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There should have been birds.
The weather was fine, and the wind came down through the open walls of the pavilion; there should have been swallows, swooping through the high vaults of the sky, and ducks, by the water's edge below. Song Joo leaned on the wall, looking out over the lake just visible at the garden's end, a shifting, winking echo of the sky caught in the pocket of the hills, and wondered about the architect who could compose such a beautiful vantage and yet neglect to provide it with ducks, or at the very least lotus flowers.
It was a curious barrenness; even the pavilion was not named, and its ceiling was painted only with clouds, and an empty sky.
She was wearing her light blue and orange hanbok, and the wind came straight through the thin jeogori. She pulled her elbows in tighter to her ribcage, and listened in vain for music, or birdsong, or frogs.
Nothing hurt. She wondered if she should worry about that.
"Cho Seon?" someone called. She knew neither the name nor the voice, but it was the first human sound she had heard. She turned around.
He was standing at the far entrance, the light behind him, and wearing, impossibly, antique hanbok ornate enough in itself to make up for all the starkness of the pavilion.
"Cho Seon?" he said again, more dubiously.
"I'm sorry." Out of sheer habit she gave him the smile she used for unsought introductions, cool but receptive. "I think you must be looking for someone else."
He was wearing very fine clothing and wearing it well, and when he looked her up and down it was with the appreciation of a connoisseur and the assurance of a man who knows himself charming.
"Well," he said, "I was looking for the finest gisaeng in all of Joseon, so perhaps I was not so wrong after all, ah?"
He lifted her hand to his lips, and she tilted her head and let him. "How strange. You remind me of someone I know, as well."
"Is that so?"
"Yes. Someone quite dear to me." His smile slid wider, and his grip shifted, his fingers tracing up over the inside of her wrist. She smiled, and said, "So dear to me that I have come to think of him as an irritating little brother."
His eyebrows shot up. He laughed then, and stepped back a pace, dropping seduction as quickly and completely as taking off a coat, and Song Joo started to like him.
He bowed. "I'm Gu Yong Ha. May I ask your name?"
"Cha Song Joo," she said.
"Well, he said, "Cha Song Joo; it is an honor to meet you, and, I am sure, it is a privilege to invite you to a drink, but as it seems to be my duty, could I invite you to share some soju with me?"
"Your duty," she repeated, an eyebrow rising. So, even here, this was her life: there was no purpose that couldn't be interrupted by men whom she had to either pour drinks for or shoot.
"Ah, you see, this is my family's summer home" -- his gaze flickered up at the ceiling -- "mostly. So it seems we are a guest and a host, and surely no providence would provide such a charming guest and fail to furnish refreshments."
She said, dryly, "Providence has failed to furnish many things." On the other hand, he was too charming, and too Korean, to shoot.
"Wait," he said, his smile suddenly impish, and went to a small chest in the corner she had not noticed before. "If this is anything like -- it should be -- here -- yes!" He stood up triumphantly, with a round, hand-painted bottle. "And, fortunately for us, it's even the good stuff."
The chest also disgorged a tray and a single pair of cups. She bowed to the inevitable and seated herself, with much-practiced grace, before the tray. He sat down with a flourish of his sleeves that made the metallic thread glint in the sunlight and left the embroidery draped over his thighs on display, a motion that was surely as rehearsed as her own repertoire. She hid a smile, and reached for the bottle, lifting her sleeve.
"Ch-ch-ch-ch!" He picked the bottle up himself, with a look of mild reproof. "The guest doesn't pour." Which men usually did not say to gisaengs. She watched, amused, as he swept back his brocaded sleeve and filled first her cup, then his own, as elegantly as she might have taught her girls.
"So!" he said, and lifted his cup, left hand under right, as politely respectful as possible. Dryly, she brought hers up to meet his, and lifted an eyebrow to go along with it. He grinned at her. "Bottoms up!"
The soju was much stronger than she had expected, and very fine. It was an unexpected consolation. Out of the worst of the wind, with the warmth of good alcohol spreading through her chest, she could almost imagine herself comfortable.
She replaced her cup gently on the tray, and murmured, "Your hospitality is generous."
"Ah, we do what we can." He poured for her again.
She raised her cup and said, "Let us drink and die."
He looked at her for a moment, his fluid mouth unsettled, and then he smiled, and knocked back his glass.
"So," he said as he put down his glass, "since I'm the host, perhaps I might inquire what brings you here?"
"I think," she said, "I'm dying."
He refilled her cup and made an encouraging shape with his eyebrows.
"We planned to ambush the Japanese policemen tonight," she said. "It was a big operation; we'd been arranging it for some time. The Japanese police were transferring some prisoners, and we wanted to intercept them. But it went badly."
She drank. She was Cha Song Joo; she could sit next to Japanese officials and pour them sake while they bragged to their underlings about women they had used and thrown away, men they had killed for nothing more than jostling their shoulder in the street. She had good training and better discipline, and she could be a graceful guest in a graceful garden and make calm conversation about how she had been betrayed to her death.
"We were betrayed," she said. "I don't know by whom. But they knew we were coming, and when we attacked they already had us surrounded. We never had any hope. I was shot in the thigh, and then I ran out of bullets, and then I was here. I think I'm lying in the mud right now, somewhere by the lakeshore down below us, and bleeding to death." It was nice, she supposed, to die peacefully in a pavilion with soju rather than in the mud, but if this were a gift of some inexplicable providence it was the wrong one; there was one conversation she wanted to have before she died, and this was not it.
She put her cup down, and said, shaking her hair back, "And you? How have you come here? Are you also fighting for Joseon?"
He snorted. "Joseon? Fight for Joseon?" He flicked a glance at her, and must not have liked what he saw, because when he went on his scorn had transmuted into a drawl, "Ahh, fighting, it takes so much effort. I would get my clothes all dirty. No, no, I will leave fighting to others. Since you are valiantly struggling in a war I haven't heard of, and wear no style any gisaeng I know has ever worn, you must be from the future, and I must be dead. I think I must be some kind of ghost," he said, tapping his lips with his fan, "which is very strange, because I do not remember dying, but I am glad to see that at least I have more taste than to appear all in white."
"For a ghost," Song Joo said, lifting an eyebrow, "you drink a lot of soju."
"True, true!" He held his cup up at eye level, grinning at it as if it were salvation, then knocked it back. "Oh, I do hope I haven't been hit by a cart or something while crossing the street -- it would be such an ignominious end."
"There are," she said, "worse ways to die."
"Well, yes, but you don't have to live with them. Or un-live with them, as the case may be. You have fallen valiantly."
She closed her eyes briefly, and drank what was left of her soju. When she set the cup down, he was watching her.
He poured for her again. His smile was half apologetic, half ingratiating, and all charming. "I bet you are a gambler."
"I play from time to time," she said.
"Ah, I play different games, myself." He drank his own cup down in one quick motion, and this time he didn't protest when she filled his cup. "But my friend plays," he said, tapping his fingers one at a time on the rim of the cup, his smile growing sideways, "so let me tell you about the time the lovely Cho Seon played the Minister of War for her little sister's honor, and won."
The wine went fast, since he knew how to tell a story, and she had something she wanted to forget.
"I think I would like your friend," she said, later, tipping the last of the bottle into his glass.
"I think you would, too," he said, and looked immensely sad. "Pity."
She snorted, looked at her fingers, graceful around the empty cup. "Why should you pity me?" she said. "Because I'm a gisaeng? Because I'm dying?" She was all at once tired of the hypocrisy. What was she, after all, but disposable; for her father, for Unni who had taught her how to please men, for the Russian bastard who had taught her first how to shoot a gun and later how to shoot men without regrets; and now for the miserable traitor who'd sold them all to the Japanese police, and left her to die by the lakeside. It was the easiest thing in the world to pause for a pious moment afterward, and say: how sad, she was so beautiful.
"Because we have drunk the last of the wine," he said, after a pause, "and because somehow I don't think there will be any more."
"Ah. That is a pity." Without the wine there was nothing to distract her from the relentless bite of the wind. She shifted, suppressing the instinct to huddle in on herself. "Then -- do you suppose there might be a blanket?"
"Are you cold?" He caught her hands, chafing them, and she pulled away.
She smiled at him, dazzlingly, dismissively. "It's the wind."
He looked at her for a long moment, and then said, "I will look for a blanket. But we didn't keep them here."
He went back to investigate the chest in the corner, and she stood when he did, a lifetime of training making it impossible for her to stay sitting when he was not. She wandered back over to the railing, looking out over the soft green sweep of the garden, and her gaze fell down, inexorably, to the lake.
Impossible, how empty it was, how blankly it reflected the empty sky.
He came up behind her. "There are no blankets," he said. "I'm sorry."
She shrugged, unsurprised. "It was kind of you to look."
He exhaled, a long noisy sigh, and leaned both elbows on the railing beside her. "Funny," he said, "I don't feel the wind at all. Maybe because I'm a ghost."
She rolled her eyes. "Or maybe because you aren't dying."
"Well, you could put it that way too."
"I trust," she said, "that when this is your family's garden, you take better care to attract the birds."
"I'll have you know we kept a very elegant garden! We even had two brace of eider imported all the way from Qing China."
"Because there were not birds enough in all Joseon to stock your garden."
"Ah, no! Because we wanted to impress our neighbors enough that they would forget we'd bought our family tree."
She looked sharply over at him, and he smiled back, limpidly.
"I see," she said, and leaned on the rail. She said at last, "It needs lotuses."
"We had lotuses, and we planted several pear trees, too. Tch, it's gone downhill badly. It needs more bamboo."
"It needs fewer Japanese," she murmured.
"So," he said, and glanced at her sidelong. "Are you going to go back?"
"Go back?" she repeated, startled.
It had not occurred to her she could still return. She blinked, suddenly aware of hope again, a rasping weight filling her chest, like exhaustion.
He was looking out over the long sweep of the hills, where they faded blue with distance. "I have a friend. Like a brother to me, and more. He goes out at nights, to fight the government, in secret. He doesn't know I know. He's been hurt more than once, I think badly. Every night he's out, I can't sleep, I can't lie easy, until he comes back alive. Your friend, the one who is like a brother to you. Does he know where you went tonight?"
She thought of Wan, then, dear, ridiculous Wan, running for his life from anything more serious than a stubbed toe.
"No," she said. "He does not."
"Then for his sake," Gu Yong Ha said, "I am asking you: go back. Please."
She was already trying to work her way backward, from the mud that was the last thing she remembered, through the confusion of gunfire, the screech of the police cars arriving, to the person who must have betrayed them.
She leaned her back against the railing and regarded Gu Yong Ha speculatively. "I'll agree to go back," she said, "if you'll agree to fight for Joseon."
"Ah." He leaned back, shaking his head slowly. "Ah. No. My Joseon is not anything worth fighting for."
There was a flash of genuine anger under his words, which meant he cared, which meant he was persuadable. She gave him the smile she used to spur men on, challenge instead of charm. "Then you already know where to begin."
"What's the point? You're from the future -- you already know how the story comes out."
"I don't know how your story comes out."
He caught her hands, and this time she let him. He turned her hands over, tracing his fingers lightly down the palm, and said, to her palms and not her face, "Maybe I'm fighting just by living my daily life."
"Tell yourself that long enough," she said, "and you will look up one day to find yourself on the opposite side."
"Mmm," he said, and nothing else, and ran his thumbs over the backs of her hands. "Cha Song Joo," he said, softly, "your hands are very cold."
"Ah," she said, after a moment, and took her hands away. She turned back to the garden. Somewhere there, somewhere beyond, was blood, and ducks, and possibility again.
"So, you're the one who can feel the wind," he said. "What do you think: with it, or against it?"
"Against it," she said immediately. She lifted her face to it, inhaling as the cold hit her neck, her collarbones. Back to the lake, then; she should have known. "How can I get to the lake? Is there a path?"
"Not from here."
She snorted. "Of course there's no path. There never is."
Over the wall, then. She climbed up onto the railing, and balanced there in a light crouch. On the far side the ground dropped away steeply but not impossibly, though it was a good four meter drop down from the pavilion.
"Better you than me," he said with a theatrical shudder. "Your skirt will never be the same."
"Don't think I haven't noticed that you didn't promise," she said.
He grinned at her, unrepentant. "Well," he said, "you were going to go back anyway."
She tipped her head back and laughed. She kissed him, because she had not kissed Lee Su Hyeon, and rose to her feet on the narrow rail, pausing for a last moment, like a runner before a race.
He pushed her.
She teetered, and had just enough time to look over her shoulder and see him, smiling sunnily and waving. Then she was falling, and, falling, she spread her arms out, the air rushing around her, and the ground never came --
-***-
"Song Joo!" someone shouted. There was an accelerating rustle of footsteps. She struggled up on one elbow, and the world, already dark, went tenuous and strange and almost entirely away again.
"Don't try to move." It was Geun Deok; his voice was unsteady, but his arm under her shoulders was solid as a rock. He tilted her up carefully, and she let her head roll sideways and rest in the warm corner between his arm and chest, thinking only, one, this is one who didn't die.
She had to try several times before she got her tongue working again. "Didn't get all of us."
"Well, they tried pretty damn hard. Fuck, that's a lot of blood -- how do you feel?"
"Terribly cold," she said, "and terribly thirsty. I suspect the pain will hit later."
He had to leave her to get the car. She waited, propped up on her own knees, Geun Deok's pistol clutched in both hands and Geun Deok's jacket draped over her shoulders, while the headlights traced out a distant arc and curved in.
He helped her into the back seat and made her lie down, covering her with the rough wool blanket he kept in the trunk. "I've only got soju," he said, "but it's better than nothing. Drink up."
The car shook to life underneath her as Geun Deok turned the ignition. The soju was the midrange stuff they served guests at Myeong Bin, simple and not too strong. She drank straight from the bottle, and when the car went over a bump, the soju splashed up into her nose, and she choked.
"Okay back there?" Geun Deok said, and she waved a hand.
Soju and blankets. Cheap soju, and Geun Deok's blanket was hideously scratchy, and still had bits of last autumn's leaves snagged along one hem. She closed her eyes and tried not to laugh, or cry, because she was afraid that if she started she wouldn't be able to stop.
"What do we do now?" Geun Deok asked as he pulled out onto the main road.
"We go home," she said. "We go home, and I figure out how to hide this when it scars. And -- " she paused, trying to figure out how to put together people a hundred years dead, people living now, the weathered wreck of the old Gu estate in the hills above the lake; Joseon, and second chances, and change, necessary as a firebrand in the darkness; and said, slowly, " -- and we ask Sun Woo Wan if he knows a doctor who can be discreet."
"Sun Woo Wan! Well...if we phrase it right, he'll just think one of the girls got in trouble with a client."
"And then," she went on, "we find the person who betrayed us, and make sure they regret it."
"Right," Geun Deok said grimly.
"And then we find another revolutionary group."
He laughed a little under his breath, unamused. "One better at secrecy, this time."
The car pulled in to Myeong Bin, and the headlights dimmed: home.