The Life of an Australian Slave (4)
PHWEEEEEE—!
"Gah? Chief of the Waves, what in the world is that?"
"Ah, that would be what we call a train."
"What a tremendous cry it makes…"
Hmm. I could probably dazzle them with a train ride too.
"That thing moves five, six times faster than anything you've seen running."
"Preposterous!"
Hard to believe, I know. There aren't even horses here, so the fastest animal around would have to be something shaped like a fox.
"And it can haul loads that would take a thousand men with carrying poles."
"You lie!"
Huh? He seems absolutely floored. He must really covet that train!
"Hah! Do you truly believe there could be a single lie in the words of the sacred Chief?"
This is when you come on strong! One good shout ought to do it!
"N-never!"
"Is our trust worth so little to you!"
"No, of course not…"
"Have I not promised to bring water to this very land? That is exactly what this is for."
"…."
I win. All that's left is for the water to come out, and it's a total victory.
GRUMBLE GRUMBLE RUMBLE
Our steam auger was chewing into the earth with all its might. And once we'd built it, it turned out to be absurdly overpowered—
You know that mystery metal of mine, the one nobody can quite identify?
We made the drill head out of that, and now it bites down without wearing out at all, sinking deeper and deeper with barely an effort.
"Huh? It's digging into the ground like that?"
"That's right. To draw up water from down there, we have to bore a hole."
"There's truly that much water beneath this parched land?"
Where else would the water that pools across this vast basin go, my friend? It's all gathered underground, every last drop.
Come to think of it, that machine ought to work nicely for drilling oil wells someday, too.
KRRRRNK—CLUNK
"Mm. Looks like we've reached the bottom."
With the drill rods all in place, the machine now began pulling the rods back up.
"Is it finished?"
"Once a hole is bored like that, water will start seeping up from below."
"How fascinating."
"That's what they call technology."
"Ooooh… technology…"
CLATTER CLATTER, TANG
The crew clung to the machine, busily packing everything away. The whole rig gets hauled off somewhere else and used again, after all.
Better to keep it all tidy in advance.
GRUMBLE GRUMBLE
"All done, sir!"
"Hey! Good work out there!"
Mounted on the Gulleongsoe, the rig was being slowly winched back up. If the water didn't come, we'd just have to drill again somewhere nearby anyway.
"That's quite a wide hole?"
"Yep. It's so deep we have to be careful nobody falls in."
"My… it's so dark you can't see a thing down there."
GLUG GLUG GLUG
Hm? That's quite a vigorous water sound?
Even if it only rose to just below the surface, that would already be a blessing.
"Oh! Chief of the Sea! Look! The water's rising!"
"Is it now? It's coming up faster than I expected."
Is this normal? I thought groundwater was supposed to seep out slowly, little by little?
SPLOOSH SPLOOSH
What? Why? Why is the water overflowing?
"Ooooh! Magnificent! The water's gushing up!"
"Huh?"
Why on earth is it doing that? Someone explain this to me, please?
"What is that?"
"Why is it doing that?"
"I've never seen anything like it! Water pouring over the brim like that!"
Ah. Apparently even my own people have never seen this before. Just how much water is down there, that it's simply overflowing like this?
"Y-you see that!"
"Chief of the Sea is magnificent!"
I guess they really are astonished. A fly could fly straight into their gaping mouths!
"Water from the dry earth!"
"Wah! Water! Water!"
SPLASH SPLASH
Come on, friends, that's drinking water—don't all just dive in—
Ugh, whatever. Doesn't matter. Water's out, so mission accomplished.
And just like that, I had won over the tribes of the western highlands without the slightest effort.
BANG
"WAHAHAHA! Look at this! I put in a shift at the cotton farm today and bought cloth with my day's wages!"
"Aren't you the Chief? Don't you have work to do?"
He'd originally come just to gawk at the train, then landed himself a job, then fell head over heels for fried chicken and bulgogi, and now he never thinks of leaving.
If this is how it was going to be, why on earth did he fight me and protest in the first place?
"Honestly, it's just easier living and working here!"
"Haah…"
And why does he clock off into my office instead of going home? Is he here to brag that he worked today?
I'm tired. So tired…
Both the Aboriginal people and the European settlers gathered at the farms in harmony, working the fields and taking home their wages.
We, in turn, took the surplus goods and peddled them here and there, quietly piling up the gold.
"Four hundred and thirty thousand immigrants this year?"
Wow? What's going on? We usually got in around a hundred thousand at a time.
"Yes. A great many came from Spain."
"Why? What happened there?"
"A plague is spreading through Europe."
"Haah…"
Which is exactly why I keep telling people to feed their populations properly…
Plagues spread because bodies are weak. When people wander around starving, their immunity crumbles and this is what keeps happening.
Not that anyone would listen if I said it out loud. They'd just insist some witch was deceiving the people again.
"We're doing well keeping the plague from spreading on our side."
"Yes, ma'am."
We had our own experience with that, back in the day, when a plague truly devastated us.
It happened while I was nurturing the World Tree in Sinju, back when I was close to everyone. It broke my heart, but there was nothing to be done.
Nowadays, with so many people, we don't reach for the Holy Water the moment someone falls ill. The hospitals treat them first, and only the ones who can't be saved by ordinary medicine get it.
The Holy Water must be saved and poured into things like plagues—nothing on earth beats it for crushing an outbreak in its infancy.
"The nobles and priests have been passing in and out of Pyeong-an quite often lately. What should we do about it?"
"The hospitals, you mean?"
"Yes."
So they call it witchcraft and deception right up until they don't want to die. Keep coming to Pyeong-an's hospitals, and the moment you catch something, you can drink the Holy Water.
"Let them come, however much it turns your stomach. Just charge them plenty—squeeze the rich ones absolutely dry."
"Understood."
And I suppose they'll go squeeze their peasants even harder to make up for it…
Ugh, whatever! Their own cursed lot in life. Better to look after the immigrants in Australia.
Still, the population really was booming.
Immigrants kept arriving, and the native peoples kept flocking in.
"Have you drawn up the candidates for the new cities?"
"Yes. The coast looks best across the board. And we'll lay rail lines looping inland from there."
People all think alike, it seems. The Australian interior is a genuinely hard place to live—with barely any natives even there, enough said.
Well, since it's come to this, we may as well make sure everyone eats well and lives well together.
"Stop taking immigrants from Europe. It seems everyone who was coming has already come."
"Yes."
Lately we'd been getting lower-quality arrivals too, so it felt like the right time to shut the gates.
While Daehan, swamped with too many immigrants, kept founding new cities across Australia, Europe descended into a state of emergency.
"Are you telling me the immigrants are still coming in those numbers?"
"The ports are packed to bursting with people simply waiting for a ship."
What made it worse was how much they'd come to love the free potato porridge studded with strips of dried meat.
Plenty of people had swelled the ports even without any intention of emigrating—folk who did no work at all and simply loafed around eating free food.
"Phew…"
"Trouble on your end as well?"
"Yes."
"I shall go to the port and lodge a protest myself."
"Let's go together."
As the lords of the surrounding estates and the king's deputies made their way to the ports to demand answers, Daehan was already packing up and preparing to withdraw.
"Huh?"
"No more free food?"
"What's going on?"
"Let's go ask."
Overnight, Daehan began pulling out of the ports. They had scattered so much generosity across the place that packing it all up took quite a few days.
With the food no longer coming, the townsfolk grew curious and went to interrogate the sailors.
"I say there! Are you no longer providing meals?"
"Correct. We're heading home now."
"Wha—?"
The people were bewildered. Plenty of them had been solving their meals on this very spot for more than ten years.
"If you leave like this, what are we supposed to do?"
"Pardon? Why is that our problem?"
"But surely you must keep feeding us!"
As if being fed were some birthright, the people began to press their case.
The staff member, beyond exasperated, was starting to lose his temper.
"I'm sorry, but did anyone ever put us in charge of you?"
"More than ten years of feeding us means you'll feed us forever, no?"
"That's right! Give us our food!"
They'd fed these starving neighbors through the worst of it, and now those same neighbors demanded to be fed in perpetuity.
Really, the old saying had not a word of a lie in it. Rescue a man from drowning, and he'll demand you carry his bundle for him too.
"Have you all lost your minds? If you'd saved up wages from honest work while eating those free meals, you could have bought yourselves fine land by now!"
"Urk…"
There it was. A Daehan man. Big as a mountain, and a voice to match.
The wretches couldn't muster so much as a squeak; they simply crumpled.
As the sailor said, those with any sense had long since used the free meals as a cushion—scrimping together a little money while they ate, then striking out for somewhere new.
The only ones left were the folk who'd spent a decade+ gleefully gaming the free food, and this was what they'd become.
"Please… save us!"
"Haah… unbelievable. Fine. Take this, then."
THUD
The staff member reckoned that any provisions they hauled home would just end up turned into fertilizer anyway, so he simply set it all down and left it there.
"Wah!"
"Move!"
"It's mine!"
"I grabbed it first! Let go!"
In an instant, all hell broke loose—a proper brawl over scraps.
The staff member watched them with something close to contempt.
He simply could not understand people who refused to work and meant to coast through life on handouts.
Fried chicken and a drink bought with the wages of an honest, exhausting day—that is where the real flavor lies.
"Hurry up and finish so we can head home!"
"GYAHAHA! How about beer and bulgogi tonight?"
"Tch, beer goes with fried chicken, obviously!"
"WAHAHA! Who cares—let's just pack up and go!"
One only had to look at the Daehan folk working right beside them. Sweating through their shirts, every one of them, yet smiles stretching from ear to ear.
They were cut from altogether different cloth than these beggars of Europe who wanted nothing but the free.
On board the ship, the local lords and the king's deputy were deep in conversation with the captain.
"So you are truly withdrawing, then?"
"Yes."
"Hmm…"
They had certainly come to tell him to stop hauling away their peasants, but hearing that he was pulling out entirely left them strangely uneasy.
"You aren't planning another war, are you?"
Seized by a sudden misgiving, the nobleman asked with visible worry.
"No, sir. We've taken in all the immigrants we need, so we're simply wrapping things up."
"Ah…"
Relief washed over the nobleman's face. He had assumed the people were being taken somewhere small and cramped—an island, perhaps—which was why no more could be accepted.
"You've toiled long in our service."
"Hardly toil, sir. All I did was sail a ship back and forth."
"And yet? Will the shop keep operating?"
Boarding the vessel, he had noticed the crew clearing away every tent and stall along the waterfront, and it left him a little unsettled.
After all, there was so much they bought from Daehan on a regular basis—tobacco, medicinal liquors, tea, and on and on.
"No, sir. We shan't be coming back."
"Oh…"
For years, Daehan's goods had been effortless to acquire here, but now they would have to make the trip all the way to Pyeong-an Naru themselves.
Which meant hiring merchants all over again—and the nobles found themselves quietly grieving the loss.
"Could you not keep even a single shop running?"
"A port this small wouldn't turn a profit, sir."
"Ah…"
Ever since the great ports had been destroyed, mid-sized ports had multiplied enormously—and this was one of them.
The noble bit his lip bloody hard. His pride stung. A port he had considered quite substantial was apparently too puny to be worth a shop.
"Pyeong-an Naru isn't far. We hope you'll make good use of it."
"…Very well."
There was nothing to be done. They were hardly an enemy one could beat in battle, and if the man said he was leaving, all that remained was to see him off.
Perhaps I ought to found a trading company of my own… was all he could manage, exhaling a faint sigh into his chest.
Europe's population in those days stood at roughly fifty-five million.
Over the previous thirteen years, nearly two million souls had drained away to Australia.
The problem was that those two million were, by and large, people who had worked hard for their living—the majority of them in the prime of their youth.
The waist of Europe's population pyramid had simply been scooped out, a great hollow missing from its middle.
"What? You say the tax revenue keeps falling?"
"It's just that… the peasants keep dwindling."
When the tax collector visited the villages, he found nothing but the elderly left behind, unable even to bring in the harvest—the wheat rotting right there in the fields where it had fallen.
"It was only a trickle leaving, was it not?"
"They were young people, you see…"
"Oh…"
A single ship could only carry four or five thousand at a time, so surely the serfs couldn't diminish by that much—that had been the thinking.
And besides, for every soul Daehan carried off, they had quietly paid the nobles a sum in return, like a tax. Many had all but hoped they would take more.
"Order the peasants to bear more children, and quickly!"
"Yes, my lord…"
But even if they bore children now, how long until those children grew and took up the plow?
"For now, raise the taxes."
"Gah—do you mean it?"
"Did that sound like a jest to you?"
And so, on top of everything else—a people who needed to be fed well just to grow were to be squeezed harder still. What, precisely, were the peasants supposed to eat?
Europe's long winter had only just begun.