Chapter Ten — Jang Yeong-sil

One night I came to a pavilion. The sound of water met me first. From jar to jar, thin and unbroken. In the dark stood figures as tall as a man, waiting their turn, and the smell of metal and water hung over everything. In the middle of it a man sat with his back to me, working at a gear. His hands were large. "It's late," I said. He did not turn around. "There is no late here. Water falls at night too, and the hour has to come at night too. ...Who are you. No one comes in at this hour." "I've come from far off. The sound of the water drew me in." Only then did he turn. Hands covered with callus and scar — hands that had never been idle. "Jang Yeong-sil," he said. "With these hands I measured the stars and the hours. A slave's son, at that." "You measured the hours?" I asked. "That is what I am proudest of." He smiled faintly and looked back at the figures in the dark. "That water clock. Before, a man had to sit up all night watching the water. To beat the drum and ring the bell when the time came. But men fall asleep. A man dozes and the hour goes wrong, and when the hour goes wrong the whole day of the whole capital goes wrong with it. I took that work out of human hands. The water fills and fills, and at last that figure beats its own drum and rings its own bell. With no man keeping watch. It does not doze, it is not lazy, and it shows no one any favor. A slave's son built the machine that governs the hours — the world must have been startled once, at least." He paused, then added, "These days they measure rain at the palace as well. The prince, troubled by the droughts, had vessels cast in bronze and set in the grounds, and has the depth of the rain standing in them measured. Then you can compare this district's rain and that one's as numbers. I watched it beside him and thought: here is a mind that would take a ruler even to what falls out of the sky." "I lived for that daybreak," he said. His eyes brightened for a moment. The light did not stay. I saw it go out. "And yet the face that speaks of that daybreak isn't bright." His hand closed over the gear. "A palanquin broke. The king's palanquin, which I had inspected. I was beaten for it. After that no one wrote me down. Not when I died, not where I was buried." He looked around at the figures. "Those will still ring the bell when the hour comes. And the hands that made them scattered one day without a trace. Like breath." Breath. I stopped for a moment on that word. It had hung on my own mouth all my life. "There was a small city," I said after a long while. "A strong king came with an army and surrounded it, and one poor wise man inside saved the city by his wisdom. The city lived. ...And after it lived, no one remembered the poor man." He was quiet a long time. "...That is me," he said at last. "That is you, and that is me. It is also the others I have met on this road. The hands that hold up the world usually have their names rubbed off." "Then," his voice shook, "if the work will not be remembered, why did I live for that daybreak? Why did a slave's son take all that trouble?" "Those nights you spent cutting that gear," I asked. "Was anyone beside you, watching?" "...No one. It was deep night, everyone asleep, and I sat alone with one lamp." "And you cut it all the same." "I cut it." Then, like a man caught by his own words, he slowed. "...On those nights I wasn't thinking of the king, or the records, or the ages to come. I just — I liked the way the metal found its shape in my hands. When the water first ran its own course, when the figure's arm rose toward the drum — I liked that daybreak, simply." He looked down at his hands. A long time. The closed hand opened slowly. "Those nights weren't lived so that someone would write them down. They were already fully lived, right there. Being remembered was something else, something that comes after. I had been stringing the two together all along — the records erased me, so even that daybreak became a thing that never happened." He raised his head. For the first time the light in his eyes stayed and did not go out. "That daybreak happened. It happened though it wasn't written. The bell rang, and I made it, and I loved that night. That is something no one can take from me." I said nothing. There was no stone of mine to lay on the place he had reached. After a long while he asked, almost too quietly to hear, "And you... did your name remain?" "I have no name," I said, with a small laugh. "They only called me the gatherer." And I looked back at him. But I was holding one thing I did not say to him. Nowhere in any record of men is his name — and yet it seemed to me there must be a place where that daybreak he cut is written out, not one stroke missing. That was a word for him, and also, in truth, a word for myself, who will scatter without a name. In that short while sitting across from him, one drop of water seemed to fall on my dry chest as well. As I left the pavilion a drop of water fell behind me. And then another. The hour was still far off, and still I stopped and waited, certain the bell would ring. It did not ring. But I knew that one day it would. Even at an hour the maker does not see.