Chapter Text
Acting like a monkey was one of His Majesty’s tamer qualities—three years ago, I found him in a courtesan parlour for the first time with a friend.
The King had been oddly subdued that day, affecting perfect posture without needing to be told, and so eerily quiet that he did not talk back to me even once. Concerned, I had lingered on the palace grounds after the shift change, thinking that His Majesty might shortly find himself besieged by illness, and so I let myself back into his hall to recommend that he take a preventative tonic.
As I stepped into the building, Eunuch Kang spotted me and yelped, then immediately dropped to the floor and knelt his head to me.
“Of course,” I sighed and swiped a hand down my face, “I should have known. Where is he?”
My incorrigible nephew had had the sense, at least, not to head to Oktajeong—he had selected another parlour outside of the city core, and to his credit, thought to find robes made of materials a low-ranking nobleman might wear, instead of donning himself in any obvious finery.
When I slid open the door he did not even look up, most likely thinking I was another courtesan come to join the festivities. I shut the door behind me and waited another five seconds, during which time he upended an overfull teacup of soju into his mouth.
“Yi Yung Jun,” I said calmly, just loud enough to be heard over the din.
Yi Yung Jun dropped the cup which fell against the table with a resonant thud before rolling onto the floor, and froze. “I think you have the wrong room,” my unruly Yung Jun suggested weakly, “Try the one next door?”
I gestured for the workers to exit, while his friend ducked his head and hid his face in his hat.
“What do you think will happen to the country,” I shook my head after the room had been emptied, “if the King is found dead in a back alley?”
“I wouldn’t worry about that,” Yung Jun could not hold back on smiling even as I was in the middle of reprimanding him, “seeing as I have Joseon’s fiercest warrior with me.”
The friend of his tried to scoot behind him and I narrowed my eyes before I stalked over to confront this delinquent that dared to aid and abet His Majesty’s misdemeanour—
“Uncle,” the friend peeked up at me with a tense, sheepish grin, “I wouldn’t let anything happen to orabeoni.”
I will be honest—it is possible that in that moment, I may have had a minor attack of apoplexy.
——
Last year, His Majesty picked up the most irritating of his father’s habits—showing up at my home unannounced and uninvited.
One night as I had just finished changing into my nightclothes, I heard footsteps outside and reached for my sword before my front door swung open and the King let himself into my house with an expectant expression.
“Uncle,” he held out his arms to me, smiling with too much teeth, “Did you miss me?”
I set my sword down on a nearby piece of furniture before tucking my fingers under my armpits. “How can I miss someone who never blesses me with his absence?”
My presumptuous nephew simply laughed, stepping in close and wrapping his arms around me despite my obvious rejection of his request to be held.
I rolled my eyes but allowed him to cling until he was bored, which was very shortly. “You will find that there are no kisaeng here,” I sighed quietly, “nor am I keen to share what little liquor I keep around.”
“Eun Sol was curious about your house,” His Majesty stated innocently, “She said it wasn’t fair that I had seen it and she hadn’t.”
“—Eun Sol?” I blinked in surprise, too nonplussed to default to my niece’s title, “What—?”
The King raised his eyebrows slowly with his mouth carefully held level, and pointed behind me.
I turned my head to find Her Highness the Royal Princess of Joseon standing no more than an arm’s length away from me, dressed from head to toe in pitch black robes like that of an assassin, her face devoid of any discernible emotion.
“Hello uncle,” she offered when my words failed me.
The pretty little Princess Yeonghye has blossomed into a lovely lady, and even though at most angles, she is the splitting image of her mother—to the point where at times I cannot bear to look at her for too long—something in the way she moves is not unlike a tiger: her movements careful and swift, deadly and deliberate and too eerily quiet.
That, combined with the way she holds her face sometimes—her mild, measured smiles, a strangely piercing gaze as well as a hidden espièglerie she shows only to those closest to her remind me so profoundly of a man I never thought I’d miss, much less this damn much.
——
It has been over a month, since the Queen Dowager has ended her regency and the babe that saved me from myself just by being without ever knowing he had done so has ruled our country on his own. My little nephew is now twenty, a man—only two years younger than when the late King had become his father.
Last week, he asked to visit Ganghwa Island; he wanted to see the place where his father had spent his formative years.
“It will not be pleasant,” I had informed him gently, as I knew intimately what both poverty and exile were like.
“I don’t expect it to be,” His Majesty had smiled wryly.
So two and a half days ago we set out on our trip; he requested that his humble uncle come along, instead of his personal bodyguard—the Royal Princess Yeonghye, who now insists to be referred to only as, at least during the hours she is on duty, Captain Yi.
On the short ride to the island, the King spent most of our time on the little boat leisurely circling the deck, clearly taking great pleasure in his rare chance to people-watch without being noticed. Dressed in the rough cotton of commoners’ robes, the only thing that gave my noble nephew away was his cocksure comportment—and the fact that I was trailing behind him.
“Walk next to me,” he hissed under his breath when I kept myself several paces away out of habit, “Someone is going to notice you’re following me like a dog.”
Right before we docked he fell oddly quiet, leaning his elbows on the taffrail and peering pensively down into the sea.
“Uncle,” my little prince who was now the King asked me abruptly as he tilted his face up to scan his eyes over the horizon, “When Father was my age—what was he like?”
I studied his face briefly, noting not for the first time that somehow, other than a few mannerisms here and there, he in fact looked nothing like either of his parents. I would be suspicious, if I did not know how devoted they had been to each other—and he was certainly not mine, as much as those vicious rumours would have once liked everyone to think.
When I didn’t answer immediately, he glanced over and smiled in that way of his that always flirts with impudence: one side of his mouth higher than the other, cheeks rounded and plump, and beaming all the way up to his eyes—half-narrowed as if he were looking right into the sun.
I realized in that moment that despite their differences, the answer for the father and the son was the same.
“Incandescent,” I concluded.
——
Late yesterday afternoon, we arrived on the island and His Majesty insisted on investigating the market famed in the port town. Enamoured by the size of the purple turnips common to the area, he had me purchase an armful and find an inn that would present him with their best recipes.
While the dishes were certainly enjoyable, I do not think I would like to have turnip again for quite some time.
After our evening meal, His Majesty and I made our way to the austere compound that his father had called his home for the better part of a decade before becoming King. It surprised me, how well-kept it was, seeing as it had been effectively abandoned for over twenty years—apparently the locals had decided after the Woodcutter Prince of Ganghwa Island had been enthroned that his previous residence was something of a historical landmark.
Still, I could tell that my little nephew was uncomfortable—he made no disparaging remarks, but his eyes flitted from place to place and the asceticism of it evidently shocked him.
“Uncle,” he inquired carefully, “Do many of the people live like this? Or is it just those in exile?”
I thought of my own childhood home, a one-room hut that made the building we were standing in then look like a minor palace—a room that was never warm, never dry, but possessed something the current attraction lacked: a constant fetid stench that I still sometimes smell on the nights when sleep is nowhere to be found.
“Some do,” I said with slight hesitation but full honesty, because I knew he would not want me to ever lie to him, “But most make do with even less luxury.”
“Why?” His Majesty said after a long moment of consideration, sounding somewhere in between indignant and dismayed, “Why is it that way, when it shouldn’t be?”
“Those who have in abundance,” the image of Kim Jwa Geun materialized behind my eyes, “are often reluctant to share their bounty with others. They will do anything to ensure that those who suffer scarcity never catch up to them—most often with malicious means, including taking from those who have very little to begin with.”
——
This morning, we took a long walk along the vast expanse of tidal mudflats lining the coast. His Majesty headed all the way out in the direction of the water until his ankles were submerged, having chased a white-naped crane all the way there for the alleged offence of heckling him until it flew off into the distance.
When I caught up to him he trudged out of the water and laid right down in the muck with an exaggerated groan of exhaustion, closing his eyes and going silent for a good minute. When he opened his eyes again, he had an oddly serious, distant expression.
“The day Father died—,” the King stared up into the clouds and sighed, “you said to me that people have been rotten since the beginning of time.”
“I did,” I nodded, lifting my gaze to the mountains instead.
“Uncle,” His Majesty sat up and kept his eyes on where the sea met the sky, “How long will they be like that?”
“Until the end of the world,” I shook my head.
“I have until the end of the world then,” His Majesty huffed a quiet laugh.
“To do what?” I looked back down in surprise.
“To change it.”
***
THE ERA OF KING YEONJO’S DIRECT RULE (1872 - 1912)
King Yeonjo the Compassionate, born Yi Yung Jun (1852 - 1934) took the throne upon his father’s sudden death in 1864, with his mother behind him as regent. When he came of age in 1872, the Queen Dowager relinquished her authority and Yeonjo set about to revolutionize the nation.
His first act of sovereignty was to appoint his younger sister, Royal Princess Yeonghye as the Captain of the Royal Guard, making her the first woman in Korean history to serve as the King’s personal bodyguard. She kept her post until she retired in 1899, and never married as far as records show.
The firstborn son of King Cheoljong the Great and his Queen Consort Cheorin (later Queen Dowager Myeongsun), Yeonjo was said to have struggled with the duties of his station in childhood, but eventually came to his own as a just, benevolent ruler who kept the interests of the people, from the nobles to the commoners, in mind.
In 1876, just four years into his solo reign, Yeonjo established a system of constitutional monarchy—the Republic of Korea that still stands today. He passed the throne onto his only child, his son (King Rokjong, born Yi Hong Bok in 1885), after his 60th birthday in 1912, and elected to spend most of his remaining days in a modest villa on Ganghwa Island instead of a palace.
On the morning of his passing, the diary entry he had the representative from the Royal Secretariat transcribe was thus:
“Last night—I dreamt of something very strange.
That the sun came down from the sky, and the world that you and I know was swallowed up in flames, until all was nothing but ash. But I blinked, and from the ash another world sprouted as rapidly as bamboo.
This new world looked just like ours, as if the great conflagration had not happened at all—except everything was just a bit brighter, a bit livelier, a bit lovelier. This world went on and on and on, and in it the people lived free from suffering and sorrow; they found no need unmet and no reason to cause harm.
It was as if the sun had wed the earth, and begat a gentle, loving, world without end.”
***
— Fin.