The slanting sun hung low, and the evening wind blew warm. The flat-bottomed ship with its square bow and stern ran with the wind, moving very fast; in less than half an hour, it had sailed to the southern shore of Atoyac Lake. Before their eyes, the ship was already nearing the river mouth where the Talsas River flowed into the lake. The sturdy old man stood beside the stern rudder, drew in a deep breath, bulged his thick old arms, and hauled the rudder hard.
"Stand firm, all of you! Turning around!..."
"Huh? This—!... Bodhisattva!..."
Seeing how quickly the bow swung aside, feeling the hull tilt so sharply it nearly threw him down, the old man gripping the Gold Talisman was truly startled. He quickly bent his knees, grabbed a cable, and hurriedly wound the Gold Talisman around his arm and tied it tight. Only then did he hastily adjust the sail with both hands, reducing the angle against the wind and easing the tilt of the hull.
"Main God above! This old block of wood! This old Kim!..."
The crouching old man hurriedly got up too, spat out the grass stem in his mouth, cursed under his breath, and flailed about helping adjust the sail. Only after the bow had swung through a full half-circle, the hull leveled out again, and the fore-and-aft sail slanted into the wind did the two of them let out a long breath at the same time.
"Whew! Steering is hard work. For Lord Cedar to still have this kind of strength at his age—he really is a vajra arhat!..."
Shipwright Kim Seon-su untied the cable and gripped the Gold Talisman tightly in his palm again. He was actually only forty, but more than thirty years of hard labor, wind, and frost had