The Promised Land (1)
The smuggling trade with France had finally found its rhythm.
Because the whole point was to make it an exclusive business, the French ships still came only as far as Seogeomdo. But the volume Taesu shipped from Seogeomdo, through Ganghwado, and on to Byeokrando or Imjinjin had risen sharply.
That was because Gyodongdo had been emptied out. There was no longer any need to worry about stumbling into the psychic surveillance net of the Golden Fleet.
De Thierry’s efforts were touching in their own way.
When Un-hong saw him in a foreign robe and queue, she remarked that he looked quite Chinese. As for Taesu, he thought the man looked like some random foreigner who’d been invited onto one of those embarrassing nationalist YouTube channels.
“La Hache, the Axe! My friend, it is a pleasure to see you again.”
“Who’s your friend? And who taught you that ridiculous name?”
“Father Thomas said that was your name—ah, never mind. I shall simply call you Charles, if you please.”
“No, you won’t. Let me see the goods.”
After Erigon pulled out, it became difficult for de Thierry to obtain French guns directly, either.
So what he brought this time was the British Brown Bess musket. Fortunately, there had been weapons leaked into the South China Sea after the war seven years ago.
And beyond weapons and luxury goods, he had also increased the share of everyday necessities he could source immediately.
Western wood, scissors, and the like—those were circulating widely around Imjinjin now. Kim Dae-geon and the Foreign Missionary Society had played a large part in that.
De Thierry steadied himself.
This time, he had no intention of yielding to violence.
He had brought quite a few of the sailors who had once claimed to use mysterious Oriental kung fu arts. He had even managed to acquire and load a six-pound deck gun that someone had spirited away from a ship the British East India Company had condemned.
He was a man who, while in New Zealand, had bought half as much land as Ganghwado with thirty-six axes. It was no wonder he had taken such a liking to Taesu’s nickname. He was not someone who could afford to lose at bargaining.
But from now on, Un-hong was here.
While the Chinese sailors—who had been picking fights nobody asked for with irritating enthusiasm—got themselves beaten by Taesu, de Thierry had to endure a beating from Un-hong instead.
“Koreans smoke a great deal of tobacco, don’t they? These matches are far more convenient than flints, and—”
“Park Hakseung’s stuff catches fire a lot better. I’m not paying a gouger’s price for that.”
“Then what about these scissors? Steel scissors made with pivot pins are among the newest inventions in Europe.”
“Can they cut through iron? No, I suppose not. Park Hakseung’s axe cuts better. This would barely do for trimming women’s cloth.”
“A-and the clock? Surely Korea doesn’t have anything like this!”
“Look at Park Hakseung’s wrist right now. Ah, too busy beating the daylights out of someone to see it?”
“Then perhaps this Lancashire cotton, which has always sold well in Korea—”
“I’ll buy it, sure enough, but it still isn’t as good as the outfit Park Hakseung ‘gave me as a token’—so you’ll have to lower the price.”
De Thierry was at a loss.
Park Axe’s lover—de Thierry, being French, had no chance of getting that wrong and assumed she was a woman, while the more politically correct Koreans thought he was a man, but either way the impression was the same—was truly not someone to be trifled with.
At that moment Taesu was busy seizing one Chinese sailor by the arm as he thrust forward with a Bong-gwon strike, yanking him in and driving a knee into his gut.
Holding up the unconscious sailor by the head, Taesu turned at last and looked over.
“So? Done?”
They could have kept fighting if they’d wanted, but de Thierry, as a civilized man, decided not to.
They weren’t charging customs, either, so it was still a profitable enough arrangement. More than money, after all, de Thierry’s ambition depended on having a line to Joseon.
So he listened, at least for now, to Taesu’s offer as the man tossed aside the sailor and walked over.
“You selling that cannon too?”
“Ah, that one’s for defending against pirates—”
Then Un-hong, who had glanced at Taesu, cut in.
“Aren’t you Chinese yourselves? Then Chinese ships shouldn’t be a problem, should they? The only pirates worth worrying about are our navy, and there aren’t any around here. Just sell it to us. I’ll even give you a better price on the rest of the goods.”
Come to think of it, they weren’t the British, and civilized commerce probably didn’t require cannons.
Besides, they’d just been stacked on board without any regard for weight distribution or firing arcs, so they probably couldn’t even be fired anyway. Still, that was better than the old East India Company, which used to sail around with cannon painted onto the hull.
And so four Bloomfield Pattern six-pound naval guns changed hands as well.
De Thierry went back with a light ship and a light heart.
* * *
Back at Cha Un-hong’s house in Kaesong, Taesu introduced another piece of future civilization.
Joseon’s protein-starved meals had never suited his taste, and since his body was his capital, meat consumption mattered to Taesu’s way of doing business.
Meat could be obtained as a “gift” from Choi, who supplied raw hides, so all he had to do was grill it. But beef from this era was still sorely lacking in fat, which left something to be desired.
So Taesu decided to make a sort of chop steak.
The sauce was kôe-chiap—hyeojip, a Cantonese fish sauce and the original form of ketchup—procured today from de Thierry’s trade ship.
One of the Chinese sailors who’d been getting beaten around had decided it was better to hand it over than lose his own blood. He’d understood it as ketchup and brought it over that way by mistake, but it was edible enough.
Un-hong stuffed her cheeks full of meat and stir-fried vegetables and wore a blissful expression.
“Good heavens, and when did you pick up a trick like this?”
“Is it good?”
“It’s delicious. I lost my parents young and spent my life focused on the family business, so I never learned any wifely virtues. Luckily, Ga-yeon is good at domestic work, so I’ve never been inconvenienced, but this is the first time I’ve ever eaten something like this.”
“So there’s something you can’t do after all.”
“I-I could do it if I learned a little.”
Un-hong hurriedly changed the subject, unwilling to linger on a topic where she lacked confidence.
“I went along with it earlier because I caught your drift, but what on earth did you buy those cannons for? Planning to hand them over to Chongwiyeong again?”
“No. We’re keeping them. The guns, too—I’m not selling those.”
Taesu answered while tossing a large chunk of meat into his mouth.
Then, as if explaining himself to the Mountain Spirit who was shrieking, You said you wouldn’t use them before!, he said,
“The king seems to have decided to attack his own subjects. In that case, there’s no guarantee we’d be safe either.”
Taesu’s republican tone—talking about the king as if he were the boss of a neighboring gang—was already familiar to Un-hong.
She didn’t ask the idiotic question, “Why? We never said anything bad about the king’s virility.”
If she were the sort to measure every situation and carefully wield controlled violence, she wouldn’t have planned a palace coup over being offended by a potency issue in the first place.
This wasn’t to say King Ihwan was some worthless monarch.
The mistake was assuming that state violence would somehow be fairer than any other kind.
So Un-hong, too, fell into deep thought with a serious expression.
“That’s not without merit. To start a war, the first thing you need is money. We’ve already ‘brought guns in from China,’ so if they set their minds to it, they could find any excuse to slaughter us and take our money whenever they pleased. Ah! There’s still some left. Don’t take that.”
“I’m taking the leftovers because there are leftovers.”
Taesu put the remaining meat and kôe-chiap into the rice and stir-fried it again.
At this point he added pepper, which was a common seasoning even in Joseon, as well as the warm raw egg Ga-yeon had brought from the chicken coop and cheese he’d obtained from a Western ship, letting it all melt together.
His hands moved briskly, but his words were somewhat dark.
“No matter how we get our hands on guns and cannons, the real problem is people. The Ganghwa training detachment is too small, and the people you can gather are—”
“Mostly day laborers and hangers-on, yes. Because of the family circumstances you already know, our household can’t keep many people on hand and put them to work. Hmm. Then…”
When she didn’t continue, Taesu lifted his head.
Then he realized what glittered in Un-hong’s eyes.
He scooped up a big spoonful of fried rice.
And fed it to her.
Un-hong’s face flushed red in an instant. Taesu smiled faintly.
“You were guessing it too, weren’t you?”
* * *
Choi Yang-eop and the Catholics were proving useful in the smuggling trade with France as interpreters, guides through the waterways, and escape planners.
It suited them perfectly, really, since that sort of thing was practically their livelihood to begin with.
As a result, Catholics from all over the country were gathering in this area. The fact that most of Joseon’s Catholics were concentrated in the Kiho region also played a part.
Of the fewer than ten thousand Catholics thought to exist in Joseon at the time, about a thousand had gathered around Kaesong and Ganghwado over the past year.
Given the Joseon era’s difficulty with migration, that was a tremendous number.
Still, on the other hand, by fleeing punishment the heretics have been gathered into one place, so their momentum for spreading elsewhere must have died down. There are also many places where the network was severed because they left behind their congregations and came here.
That was the Mountain Spirit’s explanation, delivered with all the enthusiasm of someone who had volunteered for Catholic surveillance without being asked.
Even setting aside the Mountain Spirit’s delight in disaster, the number was nothing to scoff at.
Taesu could beat Choi Yang-eop into submission by himself, but he couldn’t control all the Catholics that way.
It wasn’t that he lacked force so much as that, if he handled people like that, he couldn’t expect their cooperation. If that were possible, then every Catholic in Joseon would already have become the king’s loyal subject.
In one way or another, there had to be some reward. Just as the Ganghwa troops and the Song merchants who followed Taesu and Un-hong received the reward of exclusive subcontracting rights.
What the Catholics needed wasn’t money itself, but a safe hideout and a protector.
For Taesu and Un-hong, who needed somewhere to hide the Catholics and a fighting force to stand with them if the worst happened, it could be the perfect deal.
* * *
Choi Yang-eop did not eat the Kaesong rice cakes Taesu had brought back from Un-hong.
Instead, he frowned.
“And you’re telling us to go to an island?”
With the Tongu-yeong of Gyodongdo having been moved to the main island of Ganghwado, most of the people of Gyodong-bu, who had lived by relying on the garrison, had already left as well.
Seogeomdo was similar. Goerido was an uninhabited island to begin with, but it had a smithy essential for war.
Taesu intended to relocate the Catholics there, out of the government’s sight, both to keep them safe and to secure armed manpower.
“Isn’t that a pretty good offer? It’s an island with no navy, so if you’ve got the nerve, you can always run off to your spy den in China.”
Unlike when he met Un-hong, he was speaking with not even a grain of consideration.
Why not try building a ship from bare ground and crossing the Yellow Sea yourself? Even Jonah who fell into the belly of a whale would’ve had better conditions than this. At least he could have beaten the whale with some rubber-rubber nonsense and ridden it across.
But Taesu didn’t seem to truly want that.
“Still, I’d advise you to defend yourselves there as best you can. How long do you intend to do nothing but suffer persecution?”
“Our believers aren’t soldiers. Are you trying to trick us into rebellion?”
“Then if the king says he’ll kill you all, are you going to stand still and let yourselves be slaughtered?”
“Th-that’s why we helped you, isn’t it? What are we supposed to do in a place where nothing grows? If we can just be careful to avoid the authorities…”
For one thing, the fact that nothing grows there was not an unexpected obstacle but an intentional feature.
Who intended it was obvious.
If farming goes well, that’s a problem. If you can survive without us, won’t you betray us and strike us in the back immediately? Would people who betrayed even their ancestors and forebears keep faith with their benefactors?
Taesu had much the same thought. He spoke like the Mountain Spirit.
“Why don’t you pray to your God and ask Him to send manna, then? Can’t He manage even that much?”
“This is no time for joking!”
Taesu looked down at his ex-class axe.
I’m not joking.
Misreading that look, Choi Yang-eop hurriedly added,
“I’m sorry for shouting. But even the Scripture says not to put the Lord your God to the test.”
Choi Yang-eop was not someone who feared death.
But for some reason, that axe made him uneasy.
He felt like if it struck, he’d fall straight into corruption.
That was, to some degree, true.
Taesu spoke like a devil whispering an irresistible proposal at the moment it could not be refused.
“If asking for manna is testing the Lord, then so is a promised land flowing with milk and honey. Go and make it yourself, and defend it yourself—if you’ve got any pride.”
Like the devil usually does, it was a contract written in the language of God.
* * *
Even though there had been no noticeable resistance, I was already deeply irritated before the first voyage had even begun.
Spring had come, and the weather had turned pleasantly warm. I sat on the pavilion in the courtyard of Taesu Finance and rubbed my forehead.
“Gather at the appointed time.”
“Bring these and those things.”
“Familiarize yourselves with the precautions.”
“Wait until further instructions are given.”
Even the most trivial matters like these weren’t being followed.
Everyone interpreted the orders in their own way, and the level of education was so wildly uneven that there was trouble every time I took a breath.
It wasn’t really a problem with the Catholics so much as a problem with a society that had no elementary school. So far, the Ganghwa troops had gotten by only because there were so few of them.
It felt like trying to run reserve training with a thousand obnoxious old men from a convenience store. Still, that was better than dealing with obnoxious children armed with idiotic logic, so I supposed I should be grateful.
Paperwork was useless.
In a society like Joseon’s, which had no fixed “rules” like the modern world, every document became trash the moment it was written. There was nothing else it could be used for.
In Joseon, it was far better to tell one sharp-eyed, nimble-handed person only the goal and give them full authority. That was probably how the government worked, too.
Take Yukjagi, for instance, busily marching around the front yard and barking orders. He’d gotten quite a bit bigger in a year, probably because he was still a child.
Stop dismissing writing just because you can’t read. That’s why Gong the steward handles all the work and you’re the one groaning.
I still need to look at it once in a while. And Gong the steward handles work for Un-hong’s side, not the Ganghwa troops.
Reading it to you still counts. And like you just thought, that kid over there—Yukjagi—handles the merchant side. Honestly, I don’t know how to react anymore. What exactly do you do all day? Beat people up?
“Graaah!”
Yukjagi flinched and stared at me from across the yard.
“You’re still mad about the people who haven’t paid back their money, right? I had no idea you’d be so furious you’d smash the pavilion with an axe. I’ll catch them all tonight and bring them in. I can even dig some holes…”
“...You handle that yourself.”
Hah. What a complete reversal of cause and effect.
Un-hong couldn’t help much either, aside from Gong the steward’s tireless efforts. If her organization were broad enough to do more than that, I wouldn’t have even planned to use Catholics as soldiers.
Should I recruit more Bobusang? This was Kaesong, after all, where the Bobusang’s central headquarters at Balgasan was located, so maybe it was possible somehow…
Just then a quiet voice came from the side gate.
“No need to ask around separately. You must be the famed Park Axe, sir.”
I gave a dry laugh.
There was only one man there, but he was unmistakably dressed as a Bobusang.
Author’s Note
1. Manna is the miraculous food sent down to the starving Israelites in Exodus.