The Divine Domain of the Gods (2)
I called up the past to forget the present.
Back on construction sites, the ones who passionately demanded a ridge-pole ritual were often churchgoers. They just wanted makgeolli and sliced boiled pork.
This place was no different. Judging by the cheers that rose even as they smashed the statue of Guan Yu, not a single soul gave a damn about the sea god.
It wasn’t as if I was doing it just to vent, either. The mountain spirit had told me this was the way to make the boat come.
I couldn’t hear you. I was practicing modern civilization.
The strongest counterexample to modern civilization kept yammering away.
The mountain spirit, who had been spouting nonsense, suddenly shut up.
Then he got angry.
Damn it. Had something gone wrong?
I’m sorry, Kim Soon-won. I dragged you into some demon’s idiotic stunt and nearly got you killed. I must have lost my mind for a moment.
But the mountain spirit only grumbled and left it at that.
Did it work?
Yi Seong-nyeo?
The mountain spirit’s voice shifted at once into a tone of plotting.
It felt like a company that came in on the back of local tax breaks to “revitalize the region,” then kept its headquarters in Seoul.
Now?
Fine. An octopus and a sea god — somehow, that gave me a bad feeling. I just hoped it wouldn’t turn into some cosmic-horror nightmare.
Too tired to think any further, I handed the axe over to Yi Seong-nyeo. Since everyone would have to sleep rough tonight anyway, she even looked pleased at the excuse that if anything happened, she should show it and use my name as backup.
After leaving the crowd behind, I found a patch of sand in the shade between seaside rocks and settled there. I wasn’t in the mood to join the noisy drinking party.
Just then, Cha Un-hong poked her head out from between the rocks.
“There you are. Have a drink with me.”
What she held up was a cup of ritual clear liquor.
* * *
Cha Un-hong swayed slightly as she sat down beside me.
The light, already on the verge of turning to sunset, cast deep shadows across her face.
“Things in Gyeonggi seem to have gone well. If Chungcheong works out too, then after we wrap up here, we’ll head down to Jeolla, right?”
“Yeah. It’s already early summer, so we need to keep moving.”
They had until deep winter.
Before the king fathered an heir and used that child as leverage to shift the balance of power, we had to build a unified force.
“Then after that, we’ll have to push north through Gyeongsang and all the way up to Gangwon, I suppose. Looks like I’ll even end up touring Jirisan, a mountain I’ve no business seeing. They say the roads are terribly rough.”
“If it’s hard, you can always go back.”
“I was the one who brought up the idea of opening the sea routes to make money in the first place. I can’t exactly back out now. Everything we’re doing is for that, isn’t it?”
“I’m the one who agreed.”
Cha Un-hong tugged lightly at the hoodie I’d let her wear.
“Why did you agree?”
“Hm?”
“When it comes to making money, caution matters just as much as grabbing hold of a good opportunity. They say don’t bother learning how to earn — learn how to spend. Compared to the danger, the money you’ve made so far isn’t all that much, is it?”
“It isn’t much” was only true by Songsang standards. Starting with nothing but his bare hands, no one in Joseon had made this much in such a short time.
“I thought maybe you were helping because you’d been smitten by my beauty. Don’t laugh at me. Seriously. But looking back, if that were true, you would’ve just changed clothes with me when you first came to our house.”
“Right. And I’m not saying you’re not beautiful.”
“Hmph. Anyway, even though I told you I’d make you filthy rich, you didn’t seem all that greedy for money either. If so, you could’ve simply married me and strutted around as the owner of an ginseng field. But you refused.”
“I did.”
“So I was curious. If not money and not women, then what is it you want?”
“What I want...”
“That’s right. Beautiful maidens don’t interest you, and if you laugh one more time I’ll splash this cup in your face. You say you want to make money, but easy money doesn’t appeal to you. So what is it — do you want to leave a name for yourself through righteousness and benevolence, like helping Yu-jak or that widow?”
I was silent for a long time.
As he sat there staring out at the sea, fragments of evening light flickered across his profile, reflected from the waves.
Cha Un-hong, following the drifting light and shadow with her eyes, snapped back as though waking from a trance when she heard his answer.
“I don’t want to leave right and wrong in someone else’s hands.”
Cha Un-hong’s heart stirred.
It was the same thought she had vaguely felt before, when she had gone to look over the bustling trade district at the Imjin River after the Chongwiyeong withdrew.
Cha Un-hong asked the question she hadn’t been able to ask then.
“Then what is right, and what is wrong?”
She was curious about the yucheok Taesu carried.
The yucheok was the brass ruler of the Bobusang. It was used for measurement and punishment alike. It was the standard by which they weighed the world.
But Taesu gave a deflating answer.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“I haven’t studied enough to speak clearly about it. I just do what looks right to me in the moment.”
Instead of objecting that this was just self-righteousness — doing whatever he felt like — Cha Un-hong fell into thought.
The question of what is right is not some idle luxury, the sort of thing modern people worry over when they have too much time on their hands.
“Rightness” itself is Joseon’s national identity. This is a country built and maintained for that very purpose.
But what had become of the “rightness” defined and accumulated through centuries of history?
As Cha Un-hong had told Taesu while proposing they open the ports, only those who said “the path that benefits us is the only lawful and righteous path” were left standing.
Perhaps the most perfect definition of “rightness” was that it could not be defined at all.
That was a statement more devastatingly dismissive of Joseon than any restorationist uprising — more even than a republican revolution.
Taesu was not a revolutionary. Revolution belongs to politics, to a system of government.
Cha Un-hong had seen enough Western learning through Choi Yang-eop’s translated books to know the distinction, and her sharp mind separated them cleanly.
The word for a man like this existed not in the West, but here.
Cha Un-hong gave a small snort of laughter.
“You’re a knight-errant, then. I thought you were a merchant, but I seem to have mistaken my business partner.”
Taesu turned to look at her for the first time since she had come over with the drink.
“I think I saw you correctly.”
“What?”
“If you hadn’t reached out your hand when we first met at the Imjin River, I’d have lived here as though this were my hometown too.”
For some reason, Cha Un-hong had the feeling that hometown could never possibly be Ganghwado.
“I’d have ‘worked hard’ in the way those with power told me to, and only gone as far as they allowed, sneering at the people behind me as lazy, all while the ones who had set the road were laughing over feasts in the comfortable places beyond the rough path.”
The vocabulary wasn’t all that difficult, but to fully understand Taesu’s words, one needed the experience of a modern person.
So Cha Un-hong stayed silent. It was an attempt to feel it through intuition rather than reason.
Taesu slipped into that intuition.
“I won’t let anyone tell me I’m the kind of person who needs permission to take my own steps, or that I’m the kind of person who doesn’t. I think that’s what I want to do.”
“And the direction of those steps doesn’t matter?”
“It doesn’t.”
“...So that’s why you didn’t get drunk to the point of forgetting your worries like the others. Because no matter whether the boat comes or not, you’ll keep walking.”
Taesu smiled and patted Cha Un-hong on the head. She flinched, but then let him do it.
“Exactly. So what if I stumble? So what if I get lost? You’ll come find me anyway, won’t you?”
* * *
The sun turned red.
By then, everyone had already scattered, staggering off to find a place to sleep like college students after a field trip party. Nobody cared about this corner anymore.
Taesu’s expression was calm. I’d even say it was bright.
The serious things he said were serious, that was all.
Park Taesu had once been a serial killer in Korea and still hadn’t gone around wearing some dark, brooding face. There’s no need to become emaciated or abandon humanity just to hold to a steel will.
So Cha Un-hong could ask, half in jest, “What were you saying to that widow for so long earlier, and why did you even give her the axe? It’s unseemly for a young man to consort with a married woman.”
Taesu didn’t get angry or flustered.
“There was nothing like that. We just talked about what she’d do next.”
“What she’d do next? She’s a street trader, isn’t she? Wouldn’t she have to set off wandering again anyway?”
“She said she wants to stop being a traveling peddler now.”
That had been what they talked about when he tested her lightly while giving her the axe.
There aren’t many Bobusang who actually want to do that work. As for Yi Seong-nyeo, if her husband had still been alive, she wouldn’t have needed to.
Or if she had found herself a new, respectable husband, the same would apply.
The thought made Cha Un-hong’s eyes turn sharp.
“Don’t tell me you’re thinking of taking her in as your second wife...”
“...No. She said she wants to leave her hometown and live elsewhere with the money she got this time.”
As a reward for the pacification of Gyeongryangjang, Taesu had given Yi Seong-nyeo a share of the proceeds.
And Yi Seong-nyeo clearly had no desire to return to a marriage that would only strip her of all that money. Even if she went back to her parents’ house, she’d soon be forcibly sent back to her husband’s home, so the problem remained the same.
After laying enough groundwork, Taesu finally told the truth.
“When the boat comes this time, I’m thinking of putting her on it and sending her to Ganghwa. She can remarry there, or if that doesn’t work out, she could work at the Ganghwa office.”
The mountain spirit may have wanted to turn her into a shaman, but the mountain spirit’s wishes were no concern of Taesu’s. Unless Yi Seong-nyeo wanted that, of course.
Cha Un-hong drained half of the clear liquor she had only been holding and said, “Oh dear. That’s terrifying.”
“What is?”
“The same goes for Yu-jak’s sister, and now for that widow too. You’re taking in women with such chivalry wherever you go that I can’t imagine how things will end for you. Planning to use that talent to conquer the whole country?”
Taesu merely smiled instead of saying that even Im In-son, lying drunk out there in the distance, would he be a cross-dressing woman too?
“Could there possibly be another person like you anywhere in Joseon?”
That was true enough. A female tycoon who wasn’t a loan shark was rare.
But it didn’t seem to be that aspect Taesu was talking about.
He confirmed Cha Un-hong’s last doubt.
“There isn’t anyone else like you for me, either. Remember what you said to me first?”
“You mean the talk about the West?”
“No. Before that. The very first thing.”
Cha Un-hong remembered.
Let’s be travel companions.
If there was a travel companion walking beside you, then of course you couldn’t be the only one deciding the road. That would just be forcing your path onto someone else.
But as the mountain spirit had said in Cha Un-hong’s house, human beings can’t live alone.
There was no need to erase either half this time, either.
Taesu had overcome the contradiction the same way he had before: by “expanding” himself.
What Taesu called “myself” already included Cha Un-hong.
From the moment Cha Un-hong first included Taesu in herself by asking him to be her travel companion.
“From then until now, and from now on, we’re travel companions who burden each other, lose our tempers, and trip each other up. Just like those comrades in a robbery gang, anyone else who wants to walk with us will need both our permission.”
Cha Un-hong nodded slowly.
Then she held out the half cup of leftover clear liquor.
“It feels devious to drink a toast only after seeing the boat arrive. Didn’t the followers of the Western teachings say that blessed are those who believe without seeing? I trust you more than anyone, so I’ll be the first to raise a cup.”
Taesu reached out as well. The mood was exactly right for a drink.
But Cha Un-hong snatched it back and downed it herself.
Taesu laughed in disbelief.
“You’ve already had quite a bit, haven’t you? Couldn’t you at least share a little—”
Cha Un-hong shared the liquor.
* * *
Despite the grip strength that had crushed the wrists of countless deadbeat debtors, Taesu couldn’t shake off the slender arm wrapped around his neck.
Clear liquor flowed from Cha Un-hong’s mouth into Taesu’s.
Taesu hadn’t been drinking much lately, still carrying the memory of the Joseon hard liquor he’d tasted back at the Imjin River.
But now he revised that opinion.
It was sweeter than imported French wine, and stronger than the modern whiskey sample in his backpack.
The lukewarm taste of the clear liquor spread through his whole body except for his tongue. His tongue could feel nothing but the strangely cool touch of Cha Un-hong’s lips.
His Adam’s apple moved.
After a moment, their lips parted.
The breath that had been held in between them spilled out. It was the kind of heat that made it seem like summer itself might be exhaled as white mist.
Once some distance opened up between them, Taesu could focus his eyes again. Cha Un-hong looked dazed, almost tearful.
He stared at that face for a few seconds.
Then he wiped at the reddened corners of her eyes with his thumb.
“Sorry.”
To avoid misunderstanding that, you’d have to be in their position.
Taesu sat there with his body tilted back at an angle. Cha Un-hong had both hands pressed to Taesu’s chest and was bowing her head.
“Don’t make me go this far.”
“Got it.”
Taesu straightened up. The two of them now sat facing each other, arms around one another.
It was summer, and because she was dressed as a man, her clothes were simple. Taesu could feel the softness of her curves plainly through them.
Cha Un-hong had met Taesu “two years ago.” By now, Taesu thought, it would be hard for her to keep pretending she was still a boy.
With his left hand, Taesu pulled off the hoodie she had been wearing all this time.
Laying it beneath them, Taesu propped Cha Un-hong up with his right hand and leaned forward.
Cha Un-hong lay back and looked up at him. Her lips trembled.
In a voice unlike her usual one, she asked, “Hee, here...?”
“Yeah. Here.”
Taesu’s hand slowly slipped beneath her jeogori.
Each time his fingers brushed bare skin, Cha Un-hong gave a little jolt, then softly pursed her lips.
“Ah...”
Though the touch of his hand still lingered across her body, Taesu was now holding her clothes.
The Bobusang custom of hwan-ui was now complete.
Cha Un-hong, looking at Taesu through eyes bright with moisture, raised a hand as well.
The hand that had been caressing Taesu’s neck soon moved down to the ties of his clothes. Cha Un-hong was very familiar with how to untie a man’s garments.
It was now low tide off the coast of Hongju. Even the sea water, as vast as the open ocean, seemed to withdraw in reassurance for the two of them.
Of course, neither of them could see any of that.
Even if the boat had arrived just then, they probably wouldn’t have noticed.
The Bobusang have no home.
They live on the road and die on the road.
That night, the two of them were faithful Bobusang.