The Village of the Bird Poles
Wind, campfire and river sounds change with every scene, and the music follows the story.
In Okjeo and Dongye, small states on the East Sea coast, there was no great king; in each village a chief led the people. The people of Okjeo had to carry salt and fish on their backs to their big neighbor, Goguryeo, and in the tenth month the people of Dongye held rites to Heaven, singing and dancing day and night.
Characters
A child of a riverside village in Mahan
Carves birds from wood
Treasures her bead necklace
rites to Heaven
Sori’s state
from Byeonhan in the east
The southern land King Jun of Gojoseon is said to have reached by sea: “Han (韓).”
Mahan in the west; Jinhan and Byeonhan in the east.
It was a land where seventy-eight small states
lived shoulder to shoulder.
SoriI’m Sori. I live in a riverside village in one of the fifty-four states of Mahan.
the chickens!
SoriOur house is an earthen mound shaped like a tomb. The door is at the very top of the roof.
SoriThe chickens in our village have tails more than five feet long.
Nothing to you but tail!
SoriAt the entrance to our village stand poles topped with wooden birds. My brother Maru often sat beneath them, carving birds.
carving another bird?
of a sotdae.
all the way to the sky.
our wishes to Heaven.
That spring, a boat loaded with iron came up the river.
Byeonhan iron!
People came out with rice and cloth to trade for iron.
for this rice?
iron is money!
I’d give you an armful of iron!
It’s our family treasure.
The people of Mahan treasured beads more than gold or silver.
our mountains in Byeonhan.
the Ye and the Wa buy it too,
commanderies, Lelang and Daifang.
that melts iron?
than the sun.
In the fifth month, people sowed rice seed in the flooded paddies.
We’ll have to go easy on the ditch water.
When the sowing was done, they held rites for the spirits. People gathered in crowds and sang, danced and drank day and night.
Sori!
high!
Dozens of people stamped the ground in lines, bending and straightening, hands and feet moving as one.
No rain had fallen for days. The people of the upper village dammed the ditch and turned the water into their own paddies.
our paddies will dry up!
come first!
Get him!
I didn’t mean to…
Run to the Sodo!
Stop!
This was the Sodo, a place where a great tree was raised and hung with bells and a drum to serve the spirits.
If a fugitive entered the Sodo, no one would send him back.
where the spirits dwell.
can be handed over.
Hand him over!
even I am powerless.
The one who led the state was the sinji; the one who held rites to Heaven was the cheongun. They were two different people.
SoriThat night, I wrapped up some rice balls and slipped off to the entrance of the Sodo.
did he wake up?
The fallen man’s family demanded payment.
be strung again.
I have only one.
Luckily, the man who had fallen woke up. The sinji stood between the two families and settled the quarrel.
And the two villages will share the water.
At dawn a few days later, Maru left for Byeonhan aboard the iron trader’s boat as it headed home. He said he would earn iron and replace his mother’s beads.
tenth-month rites, I promise!
carving the bird!
The boat went down the river and out to sea,
then followed the southern coast east, and farther east still,
to Byeonhan, the land of iron.
An ironworking village in Byeonhan. Every day, Maru pumped the leather bellows to blow air into the furnace.
Till the fire burns white!
When autumn came, the blacksmith gave Maru a few pieces of iron as his wages.
At market, it works as money.
beads for Mother?
SoriAfter my brother left, I spent every day carving the bird he had left half-finished.
In the tenth month, the harvest was done. Dad and the villagers raised a new pole topped with Sori’s bird.
The way Brother will come!
In the tenth month, with all the farmwork done, people again held rites for the spirits and sang and danced as they had in the fifth month.
Just then, someone came walking in along the road from the east.
I strung new ones.
has come home.
our wishes to Heaven.
The wooden birds atop the sotdae still gaze at the sky today.
Around that time, a few of the small states in the land of Han (韓) were slowly growing larger.
Baekje-guk in Mahan, Saro-guk in Jinhan, Guya-guk in Byeonhan.
These were the states that would one day grow
into Baekje, Silla and Gaya.
