Chapter 19: Braiding

The grave field was behind the village, on the slope, and it was eleven paces from the last house.

Doha got four paces into it.

He did not remember going down. What he remembered afterward was the noise, and there was no noise, and he could never explain that to anybody either.

Forty-one at once.

A spear butt coming up at an ankle. A two-handed axe stroke that stopped at the top. A woman shouting a word. Somebody's palm going flat against a chest. A short blade going in low and turning. A long straight thrust with the whole body behind it that had been going on, patiently, without arriving, for six years. A boy — a boy, a boy's arms, somebody very small — trying to get a door closed. An old man's fingers on a lute string that was already broken.

Forty-one dying intentions, layered, all of them enormous, all of them in the wrong bodies, all of them warm.

And every single one of them wanted him to do it.

Doha's knees were in the grass and his hands were flat on the ground and the ground was as warm as a sleeping animal.

Somewhere a very long way off, Chan-i was screaming his name.

"I can't —" Doha heard himself say. "There's forty — there's forty-one, they're all — get me out, get me OUT—"

Girin came into the field at a dead run and picked him up bodily and carried him out of it, and behind them the grass in a wide swathe was the color of old paper and had been for eleven years.

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They sat him against the wall of the last house.

It took a long time. He was aware of Hong Yeohwa crouched in front of him with her hand flat on his sternum, of the child crying somewhere, of Ae-ryeon saying what's wrong with him, what's wrong with him, and of Chan-i's voice going flat and administrative in the way it did when Chan-i was frightened out of his mind.

Eventually the world came back in the correct order.

"Forty-one," Doha said.

"There are forty-one graves," said Chan-i.

"There's forty-one knots." Doha got his head back against the wall. "And there's more than forty-one people down there, because eleven of them have got two."

Ae-ryeon stopped talking.

"Two?" she said.

"They're jars," said Doha.

He explained it badly and twice, and by the end of it Ae-ryeon was sitting on the step of her own house with her hands in her lap.

"He's been putting things in our dead," she said.

"Yes."

"For eleven years."

"Yes."

"He held my mother's hand," said Ae-ryeon.

Nobody said anything.

"She was thirty-one," said Ae-ryeon. "It was a fever. He came four days after and he sat with her in the back room and he held her hand, and he did the washing himself and wouldn't let me help because he said I'd had enough, and he wrapped her and he set the stones and he said the words and he rang the bell twice and I have thought about that bell every day for four years because it was the only thing in that whole month that made me feel like the world had somebody minding it."

She looked up.

"What's in my mother?"

"I don't know," said Doha.

"Yes you do."

"I know what it's doing." Doha put his hands on his knees, because they were shaking and he wanted them somewhere. "Eleventh row, fourth from the left. There's a man in there swinging an axe two-handed. He's about fifty and he's very strong and he's got a lot of practice, and he brings it up and over and it stops at the top, it just stops, and he's been stopping at the top for a long time."

Ae-ryeon put both hands over her mouth.

"That's not the worst thing," said Doha.

"There's a worse thing?"

"They're braiding," said Doha.