Chapter 17: Three Graves

Hwabon was a farming hamlet of nine houses, an hour up the river road.

The girl was eleven years old and she had been dead for eight days and she was in the back room of her mother's house under a blanket, and every forty seconds or so her right hand closed.

Doha stood at the foot of the bed for five seconds.

"She's holding a rope," he said.

The mother made a noise.

"There's a rope," said Doha. "She's got it in her right hand and she's pulling down on it, hand over hand, and she can't get the second hand up because there's something in it. She's holding something in her left arm and pulling a rope with her right and she never gets to the top."

"The well," said the mother.

Everyone looked at her.

"The bucket rope in the yard," the woman said. Her voice had gone strange and slow. "She fell — she was reaching over for the — she had the cat. She had the cat under her arm, she was always carrying that animal about, and she went over into the well and she had it under her arm the whole way down and the boy found her holding onto the rope."

She stopped.

"She didn't drown," she said. "The water's not four feet. She hit her head. Somebody told me she wouldn't have known anything about it and I have been holding onto that for eight days."

"She knew about it," said Doha.

Hong Yeohwa's hand closed hard on the doorframe.

"She knew about it for about a minute and a half," said Doha, "and she spent the whole of it climbing, and she never once let go of the cat."

It took him two hours, because a rope-climb one-handed with a weight under the other arm was not a martial technique and had no gi in it anywhere and was therefore, in the strict sense, one of the hardest things he had ever had to do correctly. There was no form to fall into. There was only a specific desperate hand-over-hand rhythm belonging to an eleven-year-old with wet fingers, and it had to be right, and getting it right meant doing it exactly as badly as she had.

They rigged the rope from the roofbeam. Chan-i held the counterweight. Girin stood behind Doha with both hands out in case he came off it.

He climbed it four times wrong and the fifth time it went all the way to the top.

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The knot untied with a sound like a held breath let go, and the girl's hand opened, and stayed open.

Fourth seam.

It went in under the sternum on the left and it was small and bright and it had almost nothing in it, and what it had was this: nearly there, nearly, don't drop him, nearly—

Doha sat down on the floor of a farmhouse in Hwabon with his back against the wall and cried for about ninety seconds, which was the first time he had done that in front of anyone since he was nine years old, and Girin stood in front of him the entire time with his enormous back to the room.

The second one was a bandit.

He was in a ditch off the pass road with four months on him and nobody had claimed him, and the county man's file said unknown, male, adult, and the local view was that the ground could keep him.

The ground did not want him. The ground had gone pale for nine paces.

"He's throwing a knife," said Doha, "left-handed, underarm, at somebody about nine feet away, and he's got it wrong — he's turning his hips before the arm and the knife's going to go left. He's been getting it wrong his whole life. He was still getting it wrong."

"How long to learn it?" said Chan-i.

"An hour. It's a bad technique. It's not even a technique, it's a bad habit somebody kept."

"And you'll carry it for fifty years."

"Yes."

Chan-i was quiet for a moment.

"Do it," he said.

Fifth seam. It went in high on the right and what was in it was so small and so mean and so tired that Doha had to sit for a while afterward: a man of about forty in a ditch in the rain, four months ago, whose last full thought was that he was going to get it right this time and show them.

Nobody ever found out who he was.

Doha carved the stone himself. The Hall's form for an unknown was three characters and a date, and he did those, and then he stood there with the chisel for a while and added a fourth line that was not in the form.

He was still trying.

"That's not regulation," said Chan-i.

"No."

"Elder Mo will have something to say."

"Elder Mo can't hold a chisel," said Doha, and then heard it, and shut his mouth, and Chan-i laughed out loud for the first time in nine days, once, horrified at himself.

The third one was a teacher.

He was eighty-one and he had died in his chair in a room with forty years of students' names written on the wall, and the local school had sent to Sohari's county office three times, and the county office had explained three times that a Hall rite for a man with no sect and no martial rank was eighty taels and the school had eleven.

He had been dead nine weeks. The well in that street had gone bad in the sixth.

Doha stood in the room for the nine seconds.

Then he stood in it for eleven more.

"What is it?" said Chan-i.

"It's writing," said Doha.

He crouched by the chair.

"He's writing a character," he said. "Just one. He's got the brush and he's — his hand's not — " Doha's own right hand came up and made a shape in the air, slowly, and stopped in the middle of it. "He can't get the third stroke. He's eighty-one and his hand's gone and he can't make the third stroke of a character he's written ten thousand times, and he's trying it again. And again."

He looked up.

"That's it," he said. "That's the whole thing. That's what a man dies in the middle of."

"Which character?"

Doha told him.

Chan-i went very still, and then he went out of the room and stood in the street for a minute.

It was the character a schoolmaster in that province wrote at the top of a boy's first page, on the first morning, before anything else. It meant begin.