Winter in Europe
Even after the young population of Europe had been scooped out in great handfuls, there were still plenty of young people left on the continent. The trouble was that so many of them weren't quite whole.
"Ahhh... I don't feel like working."
"Maybe we just call it a day, head in early, and play hanafuda?"
"Why not?"
Among the games Daehan had exported to Europe was the flower card game — a matching game of illustrated cards.
Tak! Tak! Tak!
In farmhouses across Europe, the cheerful clatter of wooden cards rang out, but the faces around the tables were rotting away by the day.
"Damn it..."
"I've been cleaned out."
"Right! Everyone owes me a fistful of wheat each!"
Where there were winners, there had to be losers — that much was inevitable. Gambling was, by its very nature, a game that left everyone miserable except one lucky soul.
With the young men like this, the harvest shrank with every passing day.
"I'm sorry. This is all we have for this year."
"What is this? It's far too little!"
The tax collector had come to gather the levy, but the wheat was pitifully scarce. He drew no separate salary of his own, so there was precious little he could skim off for himself.
"Well, nothing to be done. I'm taking it all."
When the collector calmly declared he would take everything, the village chief's face went blank for a moment.
"What? Then what are we supposed to eat?"
"What do you think? You should have farmed harder!"
"No! You're telling us all to die?"
When the chief exploded in anger, the portly collector felt a flicker of fear. He had two guards with him, yes — but there were dozens of men in the village, weren't there?
"Then hand over a pretty young girl to present to the lord, and we'll call it even."
"Ah..."
The collector intended to take the girl somewhere, sell her off, and turn her into coin. And the chief, for his part, reasoned that with food already short, one less mouth in the village wouldn't hurt.
"Just give me some time..."
"I'm a busy man. Make it quick."
"Yes, sir."
And so the tax collector left the village, dragging along a seven-year-old child who clung to her parents, weeping and screaming.
With outrages like this a constant of daily life, and plague spreading on top of it all, the minds of Europe's people were slowly curdling.
And then, in a remote farmhouse deep in the countryside.
"I'm hungry..."
"Mmm..."
"Daddy... do we have anything to eat?"
"Hmm?"
A family was starving. They had gone hungry for so long that the man's eyes had taken on a slick, yellowish sheen — something about it felt just slightly wrong.
The man stared at his own child with that strange, unblinking gaze.
"Honey?"
"What do you think?"
"Ah..."
Husband and wife conversed with nothing but their eyes. Before long, tears were streaming down both their faces — while drool ran from the corners of their mouths.
And that evening.
Bubble, bubble...
"Oh, that smells good."
"Heh heh heh."
"Hihihi."
Meat of no clear origin bubbled away in the family's pot, and the eyes of the couple watching it were somehow, terribly wrong. Like a mind that had simply broken.
An old man lay prostrate on the palace floor before Felipe III of Spain.
"Your Majesty! I beg to speak, and I stake my very life on these words!"
"Hmm? Your life, no less? Very well, speak."
Felipe's face was cool with indifference. It was only because the old man had pestered him so persistently that he had come out to attend to state business at all — and the moment he arrived, this was what he got.
Unlike his father Felipe II, who had built Europe's first true absolutist monarchy, the man was genuinely lazy and extravagantly self-indulgent.
"You must curb the nobles' extravagance and secure food to feed the people!"
"I'm sure everyone will be just fine if we leave well enough alone."
Curb the nobles' extravagance? Felipe's face, already sour at having come out at all, curdled into open distaste.
"Hundreds of Your Majesty's subjects starve to death each day! If the nobility would only rein in their luxuries, not a single commoner need starve!"
"Oh, come now. How much can a few nobles possibly spend? You're dismissed."
"Your Majesty!"
"There, there. I said you're dismissed, didn't I?"
"..."
"Tch. Fine, I'll go myself."
The old minister didn't budge an inch, as if genuinely prepared to offer up his neck on the spot. Felipe, thoroughly fed up, stalked out of his office.
His destination was a lounge that doubled as a secondary workspace.
Clunk. Glug, glug, glug.
"Ahhh~ Pomegranate liquor truly does have the finest color and aroma!"
He poured from one of the many bottles crowding his desk — every last one of them imported from Daehan.
Click. Chik.
"Phew~ What a marvelous little invention. They really do make things beautifully, don't they?"
No longer needing to strike flint or hunt down a candle flame as in the old days, a smile spread across his face.
"And how on earth does anyone expect me to quit this stuff, really..."
Whether people starved to death outside the palace walls was of no interest to the nobility whatsoever. All that mattered was the liquor and tobacco going into their own mouths.
And how unspeakably savage the hungry had become out there.
People ate people. And to keep the number of mouths down, some killed their own children, or their own parents.
"I trust everyone has been keeping well."
"Getting by, getting by."
"Ho ho ho."
Ever since the formation of the alliance, the European powers kept permanent representatives stationed at the Holy See. Something about weathering the crisis together, and so on and so forth.
Strip away the diplomatic varnish, and what it amounted to was this: stop feasting alone and share what you have with the rest of us.
"Shouldn't we be dividing up Africa?"
"How so?"
"We need a great many slaves."
"We're rather short ourselves..."
With serfs dwindling, the plan was simply to seize slaves from somewhere — anywhere — and put them to work. The easiest mark was the African peoples. The natives of the New World were far too fierce; more of them died in capture than were ever brought back alive.
"We're thinking of forming a company and pushing east. What say the rest of you?"
"Then we'd best form one as well, it seems."
"Quite. We should have one too."
Life had grown unbearable for Europeans, and so they began in earnest to prepare for the great work of devouring other nations.
"What if we partition Africa into fixed zones, each party agreeing not to encroach on the others?"
"That favors Spain far too much... You already hold so many colonies as it is."
"Ahem. We were the ones who ventured out first, so what can be done about it?"
It was a gracefully wrapped version of if you're that bitter, you should have gotten off your backsides and expanded sooner. They scowled, of course — but Spain was still the mightiest power in Europe, and there was nothing to be done about it.
After all, Spain was the one holding back the monstrous Ottoman Empire.
"Well, there are still plenty of open lands. Do your best with them."
"Then let us agree: no raids, no attacks upon one another. Shall we?"
"Surely that goes without saying?"
How very convenient of you all. Every man seated at that table was already eyeing his neighbors, waiting for the first chance to snatch something away. Wipe out an entire population and there'd be no witnesses left — a perfect crime, no? And then you simply pin it on somebody else.
On, say, a place like Daehan.
"By the way, expanding into India is rather difficult, isn't it?"
"It is. Daehan has the sea routes locked down tight — ships we send simply never come back."
It wasn't India, exactly. Daehan's ships plied the waters off northeastern Africa, and vessels began vanishing one by one from those very seas.
"Ha... so it isn't just us."
"There's nothing to be done about that region. You'd have to cross an ocean's worth of open water — coming back alive is next to impossible."
"Daehan sails straight through the open sea, though. Does anyone know how they manage it?"
The Europeans did try navigating by the stars, plotting their position on the open water. But it was harder and far less accurate than they'd hoped. The reason was simple: they lacked marine chronometers. In Daehan, such timepieces were issued to sailors alone and managed under strict control.
"That's one problem, but I'd give anything for ships that move without sails."
"Has any nation managed to pry the secret out of them?"
"..."
Suddenly, the whole room became a gathering of thieves caught with their mouths full of honey. Everyone knew a little of the truth. They had all seen those ships loaded down with mountains of wood and coal, so they'd worked out that much — the ships burned something to move. The problem was what came after. Boil water, and then... how, exactly, did that push a ship forward?
They'd managed to hoist weights with the steam, and that much worked. But with their metalworking skills so sorely lacking, progress had ground nearly to a halt.
"Hah... We really should have seized one of their ships when we had the chance..."
"Ahem."
"Do you intend to try again?"
"We have neither the money for new ships nor the shipwrights to build them."
Hadn't all of Europe reeled from that single naval encounter? The aftershocks still hadn't faded, and even thinking back on it now made people shudder.
"Africa it is, then. Nothing else is quite so manageable..."
"The Ottomans hold the north, so we'll have to work around the southern coast."
"I must ask that none of you intrude upon lands claimed by Spain."
And so, in earnest, the nations of Europe began founding companies one after another and setting sail for Africa.
Meanwhile, with none of the European great powers having ever pushed into Southeast Asia as they might have in another history, that region was a tangle of dozens of kingdoms squabbling over control of the seas — while in India, the Mughal Empire was straining every sinew to unify the subcontinent.
Amsterdam, Netherlands. The Rapenburg Shipyard.
Clang, tap, clang, tap.
Even in the depths of winter, with a bitter wind cutting through the yard, workers sweated over the building of ships.
"Ha... this is brutal."
"I'd give anything just to eat my fill."
"Well, the sooner we finish these ships and get out to sea, the sooner something comes of it, no?"
Sailors had been roped into the work as well, and the yard was in an uproar. So many ships had been lost all at once that recovery was achingly slow. And across every field and hillside in Europe, timber had become nearly impossible to find.
"Sail to Africa? They say if you go down south and bring back black folk, it turns a profit."
"Profit, nothing. They ought to be put to work farming before anything else."
So many of the Netherlands' young people had emigrated away that once the older generation began dying off, farms could no longer find hands to work them. And the country wasn't exactly blessed with broad lands to begin with — which meant, like it or not, they had to build ships and strike out to sea.
"If there are no farmers, you'd think they'd at least cut our taxes..."
"Right? Fewer people, and they raise the taxes anyway."
"Madmen, the lot of them..."
Shipbuilding, seasoned liberally with self-pity.
"Grub's up!"
Off to one side, someone came dragging a barrel along on a cart.
Clatter.
"Oh..."
The soup ladled into their bowls was thin beyond thinning — practically water.
"This is all there is?"
"Don't like it, hand it back."
"I'll keep it."
Then, from the other end, each man collected a single slab of rock-hard bread.
Tak tak tak — CRACK.
"Christ... did the stone just break?"
He'd swung the bread down against a nearby rock to split it, and the rock was what gave way — a genuinely wondrous phenomenon. Which was, of course, precisely why the soup existed. You had to soak the bread until it was at least soft enough to chew.
"Things were better back when they handed out free soup down at the harbor."
"Free soup, my ass — that stuff was poison."
"Haah..."
This yard, too, had lost workers to emigration, and it was one of the places where Daehan had once handed out potato porridge, freely and for a long while.
"Should've just emigrated back then..."
"Oh, come off it. For all we know they're all dead over there."
"Were those people really demons?"
"Who's to say... Well, no one's ever come back, have they?"
Even now, the people of Europe still chose to believe the words of the Holy See and the nobility. And apparently it never once occurred to them that no one had come back simply because life over there was good.
Creeeak.
"Agh—"
"Hey. Take it easy with that."
Somewhere in the yard, a man was eating his bread and making a truly horrifying sound with it. Not that anyone could afford to give it up — this was all there was.
"Hoo... We'd best get these ships finished. But when will they ever be done?"
Empty bellies made for leaden limbs, and leaden limbs made for idleness. Men gathered in great numbers to build ships, yet the grim reality was that almost nothing ever got finished and launched.
"Wouldn't we eat better out at sea, though? We could fish, at least."
So they clung to the hope that once they reached open water, they could at least catch fish to fill their stomachs.
"And what would you use for bait? Planning to scrape off bits of your own flesh?"
"Haah..."
As ever, reality refused to be kind.
Still, slowly and stubbornly, the ships did go up keel by keel. And in them, the Dutch put to sea carrying barely half a month's worth of provisions — their scheme being to somehow scavenge supplies from whatever land they sighted along the way.