Festival for Three Thousand Women (23 page)

Considering the great numbers of people, the festival seemed pretty well organized. While the man gave them what they'd ordered, Bobby noticed a dozen other hawkers nearby. And since most of the Korean women were wearing their best gowns, the top of the hill was resplendent with color, drenched in reds and greens, brightness everywhere and the sound of silk moving against itself everywhere too. Only Gloria, among all the women, was out of costume. She wore tight jeans and a halter top, but appeared to be as much at home here as she had been in the Vil or on the farm.

“Look,” said the grandmother. “They're setting things up. I think the festival is finally about to begin.”

It was late and though the hill was already packed, everyone knew that, come tomorrow, it would get a lot worse. Mr. Kwak and the Lees, for example, were the only teachers who'd taken the morning off, yet many of the others were coming over on the evening train. When the headmaster heard that Bobby wanted to attend the festival, he'd insisted that he go early, and now Bobby could see why. Soon, he feared, people might begin falling from the hill for real, pushed off its edges by the bulging crowd.

But the grandmother was right. From the edges of the clearing in front of them, men had begun bringing out long boards and were setting up contraptions that looked like teeter-totters. Something was going to happen soon, and they all stood to see more clearly what it was.

“The T'ang-dynasty troops won't arrive until tomorrow,” said Mr. Kwak. “In the meantime the virgins are at play, dancing and jumping, free in the enjoyment of their innocence, the last moments of their maidenhood at hand.”

The men who'd built the teeter-totters had lit six fires, and all of a sudden a dozen girls jumped up from the nearby blankets and ran into the clearing like athletes, their skirts bouncing as they waved to the crowd.

“These are virgins having one last good time,” said Gloria. “For them morning is an unknown whore.”

The crowd roared, but from what Bobby could tell, these virgins could outrun most troops, for they soon commenced to sprinting around the outside of the clearing, their long strides evident in their speed but invisible under their billowing gowns. And when they'd run past everyone three times, they suddenly paired off and jumped onto the teeter-totters, two-by-two, only standing up instead of sitting down like American virgins would have.

The pairs of women must have been matched perfectly, for as they stood out on the ends of the boards, the teeter-totters came quickly to rest, stock still, with each girl standing about three feet off the ground.

Bobby had thought that most of the people around them were spectators too, but he soon discovered that not only had they been sitting among the virgins but among the musicians as well, almost everybody near them a part of the show. Five old farmers from the blanket next to them suddenly sat up in some kind of formation and began playing instruments that Bobby hadn't even noticed they'd had before. There were two different drums and an eight-foot-long
gaiagum
, and two men were playing reeds. And the music was so atonal and cacophonous that it locked everyone's attention on the stillness and delicate balance of the girls on the teeter-totters, who were suddenly looking so forlorn.

“Only true virgins can stand like that,” said Judo Lee.

After the farmers' band had screeched into the stillness for a while, it stopped as suddenly as it had begun, and at that instant a slow kind of movement began among the girls. Though they appeared to be standing still they were bending their knees under their dresses and causing, ever so slightly, a dip and pull. Earthward and skyward they moved, and soon the whole hilltop began to sway, as if the earth itself could feel the T'ang troops on the march, a few hours away but unstoppable as the tide. The grandmother took Bobby's arm, and when he looked at her he realized that it was in order to keep her balance that she did so. The girls teeter-tottered in unison, and slowly, from the movement started by the bending of their knees, a certain acceleration took place. When the ends of the teeter-totters first touched the ground, each opposite girl moved slightly skyward as the spring from her partner sent her off the end of the board. And when she came back down, her momentum sent her partner sailing up and a little away, still standing up.

This event was something Bobby had seen depicted on calendars ever since his arrival so many months before, and it represented perfectly a carefree afternoon for virgins, though the shadow of the wolfish T'ang was at the door. And though the farmers' band had been quiet during the acceleration, it started up again suddenly in a plaintive frenzy of sound that tore at the sky but sent the girls up higher into it at the same time.

These six pairs of girls were jumping perfectly and no one was falling. Yet as the band played on, the distance between the bottom of the nearest girl's feet and that stiff tongue of a teeter-totter grew until she was ten feet above the ground and then twelve, and then fifteen. It was miraculous, but they could all see, between the girl and the board she'd left, the dark blue sky and the mountains to the west and the curvature of the earth beyond the mountains. Yet no one fell. It was as if there was no limit to the height the girls could reach, as if they could avoid the T'ang simply by flying away, fleeing into the fantastic air.

Bobby was stunned. What a perfect depiction of the human heart unafraid, of trust in friendship and in the assurity of things remaining as they are. The girls jumped and jumped, each face composed, no mark of emotion upon it. And when, in the end, the six on top flew off the boards as if heading for the moon the crowd went wild. They were like slow female rockets and their partners on the ground stood with arms raised after them, like family members saying good-bye.

Whether the girls turned in the air or not Bobby didn't know. Perhaps they did, but it seemed to him that they simply sailed off the ends of the teeter-totters and up into the darkness. And when they landed, unaided and alone, they were in a perfect line, like chorus girls coming from the sky, only their skirts puffing a little to break their fall.

For Bobby this was the performance of a lifetime, and when he turned to his friends to say so, they all had tears in their eyes, even Gloria, for the way Korea had been, when such things were possible, before the Chinese invasion ruined everything thirteen hundred years before.

It was so beautiful and sad that the crowd might have wept the whole night through had it not been for the farmers' band, who, as soon as the performance was done, forced a change of mood on everyone by screeching out an alleycat's version of a waltz. In a moment the grandmother and all the other old women were dancing nearby. Only the men sat now, uninvited to dance and brooding, in postures that foretold of how badly they'd fare come the morrow. God, it's magnificent, Bobby thought. Gloria was Egyptian in their midst and Bobby really could imagine a world full of battles, with nothing decided by any other means.

The dancing went on and on, but when the women finally tired and came back among them to rest, they smiled and took the arms of the men and let them pour more wine. And when they all settled back to sleep, a small fireworks show began in the clearing where the dancers had been. It wasn't much really, only six rockets shot high up into the night sky. When they burst up there, everyone could see the colors of Korean gowns coming down, and then six parachutes, like little rag dolls of women, came floating back to earth. At first it appeared as though the parachutes would land in the circle where children were gathered, hoping to catch one and take it home. But a small wind came up, and as if they were tied together, the wind took all six parachutes and blew them just past the edge of the hill where they sailed on down into the town.

Everyone went to sleep then, fairly early, a whole hilltop full of people waiting. The sky was high above the clouds and though Gloria took Bobby's hand, they lay as still as they could and listened, both of them imagining the steady motion, the rhythmic progress of marching feet.

The image: Thus the superior man consolidates his fate by making his position correct
.

 

T
he invasion started sometime just before dawn. Bobby had not slept well. Exhausted from the previous day's climb, he could feel a new aching in his lungs, and the tossing and turning of the people on the hilltop had given him the feeling of sleeping among a sea of grazing cattle.

But when he was awakened by the warning system set up the night before, the shouts of men stationed at the hilltop's edge and the beginning moans of women, he came to his feet with as much energy as he could muster, ready for what this day would bring.

“Aigo
, the Chinese are coming!” said voices all around. The weather was perfect for an invasion.

There were no clouds in the sky, yet since it was still spring the heat would start out easy, not deterring the invaders as they climbed the hill. Still, Bobby remembered the steepness of the climb and realized why those few Korean defenders of so long ago might have thought they had a chance.

As soon as everyone was awake, an element of frantic abandonment ran through the crowd until someone summoned all the men, restoring order. Gloria, looking even more Egyptian in the virgin light, nudged Bobby. “That's you, man,” she said. “Get a move on.” The gaiety and the eerie quality of the night before was gone now, replaced by the sure and frightening knowledge that death was close at hand. Even Bobby felt the urgency of it as they marched off to fight. “The ordinary hopes of all manner of men are put aside when there is war,” said Mr. Kwak.

There were thousands of people on the hilltop, but only about two hundred of them were men. And the women seemed to recede as the men advanced, so that when the men looked back there was now an expanse of land between them, though only a few hours before the hilltop had been so heavily peopled that there was no room even to walk.

Mr. Kwak carried one of the books he'd purchased the day before, an old Korean history. He had it open to a page concerning the invasion they were about to try to repel.

“It says here that the defenders of Puyo hill were made up of a handful of poorly equipped palace guards and another handful of conscripted militia, laborers and peasants who'd been rounded up from the surrounding estates.”

It was light enough now for them to see the men they stood with and easy to understand that most of them represented the militia. Among them only a dozen were in costumes of any kind. These guys were the palace guards and quickly began shoving the militia around. “Hurry fools, there are boulders waiting near those trees. Bring them over, one at a time.”

Boulders, indeed, Bobby thought. The man spoke roughly, but Bobby put it down to him trying to get into the spirit of the thing, and when Mr. Kwak turned, Bobby followed, just a couple of peasants doing their jobs. From below them they could now clearly hear the shouts of the invading troops. And though there had been no room the night before for anyone to move, when they looked among the trees now they did find boulders, multicolored and numerous and made of papier-mâché.

Except for the cumbersome quality of the boulders Bobby could have carried six, and he tried to suggest to Mr. Kwak that they take as many as they could, setting them nearer the hilltop's edge so that they'd be readily at hand.

“No,” said Mr. Kwak. “One at a time.”

Judo Lee, though he would have been an excellent boulder man, had been told to stand among the peasants who would pour the boiling water. It had supposedly been prepared on fires since the night before, but when Mr. Kwak and Bobby got back to the hilltop's edge they could plainly see that the water was cold. Nevertheless there were barrels and barrels of it, and Bobby wondered how in the world they had gotten it up the hill.

While the guards were busy shouting at the water-carrying peasants, Bobby took the opportunity to move closer to the edge, to look down and see what he could of any T'ang-dynasty soldiers close at hand. There were wagons down there, and people were coming from everywhere to pull T'ang uniforms from them. The army was forming before his eyes.

“I get it,” he said. “Those who come early are the victims, those who come late get to be the Chinese.”

“‘The hill was sealed off for the night,'” said Mr. Kwak, reading from his book again. “‘But the women and a handful of guards, hearing of the Korean defeats farther to the north, knew that the hilltop would offer them only temporary safety.'”

“Right,” said Bobby. “Not enough food, not enough shelter either.”

“‘The peasant girls of the town surrounded the palace virgins and all pledged to die for their maidenhood.'”

Bobby looked back at the women, who really were on the other side of the hilltop now, and wondered which ones were peasant girls and which palace virgins. Surely those on the teeter-totters had been royalty. Surely, too, Gloria and the grandmother would be their peasant protection, both of them chaste again.

“This is exciting,” Bobby said. “When will the invasion begin?”

“‘The T'ang had amassed a thousand men,'” read Mr. Kwak, “‘and attacked the hill at first morning light.'”

When he looked down Bobby could see that there probably were a thousand soldiers now, but it had been light for an hour. And would they really fall when the boulders hit them, bouncing harmlessly away? What were the rules in this war?

“The T'ang are coming!” yelled one of the guards. “Prepare to die for Paekche honor!”

For a while the T'ang-dynasty troops tried to catapult papier-mâché boulders of their own up to the top of the hill, but the boulders had nowhere near enough weight for such a lofty ascent, and as soon as their foot soldiers began to traverse the path, the water men soaked them down with a perfect shot, a barrel of it on the heads of the leading dozen. Maybe they were fighting a losing battle, but it was fun. They would not make it easy, no matter what Mr. Kwak's book said.