Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 104

by Kressel, Matthew

  I always worried because whenever a drought struck, an accursed storm of blood always followed. The king always laid the blame at anyone’s feet: government officials had committed some kind of error . . . or the royal samu had slacked off during his divination ceremonies . . . or the soldiers had gone lax at their guard-posts. Ever since that torrent of blood first surged out from the heart of the palace, through the front gate and out into the courtyard beyond, all manner of alarming stories had spread. It was rumored that when the king slumbered, he set his head upon a human pillow, and that when he sat, it was likewise upon a person . . . and that if either dared to move, the king would slay them with his sword.

  The people call him simply Cha-Daewang, “The Next Great King.” Next, that is, in relation to his predecessor, Great King Taejo. After the previous king, Taejo, had lain ill in his royal bed for an extended period, he’d delegated authority to Cha-Daewang, who had responded with conspiracy. To claim the throne, he had quoted ancient scriptures: “Traditionally, when the senior brother grew elderly, his younger brother was to succeed to the throne . . . ” Great King Taejo, powerless to fight him off and anyway wise enough to desire no further spilling of blood, had abdicated the throne and gone off to live out his last days in seclusion in his detached palace.

  Following the accession of the Cha-Daewang, I stayed home, barely going outside. Only into the dark of night, like a bat, did I escape my room, wandering around briefly while trying to avoid others’ gaze, and returning home before dawn. My skin turned indigo, matching the hue of the night, and my eyes began to gleam yellow. A physician reassured me that I shouldn’t fret over this, for it was, he said, merely a deformation of my retina, an unusual new layer to reflect the light from the back of my eyeballs; and that the development of this odd retinal layer is actually common to people who work at night. He also explained why my pupils stretch inhumanly wide at night, while narrowing during the day time, like a cat’s: it was merely to control the quantity of light to which I was exposed. When I worried about whether I might pass this trait on to my children someday, he reassured me, speaking of some theory he called yong-bul-yong, that is, use-and-disuse, according to which such traits would be unlikely to be passed down beyond a single generation. There was no evidence, he said, that such “acquired characteristics” would be passed down to later descendants this way.

  One hot night, I escaped from my room and headed to one of the royal altars. By then, the samu had been performing their fire-rites, in an attempt to summon the rains, for several weeks. One of them—a samu I knew and got along with well—noticed me hiding in the darkness, and came over to greet me. We’d known one another since childhood, and were of the same age; now he was the only one remaining who wasn’t perpetually bent at the waist. (Our royal subjects had spent so long bent forward deferentially before the king, that now their bodies were warped into a permanent bow, and their faces always pointed toward the ground.)

  “What has brought you here so late at night, Your Royal Highness?”

  It was precisely on account of situations such as this that I avoided going out in public: despite the status of Tae-ja—the Crown Prince—having transferred from me to my cousin, many people still followed the old habit of referring to me as if it had not. Each time someone committed such an error, it felt as if my life has been palpably shortened by several years.

  “I was just dropping by to check in on the rain invocations . . . ”

  The samu glanced around and whispered, “How could the sky not turn dry, when the hearts of the people are so parched? True, it is when the people are fatigued that the sky ought to be kindest to them, but nature’s laws don’t work that way.”

  “I remember my deceased father often used to call down the rains.”

  “As you may know, my lord, to summon rain requires a change in atmospheric pressure. For example, when one’s spiritual energies are quickly extended into the sky, the water vapor in the air above condenses and falls down. It also rains when two massive spirits take form in the heavens and do battle there; or when a giant creature blocks the flow of wind, and the air strikes against its body—this, too, may produce rain. It is great movements such as these, in the air, that are necessary to produce precipitation.”

  “Like . . . at the moment when a great giant moves?”

  “Yes, but there aren’t so many of them alive now, and each one keeps such a vast territory for itself, because they’re so enormous, and such ravenous eaters besides. Your late father was close friends to one such giant, who lived in the Taebek mountains. He used to summon the rains through that Revered Ban-go, but it’s been ages since He stirred. They say his body is blanketed with dirt and trees, and that he is now indistinguishable from the bedrock beneath him. Rumor has it the other titans are all in a similarly torpid state, now: to seek them out would be pointless.”

  The learned had urged for all the current scholars of phylogeny and embryonic recapitulation to gather and study together, for a generation or so, in order to analyze the rules governing the differentiation of living things. Even so, since all the forms of everything living will have metamorphosed within a generation, such study is pointless. Many such scholars have declared, “There exists no rule governing the differentiation of forms,” and retreated to their beds, concealing themselves beneath their blankets. But a certain tendency definitely exists. Most giants who lived during prehistory have ceased in every life-function, including breathing and movement, and chosen to become mountains, rivers, and lakes. Likewise, the tremendous lizards which once dwelled on the earth and in the heavens had also cast aside their dignity and diminished themselves to the size of one’s finger.

  “Is there any sign that points to a resurgence of the giants?”

  “With so little known about nature’s governance of how forms evolve . . . how should I know? Still, it seems unlikely for anything too enormous to reappear. These days, not only humans, but even smaller animals tend to hunt anything too big. That’s why lizards have became smaller: coordinated group effort pays off more than the trouble of maintaining a single, vast body.”

  “So is there no other way to call the rain?”

  “For now, all we can do is pray. Sure, human longings are unscientific, but . . . that doesn’t mean they have no effect.”

  As I turned to leave, he added one more comment: “I noticed that the sun is due to swallow the moon on the last night of this month. Please be careful: it’s inauspicious . . . ”

  As I watched him return to his place, I pondered about the meaning of his warning. It was a bizarre comment: a lunar eclipse? During the new moon? How could that happen? The moon’s face would be hidden from the sky, and anyway, wasn’t a lunar eclipse caused when the Earth’s shadow darkened the moon? If the sun were to “shade” the moon, would not the night blaze bright as day? But then, gazing up into the night sky as I pondered his words, I realized my error: even on the last night of the lunar month, the moon still hung in the sky—it was merely hidden from view. To what end might the sun swallow and shade the moon, when it is already invisible? Wouldn’t that just be mere nonsense, some sort of purposeless cruelty? The sun was the father of all time, as the king is the father of the people; therefore . . . the cruel sun must represent the cruel king . . . and . . . the invisible moon must be the prince who lost his inheritance . . .

  I let out a deep sigh. There was no way to prepare myself for that, though I felt no inclination to do so anyway. Even before he’d claimed the throne from my father, my uncle had already held the reins of power. Even street-beggars have a place to lean their backs against, when they want to rest their legs. Me? I have nothing to lean against in this world . . . so how could I sustain my life, even if I did flee?

  I crawled through the darkness back to my room. I usually climbed over trees and scuttled over the ground instead of walking on two feet. I first began doing so, bending my body down each time I heard footsteps, to avoid discovery, but at some point a callus had formed u
pon my palms, like the ones on people’s feet.

  It has been said since ancient days that ontogeny repeats phylogeny. The cells of our bodies continue being born and dying at every moment, and the blood in our veins is continually being created and disappearing; when old cells die, then new ones appear to fill the gaps left behind, and soon enough, not one of the original cells of one’s body remains. In other words, one truly becomes a completely different creature not only in mind, but also in body. All creatures, whether they wish it or no, die and are reborn several times during their lives.

  My late mother, bless her, emphasized repeatedly how revolting one’s appearance would be at the end of his life, if he failed to spend his whole life struggling ceaselessly to maintain his humanity. Only a rare few manage to die with a recognizably human form: many more people end their lives shaped like animals and insects. The aristocrats who pass their days comfortably in their rooms, living off taxes and stipends garnered from the people, lose their human forms the soonest. How many of them develop stubby legs and tails, and fat, reddish bellies, their faces dominated by bulging cheeks!

  From my early childhood, my mother constantly repeated to me the tale of one woodcutter. This woodcutter was married to a woman from a certain winged race whom he met by chance at the shore of a lake, but after his wife flew away into the sky he went up to the roof and wept, and could neither eat nor sleep. His body diminished until it was tiny, and his legs became as thin as chopsticks, while the bottoms of his feet bent and curved, and curved claws sprouted from his toes like the hooks that hold up the bar of a clothes-rack. His fingers atrophied, and then disappeared, while white feathers sprouted all over his body. A scarlet comb grew upon his head and from his throat came the sound of a heartbroken bird, instead of the sound of a man. His longing had transformed his appearance into that of a rooster, but those wings were useless: he could not fly to where his wife had fled. If only his will and longing had been directed more sensibly, he could have developed wings capable of flight, but he had already lost his wits and sealed his fate, by letting slip his ability to control or direct his own development.

  People separated from their lovers become flowers, or ossify into stones like the one in the famous story of Mangbuseok, instead of turning into birds or horses. This tendency of creatures to metamorphose into the complete opposite of that which they long to become is also fascinating. Do you realize that the widely-credited notion that sunflowers follow the sun, is actually mere fantasy? They certainly do grow large flowers out of admiration for the sun, but then they bend their faces down toward the ground. They do this because they cannot bear the weight of those flowers. I thought then that perhaps I was like these others: since I wished nothing so much as to flap my wings and fly far away, maybe I would die instead with a heavy body, its belly stuck to the ground as it crawled about.

  The rains never came, but a late freeze struck the land that spring. Some birds dropped from the sky, frozen dead, while those that survived grew thick coats of feathers. When the cold snap continued, some fat, flightless birds waddled along the ground. Other birds leaped into the water, finding some slight warmth in its depths. Beast and human alike began to starve, for they couldn’t eat even the leaves of the plants, which had long since metamorphosed into thorns. People hid in the mountains and grew long, thick coats of fur, like beasts. Sometimes when people hunted bears, the bears cried out with voices that sounded less ursine than human.

  On the spring day that the assassins came for me, a frost had appeared overnight in the yard outside my home. I was sitting in my room when I noticed some people hiding at a distance behind the trees and walls, quietly approaching my detached palace. Their careful, secretive movements were so furtive that to watch them and wait practically bored me. Before the assassins arrived, my eunuch entered the room and threw himself upon the floor before me.

  “Your Royal Highness, the king’s assassins are approaching the palace,” he told me. “Please, you must flee quickly!”

  “To where? My uncle rules this whole land,” I replied calmly, flipping the pages of my book. For some reason, the eunuch began to weep.

  He sobbed for a while before raising his head, and dutifully said, “Nobody will recognize you, since your appearance has changed so drastically! Let us exchange clothes, so that the Royal Body may survive their attack!” Afterward, he pushed me toward the back door, and sat himself down upon my seat. The night was chilly, and as I crawled out into the dark courtyard, shadowy figures raced into my room. Then the slashing of swords and screaming voices assailed me from behind.

  Grief-stricken, I reflected sorrowfully that my father had founded a nation, and won glory in the eyes of the world’s, but I, his foolish son, could only crawl about on four legs and stay alive by wretchedly allowing another to die in his place. Suddenly death terrified me, for how could I face my father in the next world?

  At that instant came a clap of thunder, and a shower of rain commenced, extinguishing all the torches and plunging the palace into darkness. Finally, at just the right moment, the prayers of the samu had reached heaven. Although it was surely a coincidence, the palace soldiers, ignorant of the sciences, fled in terrified confusion, certain that their own misdeeds had angered the heavens. I seized that instant to go over the palace wall. A lone soldier caught sight of me, but on account of my glowing yellow eyes, he must have supposed I was just some cat upon the wall.

  I couldn’t bear the thought of being around people, so made for the mountains. The rain, having broken the drought, was met by grass surging forth, each blade raising its head toward the sky, and trees unfolding their leaves, while greedily stretching out their roots. In my footsteps, patches of verdant grass sprouted and sank back down toward the soil. The drought, and the sudden rain, had provoked from the plants this animalistic behavior: since it was uncertain when it might rain again, the whole forest around me was noisily occupied spreading seed and growing fruit. I walked and walked through the downpour, until I could walk no more and dropped to the ground in exhaustion.

  There I lay, for I don’t know how long, until I caught a groggy glimpse of what looked like a white birch tree moving. But when I opened my eyes more widely, and looked carefully, I realized it was no birch at all, but a white tiger. The beast was only a foot tall, slender and tailless, and all its body as white as fresh snow. The tiger crept quietly around me. I remained supine, lacking the strength to flee the creature, and with a wan smile I wondered whether it was a worthy death, to join the cycle of sustenance in the form of a predator’s meal.

  “What’s so funny?”

  When the tiger spoke, I was stunned. Its voice was very clear, with exacting and altogether human pronunciation. How could a tiger speak a human language with such different vocal cords? Momentarily, I let out an anxious laugh, and tears—just then inexplicable to me—fell from my eyes.

  The tiger spoke again, asking, “Why do you weep?”

  “I cried because I feel such pity for you,” I said, remaining where I lay.

  The tiger laughed . . . human laughter. “What’s so piteous about me?”

  “If you can speak human languages, it means you have a human mind; and if you have a human mind, you once were human, despite your present, animal form. I don’t how you came to take the shape of a beast, but it’s sad, isn’t it? How could it not be pitiful, to lose that original form which you inherited from your parents?”

  “What does original form mean, anyway? Ought every creature to spend its whole life as a newborn infant?” the tiger quipped. “You say you were born in a human form, but your ancestors were once bears and tigers, snakes and fishes, and birds and plants. Now you fight to hang onto this human shape, but ultimately you’ll realize the effort is pointless. What’s so precious about dying in the same form you were born into? I might look like an animal, but I chose this form: I wanted to fill my belly with the work of my own two hands . . . and this form is the result.”

  I had nothing to offer in
reply.

  “Do you know that in the old days,” it continued, “it took aeons for creatures to change from one form to another; that it took many ten-thousands of aeons for any kind of differentiation at all to develop. Things aren’t better or worse now—it’s just that a different kind of adaptation is necessary these days. Nature chooses its survivors without considering good, or evil, or superior, or inferior. Even the human form is just a single means of survival chosen by nature. Humans are frailer than rabbits, when they’re not in a group or deprived of their tools! A pathetic weakling like you . . . pitying me? How insolent!”

  The tiger bared its razor-sharp fangs at me, its wrath apparent, so I shut my eyes and tensed in anticipation of the coming attack . . . but as long as I waited, it didn’t slash open my throat. When I dared to open my eyes, I found the tiger quietly watching me.

  “Say it,” the creature finally said.

  “Say what?”

  “What is it you want?”

  “I don’t want anything,” I said. “I just don’t want to be discovered by anyone. I want to live and die without anyone finding me.”

  The tiger said, “You should become a bug, then. Since you can’t get over this fixation on people, it’d be best to become a maggot or a fly. Or . . . how about a worm? Worms enrich the soil. You’d be more useful to people that way, than whatever it is you are right now.”

  Though every single word he spoke dripped with insult, I couldn’t think of any suitable rejoinder to offer him.

  “But those forms are rather distant from mine,” I said. “Becoming a worm would probably be really difficult. What can I do?”