Prologue / The Opening Stones (1)

A yellow night.

A white scream.

A corroded sky.

Tap.

A leaflet drifted down out of empty air, brushed my cheek, and floated on. It spun, struck my collar, turned, and came to rest at last against the worn-through tip of a shoe.

I looked at it for a while.

Did the thing even know it had been thrown away?

I was still gazing down at that leaflet when a siren, resonating from somewhere far off, woke the city from its drowned silence.

"Hmm, hm-hmm~"

I was walking through a gray forest drowned in orange waves, with a mechanical wail that might have passed, to modern ears, for a kind of classical music playing behind me, when someone seized me in a hurry.

"Hey!"

The roughness of the grip on my right made my head turn of its own accord.

"That's the wrong way!"

The clank of metal. A familiar presence. A ragged, panting breath.

"…Where do you think you're going? The shelter's the other way, sir!"

A sergeant. He was a sergeant.

"Sir?"

The man who had stopped me was a soldier stuffed to the brim with exhaustion and irritation.

"Hey!"

When I turned my head in silence and gave him nothing back, he shouted at me with a tighter face, loading the cry with a full measure of what the hell is wrong with you.

"Are your ears blocked? Didn't you hear the broadcast telling everyone to evacuate?"

I glanced sideways. His finger was already half-rested on ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠the trigger.

"There's no—there's no time for this! Did you really not hear the broadcast? You need to get somewhere safe right now—"

"Bullshit."

"Excuse me…?"

I turned a wide, bright smile on the soldier, who was staring at me with a look of perfect stupidity.

It was worth it. It was more than worth it.

I answered the sergeant again—the man still wearing that vacant expression, still unable to decide whether any of this was real—with another smile, unfeigned and almost cheerful.

"I said bullshit. Where in Seoul is there a safe place right now?"

And without laying a finger on the flustered soldier's rifle if I could help it, I eased him gently aside.

Time was short. I did not have time for this. I had no time at all.

What exactly had I given up to run all the way here, for that one spectacle, the only one of its kind I would ever be granted in this life?

"Ah!"

It was not the fact of being pushed aside that struck him. It was the meaning of my answer, arriving a beat too late, that made him cry out at my back again, his face gone white with shock.

Looking back on it, the sound was closer to a scream.

"…W-wait, you can't! Sir! Sir! That's not the right direction! Hey—hey—"

"You've been working hard."

I gave a small, silent nod at the judgment I had just passed. He really was a soldier worthy of it.

A proper soldier!

And well he might be. In all the time I had been walking toward the heart of the city, he was the only one who had caught me by the ankle.

"Well. Seoul hospitality really is a letdown. Everyone's too busy finding a hole to crawl into. Ah, well. So be it."

Then, swept away by the humming that spilled from my mouth, the soldier shrank to a single point in the distance and was gone.

"Heh. Hm-hmm."

Light steps. A tune that would not stop coming.

Some stretch of time later I stood alone at an intersection, taking the evacuation leaflets that scattered down like Christmas snow, and climbed onto the roof of the tallest bus in the road and sat myself down.

To put it plainly: it was quiet.

"Nice atmosphere."

The city was silent. Only the leaflets, endlessly drifting through the air, offered me any comfort.

"Very nice."

I was satisfied.

The leaflets, their backs a field of pure white, had piled thick upon the asphalt. Was it not just like Christmas Eve?

And more than anything, I was full of anticipation. It would be a rare landscape. A sight no one else would live to see.

Of course it will. Naturally.

"Ah, beer! Damn. I forgot…"

I was sitting in my quiet spectator's seat, killing time and regretting that one omission, when far off—far, far off—a vermilion flash rose up from the earth.

Yes. It rose.

And it was light.

"Oh."

I lost myself for a moment in the swelling orange radiance.

It was beautiful.

Simply beautiful.

"So it's starting."

Before that soul-stealing beauty I carefully closed both eyes.

A lukewarm heat, the kind you feel through your whole body when a fever is coming on, began to crawl up the back of my neck.

Then the scorching wave arrived.

I smiled.

And the old city was forgotten.

An old minister, marked by a scatter of age spots beneath his philtrum, spoke.

"Has the criminal anything further to say before His Majesty?"

Every gaze in the hall turned toward the boy kneeling bound below the dais. The black crown of his head, now the center of all attention, gleamed.

"Criminal?"

At the minister's prompting the child slowly lifted his face.

Seven years old, at most. Perhaps six. The boy's cheeks, which ought to have been as clear and soft as any child's of that age, were terribly rough, and both his eyes were bloodshot red.

Proof, if any were needed, that the laws of Joseon were severe.

"Did this official not ask you a question?"

The minister shook his beard and pressed the silent boy again, as if the repetition itself were a last mercy.

"This is your final chance. Will you not answer at once?"

Then the boy answered—with pure rage, and with eyes that burned.

"Go."

"What was that? Speak louder."

"Wh-what! From what position of safety do you dare—such, such insolence— What are you all standing there for? Gag the criminal at once!"

Someone shouted that this was treason. The minister, who a moment before had been all haughty composure, shot to his feet and now stamped in place, and hurled his fan at the boy.

At that blast of official fury the spectators' necks turtled backward as one, a collective flinch, a hissed ah—hot! running through the crowd.

But.

"Ha!"

The boy was not cowed. He cried out again.

"Treason? You call this treason?"

He said it as if declaring it to the multitude gathered there for his sake, and as if he were laughing, fully and without mercy, at the old swine who feared his tongue.

"Y-you—! Will you not shut that mouth!"

"Treason, you said? Indeed—how thick-faced is the master of that palace, who looks upon the torn and starving bellies of his own people, his own children, and still congratulates himself that he is better than Jie and Zhou! And how thick-faced are the jackals who serve him!"

"You wretch!!!"

"Haha, is that all? Just shouting? 'When a vassal is not a proper vassal, and a sovereign is not a proper sovereign, how can the people remain a gentle people?' You cannot even understand a verse of Confucius and Mencius from this mop-headed boy who hasn't reached the age of fifteen! What were you studying all those years, at your age? How did you ever dare imagine yourselves fit to teach anyone?"

"Silence! Will you not be silent!"

The minister stamped his feet in rage, but the boy's rebuke did not stop. If anything he leaned into it, shouting for all to hear at the minister who had come down from the dais ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠to clamp a hand over his mouth himself, and at the men hiding behind that minister's back, armed to the teeth with fury and shame and wounded pride.

Wake up, he was telling them. For heaven's sake, wake up.

"Shut that mouth at once!!!"

The assembly erupted at the boy's explosive words. At the minister's seizure-like command the bailiffs rushed in and seized the boy roughly by the mouth and throat.

The year of Our Lord 1882. It was a summer that could not be called merely hot.

It was a dry afternoon.

"Soldiers!"

From the high outer compound of the Hadogam, an officer in a sharply cut uniform, a long service saber slung aslant at his waist, roared his commands at the men drawn up before him in much the same dress. His fierce beard trembled. The blade flashed as if it meant to split the sky.

"Fall in! From the front, forward—march!"

"Ha!"

A green formation shuddered into motion with that shout. Clean-honed spears and swords stabbed high at the heavens, and the tread that answered the officer's cadence was truly fierce. These were the Byeolgigun—the Special Skills Force—the same men the streets so often mocked as the Jap Brigade.

"About face!"

"Ha!"

The column swung through a full circuit of the Hadogam. The officer ran in among them, joined their ranks, and shouted.

"Chests out! Step out with pride!"

"Yes, sir!"

Whatever the gossip in the markets, they were a foundation stone this country could not do without—not if it meant to protect its people now that the ports were open and Joseon was stepping out into the world.

"Don't take your eyes off the man in front of you! Rear rank, do not fall behind!"

Of course they were not yet the equal of a Great Power's army. A little time ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠passed, and groans began to rise, and gaps started to show between the files.

"Wah—!"

"My foot!"

The column lurched badly. Men whose dress differed from the soldiers' only by a small yellow epaulette on the shoulder and a tassel on the cap began to shout from inside the ranks—the drill instructors of each battalion, and the junior officers, the very waist of the army.

"You there—your footwork is wrong! Fall out!"

"You. You. And you as well."

"Get the ones who went down out of the column."

"Think of the cadence the way we practiced it—the cadence!"

They were still green. Soldiers tangled in one another's steps and milled in confusion, and between them the drill instructors of each file, under the cutting eye of the Major, dragged the offenders out of the formation.

The trouble was that the men who had wrecked the column were the same men who had long since fallen out of the Major's favor.

"Hmph."

The Major, who had been watching them with particular care, planted himself squarely in front of the culprits.

"You there!"

The instructors and standard-bearers who had hauled them out of line went taut at once. On the dais, the Left and Right Lieutenant Colonels and a Colonel whose beard had gone entirely white watched the Major with uneasy eyes—the look of men who could not tell what fresh quarrel was about to spark.

The Major's beard trembled, and his voice shook the outer compound.

"Soldiers! Why is it that you still cannot complete a single march in formation? Did you not hear from your drill instructors that the court is sending a military inspector to review this camp in three days' time?"

The question was a blade, and it was meant as a rebuke. The eyes of the men still marching, and the eyes of the officers watching from their chairs on the dais, all turned toward them.

And then, unexpectedly, what came back from the soldiers was not a cringing excuse and not a plea for pardon. It was insolent, offhand speech, the kind one used on a servant.

"When did you ever tell us, talking so big?"

"…What did you just say?"

"I said you."

"Why, you—"

"You. Hahaha!"

This was a Major, a man plainly above them in rank, and the officer charged with teaching them. The men who had ruined the drill did not ask forgiveness. They started laughing instead, each of them finding it funnier than the last.

"You dogs!"

The officer, realizing at last that he was being openly slighted, opened his mouth with a face dark with humiliation.

"Do you dare insult me—I, whose family has served this country as military officers for nine generations? Even the old gentlemen of your houses would not stand in front of me and call me you, like some street tough! How does a junior address his senior with the manners of a ruffian?"

"And when, exactly, did a man like you ever receive our respect, that you should lecture us on our manners? We attend these drills so as not to disgrace the ancestral stones of our houses. That is all."

"You—!"

"Enough. That is enough, Major!"

In the end the Colonel on the dais, his beard shaking, could stand it no longer and held him back—with the air of a man who intended to pretend he had seen none of it.

"B-but these men—"

"That will do! Training is finished for today! All of you, return to your barracks and rest!"

"General—General!"

"Ahem!"

A commander who, faced with a blatant breach of subordination, ordered the officer to stand down instead. On either side of him the other staff and officers shook their heads as if they had witnessed something they would rather not have seen, and hurried after their commander.

Only a very few officers, as they passed, bowed their heads to the humiliated Major in something like embarrassment.

"Damn it!"

It was a spectacle almost too ugly to look at. And it was, without ornament or excuse, the present reality of the Byeolgigun—the force that was supposed to become the ridgepole of the Joseon army.

Light, mocking laughter echoed at the Major's back.

"Damn it!"

That furious officer was Major Woo Beom-seon.

Open contempt, returned to him by the country his family had served for more than nine generations. An army in which discipline could not be found with a lantern. Insubordination that broke out whenever a crack showed, and budgets holed through like a wicker basket.

"And this—this is supposed to be an army?"

At the root of it, this country was wrong. That was what Major Woo Beom-seon believed.

"…And that is why you came to find me?"

"It is, Lieutenant."

The sun had gone down. The man thrown into confusion by the Major who had appeared without warning at the annex of the legation, a bottle of liquor in his hand, interrupting what had been a quiet rest, was Second Lieutenant Horimoto Reizo—drill instructor and advisor to the Byeolgigun.

"That—well. First, let us sit up."

The Major set the bottle on the table, breathing hard, his face still dark with rage. The Lieutenant, who could not quite find the Korean sentences that would have sent the man home, rose at an angle from the bed with a complicated expression.

If I refuse to deal with him, I truly dread what kind of mess will be waiting tomorrow morning.

If he sent the man back to his quarters now, he could not even guess—and did not want to guess—what ugly business might break out at the Hadogam at dawn. A mass refusal of orders, perhaps. Or a beating. Either prospect was dreadful enough.

The Lieutenant put the room in order, sat down across from him, and asked,

"What happened today?"

"…It was only training. Ha. It isn't even funny."

The Major poured first for his host, then for himself, drained the cup, and clenched his fist around it again and again until the porcelain seemed ready to crack. He was trembling.

The more he turned it over, the more impossible the whole thing became.

"On an ordinary day I could have swallowed it. But the place was the problem. I had been entrusted with a scheduled drill, with my superiors sitting right behind me, and they dared to call me you… There is a limit to how far a man can run wild. Damn it."

Lieutenant Horimoto could see the scene as if he had been standing there. He answered with a bitter mouth. Today had not been the first time.

"It is, truly, a wretched business."

"It is."

The Lieutenant himself knew perfectly well what chronic disease the Byeolgigun he trained was carrying, and what scorn and mockery it received in the streets. He knew, too, what a single foreigner was worth in their accounting.

Just a Jap with a sword. That is all.

And yet, regrettably, if these Koreans truly meant to open the country, the old custom that had to be broken first was precisely today's affair.

"What am I supposed to do?"

And so Second Lieutenant Horimoto Reizo, an outsider and a foreigner in the strictest sense, found this Joseon officer—a man who ought to have had a wide road still in front of him—genuinely pitiable.

He was a man still wandering, caught between new learning and the order of a dying age.

"That…"

But the Lieutenant had been warned, more than once, not to give too much of himself to the work, and not to grow too warm with the staff of the legation. He let out a short breath and turned his face from the right answer.

"You will simply have to endure it. Did I not tell you before of the coups in my own country, and of the fighting among the samurai? The backlash that follows reform is a pain that men in authority must, by the nature of the thing, bear."

"You mean the Southwestern War that broke out in your country?"

"Yes, Major."

"Puhaha!"

Even as he offered the wrong answer, the Lieutenant nodded as if he were drilling the right one into his own skull.

"Heh. So this is the normal reaction to enlightenment, is it?"

"…It may be."

"Damn it."

The Major, swelling with anger, threw back cup after cup and forced down the heat climbing his throat.

They sat for a long time without speaking. Then, as the night-patrol bells began to toll the curfew—dong, dong, dong—Woo Beom-seon, who had kept the silence, opened his mouth.

"…Tomorrow I will call upon Vice Minister Min."

"Vice Minister? You mean His Excellency Min Young-ik?"

"I do."

The Lieutenant tilted his head. Woo Beom-seon nodded and went on, laying out the resolution he had come to.

"He is a yangban well disposed toward enlightenment. He will not simply throw a military man out of doors for being lowborn. I will put the matter before him, and I will use this incident as the chance to put the Byeolgigun's discipline on a proper footing."

"…"

Startled by the news that Woo Beom-seon meant to seek out Min Young-ik—Councilor of the Board of Personnel, and a man of real power at court—the Lieutenant scratched his head.

Well.

This does not strike me as a good idea.

Min Young-ik, a minister of the Office for the Management of State Affairs. From what the people at the legation said, he was one of the few yangban in Joseon who took enlightenment seriously, and his mind was reasonably awake. There was room enough, on paper, for the Major to go and see him.

But is he not, after all, a clan aristocrat himself?

The Lieutenant had watched his own country's Restoration unfold, and had seen men put knife and stratagem to one another for reasons as various as they were absurd. He looked quietly at Woo Beom-seon, who had come to the end of his brooding and made his decision.

Then a young face flickered through his mind, and his conscience rose with it, just below the throat.

He looked from the black crown of Woo Beom-seon's head—the rage in the man already half-drowned in drink—to the Rising Sun hanging on the wall, and back again. He shut his eyes hard and spoke.

He was, he told himself, probably a vulgar man: one who chased his own honor harder than he chased loyalty to his country.

"A few days ago, I met the prodigy from the rumors myself."

Woo Beom-seon cracked one eye and asked, slowly,

"…The one who shines shoes?"

Even Woo Beom-seon, drilling the Byeolgigun at the Hadogam, had heard the talk of that child. A boy who went back and forth between Dongdaemun and Namdaemun, shining the shoes and the military boots of Westerners and Japanese.

"Yes."

His work was good and his talk was better. Among the older men in the camps his name had gone around as a sharp little thing.

"It was as they said. His eyes were clear and his expression was composed. Even looking only at the surface, he was not a child who seemed ordinary."

"And why, exactly, are you suddenly telling ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠me this?"

"Because in my judgment, Major, it would be better for you to speak with that prodigy than to call upon the Councilor of the Board of Personnel. That is why I mention it."

"I should…?"

"Yes, Major."

Woo Beom-seon tipped his head, utterly at a loss. The Lieutenant was trying to shake a decision already made with nothing more than a shoe-shine boy.

Even so, the drink went out of him at once. He had known the Lieutenant long enough to know the man was not the sort to mock him with a fool's suggestion.

"However high they pile the word prodigy, what answer am I supposed to find in a child who hasn't even reached the age of fifteen?"

"Because I found one."

The Lieutenant shifted his seat, making it plain this was no joke, and went on. Woo Beom-seon looked steadily into his eyes. There was nothing in them but the truth.

"A month ago—do you remember the matter of our country's new rifles, the shipment that kept being delayed for the Byeolgigun?"

"I do."

"The one who opened that blockage was none other than the prodigy at Dongdaemun. That child is not a mere shoe-shine boy."

"What?"

The Major's face changed. The Lieutenant nodded, confirming it, and Woo Beom-seon pressed on.

"Was it not you who settled the rifle problem? The Qing's tangled reaction, and the trouble at the customs house?"

"No. That is not true at all. It was my own country's affair, and yet once I had heard the child's explanation I realized I knew less about my country than he did."

"What are you talking about?"

"I wanted you to know, Major, that even our intention to supply Joseon with new rifles is finely split inside our own government. I myself understood that fact far too late."

What followed, put briefly, was this.

First: there were men in the Japanese cabinet who wished to see the Korean king's interest in the Byeolgigun cool. The force was mocked more harshly by the day as the Jap Brigade, and it had begun to draw a dangerous degree of attention from the great ministers of the court.

Second: there were men in that same cabinet who were uneasy—who found it inconvenient—that the Qing should be growing more and more displeased at Japan's swelling influence inside Joseon.

Third: the awkward truth was that Japan's own industry was still too thin to supply the new rifles without strain, and there had been fighting over the matter even inside the army.

Having laid out these sensitive inner workings without ornament, the Lieutenant spoke in a quieter voice.

"I had been talking like a man at his ease. That was all."

He remembered how, while the cabinet chewed on those three separate headaches, he had gone on sending request after request for support through the legation. He could not keep the bitter smile off his face.

"The Minister said to me, you see—that it was a foreign matter in any case, and that we were outsiders, and that I should not bring too much passion to the work of the Byeolgigun. Is that a thing to say to a man formally hired, paid, and trusted? It is not even a joke worth laughing at."

As if the shame of it still sat on him, the Lieutenant bowed his head and threw back a cup the way Woo Beom-seon had done a little while before.

The liquor ran hot down his throat. Some nameless filth that had been clotted inside him finally went down with it.

"And so?"

"…I had heard the rumors, and I half believed them. In the end I asked the child to shine my boots, and used that as a pretext to pour out my troubles. What I got back was not what I expected."

"What wasn't?"

The rage and the grievance of the morning had already left the Major. He was listening now, closely, to the Lieutenant's strange account.

And the speaker, telling his listener not to doubt him, answered with something like reverence.

"It was over in an instant. In the time it takes to blink he had put a mirror-shine on my boots, and then he opened his mouth, slowly."

"Good God."

Remembering that hair-raising moment, the Lieutenant gave a light shiver. The boy had been pale as a ghost. He had even dusted off the gaiters. And when the answer was finished he had simply held out one small palm, as if all he wanted in the world was his fee.

The Lieutenant stopped there, his face still a little sickened by the memory. The Major, sober now, pressed him.

"…So what did you do?"

"About what?"

"The child's plan."

"What do you think I did?"

The Lieutenant answered as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, his eyes traveling from the service saber hanging on his own wall to the one at Woo Beom-seon's hip.

"Are they not, even now, sitting perfectly intact in the hands of the Byeolgigun?"

That was the answer.