Chapter 4: The Kiln Behind the Potter’s Field

Bok Sun drank the rice water in small, greedy sips, her swollen eyes squeezed shut and her fingers curled around the rim of the bowl as though someone might snatch it away.

Her mother knelt beside her and watched every swallow. She had not said a word since Ja Young poured the first cupful from the pot, only stared at the cloudy liquid as if it were something out of a legend, a bowl of dragon’s pearls or water from the spring of youth. When the little girl finally pushed the bowl away and sank back against the quilt, drowsy and damp and breathing easily for the first time in days, the widow bent forward until her forehead touched the floor, and her thin shoulders began to shake.

“Where,” she managed at last. “Where did you find it?”

“Somewhere it shouldn’t have been,” Ja Young answered. “Don’t ask more than that, and don’t tell anyone you have it. Boil a handful at a time, and give her the water first, then the softened grains when she can manage them. There’s enough for a week, perhaps longer, if you’re careful.”

“I’ll share it. The Choi boy—”

“The Choi boy’s family has a little barley. Your daughter has nothing. Feed her first.” Ja Young rose, one hand braced against the wall. “Tomorrow, if there’s any left over, we’ll talk about the Choi boy.”

So Hee watched her mother straighten, slowly, and saw her press the back of her wrist against her eyes as though they stung.

“Smoke,” Ja Young said, before So Hee could ask. “This house has a bad chimney.”

It did. Every house in the lower village had a bad chimney. So Hee said nothing, but on the walk home through the dark lanes, she noticed that her mother coughed four times, and that she walked more slowly than usual, and that twice she stopped to rest a hand on a wall when she thought no one was looking.

The kiln lay a short walk beyond the last houses of the lower village, at the far edge of a field that had once belonged to the potters and now belonged to thistles. It had been built the old way, a long tunnel of brick and clay climbing the slope like a sleeping serpent, with a row of stoking holes along its back and a firebox at its mouth large enough for a man to crawl inside. The Yang grandfather had fired pots there for forty years, great glazed storage jars that half the village still used for kimchi and soy sauce, but he had been dead for six winters, and no one had lit a fire in the firebox since.

The swallows had moved in almost at once. So Hee heard them before she saw them, a sleepy rustle and chirp from the dark curve of the roof as she ducked through the entrance with a covered basket on her arm.

“Gae Ttong?”

“Here.”

He was sitting against the far wall of the firebox with his knees drawn up, a shape of darker darkness in the gloom. She set the basket down, struck a flint, and lit the stub of candle she’d brought, shielding the small flame with her hand until it caught. The light jumped up the soot-blackened bricks and set the swallows muttering overhead.

“You came,” he said.

“I told you I would.”

“You also told me I’d be dead by morning if I snored and gave away our hiding place.”

“That was a joke.”

“Was it?”

“Mostly.” She knelt and uncovered the basket: a bowl of millet gruel, still warm, a cup of barley tea, a folded quilt that smelled of the herb chest it had been stored in. “It isn’t much. It’s what we had.”

He looked at the bowl for a long moment before he picked it up. “This is your supper.”

“It’s half of my supper. My mother insisted on giving you half of hers as well, so don’t argue, or she’ll take it as a personal insult.” She sat back on her heels and watched him eat. He ate slowly and carefully, the way hungry people learned to eat so the food lasted longer, but there was something in the way he held the bowl, the angle of his wrist and the tilt of his head, that still didn’t look like any hungry man she had ever seen. “How are your hands?”

“Better.”

“Show me.”

He set down the bowl and held them out. She unwound the bandages by candlelight and examined his palms, turning them gently toward the flame. The broken blisters had begun to dry, the raw skin knitting at the edges, and there was no heat or swelling to suggest infection.

“You’ll live,” she decided, and began to wrap them again with fresh cloth.

“That’s a relief. I was worried.”

“You should be. Grave dirt in an open wound kills more strong men than swords do.” She tied off the first bandage. “My mother lost a soldier that way when I was small. He’d survived three battles in the north and came home to die of a scratch from his own plow.”

“Your mother has seen a great deal.”

“More than most.” So Hee reached for his other hand. “She was chosen for training when she was twelve. They sent her to the capital, to the medical office in Hanyang, and she studied there for six years. She was the best in her class, she says. Reading, pulse, needles, midwifery, all of it.”