Chương 101: “Sir Ozy (2)”

From the first breath he took, everything was painful. The air felt like it burned though the ground was cold and wet beneath him. He did not know what he was or where he was. He only knew that every part of his body hurt and that the sounds around him were too loud to make sense of. He was left there. In the dirty streets, among the refuse and the gutter water, because his body and face were wrong. The ones who had brought him into the world simply abandoned him.

He would have died that day if not for a boy who found him. The boy was small, smaller than the other towering beings that moved through the streets around them. His face was marked with scars and his body was thin enough that his ribs showed through his skin. He had nothing and no one. But he stopped for the creature in the gutter. He picked it up with both hands and carried it to the place where he slept, which was a gap between two walls with a piece of cloth stretched over the top.

He set it down on the cloth and sat beside it, giving the strange-looking creature milk from the coins he had scrounged up by begging. The creature grew quickly, as beasts do. Within months, it had a body that could move on its own; stubby legs that could carry it, a small jaw that could at least bite. However, the mind grew faster than its body. It could observe and remember, and it could connect what it saw today to what it had seen the day before.

Where other beasts sharpened teeth and claw, this one sharpened thought. It began to understand the towering beings around it. They were enormous. They moved on two legs and spoke in sounds that carried meaning, and they built things that kept the cold out. From below, looking up at them, they seemed like gods. Beings of impossible height and power who shaped the world with their hands. The boy was one of them. He was its god.

What the creature could not understand was why the other gods would beat its god until he stopped moving. It happened at the same time each day. The boy would go to a certain street to look for food, and the larger ones would find him there. They were always larger. They would hit him with their hands or with whatever they picked up off the ground, and they would not stop until they were bored or tired. The boy would fall and curl into himself, arms over his head, and wait for it to end.

The creature watched from the dark, it did this every time. It pressed its body into a gap and watched through the crack, eyes wide, breathing shallow. It did not understand what the boy had done to deserve this. What was their crime? The boy's and its own? To want to live? To exist? The creature looked down at its stubby paws, then at the boy on the ground, being kicked by beings just like him. Yes. Existence itself was the offense. They had been born with wrong faces, and even that was a sin considered by many.

But what did it mean to exist in a place that punished you for it? The creature did not yet know. It was too young to know. Its body was round and its paws were too short to run properly. The creature watched its god get beaten again. The larger ones had him on the ground. One of them had a foot on his back. The boy's face was pressed into the wet mud and his arms were over his head. Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

The creature felt like he was going to lose his god, so its legs moved. It scrambled out from the gap and ran at the nearest pair of ankles on its stubby legs. Its jaw clamped down on the skin as hard as it could manage. Skin barely broke under its teeth as the taste of blood filled its mouth, hot and metallic, and it held on.

"Ow! What's this mutt doing here?" A boot caught it in the ribs and sent it rolling across the wet ground. It came to a stop against the base of the wall, its side aching, the breath knocked out of its lungs.

"Hah! A mutt?" One of the larger ones bent down to look at it. He turned to the boy on the ground and back to the creature, and laughed.

"Look at its face. It looks just like our Jun here." The rest of them laughed at those words. And true to its powerlessness, it was easily picked up. One of the larger ones grabbed it by the scruff of its neck and held it at arm's length. Its legs dangled.

"Why don't we give it a bath?"

"No! Don't!" Its god screamed from the ground. The boy was on his back, one arm reaching out, his voice cracking. Blood was running from his nose and his eyes were wet. The creature did not understand why he sounded so afraid. A bath was a good thing. The boy gave it baths sometimes, cool water poured over its body, the boy's hands careful and slow on its fur. It liked baths, and it liked the boy's hands even more. As they carried it away, the creature looked back over the hand gripping its neck.

Its god was trying to stand. One of the larger ones struck him across the face, and he went down again and did not move. Good. This way, they would leave him alone for the rest of the night. He would not be beaten anymore. The creature thought that as the streets grew darker and the buildings grew sparse around them. It did not struggle. There was no point. The hand on its neck was larger than its entire head, and its legs could not reach anything to kick against.

It hung there, watching the town shrink behind it, watching the last of the familiar walls and gutters disappear. They brought it to a place far from the town, and there was a sound the creature had not heard before—a low, constant rushing, like the wind but heavier. The air smelled different here, clean and cold. The hand holding its neck pulled back. And before it knew it, the creature was in the air. Then it was in the water.

The world turned over; there was no up and no down, only the cold and the rush of current dragging it sideways. Its paws flailed. Each stroke barely moved it, but the water pushed it further in the wrong direction. It opened its mouth and water rushed in instead of air. It coughed as more water entered. Its lungs burned worse than the breaths it had normally taken. It flailed harder. The surface broke above it for a moment, reaching the light air, and it gasped once before the current pulled it under again.

Its legs were starting to slow, and its paws were too short to fight the water properly. Something scraped against the creature's side, a rock or the riverbed itself. It could not tell. The cold had made everything feel the same. Its paws kept moving, even slower now, the strokes weaker each time. Was this it? There was no word in its mind for what was happening. But the feeling was there, the understanding that its body was stopping, and that once it stopped, it would no longer move again.

In the last dregs of its fading awareness, it thought of its god. It hoped the boy would eat tonight. It hoped he would find somewhere dry to sleep and that, without the creature around to protect, the boy might have one less reason to get beaten. If the boy was safe tonight, then the creature's existence had meant something, even if it had been brief and small. The current carried it further, and everything went dark. *"Amitabha. Elder, look at this creature I found at the riverbank."

The young monk held the creature in both arms, cradled against his chest. It was small, flat-snouted and round-bodied, with stubby legs that hung limp. Water dripped from its fur onto the stone path. Its breathing was faint, each inhale a thin rasp that barely moved its chest. Its eyes were closed and its body was cold to the touch. The elder approached and knelt. He was old, his head shaved smooth, his robes worn at the hem. He placed one hand over the creature's body and held it there.

Something passed from his palm into the animal. A warmth that circulated into the creature's body. The elder kept his hand there for a long moment. The creature's breathing steadied but did not deepen. It clung to the same thin rasp it had been making when the young monk pulled it from the riverbank. The elder withdrew his hand. His brow was drawn.

"Amitabha." He looked at the young monk.

"All life is sacred. Bring it to the medicine pavilion and tell Elder Jie to save it."