Except with me.
I dared to close the distance to Inspector Han. Sensing my intrusion, he turned his face to me, just barely. Only a crescent of his countenance was visible; his straight nose, his high cheek, the elegant curve of his firm lips. Unbidden memories flickered, glowing images from a decade ago. A boy with amber eyes and a radiant smile. I blinked, and the images vanished.
“Do you know why I’m involving you in this case, Seol?” he asked me.
It took me a moment to collect my thoughts. “No, sir.”
“Who would you say you are?”
“A servant?” I answered. He kept silent, waiting. I bit my lower lip in thought, then frowned up at the sky, a gradation of light to bright azure blue. “They say that between the servant and yangban aristocrat is the distance between heaven and earth. I am the earth, sir.”
Inspector Han chuckled, a quiet rumble from deep within his chest. “Is that what you think?”
“I don’t know, sir. I’m always changing my mind.”
“They say many things here in the capital…” He paused, as though weighing whether to speak on. In a too-light voice, he said, “When I was young, they called me the sun, the great burning star, but when my father’s sin besmirched me, I became lower than dirt.”
My lips formed into a silent O as I looked at him closely. The golden light illuminated his face, allowing me to see details I hadn’t noticed before: the strain around his eyes, the oppressive stillness of his gaze, the small scars littered across his right hand. I knew little about his past, and this glimpse into it revealed a world filled with humiliation.
Silence continued to hang over us, intensified by the whistling chirrup of a lone sandgrouse, and at length Inspector Han said, “Whether you are the sun, the earth, or the moon, you are a capable girl. To me. Your mind, somehow, can grasp the chaotic threads of this case. There aren’t too many like you, Damo Seol. Man or woman.”
I sat still on my horse, fingers weakening around the reins. For the first time since my brother had disappeared, I felt seen.
* * *
It was past noon when we arrived before the fortress surrounding Suwon. The four-hour-long journey had filled my heart with one prayer—a prayer so immense, it felt as though I’d swallowed a heap of cloud. In my next life, I wanted to be Inspector Han.
Look at how tall he sits on his horse! I wanted to call out to the crowd bustling outside Hwaseong Fortress. Look at how the peasants kowtow before him, trembling. Look at how he spares them nary a glance.
This was my master, and I was his extension.
At the fortress gate, Inspector Han presented his identification tag to the guard, and at once we were permitted entrance. Never would I have imagined that by becoming a lowly damo I would be traveling around the kingdom, seeing places I’d never have visited while living with my sister back home.
The town of Suwon was a crowd of shops and people, a labyrinth of streets and alleys. Bristling along the walls were intimidating blockhouses, observation towers, bastions, and other military facilities built to fortify the defense of our capital a short distance away.
As we rode through town, Ryun reached into the sack tied onto his saddle and pulled out a ball of rice. “Here. It’ll keep you full for a while, Seol.”
I lifted it to take a bite, which was when I noticed Inspector Han’s light brown eyes again. They looked almost golden in the sunlight.
“You will stare a hole through Inspector Han,” Ryun’s voice broke into my thought, “watching him so fiercely like that.”
I took a bite into the rice ball, chewing on the sweet and slightly undercooked rice, the grain sticky on the outside but hard in the center. “I wonder, if someone dies and is reborn again, would they look alike?”
“I don’t know,” Ryun replied. “But I think you would feel a tug … a feeling of affinity. Why?”
I only offered him a smile, his question disappearing into the silence. The similar hue of my brother and the inspector’s eyes comforted me. It was as though Older Brother had sent his spirit and had lodged it in the eyes of another. But besides the color and the warmth of spirit, their similarities ended there.
I took another bite, but this time I tasted nothing, lost in memories of the past.
Older Brother had always been fragile, more of a sensitive and deeply feeling poet than a fierce military official. Most of my memories of my brother were of him sitting before a table, studying and memorizing Confucian classics. And while Inspector Han was capable of shooting two hundred arrows a day in rain, snow, or sleet, I couldn’t remember my brother hunting down any of the wild dogs roaming Heuksan island.
But similar or not, my brother was dead, and it was my sister’s fault.
I once asked her why Brother had run away, and her only response had been that they’d had a dreadful fight. One thing she didn’t know was that I had seen everything: her throwing at him an earthenware pot filled with boiling tea, her yelling, “Go to the capital then, that place of terror. We are not family. We are finished.” Older Brother had run away and had died alone because of her, and I knew that he was dead, for he had never written home.
* * *
The thought of Older Brother dampened my spirit, but life in the capital had taught me not to dwell on sad things. Do not dwell on being branded on the cheek, everyone watching and clucking their tongues at you. Do not dwell on your dead brother. For when grief swells around you like the sea, you must swim and keep your head above it. Do not drown in it.
I locked the memories of him in a box, to be opened only when I was alone. I didn’t want Inspector Han to see a sulking, homesick girl; I wanted to impress him. Straightening my shoulders again, I readjusted myself in the saddle.
“Curse this heat,” Ryun muttered. Dark patches of sweat blotted his attire as the sun pulsed overhead.
“You look about to faint,” I said, my voice strong again.
Ryun waved my words away weakly, wiping his brow. “Don’t talk to me. I have no energy to reply.”
We traversed through the town and rode out of it, passed by different landscapes, rice and cornfields appearing, then receding. At last, the road branched out into little paths, with one disappearing up the slope of Mount Hwa. The stifling heat eased as we traveled deeper into the woodland shade, and before long, I saw the sweeping rooftops of Yongjusa Temple.
Most temples were in ruins, Buddhism having lost favor with the imperial court long ago, but Yongjusa was a rare jewel. “King Chŏngjo agonized that his father, the murdered Prince Sado, was wandering near hell,” my brother had told me, “and so His Majesty resurrected Yongjusa and moved the tomb nearby, that the temple might protect his father and grant him eternal peace.”
After tethering our horses, we climbed up the granite steps, which led us to the main gate. Four statues with bulging eyes glowered down at me, and one held a sword as though prepared to kill anyone with a wicked spirit. Quickening my steps, I hurried past the monstrous figures. We passed by two more gates, drawing closer to the chanting and steady beating of wooden handbells. But not a single human soul appeared as we searched through the smoky mist. The sound of chanting hummed on without a tangible source. It was as though we’d stepped into a deserted village filled only with ghosts.