Kingdom of Heaven (2)
What we saw when we hurried after the porter with all our strength was not something peculiar to Joseon alone.
In the middle of that mountain path curving around the rock face, men’s excited shouts rang out.
Beside a battered, smashed-open burden chest lay a woman collapsed on the ground.
Two men were pinning her arms down while a third was grabbing her around the waist. What I had heard was the voice of that female merchant.
It reminded me of home. There were plenty of scum like that down by the Han River embankment in the nineties.
A quick glance told me there were seven of them in all.
Still a little too far away. There was also the risk that the woman could be taken hostage.
Instead of shouting, I pulled a lump of iron from my pack.
Then I put it into action the way De Thierry had taught me.
A report cracked out loud enough to make even me jump.
Come to think of it, it was probably the first live firing of a handgun in all of Korea, too.
* * *
First produced by Remington twenty years from now, in 1825.
The President Slayer that would someday punch through Abraham Lincoln’s head.
The roar of the Derringer pistol drew everyone’s attention at once.
To add to that: it drew a little too much attention.
I’d fired it hoping as much, but I was still a little surprised by how fast everyone’s target shifted from the female merchant to me.
“Isn’t that the bastard?”
“Yeah, that axe at his waist! It’s Park the Axe!”
Cha Un-hong said, gripping the reins of the porter tightly.
“I knew it. There’s no way a bunch of able-bodied men would be wandering around this mountain path for nothing. Seems they were lying in wait for you and happened to set upon a traveling merchant.”
“Looks like it.”
I had no idea why they’d been waiting, but that was easy enough to ask later.
To my relief, those bastards didn’t look like they’d be avoiding a fight either.
They kicked away the female merchant they’d been trying to violate and came at me.
“You little bastard, you should’ve shown up an hour later. Have you got rocks for eyes?”
“Just finish him off quick and then we’ll go back to it.”
“What’s that thing in his hand?”
“Looks like a sugun with only the grip left on it, maybe…….”
“The idiot must’ve rushed and missed.”
The hired thugs weren’t all that afraid of a gun.
Weapons of this era were, by and large, single-shot affairs. Even the Derringer, famous for being a two-shot pistol, could only fire one round for now.
So Cha Un-hong swiftly drew out another loaded Derringer and held it out to me.
But I shook my head.
“Keep it.”
“What are you planning to do?”
With a weapon whose range was about the same as the Derringer’s but whose mass and destructive force were far deadlier, I drew the axe at once.
The axe was the weapon I used most often. Even I, with no real experience at first, was beginning to find my own way with it.
Having experience in striking and grappling, I was also adept at moving my own body.
And a weapon, in the end, is just an extension of the arm.
I twisted my shoulder slightly, then snapped it back the other way and drove the axe up at an angle.
With the sound of a clog being split apart, the blade shattered the jaw of the man at the front in two and rattled his brain to pieces. There was no chance of him staying on his feet.
The fellow beside him yanked out a dagger in a hurry.
“You damn bastard, you really wanna—”
He didn’t even finish the sentence before the entire upper half of his head vanished. The result of the axe uppercut followed by an axe backspin blow was truly grotesque.
“You fucking lunatic!”
“I’ve never seen a human butcher this rotten before!”
The hired killers were deeply wronged.
Why the hell was I swinging an axe before they’d even done anything? They were only planning to half-murder Park the Axe on sight and drag him away, that was all.
But even after seeing the man with the dagger collapse mid-sentence, choosing to keep using their tongues as weapons was still stupid.
Rather than waste time answering them, I wasted time by kicking the jaw of the fool who’d just wasted his breath talking. He bit his tongue and fell sprawling, and in the next instant his neck was stomped and snapped.
As the thugs began to retreat, I finally opened my mouth.
I pointed my axe at the female merchant who was still lying on the ground.
“I am the Dobansu of Balgasan. To harm a merchant is to harm me.”
* * *
The female merchant who had been carrying the burden chest was named Yi Seong-nyeo.
She was originally from Janghowon in Chungju, not far from here.
Like most women in Joseon, she was married off to the household her father chose and lived an ordinary life.
Until her husband died two years later.
Hindus and Joseon women have one thing in common: no remarriage for widows.
And they have another thing in common as well: they’re both IT superpowers. The goal of both groups is not some foggy ideology, but sensible profit.
In India, if you burn a widowed daughter-in-law alive, the subsidies come rolling in.
Joseon is similar, except it prefers to save on firewood.
There are all sorts of Joseon’s premium life hacks—silver daggers, ropes, and the like. If you didn’t want to end up as a passive-state martyr and make your in-laws’ year-end accounting pleasantly tidy, you had to prove your asset value.
So, after somehow making contact through her family home, she ended up tied to the peddlers of the Woorongju Six-Army Commerce Bureau and set out with nothing but her bundle on her back.
If it had been the glorious first step toward success, like the female merchant Kim Man-deok of Jeju long ago, that would have been wonderful—but the world wasn’t that kind.
All manner of insults, threats, and local bullying were one thing. Nearly being violated wasn’t even the first time.
The reason Yi Seong-nyeo hadn’t quit work was less firm resolve than a kind of self-destructive neglect. Maybe she’d been wandering around like a corpse, half hoping to die like today.
Until just a moment ago, anyway.
Half-collapsed, Yi Seong-nyeo looked up at me with an expression as though she’d just come to some profound realization.
To her, I must have seemed like some savage god walking behind me—one who struck, slammed, split, broke, and crushed all in one motion.
* * *
Shared hardship, shared relief.
That was the one and only absolute creed of the peddlers’ guild.
No matter how much of a ruined life you were living, when one of your own was in danger, you dropped everything and helped without hesitation.
And that principle comfortably covered murder and worse besides.
Right now, I was the one embodying that creed.
I was alone, and there were seven of them.
Under ordinary circumstances, it was the kind of number that would leave even a fully intact group exhausted by the end, if their opponent just stood there and stretched his neck for them.
But I seemed tireless.
I shoved and kicked the leg of a man who had been standing crookedly, as if stepping on his knee.
Crack! With a dry snapping sound, the joint bent backward.
The moment he went down, the fastest possible execution followed.
After dropping my body to strike the neck, I didn’t rise again. Instead, I planted a hand on the ground and vaulted forward.
Another thug charging in from behind missed his six-sided club by a mile.
Then that club was split apart in a single axe swing from me as I turned back.
A grown man might be able to break a six-sided club with an axe.
If he braced it against something solid and brought the blade down over and over, maybe.
But this had been done in midair, and not by smashing it apart, either, but by slicing it cleanly like a cucumber.
The man holding the club stared at his wrist in confusion.
“Wh-what is this guy, human or ghost?”
Fortunately, there was no danger of my human-ghost hybrid identity being exposed. The brain that had once held onto that sharp little suspicion had just been destroyed.
By now, the remaining two men were starting to back away, looking around nervously.
But unlike the Kaesong merchant thugs from Seungcheonpo, who’d basically been ambushed, these were professionals who had come prepared for violence.
This was a mountain path, so it was hard to take advantage of superior numbers.
They went for a kind of flanking strike.
“You bastard! Drop the axe!”
One of them circled through the brush and pressed a dagger to Cha Un-hong’s throat.
I glanced that way for just a moment.
At that instant, the man who looked like their leader behind me raised a hwandu.
For some reason, I could almost hear the mountain itself screaming, and not in a way that belonged to me.
Yi Seong-nyeo, suddenly alert, clutched her walking staff.
She stabbed the swordsman squarely in the rear from behind.
“Gaaah! You, you damn woman!”
“Aaagh!”
Yi Seong-nyeo rolled away after taking a kick from the swordsman, and she never saw my incredulous expression.
She didn’t have the luxury to. The next second, the cannon-like shot I’d heard earlier rang out again.
BANG!
It was the Derringer I’d handed to Cha Un-hong before the fight.
The Derringer’s greatest strength was its concealability, thanks to its small size.
Pretending to be frightened, Cha Un-hong had pressed the pistol to the kidnapper’s jaw and pulled the trigger without hesitation.
She wasn’t as belligerent as I was, but she had the same kind of reckless nerve I’d once judged her to have.
She didn’t have my brute strength, either. That was why I had never thought Cha Un-hong would be the one to lose.
The Mountain Spirit let out a groan.
[I thought she was at least a little human, but I suppose husband and wife do indeed share one mind…….]
‘Who’s married?’
I thrust out a fist like I was beating the spirit itself.
With the swordsman’s face crushed by the rear end of the staff Yi Seong-nyeo had stabbed into him, the brawl on Cheonggye Mountain came to an end.
* * *
The only one left alive was the final swordsman.
I kept beating the man who had been pretending to be dead until he got back up again three minutes later.
Not only did the swordsman perform a miracle of resurrection, he even spilled information nobody had asked for in a steady stream.
“Jo, it was Jo Daeju! Jo Daeju sent us!”
[Sounds like Jo Gwan-seop—the fellow who used to be the right-hand man of the men you stabbed to death in Seungcheonpo?]
‘That bastard ran like hell last time and I let him get away. Why’s he causing trouble now?’
[How should I know?]
The swordsman, unaware that I’d already gotten what I wanted, babbled anything he could think of in order to stay alive.
“I-I heard there was a big lord in Seoul who’d help us out, so not to worry. We’re just hired hands taking a few coins for the errand; we really don’t know anything more!”
[It’s Kim Jwa-geun, then. Probably the same one that boatman Kim Sun-won mentioned back then. Said he had Jang-dong behind him.]
‘That Kim Jwa-geun bastard’s name keeps popping up everywhere.’
The master behind smuggler Jo Gwan-seop, who trafficked in red ginseng, and Kim Sang-jun, the vicious moneylender.
The target of Heungseon-gun’s purge, and the king’s mortal enemy.
As befit a social elite, he had a truly diverse web of human connections.
And now he’d been added to my kill list as well.
I still had no desire to help either the king or Heungseon-gun, but I’d also lost any desire to leave Kim Jwa-geun alive.
Still, before that, I had to finish this journey first.
Just as I’d gathered people to stand against the French army, I needed a force of my own.
Seoul would be the final conquest.
At that moment, the swordsman who’d been watching my expression while I was lost in thought suddenly sprang upright with a savage cry.
“Aaaagh!”
Then he snatched up the staff that had been jammed into his rear end—and Yi Seong-nyeo wanted nothing more to do with touching it—and charged me.
He didn’t have time to think about the searing pain in his anus and every other relevant place. If he went back like this, he would die.
If I take out Park the Axe, then a woman and a brat are nothing……!
That judgment was more or less accurate.
Except for the fact that there was still one more member of our party who wasn’t exactly weak.
The swordsman, whose vision and breathing were both a mess from having his eyes and nose swollen shut, stumbled and slammed into the porter standing beside me.
Porter, who had been mildly irritated by the petty squabbling of humans, became enraged.
The staff might be sharp enough on a person, but it was not enough to kill a donkey in a single blow.
Porter kicked the swordsman on the opposite side from where he’d been stabbed by Yi Seong-nyeo earlier.
“Guhk!”
The swordsman collapsed at once.
Only one possible action remained to him now.
“P-please, spare me!”
Coincidentally, it was the same cry Yi Seong-nyeo had let out when I first heard her.
But the swordsman wasn’t a peddler.
So I decided not to grant the request.
* * *
Yi Seong-nyeo seemed to have just as much nerve as Cha Un-hong.
She did not so much as flinch at the mountain of corpses and bowed calmly.
“So the Park the Axe I’d only heard about really was a hero of such caliber. I’ve never even heard of this so-called Chaeumbang before, but if someone like you doesn’t become the Dobansu, then who on earth should?”
“I’m glad you don’t seem badly hurt.”
“If the Dobansu hadn’t been here, would this have ended at the level of ‘hurt’? I’d have been disgraced, my head crushed, and become a wandering vengeful spirit with nowhere to go.”
A head-crushed vengeful spirit. Yeah, I know one of those already.
Then Cha Un-hong tapped my shoulder from behind.
When I looked back, she was wearing a complete tearful grimace.
And fair enough, too.
Cha Un-hong wasn’t injured either, but I had just blown a man’s head apart right over hers. Her face looked like something out of a horror movie.
“Do something about it.”
If her face got messed up, I’d be hearing about it later, so a Joseon handkerchief wouldn’t do. I pulled out a few tissues from my backpack and handed them over.
Then Cha Un-hong closed her eyes and stuck her face out.
“Yuja kept going on and on about the divine treasures your master possesses, so I thought I’d like to enjoy some of that for myself, too.”
And then she even smiled sweetly. I really had no choice.
I slowly wiped her face clean. What the hell was she doing acting like this? What if she got found out?
No, wait.
Was I insane?
Found out about what? We weren’t even anything yet. What was there to be found out?
[Yet?]
Shut up.
* * *
Fortunately, Yi Seong-nyeo’s question had nothing to do with Cha Un-hong’s identity or my relationship with her.
“By the way, what brings the Dobansu all the way out here on your travels?”
Cha Un-hong, who had quite naturally stepped forward, answered that one.
“Our master aims to help the peddlers who are oppressed to a degree worse than the sagung—widowers, widows, old folk living alone, and orphans. Just as he did today. So first we’ve been managing the Chaeumbang in Kaesong, and now we’re making the rounds of the Chaimbang in Gimryangjang.”
“What a hero’s ambition. If that comes to pass, then even we street vendors will be able to live in peace.”
It wasn’t just empty politeness.
Yi Seong-nyeo genuinely felt that way.
She couldn’t explain why, but this man had a god with him.
If someone like that led the most despised people in society, then perhaps the “Kingdom of Heaven” that so many Catholic believers in her hometown always talked about could appear on earth as well.
As Yi Seong-nyeo was thinking that, she soon noticed Cha Un-hong’s strange gaze and quickly changed the subject.
“Then…… are those things you’re carrying goods you plan to sell in Gimryangjang?”
“That’s right.”
Yi Seong-nyeo hesitated briefly, then said, “Gimryangjang isn’t in very good shape right now. I’ve just come through it myself on the way from Chungju to Anseong, and there are still some bronzeware items in my burden chest that I couldn’t sell.”
Both I and Cha Un-hong opened our mouths at the same time.
The second major hub of the peddlers’ world being in such bad shape that even a single bowl was hard to sell was something almost impossible to believe.
But Yi Seong-nyeo looked at me with an expression that made it impossible to think she was lying.
“Please let me help the Dobansu. If you would accept me as one of your own, I’m sure I’d be useful.”