Editing Tales of Leo Attiel:Volume3 Chapter6 (section)

===Part 1===


“Kuon? Kuon, 'the fugitive from the mountain'!”

One mountain man was enraged at the name. Hearing it said, the others were all equally surprised, but that man's eyes were noticeably filled with fury.

“How dare you just come back here, you and your filthy blood, you fucking betrayer! To think that hunting game would lead to meeting a friend's enemy!”

It seemed that Datta must have been a friend of his. The man drew the broad sword at his waist.

“Don't move from there! By the horn of the bronze bull that Tei Tahra rides, I'll cut you down along with the evil spirit possessing you.”

He strode towards Kuon, his gleaming blade brandished over his head. Before Kuon had time to react,

“Kuon isn't a betrayer!” Sarah, who had only just managed to stand up, cried out.

Being yelled out face-to-face by a clearly foreign woman left the man considerably startled. Sarah opened her mouth even wider,

“Kuon never betrayed anyone. And first of all, there wouldn't been any point to his killing Datta! That man called Diu Wei set a trap. If you can't even understand...”

“Stop it, Sarah!”

This time, it was Kuon who yelled as he seized her. Sarah frantically broke free from his hand which was gripping her shoulder.

“What? Are you going to just let him take your life because of a misunderstanding? You can't possibly have come all the way here just to get yourself killed?”

“Don't interfere. I'll explain it myself.”

“Weren't you going to run away just now? You're the one who shouldn't interfere. I've been pissed off at that Diu person even since I heard your story, Kuon! Now, get Diu here. I'm going to let him have it.”

“Sarah!”

Just when Kuon reached to grab hold of Sarah's shoulder again, her posture unexpectedly collapsed completely. Taken by surprise, Kuon's hand let go of her, and Sarah fell sideways to the ground. Kuon hastily crouched down and lifted up her head. Her entire face was drenched from large beads of sweat. Diluted blood was mixed in within them. Her breathing was shallow and uneven.

While Kuon had lost his calm, unsure what to do, Aqua knelt by Sarah's feet and rolled up the hem of her skirt without asking permission.

There were several wounds puncturing Sarah's slender ankle. There was less blood than might have been expected, but what there was plenty of was a viscous, dark green liquid that was stuck to the puncture marks. Kuon could not stop himself from moaning when he saw it.

“She's been poisoned by the ashinaga,” said Aqua.

Kuon shouted at 'her' almost on reflex.

“Medicine... Don't you have an antidote!”

“There isn't any antidote that works against ashinaga poison,” Aqua's reply was perfectly calm. “If one of the hunters had been poisoned, we could have given them into the care of the shamans. But even then, they wouldn't be sure to be saved.”

The blood instantly drained from Kuon's face.

Sarah's eyes were closed as she gasped weakly for breath, and her earlier, reckless energy seemed almost impossible to believe. It looked like her voice could no longer even make a sound.

“P-Please,” Kuon pleaded in a trembling voice, “please take Sarah... this woman to the shamans. Sarah has nothing to do with my situation. So...”

“We've no reason to help someone who has nothing to do with us,” the man who had brandished a broad sword earlier laughed scornfully. But with a shake of the head, Aqua disagreed.

“Are you insane, Older Brother Koru?”

Aqua and him were not blood siblings, but that way of referring to him was probably because they were warriors from the same household and shared the same family name.

“Even if it costs them their life, a warrior's duty is to drive back those who try to invade the mountain. But this woman was injured by the prey we were chasing. What's wrong with at least giving her to the shamans to take care of?”

“It happened because that woman got in the way of our hunt,” the man called Koru, who seemed about thirty, squared his shoulders and shouted. “This is Kuon, the murderer whose despicable trap killed Datta, even though he'd always looked after him. Since that woman is with him, she's just as guilty. Her being poisoned by an ashinaga is Lord Tei Tahra's will.”

“Brother, that's...”

“Shut up, Aqua. You might be the head of the Holo's daughter, but you're no more than a newcomer to the unit. How dare a woman answer back to her older brother?”

In venting his anger, Koru provoked Aqua to utter fury. The circlets on 'her' arms clanged as 'she' strode up to 'her' 'older brother', 'her' slender face red with rage.

“Older Brother Koru, you've made three mistakes. The first was to act as though you know God's will even though you aren't a priest. The second was to talk as if this woman was a criminal. In these mountains, deciding who is guilty of a crime is the duty of the priestesses, who can hear God's voice. And finally, you treated me – a member of the Holo – like a woman. Not only did you spit on the Holo family, your words also sullied Lord Tei Tahra by misunderstanding his nature,” Aqua declared in a single breath.

The man called Koru went pale and could find nothing to answer. At that point, the man in armour, who appeared to be the leader of the group of hunters, pulled on his reins.

“If we stay here, we'll be attacked by another ashinaga. We'll take the woman to the mountains. As for Kuon, there's no other choice but to leave anything about him to the head priestess,” he declared his decision.

Several of the hunters hurriedly started to dismember the corpse of the armoured spider, while in the meantime, the men from the tribe took possession of Kuon's sword and of the gun that was still in Sarah's hand. Kuon lifted Sarah onto his back before anyone ordered him to do so, and started to climb out of the valley with his former companions.

Sarah was light. He wondered how such a small body could have crossed Allion's mountains without a single word of complaint, or followed him on the journey through the Kesmai Plains.

Just before sunset, they finally arrived at the hut the hunters were using. He laid Sarah down; her breathing was even more ragged than it had been earlier. Seeing her shaking hands, Kuon wanted to wrap them up in his own, but as soon as they arrived at the hut, Aqua tied up his feet, and he was placed far apart from Sarah.

“There should a shaman at the nearby meditation grounds,” said one of the hunters as he left the hut.

“Don't move,” Koru Holo bared his teeth at Kuon, who had been thrown into a corner of the hut. “Just let me see you even try to call in evil spirits. I'll kill the woman right away.”

Kuon didn't say anything in reply. Even if his feet had not been bound, he had never had the slightest intention of moving from where he was.

After what seemed like an eternity, the man who had left the hut returned with a shaman.

The shaman whore long robes, the hem of which had been dyed red, while strings of shells, animal horns or shiny minerals picked up in the mountain jingled and clanged as they hung from his neck down to his chest. His flowing, unkempt hair was partly white. His forehead and eyes were almost entirely hidden by a wide cloth wound around them, and, as though to replace them, a single large eye had been drawn in the centre of that cloth.

Generally speaking, those who conveyed God's voice to the people were all women and priestesses, while the priests, who belonged to the same priesthood, as well as the shaman were all men. Yet it was not as humans that they served by the god's side, as it was said that even though they were human, they all shared a divine protection. Just like the priestesses, they spent their time overseeing the various ceremonies, and, within the many hermitages that were scattered across the mountains, they underwent rigorous rites to ward against the incursion of evil. They also studied medicine and poison.

The shaman who entered the hut was followed by two priestesses. Both were teenage girls, and they had probably been entrusted to the shaman as they were in the middle of their training. They wore long, plain robes, and not a single ornament. Being close in age to Kuon, they were acquaintances of his, but right now, he didn't have time to care about it.

The shaman knelt by Sarah's side and first examined her wounds. He stretched his hand out to the priestesses, and one of the girls produced a bundle of medicinal plants from a leather bag. The shaman covered the wounds with them. 

“Ashinaga poison does not have any specific antidote,” he said to no one in particular, “so there's no choice but to use the poison from a horned snake on it.”

From his words, you might expect that horned snake poison would have a neutralising effect, but in fact, it too was a substance that could snatch a person's life away from the mountain god. When the two poisons mixed inside someone's body, they transformed into a third type of poison, causing the patient to suffer a raging fever, which would last all night. The odds were fifty-fifty that they would survive, and even if they did, they might have to offer as consecration their eyes, tongue or the ability to move any of their limbs. In other words, they might lose their eyesight, speech, or be affected in their arms and legs.

Kuon held his breath and did utter a sound.

“We don't have everything we need here. Let's carry her back to the hermitage,” said the shaman and, with the help of the hunters, he had Sarah carried out from the hut.

Naturally, Kuon could not go with them.

Wandering around the mountains after sundown was extremely dangerous, so they would stay at the hut until the next day.  Kuon lay stretched out, his feet still tied together. He couldn't sleep. Even if he didn't want to think about it, he couldn't help but worry about Sarah. He would feel a lot easier if he just gnawed his way through the rope and ran to the shaman's place, but that would just cause unnecessary antagonism, and they might halt Sarah's medical treatment.

And so, he had no choice but to grit his teeth and wait for time to pass.

“Are you stupid?”

He suddenly noticed that Sarah was looking down at hime from above. Her hair, which was longer than it had been when they had met, tickled the tip of his nose as she spoke.

“Did you think I was going to die? Too bad for you. Fate and God love me. That's completely different from some stray dog.”

''Beeh!'' The image of her sticking out her tongue rapidly receded from before Kuon's eyes. He was going to chase after her, but his legs wouldn't move.

''Right, I was tied up...'' The moment Kuon realised that, he woke up. He must have dozed off at some point, and, of course, that image of Sarah had been no more than an illusion appearing in a dream.

The next morning, the party left the hut.

Although his legs had been untied, Kuon was surrounded front and back by brawny hunters. When he asked about Sarah, the only answer he received was that “there's been no communication from the Master Shaman.”

Currently, he had no choice but to follow them. They continued in silence along a path which was only discernible to the eyes of hunters who were very well used to the mountains.

At every one of the mountain passes, there were watchtowers for guards on lookout. Warriors were stationed there in shifts and every time the party passed by, they called out to them admiringly: “You've brought down some splendid prey!” Yet Koru and the others wore complicated expressions. The dead ashinaga – the dead armoured spider that they were carrying had been killed by Kuon and Sarah. But when the warriors on watch realised that Kuon was among the party, their attention immediately shifted and they started raising a fuss.

“Kuon the fugitive?”

“Yeah, that's Kuon, the guy who got possessed by evil!”

The warriors all made the sign to invoke Tei Tahra's protection. Kuon had survived ceremonial execution despite being possessed by evil spirits and betraying Datta, and all of them viewed him as an ominous existence.

“Tei Tahra, I implore your protection!” 

“No, this is clearly God's will. Lord Tei Tahra's wooden staff has chased down evil!”

The party crossed the summits one after another, as voices rained down incessantly upon them. Just before sunset, they struck a course that detoured to the east of the mountain peaks, and lead Kuon  to a cleft that opened up in a sheer cliff face. 

Kuon felt a chill strong enough to make him his shiver for a moment. 

He remembered. On the other side of that boulder that was shaped like a beast's raised claws was the rocky prison in which criminals were incarcerated. In the past, right after Diu Wei had screamed that “You killed my father!”, Kuon had been locked up within it.

There were ceremonial grounds nearby. Whenever criminals were thrown into the rock of imprisonment, the priestesses performed a divination by fire to determine their guilt.

Entering the cleft meant having to stoop, but although the interior was wide, the ceiling got lower and lower the further you went in. The very deepest part had been fitted with prison bars, and Kuon, whose arms and legs had both been tied up this time, was thrown into it.

He was left there, alone.

This did not mean that his guilt would be determined right then and there, but that for the time being, Kuon's presence would be reported to the village, and that he would remain locked up while waiting for the head of the tribe and the priestesses to reach a decision.

Night fell once more. As he lay where he was, Kuon's body felt heavier than usual. He was exhausted from having walked all day along the steep mountain paths, and, since he had not been given anything to eat at all that day, he was intensely hungry. On top of that, he was lying on bare rock, and the cold, damp surface was gradually leeching away his body heat.

Yet Kuon quickly forgot his overwhelming exhaustion and hunger, as well as his frigidly cold body.

''I came back. I actually came back?''

Because of worrying about Sarah, he hadn't really thought about it the previous night, but he was, undeniably, back in the birthplace that he was supposed to have abandoned. Once he realised that, Kuon felt dizzy. 

In replacement of the physical pain he had felt, a shadow crept up to his mind. It was so icily cold that it made him shiver. The shadow stretched out its clammy hand and stroked him. Kuon shuddered. This was the same stagnant ''sludge'' which had assaulted him just before entering the mountains.

“Ah...” A short, involuntary breath escaped from him.

''Its'' mouth curved into a smile.

''Getting yourself locked up in the same place as before – you really are one stupid bastard, Kuon. What have you been doing and what's been going on for you in between the two? Was it just a dream? Maybe I never actually took a single step out of this prison, and just had a really long dream.''

Right from the very start, what Kuon had done had been stupid.

Needless to say, he had not crossed the Kesmai Plains and returned to the Fangs out of nostalgia for his birthplace. The conversation in the restaurant that he had with Leo Attiel had stuck in his mind. The prince had pestered him into telling stories of the past, then Sarah had explained to him that the prince had wanted to get help from Kuon's old home.

At first, he had though that was just stupid. Was Leo really so cornered that he had to seriously consider something so ridiculous?

Kuon took pride in his own strength. Moreover, he believed that whatever the battle, it would be over once they took the head of the enemy general. The old Kuon would never have gone to the trouble of crossing the Kesmai Plains; instead, he would have ridden directly to Olt Rose to take down the 'enemy general' that was Darren. If Leo was having trouble, then removing the source of that trouble – Darren – would spell Leo's victory.

─ But Kuon had learned a lot at Conscon and after it. He realised that some things were impossible to achieve with nothing more than his own sword.

''We need allies.''

All of a sudden, Kuon hadn't been able to stay still anymore.

''Right, I'll go back to the mountains. Once the priestesses hear Tei Tahra's voice clearly, there's no way I'll be accused of any crime. And then, I can gather willing allies and the prince will be saved.''

Considering Kuon's current situation, that had been some truly misplaced optimism.

But no, even back then, calling it optimism would be wrong, and instead, it was a feeling of needing to hurry.

''Should I go?''

Once that thought had occurred to him, his heart was filled with a such a fierce sense of urgency that it felt strange to think that he could have left the mountain for so long.  As soon as 'should I go' turned into ''I have to go'', he had crossed the Kesmai Plains as though he were chasing after that feeling.

Even so, once the mountains where he was born had been before his eyes, Kuon was struck with a different kind of emotion, albeit one that stemmed from the same root. For Kuon, it was exactly as Sarah had said.

“I'm scared” – And at the same time as he felt that emotion, Kuon could no longer comprehend why he had come back.

This has been mentioned plenty of times already, but he was not a pure-blood from the mountain. Because of that one fact, and just as he had said earlier, even his relatives had looked away from him. Yet Kuon was supposed to have been set free from that conflict. He was supposed to have obtained freedom, and to have escaped from the malice that was about to make him take the blame for a crime; from the guilt of “not being a pure-blood,” and the shackles and loneliness that went with it; and also from his fear.

So why did he come back? What was that sense of urgency that had made him feel that he had to go? Why had been able to make this decision so easily?

Unable to set his emotions free or to understand them, in the end, he had been thrown into the same prison where he had been less than a year ago, and he was as frightened now as he was back then.

''Whywhywhy?''

He trembled in terror. Once he started shaking, he could no longer gain control of himself. 

''Was it just to die? Was it just to go out of my way to be killed?''

“That's exactly right,” a voice answered.

Without Kuon realising it, the stagnant ''sludge'' with its viscous hands had taken on a clear form. He trembled even more violently than before.

Even though he tried not to see that figure, and tried not hear that voice, it was in vain. This was a creature that did not exist outside of Kuon's perception.

The ''sludge'' now had pure white skin. In the darkness of the stony prison, only its eyes were burning a brilliant, bright red as they started intently at Kuon.

It was Gosro. The image of him as he had been after he had lost human intelligence and reasoning, and turned into a beast, hung over Kuon.

“You came back simply to die,” Gosro whispered, his breath carrying a strangely fishy smell. “Hey, boy. Hey, Kuon? I haven't forgotten. What you did with your own hands.”

Gosro stretched a white arm and grasped Kuon's hand. The boy's back arched under pressure from a strength that seemed unbelievable in an elderly man.

“There's no way I could forget. You pierced me through with the sword you were holding. And then you threw me into that burning hot fire. That means you chose to make me into a sacrifice so you could live as part of the mountain. But even so, you ran away?” Gosro's bright red tongue protruded from his mouth as he smiled. “You idiot. Like hell you could escape. Because if you could, why did I die? Why did you jab your sword through my flesh and bones and entrails?”

“Turning someone into a sacrifice means that you've agreed to suffer the same fate one day.”

Another Gosro peered upside down into Kuon's face. But no, it was yet another, lying flat to the ground, who brought his lips close to Kuon's ear.

“You should have realised 'who' I am by now, right? I, who was run through by all those swords and then burned in the flames, I became one with the mountain, the spirits and with Tei Tahra. That's right, Kuon. You didn't come here of your own will. It was me. I called you, Kuon.”

“Isn't it the fate you accepted yourself? The fate of offering your blood and flesh and soul to the mountain.”

“Say, Kuon,” at some point, the Gosro who covered him from the front had turned into Kuon's own figure. His skin was dyed chalk white, and his eyes had turned so red that it looked like tears of blood might start trickling from them at any moment. When the Kuon whose hands and feet were bound opened his eyes wide, swords were piercing the pure white Kuon from every direction. Next, a red dot of light flickered at his feet, which turned within an instant into a raging fire that swallowed his body whole.

“Help me!” Kuon cried. And struggled. He tried his hardest to swing his tied up limbs and shake of the images of Gosro and of himself being engulfed by flames. Yet as he squirmed and floundered, he, who could strike fear into the enemy even as a lone swordsman when he held a weapon, looked exactly like a child struggling to go against an adult who was telling him off. Seeing Kuon in that state, the Gosros burst out laughing. 

“Help me! Help me! Help me!”

Kuon continued to scream as he rolled this way and that. Eventually, his own laughter started to mingle in chorus with that of the Gosros.