Where Light Meets Darkness (2)
November 1896.
The royal palanquin left the Russian Legation and returned to Deoksugung Palace at last.
And on the very first day of his homecoming, Gojong's mood curdled.
"Seo Jae-pil—that treacherous little bastard. What's he up to now?"
"He has gathered the merchants of the marketplace, Your Majesty, and launched an organization called the People's Joint Association."
"And what exactly is this organization supposed to do?"
When the eunuch finished his report, Gojong's face crumpled the way a man's does when a fly lands in his coffee mid-sip.
"National independence? Civil rights? The Six Articles of Constitutional Reform? These sons of bitches—"
"Your Majesty! Please compose yourself!"
What a miserable joke this all was.
Having watched from inside the Russian Legation how the Tsar of Russia ruled his empire with absolute, unchecked power, Gojong had wanted to govern the same way.
Which is to say, like the biggest loser among losers worshipping the most feared delinquent in the province.
The way a kid nags his mother into buying him a North Face puffer, he had drained the royal treasury to commission a dazzling set of imperial robes, and he'd been planning to declare himself emperor under a brand-new reign name—the way a nobody picks himself a cool-sounding nickname.
But.
But you bastards went and ruined it all.
After the Gapshin Coup, now again! Again!
The People's Joint Association, which in the original timeline would have erupted only after the founding of the Korean Empire—once Gojong's inferiority complex had been more or less soothed—had instead blown up at precisely the moment his fuse was shortest.
"Arrest every last one of these dogs."
The problem was that this particular loser, the moment his pride was wounded, turned into Lü Bu inside his own household.
"Fellow citizens! What kind of country is this Korea of ours! It is a nation with five hundred years of glorious history that no country on this earth can hope to match!
And yet! Are we to stand by! And fail to protect it! Even with our own two hands?!"
"NO!!!"
"Let us all cry out together! In the name of the twenty million Koreans who have guarded this nation's ancestral shrines for five hundred years!"
"Independence and self-rule! The rights of the people!"
The young Syngman Rhee looked out over the sea of humanity surging before him and screamed himself hoarse all over again.
Kheh, kheheheet! KHAHAHAHA! Yes. This is it. Go mad for me, people. Put your faith in me, this Syngman Rhee, and I will lead you all to glory—!
"U Nam. Is it going well?"
"...Ah. You've come, Teacher."
"I'm sorry about the timing. I had hoped to prepare more thoroughly first, but it seems the hour is pressing."
Seo Jae-pil spoke as though spitting the words out.
"We must reform this country fast enough that citizens take part in politics directly, as they do in the United States. Only then will this land called Joseon even begin to turn over."
That damned Yi Wan-yong.
The man had talked such a dazzling game, but the moment the People's Joint Association came up—civil rights? democracy? hmm, not for me—he'd bolted like a dog with its tail between its legs.
Originally the gathering was meant to take the form of a joint assembly of officials and citizens, with high ministers in attendance—a snapshot of all of Korea standing as one. Instead, judging by how eagerly the man chased his own advancement, he looked like the type who would sell out his country the instant his personal safety was at stake.
When else could constitutional democracy ever take root, if not now, while the crown's authority lay in tatters?
"Seo Jae-pil is right!"
Syngman Rhee nodded along with a broad smile on his face.
And a few days later, he would never smile like that again.
"Ugh... ughh..."
"Hey, you treasonous dog, aren't you going to breathe? We're busy, y'know?"
Syngman Rhee, sprawled face-down with blood dripping from his split mouth, slurred through half-closed eyes.
"Why... why are you doing this. What crime did we, commit."
"Well, well. Look at this one."
He clutched at the jailer's trousers with trembling hands, but all that earned him was another club swung at his head.
The crackdown on the Independence Club and the People's Joint Association was even fiercer than it had been in the original history.
The last remnant of Joseon's civil authority and military power, wielded by Gojong, pointed not at the Japanese troops who had murdered the queen, but absurdly, at the citizens crying out for reform.
Countless people lost their lives in prison.
Syngman Rhee was lucky enough to survive, though only at the cost of half his face being paralyzed.
The Independence Club was dissolved, and The Independent was all but torn out of its founders' hands by the government.
And then—
"What the fuck are you doing here?"
"What does it look like? We're conducting a lawful search, Mr. Philip Jaisohn."
Yi Wan-yong, who had just turned Seo Jae-pil's residence inside out with a squad of royal guards, replied with perfect composure.
"By order of His Majesty the King of Joseon, you are to be deported immediately. And this deportation is permanent."
"Ha."
"You should have known when to rein it in. Democracy? In this Joseon? You've now entangled yourself in treason not once but twice, so even that precious United States citizenship of yours won't serve as much of a shield."
Then—
Yi Wan-yong continued, his hands clasped behind his back.
"Didn't you have a servant? A boy."
"He's still a child."
"Exposed to such reactionary ideas, he's to be pulled up by the roots. That is His Majesty's decree."
"Why? Going to kill him like you killed my family?"
"So what if we are? What are you going to do about it?"
Yi Wan-yong took a single step toward Seo Jae-pil.
"Get out of my Joseon, you Yankee bastard."
So this was the power of an enraged absolute monarch.
Gojong, whom I'd written off as nothing more than a shut-in loser holed up in the Russian Legation, had unleashed a whirlwind that was shredding the Enlightenment faction to pieces.
Syngman Rhee... was he even alive? Did it happen this way in the original history too?
Focus. Thoughts like these were nothing but indulgence right now.
"The road to the Legation is blocked, and so is the road to Incheon. All that's left is the pioneer church in Pyongyang."
Mr. Hulbert pressed a Colt revolver and a silver cross into my hands as he spoke.
"Show this cross and give my name to the American missionaries at the Pyongyang pioneer church. They plan to take you through China and get you out to America.
...I'm ashamed. I'm sorry to entangle a child like you in the affairs of grown men."
"It's all right."
After parting with Mr. Hulbert, I began running for Pyongyang.
Sleep by day, move only by night.
Spend too much money at once and people get suspicious.
Break the banknotes into small bills, and spend them the way you'd buy a cheap snack when you happen to step outside—little by little, here and there.
Keep your clothes as clean as you can, too. The moment you start dressing like a beggar, someone starts wondering, could he be a fugitive?
Why? Because pilots do all of this by default. If you can't put a full spread on target with a sidearm back home, they chew you out for it.
You think you just lie down and die because you got shot down over enemy territory?
After about a month of running like that, I finally managed to cross the Yalu River in the company of a missionary.
"Is it all right for just the two of us to cross?"
"If we mingle with a crowd and somebody reports us, we're finished. Especially with me being a Westerner. Crossing quietly is the safer way. Once we reach Dalian, we'll board a ship there, stop in Beijing, and then on to America."
Three days after we crossed the border.
The missionary and I, riding on horseback, ran into a bandit gang drooling at the mouth.
Seriously, fuck. Why is my life like this.
"Whew. Whew."
"!&*!#!(!*&#"
"The hell are you saying, you chink bastard?"
Keeping it out of sight, I thumbed back the hammer of the revolver I'd hidden between my belongings.
Two at twelve o'clock, two at three, one at seven.
Only one of them was armed with a gun—twelve o'clock, three o'clock, and one more at seven.
The rest were carrying the big dao blades that barbarians lug around in historical dramas.
That was fewer than the six rounds in my revolver, which was something to be grateful for.
"Tae-o, my boy. Let's not—let's try to settle this peaceably. They might be, ah, honest self-defense militia, you see? Uh, dzeh-za-hao?"
At the missionary's Chinese—learned together back in Pyongyang—the mounted bandits just snickered.
"Gak!"
"Missionary!"
"R-run, boy. Lord, I pray You take this little lamb—"
The light went out of the missionary's eyes as the blade sank into his belly.
The revolver was in my hand that same instant.
Where to start?
Twelve o'clock. Seven o'clock. Three o'clock—in that order. Take the front ones first. Fire.
BANG!
The crack of the shot carried the head clean off the one at twelve o'clock, who'd been sitting on his horse twirling his whistle over a rifle.
Next.
Seven o'clock. No time to even line up the sights.
BANG!
Just as he brought his rifle's sights up to his eye and began squeezing the trigger, my bullet tore through his lower right abdomen.
"Fuck."
My hand hurt like hell. Trying to fire a pistol with the strength of an elementary schooler, my stance collapsed at every shot.
Change of target. The one at three o'clock with the rifle was too far to shoot without aiming. The one at twelve o'clock—the one with the blade in the missionary's back—was close.
My eyes met his.
Whereupon the bastard gave up on the stubborn knife stuck in the body and yanked a stiletto from his belt instead.
"Gaoli bangzi!"
"You chink son of a bitch!"
BANG!
Point-blank—a distance I could hit with my eyes closed—the whites of his eyes rolled back and he toppled toward me.
I dipped my right shoulder to take his body, then heaved my left shoulder up, using the momentum to pivot ninety degrees to the right and drop him like a shield.
CRACK-CRACK!!!
The bullets the three o'clock man fired at me buried themselves in his own comrade's corpse instead.
"*!@&#(!#!!"
Now there was time to aim. I steadied my breathing and fired between the fallen bandits' bodies.
With a crack of displaced air, the shooter at three o'clock crumpled mid-reload.
That left—
SMACK!
Fuck. It hurts.
Something hot ran down my left cheek. Had the pommel of a blade caught my head?
A blade came down at me as I lay sprawled in the dirt. There was no time to think—I rolled sideways, and the ground where I'd been caved in with a crunch.
I scooped up a handful of earth with my left hand and threw it in his face.
"#$&(@$!!!"
"Drop dead, you fucker!"
Bracing the pistol on my dirt-fouled left hand, my right—still trembling from the recoil—pulled the trigger one more time.
BANG!
The last bandit went down, blood gushing from his throat, onto the dry, cracked earth.
Dizzy. I couldn't afford to lose any more blood.
I flung the revolver to the ground, picked up the dagger the bandit had dropped, and tore at my sleeve.
Winding the long strip of cloth around my head slowed the dizziness somewhat, but at this rate it was only a matter of time.
Right. If I took one of the horses the bandits had ridden and galloped for the coast, surely something—something—would turn up.
I got one foot into the stirrup, and promptly collapsed.
"Life, is, such, fucking, shit."
Far off in the distance, past my slowly closing eyes, something hazy was drawing closer—but I passed out before I could make out what it was.
"So the gunfire came from around here?"
"Yes, Commander."
"Hey, Commander! Look—free horses over there! Free horses! ...GYAAAAHHH!!!!"
Having socked his subordinate once, Zhang Zuolin socked him again and spoke.
"You little bastard. Do we look like bandits to you? We're a self-defense corps, a self-defense corps. We're not some swarm of locusts roaming from place to place—we've got homes, wives and children. Men like us don't go chasing after danger."
After the Qing had been slaughtered in the Sino-Japanese War, this Manchuria had been suffering under the dark evolution of its stragglers—soldiers who couldn't return home and devolved into roving packs of bandits and brigands.
If the closing days of the Wild West were drawing near in America right now, then Manchuria was in the full glory days of Manchuria-Western.
Every village was organizing its own self-defense corps, and the merchant guilds were sponsoring them—a reality from which even America's constitutional amendments could stand to take a lesson.
Zhang Zuolin's self-defense corps leaned a lot closer to banditry than to self-defense, but well...
"Still, if the owners of those horses are all dead, there's not much we can do about it, is there?"
"True enough. Even the life of an ox or a horse is a precious thing bestowed by the Jade Emperor himself. Can't leave them to rot out here in the wilderness."
Zhang Zuolin and his men chuckled heh-heh-heh and urged their horses forward.
"Hot damn! They're all dead, sure enough!"
"Looks like they tried to rob some travelers and it turned into mutual slaughter. Idiots."
The men dismounted, nudged the corpses with the toes of their boots, and gathered up the orphaned weapons one by one onto their saddles.
Zhang Zuolin walked up to a revolver that gleamed unusually bright, bent down, and picked it up.
Far too clean and well-kept to have belonged to bandits. Then it belonged to the ambushed travelers?
"Still warm, this."
He swung open the revolver and checked the cylinder, and before he knew it, the words left his mouth.
"The hell is this."
Five of the six rounds in the cylinder bore hammer strikes.
Five bandits shot. That wasn't the work of any ordinary marksman.
Zhang Zuolin lifted his head and scanned the surroundings.
"If the Westerner had fired it, the distance between this gun and the bodies would be far too great."
Which meant.
He walked over to the boy lying face-down in front of his snorting, tail-swaying horse, and prodded him a few times with the toe of his boot.
The boy's hand twitched, clenching a fistful of dirt.
"...Heh. He's alive."
Zhang Zuolin broke into a wide grin.
"He'll make a fine self-defense trooper. Welcome to voluntary enlistment."