The Wandering God

10 If You Beat the Snake Without Killing It Endless Evils Will Ensue

打蛇不死，後患無窮
dǎshébùsǐ, hòuhuànwúqióng
If you beat a snake and it doesn't die, afterwards you'll have trouble without end.
Eradicate a problem before it grows out of hand.
*~*~*~*~*~*

After I left the three men and the landslide behind, I strolled through the forest humming like an idiot. It felt good to be on my own again, setting my own pace without Kageyama's disgruntled snarking about pedestrians slowing them down.

I whistled and swung my arms as I walked. The town was only a couple of hours away, and I knew I would easily beat the men there. Perhaps I could take Zakhar's purse and find a bath house, clean up, then have a pre-dinner snack.... the possibilities were endless when you had coin to spend.

Around midday, I stopped for a nap, stretching out langrously on the mossy bank beside the road. I plucked a large leaf from a nearby plant and hung it over my face to block the light from my eyes.

I was just starting to drift off when I heard a soft whirring sound and felt something sting the side of my leg. I sat up, surprised. Normally, the thick linen of my clothes protected me from insects.

Something on my right thigh glinted in the sun. It was a long needle, spider web thin, sticking through the fabric of my pants and into my skin.

I blinked, hesitated, too long- SHIT! I ripped the needle out of my leg and threw it away from me, but the sedative tipping it had already entered my blood. I felt my mind and body numbing. Unwillingly, I collapsed backward onto the moss as if drunk, the world swimming around me in a mosaic of green leaves and sunlight.

Shadowy figures appeared above me, and I couldn't focus on them no matter how hard I tried. Rough hands hoisted me up and I was thrown over someone's shoulder like a sack. I stared mutely down at the forest floor and the back of someone's thick, hairy legs.

Time seemed to fast forward and then slow down, over and over, and I couldn't understand anything, who was holding me, where I was going, what direction and how far. I heard sounds around me, human voices, but through the haze of the drugs everyone sounded underwater, and I couldn't understand any of what was being said.

Suddenly darkness fell, but it wasn't night. A circle of bright forest stood off to my right, and I realized I was in a cave. The person carrying me threw me to the rocky floor. Numb as I was, my body rolled and flopped like Sangmi's dolls.

I heard a sharp bark of sound around me, which my numb brain slowly translated to laughter.

Then blackness.

*~*~*~*~*~*

I drifted in and out of consciousness, for how long, I wasn't sure. When I woke, night had fallen outside, and there were two men in the cave watching me.

Bandits. Real ones, this time.

One of them, a terrible looking brute with long wild hair to his waist and a single gnarled tooth in his lower jaw, was holding a torch close to my face. Too close. I could feel my eyebrows singeing, and realized it was the pain that had woken me up.

He leered nastily when he saw I was awake. "What a pretty thing. Ya think we'll get to play with her?"

"The snake man told us not to touch her until he got back," the second man said. Where his partner was all bony limbs and hair, the second man was smooth and round, like a giant baby. A foul smell, like soured milk, rose from him, and I suspected it came from the unwashed folds of his body.

Disgusting.

My hands were tied behind my back, my legs just below the ankles. Whoever had done it had experience with knots, because they only tightened when I tried to slip a hand out. No escaping without some sort of sharp edge. I glanced around the narrow cave, but it was empty except for the bandits and stones too smooth to be used for cutting. Perhaps if I could get the bandits to leave the torch behind an-