The Living Reed: A Novel of Korea (14 page)

“And remember,” he told her one night when she complained that she could not eat the coarse food of the country folk, “remember that these are your people and this food is what they eat until they die and they never see better than a bit of pork once or twice a year. And if the room they live in crowds you, and the smells are too foul for you to breathe, then remember that these are still your people and they have no palace in which to live.”

“Nor have I,” she said mournfully.

“You have,” he said firmly. “If you hold to your courage, you shall be in your palace again within the year.”

In these ways he kept her to her best, and was heartened because she grew less willful and more steadfast as the days passed. She learned to watch the people and see how they did, instead of turning away from them, and in so doing she became more the queen and less the woman.

They reached Chung-jo on a cold winter’s night. Il-han went to his friend’s house, and knocked on the gate with the handle of his whip. His friend opened the door himself, for he was poet and a poor man, and had no servant.

“It is Il-han,” he told his friend.

“Il-han! Come in, come in quickly—”

His friend’s voice was joyful, for they had once gone to school together and it had been years since they had met.

Il-han gave his horse’s bridle to the servant and stepped into the gate and spoke to his friend’s ear.

“I have a royal refugee with me. She must be safely hidden. I know the woman in your house will receive and hide her somehow.”

The poet could not believe what he heard. Gossip from the capital had proclaimed the Queen’s death. Yet, some said, no one had found her body, nor had the rivers cast up a body that could be hers, and though the wells had been searched, they had not yielded her. True, there was a woman dead who wore royal robes, but it was found that she was not the Queen.

“You are not saying—” his friend gasped.

“Yes, I am saying!” Il-han told him. “Let me bring her in now. She is half frozen, as we all are. She needs rest and food.”

He waited for his friend to protest that he could not accept such danger as the concealment of a queen. But this poet was a true one. He revered learning and so he had stayed poor and having little to lose, he was brave.

“I will tell my wife,” he said. “Meanwhile the door is open. Lead her into my house.”

So saying, he went ahead and Il-han helped the Queen dismount and he led her into the house.

“I have chosen this hiding place for you because my friend is a good man,” he told her. “And it is well that he is poor. He will not have many people coming and going. You will be safe. But I ask that you make yourself one of the persons in this house. You are not royal here. Imagine that you belong to this poor good family.”

The Queen was humbled by now, through her many days of hard travel. For the first time she saw how her people lived and who they were. Never again would she be so wasteful of money and jewels and fine silks. She had the heart and mind of a noblewoman, truebone and clear, and she was changed.

“I will remember,” she told Il-han.

He had not imagined how difficult, nevertheless, it would be to leave her there as the poet’s wife came bowing and half dazed to receive them. Her husband had bidden her not to mention the name of the Queen and not to say Majesty and she obeyed but she was overwhelmed.

“If you will come with me,” she murmured.

The Queen bowed her head and then turned to implore Il-han. “You will stay a day or two?”

“Not even an hour or two,” Il-han replied. “I must return at once and begin my plans for your return.”

“We have said nothing of those plans,” she urged.

“Because I will not tell you something that will be a burden on you. You are to live here quietly, helping this family as a friend might. Share the duties of this housewife—they have no servants. Listen to her talk, but do not talk much for yourself. Use this time for learning what it is to be a poor man with no treasure except a love of learning and of beauty. These people, too, are your subjects.”

“Is this farewell?” she asked and he saw fright in her wide eyes.

“We meet again soon,” he said.

He stood and watched as the poet’s wife led her away. Suddenly she turned and came swiftly to him again. He looked at her, questioning, but saying nothing, she reached into her bosom and then pressed something into his right hand.

He looked and saw what it was. “I cannot take it,” he exclaimed beneath his breath.

It was her private seal, a piece of Chinese jade upon which was carved her royal name.

“You must,” she told him, her voice very low. “You may need to use my name in some high place to save your life—or mine.”

He stood amazed while she ran back to the waiting woman, and he marveled that she put such trust in him. His heart was moved and he knew himself forever her loyal subject, yes, and more.

He stayed then for a brief space with his friend while the servant fed and rested the horses.

“Why should you hasten away?” the poet urged.

“It is better if there are no horses at your gate when the dawn comes,” Il-han said, “and better if I and my servant are not here in your house. A woman can be hidden more easily than a man. Ah yes—before I forget—let your wife lend her some plain clothing when she needs it. She wears all that she has. And if someone asks who she is, say that she is a distant relative, newly widowed, who has come to stay with you because she has no other home.”

“I am still bemused,” the poet said. “It will take time for me to get back to myself.”

“I shall be here again before many moons,” Il-han told him.

The poet held him by the arm. “Wait—my wife wants to know what she eats.”

“She eats anything,” Il-han said firmly, and went away.

The Queen was left much alone in the lowly house of the poet. She understood that this was not enmity but reverence for her royal person. The poet’s wife was always near but speechless with awe unless the Queen encouraged her. The poet kept apart in a separate small hut where he sat upon a straw mat before a low table and read his few books and brushed his poems. Each morning he presented himself to her, bowed to ask of her welfare, and then withdrew.

The Queen mused often on her fate. She remembered that her mother had foretold her wanderings, for she had been born at sunrise one morning, and at the same moment a cock crowed. According to the four pillars of her destiny, the hour, the day, the month, the year in which she was born, she had lived thus far according to prophecy, a woman of willfulness she did not deny, but also of strength. When she thought of her own strength, she thought of the King. She had believed him to be weak, but there were times now when she was not sure. Perhaps he had hidden his true self from her. He was the son of a strong mother and through his childhood he had cultivated habits of secret resistance against his father, loving him and hating him, deciding what he would do but telling no one what it was until the act was complete. The return of the Regent—had it been perhaps with the consent of the King? If it were only the Regent’s love of power, could not the King have prevented the usurpation, since he had eyes and ears everywhere throughout the capital? And if he had allowed his father, the Regent, to return, was it because he hated her, his Queen, and rebelled against her as he had rebelled against his mother before her, and so because she favored the Chinese as suzerains, he had chosen his father who was against such suzerainty? When did the King become the man? And when did the royal family tangle become enmeshed with the troubles of the nation, and beyond that, with the declining strength of China and the dangerous strength of Japan made new by Meiji emperors?

She grew restless with such musings as the days passed. There could be no hope of messages from Kim Il-han. He had warned her that communication was impossible. “When it is safe for you to return,” he had said as he left her, “your palanquin will be at the gate. Step into it without asking a question. It is I who send it.”

Yet there was no palanquin. She was first impatient and then angry. Once she went to the gate, as she should not, and saw a brook tumbling out of the mountains, and beside it a wandering cobbled country road. The poet’s house was outside the village, a cluster of grass-roofed houses belonging, she supposed, to landfolk and their families, except that out of villages came poets. Such men, four or five, gathered at the poet’s house often, and then the poet’s wife asked her to stay within the small side room.

“I would beg my husband not to allow his friends to come while you are with us,” she told the Queen, “but they are used to coming, and were he to stop them now they would put questions.”

The Queen heard this with interest. She who was accustomed to command! The poet’s wife saw her unbelieving look, and went on in haste to explain.

“You do not know what poets are! They are so willful that they dare anything. They are children in spirit but in wit and wisdom they are already old men when they are born. What I have to endure! I tell you, it is not easy to be married to a poet.”

“All the more reason,” the Queen said, “for me to hear these poets. Leave the door open a crack—”

At this very moment while she stood in the garden she saw the poets coming from the village. They wore their long white robes, those robes which their wives washed fresh for them every day, doubtless, as the poet’s wife did in this house, and they wore their high black horsehair hats tied under their chins, the tapering crowns making the men seem taller than they were. They walked one behind the other, the smallest and the oldest first, so that she could see each head above the other. She waited as long as she dared so that she could see their faces, and then made haste into the small room, leaving the door open a crack.

Lucky the room was without a window, for she could sit in darkness and peer through the crack at the five men who crowded into the one room, each upon a floor cushion, the low table in the middle. Greetings were given and taken, the easy greetings of old friends, and she saw that they were contented men, though poor. Since she had been reared in the learning of ancient China, she remembered what Confucius had said: “Though I eat coarse rice and drink only water, though my bent arm is my pillow, happiness may yet be mine, for ill-gained wealth and empty honors are only floating clouds.”

Yet these poets, she soon perceived, were men of mirth as well as wisdom. They were not dismayed when the poet’s wife brought them only pots of weak green tea without cakes. Sipping the tea, they encouraged one another to begin the day’s enjoyment by reciting the poems each had written since the last time they met, and with proper courtesy each waited on the others until the eldest took lead. Closing his eyes and placing his hands on his knees, he recited in a clear voice, surprisingly loud for so small and old a man, a poem about a beautiful woman who could change herself into a fox at night. When her husband, who was also a poet, went hopefully to bed with her, he woke to find the marks of tiny claws on his hands and cheeks, and the pillow beside him was empty.

It was the youngest poet whose poem was of sorrow and death in the shadows of a pine grove. The more she listened the more the Queen perceived that the old men dreamed of youth and beauty and the young men dreamed of melancholy and doom. Most confounding to her was the fact that none of them spoke even once of the terrors of the present age, the enemies pressing from without the nation and the quarrels and the wars within. These men, both young and old, learned though they were, seemed not to know that they lived in peril of the times or that the past could not save them, or that their future could be lost unless they bestirred themselves to save their people. When she perceived this, it was all she could do to keep from throwing open the door and revealing herself as their Queen. To what end? So that she could cry at them to wake their minds!

“How dare you,” she longed to cry at them, “how dare you live in these mists of dreams and poetry while I, your Queen, am in danger of my life? Wake up, you men! Old and young, you are all children. Must I be your mother forever?”

She forbade herself such indulgence. She must be silent for the sake of more than these, and silent she was, biting her thumbnail and forcing herself to be quiet. She must wait and still wait until some night the poet’s wife would rouse her and whisper to her, “The palanquin is at the door.”

Kim Il-han was not idle although he was prudent and did not venture from his house so that he might protect his family if the Regent ordered violence. To his father he sent word that he was not well, that his illness was not defined by the physicians and he felt it his duty not to come near his father until he was sure he was harmless. Daily messages passed between the two houses, nevertheless, his father’s and his own, his servant coming and going, and his father, too, was prudent, and he said he had slight disorder of the stomach and must stay inside his own gates. The old man knew, of course, that his son’s illness was not of the body. These were dangerous times for the Kim clan.

Step by step, Il-han planned the restoration of the Queen. His tool in this planning was his son’s tutor. He called the young man to his private room one evening when the household lay asleep, and without daring to explain his whole purpose, he sent the young man to summon a handful of other statesmen whom he could trust. These gathered, not all at once, but one by one, this one today and another one tomorrow, weaving a web between their houses, and the messenger was always the tutor.

“You must trust me,” Il-han told him. “I am working to save us all.”

“Will you restore the Queen?” the tutor asked. “The times are changed,” he added.

Il-han looked at him sharply. The face he saw was lean and young, the mouth too gentle, but the eyes were clear and demanding.

“Nothing is forever,” Il-han said at last. “If she returns, she too must change.”

“I trust you, sir,” the young man rejoined, “so long as you know there must be change,” and taking up the letters that Il-han had given him, he went to obey.