The Country of Won Gyun (2)
Escorted by Ha Jeong-il, Yi Ha-eung did not raise his voice or shout anything as he emerged.
The ones who shouted were a few of the peddlers.
“It’s the secret royal inspector!”
“Please, sir inspector, save us!”
Hong Hui-rok’s stance visibly weakened. He turned around in a hurry.
“An inspector?”
Even Bak Seol-chae, tied up as he was, was baffled by this.
Last night, during the civilian complaint session Yi Ha-eung had held after gathering everyone together, he had not once said he was a secret royal inspector.
Of course not. He wasn’t an inspector.
But if you retraced the conversation, he had said quite a few other things.
“You must have many grievances. If I get the chance, I’ll present your petition to the court.”
“On the way here, I looked around and saw all kinds of common folk like you.”
“Well now, I’m poor myself, so I had to rely a little on Park Axe’s help aboard his boat. After all, I couldn’t exactly borrow a horse from a post station and gallop over the water.”
If you still couldn’t tell after hearing that, you had no business being a peddler in this commercial city of Tongyeong. No, before that, you had no business being a Joseon man at all.
Besides, even at this very moment, Yi Ha-eung was effectively declaring himself a secret royal inspector.
He addressed the so-called “good commoners” crying out for the inspector.
“What nonsense is this? I am absolutely not some kind of inspector. I am merely a scholar who could not stand by and watch the people be oppressed, so I stepped forward!”
That speech alone was enough.
He was one hundred percent a secret royal inspector.
That was what everyone there thought. Even Bak Seol-chae was indignant that Park Dokkaebi had tricked him.
Hong Hui-rok studied Yi Ha-eung closely.
As commander of Tongyeong, he was not so lowly that he knew every high official—but that was precisely the problem. He did not know Yi Ha-eung’s face.
But secret inspectors are usually selected from the young rising officials below the threshold, people who aren’t widely known. Just because I don’t recognize him doesn’t mean he’s fake!
While the cautious commander hesitated, Yi Ha-eung kept playing the part of a scholar with nothing but righteous spirit.
And since he truly did have nothing, the performance was devastatingly convincing.
“I have already heard everything. You, Village Commissioner Tak Mun-jin of Namsan, went around waving clubs and threatening soldiers, while not only fabricating false debts to harass the local people, but also brazenly cutting down and selling the nation’s pines when you were supposed to be the one guarding the ban!”
Tak Mun-jin quickly hid the club behind his back.
Bak Seol-chae, the man known as the Unchained One because no rope could hold him, now displayed his skill once again and wriggled free.
“And as for the private fish weirs installed to evade the salt and fish tax—something the state strictly forbids—how dare a village commissioner set them up himself and without restraint? The very man who ought to crack down on such things is breaking the law instead! That is a grave offense even among those who violate royal decrees.”
The good peddlers all cried out.
“What a filthy scoundrel!”
“Look at that righteous punishment from the secret inspector!”
They acted as though they themselves had never bribed Tongyeong to install private fish traps. Well, that was the charm of a people’s trial, after all.
Tak Mun-jin, too, did not dare make excuses and only backed away, trembling.
Yi Ha-eung’s arrow-straight finger then pointed to the next man.
“Village Commissioner Yeom Hui-am of Hansan! You collected money under the pretense of recruiting soldiers as you pleased, then extorted costs from the commoners by claiming they had to replant the trees you’d cut down and sold.”
“Livestock Overseer No Gyeong-ha of Jinju! You treated the ranch lands as though they were your own and split up grazing fees to milk them from the herders. Then, when it came time to pay taxes to the state, you calculated the rice price as if it were gold and seized the difference, and on top of that, when it came to the low-ranking clerks, you extorted fines from them too, claiming they’d broken the law, didn’t you?”
“Deputy Commander Hyeon Seok of Gadeok! You took four thousand five hundred nyang for repairs to the office building and then swallowed two thousand of it whole before sending it home? Does the government station belong to your ancestors or something? And even the rest you secretly used for usury and lending at interest, so of course the government station still stands in ruins—I saw it myself!”
It was a full-scale exhibition of every military scandal that could possibly emerge from Joseon, the country of Won Gyun.
The good commoners raged in righteous fury.
No one there remembered that every one of the crimes Yi Ha-eung was rattling off had been told to him by them the previous night.
Of course this was the miraculous investigative power of a secret royal inspector. It was all in the old folktales.
Everyone was waiting for the inspector’s signature line: “Seize those bastards and strip them of office!”
But Commander Hong Hui-rok was not such an easy mark.
At this point, he sensed something was off.
Unlike the expectations of the peddlers, there was no way to carry out a seizure-and-dismissal here.
To seal a warehouse was one thing; to expel an official was another.
But there was neither warehouse nor official here.
Then why is he causing a scene here instead of at the naval headquarters?
It was possible that Tongjisa Seo Sang-o had pulled some soldier-general excuse like, “It’s not my fault, it’s my subordinate’s,” and sent the inspector here instead.
But Hong Hui-rok did not think Seo Sang-o was that clever. As every subordinate tends to think of every superior, Seo Sang-o was probably, by now, indulging in his usual drinking, women, and gambling under the influence of Won Gyun’s spirit—the spirit of some other Japanese general by now, in a different age.
The inspector did not show a tiger tally.
As his suspicions began to take shape, Hong Hui-rok stepped forward.
“Hold on, you….”
At exactly that moment, Yi Ha-eung, who had been waiting for it, raised his voice.
The boss always had to be taken down at the end.
“Commander Hong Hui-rok! I have heard that in lawsuits and punishments, you never process a case unless you’ve received a bribe. If someone pays you, even a grave criminal is simply let off, but if they don’t, even a good commoner is beaten so badly they lose their teeth—so much money have you extorted that the portion already known amounts to three thousand nyang! There is no greater crime than corrupting the principles of reward and punishment and sowing division between ruler and people!”
Since he had now been exposed as well, his course of action was fixed.
He had to shut the man up before the tally was shown. No—if the tally was shown, he had to claim it was fake and bury the whole thing.
Then Hong Hui-rok could pretend he had “not known” he was a secret inspector.
Just as the old ruler of the treasury, O Chi-hyeon, had once seen through economics, Hong Hui-rok, the current ruler of law, saw straight through jurisprudence.
“Quickly drag that filthy wretch spewing such absurd drivel before me and give him a thorough beating!”
And then, just like that, the one man who hated judicial corruption more than anyone in the world appeared.
The man who looked like he ate too much for a poor inspector’s lackey to be cost-effective was named Park Dokkaebi.
The soldiers who had been about to rush forward hesitated.
But Commander Hong Hui-rok could not understand why they had stopped.
He wasn’t the one fighting.
There was only one of that lot, maybe two if you counted the archer standing beside the inspector.
On their side, meanwhile, there were five or six officers. The soldiers outnumbered them by ten to one.
“What are you doing! You really believe this nonsense that he’s a secret inspector? Do you think you’ll get off scot-free later if you disobey military orders now?”
That was the problem with the Joseon army.
No matter what crimes they committed, they were usually just stripped of office for a few days and then returned, so victims had no choice but to give up on filing complaints.
Then again, soldiers who yielded to violence like that would yield even more easily to the bigger, closer violence of Park Dokkaebi.
That was why so-called “discipline-focused” armies were weak in a fight. They followed fear more than honor, and senior men more than commanders.
Hong Hui-rok made a hard decision.
If the inspector’s title was the problem, then he only needed to raise a cause bigger than the inspector himself.
“That Park Dokkaebi was also the one who caused a commotion yesterday. So it was all a conspiracy with Yang Choo! This is a secret scheme of rebellion, and traitors may be killed on the spot without a charge!”
Indeed, as befit a veteran officer, Hong Hui-rok finished his legal review in an instant and drew his sword.
Thanks to all the legal consultation fees he had accumulated, incredibly enough, the blade was a gleaming blue.
It stabbed straight toward the most vulnerable target: Yi Ha-eung.
A wise decision. If the inspector died, the merchant and the attendant could be soothed or silenced however one liked.
“!!”
Ha Jeong-il moved at once.
But because he knew proper etiquette, he had been standing diagonally behind his master, and so his movement seemed too slow.
So the one who saved Yi Ha-eung’s life was Park Dokkaebi—the uncouth commoner who, precisely because he was so rude, had been standing right beside the grand lord.
Clang!
The axe that came flying in at a speed that made you wonder whether such a thing was even allowed slammed the sword aside.
“Y-you… you dare to strike a traitor….”
“You said traitor?”
That was not Park Dokkaebi’s voice.
It was Yi Ha-eung’s.
Only now did he reveal himself.
“I have said it many times: I am not an inspector. But I do hold the office of Prince Heungseon.”
“P-Prince Heungseon?”
Hong Hui-rok stumbled backward, stammering.
He had fallen into a perfect trap.
If Yi Ha-eung had revealed himself as Prince Heungseon from the start, the officers would have swiftly and politely taken him somewhere else, muttering that a ruined royal like that should kindly get lost, and then carried on with business.
But now Hong Hui-rok had tried to kill a member of the royal family.
The king and the royal clan were a biological class defined solely by bloodline.
You could look down on them, insult them, frame them.
But when it came to survival and reproduction, you could not touch them.
Many royals had been executed, yes—but only for treason, and even Wonbeom’s father, Jeonggye Daewongun, had lived with three concubines in his poor household thanks to invisible support from people like Crown Prince Hyomyeong.
If you violated that iron rule, then you yourself were the traitor.
Hong Hui-rok turned around.
But the situation was already just like when the Jeolla military camp was attacked.
There was nothing else here. Everyone else had activated Won Gyun’s final skill, Disappearing at Chilcheollyang.
Taesu brought the axe behind his shoulder.
Yi Ha-eung said quickly, “If you kill a third-rank government official, things will get ugly. The peddlers here will be the ones who suffer for it!”
Taesu altered the axe’s arc slightly.
The saber snapped in two.
Katsu Kaishu, watching from a distance, unconsciously stroked his beloved blade, Suishinshi.
That man spared me on Jeju Island.
With the same momentum that had sent the axe swinging, Taesu dropped his waist and knees to the opposite side in a dodging motion.
The weight that flowed through that naturally rising movement settled into the empty left fist that had been hanging at his side.
A heavy Russian hook slammed into Hong Hui-rok’s face.
In the historical record, Hong Hui-rok would have continued his embezzling spree for twenty more years, until the real secret inspector finally caught him red-handed three years later. But here, his career came to an end twenty years early, with the sound of something bursting apart.
* * *
I don’t know exactly what Ha-eung did after that.
What I did hear was that Tongjisa Seo Sang-o blamed all the other officers’ crimes, as well as his own—including the fact that he’d been running side businesses with public funds as loan-shark capital—on Hong Hui-rok, and had him beaten.
The Mountain Spirit seemed impressed with Ha-eung.
[Hmph. Though the scheme was one I suggested, his quick grasp of it and his seamless coordination were worthy of praise, and above all, that courage of his in not trembling even with a blade in front of him. As expected, the dignity of a noble birth never truly leaves a man.]
I’ll grant you the blade part.
I’d seen people stand there calmly only in comics; I’d never seen a real human do it.
Because he didn’t know in advance someone would block it for him. If I’d chopped the sword aside and he’d ended up clutching his head and collapsing with a little shriek, I would’ve understood that too.
Was he always like that? Doesn’t seem like it.
[A person learns and matures as he lives. Unlike you, who never improve at all. Because you happened to smash Hong Hui-rok so completely, the commander had no choice but to pretend to be imitating Chungmugong while punishing him, and hide the fact that he himself got beaten by you.]
I ignored the Mountain Spirit for the moment and turned to Bak Seol-chae.
Then I confirmed what I had just heard.
“You really mean you’re quitting to become a peddler? There’s still a lot left to do with the Han family.”
“Why, I was moved by the righteous spirit of the Dobansu. Our troupe of clowns is meant to wander anyway. We already know some of the salt merchants who follow the Nakdong River. Since the Dobansu is headed to Dongnae, I’ll send word to the Daegu branch in your place.”
Bak Seol-chae said it lightly, then added in a smaller voice,
“To be honest, we need comrades now too. It’s not that I’m cutting ties with the Han family—I’ll just be helping you lot from that side.”
Right. Thanks for saying it plainly.
By now, the Tongyeong command had shattered its relationship of trust with the peddlers.
In Joseon, where the law was more or less a dead letter, that trust capital mattered enormously.
So from here on out, every field that had been held together by trust would begin to leak.
The peddlers would now have to endure severe conflict with the military.
The military would put on airs of righteousness and say they could no longer tolerate the peddlers’ monopolistic abuses, while the peddlers would in turn expose all the many matters the military had been quietly smoothing over behind the scenes.
Basically, it was a lot worse than a regional commander and the local chamber of commerce falling out inside a garrison area.
Usually, given time, it would all settle down and return to normal.
But this was the age of opening ports, when Westerners and Japanese kept crawling into Joseon.
It was like Ganghwa and Gangjin: places changed forever because foreign powers had entered, beyond the king’s control.
No, it’s because of you.
For all the Mountain Spirit’s nonsense, this was a shift of the age. I knew that because I’d studied Korean history textbooks.
Maybe, just as the Gangjin military merchants had spread out to Jeonju and Namwon as peddlers, the people here would also need to break away from clinging to the coast and move into other lines of business.
For that, they’d need friends.
I needed them too.
And the peddlers of Tongyeong usually did side business with the connected areas of Masan and Gimhae as well. This Bak Seol-chae, for instance, was already in charge of the coast from Chilgok all the way here.
Just as Jeolla had begun not in Jeonju or Namwon, but in Gangjin, the real strategic point in Gyeongsang was Tongyeong.
“Then I’ll place the Gyeongsang Baekimbang in your home base, Daegu. But as Dobansu, that’s as far as I can go. Winning over the people of Daegu and becoming the region’s head peddler is up to your own skill.”
“That’s a piece of cake.”
The reason he could say that so confidently was the other token of alliance I had already given him.
“Since the Dobansu trusted me and let me handle nearly all the salt and seafood he bought in Tongyeong, if I were to betray you now, heaven and man alike would strike me down.”
As if. My axe would smash your skull before that.
I’d handed the goods over because Dongnae, where we were headed next, required different kinds of work than ordinary trade, so he’d better mind his manners.
“If you sell such an enormous quantity of goods cheaply, and then say a few words while riding on the goodwill of the Han family, all your comrades will surely push me forward as the head peddler of the Gyeongsang Baekimbang. And of course the profits will, without question, stay in Daegu.”
“Got it.”
I turned on my heel.
The little play we had just put on had been a bit dangerous, so I’d left Eunhong behind—but she was sulking because I’d told her not to fall behind, and she had fallen behind anyway.
A little while after I brought Eunhong back from the boat, Bak Seol-chae’s Namsadang troupe put on an Ogwangdae performance for the startled peddlers and the Tongyeong soldiers who had been willing to cooperate with us.
At the dance circle by the bonfire, Eunhong rested her head against my shoulder.
“If you hadn’t been here, I’d never have come this far and seen such a rare spectacle.”
So now she couldn’t see anyone else around, huh?
Still, I reached out and pulled her shoulder closer to me.
“Neither would I.”
It was true.
From Korea, I’d come a very long way in every sense of the phrase.
But I still had farther to go.
Author’s Note
1. The crimes Yi Ha-eung mentioned were all actually uncovered by the real secret royal inspector, including Tongjisa Seo Sang-o’s. Secret inspectors also scrutinized their predecessors. In truth, there were several times as many crimes, but they were omitted for the sake of the plot.
2. “It’s not my fault, it’s my subordinate’s!” is the final words of Mutaguchi Renya, the Japanese general who annihilated the Japanese army in the Burma front during World War II without even a proper battle. He died comfortably at home.