Empire of the Ring

Snow covered hills and mountains passed by Youngho as he drove.

Due to the warm air coming out of the heater, all of the windows except the front windshield glass were foggy. Exhausted by the long trip, everyone else had fallen asleep in the warm air. They had stayed a night in Ganja, a city of Azerbaijan and had set off to the South in the morning.

Because everyone wanted to take the hummer, their trip turned into a road trip going to the South from Tbilisi, Georgia. Finding their ways into different cities and popular restaurants using a navigator and searching the internet, they were returning to Baku at a slow pace.

It was getting dark but they were still driving on mountain paths. Youngho tried to find a village nearby to stay rest for a night since it was too dangerous to drive in the dark. After driving for another hour passing through Caucasus Mountain Range, he saw a sign that said ’50 km to Kurdamir.’ 50 kilometers was a distance that could take two hours of driving in the snowy mountainous paths. When he was hesitating, a small town appeared ahead.

At first, they planned to travel along the railroad on a flat road but since it was a long way back, they decided to go across the Caucasus Mountain Range. However, the hilly mountainous roads were too winding that Youngho almost felt nauseous. He did not want to keep going since he did not know how the roads ahead were like. Jongil, who had been asleep snoring, woke up as soon as the car speed was decreased. His senses were keen.

“What is it? Oh, there’s a town. Do you want to switch?”

“No, we’re here. It’s going to be dark soon. Let’s stay for the night in this town.”

Jongil cleared the fogs on the window and said,

“Ha! Look at this town of the Middle Ages. It feels like this whole town is from the past. Look at the horse droppings on the road. I hope nobody comes out to attack us with a lance.”

“Hahaha…”

Youngho’s laughter woke everyone up.

“Oppa, aren’t you tired?”

Fatima worried about Youngho as soon as she woke up. He loved her caring heart.

“Let’s rest here for the night. Jongil said the town looks like one from the Middle Ages. Let’s hope we can find a place to crash.”

“Middle Ages? What does that mean, oppa?”

Woken up by their conversation, Zeynep’s loud question echoed in the car.

Youngho asked a guy in his mid-forty for a hotel. The middle-aged guy looked at him as if he had seen an Asian for the first time. He scanned him from top to bottom, surprised by Youngho’s Azerbaijani.

Youngho also looked at him everywhere. He was not dressed like other people in the modern time. Because he was covered in furs and his hat looked like it was handmade, it seemed that he had gone back to a point in the medieval times.

‘I can’t be time traveling to the medieval times, can I?’ Youngho thought.

The guy in his mid-forty kindly guided Youngho’s company to the hotel saying that they would not find it even if he explained in words. The guy almost ran ahead of them and he followed him by slowly driving behind. After five minutes of running, he stopped and pointed to an antique hotel building.

The hotel facility was old and no better than ones in Korean rural towns but the couple owner was very kind. Because Youngho’s company was their only guest, they made a fuss making beds and lighting the fireplaces in each room. Thankfully, they could use hot water in the bathroom because the water heater was installed.

The hotel was run by the owner family. They did not have a separate dining room for guests. Since they were invited to have supper together, Youngho and his company joined the family at the dinner table. There were lots of foods even though they had to prepare them in a rush. Kindness to visitors was embedded in their lives since not a lot of people visited the town. They looked at them eating the meal as if they were curious. They kindly refilled any foods as soon as the plates got empty.

Throughout the trip, the company had always rented three rooms. Jongil and Karajan, Fatima and Zeynep, and Youngho and Szechenyi shared each room. However, the old hotel, which was not ready to have visitors, only had two rooms available at the moment. So, they had to divide girls and boys to share each room.

Karajan loved it since girls could chat together, and Jongil also liked the idea, saying that he could drink without asking Karajan’s permission. Youngho asked in his mind if it was okay for a newlywed couple to act like this. Meanwhile, Szechenyi, happy to be considered a man like others, went back and forth to the kitchen to serve drinks to Youngho and Jongil.

***

Whenever they went, Youngho and Jongil now always brought security measures because of previous experiences. Although Youngho believed the power of the ring which sensed danger, he took security alarm for this trip. Jongil’s philosophy was that it’s too late to regret after losing something, and Youngho felt the same. Although they would be drinking, they made sure that everything was set up. Since they were in a remote town in the middle of mountains, where they did not know about the security of the town and the villagers, they needed security systems to protect themselves and their family.

It has been quite a while after they fell asleep. Someone must have disturbed the alarm sensor that was set up on the second floor. The small receiver next to Youngho’s bed started to ring. He had already woken up because of the chilliness. The ring had been signaling a near danger that could be life-threatening. Although Jongil was deeply asleep, he did not miss the alarm sound. Both of them sprang up from the bed and took Beretta pistols.

Without turning on the light, they slowly opened the door of their room and carefully paid attention to any sounds. Someone was sneaking down from upstairs. It could not be the owners since they had no reason to walk so stealthily.

Because they made sure locking the girls’ room before they fell asleep, it would be impossible to open the door without a key. Now only Youngho’s room was opened. The intruder came close to the room and Youngho and Jongil went inside. The intruder stood in front of the room to look inside. The intruder was not wearing a mask.

Youngho pulled him in and stroke his Adam’s apple to make him quiet in case he had a company. His expectation was correct because another man was approaching the room too. It was frustrating to Youngho since he went through a battle recently in Shatili, Georgia, and now there was a robber in the hotel.

He took him down with multiple strokes on his vital points. Usually, when striking someone’s Adam’s apple, he would grab his neck as a reflex action, and that was when Youngho stroke the sunken point of the armpits. It was hitting pressure points of the opponent’s body and if striking with strength, the pain was excessive. The consecutive actions were spontaneously happening in a moment, they were a series of actions fast like a flash of lightning.

Not knowing what was going on deep sleep, Szechenyi was snoring. The captured intruders were healthy-looking guys in their thirties. When Youngho and Jongil searched their bodies, they found guns. This got them outrageous. Jongil put on his jacket to take care of them outside.

They took the two intruders outside near a parking lot. After taking pictures of their faces with his smartphone, Youngho asked why they were at the hotel. Although it was an obvious question and the answer would be obvious too, this did not seem like a normal robbery. Youngho thought that if someone would be robbing travelers in this small town, the whole town would be accomplice overlooking his robbery. Youngho and Jongil did not feel good about this.

Youngho stroke the intruders’ vital points to get words out of their mouths since they were resistant. After feeling extreme pains to the bone, they confessed.

They said that the guns were just to intimidate people. They had been robbing travelers from outside but they always left money for them to get to a nearby city. They had been robbing innocent travelers for a long time. When Youngho asked if the owners of the hotel were their accomplices, they denied it. He was not sure if they were speaking the truth.

The town did not even have a police office, which was strange. Even if the whole town had been turning a blind eye when the town people robbed travelers, they could have gone to other big cities and reported the robbery. It would have been easy to find who the robber was in this small town but according to the intruders, they were still robbing people.

A small bus transported people to the town once a day but there were not a lot of travelers who visited this old town.

‘Something’s going on in this town.’

Thinking that, Youngho looked at Jongil. He nodded as if he had thought the same. Usually, travelers came to town by the small bus but Youngho’s company had driven their own car to the town. The town’s people must not have been ready to receive visitors when they arrived.

Youngho pointed to the hotel in the middle of talking, and Jongil sprinted to the hotel thinking about the family left alone. A thought popped in Youngho’s head. He hoped that he was imagining too much. The reason that he thought the town was strange was because of the ring’s signal of danger.

Youngho had heard about a story of Azerbaijan’s minority groups in remote mountainous areas from Baku’s officials. The small tribes of mountains did not have many people to keep their tribes going. Because it was difficult for them to find people to get married, they abducted travelers in order to keep their tribes’ bloodline. If they needed men, they abducted men to receive their seeds and sometimes killed them to keep the secret. If they needed women, they raped travelers and forcefully married them for babies. It was gruesome to think about. It was hard to guess what these unenlightened people, isolated in remote mountains, would do in order to keep their tribe.