The Wounded and the Time of the Order

The time next to the name didn't match.

Kim Deokchil. Left shin, crushed. Stretcher arrived at the third quarter of the hour of the Rabbit. Below that, what Yun Sunhwa had checked three times that night and written down was the time the order tied to the injury had been sent. The fifth quarter of the hour of the Rabbit. The man had been hurt before the order even arrived, so the cause needed checking again.

Sunhwa set down the brush without touching it to her lips. Twelve torn sacks were spread across the floor of the empty army grain warehouse. Thirty one people lay there. Only nine could sit up. Two cauldrons of boiled water. Forty three strips of clean cloth. Half an hour until the next pot cooled.

"Name first."

The soldier carrying the stretcher was gasping for breath.

"Garrison cook. Shrapnel to the stomach..."

"His name."

"Choe, Choe Wonseok."

Sunhwa pressed on Choe Wonseok's stomach. Hard beneath her palm, pulse thin. Right beside him, dock laborer Kang Manbok coughed up wet breath. Blood was spreading below his ribs, darkening the edge of the sack under him. Neither man could wait.

An officer at the warehouse door held up a sealed paper.

"Our soldiers first. Orders are to save whoever's needed to hold the line."

Sunhwa cut Choe Wonseok's belt and pushed a pressure dressing under it. Her hands didn't stop.

"Who sent it, and when."

"Follow the order first."

"Tell me the time it was sent and who signed it. I decide treatment order."

The officer unfolded the paper. Second quarter of the hour of the Rabbit, signed by Provisions Adjutant under Im Gwanpil. The paper reached the warehouse at the start of the hour of the Dragon. Over an hour late. In that time Kang Manbok's lips had been turning blue.

Sunhwa set the paper down beside the ledger.

"Choe Wonseok looks like he's bleeding inside. If I take my hands off, it gets worse. Kang Manbok's airway will close first. I'm opening him up first."

"You'd put a laborer ahead of a soldier?"

"I'd put the bleeding ahead."

The words behind the writ were short.

"No."

Sunhwa picked up the boiled knife. Oh Bokrye held down Kang Manbok's shoulder, and a young army doctor knelt beside Choe Wonseok. Sunhwa pointed out the pressure point to him with her finger.

"Call me the moment the pulse stops. Right now I'm not losing either of them."

The blade opened the pooled blood at Kang Manbok's side and dark red blood poured out. Oh Bokrye swallowed a curse and kept calling the man's name.

"Manbok. Kang Manbok. Who's waiting for you at home?"

"Two, two sisters..."

"Hear that? Two of them waiting. Keep breathing."

Sunhwa wrote even that answer in the margin of the ledger. Two sisters. Yeomli, Mapo. Fourth line of the loading crew. Information like that was the first thing to vanish once a man became a single number, whether in the next water ration or in compensation.

The officer tried to take the order back. Oh Bokrye's bloodied hand pressed down on the corner of the paper.

"Leave that here."

"That's a garrison document."

"It's got the time our people's blood was spilled on it. Papers from up top go light as air and float away easy enough."

"Take your hand off."

Instead of moving her hand, Oh Bokrye turned her head. Nametags hung from every post in the warehouse, written up through the night. Under each name: where they were hurt, when they came in, whose order they were carrying out when it happened. The columns where the cause wasn't known yet were left blank.

"I've got nothing to hide. My people will all see this posted."

"Trying to stir up trouble?"

"If nobody stops, people die. If someone sees a friend's name on that list, they'll tell the rope to stop."

Sunhwa looked up. That wasn't the method she'd had in mind. Publishing the treatment records would expose the patients' circumstances along with them. Kang Manbok's sisters, Choe Wonseok's unit, the name of a soldier being treated in hiding could all end up in the hands of someone with power.

"You can't post all of it."

Oh Bokrye's eyebrows rose.

"A minute ago you were telling me not to erase names."

"Keeping a name and letting anyone take it are different things. Only post what's needed to stop the work. Name, work crew, time of injury, what needs to be halted. Family and condition stay in the inner ledger."

Oh Bokrye looked at Sunhwa for a moment. When Kang Manbok groaned, both of them pressed down harder at the same time.

"Who gets to see the inner one?"

"The patient, whoever treated them, and one person chosen by each work crew. If the garrison wants it, three people have to open it together."

"More talk of three keys."

"Two keys is enough. But the names of anyone who reads it get kept, all three."

Oh Bokrye laughed shortly.

"They say the living don't fit the report format, and here you go making a whole new format."

A young voice came from outside the door.

"Is my father's name up there?"

A girl of about ten came toward the list, still in her wet straw sandals. Oh Bokrye shielded the paper with her body. The person the girl was looking for was Jo Chilseong, who had a deep burn on his neck. He was alive but couldn't speak yet, and if it was written down that he'd been hurt carrying garrison ammunition crates, the responsibility for unauthorized transport could fall on him.

Sunhwa knelt in front of the girl.

"Your father's name is Jo Chilseong, right?"

The girl nodded hard.

"He's inside. He's breathing right now, and he's had medicine. But we won't post what he was doing when he got hurt outside until he can tell us himself."

"Then write that I came."

Sunhwa wrote in the inner ledger, "Daughter Jo Bun-i visited, first quarter of the hour of the Dragon." Jo Bun-i couldn't read. When Sunhwa read it aloud to her, the girl drew a small circle to mark that it was correct.

Oh Bokrye asked, "Does this need three witnesses too?"

"No. A family member checking their own record isn't something I'll block. But whoever copies it down has to be recorded."

The officer snorted.

"Even a child's circle counts as evidence now?"

Sunhwa washed her brush. The water turned red at once.

"It's not evidence. It's a promise. That I won't forget who said what, to whom."

After Jo Bun-i went into the warehouse, Sunhwa folded the covers of the two ledgers differently. The outer one with square corners, the inner one folded into a triangle. A way for those who couldn't read to tell them apart without mistakes. Oh Bokrye tied a thick length of rope to one and thin thread to the other.

"Better than paper. You can tell them apart by feel too."

"I was wrong. If I keep writing alone through the night, the ledger ends the moment I collapse."

The words were hard to say out loud. Sunhwa set down the knife to hide the tremor in her fingers. She hadn't swallowed anything but a mouthful of water since the night before. The thought that a patient would die the moment she stopped had gripped every judgment she made. It looked too much like what her brother used to do whenever there was a crisis.

"Split the people up. Someone to ask names, someone to check times, someone to boil water. I'll keep charge of treatment order, but I'll share the record keeping."

Oh Bokrye snapped her fingers toward the door.

"Seokgu, bring two who can read. Pick one from the soldiers' side. And write that anyone whose crew shows up on this list has the right to stop work."

The scribes Choe Seokgu brought were dock accounting errand boy Im Chunbae and garrison private Choe Byeongsu. Sunhwa had the two of them question the same patients separately and write down the answers. The first was Na Okdong, whose right hand had two crushed fingers.

"Name, where you're hurt, when it happened, what order you'd gotten at the time. If you don't know, write that you don't know."

Chunbae wrote "order to push the cart." Byeongsu wrote "forbidden to approach the grain cart." The same shout, heard as opposites. Na Okdong shook his head, jaw clenched.

"One fellow yelled push, another yelled stop. They shouted at the same time."

Sunhwa didn't erase either record. She set them side by side. Nobody knew the name of whoever had shouted on the spot, let alone who'd sent the order. In the blank space she wrote only "needs confirmation."

"Don't try to make them match. A different record isn't a failure, it's the next question."

Oh Bokrye checked Na Okdong's work crew.

"West pulley, third line. Stop that same pulley now. Chunbae, go check if the axle's cracked. Byeongsu, find out who in the garrison shouted the stop order."

The officer let out a hollow laugh.

"Stop the dock work and the relief rice stops too."

"That's not what I'm calling for, stopping everything." Oh Bokrye pointed a bloodied finger at the first line of the public list. "Just that rope, that pulley, that cart stop. Until the cause is checked and another crew takes over. Wages don't get docked and blamed on the ones who stopped."

Sunhwa wrote that condition down. Stopping work wasn't a punishment, it was treatment against a repeat. But the relief station had only enough rice left for twenty six bowls of morning porridge. If the work stayed stopped long, the evening pot would be empty.

"What about food for the stopped crew?"

"Take it from the public ledger first. If we cut a hurt man's meal as punishment, who's going to give their name?"

"Who approves that share?" the officer asked.

Before Oh Bokrye could answer, Sunhwa wrote her own name at the bottom of the ledger.

"I'm responsible for this morning's share. Before the next meal, someone in charge of rations has to come and confirm it. If they don't, I'll post the name and the time, blank space and all, right outside."

Just then the army doctor beside Choe Wonseok called out. The pulse had gone thinner. Sunhwa secured the drainage tube on Kang Manbok and moved at once. Choe Wonseok's hand groped at the air.

"Don't... tell my mother. She'll think I deserted."

"I'll keep your name and unit, but your family's address stays in the inner ledger. This man isn't finished yet."

Sunhwa had the doctor set the incision site and counted her own breaths. One, two, three. Outside the warehouse came the sound of paper being tacked up. A laborer and a soldier were copying the public list and posting it on a post together. Someone spotted a friend's name and hurried out. A moment later came the dull sound of a pulley grinding to a stop.

The officer said, stepping over the threshold, "I'll report the refusal of orders together with the work stoppage."

"Report the time it was sent, too." Sunhwa didn't take her eyes off Choe Wonseok's wound. "And the time it arrived."

About half an hour later, a little color came back into Kang Manbok's lips. Choe Wonseok had lost consciousness, but his pulse held. She couldn't write that he'd survived. Beside both their names Sunhwa wrote "treatment ongoing." Not success, just what the next shift had to do.

Thirteen names went up on the public list. Two rope operations and one broken cart had stopped, and five people had been moved to other crews. Half a jug of water and seventeen strips of cloth remained at the relief station. Oh Bokrye pressed her thumbprint below the last name and handed the ink brush to soldiers' representative Choe Byeongsu.

"Check your own people too. Don't act like only our names are the real ones."

Choe Byeongsu wrote a name in clumsy handwriting. At that moment, the sound of hooves stopped outside the warehouse.

A messenger in a wet uniform held out a sealed letter. An order for the arrest of garrison cook chief Bak Sangho. The reason given was that he had refused to ladle out the officers' share first and had put rice into the soldiers' pot instead.

The ink on the time written beneath the seal hadn't even dried yet.