Bring the Sinjangkal
Vrrmmm…
Kang Hyeong-seok drove into the mountains.
Yongin, Gyeonggi Province — the mountain where Lee Geum-kyeong's shrine stood. He had come to pay his respects, and it had been a long while since his last visit.
Ka-thunk, ka-thunk!
Times had been kind to him of late, and the passenger seat was piled with gifts bought on the strength of it; all the same, so long an absence left an apologetic ache sitting in his chest. She won't scold me, but that doesn't make me feel any less sorry about it.
Lee Geum-kyeong had been away for a stretch, off conducting a grand gut. Since her return he hadn't shown his face once, so the guilt could hardly have weighed heavier.
Doom-doom-doom-doom! Chang-chang-chang-chang!
He was drawing close to her shrine when the sound of traditional instruments — kkwaenggwari gongs and barrel drums among them — reached his ears, strangely comforting against the mountain air. Hwaraengi musicians? And woven among the music were voices reciting sacred verses: the ritual chanters. A gut was underway. A sizable one, at that.
Worried that the sound of his engine might disturb the rite, Kang Hyeong-seok slowed to a crawl and parked farther out than usual.
The gut was unfolding on the very flat where he had received the nureum-gut — the pressing rite — as a boy. Lee Geum-kyeong wore her full shaman's vestments: a red skirt beneath a durumagi overcoat of white, yellow, and blue. With the sacred shaman bells and a Sinjangkal blade in her hands, she looked, for all her age, no different from the woman who had pressed that rite for him all those years ago.
Hyeong-seok watched from beside a tree. One look was enough to tell him what kind of rite it was — each gut carried its own distinct character. The food laid out in offering, the music the hwaraengi played, the sacred verses the chanters recited: all of it changed with the ceremony, and even where the purpose was the same, the character shifted with whichever rite was performed.
Chang-chang-chang-chang! Doom… doooom… doom!
The music had been climbing for some time when—
Swoop. Cheong-geum had materialized at his side, holding out a plate heaped with rice cakes. "If you were going to come, you might have at least announced yourself."
Kang Hyeong-seok gave an embarrassed laugh and picked up a rice cake. "The gut was in full swing. I didn't want to get in the way."
Cheong-geum nodded as if that settled the matter, then popped a rice cake into her own mouth. "Aigoo, isn't it pitiful, though?"
"You have to look at it as a good thing."
The rite unfolding before them was a Gun-ung-geori — the Martial Cleansing Rite. A ceremony to console the souls of those who had died bleeding out, it matched, to the letter, the frightening image ordinary people carried of shamanic rites.
Rip!
Lee Geum-kyeong sank her teeth into the enormous pig laid out on the ground. The sight of her biting into raw pork and swinging her head from side to side was grotesque and terrifying at a glance — and soon she would smear its blood across her body and shoulder the butchered carcass herself.
"Is this rite for her?"
"Yes, that's right."
He gazed, with a bitter taste, at the young woman kneeling at the edge of the ritual ground. A Gun-ung-geori looked grotesque and frightening on its face. Its purpose, however, was nothing like what the eye suggested.
"I hope she's washed clean."
"It's the Teacher's Gun-ung-geori, after all."
The rite was an act of washing away sin and paving the road. For the one who would receive the spirits — so that when the divine touched the medium, not a single speck of impurity would remain. Sin and defilement alike, scrubbed clean.
"Will the Teacher perform the Sinnaerim for her as well?"
"No. Her mother is a shaman herself. She means to give her daughter the Divine Calling with her own hands."
"Ah."
The Divine Calling was no small thing, and a mother would want to bestow it on her daughter personally. Entrusting the Gun-ung-geori to Lee Geum-kyeong, then, must have come from the wish that not even the smallest flaw be left behind.
"So another mudang is about to enter the world."
Cheong-geum ate her rice cake with a complicated look fixed on the young woman who would soon walk the same road she had. "Live well, now. And don't let any impurity touch you."
The oddly amusing lilt of it wrung a silent laugh out of Kang Hyeong-seok, and he kept his place until the Gun-ung-geori had run its course.
"Thank you, Teacher."
"Live well."
The middle-aged woman bowed again and again in gratitude, while Lee Geum-kyeong looked at the young woman standing beside her. Still a face full of confusion. She couldn't have been long past her university graduation.
Lee Geum-kyeong pulled the girl — who would now have to receive her god — into a hug and patted her back. "Your mother is a fine woman. Lean on her plenty."
"Yes, ma'am."
"Go on, now. Serve her well, live well."
Having seen mother and daughter off, Lee Geum-kyeong offered her thanks to the hwaraengi and the chanters as well, then began clearing the ritual ground.
"Teacher."
"Grab that wrapping cloth over there, will you."
Despite the long absence, she was treating him like someone who had been at her side the whole time.
Rustle, rustle. The offerings left over from the rite were gathered into one place, and by the time the musicians and chanters had withdrawn, the sun had sunk beyond the ridge and night had fallen complete.
"Have you been keeping well?"
"Same as ever, I suppose."
Hands clasped behind her back, Lee Geum-kyeong looked him up and down and smiled. "You've grown. Seen a great deal, been through a great deal."
"I'm still lacking."
"I doubt that."
It was probably the first proper gut she had held in some time — her eyes were livelier than usual, and there was real power in them.
"And lately you've found some great connections, I hear. Two of them, no less."
"Two?"
"Would it be three, then?"
Her words, tossed out with a faint smile, sent his thoughts turning — and before long he understood exactly whom she meant.
"So you knew everything already."
One was Shin Yo-sep of Shinjin Construction. The other, Shin Jeong-ah of Daejeong Mulsan. Setting aside the shared surname, the two seemed to have nothing in common — and yet lately both had become strongly entangled with him in the shamanic realm.
"Actually, they're the reason I came."
"Which one?"
"Both."
Lee Geum-kyeong gave a small nod and looked up at the moon ripening yellow overhead. "One of them is someone who can help you — but you are the one who must reach out first. Don't turn away from him."
She was reading his fortune. With no subject named, the words sounded vague, but it was perfectly clear whom she meant.
"He's hiding his past, and that past struck me as a heavy one."
"All the more reason you should be the one to take his hand, no?"
"Even though he's an exorcist priest?"
"Are we not all, every one of us, people who follow the will of the divine?"
After a moment's deliberation, Kang Hyeong-seok nodded gravely. And then it came.
"The other is a bond sent down from heaven."
His eyebrows bent. Surely she didn't mean someone other than Shin Jeong-ah? That was how suddenly the words had landed.
"Where there is a moon, there is a sun; where there is a mudang, there is a chanter. It is that kind of bond. So when the time comes to lean, lean gladly — and ask for help without shame."
"...I'm not sure it will be that easy."
Since the Damgeum-ju incident, Shin Jeong-ah hadn't said a word about any of it. But she had been badly frightened, and her temperament had always had a volatile streak. And she was his workplace superior, on top of everything else.
"In the end, she will help you — all the way. That's the kind of bond it is."
Would that really be so? He could picture her face going stern far more easily than a cheerful I'll help you! But he kept the thought to himself and only nodded.
"Teacher! I've scattered all the road rice and come back."
Cheong-geum returned just then, an empty rubber bin in hand, the leftover offerings strewn along the roadside for the dead. "Good work. Did the wandering spirits eat their fill?"
"As always."
A mountain after sundown was thick with yin energy, where wandering souls gathered easily — and the rice was laid out for them.
"Now that everyone's here, I have things to say."
Cheong-geum, who had been about to rinse the bin, opened her eyes wide and came over.
"I'll be making a trip before long."
"The place you went to before?"
Something Kang Hyeong-seok knew nothing about, judging by the way Cheong-geum's face stiffened as she pressed the question. Did the Dragon King rite go badly...? That had been the reason for Lee Geum-kyeong's recent absence — a rite praying for the peace of the sea and a bountiful catch, and this time she had stayed away longer than usual.
"No. It's not that."
Cheong-geum's eyes relaxed with relief, and Lee Geum-kyeong exhaled through her nose, shaking her head. "When the time comes, I'll return to that place. But for now, I should go see my old friend."
"Ah..."
"I won't leave the shrine empty for long. Mind it well while I'm gone."
"Yes, Teacher."
Cheong-geum answered with full ceremony, and Lee Geum-kyeong's gaze turned to Kang Hyeong-seok. "You will come with me."
"Me?"
At his startled echo, she stared at him as though the surprise itself were the strange thing. "You carry your own weight in the trade now. Showing your face can only do you good. And there's something I need from you, besides."
Kang Hyeong-seok looked at her, at a loss. Being acknowledged as a practitioner of the calling was a joyful thing — acknowledged by Lee Geum-kyeong, no less. No one in all of South Korea could dispute it, and it was an honor he might well have held his head high about. But the words that followed were heavy.
"How would I even be of help to you?"
"It's work you can do, so carry no burden over it."
Under a gaze like a grandmother's, watching a grandson grown tall, he smiled sheepishly. "Then if you'll tell me what it is, I'll prepare as best I can."
"I'm going to see a friend off."
"...I'm sorry?"
Lee Geum-kyeong pressed her lips together and chose her words for a moment. When she spoke again, her eyes carried more thought in them than before. "A friend who doesn't have many days left. I mean to pave her road, so that she arrives somewhere good."
"Ah..."
It was much like a bujeong-geori — washing away impurity and laying the path so the departed might pass on to a good place. For a friend soon to cross over, it was the last gift Lee Geum-kyeong could give.
"Understood."
It was not a thing he could bring himself to refuse. And after he had answered—
"It may take a few days."
"Ah — then I'll put in for leave."
He said it without a flicker of hesitation, and Lee Geum-kyeong's face showed plainly how much the answer pleased her. "No, there's no need for that."
"But you said it would take several days."
"The eldest son there runs a large native-chicken farm. He's a good boy who listens to me, so I'll drop word for him to look after you."
In that case, the company would likely overlook a few days' absence — after all, he would technically be away winning a contract. Still, he wondered whether even a company that handled Daejeong Mulsan's range of goods would swallow the notion of his going off to sign a chicken farm.
"Now, let's see. Where did I say that place was?"
Having read the expression on his face, Lee Geum-kyeong clasped her hands behind her back, looked up at the moon, and went on. "Samgol Poultry Farm, was it? Or Sapgol?"
Kang Hyeong-seok's eyes went wide. "Samgol? Isn't that the largest native-chicken farm in the country?"
"Ah, Samgol. Yes, that's the one."
It was the most famous native-chicken producer in Korea for quality — renowned for a richer aroma and finer meat than any other bird on the market. And supply was scarce by design: what little reached the market was exported for chicken stock or bought up whole by famous restaurants and major corporations.
Land a deal with a place like that, and Daejeong Mulsan could supply steadily into a corporate distribution network that already stood built.
"But as I understand it, their buyers are already all locked in."
"I hear they've taken to raising silkie chickens this time as well. And those birds still haven't found an owner, have they?"
"I'm going."
This deal he had to land, whatever it took. At his instant answer, a smile spread across Lee Geum-kyeong's face — the smile of someone who had known he would say exactly that.
"We leave in two days. We'll take your car."
"Yes, Teacher!"
He answered briskly — and remembered the gifts still sitting in the passenger seat. He had just turned toward the car when—
"Bring the Sinjangkal with you."
The weight in Lee Geum-kyeong's voice caught his gaze and held it.