Chapter 35: Standing on the Dead Man

They went out the north gate at first light on the second day: two carts, seven people, and a woman in a chair at the top of the yard who did not come down to see them off because being carried down took two men and she had decided that morning to spend her strength on something else.

She said goodbye at the window instead, which meant nobody heard it.

Girin was at the gate.

He had made them carry him there, and they had done it on a door because the alternative was that he would try to walk, and he sat on his stool with his ruined leg straight out in front of him and the lamp lit at eight in the morning because it had always been lit.

"Sixty-three," he said, as the cart came past.

Doha stopped.

"Sixty-three graves in Ssangbaek," said Girin, "and you counted every one of them, and then you sat in the cart, and I gave you a bun with ash on it. Do you know why I gave you the bun?"

"Because I was crying."

"Because you'd counted," said Girin. "There were four grown men on that job and not one of us knew the number, and a ten-year-old did, and I thought: right. That one's going to be a problem." He looked up. "Come back. That's it. That's the whole speech. I've been working on it since Tuesday, and it's not gotten any better."

"It's a good speech."

"It's an awful speech. Get off my gate."

They took the long way, which added a day and a half and took them nowhere near a village.

The cycle was at five hours when they left. It was at four by the second evening. On the third morning it went at three hours and forty minutes and then again at three hours and ten, and after the second one Doha lay in the grass at the side of the road for a while and looked at the sky and did arithmetic he had already done.

"Say it," said Hong Yeohwa.

"Six more days if it holds this rate. Four if it doesn't."

"And Sesan's two."

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"Sesan's two."

She sat down on the verge beside him, which she had started doing somewhere around the second day and which neither of them had commented on.

"Have you got it?" she said.

"The third beat?"

"The third beat."

"No," said Doha.

The problem was so simple that he could state it in one sentence, and he had stated it in one sentence about four hundred times in three days, which had not helped.

The fourth rite is where you put your weight down. The third beat is where you go up.

That was all. That was the whole of it. Everything else in the harvest draw he had, whole, perfect, ready — and in the middle of it there was a place where the technique required the rite-keeper to be heavy at the exact instant he stopped having anything to be heavy on, because the seat released and the spiral came up and for four-fifths of a second the heels of a man performing that rite were doing nothing at all.

You could not drive weight into the ground while leaving it.

"Then don't leave it," said Chan-i, on the first night.

"The rise is the rise. You can't do it from the seat; I've tried. You get about eight inches of it, and then you're just standing up slowly with a sword."

"Then go up off one foot—"

"I've tried that. There's not enough time and the spiral's wrong."

"Then—"

"Chan-i, he did it in a sentence," said Doha. "The hole is the fourth rite, third beat. He wasn't being cryptic; that's the answer, that's the actual answer, and he handed it over in front of forty people. It's not a riddle. It's a thing you either can do or can't, and everybody he ever taught couldn't, and I've had eight years of the only training in the world that's supposed to make it possible, and I can't do it either."

Hong Yeohwa asked her question on the fourth day, on a road with nothing on either side of it.

"When it goes off," she said. "The cycle. What does it take?"

"The nearest body."

"You've said. What does it take from the nearest body?"

"A knot."

"And if there isn't one?"

"Then it comes up empty and finishes."

"How does it know?" said Hong Yeohwa.

Doha opened his mouth to answer and stopped.

"What do you mean, how does it know?"

"You stood in a wayside yard with forty feet of nothing round you, and it ran the whole five beats and came up with nothing." She was walking with her hands behind her back, looking at the road. "But on the hill at Sesan it went straight into Chunsam, and Girin had his ankles four feet away. It didn't wander. It didn't cast about. It went to the one thing in reach that had something in it."

"It's a technique. It doesn't know anything."

"Everything in this whole horrible business knows something," said Hong Yeohwa. "That's what I've learned in a month. The knot in my brother knew he wasn't the right shape. The field at Sesan knows how to braid. The thing in your chest gets tighter when you do it wrong, which means it can tell the difference between right and wrong, which means it's paying attention."

She stopped walking.

"So how does it know where to reach?" she said. "Because if it's reaching, then it's putting something out. And if it's putting something out — down, into whatever's nearest, feeling for a knot—"

Doha stood in the middle of the road.

"—then that's the fourth rite," he said.