James Church - A Corpse in the Koryo

"We would have done it yesterday if we'd known this room was going to be in use. They normally save this view for important guests."

She gave me a crooked smile, friendly but leaving ambiguous whether she thought I met the standard. "From here, you can see mountains on either side of the road and watch the stream as it tumbles down over the rocks. It's nearly full now, after the rain. If it storms again tonight, we'll have a regular torrent. The noise might keep you up all night long. To some people, it's an angry sound, but I don't think it is. By our dormitory, up the road there, it sounds like a train. Most of the time, though, it is kind of sleepy. Like everything hereabouts."

She bowed and turned to go. Then she turned back, "just a thought, but you might like to walk around the temple up the way. A pretty stroll on a morning like this. It should be almost perfect. Stick to the side of the road, once in a while a truck coming downhill loses its brakes.

When you reach the temple, you can be alone if you want. Tell the guides you can manage by yourself. Though sometimes they feel lonely and like to talk to people." She paused. "They see a lot. And they take notes." She paused again. "On paper."

I nodded to acknowledge what she'd said but didn't pursue the opening. Nobody was that helpful without reason, and I didn't know what her reason was, so I thought I'd let things set until after lunch.

Meantime, I could look around. "Until what time is the dining room open for breakfast?"

"Did you call ahead?" Her tone changed, and not very subtly.

"For what?"

"New policy. We only fix enough food for people who sign up ahead of time. Got to make a profit, you know." She was verging on stern.

Suddenly, profits looked like a bad idea.

"All I want is some tea. Maybe some fruit."

She shook her head. "I'll check, but they only started this a month ago, and the manager is new." Her expression showed she hadn't made up her mind about him yet. "He's strict. Says if we make an exception for one person, we'll have to do it for everyone, and then where will we be?" She turned to go again, stepped partway into the hall, then stopped and stepped back inside the room. "The guides at the temple always have a kettle on." Her manner was helpful again, almost pleading with me to start asking her some questions. "They sip tea and chat most of the day. Nice girls, but they don't work all that hard, if you ask me."

When I didn't reply, she bowed deeply to hide her disappointment and glided away.

The road to the temple ran beside the river, which was coursing full and fast over large boulders army engineers had dumped there to slow the current and keep it from tearing at the banks. There wasn't much danger of that on the far side, where the solid-rock base of the mountain rose steeply, almost straight up, from the water. The last of the infant clouds had vanished in the daylight, and the rocky outcroppings were easy to see from the road. Growing from them, trunks struggling to stay upright on the slopes, were groups of the dwarf pine trees I needed to reach. Maybe some mountains were easier than they looked.

Not this one.

By the time I reached the temple, I was puffing. It seemed to me the construction engineers could have done with a little less steepness if they'd given it some thought. There was a small ticket-selling hut just beyond the empty parking lot, next to a colored map of the temple complex and the surrounding mountains. The wooden shutter on the front of the hut was propped open, and I could see two guides sitting inside, drinking tea and staring out at the scenery. One emerged from the side door to ask what I wanted. She was tall and walked with a measured gait, so that the skirts of her costume floated over the stone pathway.

Her hair was pinned up with two combs. It made her neck seem long and gave her jaw more attention than it needed. But she had a smile that looked real, and her eyes sparkled even in the dappled light.

"Good morning. Tours don't begin until noon. The temple complex opens at eleven o'clock." She could see I was still breathing hard from the walk. "The hotel staff knows they're not supposed to send people up here so early. Why don't you sit on the bench under those trees and catch your breath." Her voice was pleasant, without the hard-driving edge of the guides in the capital. It seemed to fit with the trees and the grass and the flowers. Either that or I was lightheaded from the climb.

I thought she would go back to the kiosk to finish her tea, but instead she stood there, looking at me as if she'd asked a question that I was so far failing to answer. I had started to say something about the weather when a gust of wind blew closed the shutter on the ticket hut.

It swung shut with a loud bang, there was a muffled scream from inside, and then the second guide burst out the door. She was shorter than the first guide; her hair was long, and her face was exactly like those in old folk paintings. Cute, like a kitten or a puppy, with big, wide-set dark eyes. "You'd probably get tired of her after a while," I could hear Pak saying to me.

The second guide propped the shutter open and walked over to us. The front of her skirt was wet. "I was pouring myself a cup and spilled the whole kettle when that shutter banged shut. Could have burned myself like a chicken." She was agitated. Her friend tittered, then caught herself and looked away. It was incumbent on me to say something polite if I had any thought of seeing the kitten again. All I could think was that this had the earmarks of another morning without tea.

The second guide glanced down at her skirt, which was clinging to her legs. "It's soaked through. I can't give tours walking around like this, none of the men will listen. I've got to hike back to the room and change. If I can find any, I'll bring some extra tea, too. What we had left is all over the floor."

Amazing, I thought, and kicked a pinecone halfway across the parking lot. One lousy cup of tea wouldn't do me any harm. I strolled over for a closer view of the low orange flowers that bordered both sides of the walkway leading to the temple grounds. The first guide floated beside me. "It's going to rain again later this morning anyway, so there won't be any tours." She brushed against my arm. "As long as you've walked this far up the hill, you may as well look around the grounds.

When the rain starts, we can duck into one of the old buildings. The roofs leak a little, but you don't look too delicate to me."

The sky had lost the freshness of morning and was turning a hard blue. The light on the grass and the flowers was brilliant, but it stopped suddenly at the edge of the main path, which was deeply shaded by ten or fifteen old Chinese elms standing in a row. Their trunks curved gently near the ground, as if they had once seen court ladies gathering their skirts and longed to do that, too.

With the sun climbing above the peaks, the near side of the hills was no longer in shadow. The dwarf pine trees looked farther away, and smaller, while the rocks they were growing from had become larger and more foreboding in the light. The guide looked up at the mountain.

"There is a legend about those trees. They were planted by the monks who had to flee the fighting here centuries ago. The story is that they deliberately planted the trees in the most inaccessible places, to be a constant reminder to any invaders that nothing could crush our spirit."

"Nice tale. But I think they only live to be about fifty years old, at most, then they reseed. Though how anything could reseed on those rocks is beyond me."

The guide motioned me over to a boulder sitting behind a low wooden fence. The face of the rock had been carved away and a poem in ancient Chinese characters chiseled on it, but these had been worn by the weather, making it hard to read more than one or two in each line.