Gap-su's knee had been aching for three days.
The sky was clear. There was no wind. The young fishermen at the harbour had their nets spread out and were sitting in the sun.
Gap-su went down and said: tie up the boats. Take in the nets.
One of the young ones laughed. The sky's this clear, old man.
Instead of answering, Gap-su looked at the sky. By evening they would know.
A knee that has been on boats for forty years knows before the sky does. But the only person who trusts a knee is the person who has one.
At midday the sky turned the colour of ink.
That was the first time Gap-su used that word. Until then the sky had been either overcast or dark, one or the other. That day's sky was neither. It was as if something had been ground up above it.
The waves came over the stone wall. Roofs flew. Gap-su heard the roof beams crying.
People ran for the mountain.
Gap-su sat on his porch and left the door open.
Only those who have something to run from run.
He watched the sea bare its teeth. It was a sea he had known for forty years. He was not afraid. What there was to lose he had lost ten years ago.
In the middle of the storm, Gap-su spoke to the sea.
He did not shout. He said it quietly.
"Ten years ago, on that night, you took my son."
"That same night, a ship went down with him."
"What ship it was, I did not ask. I asked, and got only the sound of waves."
"Today I will not ask."
"Only do one thing."
"If you have something to take, take me. And if you have something to give back — give it back now."
The sea did not answer.
At dawn the storm passed. The sky was washed clean and the water was calm. It was as if nothing had happened.
But Gap-su knew. The bottom had turned over.
Bae-swe went out to read the water routes at dawn the following day.
A sea after a storm is not the same sea. The sand on the shoals moves and the currents change direction. To a smuggler the water road is his life, so before anything else he had to learn it again.
A familiar rock was standing in an unfamiliar place. Bae-swe rowed and memorised them one by one.
And at the end of the ebb tide, he saw it.
A single black bow rising out of the water.
Bae-swe stopped the oar. He stayed stopped for a long time.
The ship he had heard about only in rumours for ten years was there. As if it had been waiting for him.
He rowed closer. His heart beat faster than a janggu.
There was a government brand on the split hull. Seaweed had grown on the broken mast.
Bae-swe sat where he was and looked at it a long while.
Ten years ago, on the night this ship went down, the old fisherman's elder son had been in that water too. And last night, Bae-swe had heard, that old man had asked the sea for something in the middle of the storm. If you have something to give back, give it back.
The sea had answered. This bow was the answer.
Bae-swe had spent his whole life pretending not to know. A man who knows too much does not live long.
And yet the oar did not stop. The bow of his boat kept turning that way.
He knew what was down there. Government documents, and human bones.
He cannot dive. He is a man of the land.
But he knows a woman who dives. A woman whose sumbisori is unusually clear. A woman who knows the sea floor like her own yard.
Ok-i did not answer for three days.
When Bae-swe came and told her, she already knew. She was the one who had seen that ship. She had seen it in summer, and told no one.
On the third day she asked.
"What is inside it?"
"Government documents."
"Only that?"
Bae-swe was quiet for a moment.
"Human bones as well."
Ok-i nodded. She already knew that too.
That night she could not sleep. The sea had always been generous with her. She harvested breath and she harvested abalone, and it never held it against her.
But if I dig beside the dead — will the sea forgive me.
The chest was not heavy.
Underwater everything is light. Ok-i carried it up in her arms and set it down on land. It smelled of wood soaked in salt. It smelled of ten years under the sea.
She set it down in front of the scholar's hut and said:
"I don't know letters. Read it to me."
"Why?"
"Because I carried it up from the sea floor in my arms. I have to know what I was carrying."
Su-gyeom opened the chest.
The salt had eaten half the documents.
The half that remained made his hands shake.
There was the seal of the Royal Secretariat. There was a court historian's hand. It was the record of the year of the uprising ten years before — the records the court had wanted buried.
The names of those who bought false testimony. The ledger of those who framed people to their deaths.
Su-gyeom read, and then set down the brush and stood up.
He opened the door and looked at the night sea.
Now I know why I came to this island.
He had not been exiled for writing the truth. He had been sent to the place where the truth was buried.
The hand that erased him and the hand that sank this ship were the same hand. The same seal.
They threw him to the end of the world. And at the end of the world, their crime was waiting.
Ok-i asked.
"If I dig beside the dead, will the sea forgive me?"
Su-gyeom did not answer for a long time. Then he said:
"The old fisherman lived ten years without knowing why his son died."
"What those bones are waiting for is not quiet."
"It is a name."
Ok-i was silent a long while. Then she said:
"A name, you said."
"Then I will go down at the dawn tide."
She left the iron pick behind.
Today she was not going to take. She was going to receive.
Going in through the split hull, seaweed hung down like a door curtain. Inside it, they were there. People the waves had not moved. Twelve of them.
Somebody's elder son was there. A son who had waited ten years was there.
Ok-i knocked on the wood with her fingertips.
"I've come. I've come at last."
And inside herself she sang the song her mother used to sing. Ieodo sana, ieodo sana. The name of an island you go to and do not return from. The name of the place they should have gone.
"I am not a thief. I am a guest."
"I have come to take your names."
Her breath ran out. She rose toward the light.
The breath burst over the water.
Hwiii —
Three people on land heard that sound. The smuggler waiting in the boat, the scholar standing in front of his hut, and the old fisherman sitting on the shore.
Hearing it, Gap-su put a hand on his chest without meaning to. Alive. She's alive again today.
He did not yet know that what came up out of the water that day was not only that one woman.
Today it is not only I who came up.
Ok-i said that to no one. She only looked once toward the old fisherman as she came ashore.
And that was enough.