Chapter 8: The First Chivalrous Deed
It happened on a market day, as the last autumn was deepening.
The rain that had fallen all night had only just stopped, so the mountain paths were damp and a thin water-mist hung in every valley, and Pung and A-yeong tucked the list of goods Hyeonheo had written for them into their robes and set out for the market at the foot of the mountain. Buying grain and lamp oil was the errand on the surface, but the minds of both were fixed entirely on the note that had come out of the captured masked man’s robes.
The shop written on the note stood at the western entrance of the market, a place that had rented an old warehouse and was said to be gathering porters.
“Do not strike first. Only take it in with your eyes.”
A-yeong mimicked Hyeonheo’s words, crooking a finger.
“Understand?”
“I understand.”
“When you say it with a face like that, I don’t much believe you.”
“What sort of face did I make?”
“The face of a man who’d grab the first suspicious fellow he sees by the collar.”
Pung could not answer, and A-yeong snorted a laugh and walked on ahead, the wet leaves rustling under every step. They had promised the day before not to carelessly stand in the way of each other’s choices, but that did not mean the danger had gone, and so, until they reached the market, Pung looked again and again between A-yeong’s stride and the ridgelines around them.
As they came near the market, the smell of boiling taffy and the smell of pancakes frying in oil came mingled on the wind. The shouts of the traders and the voices of haggling, the crying of animals, all grew clearer by degrees, and to look at it, it was no different from any other market day.
Only when they turned into the western street did the air change.
The peddlers behind their spread-out stalls kept stealing glances toward one side, and the customers lowered their voices whenever they passed that way. At the end of the street was a shop with black cloth hung from its eaves. The signboard bore no letters at all, but in the middle of the cloth was painted a black wolf baring its teeth.
Pung slowed his steps.
The moment he saw the emblem the silver ring tugged quietly at his finger, and an unfamiliar force spread in a prickling numbness as far as his wrist. When he opened the eye that saw the meridians, the traces of tangled energy around the shop surfaced faintly, and that light was a murky ink-black, like the residue of the watcher who had left a poison needle behind and fled north.
“That’s the place, isn’t it?”
A-yeong asked with her lips alone.
Pung gave a small nod.
In front of the shop stood a wooden board announcing that porters were being hired. Some twenty sturdy men were lined up, and most of them had worn clothes and gaunt faces, farmers or herb-gatherers who had come looking for work, unable to bear the lean year any longer. Two men in black head-cloths felt the applicants’ arms and shoulders and asked their ages, and handed a small wooden tally to any who looked usable.
That tally, too, was carved with a black wolf.
Pung went cold inside. Seokgu had said that men in black clothes wrote the names of sturdy people on wooden tallies, and the men before his eyes were gathering people with talk of transport work that paid well.
“What is it we carry?”
A middle-aged man near the front of the line asked.
The man in the black head-cloth gripped his forearm and laughed.
“Salt and medicinal herbs, up to the mine in the north. Suffer five days and it’s two nyang of silver.”
“You’d give two nyang for five days?”
“Room and board provided. If you mean to feed your family, don’t ask useless questions, just give your name.”
The middle-aged man hesitated a moment, but on hearing the wage again he took the wooden tally. Pung could not go so far as to smell what came off the tally, but when he examined its energy he found a faint purple stain on the surface. Too weak to be called poison and too murky to be called medicinal scent, it might have been the kind that clouds the mind if held for long.
A-yeong watched the line as well and curled a fist beneath her sleeve, and when Pung turned his eyes to her she bit her lip and shook her head, meaning that she would not step forward yet.
The two took seats at the soup house across the way. Pung sat near the door and watched the shop inside and out, while A-yeong pretended to eat her soup as she memorized the number of applicants and their features. When a sijin had passed, seventeen had received wooden tallies.
Seventeen.
The same number as the marks they had found on the tree in the valley.
After the last applicant went into the shop, the men in black head-cloths shut the door. Pung tried to reckon even the presences beyond the wall, but the meridians of many people tangled together and he could not divide the flows exactly, and when he forced his eyes harder his temples throbbed. In the end he let out a long breath and withdrew the ability, and A-yeong pushed a cup of water toward him.
“What’s the matter?”
“I was trying to see how many are inside. They overlap too much; I cannot see it clearly.”
“You strained yourself yesterday too, and here you are doing it again.”
A-yeong did not draw her hand back until Pung had taken the cup, and after a mouthful of water he glanced back at the shop and lowered his voice.
“Seventeen men received tallies.”
A-yeong’s fingers stopped on the tabletop.
“The marks we saw on the mountain were seventeen too.”
“It does not seem to be a coincidence.”
The two decided to find more evidence to carry back to Hyeonheo. It would have been enough to confirm the carts behind the shop and the hour of departure, but before they could even rise from their seats a wild scream burst out from beyond the street.
Crash!
With the sound of splintering wood, several bolts of cloth rolled into the mud. As the market people hurriedly cleared the way, five or six rough-looking men closed in around an old man’s stall, and on their sleeves and belts, too, the black wolf emblem was stamped.
“So the old fool still hasn’t come to his senses.”
The biggest of them stamped his foot on the toppled stall.
“Didn’t I tell you that to do business in Black Wolf Gang territory you pay the stall fee?”
“My lord, this month is truly hard for me. If you would grant me only until the next market day, I will surely…”
“Grace, is it?”
The man picked up a bolt of silk and flung it into the mud.
“Then I’ll take payment in goods. I might as well take the whole stall.”
When the old man clutched at the hem of the man’s trousers, the one beside him raised a foot, moving to kick that bent back.
Pung threw his chopsticks without time even to think.
Crack!
The flying chopsticks struck the back of the man’s knee exactly. The strength went out of his leg, he staggered and landed on his backside, and every gaze in the street gathered at once on Pung; A-yeong, too, slowly turned her head.
“He told you not to strike first.”
“That foot moved first.”
“That isn’t what I…”
A-yeong swallowed a sigh, then rose from her seat and stood at Pung’s side.
“Never mind. We’re seen already, so let’s see it through to the end.”
The Black Wolf men crowded over, and the big one looked Pung up and down and sneered.
“What country bumpkin is this, meddling in Black Wolf Gang business?”
Pung stepped in front of the old man and said,
“He tells you his circumstances are hard. Let it go for today.”
“For today?”
The corner of the man’s mouth twisted crooked.
“The pup can’t take a hint. In this place, we are the law.”
At his signal two underlings rushed in. One drove in a fist and the other pulled a short cudgel from his waist, but to Pung’s eyes the road their energy would travel was plain from the instant they set down their feet. Their training was shallow, their footing unsteady, and their movements led by nothing but force.
Pung slid half a step to the side and let the fist slip off his palm. The punch, turned from its course, planted itself in the jaw of the man with the cudgel, and the cudgel, swung after it, struck instead the crown of his companion’s head. The two of them clutched at each other and tumbled without ever knowing what had happened.
The market went quiet.
The sneer vanished from the big man’s face.
“So he’s a fellow who has learned martial arts. All of you, strike!”
Three men drew their weapons and the blades flashed in the sunlight. As the onlookers screamed and drew back, Pung read the killing intent they carried clearly with his fingertips.
He must not let his body be the first to move.
Pung pressed his inner energy down beneath his dantian and bored forward. He flicked with a fingertip at the spine of the first blade thrust at him and the point shot up into the air, and at once he pressed the pressure point at the flank that had been left open. Before the man could swallow his breath and crumple, a cudgel came flying from behind, but Pung lowered his body to avoid it and then pushed lightly at the joint of the wrist.
Crunch.
It was not the sound of a bone breaking. The man’s fingers loosened of their own accord and the cudgel dropped to the ground, and when Pung kicked it with his toe it struck the third man’s instep exactly. The instant that one lost his balance and pitched forward, A-yeong struck his shoulder with her palm and pinned him down into the mud.
“Don’t look behind you. I’ll take it.”
Pung nodded.
Blades and cudgels came down on him again from every side, but once he had read the flow they were no threat at all.
Pung moved aslant between the blades, touching nothing but pressure points and joints. Each time, one more weapon fell to the ground.
A little later the whole Black Wolf band was slumped on the ground, the strength gone from their arms and legs.
Not a single drop of blood had been spilled.
The people of the street watched Pung with even their breathing stilled, and though his body had long since gone quiet, a fine trembling remained in his fingertips. Had he harbored the least killing intent, there was no knowing what force his body might have burst out with, and so Pung understood anew why Hyeonheo had warned him so gravely.
Only the big man backed away, his face ashen.
“Y-you, what sect are you from?”
“I have no sect worth putting forward.”
As Pung came closer the man hid his hand behind his back. Seeing his meridians rush abruptly into his right arm, Pung instantly snatched the wrist and twisted, and a slender poison needle fell from inside the sleeve.
The dark blue sheen beading at the needle’s tip was the same as the one drawn out of Seokgu’s body the day before.
Pung’s eyes hardened.
“Where did you get this poison needle?”
“Wh-what are you talking about? I know nothing!”
“You are lying.”
When Pung put more strength into his hand the man’s knees buckled, and he clenched his teeth to hold back a scream, but his eyes went, despite himself, toward the shop in the west. The place where the porters had been gathered.
A-yeong followed that gaze.
“Pung!”
At the same moment as her shout, the cry of a horse burst out behind the shop. Two carts flying black wolf banners were trying to slip out of the alley, and inside the carts, covered with canvas, the presences of seventeen people lay tangled together. The hems of the applicants who had been standing in line until a little while ago showed briefly through the gaps.
As Pung turned, the big man seized him by the ankle.
“You think I’ll let you go! The Black Wolf Gang is joined to the Heterodox Alliance. Do you think you’ll be safe after laying hands on us?”
Pung shook the caught leg lightly and threw the man off.
“Say that later, to Elder Hyeonheo.”
He kicked off from the ground.
Before the carts reached the mouth of the market, Pung’s body swept over the rooftops. The man driving cracked his whip, but when Pung flicked his fingers in midair the tip of the whip broke away, and while the driver raised his head in surprise he dropped down in front of the cart and took hold of the yoke with both hands.
The two galloping horses braced their forelegs and screamed. The wheels dug deep into the mud, and the wooden frame of the cart creaked as though it would break apart at any moment.
Even so, Pung was not pushed back a single step.
“Stop.”
The driver’s face turned white.
A-yeong, who had come up behind, leapt onto the second cart and threw back the canvas, and inside, the people who had received wooden tallies lay collapsed against one another, their eyes closed but their chests still rising and falling. A-yeong put a finger beneath their noses to check the breath, then parted their eyelids to examine the pupils, and finding a black censer giving off smoke in the corner of the cart, she threw it outside.
“They’re all alive! There’s a drug mixed into the incense!”
The censer shattered where it fell and thin purple smoke scattered, the same force Pung had seen on the wooden tallies.
The two drivers tried to run, but the market people blocked the way. Until a moment before, these had been folk who lowered their eyes to avoid the Black Wolf Gang, yet the cloth seller stood in the road gripping a broken stall leg like a staff, and the owner of the soup house clenched their teeth with a great ladle raised.
Pung felt something go hot inside his chest as he watched, and he had not settled everything himself. He had only made a gap in which people pressed down by fear could lift their heads again.
A-yeong jumped down from the cart and hooked the leg of one of the fleeing drivers, and when the man, face-down in the mud, thrust a hand into his robes, she at once wrenched the arm back, pinned it behind him, and gripped his jaw.
“Open your mouth!”
The man clenched his teeth and tried to bite down on something, but when A-yeong pressed hard on the pressure point beneath his jaw, a single black pill rolled out between his lips. Just like the masked man taken the day before, he had been hiding a poison pill for suicide.
“This again.”
A-yeong wrapped the pill in a scrap of cloth and tucked it away, then pressed the man’s pressure points to stop his movement, and went on to search the carts and the drivers herself, and found a bundle of papers hidden inside the front of a robe and spread it open.
“Pung, it’s a list.”
On it were written the names, ages, and home villages of the seventeen porters who had received wooden tallies. On the back of the paper was pasted a map marking the northern road, and at its end, in place of a destination, only the black wolf emblem was stamped, with a faint red seal beneath it, hard to make out.
“With this much, even Hyeonheo can’t say we only stood and watched, can he?”
A-yeong folded the list and the map into her robes, looking at Pung’s fingers.
“Is that power all right?”
Pung rubbed the golden ring with his thumb.
“This time I held it back first.”
“This time?”
“I do not know whether I can do it the next time.”
A-yeong closed her mouth for a moment, then wrapped the broken censer and the poison needle tightly in cloth for him.
“Then don’t do it alone next time either. While you’re holding that power down, I’ll watch your back.”
Pung took the cloth bundle and nodded.
“Yes.”
When the commotion had settled the cloth seller came over, and the old man wiped his muddy hands on his clothes again and again before taking Pung’s hand.
“Thank you, young knight-errant. You have saved not only me but all those people as well, and how I am to repay this kindness…”
Knight-errant.
At the title, one he had never heard before, Pung’s shoulders stiffened. Neither when he climbed up and down the mountain digging herbs, nor when he wrestled with the ring deep beneath the earth, had he imagined a day when he would be called by such a name. It was strange and embarrassing, but the warmth carried through the old man’s trembling hands was not something he wished to push away.
“I only did what was to be expected.”
When Pung raised the old man to his feet the people around them came up one by one, and someone bowed and said thank you, while another raised a voice to say they would testify when the Black Wolf Gang came again. A-yeong was gathering up the scattered bolts of cloth, and when her eyes met Pung’s the corner of her mouth lifted slightly.
“What is it?”
“It’s nothing.”
“You just smiled.”
“It’s only… that today you seemed a little like a knight-errant.”
A-yeong did not wait for an answer but gathered the cloth into her arms and carried it to the old man, and only the red of her earlobes was visible even from a distance.
The two returned to the house on the mountaintop as the sun was sinking. Hyeonheo was sitting on the wooden floor waiting, and he examined in turn the list and the map A-yeong had brought, then the poison needle, the poison pill, and the pieces of the broken censer. His hand stopped for a moment when he unfolded the map stamped with the black wolf emblem, but he smoothed the paper out flat as though nothing had happened.
“I told you not to strike first.”
A-yeong quietly pointed at Pung.
“Pung threw his chopsticks first.”
“They were about to kick an old man.”
“I saw that too. If he hadn’t thrown them, I would have kicked.”
Hyeonheo looked from one of them to the other and let out a low breath.
“You did well to save the weak. That you saved the people who were to be carried off is well done also. Only, there were far too many eyes in the market today.”
“I am sorry.”
As Pung bowed his head, Hyeonheo lifted his gaze from the map and looked at him.
“There is no need to apologize for having acted with chivalry. It is enough that you do not forget what you used your strength for. But in the martial world, even a right choice carries its price.”
Hyeonheo held the poison needle up to the lamplight. His eyes narrowed as he confirmed the dark blue sheen at its tip, and after he had examined the poison pill set beside it as well, the lines at the corners of his mouth deepened further.
“If the Black Wolf Gang were mere market ruffians, they would use no such poison, nor would they try to take their own lives the moment they were caught. They even put forward the name of the Heterodox Alliance, so the tail you two trod on today runs back to a beast longer than you think.”
Pung looked down at his two hands on his knees, and it would be a lie to say he was not afraid. He himself could stand and fight, but the old man of the market and the porters could not, and he felt for the first time that the matter does not end at the moment one uses one’s strength; from that moment a new responsibility begins.
Hyeonheo looked at Pung’s face for a while, then gathered up the map and the list.
“Still, you did well, Danpung.”
It was a short word, but Pung raised his head.
“Had your hand been late today, seventeen people would have vanished without a trace. And had A-yeong not searched the carts and secured the evidence, it would have been hard to learn where they meant to send them.”
Only then did Pung let out the breath he had been holding stiff. The joy of having used his own strength in the right place for the first time was quieter here than in the market, but in its place something firmer remained in his chest. Strength did not achieve its purpose by being possessed alone; where to set his foot and before whom to stop, and whose back to stand against, he had to choose for himself.
That night Pung sat at the edge of the wooden floor and looked at the northern sky. The silver ring trembled faintly under the blue moonlight, and the black wolf tally in his hand still seemed to point north.
The road looked long and hard. But the Pung of that day could go forward on the strength of one thing alone: that for the first time, his power could protect someone.
And three days later, a letter stamped with the seal of the Martial Alliance arrived at the mountaintop.
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