Chapter 01
The First Name
Hoyeon's grandfather kept the bronze vessel in the back of the temple cellar, behind the rice and behind the lacquerware. There was a wooden post by the door he tapped twice before he stepped in. He did not tell the boy what the tapping was for. He did not tell the boy a lot of things.
The vessel was the size of a man's thigh, and waxed at the lid, and bound with a single black hair that ran twice around the neck of it. The hair did nothing — Hoyeon learned this much later. The hair was for the look of the thing, the way a temple bell is hung from a leather strap that is not strong enough to hold the bell. Custom.
The seal was the count. As long as a living person could say all seventy-two of the names in order, the wax would stay. The boy's grandfather had said them every morning for sixty years. He had begun forgetting them the previous winter, and he had not told anyone.
The boy was twelve. He could already name forty of them.
The Cellar
There were rules. The grandfather walked first. The boy walked behind. They took two candles, one each — the boy's was the shorter one, which the grandfather called "your nuisance" because it would gutter and need re-lighting from his — and they went down the seventeen steps without counting them. The grandfather did not believe in counting steps. He believed in counting names.
"Who is the second of the seventy-two," he asked, without looking back.
"Agares," said the boy.
"Who is the second of the seventy-two," he asked again, and this time the boy understood and answered, "Agares, Duke, who teaches all tongues, and returns the man who runs away to where he ran from."
The grandfather did not say good. He never said good. He said, "Who is the third."
"Vassago, Prince, who declares things past and to come."
"Who is the fourth."
"Samigina, Marquis, who speaks for the dead at sea."
The boy hated the dead at sea. He had asked once why Samigina was only for the drowned, and his grandfather had said, because the drowned are still listening, and after that the boy had stopped wanting to know why anything was the way it was. He wanted only to be right. He wanted only to keep up.
What the Hair Was For
Halfway down the second flight, the grandfather stopped.
"Hold your candle low," he said. The boy held it low. There, on the third step from the bottom, was a single black hair, laid across the stone like a line of ink.
"That is for me," the grandfather said. "Step over."
The boy stepped over.
"That is for me," the grandfather said again, two steps later, where a second hair lay across the stone in the same way.
"For you," said the boy.
"For me."
The boy did not understand, then, that the hairs were for the day the grandfather would not be able to come down the stairs. He did not understand that the seal of a thing is the part that everyone agrees to ignore.
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