Chapter 24: Post The Road

The Green Reed Pavilion did not want to quarantine Sesan.

They explained this at length, in a receiving room with very good screens, to a delegation consisting of two rite-keepers in stained grey, an ox-driver, and Hong Yeohwa of the Snowlight Pavilion, who sat with her hands on her knees and let them get all the way to the end.

"So you understand our position," said the elder. He was about sixty and had a beautiful voice. "The Pavilion holds the escort contracts for this county and has for sixty-one years. If we post men on a road and tell nine hundred people in Sohari that there is something in Sesan's ground, we are announcing that our county is unsafe. The contracts go to Weonju by summer."

"Yes," said Hong Yeohwa.

"You do understand."

"Completely," she said. "You'd rather have a story about forty-one graves in the spring than a story about a quarantine in the autumn, because the spring is further away."

The elder's beautiful voice acquired an edge.

"That is not—"

"Elder Pyo, I'm nineteen and I've been awake for two days, so I'm going to be rude, and then we can both pretend I wasn't." Hong Yeohwa's back had not touched the chair once. "My brother was killed on your road. Your county man wrote bandits nineteen days ago, and your Pavilion accepted it in an afternoon, and I don't believe for a moment that anybody here thought it was bandits. I think somebody looked at a wound that went in the wrong direction and thought about the contracts."

Nobody in the room said anything.

"Here are your two stories," she said. "The first is: the Green Reed Pavilion found something in the ground at Sesan and closed the road and called the Hall, at their own cost, and there was no loss of life. You'd have that one told about you for forty years and it would be worth more than the contracts."

"And the second?"

"The second is the one I tell," said Hong Yeohwa. "In Weonju, at the spring assembly, in front of eleven sects, standing up, with a rite-keeper of the Hall of the Ninth Rite beside me. And it begins: my brother was killed in Sohari county and the Green Reed Pavilion knew, and wrote bandits, because a story is worse than a war."

The elder looked at her for a long moment.

"Your father," he said, "is a very quiet man."

Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.

"My father lost a son nineteen days ago and hasn't come out of his room," said Hong Yeohwa. "I'm what's left. Post the road."

They posted the road that night.

Doha, watching four Green Reed students hammer in the first stake at the shrine, said, "I've never seen anyone do that before."

"Do what?"

"Fight without a sword."

Hong Yeohwa gave him a look of profound weariness.

"That was a sect elder in a room," she said. "I've been training for that since I was six. What you do to a corpse in a shed is lunacy, and I could no more do it than fly, and if we're going to keep travelling together you're going to have to stop being astonished that other people are also good at something."

"Sorry."

"Also, thank you," she said, in exactly the same tone, and walked off before he could answer.

They buried Yeo Chunsam on the slope above the threshing floor, outside the field, at the ninth hour.

The washing took a long time because of the back of his head.

There was no Cut, because there was nothing left to cut: whatever had been in him had gone into Doha at a range of no distance whatsoever before the blood had finished moving. He was, for the first time in the Hall's four hundred years of records, a martial artist who died in the middle of something and left an empty body.

Doha set the stones himself.

"I don't know how to do this one," he said.

Nobody helped him. Chan-i stood at the foot of the grave with his hands inside his sleeves and let him have it, which was, Doha understood, a kind of promotion.

"Yeo Chunsam," he said. "Ninth Bell. Twenty-three years old. He killed a man on the north road nine days ago with a needle, after walking with him for nine days, and lifted a hundred and sixty years of somebody else's work out of him and put it in a jar."

The wind came up off the river.

"He taught a girl her characters last spring," said Doha. "The first thing he asked me today was whether they were safe. He asked about Su-a by name. Then he told me why he'd killed a man and he asked me to state it correctly, and then when he'd lost he put the back of his own head into a stone in half a second because he'd worked out four days ago what he'd do if he was ever taken, and he used me to do it, because he knew what I am and he was right."

Doha's voice did something.

"He was twenty-three," he said. "He was six years in. He was taught by somebody who told him it was holy, and he believed it all the way to the end, and I don't think there was ever a day when anybody told him the truth about what he was standing in."

He set the last stone.

"You are not lost," said Doha. "I know where you are."

Then he stood there for a while.

"That was the hardest thing I've done since I got here," he said, to nobody in particular.

"You did it right," said Chan-i.

The rider came at dawn.

He was a Hall boy — Twenty-Three, fifteen years old, who had ridden the mule sixty li in a day and a half and could barely stand — and he had a letter in a grey wrapper with the Hallmistress's mark on it, and he had one other thing, which he said out loud before he handed anything over, because he had been told to.

"The Hallmistress says: don't read it in front of the client."

"The client's paid for the cart," said Hong Yeohwa, "and I'm standing right here."

Doha read it in front of her.

It was four lines.

Come home. Bring the bell and the boy's body both.

Do not open the field at Sesan. Not one grave. Not to look.

There is a thing in the ossuary here that I should have burned eleven years ago and did not, and I find I would like to tell you why while I still know.

Ok Sanhwa.