Chapter Text
CHAPTER XXV
"Isn't it lovely, all alone?
Heart made of glass, my mind of stone
Tear me to pieces, skin to bone
Hello, welcome home"
(Bilie Eilish ft. Khalid, american artists, Lovely)
a. Gaïa
In 1768, just one year after the first resurrection of the gwishins, Kang Si-U had to abandon his small farm located less than six kilometers away from Hanyang for fear of losing his life.
It was the end of summer, and the government was crumbling bit by bit, torn by political contradictions which had not been seen since the destruction of Samjeondo by Crown Prince Sa-Do and the promise of a part of the ministers loyal to the domination of the Qing Empire to have his head. Si-U had followed the development of the affair from afar, for there were things you could hardly focus on when your days consisted of nearly seventeen hours of uninterrupted work, and the stories of royal families were definitely on the list.
In truth, he had paid only moderate attention to these issues: his attention was elsewhere, to his harvests and to his income, which enabled him to feed himself and his own family. His own son had just turned eleven, and it would never have occurred to him to contradict his father and endanger the entire dynasty and country simply out of a spirit of rebellion.
For his part, Si-U hardly saw how life as a foreign province attached to China could be unpleasant. The farm was the farm, taxes were always too high, the poor remained poor and the rich became richer and richer. In a sense, life was going on as usual, and the prospect of a war against the power of the Qing as a result of the Crown Prince's separatist gesture had caused considerable turmoil among the common people, though of a different nature than among the higher classes.
The problems were different. It was late in the afternoon, Si-U was finishing ploughing the ground with his pitchfork for his next planting, and he always tended to let his mind wander during this type of repetitive task, which was done with his son, who had to take over the field after his father's death. The eldest had died. He had been recruited by the army to take part in the extermination of the gwishins and had been killed by one of them, who was starving, during an attempt to capture him a few kilometers away.
As a result, the inheritance went to the second son, and Si-U was planting his mourning in the ground.
It wasn't a large plantation like the ones that existed in the countryside, where space was less crowded and opportunities for expansion more numerous, but Si-U knew that his property was among the most respectable, and he was committed to providing quality food, disregarding certain modern techniques adopted massively by many farmers to increase both production and yield, but at the same time losing excellence because vegetables and fruits received less attention. Si-U had spent enough time in the fields to know that only time and application counted to get the best out of the soil.
His back was sore, but he received many compliments about the beauty and taste of his products. His reputation had earned him entrances to the court at receptions, and it was also his dedication that led one of the capital's most successful merchants to take an interest in his crops in order to finance them and offer him a partnership. Recently, he has been producing ginseng at her request. His income had doubled and they had been able to move from the old house they had occupied with his wife and their three children to a more opulent home near the fields, which the merchant had highly recommended.
The former owners are friends, she had said, but they are moving closer to the city for family reasons, and I would be happy if one of our partners could take over a house that is very dear to all of us in order to protect themselves.
It was a very pretty house, located in the heights, with a view of the mountains and the city below, and a small inner courtyard. It was larger than what Si-U and his family had been accustomed to, but the price was reasonable because of its distance from the capital, and the merchant had guaranteed an honest arrangement with the former owners.
Si-U had met them only once, for a visit of the house. It was a couple whose age ranged from forty for the woman to fifty for the man, with a mischievous little girl who had challenged Yeong-Chol, the eldest son of Si-U, in a fight with a wooden sword when she weighed about the equivalent of a carrot. They had been very kind to him, and Si-U had felt them particularly moved at the thought of selling their house, which was obviously an old acquisition that had passed through several generations. The woman in particular had tears in her eyes. Sometimes he had seen her stop in front of a room and look inside for a long time, as if she saw something that the two men would have been unable to perceive. He remembered being uncomfortable with these peaceful waiting reactions, especially since the gwishins were a new and threatening thing.
There had been large crowd movements at the time of the first resurrection. People were practically dying of fear in the villages, near the cemeteries and the teeth of the gwishins, who were said to be sharp and wild. Nobody wanted to hear any more about their need for landmarks or to find their loved ones alive as a result of the hostility shown to them by King Yeongjo. Several waves of gatherings towards the large cities had taken place, causing a neglect of the countryside and massive desertification that had cost the lives of several small villages of about fifty inhabitants at most.
Nothing that had been underneath had survived.
People felt that it was better to be together to fight such a collective threat, and the authorities had been supportive, at least in words, since in reality no financial aid or urban expansion plans had been proposed. They had been left in their misery, and if they decided to leave, everything was at their own cost, despite the fact that the government was calling for the centralization of the population and claimed to be unable to send enough troops to help all the small towns in the kingdom.
At the time of the first resurrection, Si-U had seen the gwishins so closely he had almost been devoured by one of them (the teeth), without the miraculous intervention of one of his young neighbors, who had seized the scythe he was using for his harvest and had struck the dead with all his strength, tearing off part of his head in the process. After that, the idea of getting closer to Hanyang had been in everyone's mind. A small makeshift militia was formed to defend the inhabitants, composed mainly of middle-aged men from the village who knew how to handle a kitchen knife at the very least, and several women.
They had taken the weapons at their disposal. One of the older villagers, who had served in the army, had donated his swords and remaining weapons, believing that he had no further use for them at his age.
Many other villages had followed the same strategy, but it wasn't sustainable in the long term, and everyone knew it. You couldn't fight forever against something that couldn't die, except under specific conditions, but back then, the Encyclopedia of the Dead was still in its budding stage, and the method of extermination of the gwishins was relatively unknown.
It was done randomly, striking where it was possible to strike, knowing that most of the body of a dead was strictly insensitive to pain and that the blows only served to slow them down, if not to do anything else more effective. Rumors of decapitation nevertheless circulated fairly quickly along the roads and to the farthest corners of Joseon, but cremation was rarely mentioned then, and more than once it happened that the bodies rose up after only a few hours, considerably stunned and totally clumsy, but still moving, and capable of doing damage.
Moreover, they would start looking for their heads, and their heads always saw, without exception.
One night, Si-U and one of the inhabitants had locked one of them in a cauldron to prevent it from helping his body to recover it. The receptacle had vibrated and growled for hours, until the two men had decided to throw it into the fire, and it had then uttered a heart-rending, atrocious cry which had pierced their ears. The next day, Si-U began searching for a way to reach the capital and get closer to the armies.
It was paradoxically difficult to blame the overworked, exhausted and mostly inexperienced soldiers, for the intense recruitment that had taken place following the appearance of the gwishins had essentially brought back boys eager for battle and full of illusions, and peasants who had never held anything in their hands other than a sickle and a basket for the crops. People's complaints alternated between the alleged incompetence of the army, especially towards the most isolated villages, and the general mismanagement of the government, which was clearly overwhelmed by events taking place both outside the palace walls and inside.
The norons were said to be enraged, the sorons bewildered, and the king, torn apart by both sides, half delirious with fear and anger. Gossip about the fate of his returned ancestors in the form of gwishins had travelled miles to the south coast, and potentially across the borders. One of his neighbors had told Si-U that he had once seen a good-looking man passing by, wearing funeral clothes, whose description bore a striking resemblance to the one of former King Seongjong.
The problem was that half of the neighbors claimed the same. Si-U had played along as well. It was too difficult and too awful not to want to cheat once in a while.
After moving into their new home, the fear had diminished and Si-U had become accustomed to the specialized patrols that circled the area looking for gwishins to capture. Sometimes he remembered the very first moments of the resurrection, when he had seen his mother appear on his doorstep, haggard and mute, her eyes full of horror and shock.
He had almost fainted from fright, but then his wife had come to join him, and when he had heard her ask him, "Husband, who is it?", he had understood that the figure in front of him was real, that he wasn't dreaming, that he wasn't having a nightmare either, and then the terror had become stronger, more incisive, for it was his mother, and he had never been afraid of his mother until now.
She was dead, and standing on his doorstep, and her smile was full of (teeth).
When the repressive measures had been announced, Si-U had gone to fetch the axe he used to cut the wood he needed in winter, and decapitated his mother while she was sitting idly on their little outside table, staring into nothingness. He had seen her with that look many times, and had been terrorized by it. He had aimed wrong. He was forced to hit three other times before his mother's head came off, and he was sure he had cried at some point. He still had difficulty to fully explain his reaction, and knew only too well it had been motivated by fear and the sneaky idea he had been dreaming all along, and that nothing was real, not even his mother.
When he did it, his wife and their children were out shopping. He had buried the body and the head, cleaned the blood from the wood and the ground, and waited for his family to come home to tell them that the problem was definitely solved. He could have sworn he had seen a gleam of panic in his wife's eyes when she had realized what he was referring to.
He hadn't been the only one to kill a family member who had come back to life, and had seen signs of a similar trance among some of his neighbors, acquaintances, and clients. At night, he sometimes thought about it, and then he couldn't quite bring himself to call it murder, because of the very nature of the thing he had eliminated. His great-grandfather, who had also reappeared, had suffered the same fate than Si-U's mother earlier, since he had announced his presence while his wife and children were out in the fields. It didn't matter if the gwishins looked like the living, spoke like the living, thought or even felt anything.
There was too much surreal and incomprehensible and almost immoral in them to fully accept their existence and allow them to share in the existence of the living. But the kingdom remained particularly divided on the subject, to extremely varying degrees, and the disparities were all the more apparent among the common people than among the nobility and the middle classes. Farmers, peasants, merchants of small modest shops, slaves, and itinerant theater troupes were fiercely fighting over the fate of the dead and their legitimacy. No one had the same opinion as his neighbor.
As a result, riots were abundant, and Si-U, without being absolutely certain, suspected that several of his acquaintances had hidden or were hiding gwishins, or were helping them by providing them with resources without the knowledge of the brigades.
In addition, the Yeogogoedam continued to make noise, and it was reported that they recruited people from all kinds of backgrounds to house gwishins, protect them and help them escape from the military.
In small towns, it was also the atmosphere of suspicion that ended up leading to desertion, and the isolation of their new home was all the more appreciated by Si-U as it freed them from the sideways glances and hushed up conversations which were beginning to settle in their native village. He was happy to come back after his day in the fields, and that time could have been no exception if he hadn't been troubled in his thoughts by the vision of an unknown figure in front of the doors of their small inner courtyard, leaning against the frame, and visibly waiting for something or someone.
Si-U was suspicious instinctively: for some time now, there had been some talk about the integration of the gwishins into the living population, and a second volume of the Encyclopedia of the Dead was said to contain all the information about physical changes experienced by the dead and likely to favour their concealment among the living. He approached cautiously, leading his horse at pace, but keeping the reins tight in his fist.
The man carried no weapons. He was dressed in rags, and, once closer, Si-U noted that he had a face with unusual features, a little flattened, with eyes very deep in their sockets.
He has the face of a warrior, he couldn't help noticing, but he also observed that the man was standing slumped, and that his gaze was unfocused, almost dazed, taking away all the poise he might otherwise have possessed. Si-U thought that he also looked like a lunatic.
"Can I help you?" Si-U asked, his hand ready to draw the short sword that he had ended up recovering from the former soldier of the village.
The man threw on him an unbalanced and disoriented eye.
"You are...are you Huk Sa-Mo?" He said then, and he had a very hoarse voice, as if he had been sick for a long time.
"No," Si-U answered. "He was the former owner of this house. Now I am."
"Where is he now?"
"Where is who?"
"Sa-Mo."
"Gone to live in Hanyang."
The man said nothing for a moment. He seemed to be digesting the information.
"Gwang-Taek?" He suggested next, but Si-U shook his head again.
"Never heard of," he said. "Can I help you or not? If not, I'll ask you to leave, and without making a fuss. I'm armed."
He pointed to his sword.
The man emitted a snigger.
"I was a soldier before," he taught him in a disdainful tone. "We all were. But Sa Goeng is dead, and anyway, it was useless to be a soldier. All paper soldiers. Do you have anything to drink? I'm thirsty."
"Just water. I don't give liquor to strangers. Times are hard."
"Well, times are always hard. I was a soldier. I know that well. No water for me. Not the kind of drink I need. You're a paper soldier, too."
He grumbled something else, which Si-U didn't hear. His patience was starting to wear thin.
"I'm going to ask you to leave, sir," he announced. "Paper soldier or not, I can still kill you."
The man made an evasive gesture, irritated.
"All right, all right," he grunted. "I'm leaving. I was a soldier, you know? All that fuss for nothing."
He turned around and disappeared, without saying more, without even giving Si-U his name.
The gray bandana he wore tied around his head was the last image the latter kept of him (all tin soldiers).
b. Odyssey
Woon had traced a route heading north to China during the days leading up to his departure from the Spring House.
The established itinerary carefully criss-crossed the countryside and wooded areas, carefully avoiding the cities but nevertheless staying close by as a precautionary measure, before reaching the Joseon border and by extension the delimitation of the Qing Empire, at least from a strictly geographical point of view. In fact, the kingdom remained as much under the Chinese control as it had been ten years earlier, when Woon had died, and although the Crown Prince (Jeongjo) had planned to develop the national resources and achieve a more obvious independence, following in a much more subtle and politically acceptable way the footsteps of his father, the mark of the Qing could still be seen everywhere.
Whenever the entertainment house had received scholars, politicians, or military men, the anecdotes Hui Seon told him in their daily discussions would irrevocably mention Chinese philosophy, Chinese fashion, Chinese martial arts, trade with China, and so on and on in almost every topic and area. Heuksa Chorong had been more Chinese than patriotic, and even though Chun had tried to give it back a fragment of belonging to Joseon, the guild had always devoted its loyalty to the Qing and the emperor. It was pointless to look very far to realize it. A simple construction history was enough to reveal its true allegiance.
Woon had built a path to the north that included a number of central and smaller stages, which he could skip without too many regrets. During his meeting with old Jae-Ji, who had been informed of his departure at the time, the latter had strongly advised him, if he was able to, to return and visit places or people who had been involved in his living existence and had helped to influence its course.
The gwishins belong to the past, she had told him, and therefore we must all, as far as possible, return to it, explore it, and keep it close to us.
Not all the dead to whom she had given such advice had necessarily agreed. For some, the resurrection was above all an opportunity to reinvent themselves and wipe out the past, but for Jae-Ji, it was strictly impossible to try to forget or minimize the events of a life.
You can't redo your life, she had explained with a reproving tone, you continue it by changing parameters, that's all, but the essence always remains the same, and no one can escape the past for very long.
The old woman hadn't talk again about his role of "why" in the whole gwishin scheme. She hadn't assigned him any specific mission, while Hui Seon and other gwishins she had spoken to were working openly according to directives she had given them several years earlier, without specifying their contents. She had merely given him a list of exercises, particularly concerning the collective consciousness, which she considered unavoidable for every gwishin, and which dead gisaengs as well as Hui Seon followed with absolute diligence, as if it had been a royal order.
And there were the stages. In truth, Woon had established a route to the north, but he had also sketched out another route to the south, towards Japan, as well as to the west, which could also be a possibility to reach the Qing Empire by boat after landing in Shandong Province and near the northern capital, Beijing. He had also outlined a path to the east and the Sea of Japan, and considered the idea of crossing over to set foot on the remotest lands of the Qing, and continuing eastward along the coasts to areas that were said to belong to other countries, where winters were unimaginably cold and people spoke a different language.
Some expeditions conducted by Heuksa Chorong in its early years of activity had passed close to the limits of the Manchu territory, and had reported the existence of places almost entirely cut off from the world, where only the sound of footsteps on the ground and the cries of wild animals indicated the existence of a living presence. As a younger boy, Woon had dreamed he was walking through a vast and teeming land, surrounded by high mountains, similar in many ways to Joseon's and yet absolutely unknown, and that it suddenly turned into a snow tide and the rivers froze so hard and fast that fish were trapped and eventually died of asphyxiation below the water's surface.
He had only told the old Jae-Ji about this exploration project at the request of Hui Seon, who had claimed she didn't wanted to know any details of his trip.
Jae-Ji, on the other hand, had been curious, but she hadn't asked any questions about his destination or the precise location of the various places he intended to visit in connection with his living existence. She had actually shown a polite and somewhat distracted interest in his project until he had mentioned the possibility of going beyond China's borders. Woon had revealed certain information to her that he couldn't have predicted would escape him at the time he pronounced them (she always manages to make you talk, even when you don't want to, Hui Seon had told him, it's something that happens with her, I don't know how she does that, but I've told her things that I've never told anyone else, and I still don't understand what made me do it).
Similarly, Woon had shared with old Jae-Ji some information about his trip he had only just considered at the time of their discussion. She hadn't really spoken or tried to direct the conversation, but Woon had almost spilled everything in spite of himself, and didn't realize it until much later, when he was lying in bed, free to think in the dark.
Hui Seon had told him that she was sometimes afraid of Jae-Ji, and of the extraordinary abilities she could display without explaining them. Woon had until then been skeptical of the old shaman, whose general appearance exuded a sense of considerable vulnerability and almost stupidity, but the look on her face as he was exposing his journey to her had left him with an impression of uneasiness which still persisted, despite the physical and temporal distance.
She knows things, Hui Seon had told him, she knows them, and that's all, and at times, when you have the impression that you know something, you realize that she knew it before you.
He stopped his horse near a small pond to let her drink, and took the opportunity to wash his hands, fill his gourd, and watch his reflection in the water.
He had been gone for two days, and the day before he had passed the city of Namyangju, while keeping an eye on the central road. As the capital remained close by, the passages were still frequent and regular, but the population was beginning to change shape. The yangban on horseback or carried in their sedan chairs gradually made room for farmers and herders, who brought cattle and crops back to the city in order to sell them in the various local markets.
He had almost turned back on the first evening, inexplicably distraught by the nocturnal noises and darkness, even though both were no longer a threat to his survival and had never particularly worried him during his living existence. Hui Seon had told him extensively about her own wanderings after her resurrection, and her escape through the woods to avoid persecution.
I was afraid of everything, she had confessed one day, shortly before she allowed him to go out and he saw Dong Soo again, it was terrible, the slightest noise made me startle.
Woon still remembered, for his part, the considerable anguish which had followed his own awakening, and the immeasurable panic inspired by all the movements and sounds of the outside world. He hadn't been outside for long, however, because Hui Seon had assured him she had recovered him quickly, and had therefore not really assessed the fears that could stain his solitary journey.
I've been alone before, he thought, contemplating the reflection of his face in the water, the discoloration of his skin and the deep blackness of his eyes. But never like this, he had understood when the light of day had come to break the darkness of the first night. The mare had finished drinking. Woon pulled himself away from his dead reflection, grabbed the animal's bridle, and dragged her eastward.
Never like this, his reflection had said, just before Woon looked away.