Chapter 233 — You Returned Well. I Feel as Though I Have Gained a Heavenly Army
What are we within the great picture someone draws?
Are we powerless little dots placed beneath the name of Heaven's will?
Are we people who show our faces for only a brief moment upon the wave pushed upward by the age?
Or perhaps we are ridiculous actors on a stage already arranged, speaking lines as ordered while believing them to be our own will.
I believe I possess free will.
I think I have some measure of wisdom, eyes that can weigh circumstances, and that at every moment of choice I have made fairly decent judgments.
But is that truly so?
The roads I believed I chose—were they in fact laid upon inertia that had long been pushing toward me?
People believe they walk by their own steps.
But at times, they realize only later that the ground itself has been sloped.
They take just one step, and the body is swept downward; even if they try to stop, the soil beneath their feet collapses together.
Even then, we call it choice.
We say we moved by ourselves.
Yeongu suddenly had such a thought.
Perhaps some force he could not bear was pushing him from behind.
The flow of history, the rise and fall of countries, people's desires, promises built in blood, and the resentment and expectations left by those already dead—perhaps all of it was rushing in at once and dragging him along.
He believed he held the reins, but perhaps he was not the one who had decided the direction in which the horse ran.
Just as his thoughts were about to deepen, the Great Khan changed the subject.
"He seems a remarkable person. We have a long history, but we have no sages."
Yeongu chose his words for a moment before answering.
"They must be taught, raised, respected, and then waited for a long time."
Once the words left his mouth, his thoughts naturally flowed toward Goryeo.
Into Goryeo's Palgwanhoe entered old groups of the immortal tradition, those who worshiped mountains and rivers and cultivated body and mind.
In the histories, they were written as seonrang and gukseon, but northern people believed their roots touched the far older law of the Joui Seonin, the Black-Robed Immortals.
The descendants of those who wore black robes, climbed mountains, and cultivated bow, sword, and breath had entered the courtyard of Palgwanhoe under the name of the Buddhist law.
Of course, Palgwanhoe was not an event prepared to invite and honor the Joui Seonin.
Yet Goryeo made a state rite of an event that embraced the energy of the immortal way and mountain-river sacrifice.
In the sixth article of the Ten Injunctions, Palgwanhoe was also described as serving the spirits of Heaven, the Five Sacred Mountains, famed mountains, great rivers, and dragon spirits.
That was a kind of respect.
It was the work of not establishing the law of the world only through writing, blades, and taxes, but leaving even the place of those who hid in the mountains and cultivated the Way within the shadow of the state.
Yeongu suddenly thought.
Why is there no such place here?
Had there once been one, only for it to vanish amid war, migration, and tribal conflict?
He thought he should someday ask his master.
Yeongu said,
"You will not be able to do everything at once. But those people were here before. They will come again."
A shadow fell across the Great Khan's face.
"After you left, those few who had remained all disappeared."
Yeongu quickly said,
"I did not tell them to leave."
"Of course not."
The Great Khan's voice was low.
"I was seized by a severe sense of deprivation. Because one person, you, disappeared, all the people who had watched over the beginning of the empire left. And the atmosphere of the holy capital changed completely. The gentle, warm, and healthy feeling grew faint, and the mood became cold, calculating, and quarrelsome over trivial things."
Yeongu lowered his head.
"I am sorry."
The Great Khan turned to him.
"You said it was not your doing."
"Master came because I asked him. And he probably remained because he feared this foolish man would do something misguided."
The Great Khan did not answer for a while.
He looked up at the sky opened above the unfinished palace fortress.
The sun was already leaning westward, and the shadows of newly raised pillars lay long across the dirt courtyard.
Between those shadows, workers passed, generals came and went, and a space too rough to be called a country and already too large to be called a military camp breathed.
The Great Khan spoke with a gloomy face.
"On a land already short of people, where we must gather people from everywhere, it seems I have driven away even those who had come and were doing well."
He let out a light sigh.
"It is my lack of virtue."
Those words did not sound like a formal lament.
The ruler who had just founded a country spoke like a man who had, for the first time, seen the emptiness within himself before the enemy outside the country.
Yeongu looked at Agolta's profile.
Agolta was a strong man.
But even a strong man, when he knows what he lacks, cannot help lowering his head.
"I truly hope they come again."
Yeongu swallowed.
There is a saying that if even one immortal remains in a place, the hundred li around it becomes peaceful.
It was because of the energy they emitted.
They had the power to subdue the temper of mountains and fields, prevent people's hearts from raising unnecessary edges, and settle even the tremors in unseen places.
Those people had vanished all at once.
A person with keen senses would already have felt the change.
Yeongu too now felt that empty place distinctly.
"They did not say where they were going?"
The Great Khan shook his head.
"Two or three days after you left, they all disappeared."
"Hm.
I did not see them in Goryeo either."
The Great Khan looked beyond the unfinished palace fortress.
New pillars, a dirt courtyard, soldiers and craftsmen passing back and forth were before his eyes, but his gaze was directed farther than that.
"If there were sages, they could light our path."
Yeongu answered carefully.
"I heard their words and conveyed them, so for now, you can do as they said."
The Great Khan laughed quietly.
Fatigue and relief were mixed in the laughter.
"I did not know what to do first, but now that you have pointed out three things, the work immediately before us has begun to appear."
Yeongu raised his head.
"The war with Liao comes first. It will be a great decisive battle. Hundreds of thousands will come."
At those words, the Great Khan's face returned to that of a general.
The gaze that had longed for sages a moment earlier disappeared, becoming the gaze of one measuring a distant army advancing toward him.
"If we do as you say, I begin to think it is worth attempting."
The Great Khan slowly moved his steps.
He walked over the footprints in the dirt courtyard and along the wall of the palace fortress that had not yet been built.
"Even if all our operations do not go as we wish, their livers and gallbladders will grow cold.
Liao generals will begin to suspect their own side, and the emperor, even while gathering his army, will look behind him. If that alone happens, the blades coming onto the battlefield will be dulled."
Yeongu slowly nodded.
"That is so. War does not move by numbers alone. Trust comes first. If the emperor cannot trust his generals, if the generals cannot trust the court, and if the soldiers grow uneasy over what is happening behind them, then even hundreds of thousands cannot move as one body. Right now, they are shaking in exactly that way."
The Great Khan turned to Yeongu.
"You say truly frightening things easily."
Yeongu smiled awkwardly.
"They are not my words. I heard them and brought them."
"To understand them and convey them fearfully well is also a talent."
The Great Khan stopped walking for a moment.
Far away, evening light was settling beneath the sky of Huiling.
The palace fortress of the new country was still rough, and the war to come was too great.
Yet on the face of one who had come to know what must be done, a strange vitality rose together with fear.