Chapter 135: Now to the Palace [2] Yoshitoshi.
By a strange coincidence, it was the same name as someone Kanghyeok knew of. He had never seen him in person, but if the Yoshitoshi mentioned by the samurai he had met at the tavern near Hanyang was the same one, then it had to be that man.
He must mean Yoshitoshi, the one who came as an envoy.
Come to think of it, for a Japanese man, he was wearing quite a lot of Joseon-style clothing. Especially those shoes made of black deer leather. Those were surely something he had received from the court.
Why is he here? Anyway...
For now, he was not an enemy. There was no knowing in what form they might face each other in only a year or two.
After jumping down from his horse, Kanghyeok strode up to the man. That was only possible because he had Yeoni and Makbong flanking him on either side. It probably would not happen, but even if the man suddenly lunged at him, would they not be able to deal with it somehow? If it came to it, he could always smack him with the bag he was carrying.
"W-who... who are you!"
Sayaga shouted with a flustered look. As expected, he did not swing his sword or anything like that. He merely stepped farther back.
There was only one thing he did that fell outside Kanghyeok's expectations, and that was the language that came out of his mouth.
"You speak Korean?"
Kanghyeok stared at Sayaga with a rather surprised look. At first he had been quite startled, but when he thought about it, it was not really all that shocking.
No, that's not right. Yoshitoshi has already been in Hanyang for a year by now... if he's clever, of course he would have learned it.
Had not Kanghyeok himself come here and learned classical Chinese characters?
Even while Kanghyeok was making these guesses on his own, Sayaga had not lowered his guard. That was because Kanghyeok and his group did not look ordinary at all. Where in the world did people suddenly come charging in broad daylight with swords in hand? At least in Joseon, he had hardly seen such a thing.
"You still have not answered who you are."
Now that he noticed, Sayaga's Korean was quite fluent. It was on an entirely different level from Kanghyeok's Japanese, which he had at best picked up through a monitor screen.
"Ah. I'm a man named Baek Kanghyeok..."
"Baek Kanghyeok?"
"At present, I hold the post of Jikjang of the Royal Medical Bureau."
"The Royal Medical Bureau... then do you know Heo Jun?"
"Know him? He's one of my old friends."
Even as he said it, he felt a slight pang of guilt. To introduce himself so casually as a friend of Heo Jun, who could be called the greatest physician of the Joseon era.
Well, it's true.
He rationalized it quickly enough.
In any case, the moment he said he knew Heo Jun, some of Sayaga's wariness eased. Sliding the long sword he had been holding back into its sheath, he asked another question.
"I feel as though I've heard your name before. Are you perhaps joining this diplomatic mission?"
It seemed this man called Sayaga was quite sharp. There were nearly four hundred people in the mission, yet he knew Kanghyeok's name was among them.
Then again, that's probably why his Korean is that good.
Admiring the samurai inwardly, Kanghyeok nodded.
"I'm on my way to Hanyang now to join the mission."
"I see. Then please speak more casually. You saved my life. Thank you."
With a bow of the head, Sayaga expressed his thanks for being rescued. It seemed some of his doubts about Kanghyeok and his group had been resolved.
"Sure. But..."
Now it was Kanghyeok's turn to voice his questions. Sayaga's own actions were every bit as suspicious as Kanghyeok's.
"Sayaga, why are you here?"
Was it not strange? This village might have been near Hanyang, but it was still a considerable distance to come on foot. He must have walked at least half a day to get here, and carrying that long sword the whole time.
"Ah."
"Ah?"
"Well..."
Sayaga scratched the back of his head like someone who found the answer difficult to give. He stood like that for a while, then awkwardly reached into his clothes.
"You bastard!"
Yeoni flew forward in an instant and grabbed his wrist.
That made the blankly standing Kanghyeok even more startled. No matter how he looked at him, the present Sayaga had not seemed like someone about to attack, so Kanghyeok had truly been caught off guard.
"Ugh."
Of course, Sayaga, whose wrist had actually been twisted, was no less shocked. Something dropped from his hand to the ground with a thud as it bent in an unnatural direction. Naturally, it was not anything dangerous-looking. It was just a book. And not even some kind of sword manual, but an utterly ordinary one.
"Uh..."
At this point even Yeoni, who had launched the sudden assault, felt awkward. She hurriedly picked up the fallen book.
"I'm sorry. I thought..."
"No, no. I was the one who acted thoughtlessly."
Even after being the one attacked, Sayaga only laughed awkwardly.
What kind of broad-minded Japanese man was this?
Kanghyeok felt the image he had built up of the Japanese beginning to shake. Even Yeoju, who ordinarily regarded the Japanese as mortal enemies, seemed to find Sayaga unusual.
"It looks like there's more inside?"
"Yes, that's right. Haha."
Inside Sayaga's clothes were quite a few more books besides that one. Kanghyeok had not counted them properly, but at a glance there seemed to be around ten.
So that's why his upper body looked so bulky.
Most of them were the sort of books Kanghyeok would never read, even at a glance. There were no small number of titles whose names alone made his head ache, like Essentials of Learning for Sagehood, Key to Dispelling Ignorance, and Questions and Answers at Dongho.
"D-did you come all the way here just to get these?"
"Yes, that's right. The scholar over there kindly said he would give them to me as gifts..."
Sayaga pointed toward a scholar taking shelter inside the tavern. He was an elderly old man, but even at a glance he looked like the kind who had done quite a lot of studying. From the look in his eyes alone, he was different from Kanghyeok, who was more like an idle loafer of the marketplace.
Come to think of it, Sayaga's eyes were not so different either. He felt fundamentally different from the Japanese raiders who had run wild with swords in Eotan-myeon.
Confucian learning really isn't something you can dismiss entirely.
Whatever else, did it not at least teach the basic proprieties and manners a person ought to observe? Though the problem was that it emphasized only those things too much. Still, it was a hundred times better than living like those Japanese raiders, savage and ignorant.
"While my lord was staying in Hanyang, there were various gatherings he had occasion to attend, and that was where I came to meet that elder. He gave me guidance in Neo-Confucianism, which I had been studying on my own, and now he said he would even give me books, so I came..."
"And in the middle of that, a bandit gang showed up?"
"Yes. It was only thanks to Scholar Baek arriving when he did. Otherwise, everyone here might have suffered terribly."
"Hmm."
Kanghyeok had never felt favorably toward Japan to begin with. In fact, he had felt that way even before coming to Joseon.
I'm a descendant of an independence activist, in my own way.
His great-great-grandfather had been a man named Baek Chowol, one of the intellectuals who planned the famous March First Movement. Since he died in prison in 1944, that meant he never lived to see liberation.
My father must have told me that story countless times.
Kanghyeok remembered it as something close to indoctrination. On top of that, the incident at Eotan-myeon had piled onto it, driving his feelings toward Japan to the extreme.
But what about this man called Sayaga?
In truth, when the bandits attacked earlier, he could have run away if he wanted to. Both his legs were sound, and the martial skill he possessed was not poor either. The bandits probably would not have chased down a fully armed man like him anyway. And yet he had risked his life to fight back, and as a result had protected everyone here.
So not all Japanese are bad after all.
Thinking that, Kanghyeok felt strangely complicated, because before long, they would become people who had to cross blades.
"What is it?"
"It's nothing. Nothing."
There would be no point in saying such things out loud. Kanghyeok simply waved a hand and changed the subject.
"Then you're heading back to Hanyang now, right?"
"Yes. My lord will be waiting."
"Then let's go together. At this rate we'll be late."
"Yes."
Fortunately, nothing else happened after that. Thanks to that, Kanghyeok got to talk with Sayaga about all sorts of things, and the more he learned, the more substantial a man Sayaga turned out to be.
But what Kanghyeok liked even more than that was Sayaga's attitude toward Joseon.
"You were interested in Joseon to begin with?"
"Yes. Frankly speaking, Japan still falls very short in many ways. They reach for their swords at the slightest thing... compared to that, how developed Joseon is."
This was the Korean Wave he had only heard about, right here in front of him. Sayaga seemed to admire and love Joseon even more than Kanghyeok did.
"Is that so?"
"Haha. Since Scholar lives only in Joseon, you don't really know. Once you go to Japan, you'll see just how stark the cultural difference is."
"Hearing you say that makes me really not want to go to Japan."
"Even so, you must go. You are a man acting under orders, are you not?"
"Yes. So tell me something good too."
"Something good... hmm."
Holding his chin, Sayaga sank into thought for a moment.
What kind of person took this long just to say one good thing about his own country?
It seemed he truly did not think much of Japan.
After remaining in thought for quite a while, Sayaga finally spoke.
"If you go to Tsushima, you'll be able to eat all the seafood you want."
"Well, it's an island, so of course. Isn't there anything else good?"
"Hmm. I'm not sure."
"What do you mean, not sure? Is there really that little? I doubt it."
No matter how uncivilized it might have been, did it not possess enough national strength to cross the sea and invade Joseon? It had to have some strengths. Otherwise, it could not have devoured Joseon so quickly within such a short span of time.
"Ah."
After agonizing over it again for quite a while, Sayaga clapped his hands. Then, tilting his head, he began giving a lengthy explanation.
"It's a little hard to explain in words."
"What is it?"
"You can think of it as a kind of small cannon. And by small, I mean small enough for a person to hold in both hands."
At those words, Dolseok, who had been silently listening the whole time, cut in. One of the things he was most proud of in his life was that he had seen an actual cannon with his own eyes. It had happened when one made in Hanyang was being moved through Suwon to Jeolla-do, and because Dolseok had happened to be accompanying Seungmun at the time, he had been able to go see it. He had never forgotten the grandeur of that cannon.
"For heaven's sake. A cannon's still a cannon, no matter how small. How could a person carry it?"
"It's true..."
"How can that be possible, young master? He's a total swindler. I've seen a cannon before..."
Of course, Kanghyeok knew very well what Sayaga was trying to describe.
A matchlock.
The Japanese weapon that ranked above long spears, long swords, and paired blades as their greatest armament. One of the reasons the Joseon army collapsed so suddenly in the early stages of war.
It was hardly common to get a chance to hear about the matchlock from the mouth of a Japanese man himself. So Kanghyeok smacked Dolseok on the back of the head to shut him up.
"Quiet, you brat."
"Ow. You're hitting me again?"
"Sayaga, tell me about that can... no, that 'small cannon.'"
"Yes. As I said, you can think of it as a cannon small enough to hold in your hands. Of course, its power cannot compare with a real cannon... but even so, it is extremely difficult to deal with. Even a highly skilled samurai often ends up falling to a mere foot soldier carrying one."
"I see. Would it be possible to see one in person?"
Kanghyeok cautiously sounded Sayaga out. In Kanghyeok's mind, the matchlock was a kind of strategic weapon currently held by Japan. But Sayaga answered as if it were no big deal at all.
"Of course. If you stop by Tsushima, I'll show you. You can even fire one yourself."
"Would that really be all right?"
"Of course. There are a great many of them. I have two myself."
"Huh... thank you."
"I'm the one who should be thanking you. If not for Scholar, I might never have seen my lord again."
"You mean... Lord So Yoshitoshi?"
"Yes."
Sayaga answered that way, then suddenly looked at Kanghyeok as though remembering something.
"Ah, right. I heard from Heo Jun that Scholar Baek is a truly distinguished physician."
"Well, something like that."
"In that case, would it be possible for you to examine my lord?"
"My lord? Why?"
"He has had a chronic illness for a very long time... but no physician has been able to determine the cause."
"Hmm. Very well. If time permits, I'll take a look... though first I'll have to go to the banquet—"
."
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