The voice that read the decree came in the morning.
Let the criminal hear. For the crime of troubling the realm with a brush, he is sentenced to exile on an island at the southern edge.
Su-gyeom knelt and listened. The official's voice shook. It was the cold. That morning was unusually cold, and the official was young, and this was probably the first time he had been given such a duty. Listening to that tremor, Su-gyeom had a strange thought — what will this man say to his wife tonight when he gets home.
The gat was taken off his head. The robe was torn. What remained was only fingers stained with ink.
He did not hear the gates of Hanyang close behind him. Gates close quietly. It was only after about twenty paces, when he looked back, that they were already far away.
A thousand ri is not something you walk. It is something you endure.
Two guards, one ahead and one behind. They chained only his ankles. Leaving his hands free was not kindness but arithmetic — if the hands are bound, the face hits the ground first when a man falls, and a damaged face raises questions at the destination.
The rice fields ended and the stone walls grew lower. From some day onward there was salt in the wind.
At a tavern an old woman held out a bowl of soup. When he said he had nothing to pay with, she said nothing, bowed her head, and turned away. A guard saw it and pretended not to.
Eating that soup, Su-gyeom understood. The people know who the criminal is. Those inside the palace, or the one out here on the road.
He crossed one mountain pass, and the world ended.
No — where it ended, the sea began.
The man who ferried him to the island was an old fisherman.
His name was Gap-su. He had come because the office paid a fee, though he never asked how much. He did not tell Su-gyeom to get in the boat. He simply sat holding the oar, so Su-gyeom worked out that he should climb aboard.
There was no sound but the oar.
After a long while Gap-su asked.
"What did you do?"
"I wrote."
"Wrote what?"
"What happened."
Gap-su nodded. That ended the conversation.
Su-gyeom looked back and counted the mainland going away. Every twelve pulls of the oar, it shrank by the width of a hand.
That evening in the village Gap-su said this: they call him a criminal, but his eyes were clear. The sea does not sort people.
What an exile is given on an island is a roof.
Food is not provided. There is a law that exiles may not work, but keeping that law would mean starving, so no one mentions it. In his first month Su-gyeom learned to mend nets, and in his second to dry seaweed.
In the third month a child was standing in front of his hut.
"They say you know letters."
"I do."
"Then write my name."
Su-gyeom wrote the child's name in the sand. The child stared at it a long while, then rubbed it out with a foot. And asked him to write it again. Seven times.
Seven days later there were three children, and a month later seven.
Su-gyeom knew it was dangerous. If an exile gathers people, that alone is a crime. But the waves erase sand. Writing done in a place that erases itself can be used by no one as evidence.
For the first time in ten years, he was happy.
Bae-swe first came to that island in the autumn.
A smuggler could hardly have a family name. People called him Bae-swe — the boat man — because he sailed.
He raised his sail only on nights when the moon hid behind cloud. The sail he kept dyed black. He put the harbour lanterns at his back and let the bow follow a single star. The navy's patrol boats snored at night, and when the world slept, Bae-swe woke.
What he carried was never fixed. A sack of salt, a bolt of silk, one letter with no name on it. For a better price he carried banned books as well.
That night, unloading on the island, he saw light leaking from a thatched hut.
"So the exiled scholar lives here."
"He does."
"What do you do at night?"
"I write."
"Write what?"
Su-gyeom smiled.
"The same thing you carry."
Bae-swe thought about that for a long time. He could not read. But he knew perfectly well what he was carrying.
Bae-swe heard the rumour on a winter run.
Ten years ago a ship had gone down on the northern shoal, they said. A ship carrying government records. The truth is sleeping under the water, they said.
He heard it and pretended he had not.
A man who knows too much does not live long. That was how Bae-swe had survived thirty years. He carried and he did not open. He had never asked what was in a chest, never tried to learn who sent a letter.
And yet after that day the bow of his boat kept turning north.
He decided to call it the wind.
Gap-su had lived on that sea for forty years.
The storm took his elder son, the fever took the younger, and his wife went first, waiting. People asked him why he still went out to sea. The sea took everything.
Gap-su never answered that question.
The answer would have been something like this — in an empty house there is no one to speak to.
His eyes open before dawn. Forty years of living that way, and now the body knows first. Thick-knuckled hands mend the net. You can mend a hole; you cannot mend the years.
When he was young he ran up the full-catch flag and laughed loud enough to shake the harbour. Now he comes back with an empty boat and that is fine. As long as the sound of the waves fills the hull, that is fine.
There was one thing, though, that he had told no one.
The night his elder son went under the water — that same night, a ship also went down on the northern shoal. Whether it was a government ship or something else, he does not know. Why his son was in that water, he does not know either.
He asked for ten years, and got only the sound of waves.
The women of the island go into the water.
On land they are wives. They lower their heads, they speak little, and instead of names they are called somebody's mother. But in the water it is different. Underwater there are no noblemen and no lowborn. Whoever holds her breath longest is above; whoever cannot is below. That is all.
Among them, the first diver was Ok-i.
Ok-i learned from her mother, and her mother from hers. The song they sing while rowing out, she learned the same way. Ieodo sana, ieodo sana. The name of an island you go to and do not come back from.
Before the dawn mist lifts she takes the float in her arms and walks into the water. She goes down carrying one breath. To a place no nobleman in a gat can reach, no man with a net can touch.
And when she comes up, the breath bursts over the water.
That sound — hwiii — is what the island calls sumbisori. It means: alive.
Su-gyeom heard it for the first time in spring.
He was sitting by the shore when something like a whistle came off the water. He raised his head thinking it was a bird, and it was a person. A single dark head floating on the surface.
Not knowing what it was, he asked the child beside him.
"That's sumbisori."
"Meaning?"
"The sound you make coming up when your breath has run out."
That evening in his hut, Su-gyeom thought about it again.
The sound you make coming up when your breath has run out. The sound of not having died. He realised that every sound he had made in the last ten years had been exactly that.
That summer, on the northern shoal, Ok-i saw a black ship.
It was deep. The current there was strong and no one went in, but that day the water was strangely clear.
Chests lay sleeping inside the split hull. Fish moved in and out between them. One chest was half open, and inside it something like paper. Underwater, paper does not look like paper. It looks soft and white.
Ok-i saw it and came up.
Her breath had run out. But even with breath left, she would not have touched it.
The secrets of the land stay on the land.
That evening she told no one. Nor the next day, nor the day after.
And so, as that year drew to its close, there were four people on that small island.
There was a scholar exiled for the crime of writing the truth. There was a smuggler who raised his sail only on nights the moon hid. There was an old fisherman the sea had taken everything from. And there was a woman who was master only underwater.
The four knew each other. The island was small; not knowing was impossible. But that they were inside the same story — none of them knew that yet.
A ship had lain on the sea floor for ten years with names sleeping inside it, and only one of them knew, and that one had decided not to speak.
Winter was coming.
And after winter comes the storm.