The Driven Hunt
In the stifling heat of late summer, several hundred men were climbing a ridge buried under the dense growth of primeval forest, sweat pouring off them in sheets.
Skreeeeee—
From beyond the ridge at their backs came a sound, thin and sharp. The She warriors who had been scrambling upward, gasping for breath — fighters who feared nothing so long as they were in the mountains — went white to the lips.
Skreee— Skreeeeeee—
From the ridge to the left, and from the ridge to the right, answering calls rolled out and filled the whole valley. The hunters were drawing the net tight.
"Lao Zhao! What do we do? What do we do now?"
"Run! Run! We have to get clear before they close the ring!"
Lan Gou, chieftain of the greatest clan among the She of these parts and a warrior of proven courage, clenched his teeth and raised his voice at his exhausted men.
"Damn it all. If I'd known it would come to this..."
They had been working up the waterway that left Yanping and Shaxian to the southwest and ran on toward Tingzhou when they spotted boats riding low under loads of grain and salt. The She had called every warrior out of the hills, fallen on the passing vessels, and come away with a handsome haul. Stupid, frightened Han. For more than ten years it had been the same, and the warriors had shouldered their plunder and started back for their villages certain the Han would never dare follow them into the deep mountains.
Contrary to every expectation, an army of several thousand came after them.
At first Lan Gou laughed at them. Even the Red Turban bands that had crossed the mountains out of Jiangxi had never dared fight the She in the deep country. What were a rabble of government troops doing, charging in without the sense to be afraid? He would slaughter the lot of them and take a fortune in spoils. He called warriors in from every side and gave battle — and suffered a defeat so hideous it scarcely bore remembering.
"Traitors! Heirs of the dragon-dog, bowing their heads to Han dogs!"
Lan Gou ground his teeth as he climbed the ridge. After that first crushing loss, most of the She chieftains had abandoned resistance and followed the envoys urging surrender, kneeling to the Han army. But Lan Gou prided himself on descent from King Pan, the dragon-dog. He declared he would resist to the end, and with those who still stood by him he pushed deeper into the mountains.
The trouble was that the Han army, taking those filthy turncoats for guides, was hounding him without rest.
"Hah... hah..."
"A little more strength! Get over that ridge and we can shake them!"
"Y-yes!"
Lan Gou and his She warriors left the tightening whistle-calls behind them and crossed the ridge. Down in the gorge below, the men ran to a thin trickle of a stream, plunged their faces into it, and gulped the cold water.
"Enough! Get up! We have to move, right now—"
He was driving the laggards when his keen nose twitched. Something unfamiliar hung on the air, acrid and sharply stinging.
"What is this smell..."
Lan Gou was a hunter born to the forest. His eyes had just begun to search the dark shadows between the thick trees when thunder broke.
Boom—
"Ghk!"
The warrior beside him folded with a choked grunt.
"Ambush! It's an ambush!"
Crack, crack, boom—
With Lan Gou's shout, fire and smoke spat from inside the woods. Men who had been drinking and catching a breath sprayed blood and went sprawling, and out of the smoke-choked trees black shapes burst with a howl.
"Swords— get your swords—"
"Ah— gaaaaah!"
Beasts in black armor brought down bright steel. Skulls split. A flailing hand was severed, and blood jetted. Lan Gou saw his warriors stumbling and dying in a butcher's ruin, seized his hilt, and charged.
"Die!"
He put the whole of his strength into the cut. Steel skidded on steel with a shriek, and sparks flew. A veteran, he did not stop — chopping, slashing, thrusting, a frenzy — until a blade came around in a half-moon and sheared halfway through his neck.
"Kh— ghk..."
Hot blood poured. Clawing at the air, Lan Gou lost the sword and fell.
"S-spare me! Aaaah!"
"Mother... Mama!"
Into his darkening sight came his warriors, being miserably slaughtered by black wolves. Two legs drew near his face.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
On a field where several hundred warriors had been killed to the last man, the She guide stared, shaking, at Lan Gou's grotesquely twisted head.
"Y-yes! That's him! That's Lan Gou! The chief who swore he'd resist to the very end — that's the man!"
He had been taken as a guide from a clan that chose surrender after the disaster of the first battle, and he looked at the warriors in black armor with eyes full of fear. They sat among the heaped corpses with blank faces, tending their blades. The armor covered only the chest, and yet these strangers had run the brutal mountains as if they were level ground. They were plainly no cowardly Han. The weapons on their backs made thunder, and when one of them spat fire a man went down at a stroke — a terror that could not even be set beside the hunting crossbows the She favored. Worse, they tracked prey, lay quiet in ambush, and struck from hiding with a skill so practiced that he, who fancied himself a seasoned hunter, could barely follow it.
The She had never feared a fight in the mountains. That they could be driven like game into a killing ground and wiped out in a single sweep was only natural.
The most frightening of the black warriors had his hair cropped very short, and eyes fierce and rough — a wolf of a man, the one who had taken Lan Gou's head in a single stroke. Garshakan watched, expressionless, as his men cut the heads from the corpses.
"Good. Now we go back."
"Yes! I-I'll show the way!"
The order the Khan had given was fulfilled. It was time to return to his side and take up the guard again. Kara Cho'oha followed Garshakan down the mountain path — the black wolves of the north.
"Where are you from?"
"I-I'm from Yuanzhou, in Jiangxi. I was dragged here by force! I swear it!"
"Quiet. Go stand over there."
The thick Gan dialect was hard to follow, but the accent alone was enough to place the man, and at the young clerk's order he moved off to one side.
"I'm from Wuchang, in Hubei."
"Over there."
"I'm a local. Born and bred right here in Yanping..."
"Huh? This bastard."
The moment a man running a Hubei accent, not Fujian speech, tried to pass himself off as a native, the young official's brow knotted and he shouted.
"Lying, when it'll come out in a moment? Take him and put him to the question!"
"Yes, sir!"
"N-no! I was wrong! This humble one only—"
Yanping was the throat of inland Fujian, and it was now the headquarters where An Hyeon, Duke of Yue, stayed while he pacified the interior. Dolswe watched in silence as the prisoners were questioned one after another, in line. Under the tight watch of the Tiger Hunting Army, captives dragged in from all over inland Fujian were given a brief interrogation and sorted by region — remnants of Chen Youliang's army, bandit bands that had held out in mountain forts, militia who had refused orders and resisted. Bound and boated up the upper waters of the Min, they were gathering here at Yanping.
"How stands the watch on the prisoners?"
"We've cleared a set area, penned them in, and we're guarding it strictly. They're divided by region, and the questioning and the watch are ongoing. We're weeding out ringleaders and men with crimes on them."
"Keep that guard tight, so none of them takes a foolish notion into his head. His Lordship is in residence here. Not even a small mistake can be permitted."
"Yes, General!"
Officers and young clerks sorted the prisoners by home region after the questioning, and kept investigating to weigh the gravity of each man's crimes and his standing. Those who had done great harm to the people, those who tried tricks, those with no future in them, were hauled beyond the walls and lost their heads. For men of Fujian itself, once the local pacification was far enough along, guilt was weighed and they were being sent home in stages to be settled again. Chen Youliang's men were another matter. Those from Hubei and Jiangxi were excluded from settlement, and most of them remained prisoners at Yanping under the Tiger Hunting Army's watch.
"Mind their cleanliness, the latrines, and the meals. Let it slip, and plague will run through them. His Lordship does not want them dying off in a meaningless heap."
"Yes! We're running it to the standard of our own Tiger Hunting Army camps."
Together with the incoming division commander and the regimental commanders, Dolswe spent a hard, busy stretch inspecting the camps and the prison stockade himself.
"Simply sending prisoners and refugees back to their homes won't be enough. Send them home with no way to live, and they'll rise again, or go into the mountains and turn robber."
"You're right, my lord."
"First the local pacification has to be finished, magistrates sent in, and rule restored. We proceed gradually, giving priority to the prefectures and counties where government is actually back. The first task is to send those magistrates plenty of farm tools, grain, and salt, so these people have a footing they can settle on."
Kagetora had gone north along the Shaowu route. He had wiped out what remained of Chen Youliang's army and taken Shanguan, the gate toward Jiangxi. Fang Guozhen, together with Chen Youding, was on his way to Tingzhou, sweeping the nearby remnants, the bandits, and the She bands that had risen. Fortunately, the late Deng Keming and Kang Tai had scraped together what strength they could, staked it all on one great fight at Jianning, and been surrounded and destroyed — and thanks to that, most of the resistance was feeble. In effect the Shaowu, Yanping, and Jianning routes had fallen into my hands.
The problem was that winning the war did not, of itself, restore a land worn out by rebellion upon rebellion across ten years.
"What of the prisoners from Hubei and Jiangxi? Unlike the Fujian men, this isn't their home. Settle them and we still can't trust—"
"They're likely to run."
I had summoned Pan Boxiu, who was to oversee the civil administration of Fujian, together with the principal civil officials — Zhang Yi, Zhan Ding, and the rest — to work out how Fujian's internal affairs were to be steadied.
"Leave them inland and they may flee into the deep mountains, or cross the Wuyi range and try for home. Better to send them to Fuzhou, put them to building the saltworks, and have them labor there afterward. What do you think?"
"Mm. You're right. If that fails, we put them aboard ships and send them all the way to Zhedong..."
I nodded at Pan Boxiu's advice. Set them to work as laborers in the salt fields, on the docks, and in the workshops, and watch what they were made of. For the young and able-bodied, recruiting them as soldiers was no bad notion either. In Zhedong there was simply no road home — and soothing men who had neither house nor land in an age of chaos, talking them around, and making soldiers of them was my particular trade.
"Settle the prisoners, or scatter them, and the chance they'll rise again will fall. But..."
Zhan Ding had been a green scholar, only just come of age, when I first met him. He had begun as acting magistrate of Xianju County, climbed the rungs one careful step at a time, and by now had proved himself fit to serve as acting route commander of a whole circuit. He frowned, plainly reluctant.
"Zhedong, which you have ruled, my lord, is not the same as Fujian. In Zhedong, bandits appeared because men were stirred up when trouble broke out elsewhere. Hasn't Fujian been a place where rebellion never ceased, and not only of late?"
"Mm..."
"If we don't resolve the root cause, the same rebellions will break out all over again."
I nodded. Somewhere along the way Zhan Ding had taken on the weight of a seasoned magistrate.
"You're right, Guoqi. Fail to pull the problem up by the roots, and the spark of rebellion will catch again whenever it pleases."
Jiangnan had long been called the land that fed the world. Agriculture there was developed early and deep, and upon that base every sort of industry prospered and commerce thrived. My own foundation, Zhedong, was not quite at the pitch of Zhexi, the country that fed the empire, and it had mountains enough of its own — but its agriculture was just as highly developed. In short, there was surplus enough to live on. Corrupt officials might skim their share, and the state might wreck the economy with the salt monopoly and a flood of paper money, and still, as a rule, things stopped short of the very worst. That was why rebellion had tended to start among men who already lived rough, salt smugglers and their like.
"So if Fujian is to be made stable, we have to begin with the root of the matter—"
In the midst of that grim council, Liu Ji came in from outside.
"Your Grace. Forgive the interruption of your council. Scholar Gakhyeon of Fuqing has sent a letter of recommendation, and so..."
"Ah, has he? Let me see."
I took the thick letter Liu Ji held out. Most of inland Fujian was pacified, and the prefectures and counties left derelict for years now needed magistrates appointed to them, along with a great many working officials. I had brought civil officials from Zhedong, the core of my pool of men, but they alone could not fill every post. And if I did not actively appoint men of Fujian, the scholars and the great clans might nurse a grievance that outsiders were slighting them. To be looked down on by Mongols and Semu was bitter enough, if one had to bear it. To be slighted by fellow southerners — that was the sort of thing that made a man's blood boil hotter, was it not? So I had written to Lin Quansheng, the old scholar of deep renown in Fujian, asking him to recommend talent. This, it seemed, was the reply.
"We'll review their records first, and then meet them in person... Hm?"
I was looking through the Fujian scholars and former officials listed in the recommendation when I found another letter enclosed with it.
"Mm..."
"What is it, Your Grace? Did Scholar Gakhyeon leave some further word?"
With a bitter heart I sighed and passed the letter I had finished reading to Liu Ji. It was a letter an old scholar, with death before him, had left in earnest hope that his homeland might yet see an age of peace.