The Dragon God's Grave

In Cheongguk, everyone but the king was cremated, and the ashes were given to the water. Only then, the people believed, would the dragon god who dwelled in the waters keep the dead safe on the road to the underworld.

The woman bent deeply at the waist.

"Sir, I don't know how I can ever repay this kindness. I've nothing to my name, so all I can offer is the words. Thank you, sir."

"Take the children and go before this night is over."

She straightened. A hollow smile struggled onto her exhausted face.

"Sir, I'll just stay here in the house he built for me, with the children. It's the same wherever you go in Cheongguk—where would I even run? If I'm to boil them so much as one bowl of porridge a day, I'm better off where I still have work."

Her face soaked with tears, she looked at the house her husband had raised for her the way one might cradle a thing, or stroke it.

Mui turned sharply away.

His expression was cold, but inside his chest something seethed as if he had swallowed a live coal. He wanted nothing to do with a feeling like that.

"The moment those bastards get here, we leave."

He threw the words over his shoulder and stepped beyond the fence. Il-ho followed at once.

Two of the squad had already taken the dead up the back mountain to be dealt with, and Il-ho and Sa-ho had been scattering dirt over the blood so the children would not startle at the sight of it. Sa-ho straightened, watching through narrowed eyes as Mui drew quickly away.

What had made him so angry? The question flickered and was gone. Sa-ho tapped lightly at the door of the room the woman had entered. He would rather have left her to sleep beside the children, but a young woman could not remain in this place with them. He had seen the filthy way that overseer looked at her, eyes crawling over her like a tongue, and he could not pretend he hadn't.

"A word, if you would."

The door opened with care almost before the whisper had ended. Sa-ho led her into an empty room.

As the sun began to rise, the world slowly steeped itself in a clear blue light. Already the mountain path was strung with people, long as the body of a snake.

Countless souls climbed and descended, and not one of them spoke. All that could be heard was sobbing, and curses spat at the world.

Yi-ho and Sam-ho stayed behind at the thatched house to guard the children until the woman returned. Mui and the rest had followed her up the path and now stood in the line.

Directly behind her, Il-ho bore her dead father-in-law on a wooden A-frame carrier.

Sa-ho had urged her to leave, and failed. Once he heard her out, he could not bring himself to press her again, and held his tongue. Anywhere she went, a single meal a day would already be a struggle; without even a house, she and the children would be sleeping in the open besides. How was he supposed to tell her to go?

In the end they had yielded only to what she begged of them: watch the children while she brought her father-in-law to the place where her dead husband lay, and then came back. She would not let the children see that horror a second time.

But she was small, and she had neither eaten nor rested properly. She could not even get her dead father-in-law up onto the carrier. Sa-ho set the body on the frame across her back, and still her legs would not straighten. She went down, and the dead man came down on her together with the frame.

Mui was just stepping through the fence with Il-ho when he saw it.

All the long climb, a couple had gone ahead of them in tears. Now that couple's turn was next.

The father lowered from his carrier the body of his young son, wrapped in a straw mat. At the mother's pleading they opened it. The little boy was withered dry. Each of them held him once, as if to cover him with their arms, and then they wound him back up in the mat.

Then it was the couple's turn. They stood at the edge of the cliff and hesitated, again and again, before they threw the son they held, still wrapped in straw. When they turned away, the life had gone out of them.

Now it was their own turn. Il-ho stepped to the brink, set the carrier down, and lowered the straw-wrapped body. He turned—and froze where he stood.

At the shock on Il-ho's face, Mui and the others behind him came up to the cliff.

Even men who had roamed battlefields were stunned by the horror of it.

Just below the summit of the rocky mountain, in a vast pit shaped like a valley, corpses wrapped in straw mats were heaped in mounds. Many more had been thrown in with no mat at all; their people had not been able to find even that. There was no guessing the number. And yet, strangely, the great cleft was drinking the wind, so that not even the stench of rot rose out of it.

According to the woman, no human hand had dug the place. The common folk said the dragon god had made this grave for the pitiful people of Cheongguk. That was why the dead were hauled here not only from the nearby villages, but from far away.

Shock locked Mui where he stood. He clenched a fist, and the arm shook in fine, rapid tremors. He shut both eyes hard.

Yuk-ho, standing beside him and looking down, suddenly caught that arm. He had felt that his captain was not himself, and the fear that Mui might pitch off the cliff had moved his hand before he knew it.

"Captain. You all right?"

Mui opened his eyes. As if none of it had happened, he brushed Yuk-ho's arm away with a blank face and turned his back.

In Cheongguk, the dead were meant to be carried to the state temple where the dragon god was honored. If the death was natural, the body was cremated and the bone-ash returned to the family. If it was murder, there was an investigation, and a punishment. But for five years now the temple had been demanding fifty silver coins to burn a corpse. Taxes had grown crushing over those same five years, and so the people could not even cremate their dead. All over Cheongguk, they were abandoning the bodies like this.

The kingdom was bounded on three sides by the sea. Flat land was plentiful, and the low mountains scattered through it were thick with grain and fruit trees, so the raising of burial mounds was no simple thing.

The woman stood at the cliff's edge and spoke toward the sky as it slowly brightened.

"Husband. Take Father with you, and go well. I'll protect the children. I will."

She turned her head and begged Il-ho.

"Please. Send Father on his way."

At her word, Il-ho and O-ho took hold of the straw mat and cast it down.

"Thank you, sir. I will never forget this kindness. Not even when I'm dead."

She stepped aside to give the next in line their place, then bent low before Mui and his men. She shouldered the A-frame Il-ho had carried, turned, and walked.

She went unsteadily, as if she might collapse at any moment. But neither Mui nor his men took her arm, or the frame from her back. They were people who had to leave.

Mui's gaze rested a long moment on her retreating back, then on the people still climbing the path, then on those who had only just thrown a body in.

The overseer and his men, who had hauled the women seized in the dark before dawn to the slave auction house, finished the work and did not return to Maehwadang until nearly noon. Then they slept.

Maehwadang burned as bright as day through the night, and when the sun rose it slept and went quiet. Even those with work to do passed through only now and then, one at a time. Wake someone with a careless footstep, and you caught every last scrap of their temper.

Only the overseer's room, in the rear annex, was in an uproar. At the auction house a superior had slapped him across the face, and he was venting the humiliation by taking a woman even more savagely than usual.

He had been at her roughly for a long while, and still the rage would not drain. He began to beat her. She could not flee. Caught and struck, her screams were wretched.

"Aaaaagh!"

"Stand straight, you bitch!"

Of the women they had taken, the three of the highest grade had come out of the cart already dead. They had shared poison among themselves. The men who drove the cart said they had thought the women were asleep. Huddled together as they were, it was no wonder they had looked it.

In any case, for failing to watch them he would soon be stripped of this fine post. The more he thought of it, the hotter his fury burned.

The two men guarding the annex clicked their tongues and quietly slipped away. The woman's screams, and the sound of the blows, were louder than on other days. Stand there for no good reason and they would become the next target of his temper, and take a beating themselves. If anyone asked, they could say they had gone to eat, or to the privy. Getting clear of it first was the wiser course.

Not long after they left, the woman's scream thinned into a choking, strangled gasp, and then it stopped. The overseer's bellowing stopped with it.

Silence settled over the annex. A little while later, seven men in black clothing, faces hidden behind black masks, vaulted the wall in a single bound.

Three of them smothered every sound of themselves and approached the door. Four scattered in every direction to watch the grounds.

Mui eased the door open a crack.

A reek of raw liquor slammed out through the gap, hard as a blow. Through that same crack he read the room, signaled Il-ho and Yi-ho, and slipped inside as if seeping through the opening.

A naked woman lay collapsed in the middle of the floor. Mui looked her over and drew the overseer's dagger from where it was planted in her belly. He motioned to the two coming in behind him, then went to stand at the head of the overseer, who lay naked and slack, limbs flung wide, fast asleep.

He had drunk so much of that vicious liquor that he never sensed the man at his head. He was sunk deep.

Mui drove the dagger straight down.

It punched in and shattered the voice box. The keen blade then canted sideways and ran, shearing away half the throat. The overseer never managed a scream. He never even opened his eyes. Blood poured out of him like water.

At once Il-ho and Yi-ho lifted the dead woman and laid her over the dead man's body, as if she straddled him. They drew her hand to the dagger buried in his neck and closed her fingers around it.

The three of them were out of the room at once. Together with the four who had been watching every side, they went over the wall and away.

From the moment the seven went in to kill the overseer to the moment they came out again, it had not taken even half of a quarter hour.

The next afternoon, the young woman had her two children seated in a corner of the tavern kitchen while she ladled out bowls of hot rice-broth for the customers.

The men sitting out on the wooden platform were talking loud enough that every word carried into the kitchen.

"Hey—no, listen! They're saying a woman cut the Maehwadang overseer's throat! He's dead!"

In that instant, though she did not know why, the young woman thought of Mui, and of the indifferent face with which he had looked at her. She bent deeply toward the door.

Tears dropped from both eyes and darkened the dirt floor. All this time she had been afraid of being dragged off by the overseer again.

"Thank you, sir. Even in death, I will not forget this kindness."