The Gate of Judgment (1)
Before I could even answer, the Mountain Spirit cut in.
[Surely you won’t leave a helpless woman to her fate, now will you, as a man of justice?]
What kind of nonsense are you up to now?
[Not what you’re thinking. She simply looks promising.]
Like hell you know anything. What sort of promise could a ghost even judge, besides a knack for the occult?
[Yes, full of spiritual power, she is.]
I was left speechless at the sight of that cheap joke turning into a serious lecture.
A shaman, then? Well, there are peddlers among shamans too, I suppose…
[No. There’s no trace of another god having laid a hand on her. If possible, I’d like to bring her to Ganghwa someday and have her serve me. Her spiritual power is clean.]
Your standards are filthy, though.
My conscience did stir a little at the thought of making that sort of bastard, who couldn’t shut up about spiritual virgins, serve as her guardian deity.
Still, one hope kept nagging at me.
If there was a proper shaman, maybe I could separate myself from this thing.
Why hadn’t I thought of that until now? Exorcising evil spirits was a shaman’s whole business.
The terms the Mountain Spirit offered in place of traveling with Yi Seong-nyeo were attractive too.
[I’ll put in a good word with the mountain spirit here as well. Once you’ve gone, I’ll call up the birds and beasts and make sure no one can tell whether those fellows died at human hands or were devoured by animals.]
I wasn’t exactly squeamish about what happened to a corpse once the owner was already dead, but wasn’t that a rule violation? Didn’t he just say a while ago that he couldn’t interfere in the mortal world and all that?
[I nearly got my head chopped off too, you know. If you speak well of me, I can do that much for you.]
And there he was again, the same bastard who had summoned the Cheonggye Mountain mountain spirit earlier, running his mouth in his usual stable, self-destructive, scam-artist style.
I looked away from the spectacle, which was beginning to make me feel like I was one step away from becoming an atheist who hated religion.
Cha Un-hong, now tidied up, was in the middle of scolding him.
“What indecent talk! There may be many women among peddlers, but there are still proper rules for avoiding impropriety—how could you speak so shamelessly!”
Her hypocrisy was swiftly smashed to pieces.
“And aren’t you a woman yourself? No matter how you dress, anyone can tell.”
Now I understood why the mountain spirit had picked her. He’d said she had spiritual power—was this the same kind of spiritual power he had?
“Oh? So now you’re turning your insults on the very woman who saved your life?”
“I’m a widow, yes, but I’m still a married adult. Is that really so offensive? Or are you perhaps a widow yourself? From the way you walk, I thought you were still a young girl.”
Cha Un-hong’s face held a deeply complicated indignation. Which side are you even offended for, you idiot?
It didn’t seem like a good idea to keep watching this from across the river any longer.
“I’m unmarried as well. It’s just a single-knot topknot.”
“Dobansu is the leader of our peddlers, after all.”
“In any case, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell anyone else. This companion may be a woman, but she isn’t my wife.”
“As I said before, I understand. The Dobansu wouldn’t be the sort to grab at just anyone who came within reach.”
I dragged Cha Un-hong, who was still pointing and shouting about how I looked like the kind of man who’d grab anybody, and moved her aside.
Then I steered the conversation back to where it had been.
“Continue from where you left off. You said Kimryangjang was in bad shape?”
Even after becoming Dobansu in a hurry, two years of being a bobusang were no joke. I knew enough to recite most of the basics.
Kimryangjang sat at the center of the routes linking the northern Songpa Market, the southwestern Suwon South Gate Market, and the southeastern Anseong Market. It was bound to be a bustling place.
More precisely, it was bustling for peddlers.
I’d vaguely imagined, from things like Huhsaengjeon, that southern Gyeonggi was the logistics center of Joseon commerce as a whole, but apparently that had ended fifty years ago, when some king abolished the monopolies held by Seoul merchants.
Now even merchants without special privileges could trade in Seoul, since all they had to do was walk a little farther and get there.
But that didn’t mean southern Gyeonggi had fallen apart.
What that abolition really removed was the right to beat up and bully anyone caught violating the monopoly. The unwritten practice of local turf protection was still very much alive.
In other words, although the logistics center had shifted from the Anseong-Yongin area to the capital region, most of that trade still belonged to wealthy merchant groups strong enough to endure the harassment. From a peddler’s perspective, it was still a filthy place to do business.
On top of that, for everyday goods like tobacco pipes, shoes, and bowls, many products from this region were famous local specialties—just like Yi Seong-nyeo’s Anseong brassware.
For peddlers, especially the peddlers who dealt in such goods, it was still a good road.
And the Western wares I’d brought this time were almost the same kind of thing.
That was why, in the center of southern Gyeonggi’s Kimryangjang, there was a peddlers’ relay office instead of some big government office or the headquarters of a merchant guild.
But apparently business was in the gutter there.
One possibility came to mind.
“Could it be the constables swept through, rounding up the cultists? I heard Hongju’s Im Ban-su say something like that.”
“I’ve owed Im Ban-su a debt myself. It seems men of spirit do indeed find each other.”
Ah, right—he’d said he was from Chungju. Knowing somebody seems to be the shortest road to friendship, no matter where you are.
“But this problem in Gyeonggi is different. As you know, Kimryangjang survives on goods brought by peddlers and buying agents, but they’ve stopped coming.”
“Why not?”
“Because of the second-ranking man at the Kimryangjang relay office, Kim Seong-hwa.”
He was the official number two among the peddlers’ representatives.
When the Dobansu was elected, he’d sent a proxy, claiming he himself had to remain at his post to keep things in order.
That in itself wasn’t a problem. In this line of work, more than half of the relay-office men never showed up anyway.
But according to Yi Seong-nyeo’s explanation, Kim Seong-hwa had been busy with other matters.
* * *
Kim Seong-hwa was from Geumsan in Chungcheong Province.
If I had to sum him up in one phrase, he was a man like Cao Cao.
In other words, he liked married women.
Of course, this was not exactly a taste tolerated in Joseon, where orthodoxy clung to the old Han loyalist line.
Most of his victims had kept quiet, so the matter had gone unpunished, but once a husband came after him, things turned ugly.
After beating a man to death and fleeing, Kim Seong-hwa somehow made it to Gyeonggi and rose all the way to second-in-command in Kimryangjang.
It was less due to talent than to personal influence.
Using his experience, he supplied his fellow peddlers with illicit amusements.
Among the peddlers roaming around Kimryangjang, there were plenty of women—just as Cha Un-hong had said.
He’d entice them with money, threaten them, trick them into a room under false pretenses, or if all else failed, drag them off by brute force.
After all, peddlers were an outlaw group, so they didn’t enjoy the protection of the law. Kim Seong-hwa was apparently delighted, saying he should’ve become a peddler long ago.
And yet the peddlers of Kimryangjang’s relay office, who must have long since memorized the rule that one should not so much as step over the straw shoes a woman has taken off, had not hesitated to put a dot beside Kim Seong-hwa’s name and elevate him to leadership.
This was the common “democracy” of merchant guilds everywhere in the world.
That same democracy was why Yi Seong-nyeo had been unable to sell all her brassware.
“That bastard kept flattering me, saying that since we were from the same hometown, how could we not show each other some warmth, and that he’d make a point of taking special care of my stall. Then he grabbed my arm and tried to drag me into a room, and only then did I realize what he was after.”
She said that there had been a gang of his accomplices waiting there, planning to do the same thing the group from Cheonggye Mountain had tried earlier. Still, if Geumsan and Chungju counted as the same province, then Yi Seong-nyeo and I were basically from the same hometown too.
“I threatened to slice my own throat with a knife and escaped, then managed to get away with the quiet help of some people at the market. I think those lowlife thugs from earlier were sent by Kim Seong-hwa too.”
Cha Un-hong, who had been groaning beside me, said,
“Then they’re not all in on it. So that man was vicious enough to lose the goodwill of many people, was he?”
“You saw right through it. That’s exactly what I was trying to tell the Dobansu.”
One drop of ink in water will muddy the color.
But that doesn’t mean there was more ink than water.
Among the peddlers passing through Kimryangjang who were not members of the relay office, there were far more who were furious at Kim Seong-hwa’s behavior.
He extorted money from merchants too, making up excuses like suspicious inspection fees, unpaid tribute contributions, or fines for not attending a colleague’s funeral. As a result, peddlers had already begun avoiding Kimryangjang altogether.
That was why Kimryangjang had grown so quiet.
This problem went beyond Kimryangjang alone.
Just as the Dobansu had no direct authority over peddlers in other regions, neither did a second-ranking relay man.
But just as the Dobansu’s influence was no small matter, neither was his. If things went on like this, the peddlers’ unity itself would collapse.
For the future of the peddlers’ organization, Kim Seong-hwa had to disappear.
“It’s not enough to save only my own skin. We have to avenge the comrades he’s harmed so far and make sure he can’t keep causing trouble. If the Dobansu wants to unite the peddlers across the land, there’s no better time than now to win the people’s favor.”
Even after Yi Seong-nyeo’s solemn words, Taesu and Cha Un-hong couldn’t answer right away.
The Mountain Spirit knew why. He cut straight to the heart of it.
[That widow is not falsely framing Kim Seong-hwa for some crime.]
How can you tell?
[Surely a human blessed with spiritual power can feel a god. And a god, in turn, can roughly perceive the heart of a human with spiritual power.]
Taesu fell into the bizarre delusion that gods were a sort of electronic device after all.
Luckily, I didn’t need to figure out how to persuade Cha Un-hong to trust Yi Seong-nyeo.
Yi Seong-nyeo neatly bound up the damaged burden basket.
As Cha Un-hong had said, it contained brassware.
Yi Seong-nyeo gathered up all the weapons the dead gang had carried and put them inside. Metal clinked against metal with a sharp, ringing sound.
Even Cha Un-hong didn’t think Yi Seong-nyeo was trying to sneak away with scrap iron for profit.
This was a gesture saying that Yi Seong-nyeo would take responsibility for the evidence of the brawl and bear it herself.
“I know a blacksmith or two, since I work with brass. I’ll melt these down and dispose of them. Even if I’m caught with them, they’ll be in my possession, so the blame will come to me.”
“H-heh, I suppose that’s sincere enough.”
The weapons vanished like that.
And as for the other piece of evidence—the corpses—they had also mostly disappeared by the time the three of us came all the way down the mountain.
* * *
By then, news of the Dobansu election had reached the Kimryangjang relay office as well.
Kim Seong-hwa asked his returning proxy,
“What? A peddler, not a nobleman, was made Dobansu? And he’s just some upstart with a single-knot topknot?”
The proxy lowered his head.
“Yes. He looked to be no more than twenty-something, at best. He’s only been in trade for, what, two years? And yet he’s strutting around talking about touring every relay office in the eight provinces.”
“Ha! Does he think he’s the Son of Heaven or something? What a grand imperial procession that’ll be.”
“You’re as well informed as ever, Second-Ranking Sir.”
“How many men does he have?”
“Park Do-ki didn’t gather a merchant group or a gang of followers. I slipped in behind him and took a look, and there was that widow from before—the insolent one, you know. He was with that woman. Other than her, there was only one little boy accompanying them.”
“So he’s not the Son of Heaven, but an undercover inspector. As for that woman, if she was planning to whisper sweetly to the Dobansu and then use him to hurt me, she should’ve kept her mouth shut and listened to me instead, since she was already a body to be discarded.”
“Just so. If we rough him up properly now, the Songdo relay office won’t have a thing to say.”
Even if they weren’t in a direct command relationship, the relay office couldn’t be ignored.
There were already occasional troublemakers who resented his democratic rule over the market.
He had to prevent any situation in which the Songdo relay office might circulate a sabal-tongmun calling on people to bring down the lecherous Kim Seong-hwa.
For that, there was no better way than to trample Park Do-ki publicly and make it plain to everyone who the boss was.
A circular letter relied on reputation. Just as the Hawoomen would scoff at a death warrant issued for a martial world enemy, a sabal-tongmun signed by a man who’d been beaten to a pulp was worthless.
There was only one obstacle he foresaw.
“You said that guy knows how to throw a punch?”
“Yes. He even took down that trick fighter An Pil-ju with ease.”
The target was different, but the bastard’s methods were similar enough that Kim Seong-hwa had heard of An Pil-ju, the so-called “pretty boy hunter” of the whole capital.
“So he does have something backing him. But…”
That sort of nonsense only works on an ordinary street brawler.
If power on a state level got involved, individual strength was useless.
The report that Yi Seong-nyeo was traveling with him reminded Kim Seong-hwa of news from his hometown.
It was the religious crackdown sweeping Hoseo these days.
He then said to his proxy,
“I should go see the man from the Punishment Office for a moment.”
* * *
The magistrate of Yongin at the time was Jo Bok-rim.
As the name suggests, he was a distant collateral relation of Jo Deok-rim, the Vice Minister of Works who had been Taesu’s first indirect opponent.
Bloodline-circuit politics was not only for the great power clans, nor only for the age of sedo rule.
From the days when people were firing plain pottery with the same silica to the days when they were manufacturing semiconductors, hereditary power and the sharing of kin-group influence had always been the basic order of society.
Because the Jo clan of Yangju could not compare with the Andong Kims or the Pungyang Jos, Jo Bok-rim had only ever bounced between minor posts like inspection officer or district magistrate. Still, a post was a post.
At least in Yongin, no one outranked Magistrate Jo Bok-rim, seated in the main hall.
However, Jo Bok-rim was now troubled by a message from someone “higher up outside Yongin.”
They want me to kill off some merchant and are asking me to overlook a bit of noise in Yongin while they do it?
On the surface, it was a request from Jo Gwan-seop, an illegitimate son of Jo Deok-rim from the same clan.
That alone made it awkward to refuse, but the man who’d memorized the message had made no secret of the fact that he was Kim Byeong-gi’s servant.
In other words, a coworker had contacted him through the son of the boss. Kim Jwa-geun’s favorite concubine, Yang Ji-hong, could probably exile a local magistrate with a single word.
The messenger had also said that if the target somehow slipped away because the roads crossed and they lost Park Do-ki—he could hardly imagine losing—then the magistrate should fabricate a suitable charge on the spot.
Passive silence was one thing, but Jo Bok-rim found that part especially distasteful.
Career-wise, he could never rise into the central civil elite anyway.
He kept cycling through low-ranking local magistracies to support his family, but this was Joseon; there were plenty of ways to survive even without money. He was not so desperate that he needed to sell his honor for a few scraps of pocket money from Jo Gwan-seop.
Just as Jo Bok-rim was weighing the matter, the Punishment Office chief came in and reported,
“Your Honor, the citizens of Kimryangjang have a matter they insist on formally denouncing.”
“Kimryangjang? A denunciation? What, is this just another petty dispute between merchants over market stalls? Don’t bother me with such trivial matters!”
He really did seem to have no idea what the proper function of litigation was.
In a lawsuit, what matters is not that the verdict be right.
What matters is only that there be as few lawsuits as possible, as little as possible—so that, guilty or innocent, everyone can live in “peace.”
And since Jo Bok-rim desperately needed that very peace, he was already irritated.
But if it was a VIP concern, that was another matter entirely.
The next thing the embarrassed Punishment Office chief reported made Jo Bok-rim’s ears prick up.
“It isn’t a market dispute, Your Honor… It’s just that a huge merchant entered Kimryangjang yesterday and today, and it turns out he’s a cultist.”
Author’s note
1. The relay office really existed, but the term “second-ranking relay man” is invented for this story.
2. Kim Seong-hwa was a real person from Geumsan, as in the novel, and during King Cheoljong’s reign he was investigated for rape—or possibly adultery—and abortion. Due to insufficient evidence, his sentence was reduced. However, there is no record that he had ever been a peddler.
3. Jo Bok-rim was indeed the actual magistrate of Yongin in 1847.