Between the mountains lay valleys as rich in fruitful earth and rushing streams, fields tilled with ancient tools, men and women and children doing the work of beasts. Seasons came and went, spring planting followed by autumn harvest and it was treasure, too. This he knew, but he had not traveled far into the countryside beyond his father’s house. He was the son of a scholar and he had never worked with his hands, for though the Kim clan held vast lands he had been half ashamed to think of those lands. How had the Kim clan become rich in houses and land except by royal favor and corruption and usury? Even his father — even his father—
He turned abruptly away from the window. Sunia stood there waiting, her lovely face half questioning, half sad, her white robes flowing away from her slender body like floating mist.
“Sunia …” he began and stopped.
“Yes?” she whispered.
He knew what she expected. Her warm smile, her voice, tender and shy, her dark eyes longing and soft, her whole being waiting for his invitation to love. He could not give it.
“I am troubled,” he said. “I have the cares of our nation on my mind tonight.”
She withdrew with instant grace.
“I think only of you,” she said, and left him alone.
… He woke early the next morning. The sun filtered through the rice paper lattices and, seeing the morning was fair, he put on a robe and went out into the garden. The air was cool but the earth was warm and a heavy dew lay on the mossy paths and the rocks and the shrubs. Clumps of autumn chrysanthemums glowed among the pines near a small brook sparkling as it fell over a ledge. He walked the length of a path and sat down on a Chinese garden seat of blue porcelain and there contemplated the low and flowing lines of the roofs of his home. The buildings had stood there for centuries, the foundations of mountain rock, the walls of gray brick, the roofs of earth-dried tile. Yet its stability was only seeming. Peasant unrest, the division between young and old, and even war could destroy his possession. The house could become a prison if a foreign tyrant ruled the land. What powers lay in his people to save them from such attack? They must defend themselves. China, their ancient friend, was now too weak to save her own people, and Russia and Japan were only contending enemies.
How strong were his people?
There was no answer to the question except to discover its answer for himself. It was at this hour in the morning, while under the curving roofs of his home his household lay tranquil in sleep, that a new resolve took sudden shape in his mind. He would go on a pilgrimage, not for penance or for any of the reasons for which men usually made pilgrimage. He would not seek out a temple or search for a god. No, his search would be for himself, for his own answer to his own question. North and south, east and west, he would travel in search of the soul of his people. He must know them for only then would he know what to expect of them, what to demand of them, and what they would be able or even willing to do for their country if it were attacked.
With resolution came peace. He had been a man lost in a jungle of doubt and fear but now he saw a path opening before him to lead him out of the jungle. If he did not see its end at least he saw its beginning, and he was free to pursue it and follow it wherever it led — free except for the two women he loved, his wife Sunia and his queen, Queen Min. They must be willing to let him go. Which woman should he approach first? There were arguments for one and for the other. If he began with the Queen’s approval, he could say to Sunia that it was royal command. Yet he knew Sunia’s willful and stubborn nature, and he knew her love.
“All very well for the Queen,” she would cry. “All very well for her to send you wandering alone through the mountains and the valleys in these troubled times! She has other men to heed her bidding. Of men she has a plenty, but I have only you. To me you are everything and without you I am lost and with me our children. What if you never come back? What if—”
He broke off this imagining. He would tell Sunia first. He could persuade the Queen more easily than he could persuade his wife. He must choose the time, a moment when Sunia was gay and tender and pleased about some family matter. He pondered a while and then remembered she had wanted a new icehouse. The old icehouse in the rear of the compound was falling into ruins, and last summer the stores of winter ice had melted too early so that when the heat of the late eighth moon month fell upon them, there was no ice. This he would do for her housekeeping, he decided. For herself, he would buy jade from China, a ruddy piece such as she had longed for and did not have for it was hard to come by and the jade dealers brought it only now and again. She had white jade hairpins and she had green jade bracelets and earrings, but red jade she had not, and she wanted a lump of it to use as a large button to clasp a gold jacket that she loved. He smiled at himself that he could stoop to such wiles, but he loved Sunia for her few smallnesses, since she was of noble nature. It even pleased him to find a weakness here and there in her.
That night, therefore, when he was about to tell her of the new icehouse, she forestalled him luckily by saying that the elder child had lost himself that day and the servants had searched and called his name everywhere for half the morning. They heard a faint voice at last and it came from the old icehouse. The child had crept into the half-open door and pulled it shut after him and the jar of its closing had tumbled broken stone into a heap against the door and locked him in.
“Oh, my heart beat fast enough to kill me,” Sunia gasped as she told the story. “We might never have found him and then some day in the winter when we cut the fresh ice blocks to put into the house, there he would have been — dead! Il-han, you must build a new icehouse. What if we had lost the child?”
“Quiet yourself,” he said, soothing her. “In the first place, where was the child’s tutor?”
“I forgot to tell you that he went home for three days. He is to be betrothed.”
“Then where was the servant whose business it is to follow the child wherever he goes?”
She broke in. “But you know this is kimchee time, and we need every hand to help! I had sent to the country yesterday for the last cabbages and turnips and—”
“Enough,” he said. “I accept all excuses—”
“Not excuses.”
“—as valid,” he went on firmly, “and I will build a new icehouse immediately. But I must tell you, Sunia, that I must leave home for a space and while I am gone—”
“Oh, why?” she wailed.
“Let me finish,” he said. “While I am away from home, how can my heart rest if I know there is not always someone watching our elder son? True, the old icehouse shall be torn away at once, but this child, being what he is, will only plunge himself into new peril.”
“Then why do you go?” she demanded.
“I would not go,” he said, “unless I knew it to be my duty.” And as was his habit when he did not wish to speak further at a given moment, he rose and left her.
From Sunia he went to the room where his elder son slept. The child lay on the floor bed, his arms upflung, his face beautiful in peace. This stormy boy, this being of his creation, who could so twist and tear at his father’s heart, lay there now in such calm innocence that Il-han could have wept. Yet this same child could turn into a devil of anger and mischief and destruction and there were times when Il-han wondered if he were possessed. Once, because a kitten would not come to him, the child had strangled it. Once he had bitten his baby brother’s tiny hand so that blood came. Once he had taken a stone and broken a turtle’s new shell. When he thought of these times Il-han shivered. Yet there were other times. Into the bitten hand the elder brother had pressed a favorite toy of his own. Once he had wept for a brood of birdlings when the wind blew down their nest and they were too young to take food from his hand. And there were the times, how many times, when the child had curled himself into his father’s arms, hungry for love. Did he dare leave this child? Yes, for what he did was for the child, too. The country must be safe for his sons more than for himself.