The coffin was tiny.
It was only a little larger than a bag of rice, and not even close to as heavy. The four men in white robes carried it with ease, slowly trekking up the hill with grim faces and steady steps.
Following them came a crowd of wailing women, dressed in white silk and cotton robes, wringing their hands and weeping at the heavens, as if to implore the gods as to why they would let such a terrible thing happen.
Behind the women in ghostly white came a crowd of men, also wearing pure white robes, their lips set and grim, their eyes cast down. Today, they were not wearing their black hats that marked them as government officials. A funeral was not an appropriate occasion for that.
And last of all, came a man and a woman — the family of the deceased.
They were dressed in the most elaborate white robes of all. The woman was tall and imposing, her eyes stormy and her lips pursed sternly. In her hair, she wore a white, bloodless flower. The man next to her, on the other hand, was rather plain. His face was benign, but it showed anxiety. The black ribbon on his arm marked him as the male head of the bereaved family.
When the procession at last reached the top of the hill, it stopped abruptly. The wailing women continued to wail, and the grim men continued to look grim.
On the other hand, the imposing mother and plain father approached the tiny coffin, peering inside at the tiny, stiff newborn curled up in the shiny wooden box. It was frail and graying, its expression like it lay in a painful fit of nightmares. But the fact that it was clearly dead wasn’t the most horrifying thing about it.
More alarming were the scarlet scars all over its little body, shaped like crescent moons — left over by the Scarlet Plague. They clustered around its little graying neck like a rash.
The mother and father placed joss paper stiffly into the coffin.
It was sealed, and the coffin was placed in the dirt at the top of the hill.
The father took a turn stepping on it, pressing it into the dirt. His face was pale, and he looked almost nauseous.
Then the mother was helped onto it. She stamped on it several times, pushing it farther down and away from the sunlight, her face regal and her eyes gleaming darkly in the fading afternoon light.
Those men who carried the coffin up the hill took up shovels and buried it, patting the dirt into a mound. A woman stepped forward; she was the only woman wearing red out of a sea of mourners in white. Her neck was draped with gold, and her pierced ears dripped with jewels. She was the customary shaman, here to sing the ritual funeral songs. Her lips parted, and her beautiful, flowing voice filled the air.
The sound was haunting, like the whistling of glass chimes when the air was still.
It seemed to make the father even more nervous. He was pale as a ghost, and he kept glancing at the mound, like he expected the newborn to burst out of the coffin at any minute and try to strangle him with those tiny hands.
At last, the shaman finished her song. The father wiped his forehead and stepped forward to speak, silently putting enormous effort into looking grim and melancholy instead of anxious and antsy.
“Though our daughter, Han Abrial Chae-young, spent only a few short months in the world of the living, her mother and I loved her dearly. Her death has torn a hole in our hearts, which cannot be mended without great care, and through which we will always feel a cold wind of loss blowing.”
His words were very moving, as expected of a government official. The women in the crowd wailed incessantly. He had to wait for them to be quiet again before continuing.
“Abrial was a blessed child. If she had not fallen to the terrible Scarlet Plague that has murdered every newborn birthed in the Year of the Lotus, she surely would have grown to be a kind, gentle, and compassionate young woman with great beauty. We will remember her brightness, and send her spirit safely on.”
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
The women wailed more, like a pack of banshees. He waited for them to shut up again. Then he gestured to his wife, who stood next to him like a tower of stone, both taller and infinitely more imposing than he was.
“As you all know, my beloved wife, Lady Lee Geum-song, suffers from fragile health. The death of our newborn has taken a great toll on her, which has been worsened by the business of the imperial capital. Therefore, we have retrieved His Divine Majesty the Emperor’s immortal permission to move to a residence fifteen miles from the capital, where my wife can safely heal and grieve. We ask that you do not miss us too much; though we will not entertain visits for my wife’s health, I will travel to attend the royal court each day, and we will visit our friends as we are able to. I hope that you can understand.”
“Yes! We understand, of course!” the male government officials exclaimed in return, smiling sympathetically and then continuing to look grim.
The women wailed louder. The situation was so bad that Han Chuanli’s wife needed to retract from society! How terrible!
The father, Han Chuanli, said a few more words with a melancholy air, sweat trickling down the back of his neck. Joss paper was burned in a ceramic vase to send good luck and fortune with the newborn’s spirit, and then the funeral was over.
Lee Geum-song and Han Chuanli, the mother and father, left first. Their carriage was waiting on the road not far from the funeral hill. In their ghostly white robes, they piled in and left immediately, riding away into the night with that hill receding behind them until the tiny mound atop it was a little speck, and then it was invisible.
----------------------------------------
Shortly after, they stopped by a little hut.
It was a tiny hut; a dilapidated one, too. Like a minuscule little house that had been abandoned decades ago, or an outhouse someone handy had converted into a living space for some reason. The straw roof was all falling apart, and the wood was rotting in on itself. No one would want to go inside that kind of place — least of all a wealthy government official and his wife.
Of course, except for these two, it seemed. They walked right on in.
They squeezed inside, avoiding rotted splitting wood on the door, to find a young woman with brown hair tied up in a bun cradling a newborn swaddled in cotton cloth inside. She jolted and looked up when they stepped inside, then seemed to calm down when she saw who they were.
She bowed, carefully holding the baby, who was fast asleep, and murmured respectfully,
“Master Han Chuanli, Lady Lee Geum-song.”
The father bowed his head slightly in return, but the mother just swept forward, holding her hands out to take the newborn. She had a stern look on her face, and her eyes were stormy.
“Give Abrial to me, Anna.”
The woman, Anna, obeyed, handing the baby over carefully. Her mother took the baby — the baby whose name was Abrial — into her arms, and held it close, examining its pale, sleeping expression, its round, rosy cheeks, and its half-open lips.
Then she whirled around. “We must go, quickly.” With that, she swept out of the little shack, leaving her husband and Anna to hurry along behind.
They piled into the carriage, which was roomy enough for the three of them. The father and mother sat on one side, and the young woman sat on the other, trying not to take up much space. The carriage started moving again at a signal to the coachman from the father.
“It shouldn’t be long until we reach the new house,” the father said once they’d sped to a reasonable pace, the endless hills flying past the curtained carriage windows. “Maybe half an hour, maximum. You’ll love it, Geum-song-ah; it’s even bigger than the house in the imperial capital, since there’s so much more space!” He was starting to get excited now, sitting straighter and beaming at his wife. “Three stories, built with the latest architectural techniques! And a wall for safeguarding, which can be passed off as a desire for extreme privacy and the blocking of sunlight for health reasons. And what’s more…I ordered the construction of a vast garden filled with the most beautiful plants and flowers, to look like paradise! And, do you know what else? I actually — ”
“Quiet, Chuanli.” The mother’s voice was harsh and cold. She shot her husband a scathing look, shutting him up, and returned her gaze to the newborn in her arms — the real Han Abrial Chae-young, who hadn’t died after just a few months of living due to the Scarlet Plague, and who hadn’t been buried or had joss paper burned for her and eerie funeral songs sung for her on top of that hill.
The baby seemed to feel the movement of the carriage in its sleep. It blinked its large, sparkling obsidian eyes open, and stared up at its mother with curiosity.
Geum-song’s face was strict and imposing. But at that moment, the faintest hint of a smile crossed her lips — before it disappeared completely. She shifted her arms to hold Abrial as tightly as possible and examined her from above, her gaze cold again.
“We must do everything to protect her,” she said aloud, though she didn’t seem to be talking to anyone in particular. Perhaps she was talking to herself. “The Emperor must never find her. He must never discover that she is alive. We must build a beautiful garden and bring in the most entertaining tutors, so that she will never want to leave. She must never be in danger.”
Her stormy eyes gazed down at her daughter, a softness buried deep within them, too deeply to be visible to the eye.
“Within my grasp, you will be safe. I will do whatever it takes to ensure that you live — no matter what fate has laid out for you.”