Things here in Korea were different. Christians, Catholic or Protestant, were a small minority. Folks from one denomination didn’t sneer at those who belonged to another. They presented a united front against their persecutors. In Kim Il-sung’s regime, that meant against just about everybody. Things were easier in the south, but only relatively.
Cade grabbed the chopsticks laid across the bowl of rice. He wasn’t so smooth with them as the natives were, but he managed. You got better at everything with practice. He gulped the rice and the fiery pickled cabbage. He’d dropped a lot of weight since getting cut off, but he didn’t care. He was getting close to the American lines. Fried chicken and bacon and apple pie and scrambled eggs and hash browns lay around the corner. He’d plump up just fine.
The sun had gone down. Moonlight slipped between the battered planks of the shed wall and painted thin, pale zebra stripes across the dirt floor. The village, like most Korean villages after sunset, was quiet as the tomb. No electricity, no kerosene for lamps. People had candles and oil lamps, but didn’t like to use them. Whatever oil and tallow you burned, you couldn’t eat later if you got hungry enough.
A dog howled, off in the hills. Some people hereabouts had kept dogs as pets before the war. Now dogs that hung around people turned into meat. A couple of villages back, somebody’d fried a little bit of dog flesh for him, stirred together with rice. It tasted wonderful; it was the first meat he’d had in a long time. Whether he’d like it so well if he were less hungry…was a question for another day.
Farther away, still several days’ travel to the south, artillery rumbled on the edge of hearing. Getting through the lines would be the tricky part. Cade didn’t aim to worry about how he’d do it till he had to try. After getting cut off, he hadn’t really believed he would come close enough to the front in the south to need to worry about it.
He’d slept through the day, his felt hat doing duty for a pillow. Only that bare ground under him? He didn’t care, not even a little bit. He figured he could have slept on a swami’s bed of nails. Now it was nighttime, so, like a cat or a rat or a bat, he was awake.
Soft footfalls outside the shed said a couple of Koreans were awake, too. Silently, he took hold of the PPSh. He didn’t think anything here had gone wrong. If he turned out to be mistaken, though, a blaze of glory seemed preferable to letting Kim’s or Mao’s soldiers take him. Especially Mao’s. They’d be even less happy with Americans now than they had been before fire fell on Manchuria.
Low-voiced mutters in Korean outside the door. Cade wouldn’t have been able to follow even if he’d heard them clearly. He’d picked up only a handful of words from the local language.
The door opened. A man stuck his head inside. “Ave,” he whispered, and then, “Veni.”
“Sic.” Cade didn’t have a whole lot of Latin, either. But what he did have was worth its weight in gold for talking with Catholic Koreans. When Protestants helped him on his way south, he was reduced to sign language.
He scrambled to his feet. His knees and something in the small of his back crackled as he did. He had to duck to get through the doorway. He also had to lift his feet: like the Chinese, the Koreans put a plank across the bottom, maybe to help keep out chilly drafts.
One of the Koreans outside cradled a PPD, the PPSh’s older cousin. The other man had a shotgun that looked only a short step up from a blunderbuss. Well, if they got into a fight, it would be at close quarters. If they got into a fight, they would also die.
The guy with the PPD gestured toward the south. “Vade mecum,” he said.
“Sic,” Cade repeated. What else would he do but go with the Koreans?
They wore felt boots like his, possibly stolen from dead Red Chinese soldiers. Cade did wonder how much damage the atom bombs had done to the Chinese logistics system. Not enough to make the Chinks already in Korea quit fighting. Not yet, anyhow. They were like the Russians-they were expected to live off the countryside. All they really needed was ammunition.
Those felt boots were quieter than ordinary footgear would have been. Cade was at least a head taller than one of his guides, but the other was about his own six-one. Some of the Koreans ran surprisingly tall. Some of them could grow surprisingly thick beards for Orientals, too. Not a one, though, came equipped with a long, pointed nose or round blue eyes.
A plane buzzed by overhead. Buzzed was the word, all right. The Chinese flew Po-2 biplanes, ancient Russian wood-and-cloth trainers pressed into service as night harassment aircraft. They fired machine guns and dropped little bombs and got the hell out of Dodge before anyone could do anything about it. Bedcheck Charlie, GIs called them. The Russians had used them the same way against the krauts, sometimes with woman pilots.
This Po-2 wasn’t much above treetop height. Cade could feel the wind of its passage as it flew by. And the pilot must have spotted his guides and him walking along in the moonlight, because he swung the little plane around for another look at them.
But how much could he really see, no matter how hard he tried? Cade and one of the Koreans were big men, but what did that prove? In moonlight, would the SOB up there be able to tell Curtis was white? Cade didn’t believe it. He held his PPSh up in his left hand to show it to the flyer and waved his right hand as if to someone he knew was a friend.
And damned if the pilot didn’t waggle his wings in a friendly greeting of his own and fly away. Once he was gone, both Koreans whooped and hollered and thumped Cade on the back. The words were just gibberish to him. He was glad he had on the parka and the quilted jacket underneath it. Chances were they saved him some bruises.
“Vir sapiens!” said the one who knew some Latin.
“Homo sapiens. Homo sapiens ego sum.” Cade thought it was funny. He knew what the scientific name for human beings was.
Since his guide didn’t, the Korean didn’t get the joke. Pointing at Cade, he said, “Vir es.” You are a man.
“Sic. Vir sum. Et homo sum.” Yes. I am a man. And I am a human being. Vir and homo both meant man, but they didn’t mean the same thing. In English, man did duty for most of the meanings of both Latin words.
Cade didn’t think he could explain any of that to the Korean in Latin. His wasn’t up to it, and neither was his guide’s. He turned out not to have to. The Korean kind of shrugged, as if to say he wasn’t even going to try to understand this inscrutable Occidental. He pointed south and started walking again. Cade and the fellow with the almost-blunderbuss followed.
A quarter of a mile outside the next village, someone called softly from the cover of some pines. Both Koreans answered. They went back and forth for a little while. The one who knew Latin pointed to the pines and said, “Vade cum.” That just meant Go with. Maybe he’d forgotten the word for him.
It did get the message across. Approaching the trees, Cade said, “Ave.”
The greeting fell on uncomprehending ears. A man with a rifle came out and spoke in Korean. Cade sighed. He spread his hands to show he didn’t get it. The local sighed, too. He gestured toward the collection of beat-up houses and outbuildings. With a nod, Cade went that way.
He got hidden in a privy. It wasn’t the first time on his way south. Nobody had used this one for a while, but it was still fragrant. He muttered, but not for long. Pretty soon, his nose noticed the stink much less. He curled up and got ready to sleep through the dangerous daylight hours.