Before This Cup Grows Cold, Part 2
The first person to open his eyes wide was Master Cho-ui.
“Have you lost your mind? There’s no end to what a peddler will say!”
[And how much higher is a Buddhist monk than a peddler, exactly?]
The Mountain Spirit’s resentful sneer did not come from Taesu’s mouth.
What came out instead was even harsher.
“You think the sight of the common folk panicking because they don’t understand the West is pathetic? How very noble of you. So when the Westerners came, did you step out and calm the people with all that great learning of yours? Or did you fight them?”
Kim Jeong-hui, who ought to have answered, looked as though the crab he had eaten earlier had only now begun to trigger some hideous shock in his body.
Master Cho-ui spoke for his friend in a sharp, ringing voice.
“Then what, you expect an old man to stand before Western guns and swing an axe like you? Have you always been this ignorant of order and principle?”
This time, Taesu had truly sided with the Mountain Spirit. The Taesu who had just moments ago begged to have the spirit torn from him was gone without a trace.
“Don’t play dumb. You’ve probably heard enough through this fellow here, so let me put it plainly: I don’t object to trade with the West. I don’t object to fighting them either.”
Grandee Yi Ha-eung, who had effectively become “this fellow here,” seemed to have lost even the energy to be angry. Compared with the political monster he would become in the future, he still lacked a bit of polish.
“But what have you actually done? You wish your lord were still alive so he could execute every sedo family for you, don’t you? You wish someone who understands the West would obey your commands, don’t you? Why don’t you go pray to a ghost while you’re at it!”
Master Cho-ui, feeling his earlier suspicions confirmed, shot back.
“And what do you know? By the sedo families’ tyranny, any scholar with conviction was swept from court like dust before a broom. More than one man lost his life for refusing to bend his will! Even Chusa here nearly met that fate himself! Is resolve yours alone to claim?”
“Fine. Your concern for the country, for the West, for the people—none of that is empty talk. I know that. But why do you assume you must seize the court to do any of it? Why does everything stop the moment you’re driven out of court?”
“What did you say?”
“I’ll tell you why. Because that’s the only way you can stand above others. Your work only means something if you do it as part of the court itself.”
Master Cho-ui fell silent.
Kim Jeong-hui, panting, turned to look at his friend.
Strangely enough, even Master Cho-ui wore a trace of interest.
When he spoke to Taesu again, it sounded less like a rebuke than a debate.
“Are you saying Grand Prince Heungseon and Chusa are merely hungry for troops and power? Those two men? With a monk of this very sort for company? We seek only the proper means to govern a people fallen into misery.”
“Don’t say ‘govern.’ You don’t even believe in it yourselves. That little play-acting you do among yourselves can only work for a shabby official post. Nothing more. Only that.
We peddlers may fight over a stall, but once we win one, we don’t delude ourselves into thinking we can do whatever we want to the customers. You, on the other hand, believe that if you carve up offices and hand them around, every problem in the world will somehow be solved. That’s why you cling to it.”
Master Cho-ui considered that in silence.
By contrast, Kim Jeong-hui and Yi Ha-eung, who had only just recovered, were once again shaken.
Not because they thought Taesu’s logic was right.
They could have answered every rough, clumsy thing he said. If they were going to be defeated by some ignorant modern nobody, then everyone here ought to swallow every book they had ever read and die on the spot.
And yet, to their surprise, Taesu had struck directly at the heart of the current situation in Joseon without even realizing it himself.
* * *
This was a different matter from the familiar cliché of “the enemy is at the gate, and yet they obsess over infighting.”
France alone showed that by the nineteenth century, a government tearing itself apart over power struggles no longer automatically meant the country would perish. By then, such a notion was primitive.
Once civilization had developed this far, it simply should not work that way. If the shellfish around an island went extinct because of climate change and the island civilization collapsed because it had no currency, that would be no different.
China had declared, “Only the land inside the Great Wall counts as the human realm,” and then agreed that whoever won within it would be the master of humankind. Qin Shi Huang was great enough to make that possible.
Joseon had declared, “Let us assume this refined central bureaucracy governs Joseon,” and then agreed that the distribution of offices and the management of factions would be enough to control the country. Jeong Do-jeon was great enough to make that possible.
But people agreeing on something does not make the earth flat. Just as there had been a vast world beyond the Great Wall, the Joseon government did not truly control Joseon either.
Taesu had felt as much more than once already.
In every arena—currency, weapons, the maritime trade, the Song merchants, foreign trade—the court was merely one player, never the game master. It lacked the ability, and it lacked the right.
And yet because people agreed to pretend otherwise, the country’s most valuable resource—the scholarly elite—had all attached themselves to nothing but the “court guild.” Material resources, too, were siphoned toward it through plunder.
The nation’s agenda, in turn, was narrowed to nothing but the distribution of power within the court.
Not because of malice, and not because of greed. It was because everyone believed that if they managed that one thing well, the state would run itself.
So if that childish game broke apart over something “small” like a power struggle, then of course the country would stop functioning.
Just like a modern person who had crammed every function of life into a smartphone and then found themselves helpless the moment the phone was gone.
* * *
And Taesu was telling them that he would never be their smartphone’s automatic Bluetooth connection.
“Beg the king for an office and fight Kim Jwa-geun that way, if you want. File a memorial, or beat him with a club—do whatever you like. That’s your business. But don’t talk as if it’s only natural that a peddler like me should walk the road for your sake. You’re not my traveling companions.”
Cha Un-hong understood Taesu completely in that instant.
This was the true point he had wanted to make.
Yi Ha-eung and his merry little circle had assumed that if they took the court for themselves—or even just offered a vision in which they might—Park Axe would naturally follow along.
It was hard to blame them. The bobusang really had done that. They were men who had trusted even King Gojong and followed him.
Kim Jeong-hui had also shown some measure of sincerity by presenting the kind of broad, Western-flavored, tolerant values he thought “Park Axe” would like.
But Park Axe, who now represented the bobusang, could not swallow the insult.
“However noble your intentions may be, if I join hands with you, then it means I’m obviously beneath you while you, who have done nothing, sit above me. There’s no need to dress that up in pretty words. Hey, Ha-eung.”
Summoned so suddenly, Ha-eung looked as though he had fallen into a mental quarantine.
With his mind pushed beyond its limit, he could move nothing but his eyes. So this was what people meant by the shock of opening the country, or whatever it was supposed to be.
And Taesu was like a shell fired from the Unyo.
“What did I say during the last Dobansu election? I said I’d let you live this once.”
But this was the second time. The second time he had treated Taesu like some precious spare part instead of speaking plainly and asking for understanding, the way Cha Un-hong had at the Imjin River.
And Taesu still had his axe.
Ha-eung deeply regretted having sent Ha Jeong-il on an errand. Even if he had stayed, all it would have done was add another corpse.
Taesu rose and drew out his axe.
Master Cho-ui had the bizarre impression that the blade was crying out for blood. It was not entirely an illusion.
Ha-eung was young enough to be forgiven for his fear, but Master Cho-ui and Kim Jeong-hui were honestly far too old to run away quickly even if they wanted to.
Kim Jeong-hui managed to speak at last.
“Y-you vile brute. Do you think you’ll get away with this?”
Kim Jeong-hui’s ignorance was unavoidable.
How was he supposed to know that the man before him was someone who had, without hesitation, committed a string of murders in a police state nothing like Joseon?
More importantly, Taesu had now been in Joseon long enough that such threats no longer cowed him.
He had the experience of travel behind him, and he had spent enough time talking with Cha Un-hong and the others.
As the Mountain Spirit had vouched during the Son Yu-jak incident, Taesu was the sort who learned the wrong things very quickly—and before long, he had become a Joseon man through and through.
“A banished criminal, a monk, and a fallen royal who only lurks around the edges of commoner life. I’m not exactly scared of the aftermath.”
That was why no one had been able to deal with Taesu properly until now.
However much he acted like it, the people here were not stronger than him in the social sense.
They were far more vulnerable than he was when it came to being hated by the powerful. In Kim Jeong-hui’s case especially, the killer would probably receive a pardon from Kim Jwa-geun himself, the most powerful man in the country.
And what then—should they report it to another power holder, the reigning king Yi Hwan, who also happened to dislike Kim Jwa-geun?
But to deal with Park Axe’s faction now would require the national army.
And whether the national army could even win was beside the point, because then there would be no army left to purge the gajok faction.
The king would sooner abandon Kim Jeong-hui’s little Jeju green-tea tea ceremony club than watch Kim Jwa-geun die laughing at a case of “using one foreign enemy to kill another.” In the first place, just like Yi Ha-eung, even the Heungseon faction of Crown Prince Hyomyeong was closer to being a “royalist faction” than “supporters of King Yi Hwan.”
Perhaps even Gojong, born in 1851, would end up never rolling around in this world at all, not even as a scrap of dung, and the Chusa-style calligraphy on that fan he had just received might become the last relic he ever left behind.
* * *
Of course, not everyone in the room had lost their reason completely.
No one saw Cha Un-hong rise slowly to her feet.
But everyone saw her lay a hand on Taesu’s axe, because every eye in the room had been fixed there all along.
“Please, calm yourselves.”
Cha Un-hong swept her gaze over the room with eyes that were different from before.
“Up until now, I too was only thinking of finding a line to connect us with everyone here. I believed that would be good for the road our Dobansu spoke of earlier.”
Cha Un-hong was not paying much attention to her voice at the moment either. Still, no one could spare a thought for so minor a detail.
“But now I understand. Why should it be that way? As our deputy leader, Im In-son also told Your Excellency earlier during the Dobansu election, you are not exactly the sort of people who have looked after us in ordinary times and helped us when things grew difficult.”
Kim Jeong-hui was preparing to solemnly expound the Confucian order of noble and commoner, the way a great man instructs the lowly.
In truth, Chusa Kim Jeong-hui was a scholar famous for being extremely strict about questions of ethics and right and wrong.
That is, if his opponent was not holding an axe.
So Cha Un-hong was able to continue to the end.
“We will build our own enterprise with our own strength, and to the comrades who have shared hardship and weal and woe with us, we will gladly divide the profits. If the business we create truly appeals to you, then you, all these learned masters and noblemen here, can become our comrades. Don’t tell us to become your servants.”
* * *
Much later, Master Cho-ui stood in the room with no Taesu and no Cha Un-hong, his arms folded.
“Now I understand how the ministers felt when they received the memorials the old Nam-myeong submitted while wearing an axe at his side.”
“Cho-ui, is that what you have to say right now? At my age, this is the first disgrace of its kind! Heungseon-gun. What on earth have you been going around doing?”
“I have no face left to show.”
There was no face left, and nothing they could do about it either.
The three men felt the helplessness of their own powerlessness, unable to change even a single commoner—let alone transform the country.
But Master Cho-ui seemed to think a little differently.
“Still, in the end, he did apologize before leaving, did he not?”
Taesu could admit that some of his anger had been colored by his own perspective.
Kim Jeong-hui and his friends were also victims of the “people who say they’ll permit it” that Taesu had set out to bring down. Besides, though it was incidental, there had also been a commercial purpose between them.
So Taesu had apologized for his axe-wielding tantrum, though not for his abuse, and left behind a gift.
Master Cho-ui stared at that gift.
It was a gleaming metal water bottle, and inside it was the tea Master Cho-ui had brought with him earlier.
“He does not seem to be siding with the sedo families, nor does he appear to think very differently from us about the West.”
“Good heavens! Because you’ve taken up the Buddha’s path, does that mean you can speak so casually now?”
“If Chusa were to settle himself and think calmly, he would understand as well. Listen closely to what he said earlier—his words did not differ from ours in purpose. He was simply furious.”
Kim Jeong-hui was speechless. If a commoner could insult the court and humiliate the nobility just because he felt like it, then what value did this country have left at all?
Just as he was about to say as much, Kim Jeong-hui suddenly stopped.
That was precisely why Taesu had been angry.
It was not the same as anger over the class system. Even if another commoner had done the same thing, Taesu would have been furious in exactly the same way. In fact, he had already been furious with Cho-ui as well.
If the Mountain Spirit had known the story of Taesu’s homeland, he might have explained it like this:
Kim Jeong-hui’s question was no different from asking Taesu, “If you got swindled in a lease fraud and then killed not only the con artist but every judge and prosecutor in sight, what do you think would happen to the country?”
Taesu’s answer, whether in Joseon or in Korea, would have been the same.
I don’t care what happens to a country like that.
He did not know what was right.
But he could tell that they, too, felt the same thing toward Kim Jwa-geun that Taesu did.
Master Cho-ui spoke.
“He told us to return before the tea inside that metal bottle grew cold. This is not the Sasu Pass, so he won’t be coming back with Hua Xiong’s head in his hand. He was probably saying we should think about whether we would become comrades or not by then. It must be just about cold by now.”
The master picked up the metal bottle.
He awkwardly twisted open the screw-like lid, a kind unfamiliar to Joseon people, and brought his nose close to it. Then his brows twitched.
It isn’t cold?
That could not be.
As the foremost master of tea in Joseon, Master Cho-ui knew exactly how long tea should sit before it turned astringent and went cold.
And yet the tea had not grown cold.
Cho-ui, a man even called the Sage of Tea, felt shaken at the arrival of a new horizon in tea in his later years.
Perhaps one might even call it enlightenment.
Author’s Note
1. Geobdong-i is King Gojong’s childhood name.