Moneylender Park Axe(2)
Manwoldae, the home of the Choi family, stood inside the walls of Kaesong.
Just as I’d suspected when I first came to Kaesong, the city gate was manned by soldiers shaking people down for money.
Of course, calling them “gate guards” would be a mistake. Just as you wouldn’t expect a soldier to stand at a highway tollgate with a rifle unless it was a military zone, it was the same here.
In the past, I’d have had no choice but to either fight them or pay up. But among the people I’d lent money to over the years were the very soldiers who kept the gate.
The men who’d been granted favorable loans despite their low credit ratings recognized me at once.
Since the levy had no legal basis to begin with, exemptions were just as much at the collector’s whim. I let the “Hi-pass card” register without trouble and strode through the gate.
Choi snorted when he faced me.
“Seems you don’t know what happened to the Kaesong school inspector Kim Sang-jun, who ruined himself by messing with us carelessly. If even officials ended up like that, then what right does some drifter, who God knows where he crawled out from, have to threaten commoners and steal their property?”
Considering that I was the very man at the center of Kim Sang-jun’s demise, it was almost comedic.
Choi, who knew even less than a “drifter” and had no backing at all, shouted with unshakable confidence.
“This is a heavily guarded city. Get lost before I call the soldiers!”
That would be fine with me, actually. If those soldiers showed up, all I’d have to do was shave a little off their interest and they’d gladly tie the bastard up and hand him over for me.
Of course, no Joseon soldier was the sort of person commoners could summon and expect to come running. For me, who wanted to make the trouble myself, it was perfect.
After glancing around, I quickly found the family’s main product.
I kicked the crossbeam of the cowshed.
As the proverb says, a cowshed is the classic example of shoddy construction; it isn’t the sort of place built to be firmly sealed. It was protected by little more than one or two beams that hardly deserved to be called a fence, but when one of those thick, arm-sized poles snapped in a single strike, Choi visibly flinched.
The cow, which hadn’t been tied down, blinked in confusion with wide eyes. A human kick doesn’t leave much of an impression on a bull that weighs over three hundred kilos, after all. So I was able to seize its nose ring without difficulty.
Only then did Choi understand what I was after.
“Y-you bastard! How dare you drag off a saenggu—a family cow—without permission! Don’t you know the state keeps strict watch over farm oxen?”
Someone who understood the value of farm oxen really shouldn’t have been helping turn them into meat cattle and giving birth to the modern livestock industry, but Choi still looked righteous enough to wear a halo.
He knew perfectly well the soldiers wouldn’t come. His shout that he would never forgive me in the name of agrarian Joseon called out other “saenggu”—the household servants—right away.
The servant class, which had nearly replaced slaves through the late Joseon revival of wage labor, was Joseon’s second-generation artificial intelligence. Since they worked because they had nowhere else to go, their coding was a little more flexible than that of slaves, whose GPU efficiency was abysmal.
With the adrenaline of five grown men having just beaten down one kid, the servants cracked their knuckles with enthusiasm.
“The worst thief among thieves is a cattle thief. So you were born with a bandit’s face after all!”
“Judging by your build, you’re just some brute relying on a little muscle. Let’s see if you can still talk big against five of us!”
You probably thought that, since I wasn’t an official, strength alone would be enough to stop me.
Yeah, that part’s smart.
I planted my left foot hard on the instep of the fellow standing in front.
“Aaaagh!”
A pair of straw sandals doesn’t offer much more protection than a thick sock, and there’s literally nothing inside but rag wrappings. I’d stamped my military boot down on toes that were practically bare, so the pain was easy enough to imagine.
Before that pain could even turn into rage, I twisted my right leg forward.
At point-blank range, my elbow came around with my waist and slammed straight into the jaw of Servant No. 1. He sprayed teeth everywhere and collapsed unconscious.
Son Yu-jak, who had followed after me, strained his eyes wide so he could witness the commander’s martial arts clearly. He had a grave duty to carry this story back by word of mouth.
But after that, it became hard to see.
No. 2 took a knee strike, then crumpled while clutching the shattered ribs. I released the back of No. 2’s head from the hold I’d had him in, then immediately grabbed No. 3 by the collar and shoved him into the club No. 4 was swinging.
No. 3, whose head split and sent him sprawling, wasn’t the only one who suffered. No. 4, who’d committed team-kill, was the next to have his groin crushed, and he collapsed onto himself a heartbeat later.
If Son Yu-jak had known movies, he would have thought of this as a painfully familiar action scene where one man gets neutralized with one blow after another.
But even in real life, the human body’s defenses are surprisingly weak compared to its offensive ability. Of course, you can’t just strike anywhere and expect someone to drop the way they do in films; you have to attack viciously enough to permanently wreck some part of the body, just like I was doing now.
No. 5 stumbled backward.
That was a misjudgment too. He should have been running for his life, not backing away.
As Lee Eui-chang had once felt for himself on Ganghwa’s Namsan, my reach was far longer than Joseon people realized.
A low, skimming mid-kick landed squarely in the liver. The pain went beyond a simple blow to the abdomen, and No. 5 doubled over like a fetus, convulsing.
That’s the long and short of it.
But it was only after the fifth servant’s horrendous scream ripped at his ears that Son Yu-jak could piece together the sequence from start to finish.
Around the same time, Choi finally understood what was happening and flew into a rage.
“You bastard! You really want to settle this as a fight to the death?”
He wasn’t just saying it.
What Choi had picked up from beside the cowshed was a flail.
Of course it belonged on a farm, but the moment it was used as a weapon, its meaning changed entirely.
It was the byeonggon, the flail that Joseon’s army had adopted from Mongolia during the Imjin War and used to crack Japanese heads.
That kind of barbarous behavior should absolutely be punished with a flail. Choi’s swing, carrying the spirit of King Seonjo—who had encouraged the use of the weapon—was, in his own mind, unbelievably fast.
That was his opinion, anyway.
A flail and a byeonggon have about as much in common as a tank and a tractor. I simply knocked it aside with my arm and swung my axe with a look of utter disbelief.
The flail snapped in half at once. Choi’s arm felt like it was about to break too.
You could have said the fight was over by then, but I still wouldn’t let Choi’s defeat stand.
As he hunched over from the pain, I kicked him in the gut as if I were scooping him upward. Choi flew off his feet and rolled over, feeling wronged to the very end.
“Khrrk!”
Even now, he couldn’t stay down in peace.
My axe was buried in the dirt a hair’s breadth from Choi’s face.
I’d stuck it in so carelessly that it was impossible to tell whether I’d intentionally missed or simply failed to land the blow. Choi shuddered at the sensation of a clod of earth popping up beside his ear with a metallic ring.
I said, “Hand over the money, you son of a bitch.”
“I-I’ll give it to you!”
I thought for a moment, then shook my head.
“No need.”
Then I calmly beat the shit out of Choi.
Until he looked exactly like that child employee who’d been beaten up and sent back home.
* * *
Of course, I didn’t really mean I didn’t need money.
All six of the cows Choi had were dragged off by the grinning band of thugs. In Joseon, cattle weren’t so expensive that Choi could pay off all his debts even after losing them.
Kaesong was one of the rare cities, along with Hanyang, that officially had a beef market.
Cha Un-hong, who had helped dispose of the cattle by arranging a cattle broker, chuckled as she spoke.
“I was startled when I heard the rumor on Market Street that some man like the Black Whirlwind from Water Margin was leaving axe marks on people every time he collected a nyang. I thought it might well be you.”
Since I’d come in person after worrying she might send me something I couldn’t even read, I frowned at her.
“Do I look that stupid to you?”
Loan sharking is a service industry in its own right.
If you run it like that, your customers disappear before the government ever gets around to punishing you. Even if Taesu Finance’s interest rates were cheap, they weren’t cheap enough to make people gamble with their lives.
“I’ve never killed anyone, and I’ve never even beaten someone badly just because they were late on a payment. In the Choi family’s case, they laid a hand on my men first, so I paid them back in kind.”
“Good. At that level, even the authorities won’t touch you, and the ones who got hit won’t be able to say a word.”
As I’d once told Son Yu-jak myself, I had standards.
Of course, if someone met those standards, I wouldn’t hesitate to kill him. But precisely because my standards were so strict, I couldn’t carry out indiscriminate murder.
If you have a proper standard by which to distinguish right from wrong, then even murder or war isn’t evil.
Put briefly, that was the theory of legitimacy. In a way, it was a very Confucian way of looking at the world.
That was also why Cha Un-hong wasn’t afraid of me. If I didn’t meet my own criteria, then no matter how angry I got on a personal level, I couldn’t bring myself to hurt someone.
“In any case, the way things are going, you could even introduce yourself in the capital’s Hwando-jung. The name Park Axe is already spreading nicely through the twenty markets of Kaesong.”
“……? What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
Bobusang usually didn’t give their real names to one another. When Kim Sun-won had first met me, I hadn’t even been a bobusang yet.
In theory, it was a sign of humility. In practice, it was because there were plenty of people for whom revealing their real name was a disaster waiting to happen.
So they usually called one another by surname plus hometown. Something like Kim Pyongyang or Jo Songpa, similar in spirit to a scholar’s pen name or courtesy name.
But I hadn’t been running around advertising where I came from, and the people of Kaesong hadn’t bothered tracing my roots just to call me something.
When it came to nicknames, instinct mattered more than reason. Without much hesitation, people attached my favorite weapon—the one I always wore at my side—to my name.
It wasn’t a new idea. Even the legendary political thug Pyo Cheol-ju, whom King Yeongjo kept close to him when he was still Prince Sado’s son and then purged later, had a name that meant “Pyo the Iron Pillar.”
I, who had become “Park the Battle Axe,” stared blankly at the result.
But Cha Un-hong thought it was a good thing.
It was proof that I was beginning to be accepted into Kaesong’s commercial elite in some form or another.
The people of Kaesong had recognized me. That meant I’d established a stable foundation.
My moneylending business, with its low interest, was steadily attracting more customers. To Cha Un-hong, my “cipher ledger” was also evidence of my unexpected meticulousness.
She decided I could finally turn my eyes outward again.
“If ‘that man’ in Ganghwa is spending his days reading, then I’m worried about the household. Why don’t you go take a look, and get some fresh air while you’re at it?”
Only then did I remember the “big plan” I’d almost forgotten while being busy as a loan shark these days.
Come to think of it, that cheap little silver candlestick probably wouldn’t have been enough to keep me from poverty again anyway.
Now that Kim Sang-jun’s mess had all been wrapped up, there was no reason for me to keep standing in place.
“Fine. I’ll go.”
* * *
Kim Byeong-gi, the son of the Gongpan Kim Jwa-geun who was staying at Jeondeungsa, was forced to do something he had been trying very hard to avoid.
He paid a personal visit to Yi Won-beom’s house inside the city walls.
To be honest, it wasn’t a refined move. It would make Yi Won-beom’s family wary of him.
But his father had been pressing harder and harder, so there was no helping it. He had to bring back some kind of report to Seoul.
The Kaesong school inspector incident had unexpectedly affected central politics.
That was because King I-hwan was determined to make it affect things, if only a little. As the Board of State Affairs had predicted, public opinion was poor because of the Chongwiyeong’s many and varied abuses in the name of “budget securing,” so the king needed something to distract everyone’s eyes.
“The matter of Kim Sang-jun was previously reported by the ministers as not being murder, but if, as the Kaesong governor’s memorial now says, he really did kidnap people over a few coins, then one cannot say with certainty that there was no murder involved. Only the monarch may decide a pardon, so present further evidence and report again.”
The king would take a case the ministers had failed to resolve and settle it with his own clarity.
It was a very neat, very easy picture to understand. In another 150 years or so, he might have been introduced on YouTube as the kingly master detective.
But Kim Jwa-geun reminded everyone of the legal reality that, unlike some rootless Japanese custom transplanted onto this land, the profession of detective was not permitted here.
“The matter of deciding a pardon for murder must be handled with the utmost caution, even if it means releasing a criminal. The Ministry of Justice has already examined the case from every angle; if you overturn it based on suspicion alone, then from now on every criminal will ignore the commands of the state and instead act outrageously, claiming they’ll appeal through public petition or direct appeal to the throne.”
If the king became a master detective, then the Ministry of Justice would become a bunch of idiot beat cops.
The ministers who shared Kim Jwa-geun’s interests also agreed. If probing into the case would have caused trouble for Taesu and Cha Un-hong, they probably would have agreed too, if they’d had a vote.
But I-hwan wasn’t about to step back so easily.
Whether they liked being cursed at or not, the Chongwiyeong had already been created. I-hwan had already reached the point where he saw the Chongwiyeong as basically the Jangyongyeong, and himself as basically King Jeongjo.
In the end, the only person who took the blow was the next governor of Kaesong, Kim Dae-geun, who had originally been scheduled to replace Kim Hak-seong when his term expired.
“Even so, Kim Hak-seong’s clear distinction between guilt and punishment is something others can take as a model. I therefore retain Kim Hak-seong in office as governor.”
From I-hwan’s perspective, this was already a concession. He had come to regard Kim Hak-seong, the governor of Kaesong who had “counterattacked against Jangdong,” as one of his loyal men.
Kim Dae-geun, whose only crime was being a relative from the Andong Kim clan like Kim Jwa-geun, could only swallow his tears. Kaesong was a commercial city where money could be made everywhere, and yet because of one 9th-rank nobody, his already-scheduled money-making post had been snatched away.
And Kim Jwa-geun clicked his tongue and told his son to report Yi Won-beom’s qualities as soon as possible.
Kim Byeong-gi also knew that a royal like Yi Won-beom would have no reason to like a powerful man like himself.
So he came prepared with plenty of food and liquor. For someone who already stood above him in the social order, that counted as almost ascetic consideration.
After the usual exchange of formalities and once everyone had gotten more or less full, Kim Byeong-gi looked at Yi Won-beom and said, “What have you been reading lately?”
“Could one say I’ve been studying deeply? I’m only rereading the Four Books, the Little Learning, and the Comprehensive Mirror, trying my best not to forget what I learned as a child.”
“Only shallow scholars prance around with difficult commentaries and act superior. You could say you truly have the spirit of returning to fundamentals.”
As he finished speaking, Kim Byeong-gi naturally turned his gaze toward Yi Won-beom’s study.
Up to that point, he had had no particular motive.
That was, until he spotted the silver candlestick.
Yi Uk tensed. He regretted that he’d forgotten to put it away. Maybe Kim Byeong-gi would demand the household’s last remaining silver candlestick as payment for the meal today.
Of course, Kim Byeong-gi had no such intention.
As a gentleman, he couldn’t stare too hard at the silver candlestick, so he casually moved his eyes away again. But a question had already taken shape in the mind of this true aristocrat, who knew all sorts of rare goods.
I’ve never seen a style like that in Hanyang.
Judging by the state of this house, it couldn’t be a family heirloom, so it must have been acquired elsewhere somehow. It might be from Qing China, but if so, I ought to know it.
And yet… why does it look familiar?
He couldn’t very well ask about it without ruining the atmosphere. Thus the meeting ended that day.
He could tell that Yi Won-beom was, unexpectedly, a neat and respectable man, but the true identity of the silver candlestick remained a mystery that gnawed at his curiosity.
Still, Kim Byeong-gi didn’t have to wonder for very long.
The people who had made that silver candlestick soon came storming in.
Author’s Note
1. A modern Korean beef cattle weighs around 600 to 700 kilograms, and the 300-kilogram cow mentioned in the story reflects Joseon-era cattle. Even so, for the time, it wasn’t especially small compared with cattle in other countries.