Chapter 15: Hanbat's Farmer

Gyu-ho looked at the broken branch for a long time.

In Geumsan the magpies would find their persimmon on the top branch this winter, the way they always had.

This tree had never had a magpie, and now it had no top branch either.

"If I say no," he said.

"Then you say no," Yook said, and dropped the stalk in the grass. "I go home, and she stays."

"You sell to whoever you like," he added, "and she gets very comfortable."

Gyu-ho thought of a window that didn't open, and a row of seed tins facing south.

Grandma was seventy-six, and comfortable was the word for people who had stopped being asked what they wanted.

"Yes," he said.

Yook wiped his fingers on a white handkerchief.

"Say it for me," Yook said. "I want to hear it in your voice instead of the Tower's."

"The winner is Yook Chang-geun," Gyu-ho said.

"Good boy," said Yook.

When the hour ran out, the doorway opened beside the stone, and Yook went through it without looking back.

That week Gyu-ho cooked with salt for the first time on his floor.

He tore flour dough into the boiling pot the way Grandma made sujebi on wet days, with a Prime pepper crumbled in.

He ate it on the doorstep wrapped in the Busan blanket, which smelled of mothballs and somebody else's barracks.

It was the warmest he had been since October, and he hated every spoonful of it a little.

Every root and tomato he grew from now on would go to Hanbat for one coin.

He thought, for one whole afternoon, about planting with no stream water and selling Yook Common.

Then he thought about who Yook would feed it to.

Hanbat's raiders would eat whatever he put on that stone, and none of them had made the deal.

Grandma had never once sold a bad pepper to a man she hated, because the pepper had her name on it.

He kept planting Prime.

On Thursday night he grew one more root under the lean-to and kept it off the stone.

On Saturday Yook stood up before the first lot and turned to face the benches.

"A short word, friends," he said pleasantly.

"Hanbat and the Keeper have come to an understanding," Yook said. "Every term he speaks from now on names me."

"Bid if you like," he said. "You'll be barred."

The hall went silent.

Then several hundred heads turned to the stone seat.

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