Chapter 18: Someone Taught Him

Sixth seam, and it went in somewhere Doha could not locate precisely, which he learned later was what happened when one arrived that did not want anything for itself.

They did not charge the school.

"Eighty taels," said Girin, on the cart, that evening.

"Put it in the margin," said Doha.

The fourth thing requiring the Hall's attention in Sohari county was four li north, up a track that left the river road at a shrine, and they found it on the fifth day because Hong Yeohwa went looking for the millrace where her brother had been found and came back at a dead run with her sword still tied.

"There's a village," she said. "Up past the shrine. Sesan."

"And?"

"There's forty-one graves in the field behind it," said Hong Yeohwa, "and I put my hand on the ground in the middle of them and it's warm, and there's not one person in that village over the age of thirty, and when I asked a woman where her people were buried she said—"

She stopped, and got her breath.

"She said, they rang the bell twice for all of them, so it's all right."

Sesan was the nicest village Doha had ever been in.

That was the first thing wrong with it, and it took him most of an afternoon to work out why he had noticed. Villages of that size were usually two things at once: a place where people lived, and a slow argument about a well. Sesan had a new well, a mended roof on every house, three oxen for nine households, and a threshing floor that had been re-laid within the year.

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And nobody in it was old.

"Forty-two households," said Ae-ryeon. "Two hundred and eleven people. I've been headwoman four years."

She was twenty-six. She had a small child on her hip and a ledger under her arm and the brisk unbothered competence of a woman who had been handed something too big at twenty-two and had simply done it.

"Who was headman before you?"

"Old Pak. He passed."

"How old was he?"

Ae-ryeon thought about it.

"Thirty-eight," she said, "and don't look like that, rite-keeper, I know what you're thinking, and it's the water. It was always the water here. My grandmother used to say Sesan buries young." She shifted the child. "It's better now. It's been better for years."

"How many years?"

"Eleven," said Ae-ryeon.

The chapel was at the top of the village, past the threshing floor, and it was the only building in Sesan built of stone.

It was small — one room, a step, a door that stood open. There was a swept floor and a low table and a stand, and on the stand there was a bell.

Not a large bell. A hand bell, bronze, about the size of a rice bowl, with a plain wooden handle worn dark at the grip.

Chan-i stopped in the doorway and did not go in.

"Who rings it?" said Doha.

"The rite-brother," said Ae-ryeon, and her face did something warm and uncomplicated that Doha would remember for the rest of his life. "He comes at the turn of every season. He's due Thursday. You'll like him, he's very good with the children — he taught my Su-a her characters last spring and she's better at them than I am now, which I don't care for."

"He's a rite-keeper?"

"Of course. Same as you." She frowned slightly. "Isn't he?"

Nobody answered her.

"He does the whole thing," said Ae-ryeon, a little less certainly. "The washing and the wrapping and the stones. He says the words. You are not lost, I know where you are. And then at the end he rings it twice, and that's how you know they're settled. One ring for a death and two for a—"

"For a knot untied," said Chan-i. "Yes. That's the form."

"So he is one of yours."

"Someone taught him," said Chan-i.