Chapter 20: He Already Knows What You Are

"Explain that," said Chan-i, in the voice.

"When I was in the field, I couldn't tell them apart at the edges." Doha shut his eyes and made himself go back to it, which was the single least appealing thing he had ever done voluntarily. "They're all separate in the middle. But at the edges — where the field's warm — they're starting to run into each other. The axe and the spear and the — there's a place near the back where three of them are doing one thing now. Not three things. One thing, with three sets of arms."

Chan-i had gone the color of the wall.

"What does that mean?" said Hong Yeohwa. "What does that do?"

"I don't know," said Doha. "Nobody knows. Chan-i, does anybody know?"

"There's four lines about it in the second grey ledger," said Chan-i. He had to try twice to say it. "Four lines and they're four hundred years old and they're about the western basin, and Grandmother Ok has never once let anybody past them. It's called plaiting. That's the whole word we've got. Two knots in one place will sit next to each other for centuries and do nothing. Above eleven or twelve, in the same ground, in the warm—"

He stopped.

"Forty-one," said Doha.

"They put forty-one in one field," said Chan-i, and laughed, once, awfully. "Eleven paces from a house with a child in it."

They cleared the village that night.

It took until the fourth watch and it was the ugliest work Doha had ever been part of, because there was nothing to point at. Nothing was on fire. Nothing was coming. He had to stand in a threshing yard at midnight and tell two hundred and eleven people who had a mended roof each and three oxen between nine households that they were going to walk to Sohari before dawn and might not come back, on the word of a seventeen-year-old in grey who had fallen over in a field that afternoon.

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Forty of them refused.

Ae-ryeon walked from house to house until she had it down to eleven, and then she stood in the door of the last one and said something to a man in a low voice for about two minutes, and he came out with a bundle on his back and did not look at anybody.

"What did you say to him?" Doha asked.

"I told him his wife's in the sixth row and she's got somebody else's death in her," said Ae-ryeon, "and that I'd been ringing a bell in my own head for four years about my mother, and that he could either walk to Sohari with me tonight or find out in the spring what forty-one of them do when they finish braiding."

She hitched the child higher on her hip.

"I liked him," she said. "The rite-brother. I want that written down somewhere, because I'm going to spend the rest of my life pretending I didn't."

Doha found Chan-i at the shrine at the bottom of the track, sitting on the step with his elbows on his knees.

"Say it," said Doha.

"Five."

"I know."

"One a month. You swore it on a ledger line, in front of the Hallmistress, nine days ago." Chan-i did not raise his voice. "The girl at Hwabon. The bandit. The schoolmaster. That's three in five days, on top of two in eleven, which is five, which is your allowance until the spring."

"I know what five is."

"Then say the rest of it."

Doha sat down on the step beside him.

"There's forty-one in that field," he said.

"Yes."

"And there's a man coming Thursday who put them there."

"Yes."

"And when he gets here, one way or another, there'll be a knot in this village that I've heard," said Doha, "and I have never in my life managed to walk away from one of those, and I'm not going to start on Thursday."

Chan-i put his face in his hands.

"She told me you'd do this," he said. "On the morning we left. She said: he cannot leave a thing unfinished, and the first intelligent person who notices it will use it on him, and he will be able to see it being used and it will make no difference at all."

"She's right."

"I know she's right." Chan-i lifted his head. "That's not the part that keeps me up. The part that keeps me up is that everybody who's ever met you for four days works it out. It took Elder Mo one ditch. It took that girl one shed roof. How long do you think it took a man who spent nineteen years in our Hall reading corpses for a living?"

The shrine lamp guttered.

"Doha," said Chan-i, "he already knows. Whatever's coming Thursday, he's known what you are for longer than you have."