Ragnarok (3)
The steward’s side wasn’t about to sit still either.
They swiftly barred Taesu’s party from the group PvP battlefield.
“You lot look like outsiders. The magistrates appointed to Samcheok have always worked to root out the foul habits of superstition, so if you go strutting in recklessly, don’t think you’ll escape a sound beating!”
He wasn’t wrong.
From the very beginning of the dynasty, one of the Samcheok deputy magistrate’s chief duties had been the control of this Taebaek Mountain faith.
Even the Sinjeung Dongguk Yeoji Seungram—the state-sanctioned geography book, in other words—made no effort to hide its regional prejudice against Samcheok Dohu-bu.
“Because the people of Samcheok believe in shamans and ghosts, their nature is not good.”
Taesu could see why the local believers of the spirits had openly gone up against the government. At the very least, in this land, the gods’ words carried more weight than the king’s.
So this really was Asgard, then—the capital of the gods, just as they said.
Even the steward was shouting like some Einherjar.
“Taebaek Mountain is the greatest sacred peak in all of Gwandong! We’ve honored the mountain spirits at every pass for more than a thousand years. Your Samcheok office didn’t even exist back then, so what nonsense are you spouting?”
Strictly speaking, he should have said before Joseon, before Goryeo, before both dynasties altogether—but even so, rebellion was still a little frightening.
At Sagilchi Pass, sparks were already flying.
The only reason the fight hadn’t broken out on the spot was that Taesu’s side still hadn’t shown which way they were leaning.
* * *
[You’re really not going to help?]
The Mountain Spirit’s voice was full of hurt.
Which meant Taesu was in a good mood.
He hated churches just as much as power-hungry government offices—the ones that screamed they weren’t going to pay taxes. Taesu snorted.
According to you, the spirits here ought to have some real backbone. So what’s the problem?
[Hm. Well, the god here, Okdogeom, isn’t actually a local.]
Didn’t that guy just say something about a thousand years ago?
[He moved here a thousand years ago.]
…A thousand years is still local enough, isn’t it? Back home, people who’d moved in less than ten years ago would band together and go shake down the neighborhood if some new construction went up next door, whining that the “rolling stone” was bullying the locals out.
[It’s a matter of origin. Okdogeom was originally the god of Geumgangryeong—the mountain north of Gyeongju—but was moved here when Silla grew.]
Geumgangryeong had originally been the domain of Geumsan Garichon, one of the six village heads who helped found Silla.
Bak Hyeokgeose, elevated to the post of district chief, couldn’t exactly refuse a little favor to the village heads. The mountain spirit of Garichon got his own shrine.
But once Silla became a state and its territory expanded, the capital’s boundaries had to expand too.
So the god was moved to Taebaek. It was a kind of promotion.
There were cases like that in the West too. Some local god from the backwater ends of the world who’d shot to greatness after the Roman and Islamic empires expanded their territories—something like that.
So even gods get dragged around by human circumstances?
[Of course. It’s not as if mountain rabbits are going to perform sacrifices for them. Among the Five Sacred Peaks of Seorabeol, the only one that really kept its place was probably the spirit of Tohamsan, where nothing lies farther east except the sea.]
Asgard, too, sounded like a hard place to make a living.
[Anyway, because he isn’t a native spirit, he has to fight both the old god already here and the upstart newcomer, and right now his power is greatly weakened.]
Why?
The answer came instead from the steward’s finally exploding shout.
“Ever since you bastards stole the divine golden hairpin, disasters have been cropping up again and again, and not a single good thing has happened! On top of that, you keep pulling these little schemes whenever you can. If a squashed bug twitches no matter how you step on it, then what can’t it do when it’s already condemned to die?”
[That’s why Okdogeom can’t use his strength. He has no body.]
That had been the achievement of Kim Hyo-won, the “expiration date of Joseon’s factional politics” and a former Samcheok deputy magistrate.
* * *
Back then, Samcheok had enshrined the black golden hairpin, the Ogyumjam, as Okdogeom’s sacred vessel.
It was wrapped in a hundred layers of fine cloth, and every matter large or small was reported to it. Nothing could proceed until a sacrifice had been offered first—that is, until money had been handed over to the shamans.
Okdogeom had many forms, but the most famous was that of a Silla princess.
Every time the people of Samcheok married off a daughter, they had to offer a wooden box dressed in silk robes. Naturally, because she was a princess, anything low-grade got sent straight back with bad luck as the pair.
Depending on your viewpoint, you could say it was more sincere than a paper-box donation jar—or you could say the creativity was absolutely insane.
Kim Hyo-won, who had been appointed deputy magistrate of Samcheok, naturally believed the latter. The heathens had gone too far.
Kim Hyo-won, the number one cause of the East-West political split, had been a professional political fighter from the start.
Having declared jihad, Kim Hyo-won took the lead among the scholar-knight order of the sacred Confucian kingdom.
Having been “carefully selected on an auspicious day among men of learning and purpose,” Kim Hyo-won and his scholars armed themselves with clubs and stormed the shrine. Clerics should use maces, after all.
Then they beat down everything that moved, smashed everything they could see, and confiscated the blasphemous idol of heresy.
You might imagine Kim Hyo-won had been nothing more than some neighborhood gang boss.
But he was a government-appointed local official. No matter how powerful the scholar-knights were, the magistrate’s office was still supposed to use troops when carrying out public duties.
Even so, Kim Hyo-won had his reasons.
The Samcheok provincial troops were Samcheok natives too. If the primordial hairpin god were planted in the soldiers’ heads, they’d turn into rebels on the spot.
So he’d taken private measures, bringing only scholars who possessed divine force sufficient to resist soul invasion.
In any case, Kim Hyo-won’s exploits were praised by the scholars.
And the backlash—the curses of Samcheok’s residents—were never recorded by the scholars, but they had been passed down all the way into the nineteenth century.
* * *
Purging heresy has always been a political problem more than a religious one, whether East or West.
Proof of that: Kim Hyo-won and his descendants claimed they had “thrown the hairpin into the fire,” but in truth they couldn’t have gone that far. Politics was like that.
If they really had destroyed the hairpin, the East-West faction split in Joseon might never have happened.
Some assassin would’ve received a revelation, crept in at night, and cut the magistrate’s throat. The Samcheok troops would never have stopped him.
So where that hairpin had ended up by the nineteenth century was what the steward of Sagilchi revealed.
“If you hurry and bring out the sacred vessel you’ve stuffed away in the stone chamber of Gyeonghaeng Seowon, then fine. We’ll reexamine the household’s property too, return anything improper, and hand it over to the government. But after you’ve trampled people to death like this, there’s no way we can do that!”
The ancient god Ogyumjam had been sealed inside the sacred barrier at Gyeonghaeng Seowon in Samcheok, where Confucian power was concentrated.
And naturally, Gyeonghaeng Seowon was a seowon built to commemorate Kim Hyo-won, the destroyer of heretics.
Kim Hyo-won had pinned the hairpin into his own body to prevent the ancient god’s liberation. Even now, his soul was screaming, consumed in the eternal struggle to defend Confucianism.
The steward seemed to want to pull out the soul-hairpin lodged in Kim Hyo-won and bring the princess of Silla back down into this land.
“Far from repenting for the crime of insulting the gods, ever since you erected a stele for that bastard Kim Hyo-won twenty years ago and elevated him to the seowon, then repaired both the stele and the pavilion, disasters have kept coming in succession!”
Of course, expanding the seowon like that required donations, so disasters naturally cropped up around it.
But the steward blamed every calamity in Samcheok during the reign of that useless king on it.
“Have there not, over the past few years, been suspicious murders, collapsing houses, and a string of great fires in this county? How can that not be proof?”
In truth, that incident where a concubine had been beaten to death only looked suspicious because the husband’s attempt to disguise it as drowning had been quietly played along with by the people of the town.
If Taesu hadn’t beaten the husband until the truth came out, it would have been buried. It was fortunate that the physical investigative methods of modern states—one of the many lost technologies—were still around.
When houses collapsed or burned down, even the useless king had issued special relief measures.
Expecting them to actually be carried out was like expecting a Korean National Assembly member to keep every campaign promise. If this had been a country where royal orders were truly enforced, Lee Hwan would never have bothered planning a coup.
But no such thoughts existed in anyone’s head.
Anyone could see this was a disaster sent by the gods.
Before Ragnarok arrives, they say there comes an omen: a brutal winter that never ends, the collapse of morality, and an eternal struggle.
“With the gods gone, Gwandong and this Samcheok were left poor and barren. As time goes on, livelihoods wither, the people scatter, and even the market can no longer properly open!”
Scholars who had studied the Classics were supposed to rebut that rationally.
They should have said that this was really because the ruined dynasty had made a mess of the country, and it had nothing to do with the gods.
But then their heads would be chopped off by human hands instead of divine ones. That was usually how rationalists met their end.
So while they failed to answer, the bobusang swayed by the steward’s speech steadily turned into Yellow Turban Rebels who had met Zhang Jiao.
They had to recover the sacred Ogyumjam quickly.
If that failed, they had to at least perform a sacrifice. In any case, they could not let those scholar bastards seize the sacrificial goods and the rice and cloth meant for this rite.
Damn it…!
Cha Un-hong sensed disaster coming.
Sure enough, the bobusang spat and raised their clubs.
Their momentum was like Thor’s thunder hammer.
The scholars, naturally, were not about to sit still either.
“Have you all gone mad?”
The burly men roared as they spread the mats wide to left and right.
It was like Fenrir’s jaws, ready to swallow the world on the final day.
It seemed the fate of the gods, Ragnarǫk, was about to be decided.
And then it happened.
A bronze beam, like the spear Mistletoe itself, sliced between the two sides and shot through the air.
* * *
This was a mountain pass.
Trees stood around them, with the people arrayed in semicircles according to faction.
The spear fired like lightning pierced deep into an oak tree.
Crash! The oak shuddered, its lifespan suddenly cut down. It might almost have been better to be caught by the real mistletoe, that parasitic plant.
The spear’s true identity was Itkyu’s staff.
But it had not been thrown by Itkyu. Even Itkyu himself, who had lent the staff, was staring at Taesu in shock.
“I thought I could win with weapons…”
Taesu gave no answer.
Instead, he walked forward, ignoring Cha Un-hong too, though she was only slightly less shocked than Itkyu.
With every step he took, the six rings on the staff embedded in the oak gave off a slow, ringing sound.
By the honor attached to Mistletoe, the spear that killed a god, an ex-rank axe would have suited this better—but this Ragnarok needed a little divine advice first.
If we recover that golden hairpin, will the bobusang of Taebaek Mountain really join us?
[Why stop there? You may even be enshrined alongside Okdogeom. Though, as you’ve guessed, that steward’s corrupting influence over the porters is no small matter, so you mustn’t simply hand it over blindly.]
I did think of that, but I didn’t expect you to call it “corruption.”
[Okdogeom is weak right now. But that steward is talking as though he himself brought on the disaster, isn’t he? That’s corruption.]
Taesu looked left and right in turn.
Fortunately, the bobusang and the Confucian scholar-knights had forgotten all about their annihilation posture from moments ago.
They were all staring at Taesu alone, as if one mind and one heart. They looked far more shocked than either Itkyu or Cha Un-hong.
Taesu spoke.
“Enough.”
Cha Un-hong wondered if her lover had somehow become a different person.
Stop the fight? Instead of starting one?
Taesu’s next words, delivered rather slowly, only intensified her suspicion.
“Fighting does no good for commerce or for governance. Whips and swords may subdue people on the surface, but in their hearts they only breed resentment. Thus it was that all the sage kings of old managed their states well and maintained armies of six corps, yet governed the world through virtue rather than force.”
Cha Un-hong was sure of it.
That was not the same man.
A lover’s instinct is sometimes more accurate than any investigation. In truth, those weren’t Taesu’s words.
He couldn’t be possessed, but he was quoting the Mountain Spirit and reciting them in his place.
Still, the effect was undeniable.
First, Taesu had stopped the bobusang with “force” by throwing the spear.
Then, with words that sounded like they actually meant something, he stopped the scholars too.
He hadn’t quoted difficult classical passages, but the Classics had a strict form; just from the way someone spoke, you could tell whether they had truly read them or not.
Literature soaked into one’s speech. A prime example was the double-negative style that no one could understand why people had bothered to write so much of, given how little space they had on bamboo slips.
But the scholars soon snapped out of their stun.
No matter what text Taesu might recite, the dangled pagray on his head remained a very real thing.
“How dare a lowborn brat lecture a gentleman!”
Of course, they didn’t attack Taesu themselves.
Not because they lacked fighting ability, but because they were knights. One burly scholar-knight esquire charged in with a club on behalf of his master.
But Taesu had no need to deal with a retainer himself.
“Ooooh!”
Itkyu shot out like a cannonball, dropping low and driving forward with both arms.
“W-What is this monk?”
The club, robbed of any room to spin, could do nothing against Itkyu’s iron-hard forearms.
His hands weren’t fully healed yet, but an opponent like this was no problem. Itkyu crossed the man’s right and left arms and yanked them apart in a flash.
The club instantly pointed in the opposite direction, and the burly man panicked.
In that instant, Itkyu drove a knee straight into his groin.
It wasn’t as if Itkyu had been consumed by vengeance and vowed to make the whole world just like him.
Nor was it a technique he had learned from Taesu. Kurama Yoshin-ryu had always specialized in striking vital points.
The burly man rolled his eyes back and collapsed.
The scholars were stunned.
Yet no one here seemed capable of overwhelming Itkyu with divine force. No one dared step forward.
Meanwhile, the steward ran out beaming.
“I knew you’d help us! I, I’m Lee Jin-hong, and here at the mountain spirit shrine I’m the branch chief of the association—”
Thunk!
Lee Jin-hong was knocked flat as he came to greet the spirit.
After felling him with a chop to the crown, Taesu looked around at everyone.
“You each got one hit, so that’s enough, right?”
Cha Un-hong had no idea what on earth was “enough” about this.
But she was glad Taesu had returned to normal.
And the others were glad that Taesu now sounded like he wouldn’t be hitting anyone else.
So his next words were accepted too.
“Now make up.”
Ragnarok was postponed.
Author’s Note
1. In records related to Kim Hyo-won, the Ogyumjam is said to have been “thrown into the fire.”
However, there is also a record from the reign of King Injo, when the Samcheok deputy magistrate Jeong Eon-hwang, a later figure than Kim Hyo-won, sealed the Ogyumjam in a stone chamber.
There are several theories: that Kim Hyo-won destroyed it but the residents remade it later; that Kim Hyo-won did not destroy it, but it was lost during the Japanese invasions and remade afterward; and the theory adopted in this story—that it had never disappeared in the first place.
However, unlike in the story, the real record says it was sealed not in the seowon but in the government office’s stone chamber.
2. In the sixth year of King Heonjong, houses collapsed in Samcheok; in the eighth and tenth years, fires broke out.
Also, in the early Heonjong period there was a murder case involving a man named Choe Jang-su. The details are the same as in the story, and when it came to light, three months had already passed, making an autopsy difficult.
3. The renovation of Gyeonghaeng Seowon twenty years before the story’s present and the erection of the commemorative stele are both historical facts, as is the fact that residents petitioned the authorities, claiming disasters were happening because of the seowon.
4. Lee Jin-hong was a man who in 1847 was punished for “insulting the gentry,” but the exact circumstances are hard to determine. He was not originally from Samcheok, but rather an exile sent there, and in the story he has been adapted for fiction.