Yordi remained silent. Then he continued walking. Down the right-hand slope. The tribespeople followed the two of them as quietly as before.
“In this world there exists a demon called the Mark of the Beast. A demon that corrects failure. A demon that manipulates human history at will.”
“What are you talking about?”
“For the past eons, I have essentially delivered its final verdict. When it was not yet fully matured and could not resist by any means, I sought it out and uprooted the sprout.”
The moment he felt the hand on the back of his neck, Yordi reflexively tried to shake it off. But Orkos naturally placed his hand on the sheath of his sword. Yordi swallowed his anger and gave up resisting.
“The Nodin tribe’s ‘Beseni.’ The king who strikes the king and topples him. A sorrowful ritual created by the ancient Nodin people to survive against a sorcerer-king who did not care for his subjects. However, the king fled, and all that remained in the Beseni ritual and the people was the bizarre mission of having to kill the human monarch. But do you know? All of that process was nothing more than a scheme devised by the Mark of the Beast to create a perfect new vessel.”
“A scheme?”
“It was trying to build its own nest. The deeper the grudge woven into the story, the grander the chaos the host would cause. And the more entertaining it would be. The creature considers humans as toys, as livestock to fatten its own power. The king you are trying to resurrect through the ritual is nothing more than that.”
The salty smell of the sea grew thick. The village’s boundary stone came into view, yet there was no room in Yordi’s chest for the warm comfort of returning home. Every time his steps slowed even slightly, Orkos’s fist, clutching the leather coat, struck his back.
“So I stopped it. If that thing were to strike the Federation and topple it, humanity would once again walk through an age of darkness. It did not like that. So it incited several of your people to take my wife. And it dragged her into the ritual, making her conceive the tragedy that is that creature.”
A faint anger could be felt in Orkos’s voice. It carried a scent similar to Yordi’s own.
“Even though I knew it was dangerous, I could not kill the child. Because I had received a request I could not refuse. Since you have a wife, you will understand.”
“Do not speak of my family so casually.”
“So I layered every possible safeguard onto Nathan and raised the child to be someone who could fight against anything. Even knowing that if things went wrong, that power might turn against humanity.”
“I don’t want to know. I don’t want to hear your circumstances.”
“Nathan’s mother’s name was Maia. I could not bring myself to give the boy the name Maia had chosen for him, since she had died in childbirth. At the time, I thought any attempt would fail. That no matter what, he would grow up bearing the Mark of the Beast.”
“I said I don’t want to hear it—!”
“But in the end the Mark of the Beast did not manifest, and the child grew up and declared that he would freely take his mother’s name as his surname. I did not stop him. I felt belated guilt toward the child I perhaps should have killed.”
A child who should have been killed. Yordi’s breathing grew ragged. The man was saying repulsive things. In the same tone he had used when saying he had caught the sparrows at the foot of the mountain.
“He’s only a child. How can you say he must die? Where is the law that allows such a thing?”
“If he is destined to grow up and become a calamity that sacrifices millions, then someone must deal with it. Unfortunately, the only certain method I know is crude, brutal, and sad.”
“Then why did you let that Nathan boy live?”
Yordi’s voice changed. No longer the curt youth, but that of a father harboring hatred in his chest.
“What makes that bastard any different from the other children? What makes him different from the countless newborn babies who have died over the long years! Because he is the child your woman gave birth to? Do you truly believe something so trivial can serve as an excuse?”
The bone gate was meant to ward off misfortune. The moment he strode beneath it and set foot inside the village, Orkos released Yordi. Yordi looked surprised for a moment, then his face returned to a menacing expression. The young men of the tribe who had leaped over the gate and passed Orkos and Yordi quickly picked up weapons from somewhere and stood beside Yordi. The elders and children did not cross over. The six children who had followed all the way from the man-eating snow mountain without a single straggler twisted their heads at strange angles and revealed their true forms. When the twisted, pale smiles tore through their youthful faces and burst out, the elders, exhausted from the trek, tightly shut their eyes.
The group of Changelings instantly swarmed the weak and devoured them with relish. That was the offering Yordi had promised.
Yordi, who had squeezed his eyes shut, glared at the Changelings once the sound of tearing flesh stopped. The creatures were observing him, tilting their heads as if seeking permission. The long-lived Changelings were all of enormous size. There was no way to tell how they had managed to hide inside children’s bodies all this time.
“The chieftain of the tribe permits it. Enter.”
Those words signaled the beginning. Masked shamans and abyssal monsters began to emerge one by one. From the foundations of the village houses. From inside the pit dwellings. From the ridges of high ground. From within the salty coastal waters. From the central bonfire pile. Yet Orkos was not surprised.
“Since when did you know?”
“Since when did I know?”
Orkos shook his head. It must have been a plan they had prepared their entire lives, yet it was so sloppy he could hardly bear to look at it. Had he not chosen to follow of his own will, Yordi would have failed.
“When could I have known? When the old woman cursed me in the old tongue, calling me ‘Old Man of the Mountain’?”
The old woman had said it. That Old Man of the Mountain is quick-witted too.Rather than become monster food, I’ll take you with me. The unexpected heroism the old woman chosen as a sacrifice had shown had thrown the tribespeople into confusion. Yordi had struggled to smooth it over, but Orkos had understood and pretended not to.
Old Man of the Mountain. It was the nickname the Nodins had given Orkos out of fear. The insane old man who came down from the mountain range of those terrifying monsters and snatched children to devour them.
“Or was it when you saw me climbing the Agyuibbal Mountains with young children? When the children were not offered as sacrifices and followed all the way down? No. No.”
Yordi groaned as he recalled a possibility he had hoped was not true. Orkos confirmed that thought.
“I remember your face. I only learned that your name was Yordi after hearing it from you.”
“You remember me?”
Moisture pooled at the corners of Yordi’s eyes. The Nodin youth, baring his teeth and grinding them, could no longer hold back and shouted.
“You killed my little sister! Just because she had black hair! Do you remember that too?”
“I remember. I can only say I am sorry.”
“You’re sorry? A murderous old bastard knows how to apologize? That child was only six years old! Why didn’t that child receive the same chance as Nathan—”
“—It wasn’t only Nathan. When I first began this work, in the distant past, I attempted salvation countless times, but every single one ended in failure. The only one who managed to prevent ‘possession’ from occurring up to that age was Nathan. For some reason, he alone succeeded.”
Orkos removed his mask.
“When I could no longer endure those repeated failures, I abandoned the moderate approach.”
The face revealed was beyond the word “horrific.” It was a visage that would not have been out of place on an abyssal monster. For a moment, Yordi nearly forgot his rage and felt pity. The man, slashed, stabbed, burned, and shattered, groaned in the salty cold wind and pressed the mask back onto his face.
“The Mark of the Beast manipulates causality. It rewinds time to correct things and reincarnates into a new body. Dealing with such a being cannot be a game. Unlike it, my wounds cannot be undone.”
What terrible penance. Perhaps this man’s choice had been a noble sacrifice—
Yordi, who had been blankly lost in shock, suddenly came to his senses at the faint scream of a woman in labor coming from somewhere. The baby’s cry that followed stripped away the useless sentiment from Yordi’s heart. He had a family to protect and an enemy to kill.
“You didn’t evacuate the baby.”
“The tribe’s god spoke thus. If my child is not at the end of the path, if I do not personally deliver you to my family, you might not follow.”
“To act according to divine instruction also requires no ordinary resolve. You already know that my target is that baby, don’t you?”
“…You only kill children with black hair. My child might not have black hair—”
“No. It will have black hair. And blue eyes. All of you are white-haired, golden-haired, or red-haired, but the child will have black hair. That does not change.”
“How could you possibly know that?”
“There are those who are born that way by coincidence, but your child is a different case. The man named Yordi made a promise to the gods regarding the child in his wife’s womb.”
“Damn it, how the hell do you know all of that?!”
Orkos made a show of stroking a nonexistent beard. It was a Nodin gesture signifying age and experience. Trembling, Yordi spoke in a tone resembling the howl of a beast.
“I am different from you. I love my child. I will never let him die at the hands of a vile old man.”
“If you truly love him, why did you sell the child to an abyssal ritual?”
“Because my own sorrow is nothing compared to the bloody tears of our entire Nodin tribe. Old Man of the Mountain. The child I love will gladly be offered to the ritual as a proud Nodin. If he is strong, he will be reborn through Beseni. If he is weak, he will become a sacrifice of Beseni and live forever within the new king!”
An investment that could not be abandoned. An obsession he had not cast aside for fifteen hundred years. Because far too much blood had already been shed for that purpose alone.
“You have fallen into a trap, Old Man of the Mountain.”
In the polar region where Nodins were born and died, in a land rife with the tragedy of humans devouring humans, Yordi, chieftain of the Black Horn tribe, declared,
“The god with black horns shall watch over us. The glorious moment when we punish the evil that stole our king from us!”
The abyssal demons approached with sounds like cracking ice. The warriors of the Black Horn tribe thrust forward their sharply honed spears and blades, shouting. Stand up. Do not meekly allow yourself to be slaughtered and insult us—fight back. Have you truly gone mad now that your time to die has come?
Yet Orkos remained seated. Cross-legged on the stone floor, completely defenseless.
“My back aches even when I lie down, and my joints are ragged even when I rest. So at my age, you see—”
Orkos sheathed his longsword. They were valiant and fought with several times their normal strength. That was why it took far longer than when he had faced the eight-span crow pack. That fact brought Yordi no comfort.
Yordi lay collapsed, clutching his severed abdomen. Everyone else was dead. The tribal warriors. The shamans who had drawn mystery with tools and incantations. The hollow maw made from tribespeople who had died in the distant past. The abyssal monsters they had lured using the sacrifice as bait. When he had explained the plan while performing the ritual, the gods had seemed pleased. Only now did he wonder whether they had truly affirmed the plan’s feasibility. Perhaps the gods simply did not care whose blood flowed, so long as their bellies were filled.
“The horned beast god to whom you offered your sacrifices is already dead. The great stag was devoured by an evil god of the Abyss. For a time, that creature wore its hide and impersonated the great stag. And that creature, too, met a shattering end.”
It was a lie. Yordi tried not to waver. He struggled to speak.
“Th-this wind.”
The moment he began, Yordi coughed violently and spat blood. Orkos waited in silence.
“I am listening, Yordi.”
“This wind is the final breath of the Arctic.”
Only after some time did Yordi overcome the problem in his mouth. Of course there was no way to stop the bleeding. He had simply learned the trick of ignoring the blood he was chewing and speaking anyway.
“When the last snowball covering the homeland melts, judgment will descend and devour civilization, and we will be remembered as the generation that walked within the death throes of the polar region.”
“You will not be remembered. No one will. If the gods of this world all die as you desire, if the balance collapses and the polar cold withdraws its breath, no one in this world will survive.”
“That is not true. We, and our descendants, will live forever in the embrace of the vast universe. It is the promise of the gods. The day is near when the breath of this small, wicked, and cruel world will be cut off. Old Man of the Mountain.”
Orkos merely shook his head and did not answer.
“The ritual must continue. Our king who kills kings must return. The king our people await with burning, bloodthirsty longing. We belong to the king, and the king belongs to us.”
At the end of the words he stammered while spilling his life through his mouth, Yordi raised his broken hand and scratched at Orkos’s leg.
“We will take it back.”
We will take it back. Hand it over. How dare you call our king with that mouth. You cannot do this to us. You must spit out the blood price our ancestors paid.
Orkos let him writhe and groan. Yordi’s desperate struggle soon came to an end.
“There is something I could not say while you could still hear it. Because there were those who, upon hearing that story, tried to devise dangerous schemes, I decided never to tell it to anyone.”
As he closed those eyes, Orkos spoke calmly to the corpse of the Nodin.
“It was originally a power meant for humans, to be used by humans. As you said, they learned that if they followed the Abyss instead of opposing it, they could one day enjoy blessings beyond this world, and so they betrayed.”
The baby’s cries grew gradually louder. They had tried to prepare some soundproofing, so the noise was faint as if coming through a cotton quilt, yet they had ultimately failed to keep it hidden. The same was true for Orkos. He had believed that the Heavens did not know of Nathan’s existence. He had believed so until he realized Andau’s betrayal. Now that they had taken Nathan, he had to prepare for the worst case.
Orkos’s measures had failed. The Mark had deceived Orkos and was waiting inside Nathan for its time. And someone who learned of it would try to seize the Mark of the Beast.
Keres. I pray it is not you.
Even Orkos did not know how long Nathan could endure. He could only hope that a fighting spirit had taken root deeply enough within him, so that when the final moment came, he could die as himself until the end.
Yet even if Nathan died as himself, the demon would be born again among humans. Borrowing the body of a Beseni candidate. And it would swallow all the candidates, absorb the Abyss within them, and be reborn as a far more powerful being. Then it would descend upon the Federation that Orkos had struggled so hard to protect. Unless Orkos prevented it.
Therefore, in case Nathan was already dead, Orkos had to kill a human child. Though he had repeated the act for over a thousand years, he could never grow accustomed to the feeling that came with it.
Of course, there was also the possibility that Nathan would submit to the demon. In truth, that probability was higher. But even in that case, Maia’s son would die. Orkos had once loved a woman named Maia, but his love was not strong enough to hand over all of humanity in exchange.
So he had planted a sophisticated bomb inside Nathan’s body. Not gunpowder or charcoal explosives, but a conceptual bomb composed of spiritual sigils and ancient secret arts. It would explode his brain before he could even rewind time.
It was not something he had done because he wished to. It was simply a necessary measure.
“That demon was not originally called by such an ominous name as the Mark of the Beast. It has a true name. Once, everyone called that name with reverence.”
He had been forced to take out such insurance. That was the kind of being it was. A demon existing in the realm of concepts, one that made any imaginable preparation seem insufficient.
“Regression. Possession. Reincarnation.”
Orkos groaned at the pain in his waist, which had stiffened like ancient ruins, and stood up. Then he drew his sword again. This time, it did not take long before he sheathed it once more. The world where the baby’s cries had ceased was silent.