"He was the best I ever had," said Grandmother Ok. "I want to start there, because everything else I am going to tell you will make it sound as though I am describing a bad man, and he was not a bad man, and if I let you believe he was, you will underestimate him and die."
Her windows were open. The frost had held.
"Nam Gyeol came to us at four. Left at the gate in a basket, which almost never happens and is almost always a woman with nothing left to try. We called him Six. He was named at twenty, which is fast; Chan-i was twenty-one, and we still talk about it. He did forty-one Cuts in his first nine years, and I want you to understand what that number means, boy, because you have not yet learned to be impressed by the right things. Forty-one Cuts in nine years is not talent. Talent is a shortcut. He had no shortcut. He read every one of those bodies with his hands over five and six days each, and he got them right, and he did it while sleeping four hours a night for nine years because he could not bear to be the reason something waited."
Doha stood in the middle of the floor.
"He sounds like Chan-i," he said.
"He was Chan-i with the brakes off." Grandmother Ok's hands lay on the arms of the chair. "And here is the thing about a man like that. A man like that is not destroyed by cruelty or by greed or by a woman or any of the ordinary doors. A man like that is destroyed by a question."
"What was the question?"
"He asked it in this room, on a summer evening, at the age of thirty-two, sitting on that stool." She nodded at it. "He said: Hallmistress. The Iron Rain School had a hundred and forty years of work in it. Six generations. The last man who knew all of it died on a road outside Weonju with his shoulder torn, and I untied him last month, and now it is nowhere. Not in a book. Not in a student. It is nowhere in the world. And then he said: We are the only ones who ever see these things whole, and we are the ones who make sure nobody else ever will."
She stopped.
"And what did you say?" said Doha.
"I said that we are not archivists, we are undertakers, and that a thing which cannot be put down is not a treasure, it is a wound." Grandmother Ok looked at the open window. "It was a good answer. I have had eleven years to improve it, and I have not managed to. It was a good answer, and it was not an answer to his question, and he knew it, and he sat on that stool and let me have it because he was polite."
"What is the answer?"
"There isn't one," said Grandmother Ok. "That is why he left."
The orchard was on the south side, behind the second wall, and Doha had spent seventeen years knowing not to go there in the specific way you know not to put your hand in a fire.
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Chan-i took him after midday.
There was a gate with two men on it. There were plum trees, badly kept, and long grass, and three small houses with wide doorways and no doors, and washing on a line, which was somehow the worst detail available.
"Three," said Chan-i. "It's been three since before I was born. It's never more than four, and it's never zero."
"Who feeds them?"
"Volunteers. It's a rotation. You'll be asked in about two years, and you can say no, and nobody will think anything of it." He stopped at the gate. "You need to see this once. Everyone does. Then you never have to come back."
"Why?"
"Because you're going to be in a room, someday soon, with somebody you could stop by killing," said Chan-i. "And you'll have four hundred good reasons. And I'd rather the argument you have with yourself in that second was with something you'd actually looked at."
The first house had a man in it, about fifty, sitting on a mat with a bowl in his hands.
He looked up when they came in and smiled, and it was a completely normal smile.
"Ah," he said. "Baek Chan-i. Is it the rotation?"
"No, elder. Just visiting."
"Good, good. Sit, sit. Who's the boy?"
"Doha."
"Doha," said the man, and set down the bowl. "That's not a Hall name."
"He refused it," said Chan-i.
"Did he?" The man laughed. He had a good laugh. "Good for him. I'm Hwang Sori. I was named at twenty-four, which was considered respectable, and I did thirty-one Cuts, which was considered—"
He stopped.
His head went back and to the left, very fast, and his right arm came up across his face with the palm out and his weight went onto his back foot, and his mouth opened, and he said, in a voice that was not his voice, hoarse and much younger and pitched high with a terror so raw that Doha's whole body went cold:
"Wait—"
The bowl went over. Soup ran across the mat.
Hwang Sori sat for a moment with his arm up, and his face turned away from something in the empty air about four feet in front of him.
Then he came down. He looked at the arm as though it had been left there by a previous occupant. He put it in his lap.
"—respectable," he said. "Sorry. How long?"
"Not long," said Chan-i. "Four seconds."
"It was eleven last month." Hwang Sori righted the bowl with great care. "There. Not a drop wasted. Boy — how old are you?"
Doha's mouth was dry. "Seventeen."
"Seventeen." The man nodded slowly. "I killed a man when I was thirty-six. He was a bandit and he had a child by the hair and I had a spade in my hands, and I hit him in the side of the head with the edge of it, and he went down and did not get up, and the child lived. She's got children of her own now, up at Bonghwa. Somebody writes to me."
He looked up, and his eyes were entirely clear.
"I would do it again," said Hwang Sori. "I want to be very certain you hear that part, because everybody who comes in here wants me to say I wouldn't and I won't say it. I would do it again and I would be here again and that would be correct."
"Then what's the lesson?" said Doha.
"There isn't a lesson, there's a price." The man picked up his soup. "The last two seconds of a man I hit with a spade thirty-one years ago live in my body now. He was trying to get his arm up and say wait. That's all he was doing. He'd have said something better if he'd had time, everyone does, but he had about a second and a half, and wait is what fit."
He drank.
"Four seconds a month, at first," he said. "Then four seconds a week. It's about twenty minutes a day now, spread out. In another twenty years it'll be most of the day, and I'll still be in here, and someone will still be bringing the soup, and one afternoon there won't be any of me left over between them. And I'll be a man saying wait forever in an orchard."
He smiled again. It was still a completely normal smile, and that was the thing Doha would take out of the orchard and keep.
"You can't kill me either," said Hwang Sori cheerfully. "Ask Chan-i why. It's very good. It's the best part."