Sashimi and Wasabi (2)
First to come ashore were the men of Kim Sangro’s Second Fleet, part of Park Axe’s merchant convoy.
Taesu was still aboard the ship, hashing out the cargo situation with Cha Un-hong.
More precisely, since they were in Tongyeong, he was feeding her a dish he’d cobbled together from rice, dried seaweed, cubed radish kimchi, and squid.
It was the birth of Tongyeong’s Chungmu-gimbap, a hundred years ahead of its time. Future knowledge was being squandered at a reckless pace.
But knowledge was only as useful as the person wielding it, and wise Cha Un-hong immediately saw the value in it.
“Hmm. If that’s the case, then whether you’re on a ship or on land, it’s something you can eat easily while traveling and still keep your strength up. And it keeps your hands busy, so you never get tired of it.”
Taesu watched her turn into a hamster again, nibbling away at the food, and was just about to smile when he heard someone calling his name. He turned his head.
And what met his eyes was the complete opposite in every aesthetic sense.
It was Kim Sangro, returned with a black bruise blooming over one eye.
Cha Un-hong, still holding a bite of Chungmu-gimbap, widened her eyes.
Through the half-sobbed explanation Kim Sangro gave him, Taesu reduced the whole story to one sentence.
“They told you not to unload the cargo?”
“Yes. I laughed in their faces, but those savage shore thugs turned me into this.”
Stripping away the long-winded explanation, it was nothing more than the usual local strongman bullying.
Except this wasn’t some neighborhood alleyway turf war.
As soon as they saw an unfamiliar ship from out of town drifting in, the gang of sajuin sprang into action.
As the Mountain Spirit had once explained in detail, the port-side shipping bosses were masters of all manner of dirty tricks.
[At every place where a vessel can moor, there are always powerful men who set up shop. When a merchant ship arrives and drops anchor, they take charge of the cargo and won’t even let it be moved at will.]
That was exactly how it worked.
When people said the sajuin ruled a port, they meant they ruled it from beginning to end.
They controlled everything from the moment goods were unloaded onto the pier. In fact, it was only natural that Joseon had privatized the terminals and customs office, wasn’t it?
Without their permission, you couldn’t sell the goods anywhere, much less move them or bargain over them.
In other words, the inland distribution price of anything entering Tongyeong was set entirely at the whim of these sajuin.
Kim Sangro had even tried his ultimate move, his “turn into a Chinese man” act, but apparently it had done him no good.
So in front of Taesu, he switched to “turn into a Japanese man.” He knelt with practiced ease.
“Please, Dobansu, avenge this humiliation for me!”
It was a bit much, considering he’d only gotten hit once, but Taesu didn’t point that out.
Just as he hadn’t pointed it out when his own employees came back bruised from a beating in the early days of Taesu Finance.
If your own boy got beaten up and you started nitpicking the rights and wrongs of it, maybe you’d make a fair judge—but you sure as hell wouldn’t be fit to lead an organization.
Taesu, whom even Kim Sangro with all his nationality-shifting tricks couldn’t imitate, performed a full-scale transform into a Korean man.
“Where are those bastards?”
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
Contact with the sajuin who lined the rivers and coasts was nothing new to Taesu, either.
He thought back on how he had “brought the Ganghwado bosses into line” in the first place.
Cha Un-hong had explained the method to him.
“On Ganghwado, you drove off the French ship and showed your might. Then the state assigned you defense duties and you displayed your authority. It all came down to the same thing: wei, that single character.”
Of course, what Cha Un-hong meant by wei was public authority—solemn, official dignity.
But here there were aristocrats like Yi Ha-eung, and Taesu’s wealth and fleet were no longer comparable to what they had once been.
If he didn’t reveal the fear and ignorance that made others look down on him, and instead held firm while yielding a few points here and there to the sajuin, then negotiation and expansion would be easy enough.
Taesu, however, had understood that wei as threat. Well, it was the same character.
“All right.”
“You really understand? I meant I was the one going out.”
“You’ve seen it up to now, haven’t you? I can do business too.”
Cha Un-hong mentally replayed Taesu’s conduct, trying to figure out what exactly she had witnessed.
For a moment, she nearly wondered whether he had been traveling with another woman.
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
In the coastal ports of Gyeongsang Province, peak season was said to be the time when “ten thousand households suddenly appear and a thousand ships set sail.”
That also meant most of the sajuin and their agents came from outside.
One of them was Bak Seol-chae of Cheongju Han’s house, a local official and warehouse manager family that had controlled the grain depots in the Chilgok inland region for generations.
Taesu, hearing the name, eyed him closely for a moment in case he, too, was a crossdressing woman.
But the voice was far too real for that. Bak Seol-chae spat out a wad of phlegm and said, “If some drifter doesn’t know the lay of the land and starts unloading his cargo however he pleases, that won’t do. Since when have peddlers ever sailed ships and played merchant on deck? Traders all have their own share of the pie, and if you muddle that up like a slippery loach, it won’t do.”
From the perspective of Joseon’s merchant order, that wasn’t exactly wrong.
The port sajuin were, in a sense, wholesale merchants.
And now this bobusang—this local retail trader Taesu—was suddenly trying to move into wholesale as well, so they couldn’t just sit back and let it happen.
Still, that didn’t mean they wanted to drive him out for good.
The port sajuin naturally had cooperative ties with the bobusang, too.
After all, retailers were customers to wholesalers. The peddlers who carried salt—the specialty of Gyeongsang—were especially active.
If they lacked the force to threaten a ship’s crew, the sajuin would sometimes cooperate with the bobusang to get manpower and move goods at a discount.
But Bak Seol-chae had decided this wasn’t the time to cooperate with the bobusang.
The big, broad-shouldered drifter in front of him had only brought along one half-Ryukyuan he’d just beaten down.
By contrast, there were already more than a dozen men at Bak Seol-chae’s side.
And not just any little gaggle that had gathered to fill their stomachs, either.
These were the elite men proud of by Cheongju Han, the rulers of the Nakdong River.
There was no reason to indulge him at all.
Bak Seol-chae planned to bully this half-mad-looking peddler a little, then buy him out at the price he himself wanted, pretending to be magnanimous about it.
The other sajuin around him had already ceded the role of schooling the arrogant newcomer—and a little profit besides—to Bak Seol-chae and were watching the show.
Bak Seol-chae was riding high now.
“What, you think if we just sling salt from Myeongjido on our backs and go around selling it, you peddlers will just sit there and do nothing?”
“You can do that.”
Bak Seol-chae’s eyes flew wide open.
“What?”
“I said you can carry salt on your backs and go sell it. Who’s stopping you?”
Bak Seol-chae’s system glitched for a moment at the outright denial of the peddlers’ very identity.
“H-hey. You peddlers have been beating up market hawkers for not carrying merchant licenses for hundreds of years—”
“Not anymore. Not if you become our allies too. I’m the Dobansu of Balgasan.”
Several sharp-eared bystanders cried out in shock.
“The Dobansu of Balgasan!”
“It’s Park Axe!”
“T-that Park Axe who split a Western ship in two with a single swing of his axe?”
Bak Seol-chae almost got scared for a second.
But if he backed down now, he’d have no face left to show when he returned to Chilgok.
So he pretended this was the first time he’d ever heard of Park Axe.
“I don’t know whether you’re an axe or a hoe, but are you telling us to go become street hawkers now?”
“If you don’t want to, then don’t. Just don’t get in my way.”
Taesu said that and turned around.
Then he called to Kim Sangro.
“Looks like the talk’s settled. Unload the cargo.”
He sounded very satisfied with his own bargaining skills, which he had promised Cha Un-hong were top-notch.
And naturally, Bak Seol-chae could not stand that attitude.
“You son of a bitch, who do you think you’re looking at, acting like people are easy marks?”
The men of the Han clan around Bak Seol-chae leaped into the air as if flung by their leader’s cry.
Though they were officials in charge of grain depots, and though they were also powerful sajuin on the Nakdong River, the Cheongju Han family of Chilgok also had another fascinating branch of talent.
Mask dancing and street performance.
It’s even said that the Ogwangdae performances seen in almost every city along the southern Gyeongsang coast spread from inland to the sea through this family.
Acrobats who could bound several gyeol through the air on nothing but a single rope came hurtling toward Taesu.
Acrobatics and dance are disciplines that require considerable raw strength.
Even without quoting some fighter’s claim that “you should never fight a ballet dancer,” it wasn’t hard to imagine how that bodily control, agility, leg strength, and flexibility could be applied in combat.
The leading performer sprang upward.
Even with a running start, he leaped almost as high as a man’s full height. Taesu couldn’t help regretting that there was no Olympics in this era.
He lowered his posture.
But he didn’t raise his guard.
Modern martial arts rarely deal with techniques for defending against a strike from above.
That was because there was, quite simply, no good answer to an attack from above. More precisely, just like a rear choke, there was no real way to counterattack from it.
So Taesu didn’t use martial arts.
Instead, he snatched the first acrobat by the ankle as he came down like a stabbing spear aimed at him.
You’d need reflexes sharp enough to dodge a master’s Japanese sword, and the raw strength to pick up and throw a rampaging donkey, for that to be possible.
“Aaaagh!”
His grip felt as if it might crush the ankle outright. The performer screamed as though a torture vise had been cranked shut on him.
The scream ended when Taesu hurled him into the ground.
“Gah!”
Dust exploded upward, and the other acrobats rushing in came to a dead stop.
“I-Is that even a human being?”
“All together! Rush him!”
The performers attacked while showing off their own specialties.
One came in with a string of tumbling flips to blur Taesu’s sight, another shot in low for a tackle, and another leaped slightly higher than the first one had. It was a full-spectrum assault.
So Taesu responded in full spectrum as well.
He still hadn’t let go of the first man’s ankle.
He swung the man around as though he were a person-sized hammer.
In other words, it was a hammer weighing several dozen kilos.
Bang! Smack! The speed at which a human being could be flung around felt almost absurdly unfair.
The human hammer, already unconscious, actually wore a strangely peaceful expression.
But the comrades who couldn’t stay calm took broken noses and shattered arms as they were smashed aside.
Bak Seol-chae’s face turned pale.
“Th-this…”
As the leader, his martial skill was by no means low.
But against this power, where numbers meant nothing, he wasn’t confident.
Still, he couldn’t retreat.
Not if he didn’t want to end up smashed and buried like a duckling whose head had been cracked open in the Nakdong River.
After all, fighting ship crews was part of everyday life.
He had even prepared a protocol for what to do if things went wrong and he lost. He never thought he’d actually have to use it, but still.
Bak Seol-chae quickly drew a mask from his sleeve.
It was the Malttugi mask used in the famous Ogwangdae performances stretching from the upper Nakdong River to the sea.
He pulled it over his face.
Of course, putting on the mask didn’t turn him into some yellow-suited green-faced lunatic like Jim Carrey. This was Joseon, after all.
It was a signal.
The meaning of Malttugi—deception, scheming, mockery—passed to the underlings who had not yet been hit by the human hammer.
They were smart enough not to rush Taesu first and had hung back, so they were smart enough to break off immediately.
Now they had to hold Taesu’s attention so he wouldn’t notice.
With the impressively distinctive Malttugi mask on, Bak Seol-chae struck a pose suited to drawing attention.
Taesu’s eyes twitched.
He’d seen that stance before.
And Bak Seol-chae himself supplied the answer.
“Don’t take us for peasants. I, too, have once matched wits in footwork against An Pilju of Jinju and failed to declare a victor.”
“An Pilju?”
Taesu asked, looking surprised.
Misreading the expression, Bak Seol-chae puffed up with satisfaction.
“Well, I suppose these days he’s said to have swept up all the pretty boys of Yeongnam and gone to Seoul to run wild there. Even you, from Ganghwado, must have heard of him. Now, take this!”
It was too far for bare-handed techniques to be useful.
But Bak Seol-chae was a pro.
Pretending to use footwork, he displayed a specialty of the namsadang troupe.
He whipped out a cherrywood stick that had somehow been strapped to his back, then crossed it once between his legs and hurled it forward.
It was a variation of a burna trick called dari-sawi.
The stick vanished behind the flutter of clothing and legs, then reappeared in a flash, throwing off the target’s timing.
While the opponent was busy dodging or batting the stick away, that was when Bak Seol-chae struck.
“Haah!”
His knife-hand slammed into Taesu’s guard, where there was no opening to be had.
The damage wasn’t much.
But that wasn’t the end of the attack.
And then, just as a kick seemed to be aiming for Taesu’s unprotected abdomen, that too turned out to be a feint, a kicking strike snapping upward toward his face.
It was a soft, continuous attack not unlike the quick fluttering kicks of modern taekkyeon.
If An Pilju’s bigak-sul was hard and forceful, this one was soft.
Strikes that came half a beat off from what he expected, flowing smoothly through a graceful pum-step, left Taesu with no immediate answer.
If he pushed in, he’d be vulnerable to a counterattack. As always, the most dangerous martial art was an unfamiliar one.
Even if he got countered, Bak Seol-chae wouldn’t be able to drop Taesu in a single blow. The difference in body mass was too great.
But Bak Seol-chae knew that as well, so he aimed only for vital points like the eyes and groin.
Backing away with a back step, Taesu quickly made his decision.
He stopped where he was and hardened his body.
Bang!
Bak Seol-chae, who had thrown the kick, was stunned.
Taesu had simply taken it and held his ground.
The sheer difference in weight, combined with his drastically strengthened trapezius and neck muscles, made that gamble possible.
A balddaegari kick is less like a karate or taekwondo roundhouse, and more like a full-foot slap.
It has its strengths, but also its weaknesses.
In this case, the retreat had been delayed by a fraction of a second.
And that was what decided Bak Seol-chae’s fate.
“Got you.”
Bak Seol-chae had never seen such a terrifying smile in his life.
Taesu seized the leg in much the same way he had with An Pilju, but Bak Seol-chae didn’t collapse by having his supporting foot hooked out from under him the way An Pilju had.
“Kuh!”
Bak Seol-chae sharply bent the supporting leg and dropped his center of gravity with a tremendous display of flexibility.
And the fact that he could respond that way meant he didn’t have a hidden knife.
If he had, he would have drawn it from the start instead of trying bare-handed combat.
So Taesu went for a joint lock without any hesitation.
His body rotated like an explosion, dragging Bak Seol-chae in like a snake coiling around its prey.
Author’s Note
1. The port bosses’ business methods were based on the descriptions in Mokminsimseo.
2. Cheongju Han is also the family of Han Seong-jun, a dancer who founded and worked at the Joseon Dance Research Institute during the Japanese colonial period. His granddaughter Han Young-suk was in charge of the dance segment at the Seoul Olympics closing ceremony.
However, it is unclear whether this is the direct lineage of the grain-depot family here. In Han Seong-jun’s case, it appears he lived in Chungcheong Province when he was young.
Bak Seol-chae is a fictional character modeled on Han Seong-jun’s maternal grandfather, Baek Un-chae, who taught him dance. The real Baek Un-chae was not even from Gyeongsang Province.
3. There are theories that the expression “like a duckling stranded by the Nakdong River” originated during the Korean War, and others that it existed long before that.