Talents Come Gathering

The voice was a natural baritone, cut from ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠entirely different cloth than the deliberately lowered growl the soldier had put on. It did not rise from among the onlookers. It came from the very place ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠that soldier and the others involved had just emerged.

"And a quarrel over gambling, of all things. Utterly disgraceful. This is not how a matter ought to be handled."

The man was young—mid-twenties at the outside. In an age when poor food and poorer rearing left most men small and old before their time, he was a rare sight: tall, and strikingly well-made.

His height fell just short of eight chi, near six feet, and his frame was powerfully built, every line of it marked by hard training. He wore no armor, but the sword at his hip marked him as a man of the army all the same.

At first the soldiers faltered, cowed by the sheer size of him. The moment they realized he was alone, their courage crept back and ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠their chins came up.

"And who are you? You've no business here. Move along. Why turn this into a bigger fight?"

"If you were taking that man to the yamen for a proper judgment, I would have stood aside. If he is guilty, the yamen will punish him. Why take the matter into your own hands?"

"Ha—damn it. This one doesn't understand a word."

"Just lay that bastard out too!"

Three soldiers. He had a sword, true, but so did they. Even swordsmen hailed as swordmasters were advised to run when the numbers turned against them like this.

Unless the air of a battlefield itself crushed a man's nerve, beating several armed opponents and walking away whole was brutally hard, no matter how skilled you were. And this man did not even have armor.

Still, the soldiers seemed to know that drawing steel would push things past any hope of turning back, so they came at him bare-handed first.

He closed the distance without a flicker of fear. A leopard's sudden stride carried him into the foremost soldier. It happened in a blink. His fist drove into the man's belly, and though the soldier wore armor, he could not take the shock. His body simply folded.

Whether it was the shock of a comrade dropping in a single blow, or pride stung by looking foolish at the center of every eye in the market, the soldiers who had been charging in high spirits changed direction. One of them reached for his sword before he seemed to know he was doing it.

A brawl with fists and a fight with blades were matters of entirely different gravity. I let go of Yeon's hand at once and moved to intervene.

The man was faster. Already in among them, already set in a fighting stance, his eyes changed the instant the soldier's hand found the hilt.

A moment ago he might have been a martial instructor correcting his students. Now he had the edge of an officer leaping in to seize a killer in the act.

Crack!

Where before he had aimed for an armored belly, this time he showed no mercy and smashed the jaw. The blow lifted the soldier—only a little, but enough to make you wonder whether his feet had left the ground. He finished the last man before the fellow could even gather his wits.

In less than a minute he had laid all three soldiers on the ground. The onlookers were too stunned to cheer. You could barely hear them breathe.

Into the stillness that had settled, the man spoke.

"You. Stay where you are."

The one he singled out was the man who had been ringed by the soldiers. While the fight was underway he had been creeping away from the scene; at the command he yelped and ducked his head.

"Fall back! All of you, fall back!"

A squad of soldiers came pounding in, drawn by the uproar in the market. This was a crowded quarter; the patrol that kept order nearby must have come running.

The man leading them was someone I knew by sight. I stepped forward to settle the matter. As I walked toward the patrol, the stranger at the heart of the disturbance moved to stop me.

"Young lady, I'll give the testimony. There's no need for you to—"

"I am Zhang Lan, General of the Household Guard. I know your face. You served under General Wei Yan, didn't you? I watched the whole disturbance. I'll sort it out myself."

"Ah—the General of the Household Guard. Understood. Shall we take them all into custody first?"

"Before that, let's hear what this man has to say."

I turned to the stranger, whose face showed a flicker of surprise—no doubt because I had named my rank.

"What do you make of it?"

"Ah... young lady—no, General. You saw it yourself, did you not?"

"You came out from inside, didn't you? I asked whether you know why they raised this riot."

He hesitated a moment, then answered.

"A fight born of gambling. That man is a gambler. He cheated the soldiers, and when they realized it, they turned violent."

When Chengdu fell, Liu Bei had opened the treasuries of Yi Province and distributed wealth generously among the soldiers under his command. Men with money from the war and no nose for fraud would have made splendid marks for a gambler.

What the gambler had failed to reckon with was that these were extremely violent men—veterans who had walked back and forth across battlefields where life and death traded places by the hour.

"Then why did you stop the soldiers? Wasn't it that man who did wrong?"

"Even if they were the wronged party, laying hands on a man in private is not the proper way. To distinguish right from wrong and to mete out reward and punishment, there are yamens, there are officials, and there is the law. Had they meant to take the gambler to the yamen, I would not have stopped them."

It was the sort of orthodox argument Zhuge Liang would have liked. Even in the modern world, private justice was a contentious subject; in this age it was utterly commonplace. In a chaotic era, what protected you was not some distant law but the fist close at hand.

Once Liu Bei took Yi Province, though, and Zhuge Liang set about rebuilding the administration and the legal order, private redress was forbidden. The Shu code had not yet been written, but with Zhuge Liang and the outstanding talents beneath him poured into the work, at least Chengdu now possessed something that could be called a proper administrative system. In antiquity, administration was justice. Going to the yamen for judgment was the right path.

Nerve enough not to flinch before three armed soldiers, excellent martial skill, and on top of that a thorough grasp of the law. A talent. The feeling hit me—the feeling that this man was an extraordinary find.

"Come to think of it, I don't even know who you are. What is your name?"

At my question he offered a crisp military salute.

"I am Liu Yin, a garrison captain under General Lei Tong."

"Liu Yin?"

A name I felt I had heard somewhere.

Ever since I began recalling my past life, I had carefully written down every memory that seemed useful. People especially: even if I could not remember their deeds, whenever a name surfaced I made sure to keep it.

The familiarity of Liu Yin was surely because the name had lived in the memories of my previous life. Perhaps because I had treated the talents of Shu as particularly important, I managed to dredge up a faint scrap of information about him.

"Is your courtesy name Xiuran?"

"Ah—you know me?"

So I was right.

I drew a smooth curve along my lips and concentrated on keeping the corner of my mouth from climbing any higher.

Why had I forgotten? I had been so busy thinking only of how to hook the great fish named Wang Ping once I reached Baxi that it must have slipped my mind.

Liu Yin. The veteran general who, after Zhuge Liang's death, had served as Jiang Wei's trusted right hand. Among the later commanders of Shu, he stood near the very top.

"Will you become my subordinate?"

"There was such an incident? To think a man like that was only a garrison captain. A pity."

Having heard the market affair in detail, Liu Bei said it with a pleasant laugh.

That same day I had gone straight to Lei Tong and asked him to send Liu Yin to me, and Lei Tong had released him readily enough—Liu Yin had been nothing more than a garrison captain. A surrendered commander who had come over from Liu Zhang to Liu Bei, he had probably been reading my mood as well.

So I took Liu Yin under my command that very day, and together with a brief report of what had happened in the market I submitted a memorial asking that he be raised to Colonel.

The moment Liu Bei received it, he summoned me in person. That was how I came to be standing here.

"Then..."

"Yes. I will grant him the post of Colonel. In any case, I meant to accept, within reason, whatever appointments you wished to make in your own army. I didn't expect you to turn up new talent like this, but it is a good thing."

"Thank you, my lord."

"Good. That will do for official business. From here, let us speak not as lord and vassal, but as uncle and niece."

He had just raised a mere garrison captain—whose only merit was a small affair in the marketplace—in a startling leap all the way to Colonel, and he changed the subject as if it were nothing at all.

Hm. Uncle and niece. He must mean a family matter. I seemed to recall a rumor that Liu Shan had been whining that he wanted to see me.

I waited, a little tense. Liu Bei took in my state and burst out laughing.

"Hahaha! Why so nervous? Do you think I'm about to tell you to marry Adou again? How could I watch your achievements with my own two eyes and still try to shut you inside the palace? I mean to use you as a general."

"Forgive me."

"And what is there to forgive? I say this because I wish to choose your courtesy name myself."

"My courtesy name—you would bestow it personally, my lord?"

A courtesy name belonged to the naming culture of the East Asian world of Chinese characters. Who gives a name? In most cases a parent or a grandparent, and courtesy names, too, were often given by such kin.

Sometimes friends matched them for each other. Zhou Yu and Zhuge Jin were such a case: Zhuge Jin's courtesy name, Yu, taken from Zhou Yu's given name, and Zhou Yu's Jin taken from Zhuge Jin's. I had always thought of Zhou Yu as a matched set with Sun Ce, though, and I wasn't sure why he had paired names with Zhuge Jin. Perhaps because Sun Ce was his lord.

"I gave your father his courtesy name, Yide, with my ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠own hand as well."

So Liu Bei's courtesy name and my father's belonged to that same pattern. Xuande and Yide—they did resemble each other. And according to my father, he and Liu Bei had known each other from childhood, before they ever met Guan Yu. Perhaps Liu Bei, whose eye for people was uncanny, had matched the courtesy name the way a man licks a sweet in advance, staking his claim so he could take my father as his own.

Then was offering to name me part of that same design? Was I thinking too deeply? Liu Bei was my lord, and in private he was my uncle. Sworn brothers though he and my father were, the bond ran thicker than blood. I was as good as his own niece.

"Have you already promised to receive a courtesy name from someone else?"

"Ah—no. It is simply too great an honor. That you would bestow it yourself, Uncle, only makes me glad."

"Haha, does it? I did ask Yide's leave to be the one to choose it. But if there were a prior promise, keeping it would be the courteous thing, would it not? You have a bond with Military Advisor Pang, and you're quite close with Shengming as well, I hear."

"Both are precious connections to me. How could either compare with you, Uncle?"

At my flattery, Liu Bei looked at me with open satisfaction.

"I ought to thank Yide, for giving me a niece like this. Lan'er—do you know the tale of King Wei of Qi?"

"Wasn't he the son of Duke Huan of Qi?"

"He was. Then you will also know what Chunyu Kun said to him."

The tale of King Wei of Qi. It was in the Records of the Grand Historian.

The Duke Huan I had in mind was not the famous hegemon of the Spring and Autumn, one of the Five Overlords, but another man. His son, King Wei, came to the throne young, left every affair of state to his subordinates, and devoted himself to pleasure.

Naturally the realm fell to ruin. Within, bribes ran rampant and corruption spread; without, the borders were forever being violated. Unable to bear it any longer, Chunyu Kun sought an audience and spoke thus:

Anyone who had read a few wuxia novels would have met the tale of neither flying nor crying. It came from here. The words were a jab at King Wei, who had neglected the government for years, though later they came to be used of one who deliberately lies low and waits for the moment.

Yet that later usage was not entirely wrong. King Wei humbly accepted every word of Chunyu Kun's frank counsel, set out at once on an inspection tour, and visited reward and punishment upon the officials of every region according to their deeds. In a single stroke he set the domestic administration to rights and swept away the troubles within and the threats without.

The tale of King Wei of Qi—who afterward became the enlightened ruler that opened the golden age of the Qi of the House of Tian—was one that people in the modern world who loved Romance of the Three Kingdoms often knew. Why? Because King Wei of Qi appears in a famous Three Kingdoms game.

I knew the story from my own days sunk in those games, but Liu Bei recited once more what Chunyu Kun had said.

This bird. If it never flies, that is the end of it—but let it fly once, and it climbs to the very limit of the sky. If it never cries, that is the end of it—but let it cry once, and it astonishes all who hear.

"It sounds exactly like something one would say of you, Uncle."

The assessment came out of its own accord. The difference was that the bird had neither flown nor cried, whereas Liu Bei had been unable to.

But the hands that had broken his wings and held them down were gone now, and the bit that had stopped his mouth was gone as well. The world was watching his ascent.

"Me?"

Even through the long chaos—even while the night of history went on, paved with war and death and blood—there had been no cry of the luan to announce the coming of peace, nor even the cockcrow that heralds the dawn.

Then I would strike the bell myself. I would become the cry that announces the dawn.

It accorded with my own aim, and with Liu Bei's great cause.

I gladly accepted the courtesy name he gave me.