Those Damned Relics

"Those damned relics! Relics! Relics!"

Unlike the coronations of other realms, Cheongguk's was held in the dead of night, when even the moon was gone and the dark lay thick. The first rite was to quench every torch that had blazed as bright as day, prick the king's finger, and let his blood fall upon the three sacred relics. Then the relics said to have been wrought by the dragon that founded Cheongguk kindled of their own accord, burning with a blue light that could be seen from far away, before slowly dying out again. It was as if the sleeping dragon of legend had woken, confirmed the new king, and sunk once more into the relics to sleep.

So many came from distant lands to witness that mystery that even a small kingdom's coronation drew crowds from across the world. The relics answered no other blood. They answered only a single son of the legitimate queen, the one whose blood was set upon the Dragon's Sacred Relics, and for that reason Cheongguk had never, through all its generations, suffered a successful treason. A king the dragon did not acknowledge in the coronation was a king neither ministers nor people would accept.

And yet the three relics upon which everything turned—the necklace, the ring, and the royal jade seal—were gone.

The late king, the queen, and the crown prince had died of an illness no physician could name, a few days apart. With the queen already dead, Consort Oh, who had been nursing the late king, cast every rite aside the moment he drew his last breath. Claiming the relics had to be carried to the Queen Dowager at once, she drew them from the dead king's body with her own hands and took them out.

They never reached the Queen Dowager.

A treatment chamber had been hastily raised in the detached pavilion at the center of the pond, so the king might be healed beneath the dragon's energy. Consort Oh was running from that chamber when she fell upon the bridge, and the casket that held the relics plunged into the water. They drained the pond to the last drop. They scraped the mud from the bottom. They even split open the bellies of the carp that lived there. The relics had vanished as if they had never existed. Not even the casket could be found.

Consort Oh and her house pressed everyone within the palace to hold their tongues, but rumor of the lost relics overturned Cheongguk almost at once.

At the sudden deaths of a wise king who had cared for his people, a benevolent queen, and a crown prince loved by all, the people wailed—and the questions that rose in them were greater than the grief. Guess spawned guess. Rumor bred rumor, and the talk spread like a wildfire no one could stamp out.

In the midst of it, the next king had to be named.

The trouble lay in Cheongguk's own law. Once the relics designated a king, anyone of that generation whom they did not recognize was stripped of the right to succeed. A king therefore had to be chosen from among the children of the late king's consorts. With the relics gone, even that was anything but smooth.

A war was fought beneath the surface. Yet among the consorts, the house that held the greatest power and the greatest wealth was So-wang's, and the struggle was settled with a bleak swiftness. So-wang, fifteen at the time, became king.

Because of those rumors, however, his mother—the consort the relics had never acknowledged—could not rule as regent from behind the bamboo screen, and his maternal grandfather could not enter the palace and seize the government. In the end the Grand Queen Dowager, mother of the late king, put forward the claim that she herself had been the legitimate queen recognized by the relics, and so she was able to exercise the regency in So-wang's stead. Until her death of old age five years past, she spent herself trying to keep the power of the maternal kin pressed down.

From the hour she died, So-wang moved quickly. He filled Daejeon, the Grand Throne Hall, with his own men and strained toward a coronation, for only a coronation could make him king in truth. Until now he had been no more than the king's proxy, called So-wang, the Lesser King, and the address used for him was not Jeonha, Your Majesty, but Jeoha, Your Highness—the title one used for a prince.

Every time So-wang heard that word, Jeoha, fury climbed his throat.

He shot to his feet and screamed.

"Hold the coronation before this year is out!"

"Your Highness, a coronation without the relics must not be held! The people are wracked by famine. Hundreds starve to death in a single day. If, on top of that, it becomes known as fact that the Dragon's Sacred Relics have vanished, the people will sink into despair and live in terror, and Cheongguk's standing among its neighbors will collapse! It would be wiser to find the relics first, and only then proceed!"

"Has anyone seen the dragon? Has anyone seen that a dragon even exists?"

So-wang's shriek rang through Daejeon until the hall itself seemed to shake. The ministers' horrified glances darted from face to face. How could the king of Cheongguk deny the dragon?

"Are you telling me some trinket of a relic matters more than the king? Bar the common people from the coronation! I don't want to look at those lowborn wretches! They're suffering from the famine, so tell the envoys of other nations not to bother coming! The moment the preparations are finished, hold it in broad daylight!"

A coronation at which the king called his own people lowborn wretches and said he could not bear the sight of them. Desolation washed over the wrinkled face of the old minister Seol Woo-chan, whose head was bowed. The fading last voice of the late king brushed through his mind once more.

Seol Woo-chan lifted his head, already resigned to death.

"Your Highness, for what purpose is a coronation held? It is to proclaim that you are the legitimate successor who carries the dragon's blood. It is to present a new king to the people of Cheongguk. It is to announce to other nations that Cheongguk's king has changed. What meaning can there be in a coronation with no relics, no people, and no foreign envoys?"

"Meaning? Did you say meaning?"

Forgetting all dignity, So-wang shrieked and lunged, driving his foot into Seol Woo-chan's shoulder. Bound in prisoner's ropes and on his knees, the old man toppled backward.

"Agh!"

"Father!"

Thud. Thud. So-wang's kicks rained without mercy upon the old minister's wasted body. Startled, Seol Ga-heon shifted his own bound frame and threw himself over his fallen father.

"Ugh!"

Thud. Thud. The kicks only grew more savage. How dare he interfere in what the king was doing?

"Who do you think you are, to spew nonsense about whether a king's coronation has meaning or not?"

Had it been the Seol house, So-wang would have burned even a single blade of grass in their courtyard down to ash. The royal house and the people held Seol Woo-chan in such reverence that even the ministers who were So-wang's own men recoiled at the thought of laying a hand on him. That cunning dowager had, right up to her death, vested him with tremendous power, and so she had wrecked every plan So-wang possessed. Everything he had swallowed until now tore loose.

No one stopped him.

The late king's loyal ministers, and those who followed Seol Woo-chan, were all locked in prison, and their seats had been filled with So-wang's people. They knew his vicious temper well. Fearing the fury might turn on them, they did not intervene, and more than that, they saw no profit in stepping forward where there was none to be had. Everyone standing in Daejeon was there for his own gain.

He kicked until his strength failed, then pounded with his fists, and at last straightened, heaving rough breaths. He looked down at the blood on his knuckles, his shoes, and his robes, and around at the blood spattered across the floor, and a smile bloomed on his face. The two men he wanted dead lay blood-soaked and unconscious. The sight was exhilarating.

With laughter spread across his whole face, So-wang gave the order.

"Seol Woo-chan, Minister of Rites, and Seol Ga-heon, Grand Master of Sungkyunkwan, are stripped of office! Drag them out this instant and throw them beyond the palace gate! Let every one of the people see what wrong they committed to end up looking like that! And everyone in the prison who is in league with them—cast the lot of them out onto that island!"

"Yes, Your Highness!"

The eunuchs seized Seol Woo-chan and Seol Ga-heon roughly and hauled them away.

The sunset that day was redder than any in memory, as if it meant to dye the whole world crimson.

The two men the eunuchs had cast out were flung down before the palace gate. Unconscious, they did not so much as stir. They lay sprawled on the dirt exactly where they had been thrown. People passing before the gate shuddered at the pair of blood-soaked figures, who looked like beggars, and gave them a wide berth for fear of so much as brushing against them.

A middle-aged man who had been walking a little way off, begging, drew nearer on the chance there might be something worth taking and reached to search an unconscious body. Then he gasped and dropped to his knees.

"Lord Seol! What in the world has happened?"

At the beggar's devastated cry, thick with tears, the people moving along the street surged in. In moments the great avenue before the palace was packed solid.

"What crime did our lord commit, to be made like this?"

"Heaven will punish them! Heaven is watching! The dragon is watching!"

"Quiet! Who do you think did this? Shut your mouth before they drag you off too and beat you half to death!"

"Stop making a racket and get out of the way! How can we leave His Lordship on the dirt like this? Someone carry him! We have to take him home!"

A sturdy man turned and sat with his back offered. Others of some size pressed forward, each insisting he would be the one to bear them, each presenting his own back. From among them the people chose the two strongest, and with careful hands they lifted Seol Woo-chan and Seol Ga-heon onto those backs.

The man carrying Seol Woo-chan had only just set his foot to go when an old man, who had forced his way through the crowd with difficulty, stripped off his jacket in one motion and gently laid it over the blood-soaked lord. The worn, frayed garment was the only jacket the old man owned.

"Lord Seol, I beg you—do not fall like this. Rise again!"

His face soaked with tears, the old man pressed himself to the dirt and spoke with desperate earnestness. His gaunt back trembled in small shudders. Once each day he stopped at Seol Woo-chan's house and ate of the rice shared out there, and by that alone he had clung to life through this famine. There was no one among the people of Cheongguk who did not know the rest of it. Seol Woo-chan, once broader of frame than any warrior, and every soul of his household, had grown this thin because they ate only a single meal a day in order to divide their grain among a people gasping with hunger.

A young man, weeping, took off his own jacket and covered Seol Ga-heon.

"Please don't abandon us!"

He flung himself onto the dirt behind Seol Ga-heon and begged.

The men who bore the two of them strode down the center of the great avenue almost at a run. Along both sides of the road the people threw themselves to the dirt one after another, weeping at the wretched sight of Seol Woo-chan and Seol Ga-heon.

It was a spectacle that hurt to look upon.