Flowers That Cannot Take Root
"Is that you, Hwa-yeong?"
A woman in shabby, plain clothes came out to greet her with a warm smile, her face flushed as though she had something boiling over a fire.
Hwa-yeong pressed a finger to her lips, signaling her to be quiet.
"I've told you time and again you don't have to look after me... and still it shames me so."
The woman gave an embarrassed laugh at the sight of the bundle in Hwa-yeong's hands. Hwa-yeong furrowed her brow and snapped, though the tail end of her deliberately lowered voice trembled.
"You. What has your mother-in-law ordered you to do this time? What has she ordered, that your face is red as that?"
"Ah, well... I was just boiling some medicinal herbs. It seemed she'd caught a cold."
"That wretched old woman! She's three times sturdier than you are. Even with those hands of hers that grab your hair by the day—those brutal hands—and she has the gall to play sick?"
"Don't say that. How heartbroken she must be. The only son she raised so preciously... went the way he did."
Bitterness soaked through the woman's smile. Hwa-yeong bit her lip.
"You. Listen to me, and listen well."
Still clutching her bundle, Hwa-yeong seized the woman's hands in both of hers. The elegant hands of a gisaeng locked together with the rough, calloused hands of a widow.
"Run away."
In an instant, desperation gave weight to Hwa-yeong's voice.
"Soyeong, run. You— you cannot stay in Cheonmaekji any longer."
The woman called Soyeong gave a small shake of her head.
"Where would I go, Hwa-yeong?"
"Anywhere! Wherever it is, it beats this place. A hundred times, a thousand times better. You think there's nowhere under heaven for your one body to rest?"
"And what about my mother-in-law, then..."
At that, Hwa-yeong wrenched her hands free of the grip she'd held so roughly. Then, with a feverish jerk, she pulled the silver butterfly hairpin from her own head and forced it into Soyeong's palm.
"Don't talk to me about that! Go, just go! Go, I said!"
"...But you're here too."
Soyeong smiled like a fool.
"You and Mother are both here. How could I leave? Where could I possibly go..."
"You fool. Are you truly a fool? Those poor little children, and I..."
"I'm the same, Hwa-yeong."
Just as Hwa-yeong cherished the young girls of the gisaeng house like family, Soyeong too tended the mother-in-law she was left alone with, as her own flesh and blood.
The gazes of these two women—alike, yet different—met in sorrow.
"Endure it long enough, and it will ease. You, and I both."
"...Even back when we were poor, even when I watched you refuse, to the very last, to be sold into the gisaeng house and choose marriage instead—I never dreamed you'd go on living like such a fool."
Tears welled in Hwa-yeong's eyes, but she dared not raise her voice, for fear Soyeong's mother-in-law might hear.
A flower that could speak with a human tongue was not permitted to make a loud sound.
"Dragged around by the hair, accused of devouring your husband, beaten black and blue...! Put to every menial chore under the sun, until you've forgotten how to live...! Is this truly the life you want to live in Cheonmaekji? Is it?"
Even under such cruel words, Soyeong offered her only a tender smile.
Bang!
Then it happened. The door burst open with a clatter, and Soyeong's mother-in-law appeared.
"You wretch! Where do you think you—why, what's this? You! You shameless creature!"
"Mother...!"
Soyeong's face went white as death.
"Go, quickly, Hwa-yeong. Quickly!"
The hands pushing at Hwa-yeong's back were urgent. Soyeong pressed the bundle Hwa-yeong had brought back into her arms, then dashed toward her mother-in-law.
"So you've been happily feeding me the food that filthy creature has been bringing, have you? The wretched thing. The ungrateful thing!"
"No, Mother. I only exchanged a greeting in passing, nothing more...!"
"You take me for a complete fool, don't you! Well, of course—the woman who ate her own husband would say that!"
As the old woman seized her by the hair, Soyeong's eyes found Hwa-yeong's. Go quickly. It was a farewell, given with her eyes alone.
How miserable it was, that the lives of two girls who had grown up poor should turn so wretched even once they'd become women. Leaving the sound of Soyeong's beating behind her, Hwa-yeong's steps back to the gisaeng house were desolate.
And a single butterfly hairpin, buried in the dirt where it had fallen, looked lonelier than anything else in the world.
"Hohoho..."
As she trudged toward the gisaeng house, a woman with wildly disheveled hair came limping toward her from far off, clutching two bundles of old clothes to her chest.
The people nearby murmured softly among themselves. Some wore looks of pity; others frowned.
"Our Janghwa, our Hongryeon... shall we go play with flowers with Mother, hm?"
She was the stepmother of the sisters Janghwa and Hongryeon, who had taken their own lives.
"We'll go down to the water and fold paper boats—like this, like this—and wear flower rings and flower bracelets on our hands. Won't that be fun, hm?"
The voice, speaking with the tenderness one uses with a small child, soon began to tremble. She stared at Hwa-yeong for a long moment—then came running straight at her.
"Janghwa!Hongryeon!Janghwa!Hongryeon!"
The words spilled from her in a breathless torrent. She was not in her right mind.
"Whereweremychildrenhaveyou-seenthem?Hm?Haveyou-seenmychildren?Mydaughterswherearethey?Hm?You've-seen-them,haven't-you?Have-you?Haven't-you?Hm?"
Tears streamed down the stepmother's face as she grabbed at Hwa-yeong with filthy hands, wailing.
"Unhand me, this instant!"
With a look of pure disgust, Hwa-yeong flung her off.
"My babies! My babies, does it hurt? There, there, it's all right, Mother is here. Don't cry. There, there."
In the blink of an eye, the stepmother had thrown herself flat to the ground, gathering up the bundles of old clothes that tumbled and rolled away, cradling them as she would her own children.
Hwa-yeong thrust the bundle she'd been carrying into the woman's lap as if tossing it away.
The knotted cloth came loose at the end, and the food inside spilled out, bouncing onto the ground.
"At least feed yourself once in a while, instead of wandering about hunting for your children! In the state you're in—skin and bone."
Brushing the dirt from her clothes, the woman pressed her lips inward and bit down on them. Hwa-yeong knew she had not always been this way.
The stepmother of Janghwa and Hongryeon, who had once smiled so kindly even at a lowly gisaeng...
"And what is all this, hm? There's pumpkin fritters, Janghwa's favorite, and mung bean rice cakes for our Hongryeon too."
Unwrapping the bundle on the filthy ground, the stepmother turned gentle once more, speaking to her daughters as she always did.
Still clasping the bundles of old clothes tight to her chest.
"Yes, let's take this and go on our outing. My babies..."
Stuffing the dirt-flecked food into her mouth one handful at a time, the stepmother beamed radiantly.
"You always give Mother the tastiest bits first, oh, my pretty little ones... my sweet, precious little ones..."
Laughing through her tears, cramming the filthy food into both cheeks until they swelled—she, too, was not herself anymore. She was no longer a person at all.
Watching the stepmother rub the bundles of old clothes tenderly against her own cheeks, Hwa-yeong quickened her pace and muttered under her breath.
"Here, there, everywhere—it's nothing but beasts, the whole lot of them..."
With a self-mocking laugh, Hwa-yeong returned to the giju, where the young girls came running to greet her.
"Unnie! Where have you been?"
"Hwa-yeong unnie!"
The children swarmed up to her like chicks, each vying to speak to her first.
"Unnie! Why did you take out your hairpin? It suits you so beautifully."
"Your jeogori has gotten dirty! Please take it off—I'll wash it for you!"
"Geumji, don't tell me you want to sneak into Hwa-yeong unnie's clothes and try them on again?"
"N-no, I don't! You're one to talk! Haven't YOU tried on Hwa-yeong unnie's ring behind her back, not once but twice?"
As Hwa-yeong watched the girls tussle and bicker, a quiet sorrow settled in her eyes.
My little ones, whom I must protect...
Have we, rooted as we are in Cheonmaekji, no fate but to become paper flowers—haehwa—swaying in the wind, waiting only for someone's hand to snap us off?
Creak...
With a mournful groan, the gate of the giju swung shut.
Seoryeong sat blankly before Jeong-an's grave, where the earth had been heaped high. Her small white hands were caked head to knuckle with dirt.
"..."
Deep in a wild, grass-choked mountain, Jeong-an had returned to nothing. Seoryeong sat at the graveside and gave a small, hollow laugh. And then she spoke—to the Jeong-an sleeping beneath that mound of earth.
"You... did you never once wonder what my name was?"
Jeong-an and Seoryeong had been nothing to each other. Not blood, not master and disciple, not friends. And that was precisely why Seoryeong could never let go of her feelings.
Seoryeong had been a child of more than enough use. The divine power sealed within her body could accomplish anything.
A hundred talismans, painstakingly inscribed with the souls of a thousand priestesses, were worth less than a single talisman Seoryeong dashed off carelessly.
Though the restraint bracelet on her arm suppressed her divine power, if she willed it, she could peer freely into any person's past or future.
Seoryeong was a priestess who feared nothing in this world.
"Leaving without so much as a goodbye—how convenient for you, truly."
She had always believed that Jeong-an, too, was one of them—another in the long line of those who had used her since she was small.
That hypocrite monk, feigning absence of greed—surely one day he'll come to make use of me as well.
And when that day comes, I must kill him without a moment's hesitation. The child who had once ground her teeth like that still owed the world one act of being deceived—so over the long years, enough to soften even the hardest heart, Jeong-an had simply been Jeong-an to her.
Not a mother, not kin, not a teacher, not a friend.
"You never even needed to keep something like me around."
She had simply been Jeong-an.
Why, then, had she carried her along for so long? Seoryeong fingered the restraint bracelet Jeong-an had made with her own hands.
As her fingertips traced the roughly carved character for spirit set into the bracelet, her hand slowed, little by little.
The hollow of her throat rippled pitifully as she swallowed down the hot emotion surging up from within.
The clear tolling of the cloud chime rang out. The sound of a wind chime drifted with it. And at the same moment, the wild grasses bent in one direction. It felt as though someone were approaching from far away.
A cool wind came, as if to caress Seoryeong's cheek. The fine hairs at the nape of her neck fluttered in the tender breeze.
"...Jeong-an?"
Forgetting the harsh words she'd been spitting only moments before, Seoryeong scrambled toward the sound. On Jeong-an's grave sat a single pair of beautiful flower shoes.
Myeong-do trudged steadily up the rough mountain path. At some point, he noticed something uncanny in the scenery. The tree branches, the wild grasses, even the wildflowers were all turning their heads in a single direction.
Like signposts.
The whole world seemed to surround Myeong-do, telling him: Go that way.
"..."
Just as he had the day he first met the Buddhist nun half a month ago, Myeong-do drew a handkerchief from his breast. With it came a single talisman the nun had tucked inside.
Rustle—
With the talisman in hand, Myeong-do tied the handkerchief to a high tree branch. For the sake of the road back.
Before he knew it, the sun had begun quietly slipping away from the far edge of the sky.
"Half a month from now, set your feet toward the east. Head for the place where the sun draws closest, and you will meet the one who can bring all things back to their proper course."
Myeong-do's hand tightened around the nun's talisman. The moment he moved to tuck it back into his breast, the sun came to rest directly above the ground where he stood.
Like a last desperate flare, the scorching light poured down over him.
Having reached the highest point of the mountain, Myeong-do stood, in this very instant, closer to the sun than anywhere else on it.
Ssshhh—. A wind rose, and the sound of leaves striking against one another filled the air.
Scritch, scritch, scritch-scritch... Something wriggled beneath Myeong-do's feet. He stumbled backward in alarm—and it was at that very moment.