The Silence of Bones

by June Hur

  “You know,” Inspector Han said quietly, glancing at me over his shoulder, “I am impressed with all you’ve done for this case. With your determination, you can be anything you want.”

  I whispered my gratitude, yet the delight I might have felt withered at the sight of his pale face, the pallor of a man trapped in an unending nightmare. Orabeoni. A tenderness in me wanted to reach out … and do what? What could I do or say to wake my once-brother from whatever it was haunting him? I am here. You aren’t alone anymore, orabeoni. But all I managed to say was, “It has been a difficult case, sir.”

  “It began as a simple case of jealousy,” he murmured, “then turned into one that I was hardly prepared for.”

  It was easier talking about the investigation, the only thing we had in common. Sadness pinched me at the realization that we’d spent more years as strangers than as siblings …

  “How did you know it was Senior Officer Shim, sir?”

  “After Ryun told me of your discoveries, from Councillor Ch’oi’s true son to the horse-dragon pendants, I informed Commander Yi of all this, and he had officers search Shim’s house. The bloody palanquin and his journal were found, which was enough to confirm his guilt, and that is why I was released from house arrest. But I also had another piece of evidence against Shim.”

  “E-evidence?”

  “Calligraphy reflects a person’s character, and an erroneous but habitual brushstroke order serves as a person’s signature.” He raised a finger, and as though he were painting the sky, he traced out a slash, followed by an angular slash, then he closed the box with one last stroke. “The way the character ‘meum’ was written in the criminal’s letter stood out most to me. Its brushstroke order was peculiar, and this distinguishing characteristic repeated itself throughout the letter.”

  “How was it p-peculiar, s-s-sir?”

  “It was written in one stroke, when it ought to have been written in two strokes, or three or more by the unlearned. But just one stroke? Very rare. No such errors existed in Ahn’s writing. Oddly enough, it was identical to Shim’s handwriting.”

  His words reopened a gash. The stinging resentment returned, though duller this time, less intrusive. Why had it taken the inspector so long to notice the similarities in an obvious brushstroke mistake? Officer Shim had shared his written reports with the inspector several times.

  “W-why did you not second-guess Officer Shim right away, sir?” I asked, and withheld myself from adding, If you had, this investigation might have ended long, long ago.

  “Whenever a murder occurred in the past, I’d never had to suspect one of my own. It was always others who were culprits.”

  One of his own … I would never understand this. The bureau was home to Inspector Han and to the other officers, who would face knife-wielding killers together, who would spend nights without sleep while tracking down a criminal, sharing their life stories in whispers over rice wine. They had chosen to walk the same path that twisted through no-man’s-land, and most likely, they would reach the very end together. Always together.

  “I could not sleep, I could not eat, consumed by the cases of Lady O and the priest,” Inspector Han continued. “I relied even more on Shim to keep me sane.”

  I nodded my head while my brows remained crumpled together. This answer would have to do—

  A distant whistle looped and twirled, piercing the stillness.

  For a moment I thought the whistle had come from our team, but by the way Inspector Han froze, as did the entire line of officers ahead, I knew the sound had come from somewhere beyond. Tension tightened the air around us, and officers were already reaching behind for arrows.

  “Spread out,” Commander Yi’s rasping whisper echoed. “Do not let Officer Shim escape.”

  The quick-footed officers scattered in all directions, leaving Inspector Han and me swallowed up in isolation. Dread gouging into my chest, I tried holding tighter on to the saddle horn, afraid that at any moment, something might leap out and knock me off the horse. Instead, my fingers would not move, trembling with exhaustion. Cracks had formed in my red skin, strength draining out in quick waves.

  Inspector Han’s warning drifted into my ears. The cold might kill you.

  With the back of my hand, I rubbed my eyes as a dreamlike haze edged the corners of my vision. It cast a fog so thick over Inspector Han, blurring him into a shadow even though he walked near me. I looked around. The sharp lines of the ancient trees were also blurred, bleeding like ink with too much water.

  Then I heard it.

  A growl reverberating from deep within the chest of a gigantic beast, a rumbling noise that shook the branches and sent tremors though me. But every time I turned to look, the echoing growl came from a different direction—from the mist lurking ahead, from the rock right next to me, from the sky high above. Panic clutched my heart. “D-did you hear that, sir?”

  “Hear what?”

  “A tiger.”

  “Seol-ah…” A note of concern edged Inspector Han’s voice, and I realized that my mind was tipping into delirium. “There are no tigers here—” The rest of his words froze in midair. Stretching out his arm, he gestured at me to be still.

  It took a moment of squinting and rubbing my cloudy vision to see a figure stepping out from behind a tree. The forest was barely illuminated by the moonlight that streamed through the gnarled branches, revealing a crescent of Officer Shim’s face and the blue-white gleam of his blade, drawn partially out from the scabbard.

  “Why is it you?” came Officer Shim’s strained voice. “Why did you come this way, Inspector?”

  “To arrest you.”

  “I do not know what Damo Seol told you, but she is a liar. She’s the one who betrayed you.”

  “No. She’s the only one who chose to do what was right. Now put down your weapon, Shim. You can fight me, but you will not escape.”

  The blade rang as Shim withdrew it entirely, and yet a shadow of reluctance weighed his brows and blunted the sharpness of his gaze. “So be it … So be it then…,” he repeated, as though he needed to convince himself.

  Inspector Han reached for his own sword as he took a step back, and I thought he would dash through the trees for safety. But instead he turned his head, ever so slightly, and whispered to his horse, “Get her away from here.” Then he slapped its rear flank.

  Everything happened so quickly I couldn’t tell what was occurring. The glint of the inspector’s own blade, flashing bright. The neighing horse, eyes wide. The whirring of leaves and the landscape passing quickly by me.

  Exhaustion lay thick in my mind, making it difficult to think, but whatever sense remained swam through and clung to a steadying thought: it was not the inspector alone in the woods, but my brother. The boy who had carried me on his back through the eastern torrent, the boy who had spent most of his days memorizing Confucian classics or writing poems. He was determined to fight Officer Shim, an expert swordsman.

  I slapped my cheek. “Wake up, Seol. Wake up.” Another slap, firmer this time, and the pain struck awake a moment’s clarity. I swung myself forward and reached for the reins, nearly falling off, having barely any strength left to hold on to the saddle horn. I tried again, and once the reins touched my fingertips, I held them tight and then dragged myself upright.

  We steered around and tore through the blue mist, and the wind gathered around me. Grief wailed and echoed off the peaks of the soaring trees. Snow lining the pines shook and fell to the ground. The forest parted for me, the fog parted for me.

  I would not lose my brother. I would not lose him a second time.

  “Wait for me,” I whispered through my clenched teeth. “Please, wait for me.”

  The moment I neared the sound of clashing blades, I climbed off the horse and fell onto all fours. My left shoulder throbbed as I crawled, my feet too frozen to walk, and all the while, I searched for anything—a stick, a stone, anything—to fight with. But nothing solid touched my searching hands.

&n
bsp; “Did our friendship mean nothing?”

  At the sound of Officer Shim’s voice, I peered through the swaying branches and saw Inspector Han lunge forward, his sword striking Shim’s with a resounding clang that turned into a grinding noise as blade pushed against blade. Shim managed to parry away, yet Inspector Han was faster, dashing forward and gaining enough momentum to leap and turn, wielding his sword in an orbit that slashed across Shim’s arm. A ribbon of blood arced into the sky.

  For the longest moment afterward, the two men stood opposite each other, puffs of clouds forming before their lips like smoke.

  Shim touched his wounded arm, then looked up. “I used to think of you as a brother.”

  “I still think of you as my friend, my only friend for more than a decade.” Sweat trickled down Inspector Han’s wrist as he gripped his sword tighter, his eyes glistening bright. “But while I will follow a friend when he is good, if he chooses evil, I will abandon him.”

  “Good and evil depends on which side you are on.” With this, Officer Shim lunged into the darkness. Something had uncoiled in him, letting loose the ruthlessness that had slit a woman’s throat, drowned a man, and strangled his own mother. His sword swung, but Inspector Han dodged, spinning away as his robe billowed around his legs. A breath of relief escaped me, seeing the inspector safe now, anchored on his feet with his sword at the ready.

  “Just like your father,” Shim hissed. “A traitor.”

  He came whirling back, swinging his sword with the force of an ax striking a log, a swing that knocked the sword out of Inspector Han’s grasp and sent him hurtling into a tree. A loud thud, and chips of bark flew off.

  Get up, Inspector. The plea pounded in me as I wondered what to do—me, a weaponless girl against a sword-wielding tiger. Please, Inspector.

  Inspector Han grabbed his sword and leaned his weight on the hilt as he struggled back upright. But he wasn’t quick enough. Officer Shim’s blade gleamed as it slashed through the air and swiped the inspector’s side.

  Time slowed. Every expression that moved across Inspector Han’s face—disbelief, hurt, dawning realization—passed slowly. He reached down and held his side. A rivulet of blood streamed down his knuckles, the flow nearly black in the fading moonlight. The pain weakened his legs and he collapsed to the ground, only to be met with a blade pointed at his throat.

  “You were dying long before tonight,” Shim whispered. “If we meet again in the afterlife, do not blame me for your death.”

  Inspector Han kept his chin raised, and the moonlight gleamed off the blade, casting a white slash across his face and twinkling against the silver pin of his topknot.

  “But…,” Shim added. “I’ll give you another chance. Run away.”

  “Why would you let me go?”

  “Remember when I tried to meet my own father?” Shim’s voice rasped. “He hadn’t recognized me, called me a thief, and had his men beat me. Remember your promise—that one day you would help me rise from my status? Keep your word and let me go.”

  “I would rather you be quick and kill me,” Inspector Han said calmly. “Add to your shame.”

  His words sent a shock through me, and through Officer Shim as well, for he stood frozen. Perhaps the thirteen-year-old boy in him, the one thrown into the well by his own mother, beaten by his own father, did not have enough greed and fury left in him to drag the blade across the throat of his longtime friend—and possibly the only human being who cared for him.

  As hesitation gripped Shim, I knew I had to move. This was my only chance, and they were but a few paces away. Like a calf with wobbly legs, I stumbled forward. My arm moved of its own accord, reaching behind and grabbing hold of the steel pin that held up my own topknot. I jerked it out, the end gleaming fang-sharp.

  With all my might, I raised it high and then plunged the end into Officer Shim’s upper back, feeling flesh rip and the tip scraping across bone.

  A roar exploded from his throat, a sound so full of rage that I startled back, falling to the ground. He swung around, the pin still protruding from his back. “You again,” he growled, brandishing his sword, the blade whooshing through the air. “I thought I’d killed you!”

  I closed my eyes. Enough, I thought, I have done enough in this life.

  And I waited to feel the burning slice of death.

  But it never came.

  I opened one eye, then the other. Waves of shock reeled through me at the sight of Commander Yi on horseback, as well as officers, around a dozen of them, in a circle around us with arrows nocked and drawn.

  “Halt!” the commander’s voice thundered. “Lower your sword, Senior Officer Shim.”

  For a moment, the briefest moment, Officer Shim’s eyes darted from one side to the other, as though he was calculating his escape. But he was surrounded.

  “Lower. Your. Sword!”

  The moment the blade dropped to the ground, two officers hurried forward. They held Shim Jaedeok in a painful grip, his arms twisted behind, making him stagger with his back bent forward. At the sight of his sword, left on the snow right before me, my body shook uncontrollably. I had been too close to death. The inspector had been, too.

  I looked over to see Inspector Han struggling on the forest floor, one arm slung over Officer Goh’s shoulder. I moved forward to help, but stopped at the sound of Officer Kyŏn’s voice.

  “I knew it was him all along.” Kyŏn stood a few paces away, whispering to a fellow officer, a red flush burning the panes of his cheeks. He wouldn’t look my way. “I knew it must have been someone close to the inspector—”

  “Silence!” Commander Yi snapped. “If you stir disorder again in the police court, I will cut out your tongue myself.”

  “But, yeonggam, anyone would have misunderstood the evidence I’d discovered—”

  The officers elbowed Kyŏn, gesturing at him to be silent. And the thorny memories in me also fell still as Councillor Ch’oi stepped through the row of officers, arriving before the seoja, his bastard son, who stood with his torso and wrists bound in rope.

  “You are Madam Byeol’s son?” Councillor Ch’oi demanded. His gaze was sharp and firm, his jaw locked, and his shoulders drew back as though he were king. “The son of the woman you killed?”

  Officer Shim’s face was white and his lips bloodless. He spoke without emotion and did not meet anyone’s eyes. “I am he. The boy named Ji-Won.”

  “You were her disgrace.”

  “I … I did not ask to be born.”

  “But you were, and you caused chaos in the capital.” Councillor Ch’oi gathered his hands behind his back and stared over his son’s head, like he could not bear to spare him another glance. “Tell the commander. How many did you kill?”

  Shim remained silent, only breathing in and out the cold night air, a night that was coming to an end. With anyone else, he would likely have withheld the truth, but before the man who had haunted his life for years, the word slipped out.

  “Four.”

  Lady O, Scholar Ahn, the shaman, his mother. That was four.

  “Is Woorim still alive?” I blurted out.

  “Councillor,” Shim said, ignoring my question, his gaze still fixed upon his father. “Please. My crimes were indeed dreadful, but I thought to myself, perhaps this path I walk is neither black nor white, perhaps it is gray—”

  “Answer the girl!” Councillor Ch’oi bellowed.

  Officer Shim flinched as a boy did under his father’s raised hand, and in a hoarse whisper, he said, “She may still be alive.”

  * * *

  A narrow path wound through the mountain. To one side was a thickly wooded slope that fell away steeply for about five hundred cheok in distance, and to the other side a cliff wall with plant life sprouting from its cracks.

  No one seemed to know where Senior Officer Shim was leading the whole team, which included Councillor Ch’oi, and I wondered if Shim even knew himself. The forest stretched on and on, an endless landscape of trees after more trees,
so unchanging that I paused at one point, wondering if we had not crossed this path before.

  The uneasy sensation that we were being led in circles coiled tight in my stomach several more times before Officer Shim finally stopped in his tracks. His stare drifted down the trail, which wound around granite slabs, down toward a small crevice in the plateau. “Here” was all he said.

  Inspector Han cautiously descended with a limp, along with two other officers. In a few moments’ time, he returned and signaled for the rest of his officers to join him. He hadn’t looked my way, hadn’t signaled me, but I followed anyway.

  Woorim, please be alive, please, I begged with each step down the trail and into the crevice, with each hollow thump of my heart. Please.

  “Why did you lead us here,” Inspector Han demanded, “and not to Madam Byeol’s house?”

  Shim kept his gaze lowered as he replied, “Her house was our meeting point, but this cave was where I intended to hide for the night.”

  “So your helpers are inside?” The inspector’s lips were as pale as a dead man’s, his jaws clenched against the excruciating pain I imagined he was in. The strip of fabric bound tightly around his waist was already wet with blood. “Then order them to come out.”

  “Come—” Shim’s voice cracked. He tried again, his voice this time loud and clear and strained with a grief-stricken note of defeat. “Come out!”

  At first there was silence, the air within the cave so still. Then there came a timid scraping of footsteps, and soon our torchlight illuminated two figures. One was a grime-covered youth, and the other a deeply wrinkled and deeply familiar man. It was the executioner, the one I had often seen washing blood off himself in the backyard of the police bureau. And today, even today, his hands and ragged garment were stained with streaks of dried blood.

  “Whose blood is that?” I demanded, panic rising to my throat. “Wh-where is Woorim?”

  The executioner hung his head. Repeatedly, he sobbed, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry!”

  My knees went weak. As the police arrested the two rogues, I grabbed the torch from a manservant and rushed into the cave. The orange glow of light illuminated the walls, black from woodsmoke, and I flinched as memories swept into my mind—of Woorim hurtling into the stone wall, struck so hard her bones snapped. Lying there on the ground, mouth open, eyes staring at me.