The Song of Conception (1)
No matter how open-minded Yi Ha-eung was, I hadn’t imagined he’d actually spring to his feet and protest here of all places.
So the one who rose was exactly the sort of man you kept nearby for moments like this: a trusted underling.
It wasn’t Jang Sun-gyu. Yi Hwan, the reigning king, was in the middle of an important project, so his errand runner couldn’t make it.
Instead, the second man in the top rung of the Cheonhajan stepped forward.
He had a square jaw and thick lips that gave him a hard, sturdy look.
“I heard you were a mad dog bastard, and sure enough, you are one. I, An Pil-ju of Jinju, will set you straight.”
I stared at An Pil-ju, who had come out with his bare hands.
“I only said I’d run for the Dobansu. What’s your problem?”
“You insolent dog! Hold your filthy tongue. You peddlers know better than anyone that it’s customary for a great man to serve as Dobansu. You know the lay of the land and still pull this stunt—what else is that but a scheme to humiliate a noble gentleman?”
At An Pil-ju’s bark, Yi Ha-eung let out a pained groan under his breath.
It had in fact been the Heungseon-gun side that first twisted the rules and violated the unspoken social consensus.
Park Axe wasn’t the sort to spell that out point by point, but the other bobusang were certainly capable of thinking it.
An Pil-ju, unaware of Yi Ha-eung’s private calculations, shouted even more confidently, “I’ve heard you beat up Jang Sun-gyu, but that punk was only good for running errands for his betters. He was weak from the start. You’d be making a huge mistake if you think I’m anything like him!”
So he was the weakest of the Four Heavenly Kings after all?
Still, it didn’t sound like pure hot air. Choe Je-u, standing beside me, hurriedly grabbed my arm.
“He’s from the same region as me, so I’ve heard of An Pil-ju for a long time. In Jinju, there isn’t a soul who doesn’t know him—he’s a master of bigakjutsu.”
“What’s bigakjutsu?”
“A skill with hands and feet—what common folk also call taekkyeon.”
I realized that was the old-fashioned name for something along the same lines as flint and matches—something I knew only by its modern name.
Taekkyeon?
I’d only heard of it in passing. When the opponent used an unfamiliar technique, you had to be careful.
And while I was still weighing my options, Choe Je-u also gave me information I didn’t particularly need to know.
“You know how, in our country’s custom, the young handsome boys of a village are often made into a sutongmu—a same-sex lover—through bare-knuckle contests among grown men? They say that man has taken more than a hundred pretty boys that way!”
For a moment my brain buffered under the weight of our ancestors’ so-called fine customs, but in the end I managed to extract something useful from it.
So at the very least, this bastard has a record of over a hundred amateur wins.
Even allowing for rumors being padded, that was no background I could afford to dismiss.
The Mountain Spirit, who always had a brilliant scheme to offer, said, [Why are there so many idiots in the mortal world? Just like Kim Yang-won who stood before the cannon on Goerido, that bastard’s got empty hands. Split him in half with the axe at your waist, in one stroke!]
For exactly the same reason as on Goerido, I ignored the Mountain Spirit.
Cha Un-hong, who had received the axe from me, offered a slightly more sensible warning. “What if you get hurt? A man assigned to guard a great lord won’t be ordinary. The guild will stop him soon enough, so just wait.”
Then An Pil-ju’s eyes flashed when he saw Cha Un-hong.
“Oh? So you’re confident with your hands and feet too, are you? One look at that pretty boy and I know the type. Today I’ll knock you down and take that child away with me!”
Even if Cha Un-hong revealed her sex, An Pil-ju was unlikely to refuse her.
The custom of sutongmu in Joseon at this time was not evidence that homosexuality was broadly accepted. It was closer to sexual violence committed against men as a substitute for women, who never came out into public.
Cha Un-hong knew that all too well and was horrified. She looked up at me.
I gave her shoulder a light tap.
“Don’t worry.”
And then, even knowing it might be misunderstood by Choe Je-u and the others, I said, “I will never hand you over to anyone.”
Cha Un-hong couldn’t voice the clear conclusion every woman would have reached here—namely, that the best way to avoid a fight was not to have one in the first place.
* * *
Taking an upright stance, I tried to recall the movements of modern taekkyeon as I knew it.
Probably the kicking techniques were the main feature...
But what I knew was the taekkyeon that had survived into the modern era; what An Pil-ju was showing me now was something older.
There were far more styles than in modern times, and the distinctions between them hadn’t even been properly named yet. In the first place, clearly defining a martial art is itself a product of modern physical culture—the sort of thing that requires forming an association and all that.
So the hand-and-foot motions An Pil-ju was throwing through the air with such swagger looked only like a thing that happened to share a name with the taekkyeon I knew.
“What are you doing? Already scared, are you?”
As if answering An Pil-ju’s shout, I swung my right foot out.
It was a low kick, used to probe.
Not that “probing” meant it lacked power. An Pil-ju lifted his left leg and blocked it.
Bang!
An Pil-ju looked mildly surprised, but I could tell the defense had worked. My force dispersed into empty air.
So his defense is similar to modern striking arts.
Then a modern combination would work too.
Instead of pulling back, I kept the attack flowing.
As soon as my right foot touched down, I snapped out a right straight. An Pil-ju deflected it with a knife-hand strike from taekkyeon said to split granite itself, and the blow was parried.
I retracted my hand without hesitation. The real attack was the left middle kick that followed as though it had been waiting for that very moment.
Having already felt my low kick, An Pil-ju’s long experience let him see the danger in an instant.
If I block that, it’ll break.
He leaned his upper body sharply back and avoided the kick. Sure enough, with a chilling whistle, my leg skimmed past his chest.
But An Pil-ju didn’t retreat either.
Right after evading, he thrust his foot straight out—not like me, but toward my neck.
It was what modern taekkyeon calls a crossing strike.
In words, it was a kick after dodging, but in practice the two motions happened almost at once.
I could already see a future where my jaw was shattered.
Cha Un-hong, unable to scream, clapped a hand over her mouth.
* * *
An Pil-ju’s astonishingly flexible heel brushed my cheek.
At that exact moment, I seized his leg.
Emptying my head and bringing his foot up over my shoulder—that much was already judo.
Of course, it wasn’t as if An Pil-ju had been a fool to fall for it. In a real fight, this was nearly impossible.
Even accounting for the difference in body mass, he’d overlooked one thing: my strength was so monstrous it transcended even weight.
I heard the Mountain Spirit, still within Wi-Fi range, gasp in admiration.
[Somehow your strength seems to have grown too, not just your axe.]
Of course I wasn’t listening. In that split second, my instincts sparked like a flare.
If this were MMA, I could take it to the ground, but this was Joseon. The moment we tangled and fell, An Pil-ju could pull a dagger from his sleeve and drive it into me.
So, with his right leg still locked in my grip, I kicked away his standing left foot.
“Ghk!”
An Pil-ju barely managed to plant a hand and execute a breakfall before crashing down.
It was the kind of move you needed if you didn’t want your spine snapped in two.
But because he was busy doing that, both his arms had no time to block the front.
The last thing An Pil-ju saw was a combat boot filling his entire field of vision black.
Yi Ha-eung squeezed his eyes shut.
* * *
Yi Ha-eung, still not quite recovered, glanced at An Pil-ju sprawled unconscious on the mat.
Then he said to me, seated across from him at the low folding table, “You really went too far. You knew all this and still did it?”
Without even looking at Yi Ha-eung, I poured makgeolli into my own cup.
“You’re the one who went too far, my lord. You really think people sided with me just because I won that little fight?”
Yi Ha-eung fell silent.
The bobusang were already whispering among themselves, as if waking from a spell from the moment Park Axe had thrown down the paper.
‘What’s wrong with Park Axe? Looks like something went badly off the rails.’
‘Could this be the great lord acting on his own, not the king’s will?’
‘Like those thug clerks who drag people away even after the magistrate says to spare them labor tax?’
‘If it weren’t that, why would he do that? If that lord really came on the king’s orders, no matter how insane Park Axe is, there’s no way he’d beat up the envoy.’
‘Exactly. Seeing how angry Park Axe got, this can’t be good for us, can it? Which bastard said he’d finally gotten a solid backer?’
‘I never said that. Looking at it now, that so-called great lord is highly suspicious.’
Ordinarily, people are not easy to move with suspicion like this.
Agreement depends not on whether the logic is convincing, but only on whether one wants to agree with the person who brought it up.
So Yi Ha-eung had been confident he could settle everything with the authority of the royal name alone.
In Joseon, there could be no authority greater than the state of Joseon, and the king was the state.
But Park Axe was the person the bobusang wanted to agree with more. That was the problem.
Then what remained was logic and interests, and on both fronts the king and Heungseon-gun were badly lacking.
During the Byeongin Yangyo, the government army hadn’t even managed to preserve the appearance of dignity they had during the Byeongin Yangyo, and today’s Heungseon-gun still didn’t possess the power to force the bobusang into some state-run office the way he would later under King Gojong.
King Yi Hwan couldn’t step in and push it through either. That would be no different from openly declaring he was creating political enforcers so he could stage a coup soon after.
In the end, Park Axe’s candidacy was accepted.
The words of Im In-son, the representative of the Hongju and neighboring six-county merchant association of Chungcheong Province—Won Hongju and the Six Counties Merchant Association—were a sharp rebuke of Yi Ha-eung’s mistake.
“There’s no rule that says a peddler can’t become Dobansu in a gathering of peddlers. If this great lord, who has never once lived in mutual support with us, suddenly runs for Dobansu, then we no longer need to yield the seat of honor to the yangban. I’ll cast my vote for Park Axe.”
The declaration, backed by the six votes of the storied Won Hongju and the Six Counties Merchant Association—a bobusang alliance that would survive all the way into the twenty-first century—was no light matter.
He was right. In a merchants’ guild, there could be no explicit rule saying a merchant could not become guild master, and there shouldn’t be such a rule in the first place.
Once Yi Ha-eung had pretended to respect unspoken custom while in reality trampling all over it, the bobusang were perfectly entitled to do the same.
The result of all those factors combined was astonishing.
“My word...”
Even Cha Un-hong couldn’t believe it. Choe Je-u looked as though his jaw might drop clean off.
Park Axe, with less than two years’ experience as a bobusang and not even a member of an Imbang branch, was elected Dobansu of the Fallasan Chakhimbang, the representative peddler leader of Joseon.
* * *
Still not willing to give up, Heungseon-gun tried once more.
“It’s not as though I’m desperate for the Dobansu seat myself. Even if you take the credit, that would be fine, so if you’d only step forward for the sake of the greater good...”
But after downing his makgeolli, I ruthlessly cut him off.
“There are two reasons I didn’t kill you for deceiving me. First, you’ve handled business well until now. Second, I know this isn’t some scheme to do me harm.”
Yi Ha-eung felt a chill crawl up his spine.
Of course, no matter how far he’d fallen that he was now forced to speak on equal footing with a mere merchant, he was still a prince. If he killed me, there was no way I’d come out unscathed.
But even if I were torn to pieces by dismemberment, there was no way the dead would rise again.
With a look that would have cost a merchant his eyes on the spot if he dared aim it at royalty, I said, “I’ll let you leave alive today, so don’t ever drag these people into your own greed again. Don’t strip from them the one thing they have left to lose—their lives.”
But Yi Ha-eung, too, was a hero who had once dominated his era. He summoned his nerve.
“But when the French barbarians invaded, you did lead these men out. Didn’t you think their lives mattered then?”
“That was to protect what was ours. Is Kim Jwa-geun about to invade Ganghwa or Kaesong or something?”
“What are you saying? If the country is gone, where is a merchant supposed to do business?”
It would have been better if he’d said the country belonged to them too, but Yi Ha-eung was a subject of an absolute monarchy.
So I, a former citizen of a democratic republic, said it for him.
“If that country becomes ours, then we’ll gladly fight to protect it.”
After finally calming the heart that had nearly seized up from the strain, Yi Ha-eung decided to retreat for now.
If he pushed me any further, there was a real chance I’d expose his eunuch coup plan to the world.
This lunatic was perfectly capable of doing exactly that.
I couldn’t even use the smuggling with Qing China to threaten him.
If I blabbed about what I’d acquired through that smuggling, it would be over. More precisely, the way this world worked, the king wouldn’t be the one finished—Yi Ha-eung would.
Instead, he remembered my last words.
In the way of a subject of a monarchy, of course.
The country becomes theirs... So he means Yi Won-beom, the one he’s close to.
It had been on his mind from the beginning.
If Yi Won-beom had no real support base aside from Park Axe, Yi Ha-eung could welcome him.
Originally, that would have been impossible because of the shadow cast by the Grand Queen Dowager and the Kim clan, who were aiming for the same thing. But if King Yi Hwan’s plan went through and the in-laws were stripped of power, Yi Ha-eung could take that place. The king would be dead soon enough, after all.
Then the time would come to draw me in, if not now.
Yi Ha-eung said no more. Instead, he left with An Pil-ju, who had finally managed to gather his wits again.
No one tried to stop him.
* * *
Of course, I also wanted Yi Won-beom to become king.
Short of launching a republic, that was the ideal outcome for Cha Un-hong and me.
But that was not the same Yi Won-beom the likes of Kim Jwa-geun or Yi Ha-eung wanted, nor the same Yi Won-beom the king wanted.
The price of merchant blood should return entirely to the merchants. For that, he could not be under anyone’s banner.
I had a premonition that the time had come to turn the bobusang—and beyond them the lower merchant class of Joseon—into an independent political force.
And the opportunity was now.
They said the queen was pregnant.
That great joy, now spreading far and wide throughout court and country alike, was something I’d heard as well, naturally, no less than Yi Ha-eung had.
[It’s a queen consort. Until the child is born, the king won’t move to raise troops—he’ll prepare instead. If it’s a prince, even the sedo families will bow their heads and things will likely pass peacefully because of the auspicious occasion. But if it’s a princess, he’ll need more time before a prince is born, so he’ll stir up trouble right away. If I were him.]
Hey, can’t you divine that with your powers?
[If you let me see the queen consort, would that be all I could tell? I could even turn a daughter into a son. Why do you think so many women pray at famous mountains and great temples?]
Seriously?
[...That was a joke, so don’t make that face like you’re gripping an axe and planning to climb over the palace wall at night. You honestly look like you would.]
I muttered a curse under my breath.
In the end, I too would have to conceive my own force during the ten months it took the king’s child to grow.
Starting right now.
I turned my gaze toward the great market and the festival ground that would open once the general assembly ended.