The Haeung Brothers
Heading west, the Han River network was astonishingly fast.
So a few days later, Yi Choi-eung, Yi Ha-eung's older brother and the Heungin-gun, did not seem especially surprised when he came face-to-face with Bak Seong-ok, who had somehow survived against all odds.
He wore a sour expression and puffed on his long-stemmed pipe. Deep dimples had settled into his greedy-looking, Won Gyun-like cheeks, though no fire had been lit.
Bak Seong-ok, remembering his duty, tried to strike a match with his one remaining hand.
But the Heungin-gun slapped the hand aside with the pipe, canceling the action before it could happen.
“The two men I went to all that trouble to send after him are still missing, and now you’ve lost the chance to assert our authority over the dealers in Seoul as well.”
Bak Seong-ok went pale.
Even after years of faithful service, the Heungin-gun was ready to discard him.
It wasn’t because he suddenly feared the consequences of crime, though of course he treated both the law courts and the king like a joke.
No, it was the same reason as four years ago, when he had dragged in the magistrates from the Saongwon and beaten them half to death.
Back then too, Yi Choi-eung had not acted out of affection, nor to protect Bak Seong-ok.
Then and now alike, the Heungin-gun simply did not tolerate anyone who damaged his face.
Bak Seong-ok moved quickly.
Just as he had four years earlier, he betrayed the real culprit who had disgraced the Heungin-gun’s name.
“Park Do-ki mentioned Your Excellency’s name and still did this to me. That bastard is surely a vile bandit. We should catch him and make an example of him.”
But the Heungin-gun exploded.
“And I sent you to catch him, and this is what came of it!”
The attempt to seize Park Do-ki had technically been carried out by the Gangsang Guild, but the Heungin-gun had been the one who ordered it—he was the one who had accepted the dispatch fee, after all.
“The one who disgraced my name most of all was you. I’ve already been told that Soyanggang has turned into a damned mess in just a few days, and now those people dare complain to me about it. What are you going to do about this humiliation, you fool?”
By then, the Heungin-gun had already been briefed on everything.
Only Bak Seong-ok, who had been focused solely on treatment and escape, had not known.
The Soyanggang Port sphere of influence had already been overturned like a flood-swollen river.
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While Tae-su and Cha Un-hong diligently washed off the poison and recovered, Chuncheon's Dongbansu, Lee Jin-hong, also began his own work.
Lee Jin-hong paraded the hulking man Bak Seong-ok had brought with him through the streets.
“Those vicious traitors from Gangjin, who betrayed the country, heard that we were doing business selling tobacco here and sent these knife-wielding thugs to harm the Dobansu.”
Gangjin might be far from here, but the shock of the Japanese punitive expedition had crossed all distances.
The people here had all heard of the mighty reputation of the King of Survival, Ogre.
They knew very well that what Gangsang had done there was practically treason.
It was only because it was none of their business, and they had mouths to feed, that their judgment had gone foggy. Call it small-mindedness if you like, but the court itself had not been able to punish Gangsang either.
Yet now something similar was happening again in Chuncheon, and even if they were not yet ready to step out openly, they could not help wavering.
Lee Jin-hong, a born agitator who had once dominated the Taebaek Mountains, only raised his voice and deepened that unrest.
“Is this what they call merchant ethics? No matter how big a trader you are, do you have no shame in your skin? Here stands the rightful end of a wicked criminal!”
A banner listing the man’s crimes had been hung from his back.
In rough modern terms, it meant: “I’m a thug, and I am awaiting the judgment of the people.”
Bound to the pole was Bak Seong-ok’s severed arm, cut off by Park Do-ki.
The Chan-hyeol-bi-sa-sin-mu weapon clutched in that hand was displayed as well. A relic from the dark age that the king had “certainly forbidden” was now undeniable proof of criminality.
Why did private punishment flourish, like the American frontier? Because Joseon was a contemporary nation of America, that was why. The problem was that, unlike Joseon becoming law-abiding Korea, America was simply America.
Even in Chuncheon-bu, they thought it would be tacky if a wild outlaw duel were interrupted by the NYPD arriving with donuts in their mouths.
So they kept quiet.
It was hardly an exceptional choice.
This was Chuncheon; cases like this had not begun with the present one, and they would not end with it either.
Every time, they had always stayed silent.
When Lee Jin-hong, who had mastered the private version of criminal prosecution, filed in the “confessions of the culprits” along with the court fee collected like a stamp duty from a shaman’s source, the Chuncheon office, too, “resolved everything smoothly.”
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Why did dutiful sons and daughters wander off to find ginseng and end up becoming guardians of dolmen tombs?
Because there was no health insurance.
Why did virtuous women have to stage hard-core gore shows by cutting their wrists when seized by men, then cutting the mouths they had touched?
Because public order and justice were powerless.
The countless memorial arches and eulogies were a mockery sent with the powerful’s blessing. A thank-you note that said: we’re grateful you died alone without realizing your tragedy was the fault of the system.
The moment someone said, “Then let’s prevent that from happening in the first place,” they were immediately shouted down as if they had no sense.
Try banning all underage low-wage labor across the world and see what happens. Within a month, the advanced nations would erupt into massive riots over price inflation.
One ARS call would have been enough, wouldn’t it? Even the Joseon magistrates who were cursed as greedy often used their own private money to erect memorial monuments.
It was not a waste. They had to keep serving as the foundation stones of the dolmen, just like that.
Of course, once in a while, someone would pick up one of those stones and throw it back at the owner.
Such a contemptible subversive would receive a criminal brand instead of a commendation.
Like Tae-su, who, instead of killing himself when cheated, correctly identified who was responsible.
And Tae-su was having a similar effect on the people of Joseon.
In fact, it was a change that was even more futuristic—and even harder to achieve—than the Industrial Revolution, by a full hundred years.
That change had begun with Late-Duck, who was alive and therefore did not need a memorial arch.
Although the nurse operation failed because Cha Un-hong refused to swap shifts, Late-Duck still ran for Tae-su in another field.
She went around visiting the tenant-slave friends of the Soyanggang Port district and spread the word.
“I tried to sell myself, like a wild hog, just to get my mother some ginseng. Then the Mountain Spirit told me that a hero would appear soon enough. And sure enough, just as those villains lured me in with the promise of ginseng and tried to drag me off, Park Do-ki came falling from the sky with some high monk and punished them all.”
It was an adaptation much like how people in the twenty-first century would turn a sixth-century city ghost story into children’s educational content somehow.
The tenant slaves of Soyanggang Port did fight with one another, but they were close in the same breath.
They sympathized with Late-Duck.
The neighbors who had held her father’s funeral after angering over the absurdly overpriced coffin the landlord’s house had sold them when he died.
The friends who had gone to look for her mother, even though it had done no good, just to bring medicine or anything they could find.
And then there were the suitors who, like every good folktale candidate, were aiming for the inevitable ending: “And so Late-Duck married a diligent young bachelor and lived happily ever after.”
The crowd was varied.
But they all had one thing in common: they were part of the Soyanggang hub.
There was no overseer standing there ready to whip them with, “Speed it up, Slave No. 146!” They were tenant slaves, after all.
Of course, they could not immediately do something as extreme as blocking every shipment outright.
They didn’t need to. If they “changed jobs,” the owners of the women’s inns in Seoul, including the Namchoyeogak, would be in serious trouble.
A tenant slave’s legal duty was only to provide labor. Their master could not decide their profession for them.
Striking was punishable. Quitting was not.
Yet the great question of how to eat if you quit right away was answered by Park Do-ki with an attractive alternative.
“I’m not telling you to betray your masters and jump ship on the spot. But once you exclude rice and cloth from the goods moving through here, tobacco and timber make up the bulk of it, and for those two I’ll help you find other places to trade.”
Tobacco was light, so under the original plan it would be seized along with the tobacco fields through Lee Jin-hong and then carried off to various parts of Gangwon, Gyeongsang, and Chungcheong.
But timber was too heavy for bobusang pack carriers to haul on their backs, so as before, the rivers had to be used.
And the Han River did not flow through Seoul alone.
“The basis crew at Yongin’s Gillyangjang will receive the wood in my place, through Yi Chun-hwa.”
He would receive the timber at the point where Yangju and Gwangju in Gyeonggi Province met the Namhan River and the Bukhan River.
They would not have to cut ties with the shipping routes entirely and immediately become runaway slaves; they only needed to shift some of their trade partners.
The tenant slaves immediately granted Park Do-ki login access. The owners of the Seoul guesthouses were thrown into a panic as the tenant slaves suddenly demanded two-factor authentication.
What Tae-su did not mention from that point on was that the water volume near Yangsu-ri was considerable, since it was the confluence of the two rivers.
Boats of Joseon’s level could be built there without difficulty.
And those boats would be sent to Ganghwado, becoming precious combat power for the promised land.
And in the promised land, naturally, the disciples of zeal would be dispatched in return.
They currently had more experience than anyone else in maritime ferrying and shipboard combat.
The boats would not be the ones traveling; these people would have to come instead. By then, Gangsang would almost certainly be trying to block the bobusang shipping bureau in the middle of the route.
And if they blocked it, Tae-su would kill them. He was the sort who hated delicate negotiations.
If you asked how one could stage a Battle of Red Cliffs on the Han River against Gangsang under government protection, the answer was: one could.
Hauling timber, building boats, and preparing the people to board them would not happen in a few days.
At the very earliest, next year.
And by then, Tae-su’s journey would be over anyway.
Because the king’s own preparations—the reason for this journey—would be complete.
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The reason Heungin-gun could not carelessly report to the king right now and have Park Do-ki swept away was bound up with those “king’s preparations.”
The would-be monarch, Yi Hwan, was currently making every effort to produce an heir, not only with Lady Kim of Gyeongbin but by laying hands on court ladies whenever and wherever he could.
Just like Yi Hwan in his impotent years, the people around him could not possibly fail to notice. Everyone who needed to know already knew.
And the Heungin-gun was, after all, Heungseon-gun’s older brother.
Like many younger brothers, Yi Ha-eung did not trust his brother, so he had not explained everything, but if you combined his warning not to lay a hand on Park Do-ki with the king’s recent state as a potential monarch, the picture was easy enough to infer.
“If you wanted to seize him, you should have done it quietly, and thought of swallowing a few of his so-called virility pills and other tricks. What am I supposed to do now that you’ve come back in this disgraceful state?”
He could not openly move against Park Do-ki, but Yi Choi-eung did want to “catch” him, which was why he had sided with Gangsang and the guesthouses and sent Bak Seong-ok.
He also believed Park Do-ki was somehow connected to a mysterious trade route for medicinal herbs. He simply had not gone so far as to imagine it was overseas.
Someone like that is bound to have a great deal of wealth as well.
What’s more, from what his younger brother, newly arrived in Seoul, had told him, the man also had influence in various local regions.
Yi Choi-eung believed he could swallow all of it in one gulp.
If Park Do-ki had an ex-grade axe, then he himself had an ex-grade bloodline.
Some rural market peddler, no matter how much money he had scraped together, could be hauled in, beaten, and made into a subordinate. As for virility tonics, he himself could take a cut from the middle and distribute them to the king.
But that “haul him in” part was impossible.
Instead, it was the line Yi Choi-eung had with Gangsang and the guesthouses that was in danger of being swallowed whole.
In truth, if Yi Choi-eung had been even half as capable as Kim Jwa-geun, he would not have had time to worry about some gambling den or dock gang fee.
He needed, by whatever political leverage he could muster, to pry open Ganghwado.
And that was all the more true if he had paid close attention to Yi Ha-eung’s talk of Park Do-ki’s “merit in the provinces,” which had been spoken to raise public opinion.
The greater the merit, the more dangerous it was. If the master was impotent, then even if the stable boy had great vigor, all the master’s rice would end up in the stable boy’s bowl.
Unlike Kim Jwa-geun, Yi Choi-eung was not hated by the king. If he just worked his mouth enough, the impossible was not impossible.
Once it was put into action, Choe Je-u would have to throw everything into it. To run away.
But Yi Choi-eung was not even one-tenth the man Kim Jwa-geun was, let alone half.
And of course he had no ties to Kim Jwa-geun either. He had been born of a line that could only be royalist.
Above all, Heungin-gun had no interest in any of that.
His greatest concerns were the scratch to his pride and the cut in his tribute money. He only raged at Bak Seong-ok.
“You useless bastard. Go out and die somewhere! I hear there are plenty of idiots from the capital region heading to Ganghwado. Then go there and live by begging if you must!”
Bak Seong-ok felt his mind go blank.
Yi Choi-eung did not stop at abuse. He actually reached for the inkstone beside him and looked ready to hurl it.
He must have thought that with one arm gone, Bak Seong-ok could now be made to fight in the worst possible scenario, stripped of all rank and honor.
Then another man seated in the room stepped in.
“Brother, perhaps that is enough.”
It was Heungseon-gun Yi Ha-eung, who had returned to Seoul to meet his older brother.
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Yi Ha-eung repeated the same point he had already made several times by letter.
“Park Do-ki is loyal to the royal ancestral shrine and the state. You know roughly what kind of man he is, don’t you, Brother? Since things have already gone this far, if you show some magnanimity and let him see your generosity first, Park Do-ki will be deeply moved.”
If Tae-su had been there, he would have said these feudal bastards were out of their minds.
Of course Yi Ha-eung knew it too. But first he had to stop his brother.
Yet Yi Choi-eung failed to understand either his younger brother’s intent, or why he had said “loyal to the royal ancestral shrine and the state” rather than “loyal to the king.”
“Shut up, you bastard! You want me to crawl and cower before some damned trader?”
He changed the direction of the inkstone and threw it at his brother.
That was an everyday occurrence between brothers. Yi Ha-eung, with the skill of a younger brother who had spent his life avoiding every older brother’s oppression, dodged it.
Then he said to the bewildered Bak Seong-ok, “Go out and have one of the servants bring in a brazier. His Excellency can’t smoke without a fire, can he?”
Bak Seong-ok was not stupid enough to boast about modern conveniences and say, So you didn’t see the matches I had earlier?
He slipped out with gratitude toward Yi Ha-eung, who had given him a way to escape.
Once the brazier was brought in, Yi Choi-eung calmed down a little. Perhaps it really had been nicotine withdrawal.
As Yi Choi-eung drew on his long pipe, Yi Ha-eung said, “What do you think? If, on this occasion, you were to grant a few of the Seoul tobacco guesthouse posts instead, the gains would be incomparable to what you’d get from the likes of Bak Seong-ok. I can put in a good word.”
Yi Choi-eung grew annoyed again.
“You’ve been gallivanting around so much you don’t even understand how the world works? Every owner of the capital and the eight rivers—the whole Han River system—is decided within the Gangsang circles. Not even I can just stick anyone in there however I like!”
Yi Ha-eung thought it was fine if his brother at least knew his trade-guild business.
But that was a hasty conclusion. Merchant-genius Yi Choi-eung did draw a usable conclusion.
“If they’re traveling the whole peninsula and gathering money, then sooner or later they’ll have to come to Seoul too. Besides, as you say, everyone is keeping their heads down for now because of the pressure from Kim Jwa-geun’s faction, so let’s wait a bit. Once they come to Seoul, they’ll be in my grasp.”
Yi Ha-eung was terrified to realize that everything except the last line was correct.
The physical clash between the king and the powerful noble clans was now in the final countdown. As far as Yi Ha-eung could tell, a man who did well in bed could really become that reckless.
And even more frightening was the fact that Park Do-ki truly would be coming to Seoul before long.
Yi Ha-eung rose from his seat.
He had come to ask his brother for a bit of pocket money, only for Yi Choi-eung to pretend the whole thing had slipped his mind because of some grave emergency.
It was not especially regrettable. Yi Ha-eung was going to be busy from now on too.
Author’s Note
1. Historical accounts say Yi Choi-eung was actually thin and had a sharp voice. People like that are usually written as clever characters, but he was the opposite. In the story, his appearance has been adapted.
2. The Gyeonggang merchants also used to privately attack people they disliked, plant a banner, and publicly humiliate them.
3. As I may mention later, the “river” in this period was not perceived the way it is today, from source to sea as a single river.
Late-Joseon Han River geography was divided into eight regions according to economic and cultural boundaries, and each of those was regarded as a separate river; together, they were called Gyeonggang. The Jo River that Bak Seong-ok mentioned when fighting Tae-su was the westernmost of them.