Chapter 36: You Can't Stand on Yourself

He did not sleep that night, and neither did anybody else, because he had them build him a rig.

They did it in a dry riverbed off the road: a frame of two carts and four poles, and Doha standing under it with his own weight on a rope through his belt, so that at the exact moment the seat released and the spiral began, four-fifths of a second of him was hanging.

It was ridiculous. Chan-i said so, twice.

It worked on the eleventh attempt, and it did not work the way any of them expected.

Beat three. The seat releases. The spiral starts. And Doha — hanging, with nothing under his heels, with no ground available and none coming — did the only thing eight years had ever taught him to do, which was to put everything he had down.

It went down through his heels into nothing.

And kept going.

And found, thirteen feet away in the riverbed, under two inches of sand, the small tired knot of a dog that had died there in the spring.

He felt it the way you feel a step in the dark.

"Oh," said Doha, hanging in a frame of carts in a riverbed at the third watch. "Oh, you don't stand on the ground."

He got his feet under him. His hands were shaking so hard he had to put them under his arms.

"You stand on them," he said. "That's the third beat. That's the whole thing. You don't put your weight in the earth, you put it into the body you're taking from — you stand on the dead man — and that's why the fifth beat can find the knot, because you've had your whole weight on it for two beats and you know exactly where it is—"

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He stopped.

"—and that's why he can't do it to himself," said Doha.

Chan-i, holding a pole, said, "What?"

"He can't stand on himself." Doha turned around slowly in the riverbed. "That's it. That's what he's been walking into for eleven years. The fifth beat needs the third, and the third needs a body underneath you that isn't yours, and there is not one thing a man can do about that, ever, no matter how good he gets, because it isn't a skill problem; it's — Chan-i, it's geometry."

Chan-i put the pole down.

"Then you can't do it to yourself either," he said.

The last three li into Sesan they walked, because the ox would not go up the track past the shrine.

The Green Reed Pavilion's stakes were still there. The rope between them had been cut in two places and hung down in the grass.

Su Han carried the shovels. He had not spoken more than nine words in four days, and he had dug every latrine and unloaded both carts alone, and once, on the second night, Doha had woken up and seen him sitting by the fire with his hands over his face.

They came up out of the trees at the eleventh hour.

Sesan was as they had left it: forty-two households, a mended roof on every one, an untended threshing floor, and a chapel at the top with the door standing open.

Behind the village, on the slope, the grave field had gone from forty-one pale patches in green grass to one continuous stretch of the color of old paper, eighty paces across, and the air over it moved the way air moves over a stone in August.

There was a man standing in the middle of it.

He was in Hall grey, and he had a spade in one hand, and he had been digging, and there were eleven graves open around him in a shape that was not a shape any burial ground has ever used.

Doha looked at the pattern for a long moment.

"He's not opening them," he said.

"What?"

"He's not opening them; look at the spacing — he's joining them." Doha's voice had gone completely flat. "Chan-i. He's cut through the earth between eleven graves. He's letting them touch."

Down in the field, Nam Gyeol straightened up, shaded his eyes, and raised one hand in greeting to the boy he had been waiting nine days for.

"You're early," he called. "Good. I was worried you'd be sensible."