The Monk’s Scream (2)
Yi Ha-eung went straight for the heart of the matter.
“So you’re the Waegwan interpreter from Dongrae. Why did the official in charge come all the way out here to bring back castaways? And at this hour, too?”
The leap from Bak Seol-chae of the travelling performers to Prince Heungseon, Yi Ha-eung, was so abrupt it made my head spin.
The interpreter, Hyeon Hak-ro, who’d gone and broken himself by cranking the dial too hard in a panic, committed an act he absolutely should not have committed here.
He stammered, nerves all over the place. “W-well, um… the magistrate says it’s urgent, but there’s no haegwan—the official in charge—so I…”
Well, that explained why they were so deep in debt they couldn’t even manage trade properly.
Yi Ha-eung looked as if he suspected a replacement had come in the meantime. From what he and I had discussed, the Dongrae magistrate, Kang Gi, would absolutely never be in any kind of “urgent” situation.
And Ha Jeong-il, too, eyed Song Gwang-rak, who had gone all shriveled up like a dried sea cucumber, with open suspicion.
“Now hold on. Even if an interpreter is an official and can step in for other people’s work, why are you here, a licensed Dongrae merchant? Even if the people on that ship are castaways, they’re foreigners. They’re not the sort of folk ordinary people can just go meeting.”
You’re ignoring the blades of the Ten? I ought to insist I’m a military officer too, but Song Gwang-rak couldn’t quite bring himself to say it. Not that it would’ve done any good anyway.
Still, Song Gwang-rak was no mere fool.
A sea cucumber looks ridiculous, but it doesn’t come cheap. An idiot could never become master of this echinoderm-ridden sea off Dongrae.
Just as sea cucumbers puff back up the moment you pour water over them, as if they’d never dried out in the first place, an idea suddenly bloomed in Song Gwang-rak’s head.
He mixed truth and lies in just the right measure and said, “The truth is, the Japanese who came this time have some old grudge with the Waegwan watchman. We heard that the Waegwan was planning to send men to kill them before they could be repatriated. The Dongrae magistrate wanted to bring them into the office and protect them before anything happened.”
At least the Waegwan is under Tsushima, so having a grudge makes sense.
Tsushima had a grudge against the shogunate’s modern diplomacy, which tried to sideline them and spy on Joseon—or connect with Joseon—without their say-so.
It was a plausible story.
But Song Gwang-rak made one enormous mistake.
Yi Ha-eung asked sharply, “How would the Waegwan know that those men are here in the first place? By law, they should be staying in Dongrae Province.”
Well, because the Naesang merchants had controlled the Dongrae officials on the ground, locked the gates of the Dongrae foreign holding facility, and those same Naesang merchants had been colluding with the Waegwan all along.
Hyeon Hak-ro, the one saddled with the huge debt, quickly tried to clean up the mess. “It’s not exactly honorable, but the lower officials in Dongrae do have some connections with the Waegwan, don’t they? They must’ve heard it secondhand.”
“Is that so? Well, it’s hard for the people above to keep track of everything the people below are doing.”
Yi Ha-eung smiled in a way Taesu would have called downright mountain-spirit-like.
“Then how did the Dongrae magistrate know the Waegwan knew those men were here, and call us here in such a hurry?”
Hyeon Hak-ro and Song Gwang-rak both froze at once.
Then Yi Ha-eung took one step closer to them.
“Don’t tell me the low officials confessed to the magistrate that they’d leaked state secrets to the Waegwan? How honest of them.”
It was the sort of honesty that deserved gold rods, silver branding irons, and iron leg-stocks all at once.
Hyeon Hak-ro, who had only been used as a tool and didn’t know the full story, hurriedly turned to Song Gwang-rak. But Song Gwang-rak had already dried out again. Echinoderms have no brains.
Ha Jeong-il slipped a hand into his sleeve.
Inside was the yangchong Taesu had paid for in advance.
A lot more convenient than a bow, since it doesn’t show all at once.
One of the spoils taken in Gangjin after cutting off Captain Ogre’s head and stripping the man down to nothing.
It was an American Colt Paterson pistol.
* * *
If it had been anyone else, their arm would have broken or their muscles would have torn under the force of Taesu’s elbow strike. But Ikkyu’s forearm held.
Of course, it only held for a moment. Even Ikkyu was startled.
“You have been well trained!”
With that, Ikkyu twisted his arm and seized Taesu’s wrist.
Taesu clearly had the advantage in brute strength, and yet, in the blink of an eye, the push and pull of the exchange toppled him backward as he sat with one leg extended.
But there was no time to admire the mysterious subtlety of old martial arts.
Bang!
Ikkyu’s fist crashed down on the very spot where Taesu had been sitting a moment earlier. The hard-packed ground, beaten down enough to serve as a marketplace floor, split open and caved in.
It was one of the deadliest techniques in Kurama Yoshin-ryu: a finisher aimed squarely at the groin.
The style specialized in this sort of thing—jabbing at eyes, philtrums, groins, any vital point you could name. One hit, and it was over.
Taesu had already rolled out with a tumble the instant he fell, supporting himself on one hand, and cold sweat broke out over him.
For some reason, Cha Un-hong looked as if she were sweating too. She couldn’t possibly have seen the exchange, so it must have been my imagination.
Still balanced on one hand in a handstand, Taesu twisted his body around. A capoeira kick whipped into Ikkyu’s head just as the monk was half-kneeling.
No, it only grazed him. Ikkyu staggered slightly, then regained his stance.
“Even though I fight bare-handed, you are the first to endure three exchanges before this humble monk.”
As expected of a man from Tsushima, the boasting came at a level worthy of a martial arts novel.
Taesu wasn’t the type to talk while fighting. Rather than waste his breath, he kept his steps moving.
There’s no denying he’s formidable.
In truth, this had begun as a match with a slight penalty on Ikkyu’s side.
Kurama Yoshin-ryu, like nearly every martial art of this era, was based on the reality of everyday life and actual combat.
That was why so many demonstrations of old-school martial arts began from a seated position.
But this time, because of the situation, the fight had started more like a bout.
The moment Taesu settled into stance and prepared, a good number of Kurama Yoshin-ryu’s secret techniques were sealed off.
So much for “real combat” automatically meaning better.
And yet Ikkyu was fighting Taesu almost evenly.
Taesu made his decision.
If the other man was a grappling specialist, then he simply wouldn’t give him the chance.
Don’t get dragged down to the ground.
The flurry of standing strikes from a man no one in Joseon had yet fully tasted drove Ikkyu back.
“Ghk!”
Ikkyu could only defend; he couldn’t answer properly.
It was the same reason Taesu had often struggled before.
Modern fighting was far too unfamiliar to Monk-turned-fighter Ikkyu.
The proper method was to grab Taesu’s arm or leg, throw him down, and then finish him with a knife—or with Ikkyu’s fists, which were close enough to knives.
But that wasn’t working.
It was only because this was Ikkyu that he wasn’t taking the hits cleanly and was managing to deflect or bleed them off.
By all rights, this was the point where the onlookers should have been offering commentary and gasping in admiration, but unfortunately Cha Un-hong and Jeong Jabeom were failing miserably at their duty as proper spectators.
“W-what in the world? His arms and hands are flying like a sudden downpour, but who on earth is winning?”
“I couldn’t tell you. That monster-monk Il-hyu is already famous in Waegwan for burying countless toughs and supposedly making prayer beads out of men’s finger bones, but where in the world did that Axe-Park learn his craft? At that age, how is he at that level?”
Just as those two said, to the untrained eye it looked dead even.
But Ikkyu knew better. If things went on like this, he’d eventually eat a clean shot.
Ikkyu had no knowledge of modern fighting, but his overall combat experience was extensive, and he made his judgment calmly.
I think I understand now.
You can infer technique from footwork.
The moment Taesu’s left foot lifted slightly, Ikkyu sensed that it would step forward half a pace again.
Which meant the next attack would be the left hand aimed at the face.
I’ll take that hit and grab him.
But a jab isn’t that slow.
Ignoring the impact that made his head reel, Ikkyu reached to coil around Taesu’s arm—only to close his fingers on empty air.
Before he could even regret it, Taesu’s right elbow came crashing down, and Ikkyu lifted a hand to block. Another mistake.
Ikkyu’s sharp eyes had seen that it wasn’t a feint, so he defended, and the elbow’s impact was indeed heavy—but the real purpose of the attack had been to shake his center of gravity.
The true blow was the third strike, a left body shot. It drove precisely into his side, straight for the liver.
Thwack!
A normal man would have gone flat on the ground for three minutes. In real combat, that’s no different from death.
But Ikkyu wasn’t a normal man. He was a high templar.
His steel-like body, tempered by Buddhist devotion, even startled Taesu. Still, one could also say the same thing about a body granted by a god.
“Uoooooh!”
Before Taesu could pull back his foot, Ikkyu seized his left arm and twisted.
To be honest, Taesu himself had thought this fight might end with that one blow, and that had been his mistake.
Now Kurama Yoshin-ryu’s true value showed itself. As much as Ikkyu didn’t know modern fighting, Taesu didn’t know old-school martial arts either.
No matter how much strength Ikkyu had, it shouldn’t have overwhelmed Taesu—but that was precisely what technique was for.
Before Taesu even understood what had happened, his arm was wrenched backward and his upper body forced to lean forward.
Ikkyu had Taesu pitched forward while holding his arm from behind.
Then Ikkyu tried to load his weight and throw Taesu down.
If he could bring him to the ground, then from there it would become a feast for Kurama Yoshin-ryu. There were endless possibilities.
But from that point on, it became a matter of brute strength.
“Hm?!”
Ikkyu panicked.
Taesu’s already thick arm ballooned so much that even over his Joseon clothing it was obvious.
He had never imagined there might be a human being who would try to resist an arm lock purely with force, especially from such a bent-over posture.
For a moment, Ikkyu even had the illusion of hearing the grinding of heavy machinery. He hurriedly shifted his feet.
At this rate, he’ll drag me down and we’ll both fall!
Then there was only one next move.
Ikkyu let go of Taesu’s arm as if discarding it. By the unavoidable laws of physics, Taesu staggered slightly.
In other words, Taesu was now bent a little at the waist, momentarily offering Ikkyu his back.
Ikkyu unleashed Kurama Yoshin-ryu’s greatest secret technique.
Tengu Flight.
It was a move that created exactly this sort of opening, preventing the opponent from counterattacking, then leaping in a split second to smash down upon the opponent’s back.
Originally, of course, it was a sword technique.
But Ikkyu’s palm strike was no different from a sword. Whether he broke the spine or cut it open with steel, the result would be the same.
Ikkyu had already acknowledged Taesu.
He had promised not to kill him before, but now it looked impossible to bring the man down without killing him.
Ikkyu sprang upward, wings unfurling like a tengu’s.
And then, like the pious monk he was, he prayed for his opponent’s soul.
“Great Passage to the Beyond—!”
With that cry as his kiai, the downward palm strike seemed to whistle through the air.
Cha Un-hong and Jeong Jabeom couldn’t even keep up with the speed of the exchange, so they couldn’t react in time.
Only the mountain spirit’s quiet scream rang out, the scream of someone who absolutely should not have been using a move like Great Passage to the Beyond.
* * *
Taesu rapidly calculated what he had and what he did not.
The clue had been the mountain spirit’s howl. In a sense, Taesu could be called a monk too.
Bang! He stamped the ground like a military boot smashing the Waegwan marketplace floor and threw his body backward like a drawn bow.
Taesu believed in two things.
First, the fantastical fact of a body strengthened by the mountain spirit’s power.
And second, the scientific fact that no matter how much training you had, a hand made of dozens of bones could never be harder than a skull made of a single bone.
Thwack!
Taesu felt a jolt far worse than when he’d taken Bak Seol-chae’s heel slap to the face in Tongyeong.
But I won!
Before he even turned to look behind him, he could already feel the impact on his head. He didn’t need to hear Ikkyu’s pain-filled groan to know it.
So when Taesu turned around, it wasn’t to check—it was to attack.
Following the spin, his right low kick went in at full force. Taesu had taken a blow to the head too, so he began from the most stable stance possible.
Ikkyu, unable to put proper force into his lower body because he had been focusing on his broken hand, had his thigh swell and burst almost at once.
“Ghk! Y-you bastard!”
Ikkyu concentrated on the side that had been struck—in other words, his own left side.
After all, the hand that still survived was his left. Leaning into that side to keep his balance, he tried to seize Taesu.
At that moment, Taesu grabbed the back of Ikkyu’s neck instead.
Muay Thai has clinches too. Ikkyu, unable to use one hand, got dragged along by Taesu’s neck wrestling.
And the point of neck wrestling is usually the knee strike.
With his hips driven forward far more than usual, the knee stabbed in at an angle and speed that made it nearly impossible to avoid.
Taesu never forgot a grudge. This was payback for the attack he’d taken first.
The monk Ikkyu Soshun, the senior of the Rinzai sect whom Ikkyu had admired enough to take his name from, was famous for his unconventional life as an illegitimate child of the emperor in the fifteenth century.
He claimed all precepts were hypocrisy and lived exactly as desire led him. He didn’t discriminate between alcohol and meat.
The thing he pursued most vigorously was lust.
He called himself a master of obscenity and erotic verse, and when he was seventy-eight he even seduced a blind girl painter. The old man had no confidence in his face, so he went for a blind woman instead—his level of enlightenment was no joke.
But this nineteenth-century Ikkyu, at least, would not be inheriting that one thing.
Even if the doctor who’d sewn Katsu Kaishu’s testicles back on made a house call this very moment, there was no saving him.
Ikkyu’s suffering had ended forever, irreversibly.
“Kraaaah!”
The monk’s scream rang out.
* * *
Back with the man who had sent Ikkyu out, and with Park Chang-su beside him, both of them heard the distant scream.
Avec open his fan in satisfaction, the leader of the gang said, “Looks like the match is over. Sounds like someone’s being castrated. Ikkyu still hasn’t completed enough Buddhist training; his temperament is as fiery as fire itself, so even I have trouble stopping him.”
It was the kind of line that sounded like a cliché yakuza boss had brought along a huge thug just for intimidation.
But Park Chang-su, Joseon’s own yakuza, couldn’t exactly deny it.
He knew Ikkyu’s reputation as a high templar very well.
No one who crossed paths with him failed to attain paradise in the end. So instead of thinking about win or loss, Park Chang-su let out a sigh for another reason.
“Looks like I’m going to owe you one.”
He was about to have to concede a great deal in the upcoming ginseng-versus-gold smuggling deal.
That was exactly why the man had sent Ikkyu in the first place—to exploit the other side’s ridiculous mistake. He wasn’t about to miss that.
The other four Heavenly Kings present all looked uncomfortable too.
Even if one were being as generous as possible, their gaze said, you should do a better job keeping your underlings in line.
Park Chang-su groaned inwardly. The title of first Naesang in Gyeongnyeonggye was suddenly looking shaky.
Still, the responsibility was Ha-hu’s. At least in words, he was generous.
“No need to call it a debt. We have to help each other when times are hard. Now then, that troublesome fistfighter has been dealt with, so let’s talk business. You said the Japanese spies were on the ship, yes?”
Park Chang-su gathered himself.
After all, the important thing wasn’t Axe-Park—it was the two Japanese men.
As long as those two were effectively in his grasp, he could still turn this around.
Park Chang-su said with as much confidence as he could muster, “That’s right. Those two Japanese will be brought here by Song Gwang-rak shortly.”
But just a little while ago, Park Chang-su had also said his subordinates would bring Axe-Park over soon.
Park Chang-su chose to ignore that fact with all his might.
Author’s Note
1. All of the Kurama Yoshin-ryu techniques mentioned in this chapter are real.
2. Great Passage to the Beyond means something similar to “passing on to paradise.” Here it is a parody of the character Raiden from Charge!! Men’s Private School, who uses Great Passage to the Beyond as a battle cry.