Before dawn on October 14, Yi Sun-sin dreams that he is riding a horse up a hill.
The animal misses its footing and goes down, and he is not thrown. Then he sees what looks like his youngest son Myeon holding on to him, and there he wakes.
He goes through the day without knowing what the dream was. A day in camp runs the way it always does.
The Letter That Came in the Evening
In the evening a man arrives from Cheonan. He has brought a letter from home.
Yi Sun-sin’s body shakes before the seal is broken. Without knowing why himself, his flesh and bone answer first.
He opens the outer cover and sees the hand of his second son Yeol. Ahead of the letter inside, two characters are written on the outside.
慟哭 To weep aloud. (October 14, 1597, on the cover of the letter from home)
He sees the two characters and knows before he opens it.
What Happened at Asan
Myeon had been at Asan. The family stayed there while their father fought in the southern sea.
The Japanese of that year came up through Jeolla and into Chungcheong. And some of them came to Yi Sun-sin’s house.
This was not a party passing through. They went after his family in order to shake him. They knew what the shortest road to breaking the father was.
Myeon did not run. He fought them and was killed.
He was a target for nothing he had done. He was a target for whose son he was.
That Day’s Entry
What Yi Sun-sin wrote that day breaks off more often than anything else he left behind.
How can heaven be so unkind. That is his question.
He writes that it was right for him to die and his son to live, and that the order of things has been turned around. He writes that he would go down and weep beside him, but the boy’s brother, his sister, and his mother have no one else to lean on, so he must bear it and live.
Then this. My heart is dead and only the shape of me remains, crying out. Getting through one night is like getting through a year.
Two Things Inside One Month
He won at Myeongnyang on September 16. This letter came on October 14.
Not quite a month.
In between he moved up and down the west coast seeing to ships and revising a memorial. The court discussed his rank and let the matter drop, and he left no particular remark about it.
What that month brought the man who had won is in this letter.
Today, What the Position Calls Down
This is a chapter with no battle in it. One dream and one letter is all of it.
And still this day sits at the heaviest place in the series, because what he had been protecting and what he lost came from the same cause.
Had he not been the commander, Myeon would not have been a target that day. And because he was the commander, a great many households behind that sea got through the winter.
Both sentences are true. How he lived with the two of them side by side is not written in the diary either.