Of course, Yi Hyun could not take the strange note seriously. He was an educated man and did not believe in ghosts. Perhaps his elder brother had decided to play a joke on him for some reason, but it would have been a really strange joke. So Yi Hyun decided to gather more information first.
He spoke with the captain of the royal guard accompanying him. Since that time when they had fought back to back in the night forest with the assassins, Yi Hyun was ready to trust him no less than Commander Yeong San himself. Of course, he did not mention ghosts, but he expressed concern about the elder prince’s unusual behavior, then asked Captain Chong to watch him and see whether he noticed anything strange.
At first the captain frowned, as if looking for a reason to refuse, but Yi Hyun assured him that he was driven purely by brotherly concern.
Had he fallen into a difficult situation he could not speak of?
Was someone blackmailing him?
That explanation naturally worked, and Captain Chong promised to learn what he could.
In the morning, a servant said that Captain Chong and Great Prince Seojin had gone together to the magistrate, and Yi Hyun began to wait patiently for news. Or not very patiently. Rereading the textbooks he had brought was dull, there was still no word from the guards sent after the thief, and Prince Rui did not summon him either.
His feet carried him to the room where Jade Butterfly had spent the night, and he decided to brighten the morning with pleasant conversation.
“Do you believe in ghosts?” he asked, seating himself familiarly on the edge of her silk mattress.
Jade Butterfly was sitting at the head of the bed and applying rouge at her lips with a thin brush. A small mirror stood on the table before her, and she looked into it far more often than at the prince.
“Ghosts?” she repeated, turning her head to examine the left side of her lips more closely. Then she brought the brush to them again and corrected what, to the prince’s eye, had already been fine. “I have not seen them, but I had a friend who spoke with them. Her mother was a shaman, and she knew a little too.”
“So you truly believe all those folk tales about virgin spirits who strangle people at night are true?” Yi Hyun laughed.
“As a matter of fact, virgin spirits really can harm a person,” Jade Butterfly set the brush aside, opened a powder case, and began beating the powder with a special puff. “Only there are very few of them. She told me that to become a spirit, a person must die very deeply wronged. Say, if he was unjustly killed, or he was riding to his wedding and a bridge collapsed under him. People like that can become spirits.”
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“But he is not necessarily a virgin even if he was riding to a wedding,” Yi Hyun giggled, deciding to play along.
“Of course,” the gisaeng agreed. Little clouds of whitish dust rose from her powder, filling the room with a faint floral scent. “Or if a girl was raped and died, she will not become a virgin spirit either, perhaps just a hungry one. Such cases happen more than you think. But sometimes it may be that a person died young, in despair, and unjustly. Even the reapers do not take them, or they take them but not at once. I do not remember how she told it. And then—”
“And the reapers exist too?” Yi Hyun cut her off. “And Prince Yama, and the Jade Emperor, and the fairies in the Heavenly Gardens?”
“Of course!” Jade Butterfly declared confidently. “Otherwise why live in this world, if even after death one cannot hope for justice?”
Yi Hyun had never viewed religion from that angle. He understood that Buddhism, Daoism, and shamanism were simply different ways to stuff simple people’s heads and earn a little money from their gullibility. But perhaps Jade Butterfly was right that this “stuffing of heads” helped people keep hope for the future. Some clever people like her might choose it consciously, to break out of the unbearable circumstances of their earthly lives. It was worth thinking about more carefully.
“An interesting remark,” Yi Hyun agreed with her. “So what happens to ghosts, according to your friend? Do they just drift among people, unseen and unheard? That must be disheartening, when no one notices you. I would go mad.”
“Apparently, sometimes the reapers take them, and sometimes they go away on their own,” the gisaeng mused. “But you are right, ghosts are rather rare. That means they do not exist forever, or there would already be very many of them.”
“Or perhaps they possess living people.” Now that assumption ought to sound natural. Yi Hyun was curious what folk tales said about it.
“Yes, that happens, especially if the spirit is offended about something,” the gisaeng confirmed and began lining her eyes. “Say, if descendants forget to perform ceremonies for ancestors, the ancestors may possess them and remind them of themselves. That is what they say. It seems to me, if they have already been reborn, then how will they possess anyone?”
“And how does one drive them out of a body, then?” Yi Hyun decided to finalize his playful investigation. “Call a shaman?”
“Yes, I think shamans know the necessary exorcisms,” Jade Butterfly nodded. “I have not met ancestral spirits, but we had one girl who was possessed by a tree spirit. She suddenly began freezing and falling. At first doctors tried to treat her, and then they called a shaman. She said that girl had stolen a ribbon from an old tree, and the spirit wanted its own back. We gathered all her ribbons, added another dozen, and tied them all on the branches, and then she came to herself.”
“And you truly believe that?” Yi Hyun still could not resist a sneer.
“What I believe is my business, Your Highness,” the gisaeng cut in coldly. “If I believed in justice and an honest trial, my family name would already have been cleared of charges of treason. But it seems that in Joseon, spirits are more real than honest officials.”
Yi Hyun had nothing to answer to that. He did not yet have enough influence to help her.
