Chapter 9: The Place Left Behind

Chapter 9: The Place Left Behind

It was a late autumn morning, the third day after their first work together had ended.

On the porch Pung was drawing tight the knots of his travel bundle. The rain that had fallen through the night had stopped, and heavy drops hung and fell from the ends of the eaves, while a thin mist rose over the wet mountain path. By rights he should have started down the mountain before sunrise, but the way was slick, and so the departure had been put off.

Just then hurried footsteps came up from the foot of the mountain, a stride that slipped and staggered again and again and still did not stop.

“Someone is coming.”

A-yeong stood up the broom she had been sweeping the yard with, and Hyeonheo set down his teacup. A moment later a man in gray martial robes appeared at the mouth of the yard. Breathing hard, he dropped to one knee and held out the badge of the Martial Alliance’s Hall of Enforcement together with a letter sealed with red wax.

“Elder Songjin said this must be placed in Master Hyeonheo’s own hands.”

Hyeonheo checked the badge, then broke the seal. The paper that had been shaking in the wind drew taut between his two hands, and his eyes, running down the lines, came to the last one and stayed there a long while.

“What is it?”

Hyeonheo handed over the letter without a word. A-yeong skimmed it quickly, and though ordinarily she would have been the first to demand answers, she pressed her lips shut and turned to look at Pung.

“The man they sent to Nohachon has disappeared.”

Pung’s hand stopped on top of the bundle.

Those three syllables, Nohachon, touched something deep in his chest. The low stone walls, the crooked guardian posts, the voice of Granny Donggu calling him while she rapped on the lid of a crock all rose at once, and after them came Hwang-u, big as an ox, sprawling in the dirt as he fled from a single chicken. But the fond memories lost their light at once beneath those words: a person has disappeared.

The messenger steadied his damp breathing and spoke.

“It was not a formal investigation party. When the Alliance put off its decision for fear of a clash on the frontier, Elder Songjin sent a disciple he trusted on ahead. The messenger hawks stopped three days ago, and they say his baggage and his blade were still in the room where he had been staying. There was no sign of a struggle, no mark of anyone dragged off by force.”

Hyeonheo asked without folding the letter.

“What was written in the last message?”

“He said the missing may not have been taken out of the village at all. He got as far as saying there is a road inside Nohachon, but the rest was torn away and could not be read.”

There is a road inside Nohachon.

The moment he heard it, the forefinger of Pung’s right hand turned cold. The silver ring, quiet until then, trembled faintly and pushed a chill in under his skin. At the sensation of his finger being drawn toward the north, Pung closed his hand around the ring, but the trembling did not stop.

“Thirteen are confirmed missing. Most are herb gatherers and porters, and among them are two hunters and one physician’s assistant. Part of the report has vanished inside the Alliance, and the proposal to send an investigation party has been blocked twice. The clerk who submitted it the second time was soon transferred to another department.”

At one side of the porch lay the wooden tally with the black wolf mark, taken at the market. The men who had lured people with the promise of wages, drugged them senseless with medicinal incense, and meant to send them north; the herb gatherers and porters who had vanished from Nohachon; the missing report. In Pung’s mind they linked into one dim road. Who was reaching, and how far, he could not tell, but at the least this was not something happening only on the mountain paths of the frontier.

“Does the Alliance take it for the Demonic Cult’s doing?”

The messenger hesitated a moment, then answered.

“Because Nohachon borders the Demonic Cult’s territory, that is the possibility spoken of most. Only, the official report has not yet declared it.”

“Possibility is not enough.”

Hyeonheo’s voice was low and firm.

“If they were certain it was the Demonic Cult’s doing, there would be no reason to destroy reports and block an investigation besides. Either the Cult’s hand has reached inside the Alliance, or there is someone else who means to hide behind that name. Either way, one must not move on the strength of a seal alone.”

Just as the name of the orthodox sects guarantees nothing about being right, the name of the Demonic Cult could not explain away every crime. The Black Wolf Gang men at the market had put the Heterodox Alliance in their mouths, but there was no proof that they had actually taken such an order. Watching the rainwater fall from the edge of the porch, Pung turned over Hyeonheo’s teaching: follow the traces left before your eyes rather than the names you know.

“How did Songjin know we would go to Nohachon?”

“He said he guessed it when the matter at the market was reported to him. If you were chasing the black wolf mark, he said, you would end up heading there in the end. He also bade me tell you this: do not trust the Martial Alliance’s seal, but examine first the man who carries it.”

A bitter look touched the corner of Hyeonheo’s mouth.

“So the old man has learned to read people at last.”

Hyeonheo said they would go down the mountain at once. He also wrote a short reply: send no more messenger hawks, and if there is need to make contact, leave a mark under the third pillar of the abandoned mountain god shrine south of Baegunryeong. Setting down the brush, he looked the messenger straight in the face.

“Tell him not to use paper stamped with the Alliance’s seal.”

“I will keep it in mind.”

When the messenger had gone, Hyeonheo laid a finger on the map he had spread open. There were two main roads leading to Nohachon, but whichever one they took, they would have to pass the frontier outpost.

“We go in not as investigators but as people going to sell herbs. Pung will pass as an herb gatherer, A-yeong as a guard, and I will look like an old guide. Hide the badge and the martial robes. Inside the village, keep within a distance where you can feel each other’s presence, but do not let on first what you know. The eye that reads the meridians and the power of the ring, keep those hidden too, unless it is time to save a life.”

Pung pressed down the urge to run straight for Nohachon. There might be a name he knew among the vanished, and he wanted to know at once whether Granny Donggu and Hwang-u were safe. But if someone could erase even the Alliance’s reports, there was every chance they were watching the road he was coming by.

“I will look and listen first.”

“And if strength is needed?”

Pung recalled the moment he had seized the yoke of the runaway cart. Harder than the overflowing strength was the judgment that stopped it, and because he had not tried to settle it alone, seventeen people had been saved without injury.

“I will use only as much as saving a life requires. Even if my body moves first, I will not carry it alone.”

“Remember that last part, especially.”

A-yeong said it like driving in a nail, and Pung nodded.

“Yes.”

When the branch warriors, who had been sent word ahead, reached the mountaintop, Hyeonheo handed over the prisoner from the charcoal hut and the sealed evidence. Having set aside a rubbing of the black wolf mark, he wrote down the names and badge numbers of those taking custody, every one of them, and when someone said he was being excessively meticulous, he set down the brush and answered evenly.

“In a place where reports disappear, it is not people who protect the records. It is the records that protect people.”

When the horse carrying the prisoner had vanished down the mountain path, the three of them hurried their preparations to leave. Pung too tied the cover of his bundle tight, but before going out into the yard he stopped behind the woodshed. He lifted away a flat stone and scraped off the earth soaked by the night’s rain, and about two finger joints down, the lid of a small jar showed itself.

Inside were his mother’s worn hairpin and a few coins.

Pung picked up the hairpin. Earth had lodged between the patterns, rubbed faint with use, and the cold metal slowly took in the warmth of his palm. His mother’s face had blurred with the years, but the hem of her clothes steeped in the smell of herbs, and the feel of her hand stroking his head, remained. Even in the time when he had lost day and night themselves deep under the ground, holding this hairpin he had been able to remember why he must return to the sunlight.

“You’re taking it?”

A-yeong came over and crouched beside him.

“Yes. This much, at least.”

“And the coins?”

Pung rolled the old coins on his palm. It was money he had put together little by little selling herbs after he came to stay at Hyeonheo’s house, of no great use for anything, but to him it was a thing worn smooth by three years’ handling at the mountaintop.

“I will leave them.”

“You could use them on the road.”

“I want to leave something of mine in the place I will come back to. Then it feels certain I will come for it.”

Pung wrapped the hairpin in cloth, tucked it into his robes, and buried the jar again. In this house, which he had reached at the end of five years of darkness, he had recovered warm rice and the warmth of people, and had learned how to stop his overflowing strength and how to share it. A few coins were not a thing to stand in place of that time. They were a small mark that he himself had decided where he would return.

A-yeong pressed the soil down with him, then scattered dry leaves over it, and when Pung set the round flat stone back in its place, she tamped it with her palm out to the edges and hid the trace.

“If you hide it too well, won’t we fail to find it?”

“When you come back, I’ll find it for you.”

“And if you forget first, A-yeong?”

“That’s why you have to remember too. Don’t go trying to come back alone.”

Pung looked at A-yeong’s dirt-covered fingertips and laughed a little.

“Yes. We’ll come back together and dig it up.”

When he returned to the yard, Hyeonheo was fastening a lock on the door handle, and the old staff leaned against the wall. Standing before the closed door, his back looked a little heavier than usual. To Pung he seemed less like an old man leaving his house empty than like someone going back to the world of rivers and lakes he had left long ago.

“Master, why did you leave the Martial Alliance?”

Hyeonheo gave the lock a tug and turned to look at Pung.

“That’s what you’re curious about now?”

“If reports disappeared inside the Alliance and an investigation was blocked, was there something like this before?”

The wind pushed the dry leaves under the eaves and piled them beside the stone basin. Hyeonheo watched the leaves for a while, then spoke.

“A place that hangs out the name of righteousness does not always make the right choice. There are those who throw away people to keep a name, and those who cover up what is wrong while claiming to protect people.”

That was all, and Pung asked nothing more. Only, he felt that behind the short answer lay a long-aged wound, and the reason Hyeonheo had left the Martial Alliance and the reason he was taking to the road again on receiving Songjin’s letter did not seem to be far apart.

A-yeong took down the small wind chime under the eaves and tied it to her bundle, and when the clear sound that had rung whenever the wind came and went was gone, the house was already as quiet as an empty place.

“Are you taking that as well?”

“It’s lonely, ringing by itself in an empty house.”

“Does a wind chime know loneliness?”

“If it doesn’t, you can be lonely for it instead.”

A-yeong said it lightly, and still checked the knot twice so the chime would not be damaged. Pung too shouldered the pack of herbs, then took into his eyes, one after another, the shut door, the chimney without smoke, the stone basin where he had drawn water every morning. The wish to stay longer caught him by the ankles, but in Nohachon, even now, someone might be next to disappear.

“Let’s go.”

Hyeonheo stepped out first onto the wet mountain path.

Pung pressed the hairpin in his robes once, then followed, and A-yeong slung on the bundle with the chime and came up beside him. One edge of the roof showed itself briefly between the trees, then vanished from sight as they rounded the mountainside, and in that moment the chime rang softly at A-yeong’s back. The clear trailing note mixed with the footsteps of the three of them and followed them for a while.

Pung did not look back. So long as the promise to return, together with the buried coins, remained, leaving was not the same as abandoning. He watched the wet roots and stones underfoot and kept pace with Hyeonheo’s stride.

When they came below the ridge, the road split toward the market in the south and the frontier in the north. Hyeonheo pointed out the northern road with the tip of his staff, and A-yeong re-tied the knot of her bundle and stepped onto it without a word. Pung drew a deep breath as well. The people of Nohachon, the vanished investigator, and the unknown road said to lie inside the village were all beyond the bending ridgeline.

The three of them took the northern fork.

When they had gone a few steps, the silver ring began to tremble, clearer and more insistent than before. The cold vibration spread from his finger to his wrist, and at first it ran against Pung’s pulse, but by degrees it narrowed the interval until at last the two folded into a single beat.

And in that very moment, from somewhere in the north, a faint answer came back in the same beat.