The Noose of Friendship (2)
Whether it was my imagination or not that our eyes had truly met, the girl who had been standing there expressionless turned toward me and offered a gentle smile. I couldn’t hold back any longer and shouted, as though trying to cut through the furious roar of the crowd condemning the witch.
“Kaira…!! Why are you there? Don’t die… you can’t die…!! You told me you could turn back time…. Turn it back! Get out of there!!”
My voice scattered and dissolved into the jeering shouts of the mob, but some of its meaning must have reached her. The girl branded as a witch gave a weak smile, shook her head twice, and looked away from me once more.
Kaira wore nothing that could honestly be called clothing—just a single miserable rag with three holes cut for her head and arms, crumpled and filthy. The scrap barely covered anything; it seemed designed solely to humiliate, leaving her lower belly completely exposed.
Through the torn fabric, her slender limbs, thighs, stomach, and even her face were covered in bruises and scratches, as if she had been beaten repeatedly. She must have suffered severe torture after her capture. The sight was heartbreaking.
“…!”
Then a man’s voice drifted into my ear—he was chattering excitedly to the person beside him. I should have kept my attention fixed on Kaira, yet for some reason his words pulled my focus.
“So yeah, it’s all thanks to me that the bitch is hanging up there.”
What…?
“I heard you collected the bounty… You’ve got sharp eyes. How’d you know?”
“With her face plastered all over the wanted posters, how could I miss her? I went to the leather workshop in the market to buy some straps, and there she was.”
“The leather workshop—you mean Arun’s place?”
That man… Hebel. The uncle who worked with me in the vigilante corps….
“That’s right. Just between us, it looked like the witch and Arun knew each other. Same age, after all. Probably friends…”
“And?”
“And nothing. I sensed something at the shop, so the next night I snuck over to his house. That’s when I heard the noises.”
“Noises?”
“The sound of the witch getting fucked, obviously.”
I bit my lip. Damn it. So we had been discovered. But… if the crime was hiding a witch, I should have been standing on that gallows beside her. Why only Kaira…?
“Seems he tied her up and kept her for his own pleasure. Young guy like that—probably wanted a woman’s body more than the gold. Figured he’d enjoy her for a while before handing her over to the guards… But things didn’t go his way. He raped her for about ten days straight until she finally escaped. I grabbed her by the hair.”
…So that was how Kaira had been caught.
“That story sounds off. You mean you were staking out Arun’s house every single day?”
Hebel answered with a greasy smile.
“The sound of young folks rutting is the best medicine for an old man’s body.”
The other man let out a sigh that said he was beyond arguing.
“Even if she hadn’t escaped, I planned to break in the next day and steal her anyway. Didn’t want to split the bounty with some leather-stinking kid.”
“Well, you did what you had to. Too bad about Arun, though.”
“Too bad? If she’d been caught by some real bastard, she might’ve been reported for hiding the witch and ended up on the gallows with her. Getting caught by me was a mercy.”
I could no longer stand being there and moved away. If they realized I had overheard them, I had no idea what consequences would follow.
“Hngh… huuugh……”
The thick rope around her neck—far too coarse for such a delicate body—already bit deep into her throat. I had hoped for the kind of gallows that dropped and snapped the neck, cruel in appearance but merciful in speed. One look told me this was not that kind.
“Ugh……”
She tried to appear composed, but from the lips of the girl who had once been my first love, a pained moan finally slipped free.
Kaira’s small bare feet stood on something transparent and square. Her ankles were bound tightly with rope, yet even standing on it seemed agonizing; her feet kept twitching and curling.
The soles of her feet were flushed bright red—no, almost purple and swollen. That alone told me what the transparent block supporting her was.
Ice…
It was an unimaginably cruel method. Simply standing would cause frostbite to slowly kill her toes. If she moved too much from the pain, she would slip and strangle herself.
Enduring the bone-deep cold would not save her. It was still autumn; the weather was not cold enough for ice to last. No matter how long she held on, her body heat and the air would melt it. She would be slowly crushed by the terror and pain of her windpipe tightening.
Even if Kaira had truly committed every crime they accused her of, did she deserve to die like this?
“Huu……”
This ice-abusing execution was a cunning way to inflict the longest, most terrible suffering on a prisoner. Yet for the crowd gathered to watch a witch’s neck snap and her body twitch like a dying insect, it was the worst possible spectacle.
The huge crowd soon thinned. Only a few stubborn layers of spectators remained, burning with a strange determination to witness the witch’s final moments.
I was one of them. It meant the shop would stay closed all day, but that didn’t matter. I had an obligation… to watch Kaira die.
The ice had melted considerably. Somehow Kaira had not slipped and was still alive, but now she balanced on tiptoe, supporting her weight with only a few toes. Her trembling feet and calves looked unbearably pitiful.
For a moment I was seized by the urge to abandon everything and drag her down… but I would be run through by spears the instant I tried. And even if I died, no one would halt her execution.
Helplessly, I stared at Kaira’s face—now unmistakably filled with the fear of death, exhausted from the long ordeal of enduring pain on the ice.
“Hngh…… Hu, huuuk……”
Kaira was crying. She tried desperately to hold back the sobs, teeth clenched tight.
Even while fighting her tears, her gaze swept across the few remaining spectators and returned to me. When she saw I was still there, her expression shifted to clear alarm. She shook her head frantically.
Was she telling me to leave? Did she not want the boy who had loved her first to witness her end?
But that was the wrong choice Kaira made at the final moment of her life.
The child who could barely last by pouring every ounce of concentration into her toes forgot, for just an instant, that she had to maintain her balance—distracted by someone like me. The price arrived instantly for her slender body.
“Ah……”
I heard her single, bewildered cry clearly.
Her left foot slipped. Kaira’s body lost its balance. I saw it perfectly—her beautiful red eyes, dyed by the slanting sunlight, widening in terror.
She suddenly lost the ice that had borne her weight and flailed in empty air. Her hands were bound behind her back, wrapped tightly in strange cloth, and her ankles were roped together; all she could do was wriggle like a caterpillar.
“Hahk…… Ah, heuk… kahak…… K, heok……”
Cheers rose from the crowd. Half pity, half delight at finally seeing the sight they had waited for.
The sound of Kaira’s painful coughing reached me. Her agony seemed to flow into my own body. I wanted to squeeze my eyes shut or turn away, but I could not. Truly… I could not.
“Heu… uk…… Keheuk, kuk……”
There was a strange, magnetic power in the sight of Kaira writhing in her death throes. The hair and skin of my first love, dying beneath the red sunlight, were so beautiful that I… forgot my own humanity and simply watched her final moments.
“Geuheuk… u, euut… uk…… kkuk… kkeu……”
The violent convulsions that had wracked her slowly weakened. Her coughing changed into thin, gasping breaths, and her wild thrashing dwindled to faint, fluttering twitches.
The executioners had already kicked away the ice she had stood on—ice she would no longer need once she was dead. They did not want to risk giving her even a few more moments of life by letting her step on it again.
“Kahuk…… Kuk…… Hu, huuuk……”
Kaira thrust her tongue out as far as it would go, using the last of her strength to gulp at the air before her. I stared blankly at the face of my first love, now the very image of agony itself. I could not look away from her gasping mouth, from the way her entire body shuddered with every desperate attempt to breathe.
“U, uk…… …”
The movement of her parted lips gradually slowed. The intervals between her shudders grew longer. Wetness spread between Kaira’s legs. A stream of bright yellow liquid mixed with light-brown filth dripped down her thighs.
What was she thinking in her final moments?
“……”
The convulsing, twitching feet finally went limp. Kaira’s head, tongue still protruding, tilted sideways toward the ground and stopped moving. Her eyes remained open. The vivid red of her irises, once bright with blood, clouded over into a dull, clotted brown.
I could see the last color draining from Kaira’s abused, wounded, and emaciated body. The child I had loved had become nothing more than a lifeless lump of meat.
“Aah……”
My knees gave out and I collapsed where I stood—only after watching my first love’s death to the very end. It was then that I realized something between my own legs had grown hard.
The next day, at the hour I should have opened the shop, I returned to the square once more, as if drawn by an invisible force.
Kaira’s body was gone. I wondered whether someone had given her a funeral, or whether the imperial family had collected the witch’s corpse themselves to prevent any sympathetic soul from claiming it. While circling the still-standing gallows, I finally saw it beneath the platform’s shadow.
A shabby old man—probably one of the city’s beggars—held a pure-white naked body in his arms and was vigorously thrusting his filthy hips. He was not alone. Several groups of beggars had gathered, glaring at him with looks that said hurry up and finish, waiting their turn to vent their lust on Kaira’s dead body.
A full night had passed since her death, yet Kaira’s eyes were still open. If there had been only one or two beggars, I would have rushed in, snatched the corpse, and at least closed her eyes. But with that many, I would only be beaten myself. So I could do nothing.
I simply stood there, dazed, forced to watch until the end as my dead friend’s body was defiled by those wretched beggars. I sat blankly in the park until the sun reached its zenith.
Even after the beggars—having satisfied themselves on Kaira’s crumbling corpse now smeared with semen, urine, feces, and dirt—had left, I stared at her polluted body feeling an emotion that was neither grief nor rage, but something far stranger.
Kaira’s eyes were still open. I slowly approached the corpse that had been discarded like garbage. If anyone saw me touching it now, what would they think? I knelt, gently closed those resentful eyes, then stepped back again.
And once more I gazed at Kaira’s body with vacant eyes, forgetting even the passage of time.
When lunchtime came, several scholarly-looking men, relatively well-dressed, approached while cautiously scanning their surroundings. Their neat attire did not hide the fact that they were clearly searching for Kaira’s corpse. Were they, too, planning to violate her dead body?
I focused my ears and stole their conversation.
…It seemed they were alchemists. They were spouting nonsense about how a witch’s corpse was precious research material.
Those so-called scholars discussed the matter with deadly serious expressions, then lifted Kaira’s body like an object and placed it onto the tools they had brought.
And then…
They divided it.
Like splitting pieces of bread, sometimes even raising their voices in argument. Barely suppressing my nausea, I watched their hideous conduct to the end as they pretended to be men of learning.
After the alchemists left, only the stench of death rising from Kaira’s belly and a few hardened clots of blood remained. I walked blankly to the spot where her traces lingered and found—
‘…This is……’
A single thin, pure-white severed pinky finger lying alone. I picked it up and returned with unsteady steps.
“…You can even fantasize from other people’s perspectives, Mom.”
“Maybe this really is the ending I wanted. Arun, I wish you hadn’t died… Hic!?”
The tentacle of Rin embedded in my mind thrashed as if scolding me.
“Anyway, this is a failing grade. You’re supposed to be writing a travelogue or autobiography—how can you switch to someone else’s point of view?”
“I’m sorry. But……”
I hung my head, just like the miserable corpse I had imagined dying in that delusion.
“I still had lingering attachments… To the fact that all my friends from my hometown had died. That’s why I’ve always carried these thoughts……”
Rin offered no reply. Only her daughter’s cold hand came to rest on mine.