Notes.

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CHAPTER XLV


"The most dangerous people in the world are not the tiny minority instigating evil acts, but those who do the acts for them."

(Suzy Kassem, american poet and writer)


a. The ten thousand li Wall

It took them a little more than a week to reach the capital by foot, venturing further inland in order to limit their contacts with the port cities and the population of the living in general. They had traced a careful itinerary with precautionary steps before embarking, using for that purpose the maps of Joseon that they still possessed. At the end of the morning of November 15, 1781, as an opaque fog had fallen over a large part of the region and reduced to nothing any chance to see further than the tip of one's own feet, Yeo Woon and Mago finally saw the great stone walls that surrounded the city and were to serve to protect its inhabitants in case of invasion.

The huge wooded gates, centuries old, had previously been permanently open, but they knew since then, as a result of information gathering in a nearby village called Gwangtan-myeon where several farmers were used to bring their crops to Hanyang's daily market, that they were now kept closed during the late hours of the night, until sunrise. Those who entered or left outside these periods were now only allowed in or out with a passport, thus ensuring the official status of being alive and protecting from any possible reprisals, especially interrogations, those who had to do outside or who had been caught up in occupations that were distracting enough to make them forget the new measures.

A villager from whom they had bought meat and vegetables to accompany the latter, and whom none of them would ever touch except to demonstrate that they had a relatively varied diet that was not indicative of their true condition, had warned them that people whose occupation or preferences were related to night time had been forced to rethink their habits.

- We have people sleeping in the villages now, just for one night, because not everyone has a pass yet, and they don't want to go to jail, she had declared while cutting in front of them a piece of meat that made their mouths water almost instinctively.

- And the register ? Mago had inquired then, because she had kept a sharp memory of their last conversation with the Haeju apothecary. There is a register with the names of all the living, which the guards check ?

The villager had laughed, sniffed sarcastically.

- That's for sure, they have a register. They have lots of them, actually, with all these people coming in and out of Hanyang. They've built small barracks right next to the gates, you'll see. It's not for decoration, it's to hold the registers. When you come to the doors, they take your name, they look for you in the damn list, and if they've already registered you, you're safe. The problem is, it takes forever, because there's a crazy number of new faces every day, and the register has to be updated all the time. It drives them nuts. Often it's shortened by looking if people have the fire test mark.

She had raised her hand, then turned her palm towards herself to show them only its back. On the dirty, browned skin, a reddish-pink stain indicating persistent irritation, but with contours too sharply drawn to have been caused by anything other than an object from the human's hand, corroborated her explanations.
- Needless to say, it hurts like hell, she grumbled.

Mago had responded with a compassionate wince. Woon, for his part, had contemplated the burn mark extensively, and thought of an evening in the early days of his resurrection, when he had held his palm over the flame of a candle without feeling the slightest discomfort, simply watching his skin darken as it roasted.

The walls of Hanyang, erected all around the city, but of which Woon knew, from hearing the subject come up regularly in conversations in the Spring Entertainment House, that residents regularly complained about because of the geographical limitations and inaccessibility of some of the land they entailed, were among the most accomplished defense mechanisms in the kingdom, and were unparalleled in other major cities.

Originally built more by default than out of necessity, they had initially been a structure of wood and straw, modestly designed on principle, not out of real fear of invaders. The advantage of the raw materials used in its construction was that they could be easily moved or destroyed, thus favoring numerous enlargements and a progressive adaptation of the wall to the phenomenon of growth that had characterized the capital over the decades.

Territorial wars having then quickly entered the equation and led to the need for improved protection of the major cities, it was decided to rebuild the ramparts, which had become too weak, in order to better contain the arrival of enemies while ensuring the survival of its internal population. The wood had thus become stone, and from the ground had emerged a monolithic skeleton as never before seen, of prodigious thickness and height that tended to dissuade anyone with some questionable intention from getting too close to it.

When they had been sent to the beacons, seventeen years earlier, under the dubious command of former General Seo, Woon, Dong Soo and Cho-Rip had received from their decadent guardian an instruction which, although monumentally shaky on certain points, had nevertheless been detailed on everything that had approached the capital from near or far, its layout, fortifications and armature in an overall manner.

At the time of his departure, four years earlier, he had lacked time to admire the walls and extract memories from them, but now that he and Mago were a few meters away from the latter, set back from the crowd that gathered like a colony of ants in front of the entrance, Woon could once again hear the voice of the fallen general, surprisingly solemn and melancholic, at moments when he felt a vocation of teacher in place of his usual inclination of wanting to play the role of the burlesque despot.

- The walls of Hanyang were built layer by layer, like a cabbage, he had pointed out to them, illustrating his point by swallowing the kimchi his students had prepared for him that evening, as his life had depended on it. Stones were added as attacks came and went on, making the walls thicker and thicker. Today, they are just over three meters wide, which enables them to withstand repeated shocks for a long time and reduce the risk of a breach. The same goes for the height. They are now fifteen meters tall.

He had a brief, joking laugh, prompting Cho-Rip to ask him what was so funny.

- The irony, the general had replied, his eyes full of dark humor, openly caustic. Do you know how high the northern wall of the Qing is, kid ?

- Not exactly, Cho-Rip had tried to defend himself, while at the same time seeming to curl up on himself as if Seo Yoo-Dae's revelations had been able to threaten his life. I know that it's very big, and very high.

- Between five and seventeen meters very precisely, the former general had said, grinning. I know it, I saw it with my own eyes. Just think about it. We had walls built as imposing as those of the best defense line in the north of the empire, this giant that has been staring at us for centuries as if we were a lamb just good for the spit, and all to protect a city. Don't you find that ironic, boys ?

Woon remembered that the three of them were staring at each other, vaguely confused and especially bewildered by the information the general had just given them.

- Because you think it's ironic ? Dong Soo had retorted, sitting in front of the old man, and just as busy gulping down his dinner as his superior.

- Of course it is ! It's better to find that ironic than to admit how stupid it is, the general had mocked, and he had laughed at his own quip until the end of the meal.

It was the second time that Woon remembered this particular conversation since he had walked away from Hanyang in the late spring of 1777. The first dated from their first month spent in China with Mago, a little more than two years earlier : they had just returned from an extended exploration of Manchuria, which they had traveled almost entirely with the mare Danggeum. The latter still accompanied them, and her already unusual phlegm had been greatly accentuated by the numerous trips to unknown lands that her new owners had imposed on her.

At first, their journey had been concentrated on the south-eastern regions, close to the sea in case things got worse and they ended up needing to flee as soon as possible. After a long consultation, modulated by hesitations, they had made the choice to visit the cities more assiduously. Within the kingdom of Joseon, the repression of the gwishins had pushed them to privilege the countryside and isolated areas, but in the Qing, no real news had reached them about a return of the dead, only rumors, and Mago, considerably more distrustful than Woon in certain ways, probably because she was older in terms of resurrection, had ended up giving in to his arguments relating both to minimized risks for their survival, which echoes in the collective consciousness had tended to strengthen, and to a higher level of travel comfort, which implied in passing a reduction in the occurrence of hunger crisis.

Moreover, despite the acquisition of maps that were as accurate as possible, neither of them really knew China, or were familiar in detail with its geography. As a result, they had moved from city to village, getting closer to the bed of a river that locals called the usuri ula, and which they regularly cursed for its cataclysmic floods.

Over weeks and then months, they had traveled northward, meeting populations that observers and scholars had claimed to be very different from those of Joseon, and that they had found to be remarkably similar in their lifestyles and technical development. The greatest disparities resided primarily in beliefs, ways of thinking, expressions, language, some traditions and arts, in other words, all the elements that formed the cultural identity of Manchuria, and which its people, and more precisely the Jin dynasty, renamed the "Great Qing" when they had taken power in the previous century, had finally extended to the whole country.

Woon had retained from his upbringing in Heuksa Chorong and the training camps solid notions of the Chinese dialect, and he was pleasantly surprised to discover that Mago, although she had some difficulty in expressing herself, understood speeches almost perfectly and was able to manage and amass the information she needed. I took lessons where I could, she had said, most often from other Gwishins when I came across some who had mastered the language, and if not in books, when I could get some.

In the north, where smaller, mostly widely dispersed groups of people lived, the jargon was more unique, more village-specific, and the customs more rustic, the life harder, and the temperatures much colder. They were more easily mistrusted, but as fear wasn't caused by the gwishins, but simply by the unknown, Woon and Mago had been more or less able to make themselves understood and accepted, in spite of some unfortunate experiences.

After a year and a half, they had agreed to go back down south, to the borders of the Jilin province with Joseon. It was there, pausing at the edge of a plateau that offered them a plunging view of the valley and the place where Qing territory intermingled with that of Joseon, and admiring the almost total absence of fortified demarcation between the two countries, that Woon had thought back to what General Seo had said on the walls of Hanyang, and the mocking elation that his remark had provoked in him.

The great gates of the capital, painted in that blood-red that proved the status of importance of the passage crossed, were open like the gaping mouth of a colossus, which would have deliberately let in imprudent people without warning them that their road could only lead them to the black and slimy depths of his stomach. They had always been that way, gathering the populations of visitors and residents in an amalgam without any real form or even identity, and if some specific criteria sometimes indicated very clearly that a passer-by belonged to a social class, the affluence was however such that it was difficult to distinguish the social ranks of each one.

Before Woon and Mago's eyes, instead of the two traditional rows of people entering and leaving the cities, there was a compact crowd whose impatience and trepidation reflected an unpleasant waiting. As the village woman from whom they had bought meat had explained to them earlier, two new wooden constructions were visible, but their architecture was partly masked by their presence inside the town, immediately after the gates (it's not for decoration it's to hold the registers).

Guards ran between the gates and the barracks, and all of them returned without exception with documents under their arms, which they leafed through as they traveled the distance between the two points. In front of the gates, a long line of soldiers maintained order among those who wished to enter the capital, letting only a small number pass at regular intervals, after positive signs from their colleagues in charge of checking identities.

- What do we do now ? Mago asked him.

She seemed reluctant to take the chance to enter, and Woon understood her all the more since he shared her opinion. They had no direct solution to force their way through without betraying their status as gwishin : without a pass and without their names on the register to protect them from interrogation and then from the fire test, setting foot in the capital seemed totally out of the question.

It was also dangerous to remain in the vicinity because of the surveillance patrols, and Woon feared that coming back every day without ever trying to get through the gates could be detrimental to them. Soldiers were stationed at the top of the ramparts for observation, and although Woon and Mago had taken the precaution of staying under the foliage of the woods along the main road, they could still be spotted, provided a guard paid attention at the right angle and in the right place.

- Come on, he told Mago, squeezing the girl's shoulder to comfort her. We can't stay here. I know a place around here. It'll be fine until we find a solution.


b. The Cyclops Watch

Moon Nam-Ki came to relay his colleague to the gatekeeper's station at Misi, after a lunch of rice and vegetables in a nearby tavern where he had his habits. The innkeeper, a chubby, fresh woman whose charms always seemed to miraculously appear before the eyes of undecided customers, had once told him that she was twenty four, and although he was unsure of the veracity of her words, as no paper or obvious signs could prove her true age, he was tempted to believe her, and had more than once given her the benefit of the doubt.

She had the alert and dashing eyes of a young girl, a flowery vocabulary that made all her appeal, and when she moved through the room, bringing orders on a wide, dark wooden tray and taking the time to chat with her regulars, her whole body undulated in a sensual and mysterious way, and made the fabric of her clothes quiver, which then became almost an embarrassment to anyone with unambitious interests, and a pleasure to those with more refined tastes.

Nam-Ki still hesitated as to why he found her so delightful, but assumed that there was at work here some intelligent mechanism of what men more versed than he in complicated words would have called conditioning, while the scornful ones would have limited themselves to "animal instinct". For his part, the soldier had learned to associate the innkeeper with the arrival of food and drink, and everything about his stomach was closely related to his heart. He was a man with no pretensions or high expectations, and knew how to appreciate what he got without seeking to desire more.

It was a quality that his three years of experience in the army, strewn with terrible things and little inclined yet to make good humor blossom in those who accomplished them, had irremediably reinforced to the point that it approached today a kind of naivety, if not blissful ignorance. It had been accepted for a long time among soldiers that each one deployed strategies of self-protection to prevent the horrors of which they were both actors and spectators from nibbling away at their consciences, and that these same tactics differed significantly from one to the other, even though they might have sometimes had similar characteristics.

It was all a matter of finding what was most appropriate. Hanyang was protected by stone walls, visible to all. Meanwhile, its soldiers and protectors had also erected their own individual fortresses, whose height far exceeded that of the capital's fortifications, and even the general understanding. These ramparts were never exactly the same, had been built with all kinds of materials, had dimensions that were often totally disparate from each other, because not all traumas were dealt with in the same way, and if some soldiers needed to build iron partitions and ditches, others were perfectly happy with a palisade of wooden beams. And there were others who, instead of being swallowed up by the monstrosities, chose to feed on them.

Brigade Captain Yoh was one of them. Affiliated with the gates for a little less than a year, he had already expressed his aversion to the Gwishins in every possible way, and he was fearsome when it came to conducting interrogations. The brigades had succeeded one another at the gates since the establishment of the Royal Decree of 1777, and while at least one was always needed to instruct the newcomers and, if necessary, to arrest them, it was not obligatory that they were the same individuals.

The maneuver had long been advocated by its supporters at the government, where it had been touted for its strengthening effects on the loyalty of soldiers and on the degree of repulsion they felt towards the dead. The shifts tended to limit the opposite result, namely the development of too much compassion for the gwishins or simply the questioning of the status verification procedure. Everything had been thought out within the walls of the royal palace, by literate, educated, thinking people, philosophers, whose intellectual and political reputation was well established.

As a result, their prediction scheme was appallingly flawed, and while it was effective in some cases, often extreme and already tied up in the hatred of the Gwishin, it collapsed completely as soon as individuals appeared to be more distant and measured. As for those who already had doubts about the system and the real malevolence of the dead, the process usually completed its task at convincing them, and their opinions rarely turned in favor of the approach chosen by the king and his advisers.

Nam-Kin sat down at the table where several volumes of the Great Register had already been deposited, and signaled to his comrade to fetch the next gwishin while a second stood ready to make his way to the barracks where the long series of names of the living and the dead were stored. They were usually questioned one by one, even when they were families.

Children were no more immune to the fire test than were adults, and to alleviate the anguish of the groups waiting inside the wooden sentry post that had been built since the decree was issued, next to the rooms for the register and its many volumes, the room where the checks were made was separated from the one where the examination was carried out. In the first year, both procedures took place in the same location and were visible to all : the soldiers had been confronted with scandalized crowd movements, fainting, vomiting and crying tantrums.

They're the ones who are right, one of his colleagues had affirmed to Nam Kin, while two of theirs were trying to contain the angry peasants who were shouting about scandal and abuse of power. Lately, the people were more than ever bad pupils, weary of the uncertainties about resurrections, and exhausted by a struggle of which they could only see the disadvantages.

There were just under ten people in the office, waiting for their turn. Flows were deliberately restricted following the last popular outpourings, and the rest of the entrants were guarded in front of the doors, where they were told to form a continuous line to make them pass more easily, but also with the aim of isolating them and reducing the risk of an uprising.

Nam-Kin first received a woman, whose name he asked for, and whose presence in the register was checked by three of his colleagues who sat behind him, going through the lists alphabetically, while a bureaucrat, who had been on the scene since the controls had been put in place, updated the register with the names to be added.

- Reason for the visit to Hanyang ? Nam-Kin asked in the imperious tone he always used when he put on his uniform, and which disappeared the second his shift ended.

- I've come to sell my crops, sir, the woman informed him.

She was pale, perhaps thirty years old, and seemed very impressed with the system established to counter the integration of the Gwishin among the living.

- Your cargo ?

- Cabbage, carrots and sweet potato, sir. It's all outside, if you want to check.

He made a hand gesture, and one of the guards standing at the door of the office went to take a look at the cargo. His questions, while following protocol, also allowed time for his colleagues to find out the woman's name.

- Have you ever been to Hanyang before ?

- Oh yes, sir, many times, the woman assured him in a respectful tone. I come every three days for the market, and sometimes I stay to eat with my little niece.

- Your little niece who lives in Hanyang ?

- Yes, sir. She lives a few blocks from here, I can give you her exact address if you need to question her.

- Have you already passed the fire test ?

She nodded her head firmly, and raised her hand to show him the distinctive burn mark that he and the other soldiers had learned to recognize over the weeks. It was all the more identifiable because Nam-Kin was wearing one on the back of his own hand, and he still remembered the pain, the excruciating heat, and the smell his hand had exuded despite the herbal ointments the army doctor had applied on it.

Behind his back, the voice of a soldier suddenly resounded.

- I found her !

He brought to Nam-Kin the volume of the register containing the woman's name and informations, as well as her status. Some of his colleagues had, on several occasions and in case of heavy traffic, voluntarily reduced the search by simply checking the burn mark. For his part, Nam-Kin hardly dared to deviate from the protocol, not because he didn't find it too slow, but because he feared too intensely that he would be reprimanded by his superiors.

- I read here that the fire test proved your status as a living, Nam-Kin pointed out. Our interview is therefore over, and you are free to move about the capital.

- Thank you, sir.

The woman bowed, and despite the fact that she had already presented herself several times, as the register testified, he saw fear in her eyes, beyond the relief of having finished the interrogation. Next came a young man who had never been to the capital before, and three other soldiers led him, pallid, into the next room to put him through the fire test. Nam-Kin continued his examinations and questions, but he heard, as did everyone else in the room, the sudden cry of pain when the white-hot iron came to bite the soft skin of the interrogated man's hand.

The tension stiffened the bodies around him, drew grimaces, pinched the lips, raised the children's eyes to the person accompanying them to be reassured (it's nothing you'll see it only hurts for a second). This one is clean, Nam-Kin thought. With practice, he was beginning to recognize the differences between a real yelp of suffering and a simulated pain, although he was unable to say exactly what those differences were. The examination was carried out by a local doctor, whose identity also sometimes changed, and who then provided treatment directly after the fire test.

Nam-Kin had witnessed the arrest of only one Gwishin, who had ventured to the gates probably due to lack of information or stupidity. He had tried to scream like a calf when he had been burned, and his bellow had turned into a real panic when his skin had blackened and the soldiers had seized him, surrounded him with fire and sharp swords, ready to take him off on the spot.

He had been dragged out of the room screaming, crying, half mad with fear and confusion. Nam-Kin hadn't reacted, but his dreams had echoed the Gwishin's cries for weeks afterwards.

- Next, he ordered.

(Please make the next one be clean)