The Living Reed: A Novel of Korea (12 page)

“We leave tomorrow at dawn,” he told the man.

“Master, thanks be to God!” the man said. “I feared you would never leave this doleful place.”

And yet, when he entered his cell to pass his last night he saw that the candle on the table was lighted, and someone waited for him, cross-legged on the floor. It was the young monk who had arranged the abbot’s robes in the morning. He rose when Il-han entered.

“Sir,” he said, “is it true that you leave us in the morning?”

“Before dawn,” Il-han replied.

“Take me with you, sir, I beg you take me with you!”

The young monk’s eyes glittered in the candlelight, his face yearning with demand. Il-han was dismayed and surprised.

“How can I?” he asked. “You have taken your vows.”

“In my ignorance,” the young monk groaned. “I was only a peasant’s son, and when I was seventeen I ran away and was found by Christians and put into their school. But my soul was not satisfied, and I sought the Lord Buddha here. Alas, my soul is still thirsty for truth. I have read many books, East and West. From pilgrims I have had books of western philosophers, Kant, Spinoza, Hegel, but I find no peace. Where is truth?”

“If you cannot find it here,” Il-han told him, “you will not find it elsewhere.”

And steadfastly refusing the young monk’s pleading, he sent him away and drew the bar across the door.

When he went to the abbot the next morning to bid him farewell and to thank him for his hospitality, Il-han felt, nevertheless, a pang of separation. Much, very much of his country’s past was embalmed in this place and in other temples like these in other mountains. Mountains had become hiding places for the remnants of a lost glory. What doom lay ahead? What force could hold his people together, now that the love of Buddha was forgotten?

“Pray for us,” he told the abbot, “you who still pray.”

“I pray,” the abbot replied, and he stood up to bless Il-han. The man was tall, but the priest was taller, and he folded his hands on Il-han’s bowed head.

“Buddha save you, my son! Buddha guide your footsteps! Buddha grant you peace!
Ah mi to fu
—”

With this blessing, Il-han left the mountain and went southward to the sea.

The eastern coast of Korea is smooth but the western seas eat away at earth and rock and this for eons, so that shores are cut in deep and narrow bays and coves and the tides are high and perennial. Along such shores Il-han traveled as roads would allow, following the rough and sandy footpaths of seafolk as they walked from their huts to their nets. These men of the sea were different from farmer or monk. They were hard, their voices were rough, their skin was encrusted with salt, their eyes were narrowed by sun and storm. They were fearless, setting forth in small sailboats upon high seas and at the mercy of the tides. When they came home all their talk was of the sea and the fish, the soft fish and the shellfish. While the men went to sea their wives and children dug ginseng roots in the hills behind the fishing villages, a good crop, for the best ginseng root was to be found near the eastern town of Naeson. Yet it was rare and it was the more precious for its tonic qualities in soup and tea. A root of ginseng in a broth of salted fish was medicine enough for any ill, and old folk drank it to loosen the coughs that racked their lungs. For vegetables the seafolk used the young shoots of wild herbs steamed and then dipped into vinegar and soy sauce. They seldom ate meat, and indeed in the many days that Il-han traveled among the fishing villages, he ate no meat. True, one day he saw some dried beef hanging before a house, but when he inquired how it came there, the owner said the cow had died of a disease.

“Master,” his servant exclaimed in horror, “let us eat only fish in these parts.”

For liquor the seafolk drank a homemade brew, muddy to look at and of vile odor. For fuel, as Il-han saw as he rode through this shore country, men and women, too, gathered pine needles and fallen branches, straw and grass and dried seaweed, and this signified, he thought, how little the seafolk cared for land. The houses, too, were smaller here and more filthy than elsewhere, and the people more ignorant. One night in a small village inn where he had stopped he was awakened by voices shouting “Thieves—thieves!” and the villagers burst into his room, believing him to be a thief because he was a stranger, until his servant, berating them loudly, sent them away again.

“Yet we are more lucky than the land toilers,” a fisherman told him one night when he sat by a fire in a hut.

“How are you more lucky?” Il-han asked.

The man spat into the fire and considered his next words. He had two fingers bitten off by a shark, a small shark, he said, with a short laugh, else his whole hand and even his arm would have been off.

“We are more lucky,” the man went on, “because the yangban nobles cannot seize the sea as they seize the land. The sea is still free. It belongs to us because it belongs to Heaven and not to our overlords.”

The words were pregnant. In the fishing villages Il-han found the same anger he had found among the peasants, subdued by the same despair. To be poor, it seemed, was inevitable. None could escape. But here by the sea, poverty with freedom was tolerable, while a peasant without land was a slave to the landowner.

He slept ill that night. The smell of the seafolk was the smell of fish. The fragrance of the temple had been incense and sun-warmed pine, but here even the sea winds could not clean the air of the smell of fish drying, fish molding in the mists, fish salted for the winter, fish rotting on the sand. Even the tea these sea families brewed tasted of fish, and so melancholy was their life, between bare mountain and rolling sea, that he could not linger.

After he had passed Pusan, at the southernmost tip of the peninsula, he rested at an inn at Hyang-san, and when the long tables were laid for the evening meal for the guests, he found the same poor fare but he ate as best he could, in order that he might not be suspected of being a rich man or a government official in disguise.

When he came to the river Naktong, whose source is somewhere in the region of Andong, he found it could not be forded, and he crossed it by boat These boats were of a shape he had never seen before, narrow in width but sixty feet in length, and this, he was told by the boatman, was because the river is sometimes wide and sometimes narrow. Fishermen cast nets into this river and caught koi fish and carp, and these fish had a different flavor from those caught in the sea.

Once on a fair day he met a procession of worshipers of Buddha, and was reminded of the temples. In the midst of the procession was a gold image of the Buddha. Three singing girls in palanquins rode ahead, but a bystander said they were going to the temple for amusement and not for worship, since the Lord Buddha, the man said, had died long ago. “You are right,” Il-han replied, “for he lives no more in men’s hearts.”

There remained now his last stopping place and this was the island of Kanghwa. Thither he now went, staying no more than a night at any inn until he reached his destination. In a fishing boat he crossed the channel where river meets sea, and thus he set foot upon that illustrious island. He had determined to travel it alone and so far as possible in silence.

“Follow me at a distance,” he told his servant. “Ask me no questions. When night comes, we will sleep where we find ourselves. As for food, buy such as we can eat as we travel, by foot or on horseback.”

So it was, and Il-han went first to the mountaintop where, it was said, Tangun, the first King, had come down from Heaven. The road was steep and the grass was slippery with frost as winter approached, but Il-han was tireless, his body slim and his muscles hard with much walking. When he reached the crest of the mountain he formed a cairn of stones, and he stood beside it and gazed upward into the pure blue above him. His mind could not believe but his heart did, and he stood in meditation, receiving he knew not what except that he felt calmer and more strong for being there. Before he left he searched among the stones and found a curious pointed rock and he set it on top of the cairn as his own monument. Then he came down from the mountain.

He paused again to see the Wall of the Three Sons. Seven hundred years it had stood, built and rebuilt, but now it was history. The new invaders, whoever they might be, would come with new weapons against which walls could not prevail and the channel, though a mile wide, could no longer serve as moat to a fortress. Kanghwa was now only a reminder of a people’s courage in the past, a source of strength for the spirit in a people’s future.

He had thought that he would visit for a few days the ancient Monastery of Chung Dong, but now he found he could not. What use was there now in such retreats? He longed for home and was impatient to return to work and duty.

He went his way swiftly then, content to do so as he perceived each day now fully the quality of his people. They were brave, they were strong, enduring hardship not only with courage but with a noble gaiety. Expecting nothing either of gods or rulers, they were grateful for small good fortune. Their strength was in themselves and in one another. They could be cruel and they were kind. They fought nature in storm and cold and under bleak skies, but they fought side by side and together. He loved them.

The first snow fell as he turned his horse homeward to the capital. His first task was to wait upon the Queen and tell her what a people she ruled and how worth all sacrifice they were and how they must not be yielded up to invaders from foreign lands. At all cost the country must be independent and free. What cost? That must be determined.

Halfway to the capital, he received the evil news. It was a windless cold morning and he was waked by the sun streaming into the small window of his room at an inn. It fell upon his face as he lay on the floor mattress of his bed and he stirred and opened his eyes. He had slept well, for the ondul floor was warm and he did not hasten to rise. A maidservant, waiting outside his door, heard him nevertheless and she came in with a pot of hot tea. She knelt by his bedside and poured tea into a bowl and set it on the low table by his pillow. She was a woman of middle age, her hands gnarled and cracked with winter cold and, like her kind, she was a creature rich with gossip.

“Bad news, bad news, sir,” she said cheerfully.

“What news?” he inquired, still drowsy.

“Runners passed by at midnight from the capital,” she prattled.

“The Regent has seized the throne back again. The King has yielded but the Queen will not. She has escaped into hiding but the Regent has ordered the army to search for her and put her to death.”

He sat up as though fire burned him through the floor.

“Out of my room!” he shouted.

The woman, alarmed, scrambled to her feet and was running away but he caught her by the end of her skirt.

“Call my servant—bid him saddle the horses. We wait for nothing—no food—”

He gave her a push and she ran to obey.

While he hurried into his garments and fastened his boots about his ankles, his manservant thrust a tousled head into the door.

“Master, what is your haste?”

“No questions,” he commanded. “Time enough to talk on the way. Get the horses to the gate. Settle with the innkeeper. Listen for what you hear the guests muttering.”

“Master, who is up at this hour?” his man replied.

“All the better,” Il-han retorted.

Sooner than he could have believed possible they were on their way. The morning was glorious and his heart ached. In so fair a country, why could there never be peace? Why was there continual turmoil within when they were pressed always from without? What discontent, what quarreling and dissension within this narrow lovely land, this sea-girdled strip of earth, rising out of the ocean into lofty mountains and now disaster! The Regent had ruled too long and why must he return to seize by force what was no longer his?

He rode his horse as hard as he dared while the sun moved toward the zenith. The sky was sapphire blue, and on the land the peasants did their winter work, mending roads and ditches and thatched roofs. His path led toward the central mountains, gray against the brilliant sky, their heads crowned with hoar frost and snow. Through them was a winding pass and to that place he pressed without thought of food until at high noon he chanced to see his servant’s pinched wan face. The man was older than himself, grown when he was still a child.

“There is an inn beyond the pass,” he told the man. “We will stop for rest and I may hear more news, since runners go through that pass from the capital to the coast.”

They stopped at the inn, and while the man took care of the horses Il-han sat at a table in the common room and listened to the guests. They were rude men, carriers and runners, and their talk was cynical and free. None knew where the Queen was. Perhaps she hid herself, perhaps she was dead. But the Regent would not spare her, that was certain, since it was she who had sent him out of power because she loved China.

Here he broke into the talk.

“Will not the King discover where she is?” he asked, pretending to be idly curious.

A clamor of voices hastened to reply. “The King? The King has given over the power to the old Regent. Is the Regent not his father? And will the Regent save the Queen when it was she who plotted against him and restored the throne to the King?”

He was amazed that these ignorant coarse men knew the details of the palace intrigue. Indeed they were not ignorant, although none knew how to write his name or could read a letter even of hangul writing. But they knew history from their ancestors, father teaching son, and they heard gossip from palace servants and guardsmen. Thus Il-han, listening, heard that scanty rice crops had made the people restless and since rice was short, the army rations had been cut and the soldiers were rebellious, too, and ready to listen to the Regent’s secret messengers, and so he had been able to seize the throne.

Such lower folk as these carriers and porters and carters took relish in recounting the troubles of the great, and Il-han sat in silence, listening, pretending to eat and drink and yet not able to swallow food or tea when he heard what had taken place. A wind-burned carter, his voice hoarse with frost, talked loudest of all.