Savory Death 4
When the village women and men who had gone out to work with Na-ok reached the village entrance a step behind her, a great blaze flaring up in the distance caught their eyes.
It was already the hour when early sleepers had turned in for the night.
People shouted and sprinted toward the burning house.
“F-Fire!”
“Fire!”
Songga Village was a clan village; a fire at anyone’s house was as good as a family crisis.
“Fire, you say!?”
“Whose house is that over there!?”
“I-It looks like Na-ok’s house!”
“What! Na-ok! Na-eun!”
When they arrived in front of the burning house, they found Na-ok in the middle of the yard, her clothes scorched in places, burns covering her body, cradling her younger sister who had already gone cold.
Smoke rose from patches of her body; her eyes were vacant. For all the agony she must have been in, Na-ok gave no reaction at all—she was half out of her mind.
“W-What in the world happened here!?”
“Na-ok!? What on earth is going on!?”
It was her fifth-cousin uncle, Song Ho-jung, who asked. Na-ok looked up at him with those empty eyes and spoke.
“U-Uncle… Na-eun… Na-eun is…”
The roaring flames revealed half-torn clothes and a bruised face. Uncle Ho-jung, who worked as an escort for a security firm, took in Na-eun’s ruined state and demanded in a voice thick with fury,
“Was she already dead when you got here!? Or did you see who did it!?”
“Uncle… at the village entrance… I saw a man I didn’t know leaving…”
At her words Song Ho-jung shouted to the villagers who had gathered.
“Elder! Take the women and half the men and keep the fire from spreading! The rest of you men, follow me! How dare anyone set foot in our Songga Village and lay hands on my cousin brother’s daughter! He can’t have gotten far! Move!”
People rushed the blazing house behind Na-eun and began dousing it with water, while able-bodied men seized torches and fanned out around Songga Village to search the surroundings.
And just as the flames began to die, so too did Na-ok’s consciousness start to fade.
—Thud.
“Na-ok! Na-ok!”
An auntie’s urgent voice grew distant and hazy. Na-ok could only hope that all of this had been nothing more than a single night’s dream, as fleeting as those flames.
When Na-ok came to herself again, a full half-month had already slipped by.
For several days her burns had left her hovering between life and death; on top of that, the shock of her sister’s brutal murder had kept her from recovering her wits.
“Na… Na-eun!”
Herbal salves smeared over her entire body, cloths wrapped tight, and a terrible pain flooding every inch of her—that was the reality that greeted Na-ok when she woke.
Yet far more agonizing than any bodily pain was the truth that her sister no longer walked this world—the little sister she had raised like a daughter, for whose sake she had even turned down marriage talks.
“Ghhhk… A-Auntie… d-did they catch that bastard?”
The moment she opened her eyes she ground her teeth through the pain and asked. Auntie only shook her head with a pitying look.
“Your uncle even went to the escort agency and hired a tracker with excellent skills. They’ve been searching until now, but they’ve found nothing. I’m afraid it may no longer be possible…”
“Hhk… Na-eun…”
In the end the search that continued for several more days finished exactly as Auntie had said—without a single result.
Na-ok was the only one who had seen the man, and even then she had never gotten a clear look at his face in the dark; far too many hours had passed while she lay unconscious. Even the skilled tracker Uncle brought could not pick the man’s trail out of the mess of footprints left by people fighting the fire.
“This uncle of yours is sorry. How am I ever going to face my cousin brother’s spirit after this…”
Uncle Ho-jung apologized, but Na-ok could give no answer. It was not that she blamed him, nor that she could bring herself to resent him for letting the man slip away. She had simply half lost her mind at the news that the bastard who should have paid for her sister’s grudge was gone for good.
Na-ok turned her head away on the guest-room cot in Uncle Ho-jung’s house and made no further response.
Just as every living thing falls asleep in late autumn, so too did Na-ok’s heart go to sleep. The only times she still touched the world were the tiny whimpers she made when they changed the bandages to treat the scars left by the burns.
Time flowed past like running water.
—Chirp-chirp.
Na-ok’s mind returned when winter had passed and spring came, and the crickets woke once more. The sound of crickets beginning to sing outside the window was so like her sister’s voice that her spirit kindled again, as if a flame had caught on a snuffed lamp.
Unni… please catch that man. Please avenge me. Hhk…
To Na-ok’s ears the crickets’ cries sounded exactly like her sister’s desperate weeping.
“Na-eun?”
—Chirp-chirp.
A grudge that had sunk into her bones. Yes—she had raised her sister, so it fell to her to settle her sister’s grudge. With that thought Na-ok first set about recovering her body.
The moment she could stand, she sought out the uncle and auntie who had taken her in and offered them a deep formal bow.
“I’m leaving.”
“Leaving? Your house hasn’t even been rebuilt yet.”
Thinking she meant to return to her own ruined home, Uncle asked again. Na-ok shook her head.
“No. I’m leaving Songga Village.”
“What!? Leave for where, exactly? Your body still isn’t whole!”
“That’s right, Na-ok. Don’t tell me you feel you’re a burden? Never think such a thing. How could this auntie and uncle ever face your parents in the next life? Rest a little longer. We’ll speak to the elder and rebuild your house for you.”
Na-ok shook her head once more at their words.
“No. How can I, as her unni, live in comfort while my sister weeps in agony every night? I will avenge her—no matter what.”
“You’re a woman! How do you plan to take revenge!? You don’t even know who the man is!”
Auntie and Uncle tried to keep her locked in and stop her from leaving, but the cricket song that rose every night only hardened Na-ok’s resolve. When she declared she would starve herself to death if she could not avenge her sister and refused all food and water, they finally surrendered.
On the day Na-ok visited her sister’s grave and prepared to leave, Auntie pressed a blood-crusted sachet of incense into her hands and said,
“Please… come back alive.”
The first place Na-ok headed after leaving Songga Village was Chengdu.
She was certain the man who had collided with Na-eun had fled in that direction.
She never once worried about how she would find a man whose face she had never seen. Just like the red burn scars that marked her own face and body, his voice—that unforgettable voice—had been branded into her memory.
H-Hey, w-watch it!
So Na-ok simply walked the streets of Chengdu and spoke to every man she passed.
“Excuse me…”
“Ugh… What the—!”
“Excuse me…”
“Whoa! You scared me!”
The face that once drew people’s goodwill now made them grimace because of the burn scars, and the work became grindingly hard.
One year. Two years.
Whenever the season of cricket song arrived, Na-ok half lost her mind and wandered the streets of Chengdu; only when the crickets fell silent did she return to something like sanity.
Then, on a street lined with gambling dens, a man entering one den collided with a man coming out, and their voices reached her.
“Whoa there. H-Hey, watch it!”
“Hey, you’re the one who needs to watch it.”
Sheltering from the rain under the eaves of an alley—where the rain had silenced the crickets—Na-ok finally found the owner of the voice she had never forgotten.
—Rumble!
Thunder crashed from the rain-lashed sky as if the bolt had struck her personally.
It had been three years.
“Good heavens…”
Disbelief colored Big Sis’s voice. After hearing the woman’s story, none of us could put our feelings into a single word.
Even Commander Gu Pae—who had said on the carriage ride that he felt a kinship with her because bandits had taken his parents—stared as if he had never imagined the tale would be this brutal.
This went far beyond merely tragic.
The woman’s words broke off for a moment. Big Sis prompted her gently.
“So what happened after that?”
“When I was half out of my mind I became friendly with a beggar. He told me that the man visited the gambling den where I worked every three days without fail.”
“Ah—so that’s why you asked to work at the gambling den?”
The woman nodded at Big Sis’s question.
“Yes, Miss. At first I thought about following him in secret and stabbing him with a knife. But the old beggar spoke as if he knew everything. He said the man was a murim martial artist, so a woman like me could never take revenge with her own hands… So I begged the gambling den’s owner to give me any work at all, even without pay. The beggar said the best way would be to slip poison into the food or drink the man consumed.”
Her explanation finally made sense of what the owner had said earlier.
“Ah—so when the gambling den owner complained that the food tasted strange…?”
“I bought poison with money I begged for in the back alleys, but it probably wasn’t real poison.”
In other words, she had bought counterfeit poison—even here in the Central Plains—poured it into the man’s food somehow, and that very incident had gotten her banished to the underground cricket pens. There the constant cricket song had driven her nearly out of her mind; only when we pulled her out of that place had she briefly recovered her senses.
—Chirp-chirp.
“And that’s how… Ah, I know. Na-eun. U-Unni will hurry… I’m sorry I’m late…”
The moment cricket song drifted in through the window she curled up again and began muttering to herself.
There was no disagreement about helping someone in such pitiful circumstances—but I wondered whether bringing her into the Tang Family was wise. She was not in her right mind, and we needed to raise crickets; the sound of them made her lose her senses.
But will that really be all right?
I quietly asked Commander Gu Pae and Big Sis whether we could actually put someone whose mind came and went to work. Both of them nodded as if the answer were obvious.
Something like that will heal once the grudge is settled. It’s only because the grudge runs so deep. And a person whose grudge you settle will never betray you—she’ll make an excellent Tang Family member.
He’s right, Young Master So-ryong. Before I avenged my parents I used to talk to my dagger alone. The moment the Tang Family helped me settle that score, it cleared up as if washed away. And just as Miss says, someone whose grudge you avenge for them will never turn against you.
I wasn’t sure the idea held up under psychoanalysis, but if Big Sis and the Commander said so, what was I to do? When she was lucid she would be more help than anyone, and if she simply taught our Poisonous Creature Squad how to raise crickets she would already have done her part. I nodded.
Understood, then.
Helping the woman almost certainly meant killing the man she called her enemy. I had never taken a life, yet her harrowing story made murderous intent boil up inside me. The more her tale filled me with horror, the hotter that intent burned toward the bastard.
He might as well have killed two women. He was a criminal who deserved to die. And a man like that never stops after one or two crimes—odds were there were more sins we didn’t even know about.
First, though, I needed the crickets quiet. I called on my Ogongs.
“Kids, can you make those crickets pipe down for a bit?”
Crickets are cowards; they shut their mouths the moment a predator appears.
—Tsr-r-r!
The Ogongs that climbed onto the windowsill let out a single intimidating cry, and the area fell unnaturally silent as if by magic.
After a short wait the woman spoke again in a clear voice, just as expected.
“W-Will you really help me? My mind keeps slipping like this… I’ve finally realized I can’t do it alone anymore… If you’ll only help me, I’ll serve you with my life until the day this worthless body gives out!”
I had already reached an understanding with Big Sis and the Commander. And wasn’t this the world of righteousness and chivalry?
I nodded and asked,
“So. Who’s that fucker… no, that bastard again?”
Should I have the Ogongs chew on him? Have Yo-hwa drag him off and hang him from a tree somewhere? Or just kill him messily?
Among all the options, I needed to pick the best way to wreck him.