The People's Joint Association (2)
They had entered Hanyang, and the year had turned.
"Ah, put it there and that's a forced mate!"
"It's the finals, after all. The other player looks terribly nervous."
A great deal had happened in the interval, but one fact stood beyond dispute: the Manmin Gongdonghoe had been a success.
Judged with a cold eye, the assembly baited with Go and Janggi tournaments had drawn a roaring crowd. Set beside that spectacle, the Confucian scholars' private contests of verse and classical maxims, and the frankly didactic Hangul lectures, had amounted to scarcely a trickle. None of that changed the essential truth. By the host Dongmaenghoe's own count, the first Manmin Gongdonghoe had pulled in a throng of some thirty thousand people — and it had worked.
"You really are a genius. To think such a thing was possible!"
The living proof of that success was standing in front of him in his stocking feet. Kim Ok-gyun had rushed out to greet him without even stopping to put on his shoes, and he was still gushing about the morning's assembly, which had closed in a blaze of triumph.
"The people of Hanseong who poured out may have been half-asleep, but that they came and stood with us — how splendid is that? A truly magnificent thing."
"It was only possible because so many around me gave their help out of nothing but pure passion."
"Come inside and we'll talk. How could I receive Unam, the talk of the capital, out here in the yard? Treat a guest of your stature so shabbily and they'd stone me for it. Come, come."
Kim caught the hand of a boy still trying to be modest and drew him personally into the inner parlor. He told the steward heading for the kitchen to bring two bottles of soda water instead of wine, then shut the door.
"However grown-up you may act, a child is still a child. No wine — yes?"
"Yes. That's quite all right with me."
"Good, good."
He nodded with a slightly frivolous energy, passed over a cushion, then shifted himself to the opposite side and settled in before he spoke again.
"The room's a bit of a mess. I haven't been back in Joseon long, you understand. Do bear with me."
At the apology, the boy let his gaze travel sideways across the chamber. Sure enough, Western books and newspapers printed in half a dozen languages lay heaped across the writing desk and spilling from the drawers, as tangled as laundry flung over a line.
"So. I hear the former commander has taken the post of Commander of the Capital Guards Rear Division, on Sun-u's recommendation?"
"Yes. He was so pleased it was almost embarrassing."
"Ha! The man once dreamed of wearing a sword and commanding an army. Of course he was."
The Dongmaenghoe's safe entry into Hanyang was one matter. Quite another was the debt Han Gyu-seol, Commander of the Jeolla Left Naval Station, had not forgotten. Raised to that office with the association's help, he had repaid it in deeds.
"The Rear Division may be thick with Qing influence, but a Commander's post is nothing to sneeze at. And he's risen in rank besides."
"Quite so."
"Ahem. Even so."
In other words, Han had taken Woo Beom-seon — a core figure of the Dongmaenghoe — and rammed him straight into a front-line command in the newly reorganized central army. The leader of the Enlightenment Party, however, did not look pleased that Woo, who was at once a Dongmaenghoe officer, a commander of the Capital Guards Rear Division, and the boy's own right hand, had gone under Qing authority.
"The military secretary's post in the Left Camp is vacant, I believe. That would have done just as well. Or the Chungmuwi, for that matter."
He named them outright: the Left Camp, which belonged to his own people, and the Bukcheong Infantry, whose formation had only just begun.
The feint was so transparent that the boy began turning over, one by one, the names of the men the Enlightenment Party had mustered at the time of the Gapsin Coup.
Every key post monopolized by officer cadets out of Japan's Hosan Military Academy, or by officers from the Military Drill Corps. Which means the present officers of the Front and Rear Divisions are all core members of the Chung-ui-gye.
The principal military strength the enlightenment faction had thrown into the Gapsin Coup could be sorted into five branches.
That was the whole of them. A coup force that could not even fill out a regiment.
And just before the rising, the four hundred and seventy men of the Capital Guards Rear Division under Yun Chi-ho's father, Yun Ung-ryeol, peel off for Bukcheong. There is a version of events in which they stay — but even then they would not have been enough against Qing forces that abandoned the defense of Taiwan itself to respond at once.
It might never have been possible to begin with. Against them, the Qing troops still posted in Gyeonggi numbered fifteen hundred, and another thousand had landed at Incheon on an emergency dispatch from the Beiyang Fleet at the moment of the coup.
The question formed itself. Why had the enlightenment faction forced a rising with military strength this thin?
The Enlightenment Party's adventurism? Qing interference in Joseon's internal affairs? Or a catastrophe born of Kim Ok-gyun's own childish romanticism? Or a deeper game laid by Li Hongzhang, the Minister of Beiyang?
Unless he were Kim Ok-gyun himself, or a party member, he would never know their hearts — not even in the grave. One thing, however, was certain.
A coup right now fails a hundred times out of a hundred.
Leave the Enlightenment Party to its own devices and history would simply repeat. He would only be repeating the self who had once backed the Heungseon Daewongun and been packed off to exile in Namwon. And the end of that road was always the same: a country stripped of every engine of reform, sliding into the pit of fire that was Japanese colonial rule.
I will not watch that happen.
He put the thoughts in order and cleared his throat. It was a sense of duty, nothing more — the knowledge that this last remaining chance for the land could not be thrown away on a shabby, half-built coup before the romantic in front of him did something stupid.
"I have been watching for some time, Vice Minister, what thoughts you harbor — and what resolve the men of the Enlightenment Party have made."
Kim Ok-gyun startled badly and began to stammer.
"I-is that so? Wait. Then surely you mean to join our great enterpr—"
"No. No, I do not. I accepted Your Excellency's invitation in order to stop the Enlightenment Party's slipshod scheme."
"What?"
The refusal was flat and final. The face that had first gone blank with surprise flushed a deep red. His pride had taken the blow.
"What insolence is this? And I thought so well of you...!"
"For that, I am a hundred times grateful. But every move the Enlightenment Party is making now looks to me like a path that ends in failure. A hundred cases out of a hundred."
"You arrogant little— How dare you speak to me this—"
Anger seemed to surge up all at once. He seized the nape of his own neck and tugged at it, breathing hard for a long while.
The steward, sensing that his master's temper had turned, brought in the soda water with an anxious look. The boy poured it in a bright rush in front of Kim Ok-gyun, lifted the bottle, and spoke as he drank.
"The troops you can actually put into a coup come to roughly seven hundred. Add the cadets and the swordsmen hanging about as retainers and you might stretch it to eight hundred, at the outside. Ah — and will the Bukcheong army under Master Seongheum's father be joining the great cause as well?"
"You— how do you know that...?"
"I imagine what made the coup look possible was the movement of Qing forces fighting the French in Vietnam. And the power backing all of you would be... hmm. The Japanese legation?"
He laid out the present state of Hanseong in front of the man as if he had dissected the whole affair with nothing but that brilliant mind of his, testing every joint as he went. Enlightenment Party principals being steadily edged out of the key posts. Kim Ok-gyun's own failure to secure a loan in Japan and in America. The sudden demotion of Park Yung-hyo, the Geumneungwi who had been appointed commander of the Haebangyeong and led the central army inside Gyeonggi Province. And so on.
If I can only make them admit, themselves, that the situation is against them and that time has forced their hand into a reckless play, the rest will take care of itself.
If Kim Ok-gyun took the bait, he would see that a coup was impossible. The Enlightenment Party's troops and human capital, which would otherwise be sacrificed for nothing, would be preserved intact — and could be turned, later, to something far larger, together.
And then.
"Hah?"
The heat went out of Kim Ok-gyun's face. He looked at the boy as if the whole performance were simply absurd, his shoulders twitching, and opened his mouth.
"You... you are laboring under a misconception."
"I beg your pardon?"
"A serious one."
"What?"
He was mistaken? About what?
He stared at Kim Ok-gyun, blank. The man half-hid the smile at the corner of his mouth with his palm and went on.
"Who said anything about the Japanese legation? I have not had a single contact with them since the loan negotiations failed."
"I beg your pardon?"
"I mean exactly what I say. At present, I and the Enlightenment Party have no point of contact with Japan, and no dealings of any kind."
What was that supposed to mean? The Japanese legation had not approached them? Those people who would use any opening, by any means, to pry Qing influence out of Joseon?
Kim Ok-gyun watched the reaction, then spoke again.
"I don't know what strange rumors you've been hearing, but I am not so foolish as to stake a great cause — one on which the lives of our party hang — upon Japanese who think nothing of saying one thing and doing another. I would thank you to remember that. Please leave."
The man who only moments before had risen to a thin provocation had, in an instant, become someone else: cold, composed, and finished with the conversation. He asked, firmly, that the boy leave his house.
The one left in an awkward position was him.
"W-wait, please! If we could speak in a little more det—"
"Another time. When a better world has come, we can speak then."
"V-Vice Minister!"
And so he was marched out of the house without even recouping his stake.
"Fuck! What the hell is going on?"
Thrown into confusion by Kim Ok-gyun's expulsion, he was privately appalled. Coup preparations — and the Japanese army was not even involved? How, exactly, was this thing unfolding?
He paced in front of the house for only a moment, lost. Then he turned on his heel and made for the Capital Guards Rear Division. He would have to find Woo Beom-seon and map, from the beginning, the way the court was actually moving.
"Huh? The Vice Minister? He never said anything like that."
He had gone there first on impulse, but Woo Beom-seon was Woo Beom-seon — a man hopeless at politics. He had spent the entire day drilling his soldiers into the ground, and he clearly knew nothing whatsoever of the Enlightenment Party's movements.
And so the next place he turned was none other than this.
"It's been a while, lad."
"Lieutenant Reizo."
The Japanese legation — with which all contact had been cut since the Imo Incident.
"This way."
Lieutenant Reizo was kind enough to escort him toward the minister's office, and as they walked he explained what had happened in the interval.
"The care you showed our patients in the Busan settlement during the cholera — that was written up at considerable length even back home. It was a very great affair. The minister, and Akihiko, who is acting for the consul, will sit bolt upright at the mention of your name, even from a dead sleep."
He had heard the same story while dealing with Mitsui & Co. When the Joseon government could do nothing about the cholera spreading through Busan, the literati of Joseon had stepped forward and treated the sick free of any charge, and the Japanese had been moved. He scratched his head, awkward under the praise.
"Haha. That's far too much credit."
"Not at all. Had the epidemic gotten away from us, we were prepared — in the worst case — to seal off the entire Busan settlement."
"Ah."
They had been ready, in other words, to sacrifice a full thousand of their own nationals locked inside that concession. A chill went through him at Lieutenant Reizo's words; at the same time, another thought arrived beside it, quite calmly: they were Japanese, so perhaps they would. He only ducked his head.
If they were Japanese, they might.
And yet.
"There don't seem to be many constables or guards protecting the legation. Has something happened to the garrison?"
Thanks to his intervention during the Imo Incident, the Japanese legation still stood in immaculate condition, without so much as a scratch. Strangely, though, the men watching the compound and the gate felt far too few. As if a security detail of fewer than ten — just as in the Imo Incident — were the entire embassy guard was surely his imagination—
"Hm? What do you mean? The constables you saw out front are the whole of the legation's security."
"I... beg your pardon?"
He turned a blank face on the man. Lieutenant Reizo answered, a little thrown.
"Mm? What's odd about that? A few constables and two attachés are plenty to guard a legation. Haha — what, should we throw a company around the place and build a fortress while we're at it?"
"!"
Ah. So that was it.
Listening to Lieutenant Reizo chatter as if none of it mattered, he understood.
Yes. Now it makes sense.
The butterfly effect of his intervention in the Imo Incident had broken in a place he had never expected.
This is why the Japanese legation has no leverage at all! The civilians all got out safely during the Imo Incident, and the only memories they took from their contact with the Heungseon Daewongun were good ones — so they never had a pretext to demand an indemnity from Joseon!
The fuller picture he heard from Minister Harimoto, who received him in the office.
"On behalf of the subjects of Japan, I thank you deeply for the great help you gave during the epidemic in the Busan settlement."
"Not at all."
"Ha. Please, sit."
Lieutenant Reizo offered a crisp salute and went out. The minister poured the coffee himself, took the seat opposite, and opened his mouth.
"You're only ten, I hear? Remarkable. To stand at the head of a political party vast enough to rival a national government. If Joseon has a single finest talent, it is surely you."
"..."
"Ahem. Tell me — are you still considering study abroad? Our government has recently established a fund to sponsor promising young men of Joseon, you see. If this opportunity were..."
"Minister."
"Hm?"
He cut Harimoto off in the middle of the gilding, in the middle of the recruitment pitch, laced his fingers together, and asked.
"Has the Japanese government, or the Diet, made any significant change in its foreign policy of late?"
"Ah — all of a sudden?"
"Yes."
"None that I know of."
"Then there have been no treaties concluded with the Joseon government either, and no revisions — is that correct?"
"Th-that would be so."
Watching the minister answer in confusion, he was certain.
Japan will not intervene in this coup.
He could not say, in any detail, why the Japanese government or cabinet had swung toward non-intervention — or simple indifference — in Joseon. What he could say was this: whether the coup succeeded or failed, Japan would not be in a position to step in until the affair was over.
These are the same Japanese who, the moment Qing forces moved in, judged themselves outmatched and ordered an immediate withdrawal. And now they don't even have that all-important company of troops.
Even if they came running afterward to pick over the scraps, the force they could actually put in the field would be small. That much was obvious.
Which left only one question.
Who was backing the Enlightenment Party?
The question formed, and in the same instant a shameless face flashed across his mind.
Fuck.
He had always considered himself sharp. The answer came at once.