The Merchant of Death (3)
In the version of The Tale of Shim Cheong I knew, Cheong hears the price of three hundred sacks first.
The merchants had simply been searching for a sacrifice to offer the Dragon King. They had not named a sum. Only after they learned Cheong's story did they promise to put up the three hundred sacks in her place, and only then did she take them at their word.
That was why she jumped.
Which meant that, if this were following the original, the merchants should not have known the price of three hundred sacks at all.
And yet... these men were different.
They did not merely know the figure. They offered to pay it in medicinal herbs.
Herbs worth three hundred sacks of rice.
Anywhere else, I might have shrugged it off. Here, every piece slotted into place with a precision that was almost indecent.
The Tale of Shim Cheong is, at bottom, a chain of accidents born from aligned interests. Cheong wanted her father's sight restored. A monk demanded three hundred sacks of offering rice as the price of that miracle. The merchants wanted a maiden to throw to the sea.
But this was no longer that story.
This went beyond a tidy coincidence of wants. It felt as though some purpose had been threaded through the entire sequence, tugging each scene into line.
What was it?
What, exactly, was manufacturing this sense of déjà vu?
"Scholar, have you finished your business?"
"...Hm? Ah. Yes. Thank you for the answers."
"Not at all, sir!"
I left the villager behind and found Cheong waiting for me.
"Is something the matter?"
Perhaps my face had given me away. Her eyes were already tight with worry.
For the moment, keeping her out of the merchants' sight seemed the wiser course.
"It's nothing. We should head home."
If Cheong catches their eye in the state they're in, this could turn very ugly, very fast.
It was not that I feared she would accept their offer. They were hunting for a maiden who would take a handful of herbs in exchange for her life — a vanishingly narrow condition. Men working under a constraint that tight do not stay patient for long.
And impatient men have a way of skipping past negotiation altogether.
Kidnapping, for instance.
They've already halted their journey and the losses are mounting. In this village there is exactly one maiden fit to be thrown to the sea.
Would merchants like that simply walk past such an opportunity? They had the muscle to take her and the money to bury the consequences, and they were not short on either.
So hiding Cheong was the right move.
...At least until I knew who was behind this, or what they actually wanted.
"Cheong. I would like a word with you."
"I beg your pardon? We can speak perfectly well right here, can we not?"
"Alone."
"...Eh?"
Color flooded her cheeks in an instant. I held her gaze, quite serious.
"Would that be possible?"
"...Yes."
I led her out of the village, to a cliff some distance from the houses. The same cliff we had fallen from together.
Once I was certain no one else was near, I turned to Cheong, whose face was still burning, and spoke.
What I was about to tell her was a secret I had meant to keep.
"Cheong."
"Y-yes."
"There is something I need you to know."
"What is it...?"
"...The merchants visiting the village are said to be carrying an herb that can cure any illness. And a few days ago, your father received an offer from a monk who promised to open his eyes."
"...What?"
Her eyes widened. Clearly she had not seen this coming. I told her everything I had intended to bury — without trimming a word. That Shim Bong-sa had agreed to offer the Buddha three hundred sacks of rice in exchange for his sight. That the merchants now lingering in the village were prepared to hand over the Panacea Grass in return for a maiden to sacrifice to the Dragon King. All of it.
"I-is that true...? But..."
"Every word of it. But Cheong. Listen to me carefully."
Filial as she was, the news hit her like a blow. Confusion overtook her so fast I could almost see her turning toward the road — toward the monk, or the merchants, or both. I caught her by the shoulders and held her there.
"Whatever you are thinking right now, put it down."
"...I beg your pardon?"
"Even if this feels like the only chance you will ever have. Even if it feels as though, if you let this moment pass, there will never be another way to heal your father's eyes. I am telling you not to do it."
"How did you...?"
"Did you think I wouldn't know how deep your devotion runs? But think again. If the price of restoring his sight is your suffering — do you truly believe your father would be glad of it?"
"..."
I had said it on purpose.
There is an old saying: a word has no feet, yet it travels a thousand leagues. Talk, once loosed, finds every ear it was never meant for.
Even if I stop her now, will she really never hear of this?
I did not think so. Unless we packed up and left the village entirely, the story would reach her one way or another. And if that day came when I was gone — when Shim Bong-sa and Lady Ahn were gone — Cheong might well decide on her own.
I had seen it a hundred times in stories. Someone withholds a secret, or some vital truth, and the whole tale slides toward disaster. I wanted to cut that off before it started.
If I cannot hide it, I tell her first, and I talk her out of it.
And for the moment, at least, I had her.
"...Scholar. My shoulders hurt."
"Ah. Forgive me. Have you... settled a little?"
"...Yes. My thoughts were in a tangle, but I am calmer now."
She did seem steadier. The trouble was that she had not managed to wipe the look from her face, and everything she was still feeling sat there in the open.
She's still fighting herself.
I sat her down, then took a place beside her, and together we watched the moon climb over the cliff. A cloud-wreathed moon, rising above the crash of waves far below. It was a scene that might have been lifted from a poem.
Of course, the thoughts drifting through Cheong and me were far too tangled to match the view.
"...Cheong. I am very fond of you and your father. Because of the hearts I have seen in the two of you, living here."
"..."
"The care you have for each other does not merely show. It sits on your faces. If that is what leaks out, how much greater must the feeling you keep inside be? I know perfectly well that you want to heal his eyes with every bit of that heart."
"...I see."
She would not look at me. In the moonlight, a single tear slipped between her lashes and ran down her cheek.
"I hate myself."
"Why?"
"If I had not been such a fool about selling the catch... I might have put together those three hundred sacks the monk spoke of."
"That is not your fault."
"But it does not change the fact that I was not enough, and that Father has gone on living in hardship because of it."
"...That the world is hard is no reason to take a knife to your own heart. I do not care to watch it."
If Kongji had been short on confidence, what Cheong lacked was self-worth. It had grown worse since the day I pulled her out of that swindler's hands. She had spent years scraping by, hauling seafood to market in her father's place, and she felt the weight of being the head of the household in her bones. The guilt of having failed that duty was eating her alive.
What she needed now was not comfort. It was a clear look at the facts.
"Cheong. Listen closely to what I am about to say. If you will hear me out, I will do everything in my power to obtain the Panacea Grass and see it used for your father."
"...Do you mean that?"
"Have you ever seen a scholar tell a lie?"
"...What does being a scholar have to do with lying...?"
"Fair point, I suppose. Anyway. Tell me when you are ready. I will wait even if the moon falls out of the sky."
I put a little comedy into it on purpose, and at last Cheong turned toward me and let out a small, startled laugh.
"...I'm ready. So please. Tell me."
"Are you? Then listen well. ...Even if you had worked yourself to the bone from the very beginning, you would never have been able to offer that herb, or that alms-rice."
"...What?"
"Ah, ah! Listen to the end! Tsk!"
"I-I didn't even say a word..."
"You just did! Anyway. Cheong. Do you know what three hundred sacks of rice is actually worth?"
"...I don't. Only that it is a great deal..."
"Right now you bring in about three abalone a day. Is that not so?"
"It is..."
"Then do you have any idea how many abalone you would need to gather three hundred sacks? Fifteen hundred, at the absolute minimum! The minimum!"
"...I beg your pardon?! F-fifteen hundred..."
"And you know the sea better than I do. Do you pull in that many abalone every single day? Do fresh ones spring up from the water the moment you take them?"
"...No."
"Abalone need time to grow. Harvest too many and the beds go barren, and then it takes even longer. And that is abalone. What about the cheaper catch — fish, seaweed, oysters?"
I went on, laying out how much seafood she would have to haul in at current prices to put together three hundred sacks. A light start at five thousand, I told her, and from there it ran into the tens of thousands.
As she listened, Cheong's eyes began to spin. I did not let her drift. I pulled her back and drove the point home.
"Which is to say this. Failing to gather three hundred sacks was never your fault."
"...!!"
"The price was too high to begin with. Grotesquely so."
As I said it, a thought that had been turning in the back of my mind settled into something like a conclusion. I had chewed it over more than once, and it still held. It would need testing.
"Does it not strike you as strange? At almost the same moment, you learned of two different cures. And the price of both is three hundred sacks of rice — a fortune you could never obtain, no matter what you did."
And as luck would have it, the merchants had the one method by which Cheong could raise that sum.
Offering herself as the sacrifice.
"What...? Why would anyone—!"
"I don't know why. That is why I mean to go and find out tomorrow. I have questions for the merchants."
Shim Bong-sa had crossed paths with a monk walking about without a staff, and had been given that offer. Then what of the merchants? Had they, too, met a monk?
I wanted to ask them that.
"So tomorrow, do not go out to work. Stay at home."
"I will not."
"Then until I return tomorr— wait. What did you just say?"
"I said I will not."
"...??"
"Scholar."
My plan had been perfectly simple: she stays home, quietly, as told. And yet Cheong was looking at me as though she meant to bore a hole through my skull. Then she whirled, shoved me flat, and stood over me, staring down.
W-what in the world...
"You say all those heartbreaking things to me, and then you mean to go and settle it by yourself?"
"That isn't—"
"This is my affair, and my father's. How am I supposed to leave it in someone else's hands? That is not what I was taught."
"It isn't that. The merchants may well try to harm you, so—"
"Then is that not all the better? If I appear willing to cooperate, you will have a much easier time drawing the answers you want out of them."
In other words, she meant to make herself the bait.
"If you do that, I may not have a proper reason to meet them at all."
"A reason, you say?"
"Yes. You are the one they want, so that is one thing. I am an outsider. They will grow suspicious..."
"Do you not already have a reason?"
"Hm?"
The girl standing over me sank down all at once, settling herself upon me, her face flushed a vivid red. Her fingers came up and traced the lines of my face.
"D-didn't you call yourself my husband, Scholar...?"
I had, perhaps, given her too great a shock.
Something in her manner had shifted — and not subtly.